Days of Awe (19 page)

And then two things happened at almost the same time. The doorbell rang, and, without waiting for anyone to answer, Kelly Anderson-Jensen and Andrea Brauer breezed into the apartment, laughing at something, their high, good-natured giggles like tinkling bells. But I barely had the chance to register their arrival, because Mark and Andi were heading toward me, quickly, together. I noticed how subtly his tie matched her dress, like a subliminal message flashing between the frames in an old-fashioned movie. He had his arm draped around her. She wore a look of practiced calm on her face. I'd seen her with that expression at school, expertly soothing an agitated child.

My heart started to pound in my chest, a frightened baboon thumping. I thought I might do or say something I would regret. I felt the regret already, like blood boiling in my veins.

“Hey, Izzy,” Mark said. “Chris said to tell you he took Hannah out for a quick walk.” He stepped closer to me and brought Andi with him. “She was upset.”

Andi nodded and raised a hand to smooth her silk shawl across her shoulders, her fingers lingering on the delicate fabric. “She seemed really upset.”

My own fingertips were slick from the latkes, my palms shiny with oil. I wanted nothing more than to get rid of this heavy, absurdly laden plate of food, and then go wash my hands. These paper plates were flimsy, not up to the job. Josie would have known better. Or maybe not. Hell, maybe Josie bought these plates, and they, unlike her rugs, survived the move. I shifted it from my left hand to my right, my fingers greasier with each adjustment.

“I know that Hannah is upset,” I said. “I'm her mother.” Andi had been avoiding me at school ever since September, staring at me when she thought I wasn't looking with her big kangaroo eyes, frightened, curious, ready to hop away at a moment's notice. This was how I knew she and Mark were still together. “Of course she's upset. This is
hard for her.
” My words came out chopped and angry. I looked at Mark, then at Andi. “She thinks we should be mourning, not celebrating.” Strictly speaking, I didn't know if that was exactly what Hannah thought. But it was close enough.

At that moment I sensed the Andes. They hung back, huddled a few feet away from us, their laughter clicked down one notch to a sort of high murmur. I turned, just in time to see Kelly catching Andi's eye, a silent exchange between close friends:
What's going on? What's wrong with her?
and Andi, telegraphing back with a little shake of her head,
Stay away.

I can't explain what happened next, what primal nerve exploded inside me. “How the hell can this be happening?” I said to Mark, and I wasn't sure if I meant the party or the life we were living, the life that should have included Josie, happily married to Mark, or at least happily enough, and growing older and making tragically bad art and seeing everything the way I did, sideways and hilarious, knowing me better than anyone, but instead looked like this, bright and shiny and wrong, Andi instead of Josie, the world tilted on its axis and me, barely standing.

I turned again and Kelly and Andrea were whispering to each other. I handed Mark my plate. “Take this, please.” The sour cream was beginning to melt, the watery extract seeping toward the pretzels. My hands were coated with oil. I needed to wash them. I needed to find Chris and Hannah and get out of here.

“Iz!” Mark snapped, and I stopped short, surprised, maybe because I'd never seen him angry before. “Tell me,” he whispered, “how is this supposed to work?” He glared and took another step toward me. He was very near me now, too close. There was a little dab of spit in the corner of his mouth. I fought the urge to back away. I smelled his minty shampoo mingled with something sharp and salty underneath it. He still held Chris's seeping plate of food. “Do you want me to be sad forever?”

It was a reasonable question. I had never thought of it that way before. “Yes,” I said. Andi looked like she was going to cry again. Off to the side, Kelly and Andrea were moving in, closer, like lions.

“Don't you love how she's decorated the place?” I heard one of them say, and Andi shook her head again, and then I knew that she and Mark were living together in this apartment.

“Yes,” I said again to Mark, my voice high and tight and about to crack. “I want you to be sad forever. That's what I want.” I turned to Andi, and I could see that she was good, that she loved Mark; in her drawn, concerned face I saw a flicker of how she would grow old, with Mark, with children, how she would be one of the good people who got to be happy.

Mark shook his head and walked away, just like that:
Enough of this.

