I see you everywhere (41 page)

Julia Glass

anything, everything: politics, art, laundry, taxes. I saw them as not just ignorant but smug, not just naïve but stupid.) The group was for “survivors of suicide.” I have always shuddered at the use of that word,
sur-
vivor,
for endurance beyond anything short of shipwreck or tsunami, something that puts you in violent physical peril. It feels melodramatic to think of myself as a survivor, though that’s what the politics of cancer would have me proclaim myself to be. I was sick—invisibly, impalpably sick—and now I’m better; at least until the next thing, or the last thing, comes along. That’s how I see it. None of this trumpeting far and wide that I, yes brave and resilient I, am a survivor. Yet I needed to sense that others were a little in awe of me. I was thirty-six; no one I knew had heard such bad news from a doctor. I wanted to feel—just a little—like a victim of tragedy. Six months later, Clem pulled the tragedy right out from under me—and also gave it back to me, compounded.
I’ll give you tragedy,
she said with her death. For a few years, I held a special, unspoken status; I was owed a degree of tenderness from everyone around me.

As we grow older, however, our tragedies diminish in their grandeur. Not to us, not personally, but in what my father would call the cosmic scheme of things. Because tragedy, like a rare dark flower gone to seed, proliferates all about us. Your boss succumbs to lymphoma. One friend has a stillbirth, another loses an eye. Someone’s parents plummet off a cliff while driving on vacation in Scotland. Another friend’s sister-in-law, the mother of a newborn baby, drops dead on a treadmill at the gym. You begin to understand that there are no quotas for hard knocks. It’s not, alas, like you’ve used up your allotted share. You’re simply growing older and this is how it is. One day you’re no longer hearing “Oh my God I can’t believe it!” You’re hearing “These things happen” and “There but for the grace of God.” And the terrible things that befell you first of all? Old news, background noise, forgotten headlines. To everyone else. I was repelled by the idea of a support group, the naked neediness—

but that was precisely my problem. I was desperate to talk about Clem, to have someone listen to my story who didn’t think of it as ancient history, a monument crumbling to dust. I’ll hear other stories, I thought, and Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 277
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they’ll give me some facsimile of comfort. My Clemlessness will find a context.

What I didn’t expect was the frantic, keening search for answers. The nine people who sat in the windowless room of the church basement were obsessed with knowing why a father or brother or spouse had chosen death. Even the daughter of a woman who was elderly, riddled with disease and pain, a woman who ended her life with the furtive help of a doctor—even that woman’s daughter could not fathom how her mother’s hope had come to an end, how the doctor could have “given up” on his patient. The social worker who led the group encouraged these rounds of futile inquisition. “You never stop wondering, that’s natural,” she’d say, or “It’s just not fair, having to go on alone without at least a good, solid reason—even the illusion of a reason!”

After the introductions, when each of us gave our bare-bones story, Campbell and I were the only ones who stayed silent through that first meeting. Clem had been dead for five years, Campbell’s wife for a mere six months. Halfway through the second meeting, Campbell leaned forward in his folding chair and said, “I don’t really give a damn, at this point, what her reasons were. I just want to know how I talk about her to our children without showing how outrageously angry I am that she betrayed us like that.”

Chairs shifted, but no one spoke. Some people nodded. Then the social worker said, “It’s good to feel angry—but have you and your boys really felt the sorrow of it, realized the unbearable pain she must have been in, to leave behind the family I’m sure she loved more than anything else in the world?”

“I don’t want them to understand that!” said Campbell. “I don’t think that’s really a priority here! My sons are eight and
five.
Why the hell should they know about somebody else’s unbearable pain when they’ve got enough of their own?”

“Be as angry as you need to be,” the social worker said.

“I don’t need your permission for that,” said Campbell tersely. “The harder question is just how honest I need to be.”

“Are your boys in therapy?” our leader asked.

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“Of course they are,” said Campbell. “What century, what city, is this? It’s all I can do to keep them from being put on bubble-gum-flavored Prozac.”

