Signs of Life (27 page)

“What about you, Natalie? Where are you going to go from here?” I look up for a second. I think about what I am about to say and how much I don’t want to say it, but I have to. Maybe not even for me, but for everyone else in the room.

“I’m going to train for an Olympic distance triathlon.” The whole room suddenly perks up. Bernard looks over at me. Even though we sit next to each other, we don’t make a lot of eye contact during the meetings, but now he looks right at me. “Good for you,” he says. Everyone else is nodding, smiling. I think about how I have never seen Maureen’s teeth until right now. The room is buzzing with excitement. Jack wants to tell me all about his granddaughter who runs marathons and how much she loves them. They ask how I decided to do this, who I will train with, when I will start. I explain that it will raise money for cancer patients and their families. Debbie clutches her tissue to her heart and says, “That is so wonderful.” They all want to donate money. They all want to write a check right now.

After the meeting Kai and I go home. While Kai is asleep, I go into my bedroom to put away the box I opened to find a picture of Josh to take to the meeting two weeks ago. I put back the picture of Josh in his wet suit. In the same box are two books Josh gave me years ago. When Josh and I first started dating, I was a senior in college and he had just graduated. At the start of my second semester, I had to go back to school and Josh
moved out west for a few months. We knew we’d stay together; he just wanted to get some surfing in before getting a real job. When he left he gave me these two books to read. I look at their worn-out title pages. One is called
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
and the other is
The Gospel of the Redman. The Gospel of the Redman
is a book of Native American prayers and sayings. I have no idea where he got it. Even before we started dating I knew Josh was not a religious person. He was a chemistry major, and he answered questions with science.
The Gospel of the Redman
is the only thing I’ve ever seen him read that had any connection to a God, higher power, or spiritual world. But even the word
spiritual
would freak him out.

I go through
The Gospel of the Redman
, just to see what it says. I’ve never read it. You’d think I would considering he gave it to me, but I never have. I go through it sort of looking for a secret message from Josh. I did this with his philosophy books from college a few months ago. His favorite philosophy book was called
21 Questions
. It’s all marked up in his writing and notable passages are highlighted. I went through it page by page, reading his notes, hoping he left me some sort of message about how to deal with death. I didn’t find anything. It seems a little silly now, like I should’ve called Nancy the nurse to see if she wanted to get out the Ouija board and Josh’s books and give it the old college try.

I find the section on death in
The Gospel of the Redman
. This is from a part called “The Soul of the Redman: Death Songs.”

This is Josh. This was written for him. He isn’t in a cemetery.

wedding
season is quickly approaching. Toby and Nikki are getting married this May. Angela, my friend from college, is getting married over the July Fourth weekend—I am a bridesmaid. Terrah and her fiancé, Andy, get married in August—I am a bridesmaid. Three weddings may not seem like a lot, but for women it’s not just the wedding. Nikki’s shower is next week. Angela has already sent us a slew of e-mails regarding dresses, shoes, jewelry, makeup, hair, and fitting deadlines. Not to mention two bachelorette parties and two showers this spring. I am so sick of all of this that when Terrah calls me to see when I can go in for a fitting for her bridesmaid’s dress I say, “Can you just order me an eight? I’ll write you a check.”

I know this is a hugely insensitive gesture considering she is the bride and I am a bridesmaid and I’m supposed to be doing everything for her, but I can’t do it. I can’t arrange for a babysitter to go get fitted for a dress that I’m going to wear for five minutes. I know weddings are supposed to be joyous celebrations and I really try to be happy. But part of me can’t help but feel like that demographic broke up with me eight months ago.

Toby and Nikki want Kai to be a part of their wedding ceremony. Toby requests that I bring Kai to the ceremony so Claire, the maid of honor, can walk down the aisle with him and so we can get a picture of him with all the groomsmen. I am annoyed by this. I feel like Toby and Nikki are using Kai as
some sort of ornament or decoration. In addition to this, I have to go to Carter’s to get Kai a new outfit for the wedding.

