The Mourning After (10 page)

Levon had never given thought to the mystical world of ghostly phenomena, and now something about Lucy’s existence has him doubting everything he once believed to be true—she appeared on the very day they buried his brother; she took from Levon his heaviest sorrow and replaced it with glimpses that levity might be possible.

As is the custom, Rabbi Adler pays the Kellers a visit.  With shiva officially over, he explains that the days and weeks immediately following will be the hardest.  During shiva, the house is full of people and distractions; the mourners are rarely alone.  In his experience, families hold it together in the presence of company.  When left alone to face their solitude, the real grieving begins. 

The rabbi encourages Levon’s father to join him upstairs in the bedroom where Madeline is swathed beneath the covers in her eternal malaise.  Madeline isn’t buying into the notion of their talking through their anguish and finding strength in prayer.  Her anger and refusal incite Craig who storms out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the windows rattle. 

Levon is holed up in his room down the hall, unloading his recent thoughts onto a blank page.  He cannot go back to school.  Unbeknownst to his parents, he calls his guidance counselor who offers his condolences and gives permission for him to stay home another day.  “It was probably premature for you to come back so soon,” Mr. Hayes says.  “See how you feel tomorrow.”  Levon, who drifted through calculus, Spanish, and biology, in a coma of thick fog, is coming apart.  What should have ruffled his mother’s already tattered feathers and been a noticeable sign of her son’s emotional unraveling, instead left Madeline unaware and disinterested.

Levon’s own feelings of bottled-up rage and dismay are so closely linked to his mother’s strife that he has become obsessed with her depression.  He hears every word of their conversation through the air vent. 

Today’s conversation is an improvement from the last.  His mother had gone ballistic when Rabbi Adler handed her the bereavement books with titles such as
Death of a Loved One
,
Coping with Grief and Loss
, and, the unspeakable, horrific,
Grieving for Your Child
.  Levon is positive they are still strewn haphazardly on the living room floor where she had thrown them, missing the rabbi’s head by less than an inch.  His mother would rather die than read anything that acknowledges the hole that has desecrated her heart.

Levon feels sorry for Rabbi Adler.

The young rabbi with his clean-shaven face is out of his league with the maniacal Madeline Keller.  Levon pictures him in her room in his freshly pressed slacks and lavender dress shirt.  Today he is wearing a matching purple yarmulke.  If only it could protect the gentle man from the stabbing insults of the woman under the covers.  Her resistance hits him harder than the books might have.

The rabbi’s voice tumbles through the vent, loud and clear.  Here is a man accustomed to filling a room with words. “No one’s telling you not to feel this way, Madeline.  I cannot tell you whether God knows or understands your pain, only that Jewish tradition offers you time to heal from this tragedy.”

Madeline Keller is devastated.  Levon can’t make out sentences, but he can make out phrases and a harangue of boundless suffering.

“…I don’t want time…there is no God…God wouldn’t take my son…”

Though her thoughts are disjointed, to Levon they make complete sense.  Anger and agony are laced together and form the fabric of her soul.

Levon hears the bedroom door open and close and the tapping sounds of the rabbi’s shoes on the hardwood stairs.  His father is waiting for him at the landing where they whisper in hushed voices.  “I’ve left the name of someone I think you should talk to when you’re ready.  Levon especially.  This is quite a burden for a young boy to carry.” 

Levon hears Chloe playing in her room.  She is supposed to be resting, and Levon knows she is fiddling around with her iPod so as not to hear the sounds coming from her mother. 

Last night Chloe woke up at around two a.m. and started throwing up.  His mother was convinced it had something to do with the food she ate at school. GSD patients experiencing vomiting and the resulting dehydration run the risk of their blood glucose levels dropping.  Chloe’s sickness led to Madeline’s hysteria.  “Everyone’s out to destroy my family!” she screamed to nobody in particular and loud enough for all of South Beach to hear.  It confirmed to those within earshot that Madeline Keller had become a very sick, scary woman. 

