In memory of Cooper Gordon
Rest easy, my friend
Blanky © 2017 by Kealan Patrick Burke
No unauthorized reproduction permitted
Cover by Elderlemon Design
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“Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.”
- William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
* * *
You say you can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child.
Let me make it easy for you.
It’s the beginning of the end of your world.
Imagine the thing that means most to you being erased from your life. For me, it was Robin, my daughter. She was just a baby not even old enough to have fully developed into a regular human being. She had no real personality yet. She just ate, shat, and slept. Sometimes she cooed, sometimes she gurgled, sometimes she laughed. She smelled faintly of milk and baby powder. I loved her. She was the most special thing in the world, even when I had to be at work at eight and she woke me up at six for her bottle, or to be changed. Even when the long periods of late-night shrieking threatened to drive me to anger. Even when I didn’t know how to calm her down and my head started hurting so bad I thought I would join her in crying.
I loved her.
One rainy night I put her to bed and when I woke up, she was dead.
That was the beginning of the end of my world.
This is the rest of it.
1
It only took me forty years to learn how to sew buttons back on a coat, and only the death of my daughter to realize it was something that needed doing. Without those buttons, the eyeholes would widen, the material would fray, and the coat would sunder on its hanger like a vampire exposed to sunlight. And once that happened, what was to keep the same from happening to me? I often felt like that early on, like I was suspended from a hook in the dark just waiting to fall apart.
Thus, three months after Robin died, all the loose or missing buttons on my coats and jackets had been returned to their as-new firmness. In some cases, those buttons wouldn’t budge at all, as if I’d glued them on. Inevitably this would cause me some difficulty, but I knew I’d simply tear them off just for the excuse to sew them back on. It was a ritual, one of the few that kept me grounded, no matter how silly it appeared on the surface.
On the day I found the blanket, I was alone, wandering around the house like a ghost.
Loneliness sent me to my cell phone and the still-not familiar procedure of dialing my wife’s number for anything other than to ask what time she’d be home. But she wasn’t coming home, and every day she was away, I felt the chances of reconciliation growing slimmer. Soon she would become, like our lost daughter, a memory confined to a frame or my own fevered dreaming. They would exist only to hurt by virtue of their maddening unattainability.
The connection hummed and I imagined the signal shooting across the miles between us, flung between towers, fired down through the phalanxes of knotted trees, over the stone walls around her parent’s house, and on into the steel, plastic, and glass handset, her phone’s display showing a picture of me smiling in a way I suspected I never would again: carefree, loved, alive. Above that picture, instead of “HUBBY”, it probably just read “STEPHEN.”
I wondered if this was one of the days in which she felt compelled to answer, and was relieved when the dial tone ended and her voice came on the line, immediately bringing butterflies to my stomach.
“Hey,” Lexi said.
“Hey. How are you?”
Is there a more redundant question to ask a grieving person? How are you? Still moping around because the most precious thing in your life got erased? Still struggling with suicidal thoughts quite simply because you’d rather be dead than live without your baby daughter?
“Oh, you know,” she said, because I do. What I didn’t know was why I’d called in the first place, or what was left to say between us, but it seemed critical to not let the silence get too thick for fear we’d drown in it.
“How are your folks?” I asked.
“Pretty good, considering. They say hi.”
Given that my relationship with her parents had never been optimal, I doubted that very much, but it was good of her to say it. “Tell them I say hi, too.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Okay, I suppose. I miss you.”
She didn’t respond. I knew she wouldn’t, hoped she would.
“Any chance I could talk you into stopping by, just to…you know…talk?”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that, Stephen.”
Do you ever stop to consider how seldom your significant other uses your name in daily life? For us it was always some term of endearment, like “honey” or “babe”, or even the more extravagant “sugar badger” or “manly mouse”. The only time that changed was during arguments when the strangeness of being called by your name left no doubt that you were in trouble.
“Would you think about it, at least?”
It took her a long time to reply. “Sure.”
“It’s just that I feel lost in this house without you.”
“I’m surprised you’re still there,” she said, with just the faintest hint of bitterness, the unspoken implication being that I should have fled the scene like she had, but unlike Lexi, I had no place else to go.
“This is home, Lex. Our home.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s the house where our daughter died, and that’s all it can ever be.”
“Don’t say that. We can—”
“Look, I’m not going to have this conversation with you right now.”
“Or ever.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Just talk to me, would you? Just for a little while?”
“I have to go.”
“Babe…”
“Take care, Stephen, okay?”
Stephen. I might as well have been one of her coworkers from the office calling to follow up on a monthly expense report.
“Lex.”
