The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  But no one had tricked him. His parents had been in the dark themselves, as taken aback as he by her unannounced arrival. And if she seemed different than he remembered, that was hardly a betrayal. People changed. So she’d lopped off her spectacular hair—why shouldn’t she? Eight years had passed. Neither was Paul the towheaded, baby-toothed, loose-limbed boy he’d been. For all he knew Jess was as disappointed by the changes in him as he was by the changes in her. Except that was presumptuous. To imagine even for a moment that his inconstancy mattered to her.

  He scratched out, viciously, the guy he’d been drawing. Started over on a fresh page, drew a girl this time, not some mud-flap ho but a badass chica with cargo pants and spiked hair.

  If Paul had long nursed an infatuation for Jess, it had been more intense for its childish clarity, more tenacious for the innocence of its inception. Although he hardly thought about her anymore in a concrete way, he’d never really stopped expecting, anticipating her eventual return. As though the prospect of her resuming a role in his life had lent the future a necessary luster. But the joke was on him: it turned out the idea of her retained its power on the condition she not reappear.

  That evening at supper Jess had shown him the same quality of attention she’d offered Biscuit, no more, no less. Paul had been unable to detect the slightest indication from her of their preexisting bond, and he took this absence as confirmation of something he’d begun to suspect: that he was in a kind of decline, growing more deeply unappealing every year. He thought of them down the hall now, Biscuit and Jess, side by side, sleeping, probably, but still he was jealous of them for having each other as company. He imagined he could hear their breathing through the wall, slow and inflated with sleep, rising and falling in tandem, lining the nest of Biscuit’s night-lighted room with its downy sound.

  In fact he could hear nothing. Only, straining, the insect whine of electricity within the walls. The clock beside his bed read 12:58. An hour ago he’d been aware of low voices from his parents’ room. Odd that this still held some power to comfort. The house had since grown relentlessly quiet. He wished for the sound of rain.That was a thing that helped, some nights—the sound of rain on the eaves. But it had rained once today already, and the front had come through.

  ON THE CRAMPED BALCONY of the second-story condo that he had until this past January shared with his dad, Gordie Joiner sat with a wool blanket wrapped around him, his feet propped against the railing, and regarded his own breath as it traveled in sparse veils from his mouth. It was not unusual, now, for him to sit out here quite late at night. The balcony had room for little more than the molded plastic chair in which he sat and a single milk crate, on which rested a clamshell that still held a few extremely weathered cigarette butts. Beneath the chair his dad’s old radio played, tuned to the same soft rock station that had been on when his dad had left for the hospital that final time. Plugged into the outdoor outlet, it had been playing continuously these past four months.

  The condo complex was built into the crook of the thruway entrance ramp, and the whoosh of traffic, though diminished at night, never entirely stopped. Gordie’s dad had used to say it was like living by the sea, comparing the sound to that of the surf, not a nuisance but a lullaby. So Gordie tried to think of it now. Below, from the darkness, came the sound of bottles being tipped into a recycling bin. Someone in one of the other units yelled out a window: “Sheila! Get in here!” A car started up and pulled away slowly, out of the parking lot and into the elsewhere until Gordie could no longer follow the sound of its engine. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.The rain earlier in the day had stirred all manner of intricacies from the soil, and the air, though almost painfully cold in his nostrils, smelled plainly now of spring. It was, literally, no longer the season of his orphaning.

  Will Joiner had entered the hospital on December twentythird with complications from lung cancer. It had metastasized to the liver, lymph nodes, and spine. He died just short of his fifty-fifth birthday. Gordie’s mother had died nine days after his birth. Postpartum toxemia. The loss made bitterer by the fact that nowadays, in a developed nation, such a death ought not to have occurred. Will Joiner put the blame squarely on their native stoicism, his and Bronwyn’s both, and throughout Gordie’s life his dad had always erred on the side of caution, medically speaking, in all ways but one: the cigarettes he could not, would not, give up. Red and white pack. Peeping out of his breast pocket or tossed on the kitchen table. The cellophane sleeves, run through with their strip of gold, always lying about. Even after the scan showed cancer, even after Gordie moved home, as much to police him as anything else, his dad persisted in sneaking smokes, out on the balcony or in the bathroom. Eventually he did not bother to sneak, but smoked again in broad daylight at the kitchen table, or in his leather chair before the TV, or brazenly, sitting up in bed, until Gordie had given up lecturing, given up hunting down the hidden packs and squirreled-away loose smokes he’d find rooting through his dad’s nightstand and sock drawer and the pockets of old sport jackets hanging neat and idle in the back of the hall closet.

