The Grief of Others

by Leah Hager Cohen

  The sudden presence of her father—although expected, although precisely planned for—was like something out of a dream: there he loomed in the mirror over the sink, where a moment earlier there had been no one. He looked large and angry. Biscuit loved him for it. His lips were set tight in his beard.

  He snatched the cup from her hand, pushed her aside with forgivable roughness, crossed the bathroom in two large steps, trodding on toothbrushes as he did, and poured water over the fire, creating an instant cloud of steam and smoke, within which orange tongues still flickered. Paul should have been here, thought Biscuit. He would have been in heaven. The alarm keened and keened. Her father tossed the cup in the sink, threw a towel in the tub, ran the water, got it soaked, and laid it out over the whole blackened, still smoldering doorsill. Then he crossed the hall, disappeared for a moment into Paul’s room, and came out carrying Paul’s desk chair, onto which he climbed in order to reach the smoke detector, which he ripped from its mount with such force the plastic cracked. A piece fell to the floor and the house fell quiet. Her father stood there a moment, holding the smoke detector in one hand, inspecting the other, on whose index finger Biscuit saw a small gash.

  She stepped over the doorsill and came tentatively to him.

  He climbed down, breathing heavily.

  In the meekest of voices: “Is your finger okay?”

  “This is not okay! This is not okay!”

  She stared. He’d yelled. His eyes were wide, his nostrils bulllike, flaring, and nothing about him was not furious. She didn’t know the last time her father had been angry at her like this. Never.

  “What are you even doing home? Again. During school.”

  She looked at the floor. Her heart was a mouse curled in a ball.Yet even now, the truth was she was not sorry; or she was, a little—sorry about his finger, anyway, and sorry to have him angry with her. But not that she’d caused a fire, not that she’d caused notice.

  “You cut school again.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “What are Mom and I supposed to do?” The hallway stank of doused flame, wet charred wood. “Can you tell me?” Loud, loud was his voice. Clanging. “HELLO?”

  She was studying the wooden floorboards, the grain, the way it made patterns and the way those patterns got interrupted, and also repeated. She was making herself as tiny as the grain, intricately traveling along its traverses and swirls.

  He threw the broken smoke detector across the hall.The sudden motion made her startle. It smashed apart.The battery skidded across the floor and into Paul’s room. She looked at him, indignant, awed. “You skip school, you put yourself in danger, I don’t know what you were trying to do at the Hook the other day but you could have drowned, now you’re setting fires—what? Is this”—he broke off, and a terrible kind of laugh escaped him—“is this a cry for help?” Sarcasm edged his voice. “Do we not give you enough attention? Do we not give you enough love?”

  Biscuit, quiet Biscuit, quiet, noticing Biscuit who did not yell, who never talked back, opened her mouth as though some hidden catch had been released. “You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t! You don’t!”

  The words like claws sprung from her throat.The tendons in her neck were copper wire. She could not stop repeating it, over and over, and each time she did the truth of the words shone plainer and plainer.

  “And I didn’t fall in!” she screamed, finding a break in the rhythm at last. Her voice pitched high and metallic, offensive to her own ears. “I did it on purpose! I wanted to go in the river!” The confession erupted with the ferocity of an accusation. Which it was.

  She was aware of the surprise on her father’s face, a look of stunned concern that seemed to siphon off his anger, leaving him as if physically depleted, smaller in his skin.

  Biscuit turned and tore down the stairs, smacking the treads with violent, headlong force. As she neared the bottom the front door swung open, and what she saw there stopped her.

  “Dad!” she called. “Dad!” and the quality of her voice was altogether different.

  Paul entered slowly, his T-shirt torn at the neck. One of his eyes was swollen shut and his lip was split, crusted with blood.

  Biscuit hadn’t known her father was capable of such speed; almost before she said Dad a second time, he’d passed her on the stairs and landed in the hall.

