You wish it wasn't happening so fast, so much like the way things happen on TV, where it's Sunday night before the commercial break and then after the ads for the liquid shower soap and the milk chocolate bars and the Ford Taurus LE it's all of a sudden Monday at dinner and a million things have happened. But that's how it feels, to you, like you were at the awards ceremony one night and then you were pacing your apartment almost right away afterwards, waiting for it to be morning so you could catch the plane to Miami.When you call people to tell them, you know that you are confusing them. "I'm sorry," you say, "it's just all happening so fast. We'll call you tomorrow, from the house." The people on the other end must understand that you are shocked, and maybe some of the more intuitive ones think you might be feeling a little guilty, even though of course you shouldn't be. You can't get a flight right away; John knows that. And you know that his sister is there with him, and his aunts, and maybe even his friend Stan, if he's managed to catch a red-eye out of Minneapolis. So John isn't alone.
Still, you can't help but think that of all the people he ought to have holding his hand right now, you're up there in the top few and it isn't fair that you can't get to him. "I'll drive," you told him on the phone, "I'll drive straight through; I want to be with you."
"Don't be silly," he told you. "I'm ok. Take the morning flight, I made the reservation for you and the confirmation number is on the kitchen counter."
And you tell him you love him three or four times, and that you're thinking about him and you'll be there as soon as you can.
Then you are alone in your apartment with your makeup running down your face and your skirt unbuttoned, fingers still bent around the pen you've been using to check names off the list he left for you. Aunt Naomi, check. Cousin Adam, check. Reggie Birnbaum, check. And of course your mother and father, not on the list, who you call so that they can send the obligatory basket of fruit to the shiva*. It is 7:42 when you go to the bedroom to take off your clothes and snuggle with your dog, and you realize that there is no way, absolutely none, that you are going to sleep tonight.
And so, as you pluck the earrings out of your ears -- left ear bright pink and hot from being pressed to the phone for so long --, you think of things to do for the night, things to keep you from worrying about John and thinking about how you want to be with him more than you ever have before, even when you were separated for six months after college while he started his first job and you did an internship in London, and you didn't get to have sex for the three and a half months before he came to visit for a week. It's worse than that, although not in the least bit sexual, and you try to figure out what to do about it. You change into one of John's t-shirts and climb into bed.
The television is terrible, you realize right away. Sitcoms seem sacrilegious, and nothing on the news seems as important as what you are thinking about. You flip it off, scratching your beagle, Kreplach, between the ears. He lays his head in your lap and pounds his tail into the bed. "Oh, Lachie," you whisper, and then stop. You grab the phone from the nightstand and call a girlfriend.
"John's mother died," you tell her, and burst into tears.
She makes cooing sounds and asks if you're in Miami. "No," you wail, "I couldn't get a flight until tomorrow!" She says all the things you would've said to her if the situation had been reversed, but, you realize, they're actually all the wrong things now that you hear them coming out of someone else's mouth. You become progressively more upset and when she suggests that you just try to get a good night's sleep "because he's going to need you to be well rested, honey," you agree and hang up quickly.
You wonder how many times you've said the right thing which was really the wrong thing.
Reviewing the events of the day is a bad idea, and you know it, but you are lonely and scared and Kreplach can't play Scrabble with you, so you do it anyway.
-If only you had taken the cellular phone out of the car when you went into court, John would have been able to tell you by noon and you could have flown to Miami with him.
-If only you had enough room in your little condo to have had his mother stay with you, you could have gotten the paramedics there more quickly, and John wouldn't be travelling on a plane with his mother's corpse underneath.
-If only you had checked your voice mail before you went to lunch, you would have heard his message and been able to catch the evening flight.
-If only you had stayed up late with him last night and talked. He was still sitting in his tuxedo at the kitchen table when you went to bed, and you can remember the conversation that you ended so that you could get a good night's sleep before today's trial."She just didn't look good. I don't know. . .she looked so tired," he told you, his hand cupping the Canadian Club and Sprite that you fixed him.
"Yeah, but honey," you told him, absentmindedly sifting through the papers in your briefcase, "she's what? eighty? This was a big day. She was tired."
"I know," he sighed into his drink, "maybe she shouldn't have come."
And then you put down your papers and stood up behind his chair, and rubbed his shoulders, and you reminded him how wonderful it was for her to see her son get a broadcast news anchor award, and how proud she was, and how even if she was tired now, she was going to be energized for a week by the joy of bragging to all her friends. And she was at a beautiful hotel now, probably sound asleep already, and he'd see her in the morning on the way to the airport.
But then you left him sitting there at the table with his gold paperweight award and his whiskey, and you went to bed. He was gone when you got up in the morning, and he was gone when you got home, and his mother was dead. Of course it isn't your fault, none of it, and so you decide to settle that in your head and move on to something else.
