The Year That Follows

by Scott Lasser

  The same.

  “Better,” she says. “You feel okay?”

  “I guess. Getting old sucks. Isn’t that what the kids say?”

  “I’m no kid, Dad.”

  “To me, you are.”

  She lets a moment pass. “I think you’ve given Connor a whole new view of the Japanese.” Earlier, she’d heard him talk about shooting at them. Japs, he’d called them.

  “Maybe someday he’ll remember this morning. It will be something that he knew a World War Two vet. Like meeting a Civil War vet, when I was a kid.”

  “Did you ever meet one?”

  “I knew someone who did.”

  It has only been lately that she’s really felt the passage of time, and she’s feeling it now, learning that her father is old enough to have known a veteran of the Civil War. Not her great-grandfather or even her grandfather. Her father. She is no longer young. She thinks of the black dress she will wear tonight, simple and elegant, the hem just at the knee. How much longer, she wonders, will I be able to wear that dress? How much longer will I want to? How much longer till I’m hunched over, halfway to the floor, unaware of how everything has tilted?

  “Hey, Mom!” Connor calls from the other room. “Come quick!”

  Cat runs into the living room, wondering what disaster she might discover, only to find Connor standing by his Lego building. In the building’s upper reaches he’s wedged one of the United planes, nose in, just the tail section sticking out. Connor, his eyes wide with delight, stands proudly beside his creation, a tiny hand on the building to hold it steady.

  XXXI

  They stand in Sam’s living room, Cat and Connor, Phyllis and Sam, match at the ready. Symbols, Sam thinks, this is all about symbols, the candle, the flame, the burning out of the light. There is no way to deal with death, less even to deal with the death of a child, and so we have symbols. He strikes the match, hears the tearing sound of it, then the silence as he lights the wick. Sam looks at Connor, who seems transfixed by the flame. He’s wearing a dark suit with a tie, a little man next to his mother. Connor, with his fair hair, looks as Kyle did at that age, though Sam is the only person left alive who remembers it.

  Sam says, “We do this to remember Kyle, as we will every year, to remember the dead. In this way, his memory lives on, in us.” He takes a breath.

  “Amen,” says Phyllis.

  “We should really get going to the temple,” says Sam, and soon they’re on their way, the four of them in Sam’s Lincoln. Phyllis drives, Sam is in the front. Cat and Connor sit in the back, total silence in the car, nothing but the sound of the tires on the pavement, the faint grind of the engine. Here’s what I wanted, Sam thinks, all I wanted. It strikes him how simple it is, how modest are his desires. Perhaps this is aging. When he was a young man he’d wanted so much. First, to survive the war; then to walk again; then wealth and, if not fame or reputation, to be a man who mattered, someone who was noticed. None of that matters now. How could it after the death of a child? When his children were young the fear of losing them was like a low-grade ache, a minor pain always there. So many horrible things happened to children. When they got older, he often found himself believing that fate might treat them well. Certainly he’d taught them to fend for themselves. But Kyle’s death, this could not be foreseen. Even when he’d learned about the planes he hadn’t worried. He knew Kyle worked across the street; Sam had been there once, to that cavernous floor, the rows and rows of desks and computers, the men—they were mostly men—fit into it as were the men in the Rivera factory murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This was where Kyle was, Sam knew, and when Kyle could, he’d call to say he was all right. But the call the next day came from the firm, from a man who called himself a managing director, whatever that was, an odd name descriptive of nothing, and the news was not good. From that moment on, Sam wanted his children with him, together, and with each other. That it was no longer possible made him still want Cat, especially on this day, which, it turns out, isn’t really even the right day. He was supposed to use the Hebrew calendar, but the plane reservations were set and Rabbi Gauss made an exception, saying wearily that this was yet one more alteration that the Reform movement could stomach for this one day, for this one family, for this one year, even if it meant giving in to the Romans and their calendar. Did you see the irony of it? Gauss asked, even if the Romans had made a calendar more logical and thus easier for counting time. The issue here wasn’t logic, said the rabbi. It was mourning the dead, the tradition of it, and in this realm logic held little truck. But yes, bring your daughter and grandson, and I will read the name of your son, and you, as part of the deal, will attend services on the High Holy Days.