The social worker pursed her lips, as if to show the rest of the group how strong she was, to bear the brunt of this rage with so much kindness and patience. Another member of the group said, “Do they talk about their mother? Do they talk about missing her?”

“At this point, no,” said Campbell. “Not to me.”

“Then you need to initiate those conversations,” said the member.

“I do? Really? Our whole life, from the breakfast she doesn’t prepare to the stories she doesn’t read, is one big miserable package of missing her. One ginormous
duh,
my boys would say.”

A young woman, an only child whose father had killed himself after she left for college, began to talk about losing a parent this way. “Didn’t he love me enough to stick around? Or should I have stayed at home? Did my mother abuse him somehow and I could have stopped it? Did he have some terrible secret? Didn’t he know how guilty it would make me feel?”

“The guilt is huge,” said our leader, nodding emphatically. “All of us can agree with that, I’m sure.”

After that meeting, Campbell walked off in the same direction I did; awkwardly, we fell in step and found ourselves going downstairs, together, into the Twenty-third Street station. “I’m not going back there,” he said as he fingered a palmful of coins, searching for a token. I said, “Neither am I. I’m not sure what I hoped to accomplish.”

“We should probably give it more time,” he said. “Shouldn’t we?”

“That’s what we’d be told if we ever went back to say we’re quitting.”

We shared a bench on the dim subway platform, both of us waiting for a downtown 6. I could tell, because we were the only ones there, that we had just missed a train. I was beginning to think we might never say another word to each other when, abruptly, Campbell spoke. “You know, when Janie and I used to fight—and I won’t pretend it was rare or that I was especially tolerant of her never-ending depression; I was frustrated that she wouldn’t get serious help, but still . . . Anyway, when we Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 279
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argued, about anything, we both had a hard time quitting, calling a truce. That was a big weakness we shared. And sometimes she’d finally yell at me, ‘You always have to have the last word, don’t you? Well go ahead, have it! Congratulations, it’s yours!’ And she’d stalk off and slam the door.”

He looked at me, as if for permission to continue. When he did, his voice was almost plaintive. “So now, you know what’s so incredibly awful? It’s like she’s left me with the
very
last word, the last word of all. Slammed the door and said
Congratulations
one very last time. And when I feel really, really sorry for myself, that’s what I focus on: the way she punished me for all those dragged-out arguments when I could have given in, or I could have given her much more slack because she was . . . ill.”

I knew how hard it was for him to say that word. I’d composed my own litany: Clem was brilliant, she was accomplished, she was passionate, she was loved, but she was . . . ill. Yet unlike Campbell, I hadn’t known. Why didn’t
anyone
seem to know? Was she that cunning? Were we that blind? On the center tracks, two express trains passed in opposite directions. The air they displaced, an artificial wind, blew paper refuse onto the platform at our feet. The sound of the trains diminished slowly.

“Maybe,” I said, “she’s the one who got the last word. I mean, isn’t suicide the ultimate last word, the declaration nobody ever gets to dispute?”

Campbell looked at me intently, almost fearfully. At first, I thought he was appalled. Our train came. We got on and sat down next to each other. It always feels odd, stepping from the murky station into the harsh light of a new subway car. It’s like having something stripped away. Campbell said, “Where do you live? Let me get off at your stop and walk you home.”

Ralph looks dismayed. Our attempt to unravel this shared mystery has foundered in the same old morass. Same dark, cold, insultingly dull des-Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 280 280

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tination where all these conversations come to a halt. I wish that Campbell was here. He understands the morass better than anyone else I know.

“Well!” Ralph says, to break our gloomy silence. “Can I be completely rude and ask if we could have ice cream, too?”

“If there’s any left,” I say.

The boys did put the cartons away, but there is a complex graffiti of melted chocolate goo across the counter. “Cy Twombly,” I say.

“Is that a new flavor?” asks Ralph.

I laugh. “An artist I love.” I wipe down the counter, and then I look into the freezer. We have plenty of vanilla, a little Chunky Monkey, some Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt. I divide it all between two bowls. We eat quickly and gratefully, standing in the kitchen. Ralph sets his bowl down first. “That was a happy summer. For her.”