I stood up very straight. “Thank you for having us over,” I said to Andi, “but we really must leave now,” as if we were at some Edwardian garden party. And with my oil-slick hands, I gently lifted her shawl from around her shoulders and ran my slimy fingers along the fine, shimmery blue silk. “This is very beautiful,” I said, touching it everywhere, fondling the ends, caressing it, leaving little fingertip-sized grease stains over every inch of it.

“Um, thanks,” she said. She would find out later what I'd done—in a minute, when one of the Andes noticed, or later tonight, when she took it off before slipping into bed with Mark.

I turned around. Chris stood there with Hannah, their cheeks pink from outside. He was looking at me, watching me. I met his eyes and knew that he had seen. Well, he had seen me. Probably they both had. I shrugged.
You saw. So what?
I tilted my head at him, defiant.

He sighed, and because I knew him so well, I heard everything that curdled in that sigh, the disappointment, the resignation, the dimming concern, the fading love. And I opened myself up to the cold thing that had been clawing at my heart since Josie died: Underneath the sadness there is more sadness.

When I try—and I do, in spite of myself—to stitch Josie's unraveling back together in my mind, the first thing I come up with is the incident with Lily Barrett and her cell phone. Horrible little Lily Barrett—we called her that long before the cell phone debacle.

Any teacher who'd had her in a class could attest to the girl's cruelty, her Machiavellian social jockeying, how she was on her way to becoming a dangerously unrepentant grown-up bully if someone didn't intervene. She was the girl who would organize her friends to get up and switch tables in the cafeteria if one of the unpopular girls sat too close. She would send a photo of herself and five friends from a slumber party to the two girls who hadn't been invited.

I once overheard a conversation between Lily and another girl, Amelia Ricci. I was on playground duty; they were sitting together under a tree.

“I'm so fat!” Lily complained, pinching a bit of skin on her thigh.

“No, you're not! I am,” Amelia said, poking her tiny tummy.

Lily nodded sadly. “I know.”

We always knew where Lily Barrett had been by the trail of tears in her wake. She worked the periphery, so her friends didn't know from one day to the next if they were in or out. She was sly. Merciless.

Josie had been pacing the classroom when the incident occurred, explaining the Irish potato famine to her students. She was a kinetic teacher, always on the move. She stopped, midsentence, behind Lily, clued by the telltale hunched shoulders, the intense downward focus. Lily was texting Grace Lister, about to hit
SEND
.
Maddie could use a potato famine,
she had written.
Her butt looks huuuuge in those jeans!!!!
They think they're so clever, especially the clever ones. Josie peered over Lily's shoulders and snatched that phone from her slim fingers before the girl could inflict any more psychic damage.

It gets a little dicey here. The school has a strict no-electronic-devices-during-school-hours policy. So Josie was—and this is very important—well within her rights to confiscate the phone. But according to Lily Barrett, Josie yanked it from her hard, leaned down so close Lily could see the downy fuzz on Josie's cheeks, could smell her vanilla perfume (“She was so close to me, Mommy! I was
actually scared
!” she wailed later, in front of Principal Coffey and her parents) and whispered, “You little bitch.”

Nobody heard, not even the kids who were sitting inches away. In the end, it was Lily's word against Josie's. And anyone who's worked in a school knows that kids lie. They do. Some of them are brilliant at it. It's the only recourse of the powerless.

Later, in Principal Coffey's office, Josie sat up straight in her chair and clutched her hands in her lap, looked around the room in indignation. The Barretts were nice people. Craig Barrett was the director of a local food bank. Beth Barrett was a public health nurse. They had the cowed, defeated air of kind people who had birthed a monster, gentle robins who had somehow hatched a vulture. They held hands. Craig Barrett sighed. Principal Coffey sat behind his desk in a rumpled, light green poly-blend shirt and rubbed his tired eyes.

“I know I shouldn't have been texting, but she called me a name!” Lily growled, glaring at Josie. “A really bad name.
The b-word!”

Craig Barrett sighed again. “Lily,” he said.

“I certainly did not,” Josie said firmly. “I did not, Lily, and you know it.”

