Ordinary World (25 page)

            “Andi?”

            Busted.

            I turned around slowly, the thought of pouring my latte over his head crossing my mind as I did so.

            “Hey Andrew.”

            He smiled. “Wow! What are you doing here?”

            “Me and Maggie are visiting the old neighborhood.”

            “Maggie and I,” he corrected. What a dick. I stared him down as if lasers could shoot out of my eyeballs and kill him.

            “I heard about what happened to your husband. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.”

            “So don’t,” I said. And how did he even know I was married? I wondered.

            Rob handed him a tall cup of iced coffee.

“May I join you?” he asked.

First the heathens, then the dick. Why couldn’t everyone just leave us alone?

            “Well…” I stalled and looked over at Maggie, who was now by herself at the table and banging her head on it.

            “Never mind,” he said, alarmed when he saw her. “Listen, can I call you sometime?”

            “Excuse me?”

            “I just thought it’d be nice if we could talk again.”

            “Are you hitting on me—seriously Andrew, are you
hitting
on me?”

            “I’m divorced now.”

            My eyes widened as I looked at his hand holding the cup, wedding ring removed.

            “What happened, Pumpkin?”

            “It didn’t work out,” he said. “Did you just call me ‘Pumpkin’?”

            “It’s Latin for
shithead
,” I said. This was getting fun.

            “Hey,” he said, offended.

            “You know, I’m standing here, almost outside my body, trying to figure out how it was possible that I once loved you so much, how I could ever ache for you when you left me for your now-divorced wife. So which one of you came to your senses?”

            “Forget it,” he said. “I thought you could be a grown-up and clean the slate with me.”

            “I cleaned the slate years ago, Andrew; I also threw it out. Some things you just don’t want to hold on to. See ya, Pumpkin.”

            I walked back to our table. Man, did that felt good!

            “Boy, do you suck,” Maggie said. “How could you leave me like that—hey, was that
Andrew
you were talking to just now?”

            “Yep.”

            “Serves you right.”

            I grinned from ear to ear. “I couldn’t agree with you more!”

After our brief excursion on the Cape, we drove back to Brooklyn. I hadn’t been there in ages either. We went to Juniors and the Brooklyn Museum of Art and a Mets game (I could hear both David and Sam calling me a traitor). We then went into Manhattan and met our friend Jayce and some of my other former Brooklyn U colleagues. The city looked and felt different without Devin, as weird as that sounds. I’d been here a lifetime ago.

            I went out to the Island and visited my mom and two brothers. Shortly after I had left New York for Northampton and Sam, Mom also moved to Northampton—on the East End of Long Island, that is. She had turned the deed of the house we grew up in over to my brothers, who converted it into a studio/stopover between their tours and gigs. Tony pretty much lived there year round, in fact. Since their Massachusetts visit (which my mother still didn’t know about), Joey was in back in town after a tour with his latest jazz trio, and Tony had started his own independent record label. We all met at Mom’s house one evening. After dinner and my brothers had left, I sat in the living room with my mother, both the front and back doors open to allow the night sea breeze to cool the house in lieu of air conditioning, while the ceiling fan above us whirred lightly. Wearing matching white linen capris and sleeveless top, her silver hair pulled back in a terry headband, Mom sat upright on the sofa and crossed her legs, while I curled up in the rocking chair beside her.

            “You’re looking better than the last time I saw you,” she said. “You’re losing weight.”

            “Thanks,” I said. “Hey Mom, I wanna ask you something.”

            “What is it?”

“How old was Dad when he died?”

She looked taken aback. “He was a few months shy of his forty-sixth birthday.”

“How old were you?”

“Forty-four.”

I closed my eyes and soaked in this information. Trying to picture them at that age, like Sam and myself.

“It must have been really tough for you, especially having teenagers to care for.”

“Your brothers were a godsend.”

I’d heard her make such remarks before:
You were such a handful. Thank God for your brothers.
I’d never understood it—I’d never been unruly or out of control. I’d never gotten into trouble at school or hung out with a bad crowd. In fact, I’d had way more books than friends growing up. The remarks had always hurt me too; but in the wake of my revelations with Melody, they took on a whole new meaning.

“How come you have no pictures of Dad around the house?” I asked.

“They’re still in storage from the move,” she said.

“I don’t remember seeing any at the old house either.”

“What’s with the third degree, Andi?”

Might as well jump right in…

            “How come you never talked to us about Dad dying?”

            She didn’t even bat an eyelash. “What do you mean?”

