The Grief of Others (14 page)

In the months after Bron’s funeral Will had worked hard to counter with an outwardly mild manner what he knew to be his envenomed core. He did this in the interest of others, not only his infant son but also his colleagues, relatives, and neighbors, and the well-meaning outreach workers who would call or come by with bereavement brochures, donated diapers, tins of formula. To his surprise, discipline became habit: his sweet ways built up, over the years, around the old mordant kernel, like peach flesh around its stone of cyanide. So that Gordie not only grew up with a dad who displayed no sign of having been damaged from that early loss, but might in turn believe in the possibility of recovering from future losses; might see that sweetness could follow upon suffering.

Will sighed as deeply as his body would let him, until the queer, frightening pull in his chest stopped him abruptly—the rude sensation of climbing into a short-sheeted bed—but this was only adhesions, the nurses had reassured him, a normal result of the surgeries he’d had. He found it strange but not dishonorable the way they offered reassurance on this matter without pretending he was not dying. He hadn’t talked about the fact of his dying with Gordie.

The ersatz gold-rimmed glasses done, set upside down on yesterday’s weather to let their Elmer’s bottoms dry, Will took inventory of what other pieces he’d assembled: an antimacassar for the lace tablecloth, a thrift shop earring for the chandelier. A small batch of homemade white play dough, which Will would mold into a three-tiered cake. (He’d had an inspiration for the bride and groom figurines: rice, he thought he’d try, two raw grains of it, painted with a pin dipped in ink.) The dinner plates were the white tops of pill bottles.

At his feet, Ebie’s tail thumped and she gathered herself to rise, navigating backward out from under the table, her toenails scrabbling on the linoleum. She was one, still a pup, or now a teenager,Will supposed. On the cusp of adulthood. Like his son, just nineteen and a freshman at Fordham. Or, officially, on leave from Fordham. Gordie had insisted on taking leave, against his dad’s vigorous protests, as soon as the diagnosis had been made.

“You’re staying in school,” Will had growled. “Won’t have you quitting.” Neither he nor Bronwyn had attended college. “I’ve got all the company I need,” he’d said, stroking the top of the dog’s head.

“Ebie’s great, Dad, but she’s as much burden as companion.”

What Will could not bear was Gordie’s air of overripe consternation, the rawness of his helplessness. But he had a method, a means of delivering them both from these scary slicks. “What do you know about burdens?” he snorted.

“I’m saying. She’s a
dog
.”

“You think you’re that much better?” And Will made a mincing expression, tilting his head from side to side. It worked: Gordie shook his head and rolled his eyes. The pretense of irascibility never failed to bring them back to more familiar, less starkly terrifying ground.

It was Gordie the dog had risen to greet just now, her ears having distinguished his particular footfall in the hallway outside their unit even before his key turned in the lock. She’d always been more Gordie’s than Will’s, never mind that they’d adopted her expressly to provide company for the elder Joiner when the younger went off to school. Oh, she was affectionate enough with Will, but anyone could see she considered herself Gordie’s dog, almost as though she knew what lay ahead: that Gordie would be the one, in the end, in need of company.

He came in bearing a gallon of carrot and spirulina juice and several pharmacy bags containing Will’s prescription refills.

“I’m not drinking that,” offered Will in the rote manner of an oft-repeated refrain.

Gordie ignored this, setting his bags on the counter and crouching to greet the dog effusively. “Hel-
lo
, Ebie. That’s right, that’s right.” She bucked her head forward and licked her chops at him drippingly. “You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”

Will scoffed ostentatiously, on cue.

This was how it had been ever since the diagnosis: a pretense of animosity had grown between them, a kind of ongoing, low-level dyspepsia. As surely as the disease itself, this new pattern of behavior divided present from past. Will didn’t regret it. The enormity of Gordie’s having given up school to be his caregiver—the enormity, for that matter, of his own imminent mortality—seemed to require such a charade.Will understood it not as an avoidance of true feeling, but as the most tenable means of expressing it. It translated, in a way he couldn’t begin to explain, into a high order of intimacy.

“I’m going to you-know-what the pooch,” Gordie said.