  Paul raised a hand, deflecting him. “I’m all right,” he said, the words stiff: his fat lip. He let his backpack drop to the floor, then screwed up his good eye and cocked his head. “Do I smell smoke, or are you just happy to see me?”

  7.

  As soon as she got in the car, Ricky slipped off her shoes and tucked them beside the glossy black shopping bag perched so improbably on her briefcase. She hadn’t driven in stocking feet in years, and the feel of the ridged pedals against her soles plunged her back into her twenties. Her first car: a white Fiero with no air conditioner. How tangled her hair would get in the wind. She’d put the volume up, slide her sunglasses on, guide the stick silkily through its positions. At red lights, reapplying lipstick in the rearview mirror, noticing who among the other idling drivers was noticing her. The game of switching lanes, the game of downshifting, upshifting, her foot so smooth on the clutch even she could barely feel the moment the gears engaged. Working the shift, the feel of its slick round knob, hard and tight in the hollow of her palm.

  John had not owned a car when she first met him. He’d lived in Hell’s Kitchen, near the theater district, and been an avid subway man. On summer weekends they’d take her Fiero out to Jones Beach, or to the Hamptons if someone had invited them; in autumn they’d tool up to Westchester to pick apples or to picnic at Storm King. Once, in late September, she’d driven him all the way up to Split Rock Hole, an old haunt she knew from her SUNY New Paltz days. “Where are you taking me?” he asked, as she led him through the woods. “You’ll see,” was all she would say until they reached the swimming hole. They’d gone in, cold as it was, with nothing on. They’d fucked in the water, a feat, a coup, for the water had been shockingly cold—so cold, John gauged, pinking up a little through his beard, he didn’t think it would work. But Ricky had told him yes it would, and she had proven right.

  Wherever they had gone in those days, Ricky would always drive. They both liked what it did to them: the effect of her in control (at twenty-three she looked seventeen, her body that small and sleek, her hair hanging midway down her back) and him passive (at twenty-eight he could have passed for late thirties, already burly and bearded, with eye crinkles she liked to trace with her fingernail), a reversal they played with, pushed to exciting limits.

  Now driving was a drudge, something she’d grown to detest. The wasted hours, the isolation, the unvarying commute back and forth across the river—it had become the opposite of motion, had become the very emblem of her stasis.

  The traffic leading up to the tolls was stop and go, as always on Fridays. Ricky put on the radio, tried a few stations, shut it off. She checked her cell phone, checked her fingernails, checked the gas gauge, turned the radio back on. The fact of impatience was not unusual but the degree of it was; she had decided to make a formal proposal to Jess that she move in, that she live with the Ryries not only throughout her pregnancy but beyond. She’d mentioned the idea to John that first night Jess had arrived, and had floated it in a nebulous, noncommittal way with Jess herself on various occasions, but today she would issue the invitation outright, in practical, unmistakable terms. All week she’d been giving the issue of space serious thought and had determined they could convert the little den downstairs into a bedroom. It would mean having the TV in the living room, something she’d sworn would never happen, but none of the rest of the family would mind, and she could tolerate it. Jess could sleep on the couch at first, and slowly they’d refurnish the room—how perfect that this was the beginning of yard sale season. It
wouldn’t need much, just a proper bed, a dresser, some curtains for the French doors (visions of Ricky and Jess going together to the fabric store, never mind that neither of them could sew). Eventually, of course, a crib. Ricky saw it over against the far wall, underneath the windows. Pine, maybe, and unpainted, finished with only a light stain.

  The walnut sleigh crib John had found for a hundred bucks on Craigslist last year, driving across the county by himself one Saturday to pick it up from someone’s house over her protestations that they didn’t need a crib right away, that the baby could sleep in a dresser drawer its first several weeks; the crib he’d nevertheless insisted on assembling in a corner of their bedroom, and furnishing with a new mattress and flannel sheets, and in which he’d stacked a few bags of disposable newborn diapers and a box of wipes, along with the assortment of little outfits, onesies and booties and ladybug hats that had been gifts from coworkers and friends and which were still wrapped in their tissue paper and boxes; the crib upon whose side rail he mounted the mobile he’d impetuously gone out and bought, a plastic mobile with plump blue-and-yellow felt moons and stars that perambulated slowly to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”—that crib they’d sold for forty-five dollars after the baby died.