“What did you pack her for lunch?” Madeline balked at Levon, who was now in charge of preparing his sister’s perfectly portioned meals while his mother slept.  “It wasn’t his fault,” intervened Craig.  “I spoke with the school, and everything was in order.  Dr. Gerald thinks it was probably stress-induced.  There’s no way we could have prevented it.”

Levon likes Dr. Gerald and doodles a picture of him in his journal.  In the fear-based bubble they’ve lived in since Chloe has been diagnosed, he has always been the voice of reason.  The forerunner in GSD study, Dr. Gerald’s dedicated research has made generous strides toward a cure, and he has recently left his post at Boston Children’s for a position at Shands Hospital in Gainesville.  To have him so close will provide a sense of security—however faulty—and Levon believes that if familiarity breeds contempt, then perhaps proximity will breed a cure.

There is no known cure for Chloe Keller’s disease, and few people living with it are older than forty-five. With less than a thousand people afflicted, hardly any philanthropists and no pharmaceutical companies have put their dollars or research funding behind this orphan disease, which is the lonely stepchild to its big sisters and brothers, cancer and heart disease.

Thoughts collect and multiply in Levon’s head. He writes:

Some diseases are tricky. Take my mother’s grief.  It’s not a disease you find on WebMD by plugging in symptoms.  Where is your discomfort, the prompt asks?  I type in: my heart, my lungs, my wrists, my toes, my stomach, my knees.  There are too many places to name.  Can’t I just click on the entire body, front and back, inside and out?  Sure, grief is not a classified illness like depression or diarrhea, but it is a persistent disease that plagues its victims with clusters of acute pain and nagging symptoms.  Though one can treat the side effects and numb the pain, there is no known cure for grief.

Levon is droning on in his journal. Although what he’s expressing is important, he’s not writing about those potent seventy-two hours.  He is unable to entrust them to the page.  And then there’s Rebecca.  He wonders what she might know about that night. Why does she believe David was cheating on her?  What was wrong with David the evening of the accident?  Levon doesn’t dare write down the scary questions.  Words have ways of being misconstrued and scrutinized.

He writes:
I’ve gone over it in my head a dozen times, and there is nothing I can do to change the story, the players, the ending. I grapple daily with the facts: the should-haves and the could-haves.  David had so much more to lose than I.  If only there was something else I could’ve done.

Levon drops his pen and rolls over onto his back, trying to remember happier days.  He returns in time to when his parents surprised them with an overnight stay at the famous Fontainebleau Hotel.  He closes his eyes to take in the details of that glorious afternoon in their cabana by the beach.  He smells the salty ocean mixed with the pounds of sunscreen his mother smeared on his face; he hears the splashing waves; he tastes the sweet cherry flavor of his then-favorite drink, the Shirley Temple.

Levon feels the warm sun beaming down on him, and he can hear Chloe’s giggles as she frolicked in the ocean.

The doorbell sucks him out of his Fontainebleau bliss.  It’s a rush of Madeline’s friends who have made a pact not to leave her alone. They come in pairs throughout the day, carting an assembly line of home-cooked meals.  The house is filled with an endless stream of women coaxing her out of bed, persuading her to eat, urging her to shower, to change her clothes, to brush her teeth.  The women take minimal interest in Levon, and whether it is their loyalty to their pain-stricken friend or their inability to find a pleasant word, a quiet permeates the house and banishes Levon to the safety of his room.

No one even mentions the fact that he is not in school.

Lucy finds it inconceivable to comprehend the loss of a brother. And while the school day is washing up around her, instead of immersing herself in the gloriousness of her newfound anonymity, she is desperate to talk with Ricky, hungry to hear his steady voice.  Her new neighbor, Levon, is absent from the bus.  She hopes she hadn’t scared him off with her prying.  She can only imagine how hard it must have been for him to utter those words,
my brother
, when she asked who died.

Lucy fingers the cell phone in her pocket.  It is early morning on Wednesday.  Ricky goes to the Cornerstone on Tuesday nights, once the infamous Vous, which means he’s holed up in his dorm room, nursing a mild hangover. She is crossing the halls between second and third period, and it’s a dreadful climb from literature to Spanish.  Lucy cannot get over the amount of Spanish she is expected to learn in such a short amount of time.  The demographics of Miami Beach had shifted over the years.  Once the home to snowbirds from the northeast, it was now an international hub that has attracted a largely multicultural populace.  Hardly
anyone
speaks English, that much she has noticed.  Spanish is both required and a necessity here, and Lucy, with all her self-imposed visions of sophisticated worldliness is tripping over the words, lost in a flurry of conjugated Español.  She had no command over the language. 