“Right.”Will picked up a bit of play dough and began to roll it between his palms.

But Gordie, despite his declaration, remained where he was, palpably miserable, it seemed to Will. Ebie whined once, twice, then gave up and lay back down. Gordie said, “What are you working on?” and wandered over to the table.

Will felt his son standing behind him, breathing, taking in the elements of the scene, piecing together what they must mean. Beneath the clumsy freight of his eyeglasses and oxygen tubes, Will felt his face grow hotter. He was blushing. Never before had he intended any of his dioramas to convey a message. Never before had he made one expressly for someone else. But that’s what this was: a little box of meaning, a memorandum, a wish. Another minute passed before Gordie next spoke, during which time Will continued, as nonchalantly as he was able, to shape the small cake. His fingers, however, were trembling.

Gordie’s question came out shy, thimble-sized. “Can I help?”

F
or a time she believed herself to be in love with the pediatric resident Dr. Abdulaziz. That this was irrational she knew full well, having interacted with him only a handful of times, all during the first twenty hours of her postpartum stay. But when was it love’s business to be rational?

She lay in bed at home for the better part of a week after the baby’s birth and death, grateful for every tablet she’d been prescribed to dull the afterpains, grateful for every minute she managed to dispatch asleep rather than awake, above all grateful for her fantasies of Dr. Abdulaziz. Ricky held in her mind a picture of him: obsidian eyes; unkempt, rather swirly black hair; the faint shadow on his jaw which appeared darker with each subsequent visit he made to her room. As for his voice, she couldn’t quite replay it in her mind, couldn’t quite remember how it went, only that it had been beautiful, soft and deep, his syllables intricately worked, like something carved of ivory or sandalwood. She lay in bed imperfectly conjuring him; her effort, more than its result, was the companion that made the long hours endurable. Hours, at the beginning, were quite simply her foe: the entire future spread out before her like inhospitable terrain through which she must slog. So the flights of thought that delivered her into the calm, expansive arms of Dr. Abdulaziz, delivered her ruched brow to the smoothing stroke of his fingertips, her offered throat and wrists to his slow and mindful ardor, her anguished sobs to the consoling pressure of his mouth—her ability to entertain such fancies came as a welcome surprise, and she threw herself into them with willful abandon.

She tried, and failed, in those early days, to summon gratitude for her husband, for her living children, for her own life and health, for spring itself: the just-now-unpuckering forsythia, the way the ground yielded underfoot, the high-stepping return of mildness to the air. She tried, with partial success, summoning gratitude for the fact that she had carried her baby to term and had a live birth, that she’d shared fifty-seven hours in the world with him, that he’d drawn his last breath from the nest of her own arms.

But once he’d left her arms the force of her grief gouged her. She’d had no inkling it would be like this: not simply lonelymaking, but corrosive. She was filled with hatred. Some of it for herself.

She had never told John what transpired at her routine five-month sonogram.

“Anencephaly,” the radiologist had said. Her hair a blond knob at her nape. “You could choose to terminate now. Most do.”

Most do
.Those words followed Ricky home from the medical complex, rode with her in the car, slipped into the house, climbed with her into bed, taunting, suggestive. They were two nasty things, two wicked sticks that rubbed together over and over in her mind. Until, after a hundred repetitions, suddenly they were not. They blazed into focus. How had she missed it?
Most do
. And those two words galvanized her, provided her with focus, with intention: to do the single thing, in the midst of crushing, unbearable helplessness, that was within her power. She would not be most. Her child would not be most. They would defy most. But only in secrecy could they prevail. This much was clear—she could not risk telling John. He would want her to terminate. She could see it just so: the way his eyes would go, the way his lips would tighten in the darkness of his beard, the way he’d take it like a man, quickly and all at once. He would want her to react the same way, would want to spare her the drawing out of pain. He would say it was her decision, would claim to support her either way. And no he would not pressure, not bully her—except that he would, with his worried gaze alone: silent, imploring, following her around the room, around the house, studying her. Weighing, beseeching. For four months. She could not risk trusting him to agree to such pain.

