by Mark Gunther
“I have to get out! I have to help!”
“No, ma’am, it’s too dangerous. Let the men work.”
O’Reilly, her badge read. She started asking Joy questions about her name and address and where she was going and what she was doing and why the car was there and had she seen or heard anything at all. Joy must have been answering because she heard the scratching of the officer’s pencil, but the horrible crashing echoed over and over in her ears and everything else was in slow motion and happening outside her body. This is the end of my life, she thought.
She watched the backhoe extend its shovel and two men took a chain that drooped below the bucket and slid it under a collapsed section of the scaffolding. As it slowly lifted away, the debris pile shifted.
Joy screamed. Bile rose in her throat and she threw up out the window.
The men moved another section and she saw a huge piece of wood sticking straight up into the air. The ambulance crew crawled over the pile and they disappeared behind it and then soon, too soon—Joy knew it was too soon—they reappeared and climbed back out and walked slowly away.
“What are they doing? Why aren’t they helping her? Oh my god they can’t help her!”
O’Reilly wrapped her arms around Joy as she sobbed and screamed and just thought over and over, Jenny’s dead, Jenny’s dead. A paramedic came over to the car with Jenny’s backpack and phone; Joy took them.
“Can I go say goodbye to her?” she asked. “Please?”
O’Reilly exchanged a glance with the EMT.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Rosenberg,” O’Reilly said. “Let me take you home.”
“Is this my house?” Joy wanted to know.
“Yes, ma’am,” said O’Reilly. “Let’s go inside.”
She offered Joy her hand; when Joy didn’t move she reached down under her arm and lifted her out of the patrol car. O’Reilly kept hold as Joy moved woodenly up the stairs. She fumbled for her keys; O’Reilly took them and opened the door.
Joy didn’t want to touch anything, in this house where Jenny lived.
O’Reilly led her into the hall, past the stairs, past the wall covered with family pictures, into the living room. She sat with Joy on the couch under the window. A car door slammed.
Joy’s body rose up and her feet took her to the hall and when the front door opened she threw herself at him. “Ah Danny, Danny. Oh my god. Jenny Jenny!” She wrapped her arms and legs around him and squeezed with all of her athlete’s strength.
“What’s wrong, Mommy, Mommy, what’s wrong, why are you all dirty?” Jake was crying and pulling at her leg. Joy fell to her knees and held her son, sheltering him for one last second.
“Oh Jake,” she said. “There’s been a terrible accident. Jenny isn’t coming home.”
“Where is she?”
Danny fell to the floor with them and they huddled in the hallway, by the open door.
“She died, honey,” Joy said. “She died.”
“Can I ever see her again?”
“No, Jakey,” said Danny. “We can’t. No one can.”
Jake’s face crumpled.
“Ma’am. Folks.” O’Reilly’s voice cut through the moaning. “I’ll need to be going, and you’ve got some visitors. I’m so, so sorry for your loss.”
Joy’s friend Carly was running up the walk, mouth open, face tear-streaked. Joy’s father Hiram had left his car sitting in the middle of the street with its door open and he was close behind Carly. Joy screamed again, and they were wailing and huddling. Joy held on to Jake like she could actually protect him, and Danny had both of them wrapped in his arms. Carly’s body pressed into hers and Hiram got in behind Jake with one arm around Danny and one around Carly. They all cried and moaned and screamed until things quieted enough for Carly to take them into the living room. She vanished and reappeared a few times and soon there were pillows and blankets and tea and cut-up fruit and cheese and chips and crackers in bowls with salsa and hummus, and meanwhile Hiram took Danny’s keys and Carly’s keys and moved all the cars around for legal parking. And Joy told Jake and Danny how it had happened.
Later that night, after Danny’s parents, Jerry and Elaine, arrived from Calistoga, the doorbell rang. Hiram went to answer it and returned with a round-shouldered, clean-shaven man with a slight paunch and a kind depth in his eyes. He had a small kippah, skullcap, bobby-pinned to his hair.
“Rabbi Abravanel,” Hiram said.
Rabbi said, “I’m so, so sorry.”