You remember when you met him in college and he told you on your first date that his little brother had gotten killed in a hit-and-run accident at age nine. John was fifteen when it happened. You remember wondering what kind of damage that causes, the death of a sibling. You hadn't spoken to your older sister in a few days and when you got home from that date you called her and told her that you loved her, and then felt stupid, like a character on a sitcom who just learned a lesson.
Everything that looks fake suddenly seems to be represented by television sitcoms.
And then you think about the locket John's mother wears -- wore? -- with a picture of Ben, John's little brother, in it. The way John's father used to make mistakes, before he died, and call John "Ben," and how it would shake John up for days afterwards.
No one ever talked about Ben except for John's father, and he talked about him all the time to you. "My Bennie was going to be a doctor," he would say, shaking his finger at you. "He was going to cure cancer, he told me, and he would have done it, too." When he started asking you to go get his boys in from outside, you would have to go get John or his mother or his older sister from the kitchen and they would go through the whole thing again, with him, explaining, showing him pictures, and he would eventually be quiet, muttering, "I know he's gone, I know it. Just leave me alone."
Nobody ever said Alzheimers in that house, but you were the one who quietly called Homecare Nurses, Inc., and arranged for someone to come help your mother-in-law take care of him. And you were the one who stayed in the kitchen during the shiva, putting pieces of raspberry danish on metal trays with little white paper doilies, staying away from the thirty or so old relatives and friends who showed up out of nowhere for a week of free food and gossip. At night, crowded into John's old twin-sized bed, you scratched his back while he cried, and you tried to convince him that being a news anchor was just as important as being a doctor, and that his father knew that, really.
And now, you know, it is going to happen all over again, and you try to ready yourself for a week of cutting up fruit and filling up coffee pots and folding and unfolding chairs. You also know that Mara, John's sister, will at some point come into the kitchen to tell you about the shiva for Ben, as she did the last time, and you will wrap your arms around her and say nothing, because you have absolutely nothing to add. You've wished over and over that you had been there, but you were living in Seattle and you were only twelve.
Mara is now an angry divorced woman with two sullen eight-year old twin girls, both given to sitting stone-eyed at the computer, playing endless games of solitaire. Every time you talk to your sister-in-law, she asks you in her smoker's husky whisper, "so, are you working on making me an aunt?" You have asked John not to tell anyone in his family that you are sterile because you hope that one of these days, your skills as an attorney will help you sneak around the adoption system and requisition one of those doe-eyed Korean mail-order babies, as you and John refer to them. You always tell Mara something sort of demure, like "oh, not yet, you know, perfecting the preliminaries."
You haven't spoken to her, but you figure that she and John are sitting in their mother's house with the girls tucked into the sofa bed in the basement. The two adults will be dealing with the funeral arrangements, deciding who'll go in which cars, who to have sitting in the front row at the service. Or maybe by now, you realize, looking at your watch which reads 10:00, they've stopped talking about that and are playing gin rummy 500, blearily placing cards in a row on the kitchen table. A terrible thought occurs to you, that maybe they are playing for bets, wagering the contents of their mother's house against each other, playing for the piano, so to speak.
You can almost hear the laugh track in your room.
You get out of bed and Kreplach whimpers as his head falls off your knee. Opening your closet door, you pull your black suit out of its dry-cleaning bag and hang it in your hanging suitcase. You add underwear, nylons, a pair of grey slacks, a long, black, flowing skirt, and a handful of random blouses. It won't be too warm in Miami now, you know, and so you add a cardigan. You wonder what John packed, and open his side of the closet.
Even though you've been married for almost eight years, you always feel guilty doing this. So much of your life has been dedicated to the acquisition of your own identity, ergo your own stuff, that the "what is mine is yours" part of marriage is still sometimes hard for you to stomach. Still, you know that he doesn't have any secrets from you and you look in his closet.
You wonder if there's anything in there that he is going to want to have this week. What kind of things give him comfort? When your parents die, you know you'll want to be wearing certain pieces of jewelry that they gave you and you'll want to have a couple of your favorite trashy novels to read late at night when you can't sleep. You consider throwing a copy of John's favorite Three Stooges videotape into your suitcase, but you remember that the TV is in the basement, where your nieces will be sleeping. You close his closet doors, carefully.
It's a matter, you decide, flopping down next to Kreplach again, of not knowing when or what is appropriate to grieve. Even though you have lived near John's family before, in the time when his father was still alive and his mother hadn't moved to Florida, you haven't known them all that well. They were always very nice to you and his sister even signs her birthday and Rosh Hashanah cards to you "love, Mara," but it has always been as if the fact that you weren't around when Ben died made it impossible for you to ever understand them. And they are probably right. It was a huge, giant, colossal thing, and no matter how much you love your husband and respect his family, it all comes down to that. Sometimes, on the anniversary of Ben's death or even of his father's death, when your husband lights the yellow yahrtzeit remembrance candles, you can almost hear a voice in your head chanting, "you weren't there, you weren't there."