  Gordie told himself he sat out here to avoid being overwhelmed by his dad’s random clutter, still untouched inside the condo: papers, books, shoes, newspaper clippings, hand tools, prescription bottles, saucers of loose change.Yet the bulk of the clutter was not random at all; it comprised the trappings of what had been Will Joiner’s singular passion: diorama-making. He’d used shoe boxes, mostly, but also shirt boxes, cigar boxes, chocolate boxes, and a tall oak one that had once held a bottle of very good scotch. An autodidact partial to the Encyclopædia Britannica (for which Ebie had been acronymously named), Will Joiner had taken for inspiration anything that struck his fancy. Some of the scenes he built depicted precise, if apocryphal, moments in history: Archimedes saying “Eureka!” in his bath (a speech bubble stuck to his mouth with a bit of wire), or Alexander the Great about to slash through the Gordian knot (with a translucent blue cocktail sword). Some drew their inspiration from literature: Cyrano hiding beneath Roxanne’s balcony while Christian stood in the moonlight; Alice at the Mad Hatter’s tea. Some came from his dreams: a woman hanging laundry on a clothesline, a boy leaping off a bridge.

  Their construction was at once crude and exquisite in its pains. Cheap plastic dollhouse furniture mingled with handstitched curtains; a landscape cut from a magazine was juxtaposed with real sand and a glue-gunned birch bark canoe. Some of the boxes had Christmas lights or flashlight bulbs rigged to shine through holes cut in the backs or tops. Some had movable parts you could work by pulling paper clips attached to strings. Some had tiny crank-handled music boxes duct-taped to the outside. If you turned the handle on the back of Lincoln’s assassination, for example, you’d hear Brahms’ Lullaby. Or on the scene of a magician sawing a lady in half:“O Sole Mio.” Gordie’s dad had worked in the same post office branch for twenty years and not a single colleague had ever known of his hobby—this had dawned on Gordie only at the funeral.

  A noise at his back made Gordie turn. It was Ebie, wanting to join him on the balcony: a thing she rarely did. Gordie slid open the glass door and filled with gratitude for the delicate industry with which she pressed herself past his legs, brought her rump around, her tail striking the bars of the iron railing, and wound up sitting beside him. She pushed her nose up against the ceiling of his palm, and he stroked her glossy crown and murmured, “You’re a good girl.” He had not ever seen her react to someone as she had to the girl Biscuit. He saw again how she’d torn out along the spit, how she’d knocked the girl in, how she’d then pushed her way into the Ryries’ front hall and planted herself not by Gordie but by the girl. He might almost have felt jealous if not for the fact that he, too, had wanted to plant himself, to stay in that house—which he had, for nearly two hours, accepting a cup of tea and the loan of a sweatshirt while his own soaked jacket went through the drier, chatting with the father and the grown daughter, revealing bits and pieces of his story, gleaning bits and pieces of
theirs.

  Two whole hours. It embarrassed him now, to think how long he’d stayed. As if he didn’t mind their realizing he had nowhere better to go.

  With a sudden, almost violently decisive movement that made Ebie prick up her ears, Gordie reached beneath the chair and felt around for his dad’s radio. After a moment he located the power switch, and after another he pressed it. For the first time since December it went quiet. Then there was only the susurration of the thruway, and the hard black smell of new spring.

  PART TWO

  Last Year

  1.

  The diagnosis had been made the same day she learned it was a boy, during a routine ultrasound in the fifth month.

