by Alan Rossi
Louis Walters arrived back in his office. He was wearing a jacket now. He unzipped it, hung it on the back of his chair, and then still standing, said, Shit, be right back. Forgot my tea. He ran back out of the room, returning a moment later, with a steaming cup of tea in his left hand. He sat at the desk, the glow of the screen paling his face some, and then blew on the tea and said, Thanks for waiting. I have one thing I want to say, then I’ll let you go. I’m guessing David will be back soon. She wrote to Louis Walters that she knew she’d said it, but she felt bad for communicating with him when she was supposed to be here with her family. This is, she wrote, an admittedly small amount of what I’m actually experiencing right now, but I can’t do it anymore. Not now and not ever again. Look, can you just speak out loud? he said. I feel weird sitting here reading your messages waiting for you to write something while I talk. It feels odd. I’m okay with silence, but I’m not okay just hearing my own voice. It feels like I’m having a conversation with no one, with myself. It makes me feel a little nuts. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to sit here. I’m going to just be here with you. There was a pause. And as a last note, he said, I really can’t believe David left you alone.
She looked away from the screen, out the window, to see if she could see her husband’s car. He would come back soon with a few things to put in the mini-fridge: bread, salami, cheese, fruit. Also wine. She’d told him she couldn’t go out into the town again, couldn’t bear going to dinner, being seen, or seeing anyone who might have known Nicholas. When David arrived back in the hotel room, Katherine knew she wouldn’t tell him about Louis Walters, and she further knew that she wouldn’t end things with Louis Walters. She looked into the parking lot, which she could view out the window, over her laptop. If she were to see David’s car pull up, she would tell Louis Walters goodbye, close out the Skype window on the computer, open up a web page, something from the Washington Post about climate change, the protesting of the Kodiak pipeline, the indigenous people who were protesting there. Maybe an article about the raid on an Iraqi city to free it from terrorists. Perhaps a video about posture, about how proper posture can correct bowel problems, though David might take that as a passive-aggressive comment about his own posture. Maybe something completely ignorable, some new recipe, a quiche, which she baked every Saturday morning – to show that she was being normal, she was getting back to normal. Or maybe something more to the point: How This Mother Dealt with Her Son’s Death. Or, maybe something that would make David think of things: How My Son’s Death Made Me Realize I’m Afraid of My Own. He’d say something about the fact that they had plenty of good years left, almost half a lifetime. She hated that it would be something, that she would choose something to cover over what she was doing, that she couldn’t just stop talking to Louis Walters right now.
She looked at Louis Walters’ face, which was supposedly just sitting there for her, just being with her, but which she really knew was waiting for her to type something. She saw herself in the small corner of the Skype window: tired, her face washed out by the cold light coming in the window, make-up-less, her hair a little out of control even though she had pulled it back into a ponytail. When had she done that? It had been all down and wild around her face, and sometime in the conversation with Louis Walters she’d tied it up, yet she couldn’t remember doing this at all. How long had it been? How long has it taken, all of this, sitting here? What other parts of reality were excised, deemed unimportant?
She watched herself seeing herself, the twoness of her: there she was, in the same hotel they’d always stayed in when they visited Nicholas and April, and eventually Jack. I don’t want to be talking to you anymore, she wrote. I’m going to sign off now. Katherine, Katherine, Louis Walters said in the Skype window, look, this is the last thing. I don’t think this silence is healthy. I think it’s good for you to talk. For you to get out what you’re really feeling. You need to express it. Get it out. You’ll feel lighter, better. She felt an anger rising in her, the same anger that had been present, along with the sadness, since learning of Nicholas’s car accident, an anger and sadness that arose in her mind like a wave, then settled into a still, glassy surface. I won’t feel lighter, she wrote. You can’t reduce everything down to a psychological concept, as though pain’s something we can shed like skin. You can’t talk me into feeling better. Do you want to know what I’m doing right now? What I’m doing right now is this: my husband left to get some groceries, and for the half-hour or so that he’s been gone, I decided to text you, Skype you, and talk with you because I didn’t feel like being alone. I felt like distracting myself, and I did this knowing that I’d feel worse doing it, because we’re doing this thing that is both hurtful to my husband, and by extension the rest of my family, and I know your wife would be devastated too. So, I knew that I’d feel worse by contacting you, but I didn’t know in what way, so I did it because since I didn’t know in what way I’d feel bad, maybe there was a chance it could make me feel good. There was some safety there, in not knowing exactly how I would feel bad, like the feeling bad couldn’t happen if I couldn’t locate the specific of it, like it would remain in abstraction, but now I do feel bad, specifically because now I feel alone, whereas before I didn’t. I wanted to see you to make myself feel less alone and now I feel more alone because all this shows about me is that I don’t want to actually deal with whatever’s going on. I know I was the one who contacted you, but I can’t talk to you right now, she wrote, and probably never again.
