by Marly Swick
They changed into their bathing suits and drove to Santa Monica. The beach was crowded but not mobbed; it was a mild day, not particularly hot. They lucked out and found a parking spot a block away. This is how life works, she thought. You lose a child, you find a great parking space. She kept this observation to herself. As they trudged across the sand to the water, Giselle kept feeling that she was forgetting something; she was used to carrying the heavy diaper bag loaded with diapers, juice, crackers, toys. The two of them sat on the sand for a couple of hours while Teddy sloshed around in the surf. The water was too cold to actually go swimming. Dan told her that he was planning to get back to his book project — a critical study of the confessional novel that he had more or less abandoned after Trina’s birth, claiming that he had no time. He thought, if he really focused, he could finish the Fitzgerald and Conrad chapters by the end of summer. Talking about the book, he sounded energetic, confident, almost like his old self. Giselle took this as another good sign. When Teddy finally emerged from the water, blue-lipped and shivering, they bought hot pretzels on the pier. Then Dan helped Teddy build an elaborate sand castle. Normally they would have argued over who was chief architect. It broke her heart to see them being so polite and accommodating. For supper they stopped off at Taco Bell on the way home and picked up a video. No one argued over what to rent. They were all on their best behavior. They were all pretending to be enjoying themselves. She thought maybe if they pretended long enough, they might start believing it. When they got home, she made popcorn. Then they discovered that the girl had given them the wrong video. Instead of Iron Will, she’d given them some kung fu movie with subtitles, made in Hong Kong. They watched it anyway. Afterward Teddy was so wound up, he kept leaping around, faking kung fu moves, just like any nine-year-old boy. And when Teddy crashed into the coffee table, Dan yelled at him to knock it off. “Watch what you’re doing!” Just like any irritated father. So this is how normal life resumes, she thought hopefully, as she picked at the tiny kernels left in the popcorn bowl.
TWO
At the mall he eats a slice of pizza at the food court while his mom drinks a coffee Julius. She barely eats anymore. But unlike Eric’s mother, she doesn’t stand on the scales twice a day, frowning at the black lines. She doesn’t seem to care. When Dan asked her how much weight she’d lost, she shrugged and said she didn’t know. For the past couple of weeks they have been looking for a new house to rent. Every morning she reads the classified ads, circles one or two, and makes phone calls to the landlords or rental agencies. So far, nothing decent has turned up. He has heard her complaining on the phone to his dad and his aunt Vonnie back in the Midwest about the rents in southern California. She doesn’t complain to Dan, because he doesn’t care whether they move or not. He has agreed to move if she finds a nice place, but he said it would only depress him more to drive around looking at tacky houses in iffy neighborhoods and make him more resentful of how underpaid he is, “of how little society values education.”
Teddy doesn’t think that a new house is going to be as big a deal as his mom thinks it is. She seems to think everything will be just like it used to be once they move. It’s all she can talk about. And even though he’s just a kid, he knows that’s impossible. Everyone is really trying, but it’s as if they’re all trying too hard, like they’re all laughing too hard at a joke that isn’t really funny. He’s worried his mom will die of disappointment if they finally move to a new house and they’re all just their same old selves. Sometimes he can’t believe it hasn’t even been a month since the accident. It seems like something that happened years and years ago, when he was just a little kid.
This morning Teddy and his mom looked at two places. One was too small, even though they only need two bedrooms now, and the other was too run-down. It had stained gold carpeting and reeked of cat pee. After they got back in the car, his mother rested her forehead against the steering wheel and moaned as if she were in pain. He thought maybe she was going to cry, so he said, “I’m hungry. It’s past lunchtime,” hoping his whining would distract her from crying. He’d rather have her mad than sad.
“What do you feel like?” she asked him.
“Pizza.” They were only a block from the mall and Sbarro’s, which has the best pizza. His mother used to love pizza. He thought maybe if they went there, she would eat something for a change. But she just nibbles on his leftover crust as she drinks her coffee Julius, looking sad and preoccupied.
