by Neil Gaiman
He set down the plate on a chair beside him so that he could take the bulbs. “Plant these now,” she said, “and when they come up in the spring, think of her.”
She touched his arm and walked off, leaving Abe holding on to this hope.
SARAH HAD MET ABE when she was new to Los Angeles, and some friends had taken her to a cigar club that was so exclusive you had to enter through a corporate office building and give the doorman the password to be let into the correct elevator bank. The club was on the roof of the building, and Sarah’s friends had tried to cure her East Coast homesickness by showing off Mel Gibson’s humidor. It was a dark place, one where actors who fancied themselves to be musicians were likely to pick up a guitar and jam with the band; one that only made Sarah even more aware of how much she hated this city, this new job, this departure from where she really wanted to be.
They sat at the bar, pulling up stools beside a good-looking guy with hair as dark as ink and a smile that made Sarah feel like she was caught in a whirlpool. Sarah’s friends ordered cosmos and tried to outflirt each other—getting him to reveal that he was the drummer in the band, and that his name was Abe. When one of the girls came back from the bathroom and exclaimed, Have you seen all the stars? Abe leaned over and asked Sarah to dance. They moved like smoke over the empty dance floor, to a canned jazz track. “Why me?” Sarah asked simply.
His hand, resting on the small of her back, pulled her just that much closer. “Because,” Abe said, “when your friend started talking about stars, you were the only one in this whole fucking place who looked up at the sky.”
Three months later, they moved to Massachusetts together. Six months later, they got married, amid many toasts and jokes about Abraham and Sarah and their destiny to create a tribe. But like their biblical counterparts, it took years for them to have a child—eight, to be exact. Just long enough for Sarah to believe it was time to give up trying. Just short enough for her to be overwhelmed with the news of her pregnancy; to never give a second thought to the fact that this might not be the end of the struggle, but instead, the beginning.
ON THE WAY HOME from the church, Sarah turned to Abe and told him to stop at the grocery store. “There’s nothing in the house,” she said, as if this wasn’t obvious on so many levels. They were too numb to think about how they looked, at one in the afternoon, moving through the frozen foods aisle in coat and tie and pearls and heels. They wandered through the store, picking out the items that seemed to scream normal: eggs and bread and cheese and milk; things any family could use. In the cereal aisle, Abe started to automatically reach for the berry Kix, her favorite, until he realized that they didn’t need it anymore; and he covered gracefully by taking instead the cereal box beside it, some god-awful bran thing that looked like straw and that he knew he’d never eat.
They went to the line with their favorite checkout girl, the one who didn’t mind when their daughter helped scan the bar codes on the soup cans and the frozen peas. She smiled when she saw them. “Wow, look at you two!” she said, glancing at their clothes and winking. “Don’t tell me food shopping is what passes for a date without the kids nowadays…”
Abe and Sarah froze. This woman wouldn’t know—how could she? She thought, as would any other stranger, that their daughter was home with a babysitter, watching The Princess Diaries for the six hundredth time or pretending the Tupperware was a drum set. As Abe signed the credit card receipt, the checkout clerk reached beneath her cash register and pulled out a lollipop. “She likes blue, right? Tell her I missed her.”
“Yes,” Abe said, grasping it so tightly that the stick curved. “Yes, I will.”
He followed Sarah as she pushed the cart outside, where the sun was so bright it brought tears to his eyes. Sarah turned to him, speechless and staring. “What?” Abe said, his voice raw. “What did I do wrong?”
THREE DAYS LATER, SARAH woke up and pulled on her favorite sweater only to realize that her arms now stretched a good three inches past the ends of the sleeves. Annoyed—did Abe shrink it in the wash?—she pulled out another only to realize that she’d outgrown that one, too. She stared at herself in the mirror for a moment and then pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, where she could not see anything wrong.
She tried to pretend that she didn’t notice when she unloaded the dishwasher and could, for the first time in her life, reach the top shelf of the cabinets without having to stand on a stool or ask Abe for his help.
ON HIS LAST DAY of paid bereavement leave, Abe remembered sitting in the hospital with his daughter. There were starfish painted on the window glass, and while they waited for the doctor and Sarah read a waiting-room magazine from the turn of the century, his daughter had wanted to play I spy. It had gotten to the point, in the past seven years, where Abe could almost do this semiconscious—since his daughter had a habit of changing midstream what her target object was, anyway, the game didn’t make any linear sense. He guessed the exit sign over the door, the bathroom knob, the starfish on the far right, getting more and more impatient, and wishing the doctor would just come in already so that he didn’t have to play one more damn round.
It had only been a sore throat. Her fever wasn’t more than 101. That was the criteria—you weren’t supposed to worry about a fever until it spiked past 102, something Sarah had learned the hard way when she’d call the pediatrician early on, freaking out over everything from hangnails to cradle cap. But over the course of their daughter’s life, they’d weaned themselves into health care confidence. They didn’t rush her into the office at the sign of the first cough; they made her sleep overnight on an earache to make sure it was present the next morning before they went to get it checked. And this time, Sarah had kept her home from school waiting to see if it was a virus, or strep throat. They’d done what they were supposed to do as parents; they’d listened to the doctors; they’d played by the rules—and by dinnertime, the rules didn’t apply. Children weren’t supposed to die of strep throat, but then again, you did not have to look far for the shouldn’ts. All over this world there were tsunamis sweeping entire countries out to sea; there were Eskimo women with breast milk full of mercury; there were wars being fought that had been started for the wrong reasons. All over this world impossible things were happening that never should have.