            “I don’t ever remember talking about it. I don’t even remember
grieving
it. I remember you grieving, but I don’t remember Joey or Tony or me grieving, and I don’t remember you ever talking about it to anyone. It was as if it happened to you and no one else.”

            God, did those words really just come out of my mouth?

            “I guess I didn’t want to upset any of you,” she said.

            “But even after we grew up, you still never talked about it.”

            “What was there to talk about?”

            I rocked lightly in the rocking chair while she sat still on the sofa.

“I don’t remember much about Dad. I don’t remember the sound of his voice anymore. I remember things he said to me, but not the sound of his voice. I don’t remember being hugged by him. Joey and Anthony were much more affectionate with me than he was.”

            “Your father loved you,” she insisted.

            “Oh, I believe that. I just don’t remember him showing it.”

            My mother picked up the book that was sitting on the end table and opened it.

            “Mom,” I said, irked.

            “What.”

            “I’m having a conversation with you, here.”

            “Still?”

            I stood up and left the room. Then I came back. “You know, I just realized something: I’m grieving just like you. Like no one could possibly know how it feels to be cheated this way. Like life can go on, but it’ll never be good again, so why bother. You know what I do remember? When Dad died, you left us too. I remember begging you to get out of bed, and you wouldn’t do it. I needed you to take care of me.”

            “And you wonder why I don’t talk about it…” she muttered. “So, you’re mad at
me
now?”

            “I was only thirteen years old! I thought you decided to stop loving me because of something I’d done. How could I have possibly understood?”

            “So now that you’re older and wiser, it’s payback time?”

            “I don’t wanna be like you, Mom. You never got over it, did you. You let Dad’s death define you in some way. Like if you let that go, you’d be invalidated somehow. You let victimhood become a part of you.”

            “That’s ridiculous. What, is your therapist feeding you this?”

            I suddenly realized from where I learned my defensiveness. It was like opening my eyes and seeing clearly for the first time.

            “How come when Sam died you didn’t share what you went through with Dad? My friend Miranda lost her best friend on one of the planes that flew into the twin towers. My friend Maggie lost her fiancé fifteen years ago to leukemia. The guy I told you about—David—his father died a little over five years ago. They all shared their grief experiences with me. Joey didn’t. Tony didn’t. You didn’t. Hell,
I
didn’t even think of Dad.”

            My mother slammed her book shut and kept it in her lap.

            “What good would it have done? Would it have brought your husband back? Would it have brought your father back? All it does is bring up an old pain, Andrea. It never goes away. It just becomes a part of you, something you learn to live with, like a limp or a scar or arthritis. Get used to it.”

            “Isn’t it good to feel that, though?”

            “Why?”

            “To remind you that
you’re
still alive.”

            I was struck by this wisdom that seemed to come out of nowhere. Mom didn’t know how to respond to it. I stood up again. “I’ll let you read your book now. I’m gonna go to my room and write for the rest of the night.”

She didn’t respond.

For the first time, I saw my mother in a way that filled me with compassion. And for the first time, I saw how David and Maggie and others were seeing me: so lost, so incapable of letting go of whatever it was I was clinging to in order to keep the world from doing anything unpredictable ever again. I could finally see how it frustrated them. It had frustrated me my entire life. It wasn’t that my mother—or I, for that matter—was stuck in the grief of the loss; it was the
powerlessness
that kept us from truly moving on. And their frustration was in their powerlessness to change it in order to heal me.  I had been powerless to heal my mother when my dad died. She was powerless to protect me—or herself, for that matter—from her pain. We were both powerless to change the outcome of events. Call 911; give my father CPR (not that it would’ve helped); coax him to give up red meat; take Sam’s keys and do him when he had me pinned against the wall; insist just a little harder to forget the damn cider; have the clairvoyance to tell him not to leave the house… David was right: my rewriting the eulogy had nothing to do with trying to undo the first bad one. It was trying to undo the fact that I couldn’t keep Sam from dying in the first place. And if I could just get it right—use the right words, convey the right emotions, capture Sam in his wonderful, celebrated humanity—then maybe I could somehow restore
him
. Maybe somehow, this terrible injustice would right itself.

I went into my room, closed the door, and called Jeff Baxter.

“Is this a bad time?” I asked.

“Not at all, kid. What’s up?”

“I was wondering if you could approve a short leave for me.”

            I could almost see him roll his eyes around as he huffed into the phone. At that moment, I was just one more professor making one more demand on him. “When?”

            “The week of Columbus Day.”

            “How come?” A split second later, he remembered. “Oh.”