by Ann Hood
It would be easy, then, to think of Grace’s room as a storeroom, a playroom, a room easy to clean out. But like the entire house, like each of our hearts and minds, Grace’s fingerprints were everywhere. Grace was the kid who, when playing the game “I went on a trip and in my trunk I packed…” said rambutan for the letter r. Grace was the kid who started wearing glasses when she was only two. “The thing about kids this little,” the ophthalmologist warned us, “they won’t wear their glasses. They pull them off, lose them, forget them, break them.” Not Grace. She loved her glasses, and from the minute she got her first pair of wire-rimmed ones she wore them. When I told her what the doctor had said, she rolled her eyes. “Why wouldn’t I wear them?” she asked me. “I can’t see without them.” Grace painted and drew and colored all the time, everywhere. Papers filled with a special swirl she used to make still show up around the house. And there, right on that antique white bureau, is her name, written in her own hand with a red crayon.
The first time I walked into Grace’s room after she died, when the reality of what had happened to us in the past forty-eight hours was still unbelievable, the first things I saw were those tights. I saw them and I screamed, not the kind of scream that comes from fright, but the kind that comes from the deepest grief imaginable. It is a scream that comes when there are no words to express what you feel. It is an argument with God or life or death. It is a scream that rails against logic and fate and everything there is. I saw those tights. I screamed. I closed the door to the room, hard. Then I sat on the floor in the hallway outside Grace’s room and I cried.
My friend Sharon came to me every day. She did simple things and she did enormous things. One of those things was going into our basement and doing the laundry I had begun the day Grace got sick and died. Our house was built in 1792, and our basement is of the creepy, stone-floor variety. The ceilings are low. The pipes are wrapped with something to keep the asbestos from killing us. The furnace makes scary noises. There are mice down there. And mousetraps. Still, I used to find a kind of pleasure in venturing into that basement and doing the laundry. I liked separating our clothes into piles—Grace’s, Sam’s, Lorne’s, mine. Grace’s purple and pink pants and skirts mingling with Sam’s bright orange T-shirts; her little underwear decorated with Disney princesses tangled up with Sam’s miniature boxers, Lorne’s extra large ones. I liked the smell the Tide with bleach alternative left behind, the warmth of the clothes when they came out of the dryer.
But Grace’s death left everything in mid-cycle. I would never go down to that basement and finish what I had begun on that warm April afternoon when my life stretched before me in endless loads of ever-growing laundry. So Sharon went down and finished the wash cycles. She put everything in the dryer. She folded Grace’s underwear and shirts and skirts and pajamas. She cried while she did this, but she got it done. Then she put Sam’s clothes in his drawers, and Lorne’s and my clothes in our room, and then she went into Grace’s room and carefully placed her clean clothes on the bed she never slept in.
AS MONTHS PASSED, I would sometimes dare myself to push open that door and go into that room. I would stand in that doorway and see Grace’s crayoned name on her bureau, see that pile of clean laundry on her bed, see her easel, her tutus. See everything but Grace. And I would pull the door shut and run.
Most of our house was built in 1792, but thirty or so years ago the owners put on an addition, an L-shaped thing that gives us a big kitchen and full bathroom downstairs and two bedrooms and a third full bathroom upstairs. The extension, unlike the rest of the house, which is heated by that noisy furnace in the basement, has a bad electrical heating system. One of those upstairs bedrooms belongs to my stepdaughter Ariane. The other bedroom is Grace’s.
For that first winter, we didn’t turn on the upstairs heat for those rooms at all. Now that she is a teenager, Ariane doesn’t visit as often. Both of the bedrooms stayed empty that winter. One afternoon in the dead of winter, I opened the door to Grace’s room and it was freezing cold in there. I stepped in, sat on the floor, and touched her socks—so small, those socks—every pair in that basket. I could see my breath in that room. I opened one of the drawers in her bookshelf and looked through her sketch pad. Pages filled with her swirls. Pages of her practicing writing her name. Sometimes she wrote Sam’s too. On one page she’d written a list of names of people who could join a club she and Sam were planning. On one page she’d written: I love you, Mommy! Love, Grace.
