The Grief of Others (38 page)

It had been Paul, sitting on the porch railing, his big white feet half obscured by twining wisteria, surveying them all from above, who’d finally intoned, his groggy voice even lower than it had become naturally over this past year, so that it sounded like a radio announcer’s, gravelly and imposing, “Uh, not to break anything up, but does anyone here have a plane to catch?” Then Biscuit’s parents had dissolved their embrace, but slowly, her father turning back toward the truck, pulling a tissue from his pocket and blowing his nose, and her mother blinking and wiping her eyes with an embarrassed laugh and a comment about how bright the sun; and Jess rose from the porch steps, and Gordie held his arms apart as though someone had asked him roughly how big a Chihuahua was, a gesture Jess somehow understood was meant to initiate a hug. She disregarded the intended size of the embrace, though, instead flinging her arms around him with such abandon that she managed to whack him with both her shoulder bag and travel mug in the process. Then she’d turned toward the porch, shading her eyes. “Where are you guys?” Paul had shuffled down the steps onto the grass and removed from his pocket his right hand, which he extended in a gesture at once awkward and debonair. Jess stared a moment before taking it; while it was still in her grasp, she leaned in rather quickly and kissed him on the cheek. Then, “Biscuit?” she called. So Biscuit emerged, too, slowly, from behind the wisteria, which had in the past days begun unfurling its pale shag of purple clusters. Why now did she feel shy? She came down the steps into the sunlight and Jess kissed her cheek, leaving behind a tiny damp spot and the scent of coffee and of coconut shampoo.

Biscuit’s mother was last to say good-bye, the one Jess saved for last. It had seemed to Biscuit, watching Jess go and present herself to Ricky, and on some level watching the rest of them watching—Paul, Gordie, her father, even Ebie—that this final interaction was like a little show, like a scene played out for them, the audience, if only because they
were
all watching. In any case it played out differently from the rest. Instead of throwing her arms around Biscuit’s mother, Jess clasped herself around the middle. She was smiling, but seeming to bite the inside of her lip at the same time, and her shoulders were hunched forward, her knees a bit bent and her nostrils flared. Biscuit watched as her mother put her hands on Jess’s elbows and brought her own forehead close, closer, until it touched Jess’s. They stood this way. Biscuit couldn’t hear what words, if any, her mother spoke, nor could she be sure Jess was crying. She did know that this good-bye, for all that it didn’t include a full embrace, was in some essential way more intimate—more adult, she supposed—than the others had been, and she had a peculiar reaction to this, a mixture of jealousy and relief, that in turn made
her
feel more adult.

That had been a week ago. Now it was Saturday again; again not an ordinary Saturday, large and comfortably shapeless (in Biscuit’s mind “Saturday” evoked the color, texture, and amiable homeliness of a brown paper grocery bag), but one charged with purpose, with plan. She knew this much, lying supine, stretching her limbs luxuriantly, absorbing the fact of the trees tossing their newly frilly branches against the window; she knew it on the level of bones and tissue, of rapidly dissipating dreams, before she remembered in practical terms what that purpose was. Slowly it dawned, or rather solidified, the particulate energy that had been tingling, shimmering at the edges of her awareness gathering and assuming form: today was the funeral. She got out of bed. She pulled on her pilly robe.

Downstairs she found her father sifting flour over the green mixing bowl. He wore not his ubiquitous costume of jeans or painty overalls but a pair of charcoal trousers, creased sharply down the middles, and a shirt with collar and buttons. And a necktie. Biscuit was pleased to see the tea towel slung over his left shoulder; it comfortably undermined the formality of the look.

“Where’s Mom?” she asked. And without waiting for an answer: “Are we still doing it?”

“Good morning.” Her father turned and smiled.

“Good morning,” she complied. “Are we? Still doing it today?”

His smile had a deliberate quality, its production seeming not so much forced as conscious, willed. Flour dusted his beard like fake snow in a school play. Gesturing behind him, he announced with delicate grandeur, “Pancakes.”

“What’s wrong? Are we not doing it?”

“Nothing’s wrong. Mom and Paul just went to the store.They should be back any minute. Come crack an egg.”