  Anencephaly was such a pretty word. It might have been a Victorian girl’s name, or that of a minor deity: goddess of apocrypha, muse of nonsense verse.

  Instead it was the name of a neural tube defect that meant her child would be missing the major portion of his brain and also the top of his skull and scalp. His head would be open to the sky. The radiologist there in the obstetric ultrasound suite explained that the condition was “incompatible with life,” a phrase that took Ricky several seconds to understand, but which then struck her not as sneakily euphemistic but as surprisingly elegant and apt, free of judgment. A numbing fog sifted down upon her, an etherizing blanket. She experienced the overwhelming desire to sleep.

  Yet something was not right, some vital fact was escaping her, something she knew she must bring to the radiologist’s attention, what? A sort of contradiction. Medically significant. She furrowed her brow, ransacking her mind, then struck upon it with a rush of near-nauseating adrenaline. “But—I’ve felt him—moving. Just in the past week.” She flushed furiously; sweat stood out along her brow.

  The radiologist nodded, rested her eyelids a moment, lifted them again. “Yes. The anencephalic fetus quickens, just like any other baby.”

  When she did not continue, Ricky looked in confusion at her own hands. Oh. Somewhere, far away, too far for her to do anything about it, a train wreck was in progress, tons and tons of metal collapsing on itself, whole compartments combusting, grass bursting into flame and smoking alongside the tracks.

  She and the radiologist were alone in the room. John, who had been present for Paul’s and Biscuit’s ultrasounds (uneventful both), had a show at the Llewellyn-Price going up in four days, and only just the previous day had learned the director needed part of the set to revolve. He’d looked haggard and harried that morning at breakfast, cradling his coffee in the lopsided alphabet mug.

  “You sure it’s okay if I don’t go?”

  “I’ll bring you a picture,” she’d promised, with a cavalier flourish of her fingers. “You already know what it’s going to look like, anyway.”

  “Some kind of weather.” That had been their joke with the other two, whose fetal images resembled, they agreed, nothing so much as the radar maps used by meteorologists. They’d referred to Paul, before his birth, as Gathering Storm; Biscuit as An Area of High Pressure.

  Both children had already left for school. Ricky was having an unusually decadent morning, lounging about this late. She’d scheduled her ultrasound for the earliest available time slot, nine, which meant leaving the house at eight-forty, more than an hour past her normal departure time.

  “Exactly,” she said, shrugging to minimize the importance of the event, then kissing his weary brow (he’d stayed at the theater till two the night before). “Go make your set spin, sweetheart. I’ll see you tonight.” And pulling on gloves, she’d left the house.

  It had been December, so frozen the air seemed to rustle as she crossed the porch, and the little lawn to creak under her tread. Her shrug was a dissimulation. She was in fact giddy with excitement. The moment, that moment, of seeing the little profile! In the car, she fantasized about coming home from work that night with the promised item: an impossibly grainy square of black-and-white, which she’d stick up on the fridge, displaying a certain outward irony to acknowledge that showing it off in this way was very white, suburban, bourgeois. But she imagined with real pleasure Biscuit and Paul, in turn, wandering over, wrinkling their noses at the image, demanding to know if they had been that funny-looking, too. John would declare it a good-looking bugger no matter what (and mean it), and Ricky would tease him lightly about making this categorical pronouncement based on only a blurry shadow, while inwardly basking in the ambient glow of his happiness. As for herself, she would already have pored over the image a dozen times at her desk that day, marveling tenderly over its slopes and protrusions, inferring from them a whole life, a distinct person.

  That had been her fantasy an hour ago, while making her way here in the wan light of the winter morning. Now she did not know whether the day had turned out sunny or overcast. The ultrasound room was windowless and dim, although the monitor had been switched off and Ricky no longer lay on the examining table but sat in an oversized modular chair of vaguely Scandinavian design. The radiologist, herself a large-boned woman of vaguely Scandinavian design—blue eyes; bland, implausibly symmetrical features; blond hair sculpted in a bun at her nape—was speaking gravely, methodically. She was not warm, offered no recognizable expression of sympathy. Ricky found herself grateful for this, the clinical reserve and uninflected formality of the radiologist, of whose words only a fraction penetrated the fog that had settled, mercifully, over her.