She watched Louis Walters’ pinched and hurt face. She’d hurt him, she’d wanted to hurt him, and she was viewing it now. After a moment, she wrote, I’m sorry, writing it more because it was what she was supposed to do than because she really felt it. Or, maybe, she did feel sorry, but she also didn’t – part of her wanted him to be complicit in her shame, to be shameful together, another kind of intimacy, another kind of deceit. I shouldn’t have written that, she wrote. No, you’re right, he said. You’re right. I know you’re supposed to feel bad. To feel, you know, terrible. I mean, I guess I don’t know. My kids are both alive. That sounds really insensitive. This is hard. Me talking, you not talking, this is bad. I feel it’s revealing bad things about me. There’s an imbalance to this that I don’t like – your not talking, it allows me to say too much. It’s like you can see more of me and I don’t like it.
She looked at him without acknowledging him. She felt it, what he was talking about, this imbalance. He was right. She’d felt it with others. With strangers in the coffee shop, with colleagues at the college. With David, all the time. She sensed people were uncertain how to react to her silence. Of course, first there had to be the realization that she was the mother of the man who died. But that almost always occurred quickly. This town, everyone knowing each other, it was a reason she hated it, but not the sole reason.
The first night in town – away from her house, her job and colleagues, away from Louis Walters, away from her life except for David – they’d eaten at a local place, and she had felt a grateful anonymity through the meal. A space in which to be genuinely sad, genuinely lost. She didn’t have to be the grieving mother, as she had to be at her school, in her neighborhood, with her family. She could just sit and eat food and feel whatever she felt. And she did that. She ate her locally sourced trout and grits. She drank a glass of house chardonnay. She ate some bread. David sat across from her, not talking, occasionally glancing at his phone, then at her, as if to say, What’s wrong, but knowing that, finally, for once, he couldn’t say that, couldn’t ask it. He knew what was wrong. Yet in the space of that dinner – the hanging lamps above each table lighting the place only dimly, the dark of the outside streets, old-style streetlamps, an imitation of gas lamps coming on – she’d felt she could just eat, not be noticed, not be anyone, not be the mourning mother momentarily. Then the owner had paid for the meal. It’s taken care of, their waitress, a middle-aged woman said. David had looked around. Katherine kept her own eyes on the t
able, on her wine. She took a sip. Then the manager came over. He had a beard, was a big man, had been speaking earlier to some other customer of the numerous handcrafted beers on draft, and when he came up to the table, he put a big fist there, gently pounding the table, like a mime might, and said, I can’t understand what you’re going through, but I want you to know that we’re all here for you. Your son and his family meant a lot to this community. He’d been looking down when he said it, then he looked up, giving Katherine a deeply pained look, his lips pursed hard into a frown, and his head nodding with profound understanding. She’d done her best to close her eyes and not glare at him. He was only trying to be kind, she’d thought. When she opened her eyes, he’d still been standing there, looking around awkwardly, as though he should be congratulated for his empathy. She couldn’t believe he was still there. Thank you, she’d said after a moment. David had put a hand on her hand, which was holding the stem of her wine glass. She wanted to ask them, David and this manager, to please, could they just stop and watch what they were doing, because, none of it, nothing, it seemed, felt anything other than rehearsed, scripted, the outward gestures of grief, a performance, an attempt at mimicking some inner feeling. Then she’d thought, maybe that was grief: that one could come to view oneself from such a distance that one was no longer in one’s life, but was watching it, completely separate from others and one’s self. Then he’d gone.
Afterward, she and David had walked the few blocks to their hotel. David stopped in the old-timey drugstore to get bottled water and mixed nuts for the evening. She’d waited at the front of the store, felt herself staring vacantly at a stand of Corn-Nuts, thinking of what this man had expected from her. Had he wanted her to reach out, take him by the shoulder, and thank him for finally acknowledging her suffering? She knew this was an awful way to think, and that she should push it from her mind – the man was only trying to be kind, she repeated to herself, an echo of the thought she’d had in the restaurant, only fainter, less compelling. David had come back to the front of the store with the bottled waters and mixed nuts and they went to check out with the clerk, a young woman, homely, probably from a local farm, Katherine remembered thinking now, and in the middle of scanning the nuts, the clerk had looked up and said that she’d lost her sister when she was little, so she knew exactly how they felt. God bless.
