The Mourning After (7 page)

“Levon, I’m talking to you.”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, unaccustomed to anything distracting him from staring at Rebecca’s face.  It is Monday, and she is talking about how technically the last day of shiva should be Tuesday, not today, because Saturday, the Sabbath, is not included in our count.

“I don’t think the rules really matter when you bury someone so young,” he tells her.

His honesty takes hold of them; he senses the air, the floor, everything around them moving.

“I can’t believe we’re talking about David.  I can’t believe he’s really gone,” she answers, her voice waning.

Levon had flung dirt on his wooden casket.  He saw them lower him into the ground.  David was gone.  His eyes start to well up.

“I keep wanting to pick up the phone and call him.  I forget sometimes.  How could I forget?” she asks.

“I called his voicemail this morning just to hear his voice.”

“Did he seem strange to you that night?” she asks.

Levon can’t possibly know where she is going with this.  He doesn’t want to delude himself into thinking she is in his bedroom because she might actually need his comfort and support, yet there’s an implication in the tone of her voice that makes him think she might. 

“He was off, not really himself,” she says, searching the floor beside his bed.

His heart starts to move from a safe, steady rhythm as the worry rolls off his tongue. “How do you mean?”

Forming her thoughts and words wasn’t coming easy, and the extended silence that followed was still worse.  Rebecca Blake, captain of the cheerleaders, most popular girl in their high school, had gone mute.  Levon was rapt.  Should he sit down next her?  Did she want him to pat her lovingly on the back?

“Rebecca, what are you trying to say?”

The quiet is palpable.  Her lips clamp shut.  She is standing there, knees kicking into the side of his bed,
thump thump
, a wordless hush—she is faceless, too, as she stares at her sneakers, and then an explosion of tears. First, the thick moisture descends down her cheeks followed by a torrent of sounds— part-animal, part-human.  Her body sinks onto his bed, limbs and flesh falling solemnly against his pillows and sheets.  Levon stands over her, speechless, while a current of electricity triggers stealthlike messages through his hands and fingers: reach in for a touch, get close, pull back.  Her cries are deep, soaked in a numbing pain.  Levon thinks he might break down also, but then his thoughts return to his brother and how David would have wanted him to rise to the occasion—be brave—and so he bites his lip and keeps the violent storm from rising to the surface.

When she softens, becoming quiet and spent, her body ceases to quiver and shake, and she settles herself at the foot of his bed and says, “I think he was cheating on me.”

Levon’s exhale releases into the air.  “That’s ridiculous.”  Because it was.  David worshiped Becks, as he had taken to calling her.  They were soulmates, not only connected by their shared elevated position within the social caste system but also connected by time—they had been together since they were thirteen.  For the last four years, there was no David without Rebecca.  Conversely, there was no Rebecca without David, and that was made abundantly clear by the ghostly remnants of what used to be Rebecca and the despondency that had wrecked her.

“David would never cheat on you. It’s not in his personality.”

Rebecca shrugs and lets the pain fall around her.

Levon shakes his head in disbelief.  He knows how important it is for him to be convincing.  David made mistakes, but cheating was not one of them.  He was moral and good and kind to animals and small children.  David would never betray Rebecca, not like this. 

“Becks,” he hears himself say, borrowing the endearing nickname and calmly reaching for her open hand.  Words, though, were nowhere to be found. Could his words have gotten singed by the heat of her hand pressing against his?

“Gross!” chimes Chloe as she steps into Levon’s room and finds him and Rebecca holding hands.  “You two are gross and disgusting.” 

Levon jumps from surprise and the allegation lingering in Chloe’s reprimand.

“Don’t be ridiculous, you twerp,” Levon laughs.

“And don’t go trying to kiss her either,” she giggles.  “Yuck, gross, and double yuck.”

Levon grabs her gently at the nape of her neck and pulls her close to him.  He is ruffled by her instinct and wonders if she, too, has been snooping through his journal.  “Hey, kiddo,” he smiles at her.  “You doing okay?” he asks.

Chloe reminds him so much of Punky Brewster.  Not only the short brown hair and freckled face, it’s her wholesome smile and impish eyes.  She is a fireball and a clown and Levon’s hero all rolled up into one genetically imperfect but spectacular body. 