“Can I go to the toy store?” he asks.
“I’ll go with you,” she says. She drives him crazy these days, always worrying that something’s going to happen to him. He’ll get hit by a car or kidnapped or fall off his bike and get brain damaged. She gets nervous when he’s out of her sight. Or maybe she’s just afraid he’s going to do something really stupid again, like shoot someone. When he saw his sister’s room all emptied out, he wished he were dead. Every time he walks by it, he feels sick. Last week he saw this documentary on the Discovery Channel about India. It showed how when people died, their bodies were laid out on rafts and set on fire and floated down the river. In the old days wives used to throw themselves on top of their husbands’ burning bodies. Teddy wasn’t sure if the wives wanted to or they had to, but it didn’t happen anymore. Nowadays they weren’t allowed to. He could see how maybe they’d wanted to. But he didn’t think he’d be brave enough to throw himself on top of the flames like that. It seemed like a pretty awesome thing to do.
His mother walks off without bothering to clean up their trash. He dumps their stuff into the bin and sets his plastic tray on top, then runs to catch up with her. He would rather go look at toys alone — he has his own money in his pocket — but he’s afraid she’ll cry if he says so. She cries at the drop of a hat these days when Dan’s not around. She doesn’t cry in front of him. But he’s mostly at his office, working on his book, until late at night. He says the only time he feels energetic is when he’s sitting at his computer. At home he mostly paces around or watches old movies late at night on the classic station.
They take the escalator down two floors. It’s the weekend and the mall is crowded. His mother tries to take his hand, but he shoves his hands in his jeans pockets. He spots the toy store at the end, next to Sears. It’s not his favorite toy store, but it’s the only one in the mall. And mostly he’s just trying to kill time so they don’t have to go home. He hates the weekends. He’d rather be at school. He misses playing with Eric. A couple of times they have messed around outside together, but they haven’t gone inside each other’s houses, which they know, without even asking, are off-limits. Suddenly his mother stops dead and he bumps into her. She lets out a little cry and puts her hand to her mouth. There are maybe a dozen framed color portraits hanging on display at the Sears photo studio. She is staring at Trina in her red velvet dress, who is not just smiling but laughing. Thanks to him. Teddy remembers standing behind the photographer making funny faces, pretending to strangle himself with his dorky bow tie. When you look at the picture, you can practically hear her laugh.
“Wait here,” his mother snaps at him. “Don’t move.” Then she marches into the photo studio. He knows she is going to yank the picture off the wall, shout at the photographer, make a big scene, cry. He doesn’t want to see it. While her back is to him, he darts next door to Toy Town.
The store aisles are clogged with kids and their parents. Babies in strollers crying. Kids whining for toys. Parents arguing. “It costs too much.” “You don’t even play with the one you have.” “It’s too old for you. Maybe next year.”
He manages to weave his way down the aisle past the Star Wars stuff and the kid computers to some cheaper electronic toys. He thinks maybe he’ll buy a Quiz Master. Chandra has one at school. It asks you questions, and you answer them. He knows he doesn’t have much time. He keeps glancing toward the door, expecting to hear his mother’s voice yelling for him. Instead of the Quiz Master he picks up something called a Talkboy Jr. The package says you
can record messages and play them back. You can make your voice sound fast or slow, and there are special effects, too. He tries out the buttons and hears a couple of satisfyingly loud screechy wailing and bonking sounds. It seems like something his uncle Todd would like. There’s also another brand called a Yak Bak that’s supposed to play what you say backward. The instructions on the package tell you that if you record “muss ha,” it will play back as “awesome.” Teddy tries it, but the sound comes out all muddy. Unimpressive. He glances toward the door and sees his mother. The clerk is busy ringing up stuff at the cash register. Teddy grabs the Talkboy Jr. and slips it under his T-shirt, tucking it into the waistband of his jeans. The package is pretty small and his T-shirt is big, like most of the clothes his grandparents in Nebraska send him. His mother says kids are bigger in Nebraska and they turn into fat adults; he should be glad he’s skinny.