And then it was just me sitting on the sofa alone, the phone in my hands and tears in my eyes, the yellow-painted walls robbed of their color by the lack of light through the curtained windows. The only sound in the world was the thunder of my heartbeat in my ears. My hands were shaking, so I clasped them together and clenched my teeth against the black wall of grief that rose behind my eyes. This could not be all there was. It couldn’t be the end. I needed light. I needed hope. I needed help, but there was nobody to call. It had always been just me and Lex and, for a little while, Robin, and now they were gone and I was alone.
But there was no time for self-pity.
Through blurry eyes, I checked the time on my phone. The day was not yet done, and neither was I. Resolute, yet shaken, I stood and went to the closet, donned my coat with its snugly repaired buttons, and stormed out into the bright fall afternoon, my intent to walk off the ennui of isolation, the fear of the life in which I had abruptly found myself. After all, if I could fix an old coat, then surely, I could find a way to sew myself back together.
* * *
I walked the rain-slicked streets with false purpose, my sure stride a ploy meant to fool myself into thinking I had anywhere to go. When you’re circling
the drain, worrying about direction is pointless. So, I plodded on, my eyes on the cobblestone walkways glistening grayly beneath a vibrant veneer of dead leaves. Cars sizzled through puddles. Dark figures hustled by, unburdened by the absence of a destination, all elbows and impatience. I was a ghost in the glass storefronts, fading as the day grew old. Fat pumpkins on stoops watched my passage with hollow-eyed glee. Time would shrink them too.
At length, I realized my path had been predetermined after all. The sky, a charcoal palette of swirling clouds and streaks of muted light, cast a pall on the cross-studded mounds of green before me. The entrance to the graveyard—a tall stone arch bearing Latin words I did not understand—was appropriately Gothic, as was the wrought iron fence meant to keep out those for whom burial sites held some strange and not always benevolent nocturnal attraction.
For the longest time, long enough for my own shadow to distance itself from me, I stared at that gate as if it was some mystical portal to a realm I couldn’t possibly understand, but the only thing that baffled me was the reality that, no matter how indirectly, I had put someone here. Inside, buried six feet in the dirt, were the tiny bones of my daughter, a new life extinguished and hidden in the earth. My baby. Robin. Here and then gone forever.
As the tears welled and the strength threatened to leave my legs, an old lady, her bones and expression mercilessly twisted by age and a life hard-lived, sidled out from behind the gate and squinted up at me, her left eye lost in folds of wrinkles, the other opaque and watering from the cold. She wore a headscarf and coat in seasonal colors of yellow and red. “He left me a decade ago,” she said with a faint smile as she drew abreast of me. Her words were smoky, like the breeze. “Went to lay with the Goddess of Grief, like we all do in the end.” She raised a hand, waggled her gnarled fingers in farewell, and shambled on.
Some unmeasured time later, still held in thrall by the stone arch and those Latin letters, I decided that today, clearly, I was not up to the task of entering the graveyard, not prepared to kneel by my daughter’s grave with its small polished headstone and repeat apologies for the breeze to whip away from my lips. I was already living in the house where our worst nightmares had come true. That day, I could not push myself to revisit the place where that nightmare had left her. And so, I went home, and took a different route than before to make it feel as if I had accomplished something, but around every corner, hidden in the shadows between the houses, and in the windows where my pale face hovered like a Halloween mask, all I could see was my wife’s screaming face as she held our lifeless daughter in her arms. And with it, came the memory, the treasured and accursed memory I come back to so very often of that one blissful moment in which I didn’t know Robin was dead. The pre-moment ignorance in which I could have lived forever if it meant I’d never have to know the truth. But then the stark reality struck me at the look on Lexi’s face, at the sound of her horrified, anguished scream, a sound I had never heard her make before. Then I saw Robin’s tiny little hand, and realized it was the wrong color, and everything grew dim.
* * *
Mail awaited me on my return: overdue notices, mostly, and my paycheck, which could not hope to cover them. Death is expensive, and like grief, is not likely to go away without being dealt with directly and at length. But not today. I tossed the envelopes on the table by the front door, hung up my coat, then poured myself a generous measure of whiskey. Humming some tune I couldn’t identify under oath, I planted myself on the sofa before the TV. I had come to think of old sitcoms like Cheers, WKRP in Cincinnati, and M*A*S*H as a kind of therapy, isolating me from the isolation, if you will. I sat in the glow of the TV in a room empty but for me, the sofa, and the rug Lexi and I bought at an Indian reservation in New Mexico. (Only when we got home did we see the tag that said it was made in China.)
I was three whiskeys deep and chuckling robotically at McLean Stevenson’s drunken attempts to seduce a nurse when I heard a sound from upstairs. It distracted me only mildly, worthy of notice not concern. The seasons were changing and the house was old, attuned like arthritic bones to alterations in temperature. I grew up in the house and knew its rhythms well, so I returned to the security of the world within the TV, let myself get recruited by the staff and soldiers at the 4077th and laughed at their shenanigans. It made little sense that I should wish I were there at a fictional mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean war, and yet it still seemed better than being here, if only because those folks had each other for solace, and knew how to find humor in the horror as a means of coping. This was not something I had been able to manage. Even when I laughed at the TV, the sound was hollow, an automatic response designed to keep me sane, but not loud enough to be persuasive.