  But Ricky would not think of that crib, whose incriminating hulk she’d worked hard to ignore during the last days of her pregnancy. She would not have to think of that crib because there was a new crib to think about, a clean new crib with simple straight lines and the palest of stains. It would sit beneath the den window.The great thing (without even meaning to, she was rehearsing her pitch) was the light; the den got the prettiest morning light, and a view of the river, as well, at least when the trees were bare—as they were in November, when the baby was due. A rocking chair, they’d want, too. Ricky could picture sitting in it, looking out the windows, a few leaves the color of pumpkin still clinging to the trees; the river already looking wintry, opaque; the new baby, that most tender of weights, tucked deep inside its own slumbers.

  Ricky was not stupid. She was not deluded. She did not think that if Jess said yes, her baby would somehow become or replace the missing Ryrie baby. Nor did she suppose that by nurturing John’s daughter and grandchild she would redeem herself in her husband’s or anyone’s eyes for all that she’d done or failed to do during this past year. If anyone were to suggest these motives, Ricky would have balked. But fantasies are by their natures reductive. And the wonder of it was that these past few days, her indulgence in the fantasy had caused a shift inside her, had brought a real sense of movement. It wasn’t that she put faith in the fantasy. It was that she put faith in the shift.

  Would John?

  That was the question, and the real cause, she realized, of her keyed-up impatience on this particular drive home. He had not been alive to her (nor she to him), had not taken unchecked pleasure in her (nor she in him), for a very long time. It was not a matter of simply a year. This reached back well before the baby’s death. She tried to remember the last time it had been all good between them, free of fear and recrimination, free of anger and artifice. What came to mind were nights at Cabruda Lake when the children were fast asleep in the cabin, and she and John would lie on the floating dock, a loon’s laugh rippling the air, a hundred fish stirring the black depths beneath them.They’d watch the bats flit overhead, mark the occasional lonely airplane coursing between them and the stars. What came to mind were nights in empty theaters when he’d let her hold the pounce bag and work the nail gun, and amid the smells of sawdust and talc, and the sound of The Doors, he’d spread a blanket on the dirty stage floor and lower her down under the work lights’ glare. They’d discover things to do with each other among the halfbuilt sets, something new, it seemed, every time. Even then, had it been “all good”? Ricky wanted badly to think it.

  She glanced over at the diminutive black shopping bag atop her briefcase. The bag’s very smallness thrilled her. She pictured how she would dazzle John with its contents—dazzle him, perhaps, in spite of himself. The proposal she was planning to make Jess was also meant, more important, to proposition her husband. Look, John, she would really be saying, even as she mouthed the invitation to his firstborn: I can open my heart. Look, John, you have not led a blameless life. I have made mistakes, but so have you. You have made mistakes, and your mistakes have led to other mistakes and look, John: see how I open my heart to them, see how I admit them into my home, the fruit of your mistakes. If I were truly unworthy, if I were beyond reach of your love, could I do such a thing?

  Still stuck at the tolls, Ricky leaned over and parted the cream-colored tissue that crested the bag. Inside, cocooned with inordinate care, in more layers of tissue, were a chemise of black silk trimmed in velvet, and, encased separately (as if they were not scraps of lingerie but pieces of china or crystal, or Fabergé eggs) matching panties. Ricky had never ventured inside this boutique before, although she’d noticed it often, always cordoning it off in her mind as an establishment she had no cause to frequent. And then yesterday, passing it on the way back to her office with her tuna hero and Fresca from the deli on the corner, her gaze had flitted over the window display as it had a hundred times, only this time, instead of continuing apace, she’d stopped and allowed herself to drink it in. A reclining mannequin wore a navy tulle bodystocking; another, on tiptoe, wore a dove-gray balconette bra and matching culotte, both of which were trimmed with intricate pleats and ruches; a third stood angled coquettishly away in order to show that its black bustier laced up the back with trailing pink ribbon.