As she approaches the door of Mrs. Arnold’s class, a hand brushes against her back and she jumps.  She hopes it’s her new friend, her only friend, but it is not.  She watches as the perpetrator walks passed her, scampering toward a group of fellow students.  They appear to be normal teenagers leading typical teenage lives, though Lucy knows that normal can be deceiving.  Hugging her bag closer to her body, she notices the way they are appraising her.

“
Hola
,” she calls out with a friendly smile.  “
¿Como esta?
”

The joke is lost on the group.  They turn away from her and race each other down the hall. The best way to get people to stop staring and talking about you is to get right in their face and say
hello—
it was a method she had perfected time and time again.

Mrs. Arnold’s door is beckoning.  Her thoughts return to Levon, how he’s an interesting study—shy, overweight, not cool by American teenage standards.  He reminds her of Ricky, though they look nothing alike. 

She senses depth, mild humor, and she is sure if she peels back some of the many layers, she will find a friend that can speak to her soul.  Where Ricky has left a gaping hole, Levon enters to fill it.  He hides his humanity in a naiveté that can be mistaken for aloofness. Lucy sees it in his sweet brown eyes, and she is sure no one has ever told him that he has dreamy eyelashes.  She doesn’t dare tell him that.  It might send him running—not necessarily a bad thing in his condition—and she wants to meticulously strip away those layers.

Ricky was always telling her she was a magnet for lost puppies.  What he meant was that she liked to be needed.

Lucy takes a seat in the crowded room where Mrs. Arnold has already begun an open dialogue.  Lucy is lost and it shows.  She searches the eyes of her classmates, native Miamians with years of Spanish under their belts, and finds that none of them are as puzzled as she.  When the bell finally rings, she decides she’s had enough school for the day and saunters out of the bulky building.  Finding the cell phone in her bag, she dials Ricky’s number en route to the bus stop. 

Her brother answers on the first ring. “I was just thinking about you.”

“Hey,” she says.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, sensing her mood across the miles.  “And shouldn’t you be in class?”

“Spanish Heritage Day,” she quips.  And then, “I miss you.”

Ricky knows his connection with his sister is strong, and he also knows that her call is prompted by more than the geography that separates them.  “That bad?” he asks.

“
Mas o menos
.”

“Tell me what’s going on.”

Hearing his voice is always enough.  Even with the traffic blaring on Dade Boulevard as she crosses the street, his words inch her closer to inner peace.

“I’m good,” she says, this time more convincing

“Have you made any friends?”

The mere mention of the word has her thinking of Levon.  Friend.  So many different interpretations.  “Did Mom tell you about the new neighbors?”

“It’s terrible,” he says.

“The brother goes to my school.  It’s awful.”

“Someone to fix,” he says. “That should keep you busy.”

“He could use some sprucing up.”

“Watch yourself, Lucy.  The boy is in mourning.  Not everybody finds your magic endearing.”

“He’s sweet.”

“Sweet like nice, or sweet like I’ve found my pulse again?”

Lucy doesn’t bite.  “No, nothing like that.  I hardly know him.”

“Then let me rephrase the question.  Is there any chance you could like him?”

The question surprises her.  He hadn’t asked about her interest in the opposite sex in a long time.  Five months if anyone were to count.

“You should see the memorial they have here for the Holocaust,” she answers instead, approaching the somber sculpture on Meridian Avenue.  “It’s really beautiful.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?” he asks.

She chews on her lip thinking about her neighbor missing his brother.  After what she has survived, nothing rattles her more than death: the forever aloneness, the stark finality.  She slows down her pace and takes in the tranquil beauty of the circular colonnade. “It wasn’t how I imagined getting to know our neighbors, with all those cars parked outside and people lining up the street in tears.”