Once More We Saw Stars

by Jayson Greene

  The time of the surgery approaches. I feel a panicked foreboding, a desperate need for the door to stay closed. My daughter is still here in front of me, breathing and intact. The details and particulars of how and why suddenly don’t matter to me when confronted by the thought of her sudden total absence. Keep her here, I think.

  Nurses knock, and a wild roaring goes up in my ears—blood is pounding, and I am receiving the most primal signal in all of evolution. Don’t let them take her.

  I look around and see my brother weeping openly, his face crumpled, a sight I have seen maybe once before in my life. I stand up, surrounded by them, and suddenly feel as if I’ve stepped onto a stage. This is my Greek tragedy, and the conclusion relies on me.

  “Hey there, baby girl, you did such a good job,” I say in a voice of bright cheer. “It’s time to go now, OK? I’m going to walk with you every step of the way, OK?”

  Nurses flank her bed, gathering up the tubes to move her. I feel watery, as if my vision were suddenly going to go. I straighten. This is going to feel like it is going to kill me, I think, reasonably. But all I have to do is step into it, right now. And then I will not die.

  I lift a foot, feel the blood drain from my head, place one hand on the back of her bed as they begin to wheel her out. I think of the biblical figure Nahshon, appointed by Moses, wandering head-deep into the Red Sea. The quiet sobbing in the room breaks into howls. I remain silent. I am looking at the top of her head, bluish from the last forty-eight hours but still bird’s-egg beautiful and fragile. We are halfway down the hallway to the doors; the world as it will soon be, a world without Greta in it, lies on the other side.

  The nurse to the right pushes the button and the doors swish open. We maneuver the bed at an angle and around the corner, then to the elevator.

  “Just a little further, monkey,” Stacy whispers.

  I look at my broken daughter’s body. She has done such an incredible job. I well up with an immense and ghastly pride at her last demonstration of will and determination.

  The elevator descends. I start shuddering, bodily. This is going to feel like it’s going to kill me, but all I have to do is step into it, and it won’t. I look down at Greta’s hands, her small fingers curled at the edges of the duck blanket the way they would when she was asleep. The doors open. I feel it again, that medieval urge. One is not meant to surrender the body of one’s child. But we are here, and there is no more time. I take my hand off the rail and the bed with my daughter on it moves on. Greta is gone.

  Stacy and I collapse into each other’s arms, feeling the empty space already between us that we will never be able to fill. Some part of us, I believe, is still down there, clutching on to each other and wondering how and why we didn’t die.

  When I come back to the room, there is a palpable sense of relief, one that no one would have vocalized. The pieces of our lives are scattered everywhere, and we can never pick them up again; there is some peace in immediately understanding that. When a tree caves in the side of your house, you laugh quietly to yourself in wonder at the damage and its irreversibility: there’s no way anyone expects us to pick that up. Our role as crucial actors in Greta’s death is over. Now it is time to mobilize for many other things: for phone calls, for a service, for the world.

  I look out at the buildings again, and the terrible sense of prophecy I felt earlier is gone. Death visits all corners of the world: it comes for drunk teenagers who careen off dark country roads; it comes for babies tangled in Venetian blinds in tract homes; it comes for children found floating in suburban pools. These are just buildings; they have no special role to play.

  Two

  the aftermath

  IT IS AUGUST, NINE MONTHS BEFORE the accident; you are sixteen months old. We are renovating our kitchen, and the apartment is an unlivable mess. I am taking you to see Susan for the day, who has been watching you more often as the renovation drags on. Our lives are chaotic, exhausting, unmanageable, safe.

  “Time to go, baby girl!” I call.

  You are sitting ten feet away on the rubber mats covering the concrete in our tot lot. You rub idly at your side with a broken piece of sidewalk chalk, leaving a pink smudge. You say nothing.

  I place the half-eaten banana I have been holding in my left hand on the stroller canopy, next to the balled-up piece of string cheese, and squat beside you. “We’re going to go see Grandma Suz,” I remind you.

