THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2019 by Jayson Greene
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Excerpt of “Between the Bars,” written by Steven Paul Smith, provided by courtesy of Universal Music Publishing Group, copyright © Universal Music-Careers, on behalf of Itself and Spent Bullets Music.
A portion of this work originally published as “Children Don’t Always Live” in The New York Times Opinion column on October 22, 2016.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Greene, Jayson, author.
Title: Once more we saw stars / Jayson Greene.
Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. | “This is a Borzoi book.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2018013866 (print) | LCCN 2018042539 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524733537 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781524733544 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Greene, Jayson—Family. | Children—Death—Psychological aspects. | Bereavement—Psychological aspects.
Classification: LCC BF575.G7 G6897 2019 (print) | LCC BF575.G7 (ebook) | DDC
155.9/37083—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018013866
Ebook ISBN 9781524733544
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.
Cover photograph taken by the author, Coney Island, 2015
Cover watercolor by iStock/Getty Images
Cover design by Jenny Carrow
v5.4
ep
To Greta and Harrison
To get back up to the shining world from there
My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel;
And following its path, we took no care
To rest, but climbed: he first, then I—so far,
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
—Dante Alighieri, Inferno
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
One The Accident
Two The Aftermath
Three Kripalu
Four Searching for Home
Five Pregnancy
Six Harrison
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
One
the accident
HOW SHOULD WE START, SWEETIE? Maybe with one of the silly games we invented together. They meant nothing to anyone else, but everything to us. There was the time we pretended, for half an hour, that the ramp outside of a building was an elevator. You would press your finger to a brick; I would make a beeping noise. I would say “Going down!” and you would run down the ramp, laughing. That was the whole game. It was enough.
Or: We’re on the beach. You are two years old. You saw the beach once before, when you were fourteen months; you did not enjoy it. The sun on your skin felt invasive (you shared your mother’s aversion to direct sunlight). The sand moving beneath your feet and hands fascinated you at first but quickly unnerved you; the ground had never stuck to you before, nor had it proven unreliable. The sea thundered. You wound up in my arms, squirming.
Today, you are older, and you are unafraid. You are wearing a polka-dot red cardigan over a striped green dress and a bright red hat, and in your left hand is a mango on a stick from the boardwalk vendor. I carry you out past the Coney Island pier; I take off my shoes and set you down with your small shoes on. You run out, mango stick held out carefully to your side. I walk after you.
The ocean is enormous to you, and I sense the thrill of awe and fear little people feel when confronted with the world’s vastness. You look up at me and I smile; I don’t seem scared. My shoes are off, I point out; would you like to take off yours? Your eyes go thoughtful, and then you nod. We walk up together to the mouth of the impossible ocean. The wet sand is cold; it’s only May. Individual sand grains twinkle. “Look, sweetie pie, a shell,” I say, pointing to your feet. You reach down and scoop it up out of the wet sand. It is a fragment, something that fits between your tiny finger and thumb. There is a clump of sand at its point; you hold it up in my face, grinning, as I pretend to be disgusted.
“Ewww!!”
You laugh that throaty, snuffly, catching giggle of yours. The waves run closer, reaching us. For the only time in your life, you feel ocean water running over your toes.
* * *
The brick fell from an eighth-story windowsill on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Greta was sitting on a bench out front with her grandmother. The two of them were chatting about a play they had seen together the night before. It was a live-action version of the kids’ show Chuggington, in which some talking train cars help their friend Koko get back on track after she derails.
“Koko got stuck!” Greta exclaimed over and over. The moment seemed lodged in her brain, my mother-in-law told us later. She was struck by the simplicity of the predicament, the profundity of the call for help.
Reporters interviewed the aide of the elderly woman who lived on the floor—the woman whose windowsill crumbled. Even in print, I recognized the sickened wonder in her voice, her newly dawning understanding of the malevolence and chaos of the world: “It was like an evil force reached down…”
* * *
We left our E-ZPass in the apartment. Stacy and I realize this only upon arriving at the mouth of the tunnel en route to the Weill Cornell ER. The gate fails to lift as we approach and we almost plow through it. The man at the tollbooth tries to reckon with us, incoherent and hysterical and blocking traffic.
“Our daughter’s been in a serious accident,” Stacy yells to him.
He peers behind us at the empty car seat, confused. “Where is she?” he demands.
“She’s with my mother!” Stacy says. Cars honk as the pressure of the line builds behind us.
“Please, she is in the hospital,” I interject. “Please just let us go.”
He waves us on. “Just don’t get in an accident!” he calls into our window as the bar lifts.
We’d received the phone call from Stacy’s mother, Susan, only twenty minutes before. “Oh, Jayson, it’s so horrible,” she had said—her first words. The scenario she described was still sketchy: there had been two chunks of brick; there were paramedics on the scene. Susan was in the back of a second ambulance, and Greta was in the first, already en route to the hospital. Susan had been struck as well, in the legs.
