The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  But Prager, whose fists were clenched at his sides, only continued to choke out filth through a welter of tears.

  So Kenny pushed him aside and straddled Paul himself. As he knelt, his knees pinned Paul’s arms to the ground. He did it automatically, as though this were how it was done. The weight of Kenny’s body, coupled with Paul’s grasp of his own helplessness, revolted him. He lay there. During the beating, his attention sought out small things. Parts. He was conscious of minding the sun in his eyes, of feeling inconvenienced by the stone or root that was digging into his shoulder blade. Also of Kenny’s breath, which made a sharp hiss each time he landed a punch: it was a piston sound, as regular and impersonal as a machine.

  When he was done, Kenny got off and muttered, “C’mon,” and he and Prager left. A bird was chirping. It was a chickadee, one his grandma had pointed out a hundred times. According to her, it was saying, See-me. See-me. There were warm places and cool places on Paul’s face. That was interesting. He adjusted his body so that the stone or root no longer pressed so painfully against his scapula. He closed his eyes against the sun. That was better. Something smelled sweet. Apple blossoms? Or just spring. It was nicer with his eyes closed and the thing not digging into his bone. See-me. See-me. He didn’t always like his grandma, but the thought of her seeing him as he lay like this on the ground, the thought of her outrage and shock and concern filled him with sudden tenderness for her, even pity.

  A shadow crossed his face. He opened his eyes. Baptiste was squatting beside him.

  “Yo, man.You okay?”

  Paul sat up. He did not cry. He used the front of his shirt to wipe his nose, which felt wet. The shirt came away bloody and he began to touch his face gingerly, visiting each quadrant in exploratory fashion.

  “It’s not your blood,” Baptiste told him. He added, unable to keep a trace of pride from his voice, “I think I broke his nose.”

  Paul considered his shirt again in light of this revelation, and then his fingertips, which had picked up and smeared speckles of blood as he’d touched his own face. “Gross.” He touched the area around his left eye, his fingertips gloriously cool on the skin. “I look bad?” His lip felt hot and puffy; he touched there, too.

  Baptiste considered him with some thoroughness. “No. But hold still.” He reached toward Paul’s hair.When he took his hand away, he held an inchworm on his fingernail, tiny, and bright, bright green. He transferred it to the ground where it reared up its front end, probed the air unhurriedly, then latched onto a blade of grass, sliding its back end along. A wind stirred through the grizzled trees above them. The blossoms shook on their branches like mute bells.

  “I’m sorry,” said Paul. He looked at the inchworm, not Baptiste.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What they said,” he near-whispered.

  Baptiste sucked his teeth. “Don’t be a fool, yo.”

  But no. Everything was different. A vast chill came over Paul. It was like entering a cavern: a dank, essential coldness pervaded him. He was as somber, perhaps as sad, as he had ever been. The boys stood and retrieved their backpacks, along with the cell phones and loose change and lunch tickets that had fallen from their pockets, and continued down the hill.

  He was like Biscuit now, Paul thought. Beyond pretense. For the past year and a half, he’d spent so much energy sustaining the frail hope of being popular again, of being liked. Of not being disliked. Every insult he’d pretended not to hear, every snub he’d pretended not to mind, every missing invitation he’d pretended not to have wanted—all of these had drained him, but none so much as the act of dissembling to himself. Prager and Kenny, Boyd and his cronies at the pizza shop, even Fiona Conley—who, in sticking up for him had been the most hurtful of them all, as singularly devastating as only a nice girl could be—Paul had them to thank, in a way. It was done.

  They walked a long way in silence, Paul and Baptiste. They crossed 9W, went over the overpass, turned down Depew. It was not bad walking like this: the wind cool on his swollen eye and lip, his somberness upon him, him free and unaccountable for it. Halfway home it came to Paul there was something lush about giving up hope, something peaceful, even powerful, in it.

  “You sure you okay?” asked Baptiste as they turned onto Elysian Avenue. His house stood at the end of the block.

  “Yeah.”

  “You got him good in the head, man.” He stopped walking and turned to Paul. “Yo, man, he cried in front of you. Don’t worry about the other guy. He’s like twice our age. A’ight? Prager knows he can’t give you shit anymore.”