  “Yeah, we’re gonna go see Gam-ma Suz,” you agree, not looking up. “Grandma Suz” is a single three-syllable word in your voice, with the accent on “Grand,” an offbeat triplet with a falling melody.

  “But we gotta go if we’re going to see Grandma Suz, honey,” I say again, “so you’ve got to get in your stroller.”

  You stand up: “No, I don’t wanna get in my stroller,” you declare, and waddle off.

  It is 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday, and you and I have been together for three hours. You yelled at us from your crib starting at 4:30. Our bedroom is a living room pretending to be a bedroom, with French doors splitting it in half, and your voice pierces straight through them. You haven’t slept past 5:00 a.m. in months, and in desperation, we have unplugged the baby monitor.

  By the time I surrender, you have been calling our names for twenty minutes or so, and your voice has turned peevish: “MOMMY-DADD-YYYYY!!!” I sit up, pausing for a moment for a quick sensory inventory: my head feels viscous and the floor feels too far away. Groaning, I stand.

  I close the bedroom door behind me, brushing the plastic curtain in the doorway from my face, and walk through our upturned living room. To my left, a circular saw sits atop our disgorged air-conditioning unit, which has faded from white to grey to blue-black under successive layers of dust. I slip on the flip-flops outside the bedroom to keep my feet clean, grit crunching as I walk. I round the hall to your bedroom door, sidestepping a Tupperware bin of dirty dishes. We have running water again now, but still no kitchen sink, so we pile our used dishes in the bin each night and float them in our bathtub. The two bedrooms, ours and yours, are the only ones with bare floors, which we wipe down every day, a losing battle against entropy.

  I open your door. You are standing up on your mattress in your crib, your hands on the edge, your legs swaying beneath you. You’re like a shipwreck survivor in the room filled with our clutter. “I want up,” you announce.

  I choose my path to you carefully, winding around living room chairs, my violin, Mommy’s neglected cello in its big red case. I reach down into the crib as you reach up, and we connect at my hip in one smooth motion.

  “I want Mommy milk,” you say.

  Together, we pick our way back through the apartment, you hugging me close, gazing around with mild interest at the disaster we have made of your home. I deposit you feet-first on the bed.

  “Hi, sweetie,” Mommy coos at you, her eyes still closed. Pale sun hints down on the rooftops outside our window. You stand up and regard them for a moment, your hands on our headboard.

  “Look, Greta, you can see the moon,” I say, pointing.

  You agree and then flop down. Mommy lifts her shirt and pulls you in close; you nurse, squirming the whole time and kicking your legs with pleasure and excitement. Lying next to you, your little feet thudding against my shoulder, I taste accumulated exhaustion in the back of my throat.

  “You smell tired,” Stacy would say in those days when I would come in to kiss her; apparently, after a certain threshold, I began to exude it like rot.

  You finish nursing and push backward off the bed, scooting your way to the floor butt-first. It is my morning to get up with you, so I scoop you up the second your bare feet touch the floor. We get dressed and leave together, talking in low tones. We are letting Mommy sleep; we will see Mommy later; we are going to the playground. The playground is outside; we put shoes on for outside; which shoes do we want to put on? We are putti
ng on our pink shoes; let me help you with those. OK, you can do it yourself. OK, let me help you.

  On the playground, I watch you try to climb the monkey bars. Your foot keeps missing the lowest bar. I’m watching for the right moment, between tired and overtired, to begin our journey; it’s like trying to isolate a hue of pink in a sunset. I text Susan, “Looks like we’re getting on the train in twenty minutes,” rounding down optimistically. I call to you again: “Hey, baby girl, maybe if you get in the stroller you can eat your banana?”

  You concede. I strap you in and we leave the tot lot just as other children start to show up, trailed by bleary-eyed parents. My phone tells me there is a train arriving in seven minutes. I swipe my card, nodding to the attendant. She hits the buzzer to unlock the emergency door and I push you through. The whole door-buzzing thing is a charade, since the door is always unlocked anyway.