  And so they arrive at the temple, Sam and the three people closest to him, none of the three related to him by blood, really, or even Jews. He feels something tug in his chest and he pauses a moment, while Phyllis cuts the engine, to see what it is. Nothing, apparently. He shifts to look at Phyllis. He can’t turn enough to see Cat and Connor. “Ready?” he asks.

  Inside they take seats with the other congregants. Sam has the same feeling he always gets in a temple, a surprise, the thought being, Wow, look at all these Jews. Most are old, though perhaps not as old as he. Here then, is what you might do on a Friday night, if you have nowhere to go. He would feel silly coming here for companionship, but at the same time he wishes he could belong. After the navy he never felt he belonged to anything, except maybe to the country and its endless economic struggles.

  The service drones on, the rabbi motioning for them to stand and sit, the reasons behind why some prayers require standing and others don’t a mystery, the whole service a bit puzzling to him. This is his tribe, but he doesn’t really know its customs. He watches Connor, the boy’s earnestness, his mimicking of his mother, who has told the boy about his uncle. Connor is to listen for Kyle’s name. Sam has engineered all this and feels glad for it, though he can’t say exactly why.

  Finally, the Kaddish is announced, the congregation rises, and the Aramaic prayer is recited. The words come to Sam; he finds that after all these years he still knows them. Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash, sh’mei rabah … Sam remembers when his own father took him to temple to say Kaddish for Sam’s grandfather, who had died in what was then Russia and was now something else, Ukraine, or perhaps Belarus, and there, too, they likely still said the prayer for the dead, which in truth said nothing about the dead but only of the all-powerfulness of God, this in a place that had all but been wiped clean of Jews by the Nazis.

  The names are read, a dozen or so, with Kyle’s in the middle.

  “There it is!” shouts Connor, so loud that everyone turns, or so it seems to Sam. He turns to Phyllis and she is looking at him, something close to a smile on the edge of her lips. She grabs his hand. Cat is standing with her arm around Connor, patting his shoulder. Nothing, he knows, will bring Kyle back, but this, it would seem, is as good as it will get.

  XXXII

  Cat listens to Connor sleep in the bed next to her, the boy’s breathing languorous yet strong, insistent. They’ve done it. They’ve come to California and said the prayer for Kyle, visited with Cat’s father, met his girlfriend—had Cat not come, would she have known her father had one?—and now they will wake and spend the morning by the water, then fly home, where life will go on, without her brother.

  And so now her father is going to live with a woman, the first time since Cat’s mother. Is this mortality finally raising its head in the old man, her father acknowledging that he doesn’t want to die alone?

  Cat finds Tommy’s number in her cell phone and calls. There are five rings before he answers. It’s Friday night, after one in the morning where he is, and she wakes him, apologizes. “No,” he says. “I wanted to hear from you.” He coughs, clears his throat. “How was it?” he asks.

  What can she say? That it was fine, that they stood and sat among the old Jewish people in California, paying reverence to an unknown God, often in a lang
uage they could not understand, but that when she heard her brother’s name, she felt something inside, something rip, which was, she supposed, the feeling of loss? It was also the feeling of sorrow, of anger, an acknowledgment that nothing could be done, that nothing could be made right, that it simply was what it was, is what it is, that justice and fair play and the sense that things will work out in the end because we want them to are not how the world works, that waiting for such outcomes, really for any outcome at all, is like waiting to win the Lotto. “And maybe,” she adds, “that’s all right.”

  “It has to be,” Tommy says.

  “I realized I don’t know what I’m doing with my life,” she says.