  Paul almost managed a smile.

  “Look, you want to come in, get some ice?”

  “So I do look bad.”

  “Not that much.”

  Paul hesitated. He cupped a hand around his left eye. In the time it had taken to walk here, it had swollen up so much he could barely see out of it.

  “My Grann wouldn’t mind.”

  At that, Paul did smile. And, perceiving the lie, declined.

  6.

  Further offerings are dedicated to the soul.

  Its last earthly ties are severed by

  the symbolism of burning a string

  and breaking an egg.

  Nearly two weeks ago she’d broken the egg, cracked it right into the Hudson. But the string—Biscuit had burned it many times over in her mind, but not yet in real life. Until last night, she hadn’t known what string to burn. She’d been rehearsing mentally on different strings. Lying in bed at night she’d ignite the cord on her window blind, see it burning straight up like a fuse. In the car on the way to school she’d set fire to her shoelace, or to the loose thread dangling from the cuff of her sleeve. In the bathroom, getting ready for bed, she’d incinerate a curl of dental floss someone had discarded in the wastebasket. And yesterday, sitting at her desk, Biscuit had missed the whole of that day’s lesson on the Sugar and Stamp Acts of 1764 and 1765, so caught up had she been in the fantasy of burning each strand of fringe, one by one, on her teacher’s scarf.

  Her brother’s birthday had passed and the anniversary of his death had come and gone and no one but Biscuit seemed to care or even realize. She was positive of the dates because she had written them down in her denim-covered diary that had its own tiny lock and key. It was last year’s diary, but she’d taken good care not to lose the key. She always put it back, together with the diary, in one of her mother’s old figure skates, the pair of which Biscuit kept under her bed while she waited to grow into them.

  On his birthday she’d wondered if there was going to be a cake. She knew it was probably a silly idea—the sort that, if she gave it voice, would make Paul laugh at her, not nicely—but she couldn’t help imagining the scene in different ways, each admittedly more overwrought than the next: her parents baking a small round angel cake and writing Simon on it in yellow cursive, both of them holding the tube of icing together, her father’s right hand over her mother’s left. She saw them finishing the n and saying, “He really would’ve liked that,” and each of them wiping a tear. In other versions, her mother alone wiped the tear, her father then putting his arm around her. In still others she saw them casting their eyes heavenward, but this really was silly, as no one in her family believed in such things.

  When Simon’s birthday passed unremarked, Biscuit had gotten down on her stomach and ventured in halfway under her bed, shoving aside Clue Jr. and electronic Battleship, a deflated inflatable easy chair, her mother’s old figure skates, several markers without their caps, and the dust-furred plaid skirt she’d pretended to have lost so she wouldn’t have to wear it to her fifth-grade chorus concert, and located the book of funeral customs. She’d stolen it from the library when Mrs. Mukhopadhyay didn’t come back to work after having her baby.

  She had told Biscuit she would come back. She’d go on maternity leave in June, then to Bangladesh in the autumn to visit relatives, then come back to work early in the new year. Biscuit knew when the baby was bor
n. One day after school let out for the summer she’d been at the library and saw a birth announcement on the circulation desk in the children’s room. It was a whole display, pasted on green construction paper, with a photograph of a big-headed baby with lots of dark hair, and a card announcing the arrival of Arun Jason Mukhopadhyay, 7 pounds, 11 ounces, 21 inches. Ounces and inches, like the results of a science experiment.

  In January she’d begun keeping an eye out for Mrs. Mukhopadhyay, but each time she went, Biscuit saw only the same old assistant librarian who’d been filling in since summer. Then in February another woman appeared behind the circulation desk of the children’s room, a white woman with white hair cut in a heavy bob that hung and swung about her face; it looked as though she were wearing a wig too far forward on her head.The same woman kept being there each time Biscuit went in. Finally in March Biscuit had asked this person if she knew when Mrs. Mukhopadhyay was coming back.

  “Who?” the woman said.

  “The librarian.”

  “I’m the librarian. Can I help you find something?”

