by Mark Gunther
Joy fell to the bed. She pulled her knees to her chest and moaned, “I’m so scared, Danny, I can’t lose you, too, I can’t lose Jake, what’s happening?”
The toilet flushed. She sat up.
He opened the door. “Did you just say something?”
“No.”
“I’m going downstairs.”
She heard the TV click on. She wanted him to come to her; she was lonely. She wanted him to stay away; she was afraid. She touched a hand to her sex; indifference. After nothing else happened for a while, Joy got herself ready for bed. He didn’t come back before she fell asleep.
22.
SCHOOL WAS CANCELLED for a staff in-service on this beautiful spring day. Joy always used to look forward to these days and planned her work so she could maximize her time with the kids. Kid. Jake pulled his mother up the stairs and into his room and opened his overstuffed game cabinet.
“Let’s play one of Jenny’s games.” He pulled Connect Four out of the cabinet.
Joy sighed.
Jake looked at her sternly. “You said!”
“I’m sorry, Jake. I was just remembering.”
Joy took the box and set up the stand.
Jake started to cry.
She reached out and held him. “It’s all right, Jakey, it’s okay. What’s the matter, honey?”
He stomped his foot. “Mommy, why can’t you just be happy?”
Fuck me, Joy thought. She had no answer for him.
“You’re right, Jacob. I’m sorry. Let’s play. Do you want to be red or blue?”
Joy’s afternoon hung in the balance.
“Blue.”
Earlier, Joy had walked with Jake down to the Marina Green. While he played with some kids in the playground, she did some quick sketching to get the juices flowing, then drew a few ideas for a new job she had. After an hour or so they went and played some catch out on the field. Joy had a glove Danny had gotten her as kind of a joke when he bought into a Giants season ticket group a few years before. But now that Jake was getting more serious about baseball she was learning to throw and catch along with him. When Joy got tired of that they lay down on their backs on the thick grass, holding hands with their heads almost touching, and watched the big kites coasting on the trade winds high above their heads, shocks of bright color against the rapidly moving clouds. When Jake got hungry, they went home.
After Jake beat Joy two out of three in Connect Four, but lost to her in double solitaire, she let him watch a movie. She went into her office to render the sketches she’d done in the park onto the computer, but she kept finding herself looking at movie trailers and reading lifestyle articles at Cosmopolitan.com. She felt bad that Jake was alone in front of the TV. On a normal off-day, Jenny would have been with her brother. After reading her fourth column, she called Lizzie.
“This is normal now,” Joy said. “Today he asked me why I couldn’t be happy. What do I tell him? I see other families with both their kids and I feel so jealous. Why do they get to be happy?”
The photos of a bygone era taunted Joy from the wall.
“Why do you get to be happy? Why do you get to have all your kids and I don’t?”
“No one can answer that, Joy.”
“I know. Please forgive me.”
“Joy, sweetheart, I thought about this a lot at the beginning and decided that whatever happened, I could take it. I won’t lose you. I won’t hide my kids from you. Amanda is your goddaughter and she loves you and is already talking about going to Berkeley so she can be closer to you.”
“I keep thinking,” Joy said, “about that young couple who got chased out of their hometown because no one wanted to deal with their dead child, and here I have you getting on a plane every time I turn around and sticking your nose in my business. I obviously have to handle shit like this if I’m going to get back into living again at all.”
“Shit like this?” Lizzie snorted. “You mean, sympathetic and sustained support from people who love you? You Danny and Jake have a really bad deal. But none of us got to pick that.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be like this! I get one of my kids killed, now I’m sucking the life out of the other.”
“Stop! Jenny would be outraged if she heard that!” Lizzie voice was barely controlled. “Don’t be stupid. Go do forty pushups or something. Get yourself the hell out of this line of thinking.”
“That was unfair.” Joy resented the invocation of Jenny’s name. “My relationship with Jake feels incomplete without her.”
“That sure sucks for him, huh?”
It must. I should let his therapist know about this. What does Jake tell her about me?
