The Grief of Others (13 page)

Her father had driven them across the bridge early. The sky had still been dark. They’d had to wear their puffy coats, which they hated, and to bring their suitcases, which had made them balk. They would be staying in Tarrytown until tomorrow or the next day, or possibly even a day or two after that; the duration of the visit had been left alarmingly vague.

The car radio had said it would snow today. It was April second, but never mind that—four to six inches, the radio had said. April second: already Biscuit had made a talisman of the date. Their brother’s birthday.The day their mother was scheduled to give birth. The birth had to be scheduled because the baby wasn’t coming on its own. Sometimes with this kind of baby that was going to die, it had a hard time getting born. There was something terribly confusing about all this—not about the baby and that it was going to die, but about the way her parents explained it all: with a kind of ready candor, as if to suggest there was nothing they would not share.Yet Biscuit knew this was not so, and it left her feeling muddled and hard.

Their father hadn’t come into their grandma’s house that morning, but only stood on the stoop. He’d been in a hurry to get back across the river before the snow started. That had been hours ago. It was snowing now and had been steadily for some time. Out the windows on either side of the fireplace, flakes the size of minnows swam by. Biscuit’s grandma was in the kitchen making egg salad. Biscuit could smell it. Earlier, she’d heard the eggs bumping lightly against the walls of the pot, and now she knew by the smell that her grandma had taken off the shells and was mashing them with a fork. She didn’t care for eggs herself.

The egg salad was being prepared especially for Paul, who’d entered the house that morning shuffling heavily, his shoulders up by his ears, his eyes not leaving the floor. Biscuit had heard her father’s low voice: “He’s having a hard time,” and her grandma’s reply: “What would he like to eat?”

“Ask him,” her father had said, already on his way back down the walk to the car, whose engine he’d left running.

But when she did, Paul had only shrugged. “I don’t know. Nothing.”

It was Biscuit who delivered the answer on Paul’s behalf, later, when it was nearing noon, after their grandma had put the question to them again: “How about some lunch?” She’d appeared on the edge of the room, and clasped her hands at her waist. “Paul, what’s something you like to eat?”

Biscuit looked at him. Her brother’s face was largely obscured, first by the angle—he was studying the bright pentacle with its arrangement of marbles as though it contained the secrets of the universe—and then by his hair, a dirty-blond, uncropped thatch that he lately never bothered to comb. “I’m not that hungry,” he’d said.

“No? Biscuit, what about you?”

“I’m okay.”

“Really? It’s getting on toward twelve.”Their grandma stood doubtfully in the door frame a moment before heading back to the kitchen.

“Go,” prompted Paul, nodding at the game board.

Instead Biscuit said, “One sec,” and sprinted into the kitchen. “He likes egg salad.” She felt quietly noble, supplying this information without consideration for her own preference, and the way her grandma’s face brightened at this tip inspired her to add, “If you have olives, he likes those, too.”

But this good deed turned out to be the very thing, once she’d revealed it with a little shy pride, that made Paul scoop up a handful of his pieces and fling them, hard, at her (or a calculated centimeter to her left), saying, “Butt out, Ass. You don’t know what I like,” before clomping from the room.

Biscuit contracted with regret. She’d done it again. Her knack for maintaining good cheer in the face of everything that made Paul miserable—he always seemed to take it as rebuke, as though her little gestures in his behalf were made for the sole purpose of rubbing in the fact of his glum nature. Biscuit stared into the fire. A few tears rolled down her cheeks and dried there, tight on her skin.
There, there,
the gas seemed to whistle. The false embers glowed like a tiny city half hidden in the grate. In that city was a building, and in that building was a room, and there her mother lay in a bed with nurses bustling softly around it, preparing for death.There were white sheets and white snowflakes out the window, and the gray lady stood hushed at the edge of the room, knowing, seeing.
There, there,
the nurses whistled like the gas.

There, there,
whispered Biscuit to the baby. Her grandma came into the living room, wearing an apron over her jeans. “Ready for lunch? Where’s Paul?”

“He left.”

“Left? What do you mean? I’ve got lunch all ready.”

Biscuit shrugged. She understood that at her grandma’s house today there would be no mention of the baby, or of the hospital, or of her parents. She knew her grandma would refrain from speaking out of a conviction that children were best served by protective silence, and she knew she and Paul would steer clear of the subject in deference to their grandma.

