“It’s freaking me out that you won’t talk about him,” I finally said.
“Why?” you said.
“Look up at me when I talk to you,” I said. “It’s rude to read while I’m talking to you.”
“It’s rude to talk to me while I’m reading.”
“When did you turn seventeen?” I asked.
“I’m not seventeen,” you said, but you put down the book and you smiled. You loved it when I accused you of behaving like a teenager. “I’m not even seven.”
“But you will be soon.”
“I know,” you said. You put the book down on your lap and shoved the last of the fries into your mouth. You had ketchup on your chin, you were missing two teeth, you were my little boy again. “I think I decided what I want for my birthday,” you said.
“The Lego Millennium Falcon,” I said. “We settled that weeks ago.”
“Well, you can get me that,” you said. “But Dad should get me the Rancor Pit and help me set it up.”
“Dad?” I said. “You mean Dave? Hasn’t he gotten you enough stuff?”
“He’s my dad,” you said. “He has to get me a birthday present.”
“That’s not all dads do,” I said. “Their job isn’t just to get you stuff.”
“I know,” you said, but you said it sadly. You loved stuff, you just loved it. Are you still like this in the future, or has the odd nexus of loss and privilege you’ve lived with made you more monastic? I think, if I may insert a little advice here, Jacob, I think it’s a nice thing not to attach yourself to too much stuff. First of all, the environment, as I’m sure you know, cannot support the endless manufacture and discarding of American crap. As I write this, global warming seems to have reached its tipping point; we’re no longer looking suspiciously toward some weird weather some day but living the weirdness. There have been hurricanes and tornadoes in New York City recently, along with the hottest summers on record. We don’t know whether to burn or to drown. Maybe we’ll have achieved some small progress by the time you read this, I don’t know, but I’m not hopeful. Ace, in one of his finer moments in City Hall, campaigned to build a multibillion-dollar seawall to protect lower Manhattan from the inevitable, but it’s still the inevitable.
The other thing about stuff that I’ve learned over the years is that the more of it you have the more of it you want. Stuff breeds stuff; you buy stuff and you have to take care of it—let’s say you buy a car, then you need to buy insurance and gas and new tires and oil changes, and if you’re still in New York, there’s parking: it’s a nightmare. Rent cars, borrow when you can, don’t overpurchase, and don’t succumb to the adrenaline rush that might accompany purchases. Or try not to. A trick I use when I’m shopping is just to say under my breath stuff stuff stuff and suddenly that beautiful set of Heath dinnerware I’ve been lusting after is just more crap to take care of.
I tried to teach you that trick this year, but you were like, “Mom, it’s not stuff, it’s a Lego Death Star,” which I guess made sense. You were six.
Now that I’d taken your attention from the Jedi Apprentice, I felt like I should have something wise to say about your father, but instead the only thing I wanted to ask you is why you told him you love him. But I didn’t expect you to be able to explain. I expected you didn’t even know, really. What was love to a six-year-old? You looked down in the bottom of the McDonald’s bag and were saddened to see there were no more fries. I asked you what you wanted to do in Friday Harbor and you wanted to do what you always do, go swimming and eat ice cream and see the seals, all of which sounded good to me. I tilted my head back and closed my eyes, and in the blink of an eye, the split of a second, the horn blared and there we were, at a harbor on an island at the end of the world.
“Are you going to be okay, Mom?” you asked me.
I opened my eyes. I stood up steadily. “I promise,” I lied, and took your hand.