The eggs were already on the counter, ensconced in their clear plastic bubbles: two rows of pale dun. Some were freckled and some clear, some scabrous and some smooth.
A suitable specimen
, approved the white-coated scientist as Biscuit selected one with a smattering of little bumps. She broke it against the side of the bowl and pried the halves apart. The yolk dropped cleanly out. The whites drooped after. She saw the egg she’d cracked into the Hudson that rainy day over a month ago.
Its last earthly ties
, intoned the scientist,
are severed by breaking an egg.
She saw the twin jagged cups of shell floating on dark, pointy waves. Strange to think of what had happened since that day, the day Gordie came, and Ebie, and Jess with her baby inside her, hidden and already dead. Suppose her poor ritual, so full of substitutions and never properly completed, had actually set something in motion?

“Beautiful,” said her father. “Do another.”

Biscuit cracked the second egg into the bowl, then went and perched up on the radiator, its cold metal pleats pressing against her thighs, and watched her father mix the batter with a long wooden spoon.

The egg in the Hudson was no longer a secret, nor were the fireplace ashes and chicken bones, the stolen library book, or her reason for setting fire to the upstairs bathroom. Revealing all had been something of a relief, but not nearly so great as the relief of having been, at last,
made
to tell. This had happened a week ago, just after her father came back from taking Jess to the airport. “Come on,” he’d said, “take a walk with me,” and she’d followed him down the street to the river, where they sat on a bench looking out at ruined pilings and the distant shore. It had been late afternoon by then and the water was sapphire, cold-looking on a cold spring day. Brave, early sailboats, just a smattering, tacked this way and that.They could hear, sporadically, the shudder and snap of the sails on the ones nearest them.

They hadn’t said anything for a while. Some Canada geese had been strutting in their proud, ungainly way along the water’s edge. Biscuit admired their handsome black heads and white chin straps, but they seemed ill-tempered, almost devoutly humorless, and when they drew near she slid over on the bench a little closer to her father. At last he spoke.

“The thing is, you can’t skip any more school,” he said. “It was wrong of me to let you get away with doing it so much.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“Right. The skipping’s not. But not doing more to end it is. You can’t do it anymore, Bis. It stops.That’s one thing.”

She sat curled tightly beside him, her sneakers up on the bench, tucked against her bottom, her arms locked around her shins. Her parents couldn’t stop her. That was a lonely, terrible truth, one which she’d discovered this year and which made her hate them a little. But he had gotten her attention. She was interested in the way he said it, the way he spoke as if he
could
stop her, as if his forbidding her were enough. They might pretend together.Though if she did stop cutting class, it wouldn’t be pretense, would it?

“The other thing,” he went on, “is I need you to tell me what you’ve been doing when you skip school. I don’t just mean ‘I was at the Hook,’ or ‘I was home.’ I mean: doing what?”

Across the river a train was gliding along the water’s edge. There were people in it, going north. She could not see them, but she saw their train and she held the idea of them in her mind. They could not see her, a speck on the bench on the opposite shore, but she was here, nevertheless; and she, too, was traveling, in slower fashion, following a kind of coastline, too, as faithfully and inexorably as they. It would lead somewhere else. Someday she would be someone else. A grown-up lady. As distant to her present self as were the strangers on that train.That truth, too, was lonely and terrible. She thought of the gray lady: sad and just and mute. Who marked her now and marked her then, who was acquainted with everyone she knew, including her future self. Perhaps—the idea caused in her a startling gladness—the gray lady was a piece of her future self.

“It’s not a choice, Bis. I need you to explain.”

He’d looked at her, stern and unwavering. She’d waited for this for so long. Biscuit looked away from him, watched the train recede from view. It faded into the landscape’s curves, its metal glint melding into the shimmering, scalloped distant shore.
Good-bye, my darling,
she bid it as the train disappeared, and whether she thought these words to the gray lady or as the gray lady she was not sure, but there were long pearl-buttoned gloves in the voice, and a hat with a veil, and expectance. And acceptance.
Fare thee well. Until we meet.

Biscuit unfolded her legs and stood.

Her father touched her arm. “Biscuit.” He looked angry but sounded weary. “Tell me.”

“I am.You have to come,” she’d said, and led him back up the hill to their house, and to her room, where she had gotten down on stomach and elbows and disinterred from the assorted heaps under her bed the pilfered library book. She’d shown him the page with the bones and the ashes, the white cloth, the egg and the burnt string. He’d sat holding the book on his lap at the foot of her bed, while she’d huddled at the head with a stuffed animal clutched to her chin (a powder blue rabbit; she’d never been sentimental about any one stuffed animal, but retained a sizable menagerie to which she felt attached as a group), and watched him read, her view increasingly obscured by blue fur as she shrank lower onto her pillow. She saw the light dawn, saw him connect her antics, each successive transgression, with one of the funeral customs detailed in the book.