Chloe knows the seriousness of her disease.  This wise, precocious child spends hours every day composing lists of what she wants to accomplish—and she always does.  Clearly, the whole family is bordering on obsessive-compulsive disorder.  Yet, Chloe remains a champion.  She never complains about the needles and the injections, and she never cringes when she’s told she will be hospitalized and will miss big chunks of school.  Rather than exhibit impatience and annoyance by her mother’s cloying reassurances and pervasive doting, Chloe handles her mother with ease.  Levon would have punched her by now.

Chloe knows what death means.  And because of her fragile condition, it doesn’t confuse her to learn that her loving older brother has been taken away.  Having learned of a fellow GSD patient—the one she befriended at the lavish fundraiser in Boston last year—pass away from complications, the contradiction of children dying wasn’t foreign to her.  Not experiencing apathy or denial, Chloe has spent the last week traversing between Levon’s bed and her parents’, where the physical closeness made David’s absence less imposing.

Chloe is giggling.  Once she starts, she usually can’t stop.  Levon knows all her secret tickle spots and wiggles and jiggles her until she is vibrating with laughter.  These belly laughs are potentially dangerous since Chloe’s feeding tube is located in her stomach.  “Don’t make me laugh so hard, Levvy,” she says, jumbled words that come out in bursts of snorts and gurgles.  His fingers are tickling the back of her neck and under her arms and behind her knobby knees where the pale patch that never sees the sun is the most sensitive to his touches.  Levon begins to laugh, and Rebecca does too.  This is a good sign because Levon was convinced that he had forgotten how. 

“Stop it, Levon!” she shrieks.  “I’m going to pee in my pants…”

This is no joke.  She has been known to do that.  She’s done it before.  Levon lets her go, and the three of them are staring at each other with great anticipation. 

“I’m going to go,” Rebecca says, breaking the silence and standing up.

“You don’t have to,” says Levon.

“Yes, I do,” she says.

They were all there, except for David. Levon wanted her to stay.

“Bye, Chloe,” she says with a smile, leaning down to kiss her on a speckled patch of cheek, patting her head with fingers that had minutes before sent risky signals throughout Levon’s entire body.

“Bye, Levon,” she says with a shrug, unable to meet his eyes.

Levon doesn’t answer.  He has said goodbye to too many things he loves this week:  reading the sports section aloud to David at the breakfast table; watching
Friday the 13th
marathons late into the night; playing boxball in the street.  He’s incapable of forming the words that will mark her leaving.  And without those words, the finality of their dismal reality will transform into a sleep-induced nightmare where Levon will be roused to find David smiling up at him, having listened to their voices through the air vents.

“
Good going, bro,
” he’d say, taking him by the shoulders and lightly shaking him.  “
Way to defend your brother’s honor.
”

Levon would swell with pride.

“Mommy says I have to go to school tomorrow,” says Chloe in a tone that is neither pleased nor objecting.  Levon leads his baby sister toward his bed and positions her by his side.  The opaque skin on her arms hides the mess that is complicating her insides.  GSDIa, Chloe’s form of GSD, is most prevalent among individuals of Ashkenazi Jewish descent.  There is a test that parents can take to determine if they are carriers.  Oddly, the genetic panel given to the Kellers did not include GSD. All the markers were in place (both Madeline and Craig were carriers) for the disease to take root in any one of their unborn children.  That it infected one of them was the luck of the draw, and both Madeline and Craig had conflicting emotions about the way it played out.  On one hand, Madeline was pleased that she was ignorant to their being carriers, as it may have barred them from having children at all.  On the other hand, the absence of Chloe in their lives was unthinkable.

“It’s probably good for you to go,” Levon finally answers his sister, although he is wondering how his mother expects her to be ready to re-enter normal life.

“Are
you
going?” she asks. 

He didn’t know.  His mother hadn’t rendered her decision. He spent most of the afternoon avoiding her and making small talk with their friends and extended family, and he was sure she wouldn’t mind his absence during the day.  Besides, he would do just about anything to escape this hellish purgatory.