  This platform was closed for nearly a year after you were born, so you didn’t see the subway much. When it reopened, it looked exactly the same: “They just removed the asbestos,” joked Stacy. Overhead, rutting pigeons coo in the rafters. I glance down the track and spot the lights of the B train, one station away, its headlights glowing. I don’t say anything to you, as you are nearly asleep. I have timed our journey impeccably.

  As the train pulls up and the doors shudder open, I text “On schedule” to Susan. I push your stroller over the lip of the entrance, lock the wheels, and sink into an empty seat. We have a long journey ahead of us. I will lift your stroller up by the base, straining and grunting up crowded flights of steps; I will wedge your front wheels in between two closing subway doors. We will race heedlessly down the cream-colored sidewalks of the Upper West Side when we emerge, an hour later, aboveground into the morning light. I will retrieve you, laughing, from Susan’s the next day. The city we move through is still a welcoming one, and we hurtle through it, oblivious and invincible.

  * * *

  One hour after we surrender Greta’s body to surgery, hospital administrators arrive to sneak us into the parking lot. We huddle near the exit in the disorienting sunlight while they scan the perimeter: no news trucks.

  We find ourselves saying good-bye to Susan, who chooses to go home—straight back to the apartment in which Greta spent her last night, around the corner from the accident, bits of her last breakfast still on the high chair. “I’ll be fine,” she says dismissively.

  I glance wildly at Jack and Stacy, feeling lost: Surely this is a terrible idea? And someone will say so? But Jack and Stacy relent: they have a long history of failing to persuade her to see things their way. I watch her lower herself painfully into a car with her injured legs and the door shuts, swallowing her. I want to chase after her, to scream at everyone that we need to save her from herself, but instead I just stand there.

  Jack retrieves our car and we pull into traffic, suddenly enveloped again by the city. I sit shotgun, Liz and John and Stacy in the back. Someone discovers a carton of sliced watermelon rotting beneath the front seat, and the smell is overpowering. “That’s awful,” Jack croaks, sputtering, while Stacy laughs in the backseat, swiping in front of her face as her eyes water. The odor is a reminder of the genial mess that has recently been our lives. We roll the windows down to let in air, and Jack blasts music.

  There is a cleaning lady in our apartment right now—an appointment we forgot to cancel. She knows about the accident. I try to imagine, dimly, what it must be like for her, scrubbing the counters with milk-stained baby cups on it, knowing that the child who gripped them days earlier is dead.

  To kill time, and to put off facing our home, we converge on Jack and Lesley’s studio apartment in Park Slope. We unlock the dog gates containing their pit bulls, Lia and Ivan, and collapse in their living room. Stacy lies on the couch with Liz, and the two of them fall asleep. Drained of color, they resemble still lives.

  I bend over Jack’s stereo and transfer the music from the car: “I know there’s gonna be good times,” croaks a sampled voice. Beers are opened. We move into the small, chain-linked backyard, pull up the old green lawn chairs sitting on wood chips. Ivy crawls up the brick wall above us.

  We find ourselves momentarily buoyed by a strange survivors’ cheer, telling family stories and laughing. Some are even hospital stories, small absurdities that arose from the fog and confusion of grief. Only the mention of Susan punctures the surface: we all go quiet, and our fragile bubble pops. Suddenly our ugly bruising rises to the surface, and we see ourselves for who we are: a broken family, huddling together for warmth and still bleeding. Then someone tells a joke, and just as smoothly the bubble re-forms.

  I learn very quickly about the bubble and how it works. There is a quicksilver fluidity to extreme tragedy, one you adapt to intuitively. It’s an operation that requires only your nerve endings and your immediate chemical needs for survival. Every single fluid in your body is pumping overtime—adrenaline, endorphins, blood. It’s like a river that grows wild in storm time.

  As the afternoon light fades, our backyard party dies down. Jack hooks empty beer bottles with his fingers, grabs the grease-stained paper plate with its remaining bite of sandwich, and pushes open the screen door. Lesley’s dog Ivan gallops inside and leaps for the couch. Stacy kneels down to hug Lia, who jumps up and places her paws on Stacy’s shoulders, kissing her face in the frantic way dogs do when they sense distress.