Soon my glass was empty and I did not chastise myself for how unsteady I was when I rose to fetch another. This was, after all, the point. For a few hours at least, I would have some small semblance of respite from the dread that, in my waking hours, clung to me like a heavy coat.
From upstairs, another sound, this time a shifting, as of something being dragged across the floor. Empty glass in hand, I looked up, as if being tipsy now came with the bonus of being able to see through ceilings. Canned laughter filled the room, but now it was lost on me. Seemed inappropriate, incongruous. Horror movies would be a lot less effective if prerecorded laughter took the place of ominous music during the scary scenes. And make no mistake, I was scared now. The creaking of timbers settling, of joints tightening, that was familiar. A dragging sound was not. Up there, through that ceiling, was the floor of an empty room. But once upon a time, not so very long ago, it had been Robin’s room.
I hadn’t been inside that room in months for the same reason my wife hadn’t been in this house for six weeks. The pain was much too potent here. Standing at the threshold of Robin’s room, seeing where her crib used to be, only served to remind us of what could have been done had we known it was necessary. We did not deserve to be blamed for her death. On some level, my wife and I both knew this, and yet it was impossible not to hold ourselves accountable, to wish that we had just taken our baby to bed with us that night instead of leaving her to die alone in her crib. We were good parents, I doubt anyone would have argued against that, but still she died. Someone must bear the blame for that crippling reality no matter how illogical or unfair it may be. Lexi blamed me, and herself, in equal measure. And I guess if I’m being honest, I felt the same at first. We were, after all, the guardians tasked with Robin’s well-being, and we failed, and now she was gone. And that was what I feared would build a permanent and impenetrable wall between us. Eventually she would move out for good and then move on with her life, and I wouldn’t be in it. She’d remarry, maybe even have more children, but I feared that when Robin died, Lexi buried me right alongside her. For me, that doubled the grief, and in my darkest hours, tended a black flame of anger in my heart that Lexi should abandon me when she knew I needed her, knew that we should seek solace in each other if we were to have any hope of making it through this.
Or perhaps that was only what I needed.
That sound again.
Perhaps it was the whiskey or the anger that emboldened me, but with a shaky sigh, I set down my glass and headed upstairs. The fantastic notions of what might await me behind the locked door of that room were not difficult to dismiss, even in so vulnerable a state. I did not anticipate a visitation, a haunting, or some inexplicable occurrence attributable to the paranormal. I had never believed in such things, no matter how much I might have wished that I did, if only so I could have known Robin was in a better place and not just lying in cold dead earth forevermore. It would have been so much easier to believe in ghosts, but what I expected to find in that room was a natural visitor, most likely a squirrel. It wouldn’t have been the first time they’d inveigled their way into the house in search of a warm place to build a nest, and the nature of the sound suggested them as the likely culprits.
Still, standing outside my daughter’s door, I found my
self paralyzed.
In the center of the four wooden panels on the white door, there was a single sticker: a cartoon ladybug with big round eyes and a comical smile. From that mouth jutted a speech balloon containing the words: “Oh, hai!” I had always found that little sticker adorable. Now I found it almost debilitatingly sad.
I have no idea how much time passed, how many rounds of canned laughter carried hollowly up the stairs with the TV casting lightning against the wall beside me, before the shuffling sound came again and I moved my head away from where I had been pressing it against the door.
I looked at the door knob, head cocked, listening.
The sound did not come again.
I was content to believe it had been nothing at all, imagination perhaps, or at least, something not worthy of investigation right at that very moment. And yet…
I opened the door.
2
In the weeks after the funeral, we stripped Robin’s room bare. Down came the curtains (pink with red hearts) and the matching lamp shade. Away went the fluffy pink rug. We put all Robin’s toys and her mobile into black plastic bags and stowed them in the closet alongside the boxes of her clothes and the skeleton of the deconstructed crib. We broke down a lot that day, and every day after. I thought after the horror of finding Robin cold and unresponsive that awful Monday morning and then watching as her tiny coffin was lowered into the ground, that nothing could hurt me more. I was wrong. Erasing all trace of her from inside our home was just as bad. We justified it by telling ourselves that leaving everything where it was would ultimately do more harm than good by serving as a constant reminder, and yet systematically shoving everything into sacks and boxes and tossing them into the closet felt so much worse. Like we were being disrespectful of her memory. Like we didn’t care, and now only wanted to get on with our lives. And to a certain degree, you must try to get on with things or the grief will destroy you. You must put away the reminders of loss to have any hope of surviving. And we did. We locked them all away, like you lock all the pain away in your heart and wait for time to build a shield around it.
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