Now, you feel like you are losing time again, that the great tragedies of a man's life ought to be shared with his wife and you are somehow lacking in that, again. All week, you will be asking questions or suggesting things that will have already been discussed in these twenty-four hours that you will spend separated. There will even come a moment or two when your husband will give you that look that says "stay out of this, this is for family," and you will try very, very hard not to hate him. You will succeed -- you won't hate him -- but for hours you will be shy about touching him.
None of this, of course, is as bad as it was when you weren't yet married, when your right to even wheel his father's wheelchair into the backyard was questionable. "She's only his girlfriend," you heard Mara tell his mother once, when she bought you a birthday present, "you don't have to do that, you know." It was the only time you ever heard Mara say anything like that, but since then, you have searched her face for signs that she doesn't want you around.
Being "only his girlfriend" was a hard feeling to lose, even through the stages of fiance and new bride. After you hit the two year anniversary, you finally felt like you could take a breath, although something tells you that Mara won't believe in you fully until you make her an aunt. Your mother told you once that no matter how many stages you go through in life, you'll always be looking forward to another one. You found yourself wondering how to equate the terrible twos with the "only his girlfriend" or "not family" stages.
You want to stop worrying about all this. It's only a week, and you'll be there in the morning to hold John's hand and ride next to him in the limousine to the funeral. And then later in the day you'll play Monopoly in the basement with your nieces, and you'll trade recipes with Mara, and you'll have the satisfying, repetitive duties of arranging cold cuts on platters, setting out plastic forks and spoons, unfolding new paper tablecloths.
You try to evaluate why you were crying, before. John's mother was a warm enough person, very nice to you, and much more affectionate with John than his father was, so you suppose it could have been simply an honest, human reaction to her death. You also consider the possibility that you were feeling John's pain, and that seems more likely to you, however corny it sounds. You knew that you really loved him when you cried for him when he had a bad dream, one night in London. Whenever he is overtired, he has very active dreams, and after his long flight to Europe, he slept fitfully and cried out his brother's name in the middle of the night.
You were already awake, enjoying having him in your bed again and feeling his breath against your neck. He started to move his legs under the cover, bending and unbending his knees, and to whimper softly. You whispered, "honey, what's wrong," and he mumbled something.
"What?" you asked him.
"Ben," he said aloud, and then louder, "Bennie! Don't!"
You shook him awake, not wanting to hear more, and he sat up and looked around the room. "What were you dreaming, honey?" you asked him.
"I was dreaming about my brother," he said in a cracked, dry voice.
Handing him a glass of water from your side of the bed, you put one hand on his cheek. "What about him?"
He was quiet, sipped the water, and then answered, "I don't remember." Then he reached over you, put the glass back on your nightstand, and lay back down, his back to you. You hugged your arm around his middle as he fell back to sleep, and you let silent tears fall on your pillow, wishing you could take away his pain. Suddenly, you knew that no matter what it took, if you could, you would take it away. It was like a poem you read once, about a person in love being "one half of a beautiful hurt." It almost felt good to feel that bad.
Another Hallmark greeting card sentiment is what this is, and so again you question your perception of reality: the right things to say are not always right, and the things that sound false are sometimes most true. And even that sounds like a Hallmark card, so you try to stop thinking in abstractions and deal with the physicalities of leaving your house for a week. You've called your neighbors and the kids next door will come feed and walk Kreplach, so that's taken care of. You'll call and cancel the mail tomorrow before your flight, and another attorney is taking over your caseload for the week. They've got a retired anchor to come in and take over for John for a while, and you can water the plants before you go.
Actually, you decide, you might as well water them now, so you turn on the lights in the hallway and go to the kitchen, where the watering can is under the sink. As you fill it with lukewarm water, you notice there is an unwashed plate in the sink with the remainder of some leftover spaghetti on it. John must have eaten lunch before he left for Miami. You leave the water running in the sink, washing over the dirty plate and blasting the tomato sauce down the drain.
The plants are all in the living room, and you lean over the couch to water the ones on the window sill. They are dusty, and you rub at some of the leaves with the corner of your t-shirt. The plants drink up your water quickly, and you talk to them, gently, the way your mother told you to. "You're all so beautiful. Thank you for making my house so lovely. Please do keep on growing." Every time you do this, you feel silly, but since you started talking to them, none have died.
When you return to the kitchen, the plate is clear of the bigger chunks of food, and you turn off the faucet and put the plate in the dishwasher, which is full of other dirty dishes. You add detergent and turn it on, waiting for the three clicks that signal that it is starting. You watch the lights flicker on the console, and lean back against the conter behind you. The clock on the microwave says it is near midnight, and you are starting to feel like maybe you could fall asleep now, so you head back into the bedroom and turn off the lights.
Crawling in next to Kreplach, you bury your head in your husband's pillow and inhale through your nose. You can smell his shampoo, you think, and you sigh. The dog licks your hand a few times and then falls back to sleep, and you just lay there, grieving, feeling inadequate. Maybe, you start to think to yourself, but then you can't remember what comes next.
Deborah Kaiser lives in Chicago, where she supports her writing habit by working as a Web site content developer.