SOMEONE SENDS US a brochure about a woman who takes dead people’s clothes and makes teddy bears out of them.
Someone calls and gently tells us that our church is having a clothing drive for a homeless shelter.
Someone offers to make a quilt out of Grace’s clothes for us.
Someone offers to go in there and pack everything away. They promise not to get rid of a thing. They will just put everything in boxes and label those boxes and put them in our creepy basement.
I tell Lorne that I can’t do any of it. “You don’t have to,” he says. So we leave it all untouched.
IN OUR MUDROOM by the side door we have hooks for coats and shelves for shoes and boots and more shelves for hats and mittens and scarves. On the morning of the day before Grace died, I was struggling to get the kids out the door for school. Grace was slow. Slow to wake up. Slow to eat her breakfast. Slow to get dressed. She still needed me to put on her socks, to brush her hair, to button or zip or snap. She was only five years old.
That morning we were running late and Sam was saying, “Hurry up!” and I was saying, “Come on, Grace!” and Grace smiled at us and said, “You can’t hurry an artist, guys.” Sam got in the car and was holding the door open for Grace and as she walked through the mudroom something caught her eye. She bent and tugged and pulled out her favorite winter hat. Multicolored stripes, it came to two big points on top of her head and each point had a pom-pom on it that bounced whenever she moved. “Look! My pom-pom hat!” Grace said, excited, and she pulled it on her head. “It’s too hot for that today,” I said, “but I’m glad you found it.” I pulled it off as she walked past me to the car. Her hair flew with static electricity. I hung the pom-pom hat on one of the coat hooks, right above her pale blue winter coat, the one that matched her eyes.
It wasn’t just Grace’s room. It was the pom-pom hat and the pale blue coat and the pink fleece pullover and the fucshia button-down sweater, all of them hanging on those hooks in the mudroom. After she died, I would bury my face in that jacket, that sweater, and I would breathe deeply, as if I really could capture some small part of her still.
UNEXPECTEDLY, A DAY ARRIVES. Three years have passed. It is an ordinary Saturday in February and I know I can do it. I can go into Grace’s room and I can put away her things. I come up with a system. Plastic bins for those things too precious to give away. Masking tape and Sharpies to label them. Boxes for those things to donate to the homeless shelter. Trash bags. I used to go into Grace’s and Sam’s rooms with the same supplies each season. Snowsuits and boots. Bathing suits and flip-flops. Everything organized and labeled so I could easily find it the next summer, the next winter. I used to write in big letters: Grace, age 3, summer. Grace, age 5, winter. That is where those boxes stopped.
Now I enter her room and I do not pause to think about anything except getting the task done. I begin with that laundry, still folded and lying right where Sharon left it. I shove the underwear into trash bags. I hold up the other items, one by one, and I begin to cry. If the item is something that immediately reminds me of Grace, if it was one of her favorites, if we have a picture of her in it, I place it in a plastic bin. If not—a plain yellow T-shirt, a pair of pants I don’t even remember, I put it in a box to give away.
I cry.
I move to her bureau. There is her name in red crayon. I open each drawer and pull out shirts and shorts and dresses and capri pants and jeans. Everything, everything is Grace. I am surrounded by Grace’s things, but Grace is gone. This idea fills me until
I think I cannot breathe anymore. I am crying so hard that I have to keep my glasses off because they are so tear-streaked. Sam stands in the doorway, bouncing from one foot to the other nervously.
“Can I help?” he says, my brave eleven-year-old son.
I shake my head. “I’m fine,” I say.
“It’s okay,” I say when he still doesn’t leave.
He runs down the hall, fast.
The bags, the boxes, the bins are all filling up as the room empties. The closet yields more surprises, more pain, more memories. Here is a coat I bought on sale at a fancy store in New York City. Thick hot pink corduroy with a paisley-print collar, I bought it in the only size left: 6. She’ll wear it eventually, I thought. But she never got to be a size 6, and here is that coat with the tags still hanging from it, waiting for her to grow up.
I cry.