“Maybe I will,” he answers, throwing his arm around his sister’s narrow shoulder and hugging her.

The dog next door begins to bark, and his raucous sounds prompt Chloe from the space beside him toward the open window.  Over the last week of being homebound for shiva, Levon had become a little obsessed with watching the dog and his new neighbor, the beautiful girl with the tattoo.  He was now able to set his watch to the girl’s dog walking schedule—6:30 a.m., 3:00 p.m., and 8:30 p.m.

“What is
that
?” Chloe inquires, wide-eyed and peering into the night sky.  She is so at ease in Levon’s space it’s as if she knew it was meant to be hers.

“That’s George.”

“
George?”
she annunciates, “Who’s George?”

“Our new neighbor’s dog.”

“We have new neighbors and they have a dog?”

Should he go on to explain in detail how cute the animal is and how infatuated she will become with him?  Should he tell her he is creamy gold with big, droopy eyes and a frenzied tail that could swat butterflies and bees right out of the sky? Chloe wanted to be a veterinarian, for God’s sake!  A dog living next door was going to tantalize
and
torture her. 

“How do you know his name is George?  And George can be a girl, you know, short for Georgie.”

“This one’s a boy, Chloe, trust me.”

“Will you take me there tomorrow, Levon?  Please, please, you have to take me!”

Her eyes are beseeching—insistent and full of longing.  How could he say no?

The lights are out, and Chloe is asleep in her room.  Levon is feigning sleep when his mother opens the door and pokes her head inside.  Whether she decides to send him to school or not is of no importance.  He has already made the decision to go.  Besides, what good would he be to them at home, sulking around and getting in the way?  Since shiva, his mother survived on delirium and histrionics before taking refuge in her darkened bedroom where she lay lethargic beneath a forest of olive sheets.  Levon saw the prescriptions on the counter in their kitchen for the drugs that would sedate her and restrain her from throwing herself in front of a moving bus.  He wasn’t sure how they mix with the bottles of wine she was consuming.  His mother was unrecognizable—inconsolable—and school was a welcome distraction. 

“Levon,” she whispers to deaf ears, “are you sleeping?”

Questions like this always give him a good chuckle.

He would have laughed in the past and replied, “Yes, Mom, I’m sleeping,” but their life no longer allowed for witty humor.

“Levon.”

He ignores her again and senses her coming close.  It is dark in the room.  Levon smells something so unfamiliar to him he has to hold in a gasp.  It is her, and she is nothing like the woman he breathed in before.  If not for the stale odor, he would never know she is sitting there on his bed, her weight so unobtrusive that it does not make a dent.

Levon thinks about his grandparents, his mother’s parents—Sid and Lyd to their friends.  They had moved to New York three years ago to escape the heat. When they received the disastrous phone call, they were on the first flight back and holed up in the downstairs guest bedroom.  Grandpa Sidney, a robust, handsome man with crooked teeth encouraged Madeline to eat, declared that she’s “too skinny,” while skeletal Lydia and her “proper nose” turned a blind eye to her daughter’s rapidly diminishing frame.  Levon overheard them when he carried their luggage from the car.  Grandma Lydia said, “This is just terrible, Sid, terrible.”  Then she added, “But Maddy looks good without those extra pounds.” 

Levon seethes inside. 

His mother says his name again.

He thought she would have given up by now.

Then she does something unexpected. When his mother lays down on the bed beside him, curls her arms around his body, and hugs him, the touch of her body leaves Levon in a swell of tears and confusion.  He forgets the stench and concentrates on the feel of her arms around him.  It’s better than any Shalimar hug he’s ever had.  He closes his eyes and prays he isn’t dreaming.

High school students are bursting with insecurities left over from junior high, and Levon had a menagerie that he carried around with him through the ninth grade and the beginning of tenth. Some kids worried about being liked, some worried about their bodies, some worried about the secrets they kept from their parents, while others worried about grades, fitting in, saying no, and the opposite sex.  Levon, in his ability to be fair and indiscriminate, worried about all of the above.

David’s death sparked a whole new set of uncertainties that his presence had once prevented.  Without David, who was he?  When kids directed their blaming fingers his way, who would defend him if not his gallant brother?