No one’s around. I cry because I miss Sam and because he wanted to live and because he should have lived. I cry because the war doesn’t make sense, and because there are so many of us over there, and because the people in Iraq are so fucking poor. When I am done crying, nobody sees me, I still feel sad, and sort of limp, but I hear this little girl in the hall—she’s saying good night to her dad or her uncle or somebody—and she’s telling the person she’s with that she likes her dress, and she likes her hair, and she likes her shoes. And right then, right while I am feeling all that sadness about Sam, I also feel something that is sort of like joy about that little girl, about the fact that she’s alive; about the fact that she’s got a dress she likes.
And I realize this is something new: to feel everything that has happened, but to also feel something that is happening now. It’s like trying it Dr. Ghosh’s way, trying to feel it rather than trying not to feel it, has swelled me up from the inside. I don’t feel buried by the feeling. I feel bigger, big enough to have two different feelings at once.
Maybe this is all it is ever going to be.
Maybe it never does go away.
But maybe sometime, I’ll be able to feel it all. Everything that hurts, and everything that is right in front of me, at the same time.
19
Avis
IT’S BEEN FIVE MONTHS
since Jim dropped his bombshell about Darcy, and here I am, packing up our house on a Saturday morning. The movers are coming on Thursday. Five months is a long time if you are a prisoner of war. It’s a long time for a newborn or a butterfly. But for me, who has lived in the same place—slept in the same room—for more than half my life, it feels like I’ve been thrown down a chute. I’m careening forward, trying not to get too banged up, utterly out of control of my descent, and somewhere in the dark, there’s a hole waiting for me to fall through it.
I SHOULD HAVE ASKED SOMEBODY
to do this with me today. I am not sure why I thought I could do it myself. The house seemed so empty after Jim left, after he asked if he could take the leather couch, after he took the guest room furniture, the photo from a Gisselberg family reunion, the bookshelves, the desk from his study.
“It’s half done,” I chirped to Jill. “Jim took the heaviest stuff months ago.”
Who was I kidding? Twenty-nine years in a four-bedroom house? Two moving vans could not hold all the stuff in this house.
But I wanted to be alone today. I wanted to go through my house by myself, decide what needed to be tossed or given away, what I would keep, what I would use again, by myself. I cringed at the thought of explaining anything to anyone.
“Avis. Really? You are going to wear this green dress again? You wore it to Jim’s fiftieth birthday party, and that was years ago. If you haven’t worn it in a year, you never will.”
“Did you save all of Nate’s school projects? How many of these boxes do you have?”
No, I didn’t want to have these kinds of conversations. I wanted to go through things slowly. I wanted all these memories, this chance to put my life in some kind of mental order. I thought it would sanctify something.
WE DID MAKE IT THROUGH
Christmas, this new family order and me.
Nate and Lauren stayed at the house the night before, Jim came by for a few hours in the afternoon to exchange gifts, we all kept up a sort of polite neutral patter. I was nervous before Nate and Lauren arrived. My thoughts kept slipping to that gun, still in my naughty-underwear drawer. Should I lock it up somewhere? Should I make sure the bullets were still in the closet, where they had always been?
I don’t know if I was afraid of Nate finding the gun or of somehow needing to use it myself. My mind kept darting away from the thought before the question could be formed. Of course, Nate has his own guns. A gun in my dresser drawer would not increase or decrease any risk. Would it? Why was I thinking about risk at all? Again, I couldn’t finish the thought.
I didn’t open the drawer. I didn’t check the closet.
Rodney wasn’t with us for Christmas. He was in the hospital with pneumonia again, and maybe that is what kept us all so quiet: the realization that Rodney, the most innocent of all, wasn’t holding court for the neighborhood kids in the middle of his lights but lying in a hospital bed, struggling to breathe. We went to see him that evening, Lauren and Nate and I, but he was too weak to talk. He blinked his blue-gray eyes, and he tried to say something to Nate, but could not.
I OPEN ANOTHER CUPBOARD, PULL
out another box.
Every centimeter of this house is familiar. I’ve painted every room, washed every baseboard, dusted every corner. Over the decades, Jim and I changed things. We put in a pool and added a family room. When we bought this house, I was twenty-four years old and had never owned anything larger than a bike.
It didn’t make financial sense to stay in an old house like this one all those years. Not in Vegas. But we had not wanted to move. Roots mattered to me. Knowing every family in the neighborhood mattered to me. And this was the home Emily had known, the only one in which she had ever lived. Jim and I never brought this up—as one of the reasons we did not sell our house and move on to something newer—but it was always there. If we left this house, then the few memories we had, the trailing decrescendo of images left to us, might be gone altogether.