Here is the pink bag I filled with the New York Times from the day she was born, her sonogram pictures, the hat she wore in the hospital as a newborn.
Here is the bathing suit she picked out the week before she died. A lime one-piece with big red and blue circles all over it. Tags still on. That summer after she died, I was sitting on the beach and a little girl in this same suit ran past me. I wanted to throw sand at her. I wanted to rip that bathing suit off her. But I just gathered my things and left the beach. I sat in my too-hot car, and sobbed.
Here is the black T-shirt she wrote her name on in gold in nursery school.
I cry and I cry until the closet too is empty.
We did not allow the kids to eat upstairs. There was the mice problem. And my fear of them choking. And Lorne’s fastidiousness. Still, I always suspected Grace snuck food upstairs. Sometimes she would be in her room and I’d stand in the doorway and ask her a question and she would keep her head turned from me. “Are you eating?” I asked her more than once. She always shook her head no.
But when I open the drawers of her bookshelf and begin to pull everything out, I find candy wrappers shoved in the back, half-eaten bags of jelly beans, an opened package of Peeps with two pink chicks still inside. I find this evidence and I start to laugh. I knew it! Of course it’s ridiculous, but I feel like Grace left them there so even on this difficult day she can make me laugh.
I gather the crumpled wrappers into my hand and throw them away, and I am done. Grace’s room, with the bed that has never been slept in, is completely empty of Grace.
“ISN’T IT FUNNY?” someone tells me. “People make shrines for Princess Diana and Jim Morrison, but they don’t think you should keep your own child’s things after she dies.”
We line up Grace’s shoes at the top of the stairs.
Sam gave her the red sparkly shoes for her fifth birthday because she had outgrown her gold sparkly ones.
She wore the pink metallic slip-ons during the entire three weeks our family traveled across Japan the August before she died. I bought them because we would have to take our shoes on and off so often there, and these had Velcro, and she could do it herself. Grace, who was so slow, always had her shoes off before the rest of us, and slipped into the Japanese slippers first.
When we got home from Japan, we went shopping for school shoes. The Skechers sneakers were purple and had Velcro too. But what Grace most loved about them was that they came with a small silver shoehorn. She liked to sit on the bottom step, slide her foot into the sneaker, and then insert the shoehorn to get the heel in just right.
She never got to wear the leopard boots. She was waiting for rain. But Grace loved leopard. Her backpack was leopard and her lunch box was leopard and she even had a leopard bathing suit when she was four. She got those boots for her fifth birthday. She pulled them on, walking clumsily because they were just a little bit too big. Lorne pulled her onto his lap and sat in the rocking chair he made back in high school. “Take our picture,” he said, just as he did every year on her birthday. We imagined a lifetime of these pictures, Grace getting bigger and bigger each year, still happily posing on her father’s lap. Her leopard boots swing happily to a stop. She faces the camera, and grins. That is the picture we brought to the ICU. See, that picture told all of those doctors and nurses, Here is a unique and special child. Save her.
But they couldn’t.
That famous rabbi recited the Twenty-third Psalm for us that afternoon in his office. When he finished he said, “You see? The psalm tells us we walk through the valley of the shadow of death. Not around it or over it or beside it. Through it.”
Time passes and I am still not through it. Grief isn’t something you get over. You live with it. You go on with it lodged in you. Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed a pile of stones. Grief makes me heavy. It makes me slow. Even on days when I laugh a lot, or dance, or finish a project, or meet a deadline, or celebrate, or make love, it is there. Lodged deep inside of me. Time has passed and I am living a life again, back in the world.
At first, though, grief made me insane. It’s true. I have been there. I am the one woman standing in the street on a Thanksgiving afternoon, screaming and pulling out my hair. That is my mother coming out the door, yelling my name. That is me, running from her, running down the beautiful street where houses wear plaques announcing how old and important they are. That is me making that sound which is both inhuman and guttural and the most human sound a person can make: the sound of grief. My hair is coming out, not in fistfuls, but in painful tangles, ripped from the root, from my scalp. That is me running, zigzagging, trying to escape what is inescapable: Grace is dead.