Katherine looked at Louis Walters’ waiting face and typed to him that what caused her to stop speaking was this: after eating dinner in the town, and hearing all these sympathies that felt empty, that night, she wasn’t able to sleep. I thought, she wrote, did Nicholas really know these people? He never spoke of them. The only people he spoke of were April, Jack, and two people from the college, sometimes his students. The next morning, we, David and I, went to breakfast at a diner, where the waitress, a girl named Amanda, after taking our orders and getting us coffees and waters, finally recognized us, or realized who we were, or was told who we were. She said, Oh my god, you’re the grandparents. During her speech, I watched this girl, wondering if she’d come to the realization on her own, if our grief was that apparent, or if someone had told her. I’m so sorry for your loss, she said to us. Nicholas and April and Jack sometimes came in here. We all loved them so much. It’s such a tragedy. Poor Jack. Poor little thing, I can’t imagine. I have a boy who’s four and a little girl, just one a few weeks ago. I can’t imagine it at all. They’re my heart. Katherine wrote to Louis Walters that she remembered the way the waitress had stood there holding their plates of food, an early bird special and a vegetable omelet. I decided right then I wasn’t doing this, she wrote. I wouldn’t suffer the inanities of an entire town’s superficial sympathy. I looked coldly at the girl, feeling my anger like a kind of force field around me. I wanted to project it out, to touch this Amanda woman with it. David saw this I think and to interrupt me he said, Thank you for that, Amanda. Now, I think our breakfast is getting cold. And the woman, startled, had said, Oh my god, I’m so sorry, and set our plates down. Whenever she returned, to fill up water, or coffee, she did that same sort of sad, pursed lip understanding face the manager at the restaurant had made the night before, the same one that all people had been making in order to convey their sadness and understanding. Eventually I stopped drinking the coffee and water, stopped eating. I just wanted to leave. When we finished the breakfast and went to our hotel, David asked why I hadn’t said a word through breakfast. He asked if I was all right. I pulled a pad of paper from the desk, wrote on it that I was now in a period of silence, I didn’t know for how long. That’s what started it. Even writing this now feels like a cop-out.
Katherine stopped writing. She remembered how David had looked at her, his mouth open, then he nodded, swallowed, and said, I understand. He’d walked over to her, held her, fully pulling her into him, and she’d cried. She wanted Nicholas back so bad was what she wanted to say to David, but she only cried into his shoulder, resolved to her task. Then she remembered Nicholas spending a week a year in silence, and she realized that that was what she was doing. She hadn’t done it consciously, but she was going to now. Not to find out anything about Nicholas, not to honor his memory, but just to do something that he’d done, to feel close to him and to one of his actions. She didn’t feel any closer. David had released her and begun unpacking, and for some amount of time, she’d felt that her original intention, which was to avoid the stupidity of the townspeople, could be transformed into something more meaningful if she allowed herself to do it: it would force her to confront the actuality that her son was gone, she thought. That she would, also, one day be gone. That was better, she thought. She didn’t dislike the town in its entirety, but the sort of detached, hippie view of things, the hip-Appalachia façade, coupled with the Cracker Barrel aesthetic of the surrounding rural areas, was more annoying to her than anything she encountered in the medium-sized city she lived in. Everyone here was so ‘authentic’: musicians, artists, outdoorsmen, hunters, academics. A weird little mix of a community. She didn’t want anyone in the way of her grief, she wrote to Louis Walters, and yet they were already all over it, representing it to her. She wanted to meet it alone, without distraction. So I choose silence.
Yet even now, in the room waiting for David to return, not talking to Louis Walters, only writing to him, she knew she was finding distractions from this confrontation, and every time she came back to the realization that Nicholas was gone, she felt the pain as though newly beginning again. Every time her mind reconstructed her reality for her, and that reality first began with Nicholas and then the negation of Nicholas, and the same in turn for April, it was like experiencing the news all over again. She looked at Louis Walters, who was now smoking a cigarette on the screen – it was something she didn’t like about him, but he was free to do what he wanted. He sat there, waiting for her, and she sat in front of her computer, alternately looking out the window at the view of Church Street, the farm-to-table restaurant she’d eaten at twice, a bookstore, some small boutique, and then, above the street, as if floating above it almost – the clouds and fog were so thick – there was the mountain, some indiscernible distance away.
Do you want to know the other reason I’m not talking? she wrote. He nodded his head. I’m not talking because I keep finding ways not to look at what is happening, because there are so many distractions from what is happening. You know my other son is with Jack right now, she wrote. When Nicholas made him Jack’s godfather, I thought: What a nice gesture. It felt like the right thing, but I never thought it’d have consequences. It has consequences. It’s Nathaniel. This is the chef? Louis Walters said. Yes, she wrote, the chef. It’s not that I don’t think he’s the right person, or that he and Stefanie aren’t right for Jack. I think they are. But I’m worried for Jack’s way of life. It’ll be so different with Nathaniel. The same if he comes with David and I. I think the real reason I’m not talking, she wrote, is because of Jack. It’s obvious to me now. I learned a while ago that Nicholas spent a week in silence every year. Wh
ich was what he wanted Jack to be able to do when he was old enough too. I think that’s actually where this is coming from, she wrote, though I didn’t realize it right away.