“Jealousy is new. I don’t like it,” Joy said, “but I feel it. Maybe I’ll still end up a zombie.”
“I don’t think so. The last time I was there you definitely had lips and there wasn’t a single drop of blood anywhere on your outfit. You’re working, you’re riding, you’re homemaking. Let that be enough for now. I’ve always admired your focus, Joy, but try to chill out, please. Please?”
“I love you, too, Liz,” said Joy, and hung up.
Joy stared at Jake’s baby picture on her office wall and wondered if she really was exacerbating or even creating his sadness. But when she went back to the TV, Jake cuddled in next to her, just a mom and her boy. She watched the rest of the movie with him in a comfortable silence.
“Daddy will be home pretty soon,” she said.
“Mommy, we don’t have to play Jenny’s games anymore if you don’t want to.”
“I like to, but sometimes I remember her when we do, and it makes me sad.”
“I like when you play them with me, but I don’t like you to be sad.”
“I’ll play them with you anytime, Jakey. I told you that I would, and I will.”
“I wonder if Jenny remembers me.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Sometimes in my room I pretend she’s in her room, doing her homework, or maybe she’s at her friend’s house. I wish she could teach me how to play some of her games.”
“She wanted to be a teacher. She really liked teaching you things.”
“Who’s going to teach me those things now?”
Joy held him tighter. “We’ll all do it, me, Daddy, Grandpa, your teachers. Amanda and Sarah, when they come.”
“I don’t like being by myself all the time.”
“Let’s be sure you see your friends more. Maybe this summer you can be in a baseball league.”
“Okay. Can Grandpa come?”
“Sure.” I couldn’t keep him away.
Jake got off the couch.
“Wanna hear me read my book?”
“Can you read it to me while I’m cooking? It’s going to be time for dinner soon.”
He pushed away from her. “I’m going upstairs.”
“Bring your book down. I’d like to hear it.”
As the heat of his presence dissipated, Joy wondered what her mistake was, exactly. She didn’t deserve his resentment. She was taking care of all of them. Then she wondered if she should cook at all. Maybe she should call a babysitter and go and meet Danny for dinner somewhere, if Jake was going to be like this.
Instead, she went upstairs. Jake’s door was open. He was lying on the floor, his book clutched to his stomach. He didn’t look at her as she walked in. She sat on the floor next to him and touched his arm. He turned on her.
“Am I ever going to get to be a kid again?”
“Jake, lovey, I know you miss her. I wish it hadn’t happened.”
She pulled at him. He crawled into her lap. His whole body relaxed and she remembered that she really was his mother and that had to be enough. They sat there for a long time, hugging. She sang him the sweet little songs of his infancy.
Danny found them there when he got home. Jake twisted around and held out an arm to him. He found his way into the pile and they all hugged, gradually losing their balance and tipping over into a laughing heap
on the floor.
“Looks like we should go get a pizza.”
“Get it delivered,” Joy said.
She knew the length of her husband’s hip under her hand and the wide press of his hand, somehow well under her shirt, warming her back. No one was letting go; they were so packed in that she had to get his phone out of his pocket.
When the pizza came, they unfolded and he went down to get it and some paper towels and they ate on the floor of Jake’s room. Afterwards, Jake read to them for quite a while; then he wanted Danny to put him to bed. Joy wanted to go in to Jenny like they used to do, two kids for two parents, but the only place to go was their bedroom. She sat at her vanity. Jenny’s jewelry box was there. She had it open when Danny came in.
“I haven’t been to the cemetery in three weeks,” she said. “Do you want to come with me tomorrow?”
“It’s Monday,” he said. “I’m going to work. Aren’t you?”
“Yes. But I can go out there early.”
“I’ll get Jake ready and take him to school,” Danny said.
“It’s your day anyway.”
“No credit for excess beneficence, eh?”
“Nope. But if it makes you feel better I’ll check the manual.”
Joy and Danny fell asleep holding hands.