“Well, you come, anyway.Wash your hands.”

But she didn’t. She followed her grandma, who went looking for Paul, who turned out to be not far, only halfway up the stairs, hunched on the window seat on the landing. This was Biscuit’s second-favorite spot in her grandma’s house. The window seat was shaped like a wedge of pie, and bore a pie-shaped cushion covered in faded green velvet. The house, tall and narrow, stood on half an acre of steep hillside, and this window looked west, toward the Hudson and home; over the tops of the still-bare trees, whose branches were now shoring up nests of snow, she could just glimpse the palisades across the river.

Paul’s sketchbook was open and propped against his knees, which he drew in closer to his chest, secretively, without looking up.

“Well, there you are,” said their grandma. “Lunch is ready.”

It was as if he hadn’t heard her. For long seconds, his pencil was the only sound. Biscuit felt its rude skritching in the base of her throat.

“Come on, now,” their grandma tried brusquely. When still he did not look up, she went over and knelt on the carpeted landing. It looked as though she might be going to put a hand on his arm. But then, abruptly, Paul did acknowledge her presence, by shutting the book with a violent snap and bending his head lower, glowering determinedly at his lap.

Biscuit, one step below, gazed at her grandma’s wide, flat backside, at the apron strings trailing crookedly over the expanse of pale blue pants. It struck her that her grandma could not see her own apron strings, could not know the rumpled paths they made over her bottom, nor the indignity with which one traced the middle seam and dangled like a tail between her legs, and this seemed briefly terrible, lamentable beyond proportion. Biscuit’s chest contracted. She had little faith in her grandma’s ability to reach Paul, retrieve him from the terrible place he’d consigned himself to. What did her grandma know that might equip her to do the job? Was it possible to reach someone whose sorrow you didn’t acknowledge, let alone understand?

“I’m not a dummy, you know.” Their grandma spoke tartly, and though the comment was directed at Paul, Biscuit jerked in surprise.“I wasn’t born yesterday.” Oh no, Biscuit thought, wishing there were some way she could signal her grandma that a bluff tone would only make things worse. Paul might possibly be reached with kindness, very gingerly proffered, but never with chiding. “I did raise a son.” Their grandma gave a sniff. “Not to mention a daughter. If you think I don’t know the silent treatment, well.You should have known your father.”

It was a funny thing to say—of course they did know him—yet Biscuit imagined what her grandma meant: her father as a boy, as
Jonh,
not the person they knew at all but an alien, an impostor, almost fearsome in his ignorance of her—she who did not yet exist—incapable not only of loving her but of possessing even casual interest in her. Biscuit gazed over at her grandma and Paul at the snow out the window, darting this way and that like schools of tiny fish. She was suddenly hungry to see her father, to be in the same room with him and her mother both, to squeeze their hands and have them look down and see her, too.

“Oh, he could be rotten,” her grandma was saying in her comfortably testy way, describing their father when he was Paul’s age and gave her nothing but trouble. “Trouble and lip. And attitude. His hair was even worse than yours.” She added, with a rough sort of fondness or pride, “He brought me to tears on a daily basis.”

At some point during this Paul had lifted his chin and turned to look out the window. A silence came and bathed the little landing while all three of them took up the identical task: watching the snow, the flakes that had grown smaller and wilder in the darkening midday sky. Biscuit reached out and very softly ran her grandma’s apron strings through her fingers.

In the kitchen they had egg salad on rye and three Mallomars apiece from a brand-new box. Paul did one or two small things for Biscuit during lunch—leaped up and got the paper towels when she spilled her milk, rolled his eyes in commiseration when their grandma complained for the hundredth time that she did not know how a girl with such a healthy appetite could stay so skinny. It was easy to forgive him, easy to welcome him back. He had a harder time than she did, every single day, a fact so plain to her it hardly bore remark.

After lunch, their grandma announced she was sending them out of doors for fresh air.They groaned in a protest more requisite than heartfelt. Deep down they were both relieved to get out, and put on their boots and mittens and awful puffy coats with little fuss. Biscuit yanked open the front door. The snow had stopped and the world, heavy and hushed, was coated with flakes so airy and light that every bush and branch seemed aquiver, and the lawn sloped off as smooth and steep as a pitched roof; she fairly lunged toward the steps. But Paul stopped her. “Hang on,” he grunted, and disappeared back into the kitchen where they’d left their grandma doing dishes. Biscuit could hear his rising tone, the impatience, the creeping belligerence; some request was being denied and he was arguing, persisting. Biscuit’s stomach knotted. Why, oh
why
didn’t he know how to give up, let go of things?