  “That’s okay,” Biscuit mumbled.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “No, thank you,” Biscuit said, a little louder, moving away from the desk.

  She didn’t even know where Mrs. Mukhopadhyay lived, Nyack or one of the other towns, or indeed if she had ever returned from Bangladesh. Biscuit missed the sound of the librarian’s silver bracelets, missed twirling herself in the librarian’s plush swivel chair, watching her stir the fruit up from the bottom of her boysenberry yogurt. Standing before her bedroom mirror, she tried speaking to herself in Mrs. Mukhopadhyay’s Bengali accent, but had lost the way the rhythms went, lost the lilts up and down the scale.

  So she stole the book. She returned to that part of the stacks where she remembered finding it a year earlier. She didn’t remember the title or author or call number, and it took her some time to locate, but locate it she did, and zipped it inside her parka. She walked past the circulation desk the way her father had coached her to walk through the hospital corridors a year earlier: like she owned the place, and she timed her walk through the electronic sensors to coincide with a man who was checking out a sizable armload. When the alarm went off, the man returned to the circulation desk with a beleaguered sigh, and Biscuit continued outside.

  That had been a couple of weeks ago. Now she sat on the edge of the bathtub with the book open on her lap. Having located at last, after much paging, the passage that had provoked Mrs. Mukhopadhyay to comment, “That has a beautiful sound to it,” Biscuit read it aloud to herself now:

  At sunset the embers are quenched, and any charred bones and fragments are mounded, covered with palm-leaves, and placed in an urn fashioned from a coconut shell and covered with a white cloth, for carrying to the sea. When the procession reaches the shore, the priest enters the water, and after having begged it to bear the ashes safely away, scatters them on the waves.

  Further offerings are dedicated to the soul. Its last earthly ties are severed by the symbolism of burning a string and breaking an egg.

  The acoustics in the bathroom were very good. Biscuit was confident Mrs. Mukhopadhyay would have been equally pleased with her reading today. She had done the first bit of the ritual—minus the coconut shell of course, and using proxy ashes (she had no knowledge of what had been done with her brother’s body after he died, nor was it anything she dared to ask)—and the last bit, with the egg. All that was left was burning the string.

  Biscuit was shy of fire. She’d lit a match only twice in her life, both times holding the stick so timidly, and conducting it along the strip so lightly, that she’d had to strike it several times before producing even a spark, and all the while cringing so exaggeratedly Paul had made fun of her, scrunching up his own face like a drawstring bag. Paul was the opposite. He was, as he liked to say, a real pyro.Whenever their mother set the table with candles, he’d ask to light them. Same with jack-o’-lanterns, same with birthday cakes. He’d let the match burn down so far that Biscuit, watching, would feel dizzy. The front part of the stick would blacken and crumple while the living flame stole closer to his fingers, spreading just before it a line that gleamed like moisture, as if the wood had begun to sweat. Once he’d gotten them lit, Paul couldn’t keep his hands off the candles. He’d stick his fingertips in their pools of wax and let the wax cool into hard little caps, with which he’d tap out muted rhythms on the table. Biscuit would look on jealously, wanting but afraid to stick her own fingers in the liquid wax. Sometimes Paul let her have the little caps when he was done; she saved them in a special box she kept in one of her mother’s figure skates.

  Only if their parents were not looking, Paul would pass his finger back and forth through the flame, quickly at first, then slower, slower, at last so slowly he’d stop a moment and hold it still in the flame. Then he’d hold up his finger and show Biscuit the black mark that did not seem like it could be anything other than what he told her, grinning, it was: his own singed epidermis.

  “Paul!” she’d cry, as much in reverence as reproach.

  “What? It doesn’t hurt.” And he’d lick his finger and wipe the blackness on his pants.

  He was swagger and she was swoon. She understood that the role she played in it was key, and also that it was part sham.

  Still, at least some of Biscuit’s fear of fire was real, as was all her lack of experience. She set the book on the floor next to the box of matches. The house was still. She could feel its stillness through and through, feel it right inside her bones. If she were the gray lady, she’d be able to sense even more things. The emptiness of all houses. The contents of people’s dreams. The causes of their sadness, as revealed by the shapes left behind in their sheets.