“Where is Greta?” I demanded.
“She’s up ahead,” Susan said. “She’s breathing on her own now. They told me she’s breathing on her own.”
Her voice was fuzzy, disoriented, and we heard other muffled voices, paramedics demanding things of her. A male voice cut in behind her, asked Susan something sharply. I could tell from her faltering response that she was struggling to connect the dots.
“Susan, please tell me,” I said, firmly and slowly. “Where did the brick hit Greta? Did it hit her in the head?” When I said the word “head,” I felt something break up my voice, an elemental thing
I wasn’t familiar with yet.
“It hit her in the head, yes,” Susan said. I yelled this information over my shoulder to Stacy, who screamed instinctively.
“My baby girl,” she cried, sobbing convulsively.
During the eternal drive up the highway, neither Stacy nor I speak in specifics. She reaches over and grabs my palm, her voice trembling. “She has to be OK. She just has to be. There’s no other option.”
* * *
We leave our car behind us in valet parking and run into the lobby. We reach the security guard, and I say it again, for the second time: “Our daughter’s been in an accident, and she’s in the ER.” I watch his face soften; I am already learning what happens when you tell people this news.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and waves us on.
There is a visible trail of crisis in the ER entryway, a smear on time leading all the way up the hall, and I feel us walking through it. I hear someone to my left ask, “Are these the parents?” and some part of me registers the grimness of that designation: “the parents.” Up ahead, a paramedic waves to us urgently.
We follow into a corner room, maybe twelve by twelve, with a table in the middle and doctors and nurses crowding around it. In the center of it is Greta, stripped down to her diaper and pitifully tiny, her eyes closed and her mouth open. I watch as team members lift her arms and legs like she’s a sock puppet. I remember seeing the upper roof of her mouth, the pearly islands of her teeth. I have no memory of the injury on her head; my mind either refuses to note it or has erased it.
There are things you see with your body, not with your eyes. Stepping away, I feel something evaporate, a quantum of my soul, perhaps, burning up on contact. I am lighter, somehow immediately less me, as if some massive drill has bored into my bones, extracting marrow. I glance at Stacy, grey and motionless in a hallway chair, and see the same life force exiting her frame. Susan is on a stretcher down another hallway, out of our sight. We wait.
I take out my phone and call my parents, on vacation in New Orleans. I try my mother’s cell phone first: no answer. I leave a voice mail of some sort. I pace the length of the reception desk, try my father’s cell phone. Voice mail. My brother: voice mail. I have dropped through a wormhole, it seems, or fallen into a crack in time. My unaware family and friends are living above it. On their timeline, Greta is still fine.
It is John, my brother, who finally picks up. I try to relay the seriousness of the situation, and I can tell that he does not or is refusing to grasp it.
“Oh, Jay, I’m so sorry,” he says. His voice is sympathetic, the reaction to a commonplace childhood injury, a terrifying but temporary moment in any young parent’s life. “My heart goes out to you, man. There’s absolutely nothing worse. I remember when Ana”—his eight-year-old daughter—“was bitten by the dog. It was the worst day of my life. You feel so powerless.”
I try to emphasize my foreboding through the phone: “It’s bad, John,” I say.
“She’s going to be OK,” he tells me, and I hear a touch of a plea behind the reassurance in his voice. I don’t know very much yet. But I had seen the haunted looks on the EMTs’ faces when I entered, and I had already beheld the terrible sight of Greta’s body, lifeless and birdlike, lying limp on a massive table.
“No, John,” I say grimly. “No, I think she won’t.”
* * *
The trauma team rushes Greta from intake into another hallway to perform a CAT scan, which will reveal the depth and severity of her head injuries. All that precious stuff in her head—what state is it in? Stacy and I are already silently calculating odds. Greta began speaking in sentences startlingly early; she was obsessed with dogs, and Stacy and I joked that we would get her one when she was old enough to tell us “I want a puppy” in a sentence. When she told us that at fourteen months, we laughed and expanded the minimum qualifications (“Mother, Father, I very much would like a dog, and I promise to help walk it and feed it”). We needed more time, we reasoned. We were sure we had it.
The CAT scan reveals a bleed in her brain, and she is rushed into emergency surgery. The bleed is so severe, apparently, that no one is dispatched to update “the parents” on her condition. After waiting an interminable-seeming amount of time in the ER, I seek out our social worker, a man whose face we had just been introduced to numbly minutes ago. He is holding a plastic bag, which he hands to Stacy: Greta’s gold sandals, stained with blood. Stacy accepts the bag without reaction and lets it dangle at her side. “Where is our daughter?” I ask.