ONE OF THE books Dr. Susan recommended, A Mother’s Light, suggests making a list of all the things you want your family to do when you’re gone so that they can check things off the list periodically and have an excuse to talk about you. The author advises including such things as see the Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center! Climb the tallest mountain in your home state! See the Mona Lisa in the Louvre! Although I cannot imagine, personally, instructing you to climb a mountain in my honor, I think about this list more often than I’d like to. What sorts of things would I like you to do in your life? Not necessarily so you’d have a chance to talk about me (which I can’t figure out how much I’d like you to do—do I want to be a lingering memory or will that just make me a millstone?). But what sorts of things do I think the good life requires? I’ve come down to just a few things: Be tolerant of other people. Life, I’ve learned, is just too stressful when every single person you meet annoys you. When people are mean to you, remember something is probably lacking in their lives, not yours. Check for lumps. Try to get eight hours of sleep at a stretch as often as possible. Be thoughtful about money, fall in love with the right person, read a lot. Know that your family—Allie and Bruce and Ross and Camilla and Dustin—they think of you as one of theirs. You belong to me and you belong to them and when you grow up you’ll belong to the world.
Try not to do too many stupid things when you’re a teenager if at all possible.
I don’t really care if you ever climb a mountain.
It was almost midnight, and I was on my second codeine.
Nights on this island were so black they reminded me that I only rarely saw night; my nights in Manhattan were merely grayish, since so much light spilled out from the streets, and even on Mercer Island the light pollution from Seattle, or just general cloudiness, kept us from seeing many stars. But here the sky looked like some lunatic artist sprayed it with glitter. The Milky Way splashed out across the black. You were asleep and Allie and Bruce were asleep and I was sitting outside on the deck, thinking of you and also my father, and how he named all the stars when I was a kid, showing me them in the encyclopedia. I pointed them out to myself, Orion the hunter, the Big and Little Dippers, the Dog Star. I remembered that I wanted to tell you the names of the stars before I went. I wasn’t sure Allie knew them.
The names are really beautiful, Jacob. Cassiopeia, Triangulum. Vulpecula.
It felt good to put some distance between your father and myself, and even better knowing he’d be on a plane tomorrow. I kept myself from looking at Facebook to see if he’d recorded any assessments of the afternoon. The internet connection was pleasingly dodgy on Friday Harbor. The pain in my side came and went, and so did the fogginess in my head. I wondered if things were progressing more quickly than the doctors said they would, if they knew this, if they lied to me to keep me from total despair. If the surgery I needed was actually the last intervention of my life. It was okay, I thought, if they’d lied to me. I would have lied to me. I was not doing well in those early months and maybe the right approach, therapeutically, was to lie.
Why did Dr. Susan insist on telling you, anyway? I’m still working on that one. Do you remember sitting in her office, the way she leaned forward in her own clinical Eileen Fisher outfit? The way she said that I was going to get sick and then sicker, the way I might have to go to the hospital? That someday I would no longer be with you in person but I would be standing next to you in spirit?
You weren’t even five. You had no idea what she was talking about.
“You’re sick?” you asked me. “What kind of sick?”
“Cancer,” I said.
“Doesn’t that make you die?”
Kyle’s grandmother had recently died of pancreatic cancer.
I looked away, half-shrugged. Dr. Susan tried to interject more nonsense about my spirit and how there would always be someone to take care of you and etcetera but you weren’t listening. It was like having one of those horrible dying mother books come to life, spouting out nonsense about how I’d be there in the rainbows.
“When?”
/> “Not for a very long time,” I said. “Not soon.”
“Like how old will I be?”
“Eight at least.”
“So that’s three years,” you said. You’ve always been good at numbers. “And then I’ll live with Aunt Allie and Uncle Bruce?”
“That’s right,” I said. “But not for a very long time.”
“Okay,” you said, and didn’t say anything else, and when we left Dr. Susan said that she thought it had gone pretty well, generally speaking, but she wasn’t there for your nightmares that night, or the wet bed that morning, or how I walked into your room two days later and overheard you telling Kelly the hamster that you were sorry but you were going to throw her out the window because it was time for her to die.
“You want some company?”