Abe realized he would play I spy for a thousand years, if he could.
THE NEXT DAY, WHEN Abe left for work, Sarah cleaned. Not just a cursory vacuum and floor mop, mind you, but toilets scrubbed by hand and radiator registers being dusted and the washing of the walls. She went into her drawers and bagged all the sweaters that did not fit, and the new pile of pants that ended above her ankles. She got rid of the travel coffee mugs and gravy boats and cherry pitters she never used, weeding through the kitchen drawers. She organized Abe’s clothes by color grouping; she threw out all the medicine bottles past their expiration date. She wiped down the shelves of the refrigerator and tossed the capers and the mustard and the horseradish that hadn’t been used except for that one recipe months ago.
She began to organize the closets in the house—the front one, with the winter coats still in hibernation and the boots tossed like gauntlets into a Rubbermaid bin on the floor—and then the hall closet with its piles of snowy towels and heady potpourri. It was in that one that she found herself reaching to the rear of the top shelf—the hiding spot she’d never been able to reach herself without a struggle, before, and that therefore became her cache of Christmas gifts bought and saved all year for her daughter. One by one, Sarah pulled out a remote-control robot, an art set to make flower fairies, a dress-up kit—treasures she’d found in January or March or May and had known, in that instant, that her daughter would love. She stood immobile for a long moment, holding this bounty in her elongated arms, paralyzed by the most concrete evidence she’d found yet that her daughter was Not. Coming. Home.
Sarah sat down in the middle of the hall. She opened up the plastic shrink-wrapped robot, installed its batteries, and
sent him careening into the bathroom. She opened the dress-up kit and wrapped a pink boa around her own neck; peered into the tiny heart-shaped mirror to apply the fuchsia lipstick and glittery blue eye shadow, a whore’s version of happiness.
When the phone rang, she ran into the bedroom to pick up an extension. “How are you doing?” Abe asked.
“Fine,” Sarah said. In the bedroom mirror, she could still see the clown-red cheeks, the garish mouth. “I’m fine.”
She hung up the phone and went into the kitchen for a large black trash bag, big enough to hold a yard’s worth of leaves, or a closet full of the future. She scooped all the unused toys for her daughter into the trash bag and carried it over her shoulder out to the garage. Because it was not trash day, Sarah drove all the way to the municipal dump, where she let the attendant punch her ticket once for the privilege of hauling the sack over the ravine’s edge. She waited, until this bag full of what she’d lost nestled itself between other bags stuffed with the things people actually chose to give away.
PHARMACISTS LIVE IN MINUTIAE, which is why Abe had learned a whole system of measurement in college that most educated folks don’t even know exists. Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.
Abe was trying to count the twenty-four scruples, but they had nothing to do with the pills he had spilled before him on the little rubber mat from Pfizer, a freebie he’d gotten at some conference in Santa Fe. It was funny—a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. It was that simple, he understood now. You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.
He regretted telling his daughter to clean up her room the day before she died. He regretted the fact that he hadn’t hugged her in front of her friends after her fall concert at school, because he thought her embarrassment was more important than his pride. He regretted not taking his family to Australia, when they were still a family. He regretted not having been given the chance to meet a grandchild. He regretted having seven years, instead of seventy-seven.
Abe pushed aside these thoughts and began to recount the pills. But he had to keep hiking up his pants—they were riding that low on his hips. Finally, ducking behind a wall of meds, he unbuttoned his white coat and notched his belt tighter. It would make sense that he was losing weight—he hadn’t been eating, really—but the belt suddenly didn’t fit at all. There simply wasn’t a notch where he needed it to be; he’d grown that thin, that fast.
Frustrated, he unwound some twine in the back room used for shipments and took off his belt, looping the rope in its place. He thought of going back inside and finishing the order, but instead he walked out through the back receiving door of the pharmacy and kept walking—around the block, and then down three more, and through the traffic light, until he came to a bar he passed every day when he drove home. Olaf’s, it was called, and it was open, even though it was only eleven A.M.
He was aware, as he walked through the door, that he looked like a poor man’s Charlie Chaplin, with a rope holding up his pants. He was aware that he hadn’t been to a bar during the day since he’d been a drummer a lifetime ago. There were five people at the bar, even this morning, and they weren’t the sort of folks you found in bars at night. These were the hard-luck cases, the ones who needed whiskey (a dram!) to get through another few hours of an ordinary workday; or the call girls who needed to forget before they went home to sleep off last night’s memories; or the old men who only wanted to find their youth in the bottom of a bottle of gin.
Abe climbed onto a stool—and climbed was the word; he must have been more exhausted than he thought, for all the effort that it took to get onto it. “Have you got Jameson?” he asked the bartender, and the guy looked at him with a smile as crooked as lightning.