  Outside the bathroom window light played through the shadows of branches. Scraps of Hudson glinted blue. It was a little past two. She had not skipped the whole day; she’d gone dutifully to school that morning, arrived on time, handed in her homework, done her math worksheets and her language arts exam and gym, then slipped quietly away after recess.

  A great mistake people made about Biscuit was to assume her unpragmatic. She was not. She was capable even of being strategic. She had, for instance, carefully timed the event of the burning of the string. She knew perfectly well, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, gathering up the box of matches now with shaking hands, that her father was due home from work at any minute.

  Yet there was whimsy about her, and caprice; people were right in this. She had not known, for example, that she would do this part of the ritual until just last night, when Jess brought home a cake from the bakery. Jess kept bringing things into the house, little gifts: candy necklaces, pints of ice cream, colored soaps in the shape of flowers, a pink Depression glass vase from one of the antique shops in town. “It’s fun giving things,” she’d say with a shrug when they thanked her. She’d act like it was nothing. Biscuit’s mother had made quite a fuss over the little vase, which found a home on the windowsill above the kitchen sink. She’d made more of a fuss over the little vase than she had over the mandolin Biscuit’s father had given her a week earlier. And they’d all made a fuss over the bakery cake (which had been, in point of fact, exceptional: chocolaty and dense and decorated all around the rim with orange buttercream roses)—but it was the sort of fuss you made with guests, Biscuit noticed. It didn’t matter that they really liked the cake; their exclamations had a ring of artifice, of striving, a note of form’s sake. Just as Jess’s shrugging off the importance of things—the cake, the vase, the soap—was not real.

  At any rate, there had been no birthday cake for Simon, but then soon after Jess had brought home this cake, and it was in a bakery box tied with bakery string, which she snipped off right at the table, and Biscuit had thought, Aha. She pocketed it, only at that moment hatching her plan. She smoothed the string across her lap now. It was thin and festive-looking, candy-striped. She climbed onto the rim of the bathtub and looped the string around the
shower rod. She thought she’d been admirably responsible in choosing for her site the most fireproof room in the house.

  Climbing down, Biscuit retrieved the box of matches from the floor. She took one out, being careful to shut the box again. She slid the match along the phosphorous strip. Not even a spark. She tried again, willing herself to press harder, strike faster, and then again and once more: nothing. She wiped her hand on her jeans, tried again. The match broke. She bit her lip. “There, there,” she said. She fished out a new match, struck it. It flared with a sharp hiss. Biscuit felt heat seize her finger like teeth. She dropped the match with a cry.

  Because she had not remembered to slide the box shut after extracting the second match, it sat in her hand with its inner compartment jutting far out, like the lower jaw of a hungry dragon, and this dragon, right before Biscuit’s eyes, snapped up the falling match quite neatly, even greedily, upon which all its rows of skinny teeth burst into flame.

  With a scream she flung the box away. It landed on the doorsill, burning brightly. Her palm was hot and she pressed it to her chest, inside of which her heart pounded. But as she stood there, recovering from the shock and fright, watching the flames and seeming still to feel the heat, the way it had come alive so suddenly bright and hissing in the palm of her hand, a peculiar thrill came over her, a scandalous, scoundrel excitement: this was more than she had hoped for.

  Black smoke, flecked with ruby sparks, writhed upward. The wooden doorsill, painted white, had begun visibly to scorch in the area around the blazing box. Even if she were to douse the fire immediately a mark would be left. She stood where she was. Something like a laugh trembled in her throat. It was all wrong, both what she’d done and this urge to grin, to laugh, but the plainer the problem grew, the lighter she felt. It was beyond her. Beautifully, blissfully beyond her. Someone else would have to fix it.

  Not until the smoke alarm went off did Biscuit come out of her state of exhilarated paralysis. Coughing, aware of a rawness in the back of her throat, she went to the sink. Her eyes stung. She turned on the tap, dumped all the toothbrushes out of the toothbrush cup—in her agitation scattering them all across the floor—and held the cup under the faucet.