“Well, the wedding colors are purple and black,” Nikki tells me over the phone. “So if you could get something that matched, that would be great.”

First of all,
wedding colors
is pretty much the dumbest phrase I’ve ever heard. You might as well make up a wedding fight song while you’re at it. Why don’t you just hire some wedding cheerleaders who can get uniforms in your wedding colors? Second of all, chances are there aren’t going to be any baby clothes for boys in purple and there aren’t going to be any baby clothes at all in black. I vent all of this to Mathews. He says maybe I should see it as a nice gesture that they want Kai in the wedding. He asks me if they didn’t invite Kai to be in the wedding, would I be annoyed at that too? I tell him his positive attitude is what is annoying.

I realize I am being incredibly grumpy about this wedding, and I know why. Most obviously, Toby is one of Josh’s best friends. Josh would have been one of the groomsmen. He may have been the best man. I know that’s the only thing I’ll be able to think about during the ceremony.

But the other part is the dancing. Right after Josh died, I had a hard time even listening to music. I couldn’t turn on the radio in the car for a while. At my brother’s wedding, I realized how much music and dancing bothered me. I couldn’t even watch other people dance. At Christmas when my brother and his wife, Ellie, came home we looked at pictures of them dancing together. I felt so guilty that I had missed it, but at the time I couldn’t even be in the same building as people who were dancing. Every wedding after that I would sit at a table and pretend not to notice that everyone was dancing except me. I haven’t been to a wedding since August, so I don’t know if I can dance or not.

After Battersby lost her mom, I was always so stunned by her dad’s gracefulness in accepting his widowerhood. Now that I am a widow, I think about Mr. Battersby a lot. I know he thinks about me. This past December, three and a half years after her mom died, Battersby’s cousin Colin got married. The day after Colin’s wedding she came over to tell me all about the wedding. She said it was beautiful and a lot of fun. But the best story was about her dad.

Battersby reported that Mr. B. danced like he was paid entertainment. At one point in the night the deejay played the song “It’s Getting Hot in Here.” As most teenagers know, in this song the singer informs the listeners that “it’s getting hot in here,” and you should “take off all your clothes.” It needs to be noted that as long as I have been a friend of Katie’s (since the sixth grade), we have all seen Mr. Battersby as iconic. He is a lot like my dad in the sense that he is a solid, real man who keeps promises to his children and shows more than he tells. But in addition to that, he has always been a gentleman who demonstrates respectful, dignified behavior. If I was over at Katie’s house in high school and the song “It’s Getting Hot in Here” came through her stereo, he would have walked in and said with his glasses pulled down slightly on his nose, “You know, ladies, I really don’t think these lyrics are appropriate. Kathleen, why don’t you go ahead and turn that down.”

As Katie explained to me, however, Mr. Battersby was a different man at Colin’s wedding. She said that even before the song came on, he was whipping out dance moves that had some strong similarities to aerobic video workouts circa 1985. Katie started demonstrating by pulling her right knee to her opposite elbow, then the left knee to the right elbow. “But then,” she went on to say, “it got even worse.”

“It’s Getting Hot in Here” came blaring
through the speakers, and to the shock and awe of his three daughters and the rest of his extended family, he started to take off his tie. Not just take it off, like stand there and fumble with it a little, like take it
off
. After getting his tie off, he whipped it around his head and threw it out onto the dance floor. “And then,” she paused for dramatic effect, “he started to unbutton his shirt.” At this point, we were both laughing hysterically at the thought of Katie’s dad doing an unrhythmic strip tease to a rap song. It would be like if you saw Santa Claus giving someone a lap dance. Totally unexpected and totally hilarious. For the rest of the night, Claire, Katie’s little sister, strutted around the reception with her dad’s tie loosely knotted around her neck.

I know Katie thought her dad’s behavior was hilarious, but I could tell by the way she told the story that there was an overwhelming current of pride surging through her words. And the fact that Claire wore his tie around like a trophy only confirmed that his daughters were most certainly not embarrassed by their father, but ecstatic at his display of utter happiness.