“Oh,” he’d said at last. “This has all been about”—after a small hesitation he pronounced the name nobody ever said—“Simon.” A long, cleansing sigh. “I didn’t know you thought about him.” He’d leaned back against the wall, squishing a bear, a cat, and a large velour grasshopper in the process, and pulled his fingers mullingly down the side of his beard. “I think about him, too. We didn’t—Biscuit, why are you hiding behind that rabbit?”

She’d shrugged, unable for the moment to speak. She was in some peculiar fashion overcome—with an urge to laugh, it seemed, although that did not begin to cover it. So much was happening. All her imaginary scripts coming to life.

“We never did have a funeral,” her father continued slowly, nodding as though agreeing with something Biscuit had just pointed out. After a minute he’d picked up the book again and began paging through it. “Listen to this,” he said, and read aloud a description of a Ukrainian practice. Then a silence, interrupted by a new find: “This one’s interesting.” From Senegal. More minutes, more page turning, then something from Bali. He read aloud to her the varied customs of grief, from this country and that, from one people and another. Biscuit, listening initially from behind her rabbit-screen, but eventually surrendering this and moving in close to lean an elbow on her father’s knee, let him curve an arm behind her back and snuggled close against him, in the way she used to when she was small and he’d read to her of Scuffy and Maisie and Pooh.

The steps by which last Saturday’s unplanned private encounter had led to this Saturday’s planned family event remained unknown to Biscuit, part of the whole impenetrable world of adult communications and machinations, a world she was, on the whole, perfectly content not to comprehend.

Simply, on Wednesday night at supper her parents had asked what she and Paul would think about their having a small family funeral for the baby. Okay, the kids had responded, both immediately shy.Whether Paul knew the question had been prompted by Biscuit she did not know and was in no rush to say. But he refrained, amazingly, from cracking any jokes, and her parents were full of solemnity, and for a dismal moment Biscuit had thought the whole thing was to indulge her: a sham funeral complete with sham mourning, like what they’d done for her years ago—because she could see now that it had been an indulgence, kindly meant but still essentially fraudulent—when they’d all gathered in their best clothes and helped her lay the fallen bird to rest in its poor, shabby grass-lined shoe box beneath the bridal wreath bush.

But then she’d seen the fork trembling in her mother’s hand, and her mother had dropped the fork with a clatter and put both hands quickly in her lap, where she seemed to be pressing them together. “I’m sorry we didn’t do this before,” her mother said, her gaze flicking swiftly to Biscuit’s father, then back to Paul and Biscuit, each in turn, before ending up vaguely in the area of the butter dish.

“That’s okay,” Paul had been quick to assure her, and Biscuit had chimed in, “Yeah, that’s okay.”

“This’ll be our time,” her mother had added, very softly, but with a kind of resolution, “to say good-bye as a family.”

The words had seemed to travel out and hang above the table, ominous, peculiar, with a singing sharpness.
Good-bye as a family
. Biscuit turned the words around in her head like marbles in her mouth, helplessly, over and over, until they grew as smooth and lost the distinction of meaning, were reduced to raw sound.

She resurrected them now, sitting on top of the cold radiator and watching her father cover the bowl of pancake batter with plastic wrap.
Good-bye as a family
. Was this morning’s ceremony about more than laying Simon, the idea of Simon, to rest? Simon. Simon Isaac. She had seen him once. In the hospital. The day she’d learned to walk like she owned the place. Her father had taken her and Paul to visit their mother; that’s what he had said—not “Mom and the baby,” just “Mom”—and Biscuit had been anxious about seeing her in a hospital bed; but when they arrived in the room her mother had been sitting in a chair by the window, and she had not been alone, as Biscuit imagined, but held the baby—Biscuit’s brother—in her arms, wrapped all in white wrappings like a mummy, sort of, a tiny mummy with just a bit of exposed face, teacup-fine and still: porcelain eyes shut and porcelain lips shut and minutely curved nose, with its nostrils, so black and elegant, small as peppercorns.