Joy had only seen him from a distance before, from their seats at the back of the sanctuary on the High Holidays. “What do we do now?” she asked.
“I can help you,” he said. “What do you want?”
Joy looked at Danny.
“I don’t want to cremate her,” he said.
Joy didn’t like the idea of having an urn on the mantle or going to visit a set of ashes in a columbarium either.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
Rabbi asked if they had cemetery plots, and when he found out they didn’t he telephoned the cemetery and left a message to expect Joy and Danny tomorrow. He said it was likely the coroner would release the body to the mortuary in the morning, and they would have to go there to buy a casket and plan the funeral. He said the funeral should be on Wednesday, “because we Jews always bury our dead promptly,” and with no embalming. The body belonged to the earth after the spirit was gone. He talked about the order of Jewish grieving practice: Seven days to be shattered, thirty days to be broken, a year to accommodate, and a day every year for Judaism to remember your dead. He talked about what they would have to do on each day and what kind of help they should have.
“It will be very, very hard for you,” Rabbi said. “But the shul, the synagogue, is here to help, however we can.”
Rabbi got his phone out again and left some more messages. He left, then, and eventually Hiram went home and Jerry and Elaine went to a hotel, but Carly insisted on sleeping on the couch. “Anything you need,” she said. “Wake me up.”
Joy and Danny and Jake went upstairs and lay down together in their clothes on Joy and Danny’s bed. No teeth got brushed. No stories got read.
After Jake fell asleep, Danny wanted Joy to tell him every little detail. He made her describe exactly what happened, what she had seen and heard, what everyone had said. Where was the pile? What was she wearing? Did she see any of the car at all? Who helped her?
“I’m going there tomorrow,” he said. “I will not leave you on that street alone.”
But she always would be.
In the morning, Joy, Danny, and Jake still were heaped on the bed. Joy couldn’t feel anything at all. Danny made her take off her dusty clothes and take a shower. Carly had made coffee and put out breakfast. Jake was eating cereal, and Joy thought it was good for him to do that.
“I called your mother,” Hiram told Joy. “She got a flight and should be here tonight.” He and Rose had been divorced for twenty years.
“I should have called her,” Joy said.
“No, she’s okay,” Hiram said. “Ready to go?”
Carly stayed with Jake. Joy made her promise that she wouldn’t take him anywhere except into the backyard, but only if he wanted to.
Joy and Danny sat together in the back seat as Hiram drove to the cemetery. They shopped for a gravesite and found the spot they liked. The director offered a “pre-need” discount and they bought six sites for the price of five because now they knew that you never know. Deeds were issued. Joy had never thought about a gravesite as owned property. Danny asked if there were property taxes and assessments, but the director said gravesites were exempt.
Then they met Rabbi at the mortuary. He had told them the night before to bring an outfit to bury Jenny in, and they both thought of her new dress they had bought for the tap dance recital. Which was weird, because real-life Jenny preferred big T-shirts and leggings and hardly ever wore girly dresses. Danny wanted Jenny to wear his Bar Mitzvah prayer shawl, and Joy agreed. She h
ad put the dress on a hanger with the tallis draped over it and put it in an old suit bag from Macy’s. In a separate bag were some panties and socks and old black leather shoes. Not her tap shoes. Joy wanted to keep those, and Danny agreed.
Mothers used to do this themselves, wash and dress their dead children for burial. Now someone else does it.
Rabbi had gently suggested Joy not view the body until the mortuary finished the preparations. The repairs. Maybe it’s better to remember her alive than dead. But right now she couldn’t remember anything.
They picked a plain, unadorned pine casket, sanded smooth, with gently knurled edges and a triple beveled top. Rabbi left them to go sit with the body and pray, relieving the man from the chevra kadisha, the volunteer burial society, keeping the Jewish custom of constant prayer and vigilance between death and burial so her spirit wouldn’t get hijacked by a golem or become a dybbuk, or whatever else could happen to an uninhabited, untended body before it was buried.