The social worker knocks on the big blue door of the CAT scan room, then tentatively pushes it open; it is empty save for one team member.
We are ushered to another floor. There we sit, waiting, texting friends and loved ones listlessly.
Our close friends Danny and Elizabeth show up, Elizabeth bearing a pendulous bag of sandwiches, in that helpless way you do when you can’t show up empty-handed but have nothing to give. Stacy had texted them when we were still in triage: “Greta’s been hurt and I don’t know if she’s going to be OK.”
These two are first responders in all of their friends’ lives, arriving first to a crisis with the sirens still blaring and the caution tape up. Their own lives are messy in the rumpled and continuous way of true urban bohemians, their two-bedroom apartment nearly crumbling under the weight of thousands of books and odd vintage baubles and the hundreds of art projects of their astonishingly wise five-year-old child, Clara. They were the ones showing up late to a party with hair astray and faces red, Elizabeth alluding to some jaw-droppingly unlikely set of circumstances with a wave of a hand and muttering, “Don’t even ask.” But when the slightest calamity befell anyone in their generous orbit, they dropped every single piece of their precarious juggling act and knelt at your side. There were only two of them, but somehow when they arrived you felt encircled. We had seen them perform this role for their innumerable friends and acquaintances and total strangers that one friend had vouched for. Now it is our turn. Elizabeth sets the sandwich bag down on the floor and hugs us both wordlessly.
Stacy’s brother, Jack, and his girlfriend of nine years, Lesley, come next, their faces broken and streaming. They take their seats on either side of Stacy, who sits with her knees drawn up to her chest. I remember almost nothing from this moment, only the shape of the corner we sit in and then the dim figures of two police detectives standing near the elevators; they had arrived from the scene of the accident. The rest—how much time passes, what I say to Stacy or Jack, whether I get up to go to the bathroom, whether I text anyone the news, whether I say anything at all in particular—is a penny slipping beneath dark water.
I think about Greta, knowing that whatever of her that survives will be damaged. I imagine raising a shell of my child, a body that keeps growing while a mind flickers dimly. I think about never hearing her speak again. I think about wheelchairs, live-in care, an adult Greta prostrate and mute, occupying our spare bedroom. I think, briefly, about expenses—how would we shoulder that burden?
Eventually, the surgeon emerges. We stand up, pointlessly. He is the television-drama vision of a neurosurgeon: gaunt, grey, with hollowed eye sockets and some slight wasting at his temples. He seems to be made entirely of cartilage under his scrubs.
He lowers his bony frame into the chair next to us and clasps his hands between his knees. “I wish I had better news for you. We removed as much of her skull as we could to allow the brain to swell, but the bleed was rather severe.”
I feel him choosing his words as carefully and severely as possible: our false hope is a blockage, and his job is to cut it out at the root and leave nothing behind to grow.
“So you’re saying that her recovering would be sort of…a miracle situation?” Stacy asks.
“I would say so, yes,” he answers. He looks at us, his eyes as sorrowful as his voice is laconic. He adds, more quietly, “This is one of those
situations where I’d love to be wrong.”
We are sent down to another wing of the hospital, waiting for nurses to stabilize Greta. Susan is wheeled out in a hospital gown, her legs bruised and swollen and her face ashen. Her eyes are spent and wild, lost in the way I associate with patients deep in Alzheimer’s: There is something terribly wrong, the eyes say, but it is too large for me to figure it out.
She breaks into sobs the second she sees us, her body folding in the chair as if our gaze were shriveling her. Stacy rushes over, kneeling down.
“It’s not your fault,” she says quietly to Susan. “It’s not your fault.”
Susan cries like a small child into her shoulder until she grows still.
We all settle in and wait. There is a fish tank to our right, separating the hallway and the bustle of the hospital from us in our misery. The bag of sandwiches sits, unloved, on the table.
“Is anyone hungry?” Elizabeth finally asks, the question emerging like a puff of breath in frozen air.
Stacy pokes at the bag disinterestedly. “Maybe? Where are these sandwiches from?” Stacy’s food obsessions are so fierce and pure they sometimes disconcert even her, and their persistence in this situation makes us all chuckle slightly, despite ourselves.
“They are from Corrado, a really fancy specialty market,” Elizabeth says, adding with a smile, “We chose them very carefully. There’s dill chicken in there, and roast beef, and none of them have mayonnaise.”
Stacy brightens slightly, leaning forward. She opens the bag and begins to inspect each sandwich, lifting the lids on their cartons, pincering the top slice of bread with two fingers to peek beneath at the distribution of meat to cheese, to confirm mayonnaise absence, and to hunt for the dreaded presence of raw onion. As she performs this finicky little ritual, Elizabeth starts laughing; suddenly we all are.
Once More We Saw Stars Page 1