But then Paul was back, not scowling but grinning in victory, scampishly displaying his plunder: two garbage bags, heavy-duty black ones. “Come on,” he said, pushing past.

She followed him into the clean-coated world. He strode to the high point of the lawn, the ledgelike spot right before it dropped away downhill. Snow displaced by his stride sprayed into the air before him. Some small animal, a bird or squirrel, disturbed by the sudden human activity, fled its branch, leaving behind an ivory cascade.

“Come here.”

She trotted up beside him. He spread one of the garbage bags flat on the ground, holding the plastic smooth while she positioned herself on it, then instructed her to grip the sides and fold them in over her lap.

“Ready?”

She barely nodded before she felt his hand on the middle of her back, pushing her forward, off the ledge. She was skimming, speeding downhill, spinning, then tumbling, before she came to a halt at the bottom, somersaulted into a mouthful of cold.

“You okay?” Paul called down.

She nodded, dazed. Her face felt covered with stars.

“Look out, then!” He came bulleting down on his own garbage bag, headfirst on his stomach. She did not take her eyes off him. His cheeks, as he drew closer, were ruddy, slashed with red, and his eyes burned with the danger, the importance, of his mission. Although he was not smiling, Biscuit believed he was as happy as he ever got these days, which was to say as far from whatever troubled him as he could get within his own mind.

W
ill Joiner was making gold-rimmed goblets. His tenth day home from the hospital. He sat at the kitchen table cutting a clear plastic straw into thumbnail lengths, then dipping one end of each section into a puddle of Elmer’s. The glue formed a membrane across the opening that would dry clear and so form the bottom of the glass. Next, he dipped each open end into a puddle of gold paint. The paint, less viscous, would not form a seal but only deposit a gold ring around the lip.The goblets were for a wedding. Specifically, the scene of his and Bronwyn’s wedding supper. Thus the photo album splayed on the kitchen table along with the glue and paint: he had gotten it out for reference.

None of his other dioramas represented a scene from his own life. Ordinarily he would have been sheepish about what might seem like self-regard. But it wasn’t for himself, this box, and that made the difference.

His eyeglasses had slipped low on his nose.They and the nasal cannula that led to the portable oxygen concentrator made his face front-heavy; he had to tilt his head somewhat back to compensate. The sustained effort was giving him a crick in the neck, and the bright light he’d trained on his workspace was making him very warm, but he took note of these discomforts without strongly minding them; he had begun to notice himself relishing even unpleasant sensations.

He’d had a lobe removed a year ago, followed by chemo and radiation. Then this recurrence, and another tumor removed, and more chemo scheduled. They’d wait and see how he responded. They were loath to offer any prognosis. He had no illusions about what this meant.

Bronwyn, who would not appear in the scene—it would be entirely unpeopled, a table set in anticipation of guests—had been dead nineteen years, so many more than the four he’d known her. Her youth, more than anything, is what he remembered of her. Her skin had been smooth and firm as a bar of soap. She’d had a tiny mole at the corner of her mouth that did not mar but rather enhanced her polished elegance; it looked endearingly like a toast crumb.

They’d had a civil ceremony followed by a restaurant supper, a private room rented out for them and a dozen relatives and friends. Bron, in the photos, which lay under protective film, was lovely in her knee-length ivory A-line dress, her dark hair flipped up at the ends. Will admired her handsomeness and did not grieve at the sight of her. It was the images of himself that stabbed. Bron, after all, had been relatively unchanged at the time of her death from the bride in the photos, whereas the man he was now bore little resemblance to the pictured groom. In the pictures he was lean and lanky and wore his happiness, along with his shaggy hair and skinny tie, quite unabashedly. At fiftyfive he was thickened and wheezing, tethered to tubes and metal canister: such a far cry from that other person—whom he yet distinctly remembered being—that he felt a flash of the old bitterness, the sense of helpless, stunned betrayal that had knocked him flat upon her death.