Katie’s mom died the summer after we graduated from college. Katie’s older sister, Margaret, lived and worked in Chicago at the time and Claire was still in school at Michigan State. Katie decided to move back home and live with her dad for a while. I know it wasn’t part of her plan—she had always thought she would end up in Chicago with Margaret. Obviously, she never made a big deal out of it. She just knew she didn’t want him in a big house all alone quite yet. Although she has never told me about it, I’m sure she saw her dad up close and personal with the demon of grief. Now that I’m a widow, I understand that this is a long, hard road, and sometimes—most times—it really feels like I’m going nowhere. But when I heard about Mr. Battersby dancing at Colin’s wedding, I laughed and smiled because it was funny, but I also laughed and smiled because he
is able to dance again. And not just dance. He is able to steal the show.

One of the hardest things about grief is that there is no accurate measure of how you are actually doing other than how much time has passed. I count months obviously. I’ve met people that count days, but that doesn’t really tell us anything other than how much time has elapsed. So we look for little signals. We wait for times when we laugh from the gut, or for some people maybe it’s falling asleep easily or getting an appetite back. But sometimes it can be hard to find those signs of life. For me, dancing is one of the few accurate barometers. It doesn’t mean Mr. Battersby is healed, but it does mean that he’s not where he used to be. I am nervous that I will go to Toby’s wedding and it will be my brother’s wedding all over again. I’ll have to run out and get in my car and drive home crying at eight o’clock.

There is one glimmer of hope. I’ve had a lot of practice dancing with Kai. At first I would just do squats while holding him. I think that’s how I lost a lot of my baby weight. I would sweat in my bathrobe from repeatedly squatting with a fifteen-pound baby. Then the squatting got a little boring so it turned into dancing. Instead of just the down and up motion, we’d do down, up, right kick, down, up, left kick. Then all of the sudden we were adding side steps, hip swings, pliés, samba steps, and it grew from there. I think it’s a little ironic that dancing was the one thing I couldn’t do after Josh died and then after Kai was born it was the one thing he wanted. I pictured Josh whispering into Kai’s little ear while he slept in the hospital bassinet, “Make sure she dances again.”

We dance all the time now in our pajamas or when I’m in my bathrobe. If I need to cook or clean while he is in his jumper I’ll turn on the music and dance around the room to keep him
entertained while I chop vegetables or clean up the house. He sees me jumping around and then he starts kicking his legs like crazy. At my parents’ house, one of my favorite things to do after work is put him in the jumper next to their computer and turn on “Shoot to Thrill” by AC/DC. He hears the opening chords and starts to laugh hysterically and jump and waits for me. I dance the whole time, or I try to. “Shoot to Thrill” is a long song, so by the guitar solo sometimes I have to lie down and catch my breath.

My parents, like many people in this country, have been totally caught up in the recent
Dancing with the Stars
season-six fever. My mom calls me on random Monday nights and says, “Did you see Marlee Matlin? She really is amazing.” So now when Kai and I dance, we obviously hear the announcer, “Ladies and gentlemen, dancing their final routine, Natalie and Kai Taylor.”

Of course Kai and I have made it to the finals of
Dancing with the Baby Stars
. It is 11:26 a.m. Bottle, check. Nap, check. We are on. He starts off in the jumper in the doorway, looking nonchalant. I freeze in the middle of the living room. I unfreeze to press play on the iPod. I freeze quickly again and unfreeze when the opening vocals start for “Footloose.” An obvious choice for a final routine. I kick my legs and start whirling my hair. I am channeling Sarah Jessica Parker’s performance from
Girls Just Want to Have Fun
. Kai laughs and starts jumping. I hit a combination of moves inspired by my aerobic videos (circa 2006) and a line dance my friend Trisha taught me in high school (circa 1998). The chorus kicks in. I start shaking my hips. Kai throws a smile to the audience. I grab him out of the jumper, a flawless lift. Eat that, Carrie Ann Inaba.