I HAVE BEEN THERE. That is me alone in the beautiful cemetery where important people are buried: Revolutionary War heroes, signers of famous documents, governors and senators. And Grace. My five-year-old daughter. We had to find a plot for her. We had to make decisions in the days after she died, when I still could not believe that she had died. Who could believe it? Five years old. Beautiful and funny and smart. And healthy. People came with questions that needed answers: What music did we want played at the service? What facts did we want in the newspaper? Did we want a viewing? Could we send clothes to the funeral home? Which Bible verses did we want read? Who would read them? Did we want a party of some kind afterward? Where did we want to bury our five-year-old daughter? Here, my husband said, and he drove me to that beautiful cemetery where a few weeks earlier he had taken Grace and Sam bike riding along its graceful, curving pathways beneath just-flowering dogwoods.
That is me the last afternoon I went there on my own: warm sun, the smell of dirt and flowers and heat. That is me, stepping from my car, walking on wobbly legs toward the spot that we chose. It is a blanket of dewy grass, freshly dug, freshly covered. That is me, the woman who is throwing herself on that spot, flinging her body down, and clawing at it, weeping. Dirt under my nails, grass in my mouth, hair wet with tears. That is me, vowing never to go back alone.
I HAVE BEEN THERE. I am the woman in dirty clothes that do not match, wearing flip-flops in the hard rain, crouched in her car, watching all the beautiful children leaving school. They are wearing bright slickers, rain boots that look like animals—frogs and ladybugs. They are clutching their mothers’ hands. I am the woman who got special permission to park in the No Parking zone because the sight of all the little children makes me scream. My son emerges and runs up the walkway, across the small wooden bridge that stretches child-sized over a stream, up the grassy slope, to my car.
That is me trying to act normal for his sake. He slides into the backseat. His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. “So,” he says, trying not show his worry, “what did you do today?” He is afraid that I have done nothing but cry or stare into space; or, even worse, sat for hours at the jigsaw puzzle of a European castle that I cannot stop working on, as if fitting those small jagged pieces together will solve something. “Me?” I say. “The usual boring stuff. More importantly, what did you do today?” Relieved, he tells me stories of immigration, stories of playground wars, recites the mid-Atlantic states and each of their capitals.
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nbsp; I AM THE WOMAN screaming at the airline ticket agent. I am trying to make plane reservations, a simple task that I cannot manage. There are schedules, choices, dates, and times. That is me screaming at the officious woman: “My daughter is dead! My little girl is dead? Do you hear me? Do you?”
THAT IS ME, crying in restaurants, in supermarkets, in traffic, in bed, at Christmas parties and dinner parties and school assemblies.
I HAVE BEEN THERE. At the brink of losing my mind. Unable to sleep for more than an hour or two. Unable to think of anything except what happened: how it happened, how it could have happened, why it happened. I ask my friends over and over how I could have stopped it, changed it, seen it coming. My mind only has these questions. Hospital images. My own screams echoing in it. I remember the great thirst that overcame me when she died. How I drank bottles and bottles of water in giant swallows, spilling it everywhere, gulping it, opening another bottle, guzzling that one, opening another. That thirst. I try to explain it, but it is only thirst after all. There are no answers for any of it.
I CANNOT SAY how I got from there to here. I cannot even say where “here” is. There are still nights when I cannot get rid of the images. Some mornings I still wake up crying, Grace’s face large and close. Some days I do nothing but work a jigsaw puzzle: See how the border takes shape? If I can only fill in the missing pieces, I think. But then that passes and I break apart all that work and put it away.
Yet I am here, somewhere else. I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses, writing down the address of the shop in the East Village where I bought them. I am the one telling the funny story at dinner, making everyone laugh. I am the one throwing a party for two dozen people, everything done just right. I am the mother applauding her son as the Wolf in Into the Woods, as Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as Peter Cratchit in A Christmas Carol. I am the proud wife beside her husband at banquets and conferences and award ceremonies. I am the writer who has written a new novel, who has won a prize, who is teaching here and teaching there, who is standing in front of an audience at a bookstore and reading her new short story without faltering.