  “I know, Lia,” Stacy murmurs, turning her face to escape the uncomfortable intimacy of a direct dog-to-mouth kiss. “You are a sweet one. You can tell everybody’s sad, can’t you?”

  We cram back into our car, a baby-blue Honda Fit with chipped bumpers that now sports a fresh parking ticket slipped beneath the wiper. I sit up front again, while Stacy drives and my mother and father cram in the back. Jack has quietly uninstalled the car seat.

  We’ve been warned by neighbors that the press has been stalking our building. A New York Post reporter has been spotted sauntering up and down the block, a microphone concealed in a piece of newspaper. The thought of a microphone jabbed in my face is sickening, so I pull out my phone and start drafting a statement in case we are cornered, while Stacy and my parents make small talk.

  I have cultivated the habit of distracted writing like this the way my father, a urologist, had learned to bolt upright in the middle of the night when his pager beeped. I am a music journalist and editor, and I’ve spent years writing in every crevice of life I can find: standing up on the subway holding an iPad, muttering voice dictation while walking to the corner for milk.

  This manic behavior is partly my nature, but I’m also fighting against an original-sin sense of guilt: I have chosen a foolhardy profession, far from my inherited notions of what “hard work” looks like. My mother and father worked in the medical field, and each had painstakingly climbed a few socioeconomic class rungs to do it.

  My mother’s family was Irish, working class, from the red Republican belt of western New York. Her parents expected her to marry a local boy when she was seventeen. She left for nursing school instead, worked night shifts, married her first husband, had my brother, discovered the man she had married was an alcoholic, emptied all his bottles in the garbage, and left to be a single mother. When she met my father, she had already coolly determined that if she had to go it alone for the rest of her life, she could.

  My father grew up the youngest of a splintered and unhappy Long Island family, yearning to escape. When he didn’t get into the medical schools he wanted in the States, he applied to the University of Bologna, in Italy; it accepted him. Without speaking a word of the language, he gulped, boarded a plane, and began a three-week immersion course in Italian before beginning anatomy and premed courses—entirely in Italian.

  I didn’t have a gritty origin story. I was the beneficiary, encouraged and indulged, shuttled and safeguarded. I was a milk calf, my muscles too tender and my skin too soft, and I had chosen an absurd
career path, with prospects somewhere between small-town golf pro and birthday-party magician. I had used up my indulgences.

  So I invented my writing time. I wrote with Greta strapped into a BabyBjörn, feeling the rise and fall of her breath on my chest. This combination of the two vocations, the painstaking way I made them slot together at neat angles—I was a father, I was a writer—soothed my suspicions that my life was a summer-camp version of other people’s.

  As we park, I finish the statement. It is brief, a paragraph, a simple plea to be left alone. Satisfied, I tuck my phone away. I’ve found something else my writing can do: protect my wrecked little family.

  We round the corner to face a blessedly empty street, and I exhale. I ignore the sidewalk chalk on the stoop beneath my feet spelling out Greta’s name—a play session from five days ago. There is a sign taped to the front door fending off the press, put up by one of our neighbors. Behind it, our porter, Jose, is spraying Windex. He speaks very little English; Greta knew his name and waved hello to him every morning. When he sees us, his arms drop to his sides. “Lo siento,” he says mournfully. For the only time in our relationship, we hug. We move through the lobby and into the elevator feeling eerily unencumbered.

  We push the apartment door open and are greeted by silence. Nothing in here knows about Greta’s death—not her red horsey with its empty smile, the toy bin beneath the living room chair, the straps on her purple high chair that she would fiddle with. We bring the news with us into each room, like smallpox.

  Into this new, terminal stillness, a single buzzing fly emerges. We open all the windows, hoping the breeze will guide it out, then sit and listen as it bumps its head against the sill in the quiet. Neither of us can bring ourselves to suggest killing it. We are remembering the fly trapped in the apartment two weeks ago and how fascinated Greta was by its presence. She tracked its progress with wide eyes, her bare feet slapping on hardwood floors as it alit on every available surface. My hands itched to swat it, but her interest mounted with our irritation: “Where’d the fly go?” she asked us over and over.