  “You’re making a living.”

  “Barely.”

  “You’re raising your son.”

  “I could do better.”

  “Then do better. Nothing is stopping you.”

  “I should spend more time with the people who are important to me.”

  He says nothing.

  “You’re one of those people,” she says.

  “Are you asking me on another date?”

  “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  “Then I accept,” he says.

  “Well, then. There it is.”

  “When are you coming home?” he asks.

  “Tomorrow. We get in kinda late.”

  “And Sunday?”

  “What about Sunday?” she asks.

  “How’s brunch sound? If you were serious about that date.”

  “Dead serious.”

  “Noon, then?” he asks. “I’ll pick you up?” “Perfect.”

  “I look forward to it, Cat.”

  They say good-bye and Cat snaps shut her phone with something like hope.

  She decides to go back to the living room to look at the candle—it’s designed to burn for twenty-four hours—and perhaps allow herself a second drink on this special day, when she can watch the flame and think of her brother. The living room is dark but for the flame and the smell of tobacco. She flips on the light on her way to the liquor cabinet and sees her father, hunched in his chair, with a martini in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The old man looks up, squinting in the light. “Care to join me?” he asks.

  She flips the light off and sits on the couch. Outside the window glow the lights that brighten the path to the beach. Cat looks over at her father, whom she can just make out in the darkness. There is the faint glow of the cigarette.

  Slowly at first but with growing momentum, the man leans forward then stands up, shoulders hunched and knees bent but on his feet nonetheless. “I’ll fix you a drink,” he says. Cat watches him shuffle to the cabinet, then turn on the light. She squints but notices the high set of her father’s pants on his hips, so that his torso is made short. She remembers her father’s look from long ago, say, 1970, when her father was no more cool than he is right now. He was never cool, and, apparently, he never cared. Which, after a time, is a form of coolness itself.

  The drink is one of her father’s martinis, made with gin, crushed ice, a dash of vermouth, and a chunk of lemon peel, the mixture’s aroma heady and strong, a memory from childhood.

  With the light back off they are then left with only the candle, its flame flickering, the window to the ocean almost a mirror, but with sight lines through to other lights, distant, the oil rigs on the water. Cat can barely hear the sound of the surf. When her father speaks, it’s as if his voice is everywhere in the room. “Connor is quite a little boy. He’s very bright, I think.”

  We all want smart children, Cat thinks.

  “You’re doing a fine job with him,” her father says.

  It takes a moment in the darkness for Cat to process this, that her father has passed judgment on her mothering, and found it good. She thanks him.

  “I promised Connor I would take him for a walk on the beach in the morning,” Sam says. “We’re going to collect shells for his trip back to Michigan.”

  “I don’t really know what I’m doing,” Cat says. “I mean about Connor. I just try to help him.”

  “None of us knows what to do, but we do it. You try to prepare your children for the world you know even as you know everything will change. I might have done better with you, with Kyle, but I had no idea how, till you were grown.”

  “You did fine,” Cat says.

  Cat hears him try to shift in his chair. “I tried to teach you things. When you have a child, you don’t know anything. Then a day goes by, and another, and you teach the child things, to walk or talk, how to shake hands or tie a pair of shoes. You get up in the night when the child is sick, stick by them when they are in trouble, deal with the failures that mean everything to them and nothing to you, or just the opposite, and it’s just like that every day, and over time you realize what love is.”

  A long silence. Cat thinks of her little failures as a daughter, like the time she took a dollar from the kitchen counter. Her mother had left it there and she asked about it, and Cat said she knew nothing about it. Kyle knew she had it, but didn’t say anything, either.

  “I want you to know that I loved you and Kyle the same,” her father says.

  It’s as if he knows something of my mind, Cat thinks.

  “As I love you now,” the old man goes on. “And you should tell your little boy that you love him. He knows it, but he should hear it from you anyway.”

  “I tell him.”