In the morning the fog was still settled closely over the streets. Dew dripped off every tree. Puddles formed in the potholes. Drops layered the windshields of parked cars and formed a film on Joy’s glasses she had to wipe off constantly. Spinning south in a small gear at a high cadence, Joy wondered if Jenny would appear today. Soon I probably won’t be coming at all, she thought. Maybe just on the yartzeit, and probably not alone. I wonder if I’ll ever stop looking for her.
As she crested the ridgetop the fog was losing its struggle against the slow heating of the morning, the high wall of gray slowly retreating to the west. Down below, in the valley, the row of cemeteries leaned against the base of the mountain, thousands of headstones glistening in the morning sunlight. She screamed down the descent of Hickey Boulevard, then made the left turn and rode two blocks to the cemetery. Up the driveway the auto gate was locked. Joy passed her bike under the bar and remounted. She put herself in a big gear, to make it hard, and standing, ground up the road to the shul’s small section. Olive trees were interspersed among the silent headstones, many bearing the names of families she knew, people she saw at the shul sometimes, for one of their yartzeits, commemorating the day of the death. That’s every day, for me, she thought. The commemorants were always surprised to see her in the pews. They’d ask, isn’t Jenny’s yartzeit in the fall? Yes, she’d say, with a generous smile. We’re coming most weeks these days, and leave it at that.
Jenny’s spot up the hillside had been isolated when they buried her, but newer graves were drawing her more fully into the community of the dead. Joy took off her shoes and socks to walk on impossibly thick, receiving grass, spongy under her feet. The stone needed tending. Joy took her sweat rag and cleaned each engraved letter: Loving Sister, Daughter, Friend—In Our Hearts Forever.
Jenny’s name and dates were inscribed in Hebrew and English. Other visitors, following Jewish custom, had left small stones on top of the headstone. Joy carefully lifted each stone and cleaned underneath it before putting it back in its place. Then she was done. Not much you can do for your daughter after she’s dead.
“Hi, sweetheart. I’m here,” Joy said, out loud.
She lay face down on the grave, arms and legs spread, the top of her head touching the stone. She launched her spirit into the grave, questing, searching, demanding, reaching out for any sensation, any remainder of Jenny’s spirit still residing in what was there, her body, the coffin, the things they had put in the grave, the first dirt, the vault, the rest of the dirt, the grass. Was the coffin rotting yet? The clothes, the body, were they merging together? Were the maggots returning the body to the earth? She heard the wind in the trees, felt the sun on her back; all else was silence. Joy grieved for the end of her line of women. She wanted to squeeze herself into the grave, get lost in the chorus of missing lovers, mothers, daughters lying here, to stand with her daughter in the endlessness of their dead dreaming.
After that didn’t happen Joy sat up, rolled her jacket into a ball and sat on it. She pressed the entire side of her body against the headstone, wrapped her arm around it. Down the shallow hillside below her, the carefully tended grass punctured by the silent rows of witnessing stones. A plane roared overhead.
“Should we get on that one, Jenny?” Joy said. “I bet it’s going to Tokyo. We can walk the Ginza, eat sushi.”
Will they have a rainbow roll?
“I’m sure they have all your favorites . . . then we can get on the bullet train and climb Mount Fuji.”
A mountain? I’m not a super jock like you, Mom.
“Oh, c’mon, you love to hike.”
For an hour maybe.
“Oh, all right. Let’s get on that one and go to Hawaii instead.”
That’s a much better idea. I love the water!
“We can go snorkeling, but you’d better remember to put on your sunscreen more often this time. How about surf lessons?”
You’re on, Mom!
But I’m not, actually. She’s still dead.