It takes me a moment to understand. “Vermont.”

He nods. “She fell in love with that aunt of yours. She talked about her constantly. I didn’t quite get the generational thing. She was nearly a hundred, I seem to remember.”

“Almost ninety-nine,” I say. “She was a vestige of another era, the maiden aunt who outlives everyone else. But that’s my father’s family. You can’t keep track of how they’re all related because they live practically forever.” I realize what I’ve said, but Ralph doesn’t seem to catch it.

“You know,” he says, “your aunt told Clem a secret. She said she had to share it with someone. Clem, I mean.”

That someone, I think, was not me. Again, Ralph doesn’t see what I’m feeling. Maybe he’s nervous now, eager to leave—though he keeps on staying.

“She had a baby.”

“What?” I am seized with panic.

“Oh no. No—I mean your aunt.”

I try to make sense of this. “But she had no children.”

“I think it died,” he says. “Or was adopted.”

“But that would mean . . .”

“I’ve lost the details,” says Ralph. “There was no husband, I do remember that.”

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The pleasure of remembering Lucy dissolves back into sorrow. This time, Ralph reads my face astutely. He apologizes. I tell him it’s fine. Some secrets—how well we both know this—will never come clean. They tease you with their general shape but refuse to step out of the shadows.

“You seem okay, can I say that?” says Ralph. “I mean, more than okay. This looks like a nice life you have.”

“It is,” I say. “And so does yours.”

“It’s the life of a nomad, like I said. I don’t mind. There’s another guy who shows up in the field sometimes. Our work overlaps, which is nearly perfect. And we’re both happy to be around. We’re . . . on the same wavelength, I guess.” Ralph scrapes the last of his vanilla from the bowl. He tells me then that he’s positive; he found out years ago—but just in time to take the drugs that are keeping so many people alive. He’d been on the verge of accepting a major position at a wildlife fund that would have given him administrative power yet kept him in the field.

“I said no, because I figured I wouldn’t be alive for a whole lot longer. I’d better stick with what I knew, what I was already good at, the handson work, do it until I had no more energy left. No time. So now the joke’s on me. I might actually have to think about retirement!” I sense the exaggerated cheer, his polite assurance that the tragic part is past, not to worry if I don’t know what to say.

“You were hoping I’d tell you why she did it,” he says.

“Yes. I was. But it doesn’t matter. It’s been wonderful seeing you.”

He tells me he feels the same, that we must stay in touch, and I agree.

“Let me take your godson for a tour, up at the zoo,” he says.

“He’d love that. The older boys, too.”

I retrieve Ralph’s backpack from the living room while he puts on his jacket. We kiss each other on the cheek, we hug, and I stand in the doorway until the elevator opens. We wave at each other. The doors close. I put the bowls in the dishwasher. Standing still, I realize that I do not hear a peep from the boys’ bedroom. I knock on their door. When they answer, I open it. Inside, the three boys are crowded together at Luke’s computer, their faces rapt and luminous.

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They are playing a game where you construct an obstacle course for a hapless little man you must then guide through the course you’ve built, trying your best to keep him from falling victim to the vagaries of trapdoors, falling airplanes, wayward hammers, boxing gloves that emerge—

kapow!
—from nowhere. You hear alarm clocks, whistles, the classic sound effects of slapstick. It’s like Mouse Trap meets the Three Stooges. In the end, the little man is indestructible. If you don’t give up, neither does he.

I pick up Darius from the floor and tuck him under one arm; I stack the ice-cream bowls and carry them to the kitchen. Aimless, I go back into the living room and sit on the couch. I set the bear down beside me and pick up the pieces of paper covered with my sister’s words. I shuffle randomly toward the end; here is the letter she wrote to Ralph after the day of the hunt. She describes with the clinical care of a young scientist—already having found what she was meant to do—the weapons the men used to kill the animal, the tools they used to haul it onto the ice and reduce its vast anatomy to the stuff of everyday survival. I seem to remember getting a letter from Clem with all this information, too—