His heart beats fast as he walks through the crowded aisle to the front of the store, where his mother is standing. He expects her to yell at him, but she just says, “Thank God,” and pulls him out of the store behind her. As they walk past the portrait studio, he notices that there is another picture hanging in the space where Trina’s was. Twin blond girls dressed in identical blue sailor dresses holding each other’s hands, smiling fake smiles. They look exactly alike except that one has a tooth missing on the top and the other has a tooth missing on the bottom. He wonders if that’s how their parents tell them apart. He slides his hand under his shirt as if he’s scratching an itch on his belly and fingers the plastic molded package the Talkboy Jr. comes in. He has never stolen anything before. He feels excited, like running and jumping. By mistake he presses one of the special effects buttons. A siren blasts. His mother looks around in alarm. “What’s that?” she asks. “Did you hear that?” He shakes his head and tries to look innocent.
They returned from the therapist’s office in a good mood. Dan had been back almost a month, and things, they said, all things considered, were going as well as could be expected. There was a lot of cautious, qualified language, but that was only natural, under the circumstances, wasn’t it? On the ride home they made fun of Hannah’s therapist tricks. The way she always turned everything you said into a question.
“Is anybody hungry?” Dan asked.
“Are you saying that you’re hungry?” Teddy asked.
“Are you asking me whether I’m saying that I’m hungry?” Dan turned to Giselle. “And what about you? Are you hungry?”
“I had a dream I was hungry,” she said.
Teddy snorted and laughed.
“I dreamed I was eating blue hamburgers,” she said as Dan turned into the Burger King parking lot.
“That’s what I want!” Teddy shouted. “A blue hamburger with green french fries.”
“Ah!” Dan exclaimed. “The Dr. Seuss Special!”
Teddy and Giselle groaned. And then a pall fell over the car as they sat waiting at the drive-through window, thinking about how Trina had loved Green Eggs and Ham. About how, after Koko’s Kitten, it had been her favorite book. When they pulled into their driveway, Teddy burst from the car and ran inside to his room. He spent most of his time closeted in his room with his computer. Dan looked at his watch as he turned off the engine. “I’m going to play racquetball with Harvey. Then I think I’ll stop by my mother’s for a while. Is that okay?”
“Sure. Whatever.” She followed him into the house, carrying Teddy’s half-eaten kid’s meal. She put it in the refrigerator for later.
“Do we have any clean towels?” Dan asked.
“In the dryer,” she said.
He walked into the utility room and fished out a couple of faded blue towels, leaving the rest of the load for her to deal with. One of Trina’s tiny pink socks was clinging to the towel. It fell onto the floor. They both looked at it lying there. Dan picked it up and held it to his nose, inhaling as if it were a wilted rose petal. His shoulders started to shudder, and she knew it was just a matter of seconds before he would be sobbing convulsively. It didn’t take much to set him off.
She grabbed a couple of shopping bags stuck between the refrigerator and the wall. He was blocking the doorway. She shoved past him and strode down the hall to Trina’s room. The door was shut. She flung it open and slammed it behind her. Then she yanked open each bureau drawer and stuffed Trina’s clothes into the shopping bags as fast as she could, without stopping to think. That was the key — not thinking. As she was moving on to the toy chest, Dan opened the door.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he shouted.
She ignored him, dumping a pink plastic telephone and some stuffed animals into the larger of the two bags. Trying not to think of Trina on the toy phone: Hi, Mommy, Mookie talk, shoving the receiver into Mookie’s face, making monkey chatter.
He stepped into the room and grabbed hold of her wrist.
“Let go!” she snapped, struggling to shake him off. “I’m putting her things away. We can’t live like this.”
He let go of her so abruptly, she lost her balance and stumbled into the crib. The bright mobile hanging overhead tinkled and chimed.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “Just leave it. Let me take care of it. Please.”
“When?”