Joy and Danny sat at the walnut conference table in the mortuary’s quiet upstairs room. Together, they selected the appropriate mortuary services. She watched Danny approve the estimate and sign the credit card receipt; an unexpected chunk of frequent flier miles accrued. Joy accepted a little velvet bag holding the jewelry Jenny had been wearing and things from her pockets; she opened it and onto the table trickled her rings, earrings, necklace, some change, a hard candy, and two gum wrappers. She also was given a one-gallon Ziploc bag with Jenny’s hand-decorated sneakers; the air had been sucked out of the bag and the shoes were grotesque. The man at the table with them said the rest of her clothes, unfortunately, were “unable to be preserved.” At least my daughter died wearing her favorite shoes.
When they got home, Danny’s brother Joey, his wife Leah and their eight-year-old daughter Sarah had arrived from L.A., and they did more crying and screaming, and soon after that Joy’s childhood best friend Lizzie came in from Seattle with eleven-year-old Amanda, Joy’s goddaughter, and they did even more crying and screaming. When Joy wasn’t crying and screaming she was rooted in the doorway of the minimart with the crashing sound and stabbing light and billowing dust.
Later in the day, Rabbi came by the house to sit with the family and lead them in a discussion of Jenny’s life, to help him compose a eulogy. You can’t know someone’s life until it’s over, he said.
Her life is over. Mine, too.
2.
ON MONDAY, JOY was going to buy Jenny some new shoes. Today she was going to bury her. From beneath the weight of the covers Joy reached out her left hand and Danny was there.
“Oh, Danny.” Her voice rose like smoke from her burning throat.
“I don’t believe it.” He paused. “Did you sleep?”
“I can’t tell.”
“Me neither.”
They lay there. After a while he said, “I’ll get Jake ready.”
Danny had carried Jake into his own room after he fell asleep on their bed the night before. It had taken the focused effort of both of them to get him out of the clothes he had been wearing for two days and into his pajamas. The bedding rustled over Joy as Danny got up. She knew she had to get up, too. She forced her feet to the floor and lifted her hips, stacking them precariously on her legs, her body a set of unrelated parts only coincidentally connected. She wobbled to her closet, but it confounded her. So many things, so many wrong things, memories that belonged to someone else.
A shadow crossed behind her. In the closet’s mirror she saw Danny, unshaven, in an old ugly suit. He mumbled something she couldn’t hear and shuffled out the door.
He did it. I can do it.
She pushed through all the nice things she would never have any reason ever to wear again and found a drab black suit of washed-out cotton, a decades old hand-me-down of Mom’s. It felt heavy as chain mail. The habit of hands and feet dressed her. Across the room on the vanity, bottles stood in an ordered row: face cream, hand cream, cleanser, sunscreen, moisturizer. She would sweep them all into the trash if she could lift her arm that high. A shrew stared back from the mirror, the mirror that Monday could barely contain her happiness. She had called out to Danny and he had come and embraced her and the mirror had shown her just what she imagined them to be.
Danny and Jake’s footsteps echoed in the stairwell. Joy slipped on the staid old-lady pumps that had been Mom’s too, and turned back to the mirror. The shrew had no comment. She put a thousand tissues in her pockets.
The door to Jenny’s room stood open, the bed still unmade. Joy shook her head and thought, Jenny, you can be so lazy! And she turned toward the top of the stairs to yell at Jenny to “Get up here and make your bed now!” But dust clogged her throat and she had to hold the wall to keep from falling. She stepped into the room and it was full of her daughter.
Maybe she’s not really dead; maybe if we don’t bury her she’s not really dead.
But sound and dust said no, Joy, she is, you saw it, you came home without her, she’s dead. Joy closed Jenny’s door. The little block J hanging on its outside rattled into stillness.
Joy went downstairs to wait with the family—brother, mother, father, grandfather. They sat, staring at nothing in particular, black clothes on white couches. Jake sat gravely next to Danny, his shoes bouncing arhythmically off the front rail. How can he possibly understand this? It will break him forever! But all Joy could do was straighten his little red tie and kiss his forehead. She sat. Her hands, unsupervised, ground another wet tissue to pieces.