  “Tell him more.”

  Cat promises that she will. Then, she thinks, I must tell my father that I love him. She breathes deeply, then speaks. “I love you, Dad.” The words don’t come out easily, but once they do they settle well, like truth. This, then, is why I’ve come all this way, Cat thinks: to say these words, this one time. To let it go.

  Her father looks as if he might cry.

  “I’m going to have another operation,” he says.

  “For what?

  “A bypass. Things are blocked up again, I guess.”

  “Can you tell?” Cat asks.

  “I think.”

  “When? When is the operation?”

  “Monday.”

  “Monday? I’ll stay,” she says.

  “Don’t be silly. Phyllis will look after me. I think she’s looking forward to it.”

  “It’s a serious operation.”

  “At my age, all operations are serious,” Sam says. “But I want you to go home and go on with your life. That’s what this has been about, moving on. Kyle is gone, and we’re not. So we go on.”

  Cat is relieved. She really doesn’t want to stay. She could fly Connor home to Michael and then come back to sit by the hospital bed, but she’d rather not. Not yet. And she’d like to see Tommy on Sunday. The distance has made this clear.

  “This candle,” his father says. “You could light one of these for me, when the time comes.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  “Promise.”

  “Of course.”

  “Not of course. The years go by and things slide. I know this. I let it slide with my own parents.”

  “I won’t,” Cat says. Okay, she tells herself, once a year I can light a candle, a little thing, but a promise kept. No little thing at all, that.

  XXXIII

  He watches Cat head back to bed, then walks outside to take a look at the water. To the east there is a faint glow, a suggestion of morning. He remembers once during the war looking east at this time of day when a single plane appeared. This was just after the battle for the Leyte Gulf, when kamikazes first appeared. Sam was on the bridge and saw the plane. It was flying very low, so that radar had only just picked it up. The alarms were sounded. In the old calculus, you could shoot a plane down or not, perhaps its bombs would miss you, perhaps there’d be shooting and blood-thumping terror but no death. Not anymore. They had to destroy the plane, or die. The pilot, Sam thought, was very skilled, staying low to the water, maneuvering to offer the gunners little to hit, and this was odd, not at all what they
’d been led to believe about these suicide pilots. Then, inexplicably, the plane pulled up and away, till it was reported there was a torpedo in the water. Sam hadn’t seen it fall, but it was coming straight for them. By this time Higginbotham was there. He was yelling, giving orders to start repairing damage that had not yet occurred. Then he stopped and quietly said, “Hold on, boys.”

  A second passed, then another, and another, with only the rumble of the engines and the pitch of the waves, the radar beeping, fainter and fainter at the retreating plane. The seconds kept coming. Sam heard someone breathe, then he took a breath himself. He understood. Somehow the torpedo had missed. It must have gone beneath them, set for a battleship when they were but a destroyer low on fuel, sitting high in the water.

  Higginbotham laughed.

  “Well, gentlemen,” he said at last. “We get another day.”

  XXXIV

  She lies in bed, half-awake. The idea is to catch an hour or two of sleep before Connor wakes and they start to make arrangements to go home. But sleep won’t come.

  She thinks of a winter’s night before the family broke up, when her father took her to play tennis. This was in a tennis bubble, a huge pressurized structure where devotees played during the Michigan winter. She was hardly a devotee, but back then her father believed in tennis—a sport, he said, that you could play all your life, though in the end neither of them did.

  They were checking out when Cat found a crumpled-up fifty-dollar bill on the bluish carpet. She showed it to her father. He made her leave her name and number at the counter, instructing her to say that she’d found something of value by the front desk. If no one called in a month, he said, she could keep it.

  A man called the next night, said he’d lost fifty dollars, a crumpled-up bill that must have fallen from his pocket, and he came right to the house to get it. He was an older man, like her dad. She went outside to the dark, frigid driveway to hand him the bill. He took it, thanked her, and drove away.