“Tomorrow. Tomorrow morning.” He glared at her. “Do you think you can wait that long?”
She glared back, then hung her head, feeling the tears threatening to spill. It wasn’t her fault. They really couldn’t live like this. No one could. There should be a rule that no child was allowed to die before his or her parents. Everyone died in chronological order, according to his or her age. No exceptions.
He reached up, unhooked the mobile, and gently set it down on the crib mattress. “I just want it to be done right.”
He was as good as his word. The next morning before she even woke up, he had everything all packed away in brand-new boxes he had picked up at some packing store. Each box was neatly labeled: toys, stuffed animals, clothing, books. Giselle remembered how when they had moved in to this house, all his books had been precisely cataloged while hers were thrown together haphazardly. In the early-morning sunlight the walls glowed a rosy pink like the inside of a conch shell. He was sitting on the floor with a screwdriver in hand, disassembling the white crib. The crib was brand-new. They had bought it together at Baby World. She had been glad that all Teddy’s baby stuff was back in Nebraska, stored in Ed’s grandparents’ attic. She had wanted to start fresh. No hand-me-downs. She remembered how cheerfully Dan had gone about the task of assembling the crib even though normally he hated that sort of thing. He had no mechanical aptitude and would curse at the instructions. It had taken him hours to assemble Teddy’s computer desk, and the desk still wobbled whenever you bumped against it. Ed would have put it together lickety-split, and the thing would have been rock solid. But the night they had brought the crib home in its big box, it was as if Dan’s hands were graced, as if some carpenter’s spirit had entered his body. He had hummed to himself as the pieces snapped together. But now he was muttering to himself, cursing at a recalcitrant screw. His back was to her, for which she was grateful. She didn’t want to see the expression on his face.
He barely spoke to her for the rest of the night. Well, so be it, she told herself. No pain, no gain. The first step was putting away Trina’s things. The second step was finding a new place to live. She wasn’t a fool. She knew that it would take more than a new house to create a new life, but she also knew, sure as shooting, they couldn’t do it in this house. In the middle of the night she got up and stood in the empty room for a long time. Such a long time that the birds started to chirp and the light filtered through the blinds. Even without a stick of furniture, the room was full. The only emptiness was inside of her.
***
She knew that Dan felt it, too — the emptiness — but they seemed to fill it in such different ways. She didn’t want to go anywhere or talk to anyone, whereas Dan couldn’t sit still and couldn’t keep quiet, at least t
o others. He didn’t have much to say around the house, to his wife or stepson, but he seemed to have plenty to say to total strangers. She had seen the handful of letters in his briefcase — yes, she was snooping again. Letters from mothers or fathers in Texas or Massachusetts or Oregon who had also lost a child. Giselle wasn’t sure if he had contacted them first or they had contacted him, but the letters were all the same. Giselle couldn’t understand how Dan, who had always sneered at sentimentality, could be so open to all this communal gush. The sappy little poems and photos. She couldn’t believe he actually felt a bond, a rapport, with these people. Always before, he had been the elitist, gently criticizing her more populist enthusiasms. But over the past few weeks it was as if he had been brainwashed by Hallmark. And she had seen the books, too. A growing library. When Good-Bye Is Forever: Learning to Live Again After the Loss of a Child. The Mourning Handbook. Beyond Endurance: When a Child Dies. Jonathan: You Left Too Soon. What did he possibly hope to learn from reading these books? It seemed that he felt close to everyone, coast to coast, except for the two people living in the same house with him.
Last Saturday they’d had a fight about it. Dan had dropped Teddy off at soccer practice as usual and told him he’d be back to pick him up at noon. But he forgot. The phone had rung and it was Teddy, holding back the tears, saying that he was waiting for Dan. One of the other fathers had offered to give him a ride home, but he was afraid that Dan would show up late, wondering where Teddy was, and be mad at him for going off with someone else. Giselle stormed into the bedroom, where Dan was busy answering one of his pitiful letters. “I’m going to pick up Teddy,” she’d announced grimly.