I’m not a religious person. I didn’t grow up with religion, and, somehow, I never found it later, but I prayed and prayed when Emily was sick. There were even some hours, right after she died, when I thought that I could pray her back to life; when it really seemed that if I prayed hard enough, God would hear me, and he would turn back time, and she would be alive again. She would be lying in that ICU crib, and her breath would be fluttery, fluttery, and then she would gasp, and breathe in. And breathe in again. And the nurse would come, and call the doctor. And the doctor would say, with a little catch in his voice, that she had turned the corner, that she was going to make it, that it had been a close call, but she was going to make it. I really believed.
I THINK ABOUT THAT MEETING
Jim and Lauren and Nate and I had last December. The one where we talked about what I had seen Nate do to Lauren. Jim and I didn’t learn anything that day. We hadn’t wanted to learn anything; it was a relief to believe that nothing was expected of us. After all, Nate was a grown man; our parenting days were over. Jim had his new life with Darcy to think about. I had my new life without Jim. Every one of us was emotionally stretched.
But in the middle of the night, I wake up, and I wonder:
what about Lauren?
There haven’t been any phone calls, there haven’t been any signs. I do watch. When I talk with Lauren, when we meet for lunch, when they come for dinner, she gives no hint that something is wrong. She seems quieter than she used to be. And older. But she is not bruised, she does not seem afraid.
And what one thinks in the middle of the night is never true anyway. I never worry about the right thing in the middle of the night.
When did I start thinking that I could prepare myself? I, who grew up with Sharlene; I, who watched Emily die.
I AM NOT A SCRAPBOOKER,
not somebody who tries to organize what I will remember. After all, there are a lot of years I want to forget. Nor did I want to shape something after it happened. I didn’t even like to write things in a baby book. It seemed like my interpretation of what had happened would get in the way of the actual experience. I wanted to remember things as they were, and not as I created them, by choosing certain photos, or saving certain items, or labeling certain moments.
Of course, I had that all backward. It turns out that most of what I remember are the things that accidentally did get labeled, or pulled out, or sorted. How is it possible that I can forget the dearest moments of my life? I never wanted to forget Nate’s first word, the silly tune Jim sang when he changed either baby’s diaper, the look of the sun glinting off the lake in Idaho. I never wanted to forget those things; I never thought I could forget those things. Turns out, forgetting is easy.
At least until I come across something that brings the memory back. A lopsided teacup from the pottery shop at the lake, an overheard melody that happens to be almost the same as Jim’s jingle, a baby repeating “ball” from a nearby grocery cart. Or this house. This house, as I pack it up and decide what should be tossed, what should be given, what should be kept.
A MEMORY SLIPS IN. CHERYL
and Margo and Julie and I are sitting outside on a January afternoon on the patio at Mon Ami Gabi
.
We are having wine and the chicken pate with the hot mustard sauce and the pickled olives. I have known these women for decades. Cheryl is telling Realtor stories, listing the things that sellers have left behind when they packed up their houses.
“The usual,” she says, “rotted trash, used condoms, a dead mouse in a trap. And, of course, the forgotten. An entire shelf of china cups, minus the saucers. The winter coats lined up in a side closet. The box of bowling trophies, carefully packed.”
We start to laugh. Cheryl is holding up her fingers. She has recited this list before.
“The inconvenient: The six-foot bean bag, covered in Denver Broncos logos. The one-hundred-pound weight from some gym set. The family cat.”
We laugh again. Julie sighs about the cat. Cheryl continues.
“How about the tin box labeled ‘Brownie’s Ashes’? Or the pickled gallbladder in a bottle with the date of surgery written on it? I still remember, it was kind of translucent, like a mood ring or something. Oh, and teeth. What is it with dental detritus? Baby teeth. Molar teeth. Teeth impressions.”
She pauses. I hold my wine up to the clear winter light.
“Also gym bags. With moldy socks and slimy shampoo bottles still inside. But the worst was this poor couple, buying their first house—so innocent you could squeeze their cheeks—and they come sailing into their home that first night, and into a back bedroom, and find six stuffed hummingbirds in what must have been a homemade taxidermy lab. Where was that when they toured the house? Where’d they hide
tha
t
?”
She makes her voice indignant. We are enjoying it.