Ross and Camilla didn’t hang out together too much on Mercer Island, but here they were best friends. And though I didn’t particularly want company, I smiled and said sure, because Ross had already pulled up a deck chair beside me and Camilla had sprawled out at our feet. She was a pretty girl, my niece, although a more prosaic beauty than her big brother, and although she had no idea how to let well enough alone. Her blondish-brownish hair was dyed an icy shade of yellow, the color of peed-on snow. She wore too much eyeliner, too many necklaces, and talked her parents into getting her a nose job last year. Yet for all these efforts, she was still a pleasant-looking kid, and artsy, tacking images of Frida Kahlo paintings on her walls and reading books by Kerouac and Jeannette Winterson. She didn’t seem to resent Ross for all the attention he stole.
We were quiet for a while, watching the stars emit light that, if I remembered correctly, was almost three million years old.
“Anybody mind if I smoke this?” Ross asked, interrupting a silence that had almost lulled me to sleep. He was holding a small joint, perfectly rolled.
“Spark it,” Camilla said lazily, and I was flattered. The cool kids were smoking around me. Ross lit the joint, inhaled, leaned his head back to blow smoke toward the sky. I closed my eyes. I had a small supply of medical marijuana back home, but I rarely used it, preferring the full-body fog of codeine. Also it felt weird getting high around you.
“You want?” Ross asked, passing me the joint.
I took it from his hands, thought about saying something like, I shouldn’t be doing this or don’t tell your mom, but said nothing, put the joint to my mouth, tried not to smell the sickly herbaceousness of it (this was bargain-basement weed, for sure), and inhaled. I coughed for the tiniest second, but neither of your cousins said anything derisive to me. After a minute, Camilla took the joint from my hand.
I waited for a minute to feel groggy or paranoid or anything at all, but there was nothing, really—just a sort of delayed peace. Cutting through the smell of the joint was the memory of the smell of your father and the way it felt to hug him. He was on a plane and I was on an island and so I let myself think of him, what it was to see him, how his arms were still strong around me and how he still missed that spot right under his lower lip while he was shaving. I used to run my finger on that rough spot, a place nobody else would touch or see.
If you were curious about my love life before or after your father (I have no idea if this is the sort of thing you’d be curious about, and if it’s not, feel free to skip this passage), but before your father I dated two men significantly (Howard, 1994–98, and Jim, 2001–4) and afterward no one. I had a few flings, I suppose—men I met on the campaign trails, once a reporter, and for a few lovely weeks, Haven Singlebury’s dad (Do you remember Haven? Redheaded girl from your kindergarten class?) when he and Haven’s mom were on a trial separation. This started happening right after drop-off—it was October, still warm, and Haven’s dad and I bumped into each other at the Starbucks on Amsterdam and Seventy-Sixth. He mentioned in that casual-direct way that men have when they want sex that his wife had just left for an extended stay at the Kripalu yoga center in the Berkshires. She was going through something, he said, and needed time away.
I was only half-listening. “That’s nice,” I said, “that your wife’s a yogini,” as being into yoga was one of those things I had always planned on.
“My apartment’s empty,” he said, and looked down into his latte as if he were surprised with himself, although I’m sure he wasn’t. “I’m working from home today. I have no idea when she’ll be back. If,” he said, ominously, “she’ll be back at all.”
Before this, I had exchanged maybe twenty words with Haven Singlebury’s dad (it must be the THC afterglow, but as I write this, I can’t even remember his name). I do remember that he was tall, squarely built, square face, kind of a potbelly. Blue eyes. I think he was a screenwriter or something.
“I’m working from home too,” I said, which was true—it’s what I usually did. Chuck and I had a small office in Chelsea, but that was mostly where we kept our interns.
“Want to come over?” Haven Singlebury’s dad asked.
“Sure,” I said, all casual. And for the next two weeks, every morning after drop-off, I would meet Haven’s dad at Starbucks, engage in refreshingly little chitchat, then go home with him to his messy classic six on Seventieth Street and stay there till the housekeeper arrived around noon.
And then, as October started to finally cool down, Haven’s mom came back from Kripalu, having decided to give it one more chance under certain conditions; soon after that, the Singleburys moved to Connecticut. You probably have no idea who Haven Singlebury was, the name doesn’t even ring a bell, but there were moments when I was so dreamy with possibility (and I barely even knew her father, wasn’t sure if I even liked him all that much) that I thought maybe one day she’d become your stepsister.