From here it was a quick leap to deciding there was no one she could tell. Everyone would want to spare her in the same way. She would be forced to explain, to argue, to justify her choice.The thought exhausted her. All the familiar faces—those of her family, her coworkers, the parents of her children’s friends, the cashiers in the supermarket who recognized her after all these years and clucked so nicely over her burgeoning belly—took on in her mind the placid countenance of the radiologist with her preternaturally sleek bun. Who even knew what she’d looked like? Her features had been erased in Ricky’s memory; all that lingered was a kind of bland veneer, a plaster mask. And Ricky had a horror of this face, this smooth sameness, which she saw everywhere, animating everyone she encountered: the embodiment of malevolent dispassion.

She’d drawn a line that December afternoon, that bitter day when she came home and went straight to bed. She fooled herself that it was a gentling sleep and not a narcosis brought on by rage. On one side of the line stood Ricky and her baby; on the other side, the uncomprehending world. Ricky did not perceive her rage. She saw only the fault of an arbitrary universe. Of the diagnosis she said nothing. That evening, she shared with John and the children the sonogram (this one, ironically, less of an abstract weather map than the others had been; you could make out the profile clearly: the dear funny bump of the nose, smaller hillocks of lips and chin), and if she seemed unusually quiet, it was easy enough to blame it on the fatigue of pregnancy; and if, over the ensuing days and weeks, John noticed an alteration in her, she encouraged the assumption that it was only womanly, hormonal.

All the while the baby grew. With every new movement, so did her hope. She visualized his brain developing from bud to half-blown to full-blown rose: a flower in a time-lapse display, completing itself. The intricate bones of his skull meeting all around; the architecture of flesh and skin, all of it forming, all of it beautifully realized. Between months five and nine stretch sixteen weeks, a long time, she reasoned, time enough to make up for lost time. Ricky the quant, good at math and all things rational and all things rationalizing, told herself these fairy tales, willed herself to believe in them, to adopt their skewed logic. Within this logic her dissembling was justified, for she let herself believe that secrecy was her part of the compact, the price she’d bargained for the baby’s life. And if, when John bent to kiss her now, she had a tendency to turn and give him the side of her face, and if when he lifted her sweater to place his hand on her naked belly she gently pulled it back down and remembered she’d left something in the other room, these were only small rebuffs, tiny deceptions, part of a greater good, which was hope.

Not until the end of the ninth month did she deliver the sad news. He cried. She held him. He was sitting on the foot of the bed and she, standing before him, stroked his curly head. Even then she lied. She told him the doctor had only just spotted the flaw. And she made up odds. She felt compelled to—and this part couldn’t really be called a lie—because by this point she’d come to believe there
had
to be a chance, however slim, of survival, whether because of medical anomaly or misdiagnosis. The figure that came from her lips was seventeen percent. He might look it up, might research it on his own and dispute her, but then she could claim to have found it on the Internet—anything could be found on the Internet—and anyway, she knew he would not. He would take her at her word. So: a seventeen percent chance, she said, that the baby would be born with enough of his brain to survive.

Why did she invent this? Why further complicate the lie, and why, in particular, frame it so? Enough of his brain to survive. Ricky thought of it as a way of softening the blow, but was it possible she meant to test him, too? And if so, was she hoping his reaction would justify what she’d done? Or was it just the opposite, was she hoping his reaction would prove her wrong?

She waited, her hands still lingering about his face, while John grew silent, digesting this, and then, looking up with reddened eyes, he’d asked: “But how compromised would he be?”

And Ricky, though she touched his shoulder once before letting her hands return to her sides, realized, coldly, that she had been right not to tell.With this question he identified himself as belonging definitively and abhorrently to
most
. Until that moment he had, in his enforced innocence, remained in the realm of ally, of friend: she’d been able to conceive of her secrecy—her dishonesty—as a means of protecting him. But now as he held her around the wide waist and heaved a sob, his head resting on the ledge of their imperfect child, she felt herself recoil, felt herself fill with a frightening dispassion of her own, as though she, in a final heartless twist, had become the radiologist with the flaxen bun.