  Silly things: but no. Cheap: but in fact terribly expensive.The midday light had cast a glare on the plate glass, so that Ricky’s reflection appeared alongside the mannequins, and again instead of glancing away she let herself look. Her swimmer’s body was still lithe; her hair, in the sun, showed its maple-syrup tones. Her eyes looked tired, shadowed and even sunken, but that might have been due to the partial quality of the reflection. She’d had no time left on her break, but resolved then to go inside the shop the following afternoon. And she had; today she’d spent her entire lunch break fingering the delicate garments, gently parting the hangers on their racks, selecting an armful to try.

  “Shall I put those in a room for you?” the girl had asked, and Ricky thanked her with the casual ease of one who shops regularly for high-end lingerie. Only in the privacy of the fitting room, which was (the affectation, the whimsy made Ricky laugh aloud when she saw it) round and appointed like the inside of a genie’s bottle—a love seat mounded with apple green cushions, swaths of pink-gold fabric draped from the ceiling—only as she stood naked before the trio of angled mirrors had Ricky blushed, not from embarrassment but from pleasure.

  This past week had been a revelation. A return to touch. She’d known a resumption of sex was inevitable—that or the dissolution of her marriage. And she’d known it would have to happen soon: a year’s abstinence was no small thing. What surprised Ricky was her own appetite, not simply its strength but its very existence. She’d thought it lost, gone forever with the baby. Gone with what she’d done, the choice she’d made. She’d assumed that whenever she initiated touch (that the responsibility for doing so fell to her seemed obvious), she would do it uncomplainingly, proficiently, and absent any desire. Her lack of desire might even help their marriage: a penance for a wrong. This is what she told herself, gearing up for the act. And then Jess had appeared, her presence a reminder of her entitlement, and if that was the spur, if Ricky’s final motivation came down to territory, came down to staking claim, so be it.

  The revelation was that after the bowls of ice cream, after the news that Jess was with child, after Ricky and John had shut the door to their own bedroom and lay whispering past midnight in the light of the streetlamp, when Ricky cupped her husband’s head and guided it to her breast; when she let him lie there, rising and falling with her breath, her fingers moving through the curls at the back of his neck with a gentle, proprietary pressure, as if to ass
ure them both that he belonged there—she was stirred as she had not expected to be, repositioned. Her own movement toward him had opened her.

  She blushed to think of it: the moment she’d guided him back into her after more than a year. Through the tolls at last, she glided over the bridge, the girders splitting the late light, piecing and repiecing the smoky-looking sky. So vivid was the memory, she felt John as if he were there with her, there in her, and was still blushing as she exited the thruway and looped around the ramp. At the traffic light she looked at herself in the rearview mirror. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks darkly pink. She remembered something she’d once heard about blushing.

  Three times, after the baby’s death, she’d gone to see a psychiatrist. The referral had been among the discharge papers she’d received at the hospital; the obstetrician had urged her to go, and she had, rather sullenly and dutifully, made the first appointment. The psychiatrist’s office was in the hospital; perhaps she’d gone in hopes of running into Dr. Abdulaziz. In any case, she was put off by the psychiatrist, who was not the gentle elderly person she’d expected but a younger man, hardly older than herself, with, she thought, a critical and even combative manner. He didn’t ask her about the baby. Ricky supposed he was waiting for her to bring it up. It was like a game, like fencing or chess. It made her want to win, which she decided she would do by revealing nothing, and so they passed many long minutes in dead silence, punctuated by fragments of random conversation, like inept guests at a cocktail party. Midway through the third appointment he’d asked, apropos of nothing as far as she could tell, “Do you carry a lot of shame?”