Rabbi arrived, wheeling a large suitcase that had three stubby-legged chairs strapped to it. It was the synagogue’s funeral kit, he explained, the things needed for the shiva services in their house this week.
“Shiva means seven,” he said, “and in the first week we bring the shul to you, until the next Shabbat.”
He unzipped one of the small side pockets and took out several small, round black pins with two inches of black silk ribbon hanging down.
“Pin these to your lapel,” he said. Danny and Hiram each took one. “Tear it like this, from the bottom,” and the ribbon separated. “Tearing shows how you have been torn.”
Joy leaned toward her son. She barely had the strength to resist the gravity draining her soul toward the center of the earth.
“Do you want to tear this, Jakey?”
She took the thumb and fingers of each of his hands, covered them with her own, and together they pulled the two sides of the ribbon in opposite directions. She stabbed her thumb twice trying to get the pin through his lapel into the hook. A drop of blood formed. She fumbled her own pin to the ground. Trembling, Joy grabbed the lapel of her jacket and ripped it. She shook and radiated a low agonized sound. She stood in the minimart doorway, the noise, the dust-filled air surrounding her, the car buried, screaming echoing in her head, arms reaching out, scrabbling at the immovable steel, pulled away, puking out the back of the patrol car, going home alone. Calling Danny, saying for the first time, “Jenny’s dead.” The empty house, opened by O’Reilly with Joy’s keys, waiting for Jake and Danny, falling to her knees, hugging the frightened little boy, indelible physical memory of that moment, the dark knowing she had changed his life forever. And again, the noise, the dust, the empty air, the quick violence, the fear, the . . .
“Joy. Joy!”
Rabbi was in front of her, firmly holding her hands. Everyone was staring at her. Jake nestled tightly against his father, his face a welter of fear and incomprehension. She had torn her clothes and groaned with pain and clawed at her own face in front of her little son.
“Jakey, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She reached out to touch him. He turned his eyes away from her and leaned into his father’s side. She touched his leg, tentatively. He pulled it away, solidly in Danny’s embrace, his only living child. Danny fixed his eyes on her, demanding: Keep. It. Together. She looked away and sat, hands folded in her lap, close enough to Jake that he could touch her. He didn’t.
R
abbi reviewed the week’s schedule with them. “Be prepared,” he said. “Many congregants will come. Everyone who ever knew you or your parents will come. Here, to your house, until Friday. You can come to the shul on Saturday to say kaddish, the memorial prayer, if you wish, but it’s not expected in the first week. After the first week, mourners can come to the daily service at the shul to say kaddish in the first year. Or you could come weekly, on Saturday morning or Friday night. Find what works, but don’t be alone.”
That’s what I’ll be forever.
The mortuary chapel, painted in a timeworn institutional beige, had a twenty-foot ceiling and undecorated walls. Every seat was taken. People stood in the rear and crowded the side aisles, leaning against the wall. School families, shul families, their parents’ lifelong friends, high school and college classmates, Danny’s staff, their neighbors, the drycleaner and the shoemaker, people from their favorite restaurant, from the grocery store, people Joy had worked with over the years, from Danny’s early law office, and even some of the neighbor families from where they first lived before their kids were born. Joy walked woodenly down the center aisle, holding Jake’s hand, Hiram and Danny behind her. Hands reached up, lightly touched her arms; murmured words of condolence emanated from unidentified faces.
The small stage had a seating section for the family off to the side. She took the two steps up the stage and turned to the family section. Rose, Joy’s mother, was there. They brushed cheeks.
Even as a child Joy thought her Mom had lived a desiccated existence. Attentive and competent—and lonely. But Rose had studied Judaism in those seemingly lonely hours and her desire for more observant lifestyle met active resistance. The teenage Joy had no patience for that and even less for her parents’ constant bickering. Hiram refused, as he said, to turn his house into some kind of a cultic museum, and after twenty-four years of marriage Rose stepped away. Hiram soon had a steady supply of girlfriends. And Rose was so happy and relaxed when she invited Joy over to her little apartment inside the eruv in Berkeley that Joy had to forgive her. The match with the widowed Rabbi Pinchas Gelberman in New York came four years later.