“I did,” Josie admitted to me a few days later. “I absolutely put my lips right up to that little she-beast's ear and whispered it.
You little bitch.
”

It was a Sunday morning. We were sitting at my kitchen table, sharing a cinnamon roll. Hannah and Chris were in the living room, watching SpongeBob. The Lily Barrett issue had been put to bed; Josie had been cleared. Now she set her fork down on her plate and poked at a crumb on the table with her index finger. “I don't know what got into me.” She laughed without smiling. “I've never…I have never. You know that. I mean, she deserved it, but she's a ten-year-old child.” She stared at her fork as if it might explain her actions, or absolve her.

But the fork wasn't up to the task. I chewed slowly, thinking. “I mean…they get to us,” I said. “It's no secret we all want to say something like that once in a while.”

“But we don't. You don't. Do you know anyone who has? The thing is, Iz…” She half smiled at the sound of that. “The thing is, Iz, why couldn't I control myself?”

This was a year or so after Lake Kass and well before Alex Cortez came into her life. In the living room, SpongeBob played a trick on Mr. Krabs. Hannah's giggles and Chris's laughter sounded like music.

“Let it go,” I said, peeling off a soft hunk of cinnamon roll. “Forgive yourself.”

She nodded. I wanted to make this okay for Josie. But I also wanted to move on, to talk about something else, to get up and pour myself some more coffee. I wanted to reassure her, but all I offered was a topical antidote.

The thing was the look in her eyes, a touch of panic: which I saw, noted, and decided to ignore.

It was not hard to find Alex Cortez in Madison. I Googled him and cross-checked my search with Van Vleck High School, where Josie had mentioned he taught, and right away his home address, phone number, and e-mail address popped up, along with an unfortunate link to
ProfessorAssessor.com
. (“Mr. Cortez is a
hottie
!” “Sexy accent.” “I got a C+ even tho I did ALL the assined work and there was alot of it. A**HOLE!”)

I stared at the tiny photo of him on the website, trying to read Josie's imprint in his face, or to somehow divine their connection. I remembered him vaguely, or maybe I didn't. He had thick dark hair, a squarish face, dark eyes, full lips. He had that private smile a few men can manage, like he knew the effect he had on people, but hey, now, that wasn't his fault, was it? He was a
hottie.
But really, what could a slightly blurry photograph on an amateurish website possibly tell me? Since Josie had died, I'd been simmering with a powerful need to meet him in person, along with an almost equally powerful desire not to.

It was late June. Josie had been dead for three months, which I still sometimes measured in days. My grief was humid and consuming. I dreamed almost every night that she was still alive. Once I woke up in the middle of the night and, just for the briefest moment, I thought that Chris was Josie.
What are you doing here?
I whispered through a sleepy fog.
I've missed you so much.
I reached over to touch her narrow back and was jolted awake by the broad, familiar expanse of Chris's.

One night I woke up and Chris was propped up on his elbow, staring at me.

“What is it?” I said.

“You were crying in your sleep.”

I didn't think so. I shook my head and raised my hands to my wet face.

Chris lay back down and turned his body toward mine. The bed creaked. He smelled like clean cotton. “There was this kid I went to high school with,” he said softly. “Matt…Goodman. No, Gilman. Matt Gilman. He had leukemia freshman year. He was hardly ever in school sophomore year. He died the summer before junior year.”

I was in a daze, the sweet, sad mist of my dream still floating around me, fading. Josie, fading. I breathed in Chris's scent. What was he talking about? Matt who?

“And,” he said, “I felt like, for months, I just couldn't believe how…unjust it was. How we're put on this earth to leave it. I know it's different. I wasn't even really friends with Matt. But I dreamed about him for years.”

This was my husband, in the dark, trying to find me. I understood what he was trying to do. I understood his kind attempt to reach me.

“That's when I stopped believing in God. Not that I ever really had, but that's when I stopped. Eventually I decided it's what we do with our lives that matters.” He sighed peacefully, a man who had long ago come to terms with these impossible contradictions. Matt Gilman's death had
helped,
had given him clarity. But it hadn't helped Matt Gilman. “Anyway,” Chris said. He moved his hand to my bare shoulder and squeezed it.