“Why would someone stuff a hummingbird?” asks Julie. “Sounds like some sick cult. I would not have stayed in that house.”
“Perfect,” says Cheryl. “Remind me not to sell you a house.”
And we all laugh. We are good friends. Sitting there, with the whoosh of the Bellagio fountains and the honk of taxis and the faint sound of music piped from across the street, our lives are easy. We are not thinking about packing up our own pasts; we do not imagine how many times our lives will change.
THERE IS ANOTHER THING JIM
and the girls don’t know about me.
When Nate was four, my closest friend was a man. Young, pretty mothers, taking care of children at home, aren’t supposed to have men friends. Everyone knows what is going on.
His name was Jess. I met him at the playground, watching his girlfriend’s child. A little boy the same age as Nate. Luke. Nate and Luke were best friends. And for a while, so were Jess and I.
Jess was a musician and had a musician’s life. His girlfriend had a job in a dentist’s office. Jess played nights and could take care of Luke after preschool. It worked well that he was easygoing, that a small child’s fits and temper did not unnerve him, that he could sit and strum the guitar, or let Luke strum his guitar while he sang along, hour after hour.
I had Luke over to play once. I thought Jess would drop him off, would be glad for the hours off, like most of us moms were, but Jess came in and just hung around with me. I was uncomfortable at first, but he made me laugh. He got on the floor and wrestled with the boys. He helped them turn all the cushions into the Alamo. He sang me a song he was writing as we made lunch.
I had never had a friend like Jess before. I guess I never have had since. Someone who knew immediately what Sharlene must have been like, who could guess where I had grown up, who teared up and didn’t stop the first time he heard about Emily. Of course, we couldn’t stay friends. But for one year, I had a friend who didn’t belong to my life before or my life after, who bridged my worlds, who seemed to understand that all of it was me: the rent-by-the-week motel rooms and the big suburban house, the string of men with Sharlene and the conventional marriage with Jim, the things I did to get out of one life and the things I did to stay in another.
Jess and I kissed once. A real kiss. Knee buckling, gut wrenching, soul releasing.
I thought about that kiss for years.
Played it out in my mind. Played it forward.
Just once.
So when Jim explained about how he and Darcy had gotten closer, working together every day, when he told me that he could talk to her and that she helped him think about things, when he said that being with Darcy made him a better man, I just kept wondering:
what does that have to do with ending our marriage? Did you think you couldn’t have a friend?
THE GIRLS KEEP TALKING ABOUT
dating.
“Oooh, Avis, you are on the loose again!”
“Bar dates, hot countertop sex, romance!”
Are they kidding? I don’t want hot countertop sex.
What I want is for the life I lived to matter still.
I have already been young. I have lost a child. I have reared another one. I was in love. I married. I worked. I made friends. I cooked twelve thousand meals. Made eight thousand beds. Kissed a child awake and kissed a child asleep, encouraged and discouraged and recouraged, over and over. And now, am I supposed to start anew?
I don’t think I’m interested.
I had my good shot at this life. I cared, and I knew it was precious, and I dove in, full all of me, straining to feel all of it, and, still, now it is gone, just like that.
I worked so hard to imagine a life I had never seen. And I made that life. I did it. The baby who arrived in Las Vegas with a couple of hitchhikers. She made an unimaginable life come true.
IT’S NOT THAT I CAN’T
see the path before me. I’m Sharlene’s daughter. I know how to pick myself up and move on.
I just don’t know if I am willing.
And really, after this much life, why am I looking for more?
I thought it would go on longer. I thought Jim and I were going to grow old together. I thought we would bounce our grandchildren between us. But I expected Emily to live too. And she did not.
It comes down to this: Do I want a new life? And if I don’t, isn’t that my choice too?
I’m sure there’s something wrong with being able to think these thoughts in this matter-of-fact way, I’m sure this is why I should have asked someone to help me out today, but it just seems like one of the options.
I am fifty-three years old. I have a gun in a drawer upstairs. I no longer have a husband. I have a child who is not sentimental and who has his own life. I could simply choose not to live.
Which, of course, is not actually a suicidal thought.
I’m mad. And I want my life back. But I don’t want to die. Not even a little. I want to live.
SO, DAMN, I DO HAVE
to pack up this stuff. I do have to sort it all out: the precious from the unneeded from the still useful. What am I going to do with Nate’s baseball uniform from the seventh grade? Or the box of cards his first-grade class made for him when he broke his elbow? Or the plastic bracelet the hospital attached to Emily’s newborn wrist?