And then Haven’s mom returned and I never saw him again or even thought about him much.
I guess the thing I want you to know, Jacob, is that there was nobody I loved like your father.
Sitting under the stars, getting stoned with your cousins (Don’t get stoned with your cousins! Or, if you do, please don’t drive anywhere after), I allowed myself to think about Haven’s dad a little and your dad a lot, until Camilla rolled over and looked at me and said, “Holy shit, Aunt Karen, are you okay?” because I was crying. But it seemed hilarious to be getting stoned with someone who still called me “Aunt Karen,” so I started to giggle, and then Ross and Cammy joined me giggling, even though they probably didn’t know what was so funny and weren’t even as high as all that. But it felt good for all of us to laugh. I laughed enough so that I confused my tears with tears of laughter and I wiped them off my cheeks with my sleeve.
“You can finish this,” Ross said, handing the end of the joint to Camilla. I was sad he didn’t hand it to me. I got out of the deck chair and lay down on the thick green lawn next to Cammy, and Ross lay down next to me, and I remembered how once they were both so little I could carry them in my arms at the same time, and then I decided to stop remembering things.
“Wow,” Ross said. “Those stars.”
“I always think I’ll get used to them, but I never do.” Camilla held the very end of the joint between her fingers like a guitar pick. She squinted through the last drag, then pushed it out on the grass.
“You know their names, right?” I asked. “Your mom taught you their names?”
“That’s the Big Dipper, isn’t it?” Ross said, pointing at Perseus.
“Not at all,” I said.
“What’s that one?” Cammy asked, stretching an arm dreamily toward the sky.
“That’s Leo,” I said, even though I wasn’t certain what she was pointing at. “If you look to the left a little, you can see his tail.”
“How do you know?”
“Grandpa taught me,” I said. “We used to drive out sometimes to eastern Long Island, where it was much more rural—we’d go to the beach and then we’d wait for it to get dark and my dad would give us his binoculars and tell us about each of the constellations. He knew all of them. His dad taught him when he w
as a kid.”
“Actually, I kind of remember,” said Ross. “He had all those books about myths, remember? Greek myths? He taught me about the different gods and how you can see them in the stars. Their chariots. I remember sitting on his lap when I was little,” he said.
“I remember that too,” said Cammy.
I felt a pleasant buzzy feeling in my muscles from the joint. “I can’t believe what’s happened to him.”
“It’s still locked in there somewhere,” Camilla said. “He just can’t access it anymore.”
“You think so?” I asked.
Cammy shrugged. “We’re always the people we were, aren’t we? Just because Grandpa doesn’t seem to know what’s going on doesn’t mean things aren’t still somewhere inside him. Doesn’t mean he isn’t still thinking. It’s just different now. He can’t talk to us anymore.”
I didn’t ask her to elaborate. Ross said, “You’re high.”
We were all still gazing at the stars. I coughed. Then I lifted my shirt to the cool air, ran my hand over the landscape of scars, some keloidal, some mere traces, that ran across the lower part of my belly. I felt them hold together the leftover pieces of me, like solder on stained glass. Another surgery, then more of me to solder back together. I kept my eyes closed. The stars were so bright and eternal I couldn’t face them.
You know we’re made of stars, right? That every atom in us was made in the burning crucible of the explosion of some long ago star? You may have already learned about this in physics class, although my favorite scientist on the subject is Walt Whitman: I celebrate myself, and sing myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
“My tongue, every atom of my blood,” I said out loud as I traced my scars, ‘form’d from this soil, this air, / Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same. / I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin, / Hoping to cease not till death.’ ”
It felt weird and lovely to recite Whitman, on a summer evening, on a beautiful island, lying on the grass. Leaves of Grass: read that as soon as you can if you haven’t already.
Our Short History Page 12