“Nice try, kid,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
The bartender shook his head. “You got any ID?”
Abe was forty-two years old, and he could not remember the last time he’d been carded. He had gray hair at the temples, for God’s sake. But he reached for his wallet, only to realize that it was back at work, in his locker, like usual. “I don’t,” he said.
“Well, then,” the bartender said. “I ain’t got Jameson. Come on back when you turn twenty-one.”
Abe stared at him, confounded. He jumped off the stool, landing hard. The whole way back to work, he searched for his reflection in the shiny hoods of Buicks, in plate-glass windows of bakeries, in puddles. When you lost a child, did you lose the years you’d spent with her, too?
A WEEK AFTER THEIR daughter’s death, Sarah could not stop thinking about her. She would taste the skin of the little girl, a kiss, the moment before the chicory of the coffee kicked in, or the sweetness of the muffin blossomed on her tongue. She would pick up a newspaper and feel instead the rubbery band of small socks between her fingers as she folded them over after doing the wash. She’d be in one room and hear the music of her daughter’s voice, the way grammar leaped through her sentences like a frog.
Abe, on the other hand, was starting to lose her. He would close his eyes and try to conjure up his daughter’s face, and he still could, but it was unraveled at the edges a little more each day. He found himself spending hours in her bedroom, inhaling the smell of her strawberry-mango shampoo still trapped in the fibers of the pillowcase, or poring through the books on her shelves and trying to see them through her eyes. He went so far as to open her finger paints, stand stripped to the waist in front of her tiny mirror, draw her heart on his chest.
ALTHOUGH SARAH’S MO WAS usually to do the opposite of whatever her mother told her to do, this time, she took her advice. She showed up at the church, shuddering as she remembered the hymns that had been played at her daughter’s funeral, steeling herself for the absence of the coffin at the altar. She knocked on the pastor’s office door, and he ushered her inside and gave her a cup of tea. “So,” the pastor said, “your mother’s worried about you.”
Sarah opened up her mouth to say something snippy and typically awful, but she caught herself in time. Of course her mother was worried. That was the job description, wasn’t it? That was why she had come.
“Can I ask you something?” Sarah said. “Why her?”
“I don’t understand…”
“I get the whole God thing. I get the kingdom of heaven. But there are millions of seven-year-olds out there. Why did God take mine?”
The pastor hesitated. “God didn’t take your daughter, Sarah,” he said. “Illness did.”
Sarah snorted. “Sure. Pass the buck when it’s convenient.” She could feel herself dangerously at the edge of breaking down, and wondered why on earth she’d thought it was a good idea to come here.
The pastor reached for her hand. His were warm and papery, familiar. “Heaven’s an amazing place,” he said softly. “She’s up there, and she’s looking down on us, right now, you know.”
Sarah felt her throat tighten. “My daughter,” she said, “can’t ride a ski lift without hyperventilating. She panics in elevators. She doesn’t even like bunk beds. She’s terrified of heights.”
“Not anymore.”
“How do you know that?” Sarah exploded. “How do you know that there’s anything afterward? How do you know it doesn’t just…end?”
“I don’t know,” the pastor said. “But I can hope. And I truly believe that your daughter is in heaven, and even if she does still get scared, Jesus will be there to keep her safe.”
She turned away as a tear streaked down her cheek. “She doesn’t know Jesus,” Sarah said. “She knows me.”
ABE FOUND HIMSELF DEFYING gravity. He’d be standing in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, and he�
�d find himself rising to the balls of his feet. He could not walk fast down the street without starting to float between strides. He started to put stones in the pockets of his pants, which were all too long for him now.
He was sitting on his daughter’s bed one Saturday, remembering a conversation they’d had. Can I still live here when I get married? she’d asked, and he’d grinned and said that would be perfectly fine.
But what about your husband? he’d asked.
His daughter had considered this carefully. Well, we could set up the cot, like when I have a sleepover.
The doorbell rang, and when Abe went downstairs, he found the little girl his daughter had considered her best friend—the last one who’d used that cot, actually—standing red eyed beside her mother. “Hi, Abe,” the woman said. “I hope this isn’t too much of an imposition.”
“No!” he said, too brightly. “No! Not at all!”
“It’s just that Emily’s having some trouble, with, well, you know. She drew a picture, and wanted to bring it here. She thought maybe you could hang it up.” The little girl thrust out a piece of paper toward Abe: a crayon drawing of two little girls—one dark-haired, like his daughter, one fair, like Emily. They were holding hands. There was a melting sun overhead, and grass beneath their feet.
Abe realized he was nearly at a level with Emily; he barely had to crouch down to look her in the eye. “This is beautiful, honey,” he said. “I’m going to put it up right over her bed.” He reached out as if to touch the crown of her head, but realized that this might hurt him more than it would offer comfort, and at the last minute pulled his arm back to his side.
“Are you all right?” Emily’s mother whispered. “You look…” Her voice trailed off as she tried to find the right word, and then she just gave up and shook her head. “Well. Of course you’re not all right. I’m so sorry, Abe. I truly am.” With one last look, she took Emily’s hand and started to walk down the driveway.