Encased in a quart-sized Ziploc bag and tucked into Joy’s jersey pocket was their tattered copy of A Horse and His Boy. Opening to a random page, she began to read out loud, to Jenny’s tombstone. Down the hill a bit, the sprinklers began to sputter. Soon they would reach her. The present returned. She stood. Turf rolled under her bare feet as she walked the line of headstones. She always finished her visits by pausing briefly at the gravesites of other children, marking her visit by placing on each memorial a stone she had brought. Ellen, age twelve. Oren, age ten. Aryeh, age sixteen. There rarely were stones on those graves. Where were their parents? Dead? Moved on? The air was still; the suddenly hot sun beat down on her. She turned back to Jenny’s place as the nearby sprinkler began to turn. Everywhere Joy went, Jenny was dead. Only in the cemetery was this normal. She retrieved her bike, donning her shoes and her helmet. She looked at the now-shining headstone.
Joy waited, loath to leave, but no magic butterfly landed on her shoulder, bringing the secret of touch—it was time to go home.
“Oh, my love,” Joy said, “my dearest sweet baby, I wanted to give the world to you. Who gets that now?”
23.
CARLY AND JOY sat in Joy’s kitchen after a late afternoon walk by the Bay. Carly’s face was ruddy from the wind and damp. She is still a beautiful woman, Joy thought. Out the back window, fog rolled over the neighboring rooftops and a brisk west wind rustled the trees. Joy had made some lemon spritzers. Non-alcoholic.
“Isn’t Jake’s birthday coming up?” Carly asked.
“Yes,” Joy said. “Eight years old.”
“Want to have a clown?”
“I was thinking yes,” Joy said.
Carly the clown had provided the entertainment at most of Jenny’s birthday parties. She wanted to do Jake’s parties too, but when Joy had two living children she worried that Jake would feel eclipsed by his sister if the birthday parties were always the same. So even though Carly did his third birthday, they had a zoo party when he was four and a pottery party when he was five and took all the kids to the movies when he was six. Another wrong thing I worried about. “Hooray!” Carly clapped. “I thought I might have to wear the clown costume to the office.”
“Or maybe to court.” Joy always had loved Carly’s absurdities.
“It wouldn’t be so off base, given what we actually do there.”
“Jake’s getting a little old for clownies,” Joy said. “This is probably his last one. Maybe you can be a clown for Danny’s birthday.”
“I’ll need a grownup costume.”
“Just don’t forget the red nose!”
“For Danny, maybe that’s all I’ll wear.”
“He’d like that.”
“Wow, girl. Is that an invitation?” Carly asked.
Joy was overcome with the thought that Danny deserved more than she was giving him. Wouldn’t it be easier if it was Carly instead of some stranger? But she said, “No, better not, I think.”
“Oh, honey.” Joy’s voice had given her away; Carly heard the whole story in a sentence. She came around the counter and enveloped Joy’s whole body in a hug. She pulled her head to her shoulder and stroked her hair, holding her close, like a lover, like a mother with her baby, planting light kisses on her head. Cradled there, Joy saw an alternate future: Leave Danny, room with Carly, go on dates, have some kind of reasonable sex with the occasional hook-up, take Jake on alternate weekends as the family-that-was slipped away. She imagined waving to Jake as he grew away from her, leaning on his father and grandfather, romantic love denied him because his mother couldn’t love him freely after his sister died. She saw herself alone at seventy, at eighty, Danny with a new family, Jake living across the country, visiting his elderly mom in assisted living every couple of months when business brought him out to San Francisco.
“The regular costume is good for Danny, too,” Joy said lamely, but Carly only took out her calendar. Together they picked the date for Jake’s party.
On the Sunday of the party, Joy put on makeup and dressed in a full-skirted sleeveless dress in a summery print. At Jake’s request there were helium balloons everywhere, tied to things or pressed against the ceiling with their colored ribbons dangling, parading down the hallway and into the backyard. Danny said Jake was trying to lift their spirits. Joy said she’d try to lighten up. All the boys had arrived, the food ready, and Carly was leading games out in the backyard.
Danny came looking for her. “Hey, pretty girl. Come play some games.”
“Do I have to?”
“Yes, you have to.”
Joy was silent. She didn’t get off her stool.
Danny leaned against the counter. “Okay, Joy, two minutes. What’s up?”
“Do you remember his sixth birthday, when Jenny hosted his friends’ big sisters?”