  Rate of occurrence was about one in ten thousand. A rudimentary brainstem might be present but not the cerebrum, without which there could be no thinking, no feeling, no consciousness. Anencephalics who were not stillborn had a life expectancy of a few hours or days. Rarely, weeks. She could choose to terminate now. Most did, the radiologist added.

  “I’ll carry to term.” The strength and alacrity of her assertion surprised her.

  The radiologist nodded but said, “You’ll want to talk with your partner.You don’t have to decide anything now. We’ll notify your doctor of the results.”

  He kicked then. Ricky put her hand on the spot. He pressed out against it, and she cupped whatever it was—elbow, heel—with a wild ripping of her heart.

  “Is there”—she tried to sound nonchalant, as though her interest were merely clinical—“a margin of error?”

  The radiologist looked nonplussed for just a fraction; then her features resolved into an expression of terrible sympathy. She said nothing but held Ricky’s gaze, until Ricky, blinking, looked at the floor.

  The radiologist made a move as if to stand, and Ricky looked up quickly. There must be some other question she ought to ask, some way of forestalling the end of this meeting and its commensurate conclusiveness. “Can I have a picture?” she said. Again, her utterance—both the assertiveness of her voice and the fact that she had the wherewithal to think of the request—surprised her.

  “Sorry?”

  “Of my baby.”

  The radiologist made a tiny sound inside her mouth. “Of course.”

  She had to get back on the table, push the stretch panel on the front of her maternity jeans back down over the small hump of her belly, pull up her shirt, have more of the warmed gel squirted onto her skin. In the radiologist’s unbroken silence—she said nothing more from that point on—Ricky read reluctance, possibly even disapproval, but the woman guided the transducer unhurriedly, pressing the button to print not one but two images, and before she left the room nearly undid Ricky’s composure by placing her large hand on the top of Ricky’s head and keeping it there for at least three seconds, an unexpected and very nearly shattering benediction.

  Ricky took home the two squares of baby weather map, not in the evening after work as planned, but straightaway, in the middle of the morning, direct from the complex of medical office buildings in Nanuet. One she stuck on the fridge.The other she brought, the edge held delicately between finger and thumb, as she climbed half blindly the stairs to her room, where she barely managed to conduct her body to the big wooden bed before, like the princess who has
pricked her finger on a spinning wheel, and without first calling John to tell him what had happened or the office to say she was going to be out sick, she succumbed to the most instantaneous oblivion, a sleep as viscid and nullifying as tar.

  2.

  Biscuit lay before the fire, lost in the flickering light and colored marbles nested in tin. She was playing alone, purple against black, opposite points of the star. The purple was good, a creamy lilac, all sweet and bitable, but the black was even more intoxicating, the inkiness so liquid she wanted to drink it, wanted to roll the onyx orbs about on her tongue, grind their glossy surfaces together inside her mouth.

  She lay with her chin resting on her stacked fists, luxuriantly yet imperfectly lost. Somewhere on the edge of her awareness, treading lightly but refusing to retreat altogether, was the fact that Paul was angry again, had gotten mad at her during this very game of Chinese checkers and flung a handful of his pieces at her before storming from the room, so that even now as she continued her move without him, she knew the game could not be played to completion. Somewhere even further from the center of her thoughts, the bigger worry loomed.

  The fire was gas, the logs fake. The gas made a queer whistling sound, faint in Biscuit’s ears. Even the embers were not real but some sort of molded ceramic that only seemed to glow from within. It was her grandma’s fireplace, lit today not only because of the unseasonable cold, the last gasp of winter trespassing on the first full month of spring, but also because of the sad reason for the children’s visit: a curative. Not that anyone said this straight out. Her grandma hadn’t even mentioned the reason they were here. But Biscuit could tell because her grandma, a woman not given to excess of any kind, had declared the lighting of the fire (the turning of a knob) a “special treat.”