The Grief of Others (7 page)

“You’re smart, and you’re sensitive,” his mother said when he confessed through tears, the second month of sixth grade, what was happening—though whether she offered it as explanation or compensation, he couldn’t tell. “Rise above it, if you can,” his father said. “Think how insecure they must be, to feel they have to tease others. You could think in terms of feeling sorry for them.”

He practiced being sorry for them the rest of the way home. He thought the words
I’m sorry for you
and
I pity you,
but what he meant was
I’m sorry for your mother having to look at your shitass face every day
and
I pity you for being such a sorry fucking scumbag
. His thoughts were bullets shot from a gun. Hollow-point, armor-piercing. By the time he reached his block, Paul had killed Stephen Boyd and his cronies several times over. He felt, if not better, at least a few yards removed from the epicenter of hatred and shame. He also felt—how could this be?—hungry again, empty in the gut.

His father’s truck was in the driveway. Paul registered the fact with a twinge of minor curiosity. It was not routine, yet neither was it bizarre. Depending on whether or not a show was going up soon, his father might get home from work in the afternoon or not until late at night. He went across the porch, pushed open the door, and shed his wet backpack and jacket in one motion, letting both lie where they landed on the tatty hall rug. “Dad?” he called, heaving off his boots.

“Paul?” His father answered from the back of the house. “We’re in here.” Walking through the passageway, Paul detected multiple voices, and when he rounded the corner he saw that the kitchen was seriously populated. His father sat at the table. So did a wiry young man with red hair, wearing one of Paul’s father’s sweatshirts. It was far too big for this stranger; even rolled up, the sleeves fell past his knuckles. Cross-legged on the floor, leaning against the radiator, sat his sister, Biscuit. She wore her pilly lavender bathrobe and was eating a banana in that overly attentive way she had, while stroking the side of a vast black dog, which lay on the floor beside her with its chin on her thigh. Finally, leaning against the stove, both hands laced around the chunky, lumpy alphabet mug Paul had made in second grade, stood a young woman with dark hair cut spikily short and a spark of a smile between her pursed lips.

“O-
kay
. . .” said Paul from the doorway, shaking the long bang that drove his mother crazy out of his eyes.

“Come on into the room, Paul.” His father sounded so expansively casual that Paul knew he was tense. “You remember Jessica? I don’t know how old you were, the last time we were all together.”

“Paul!” burst the woman at the stove, and it was too much. As if she’d thought the same thing, she tamped down the enthusiasm, following her initial utterance with only a low “Wow.”

She was not as he remembered. She looked shorter, plainer, denser. All her thrilling miles of hair hacked off.

There seemed to be a mass of cotton in his throat. “Uh, I think so,” Paul mumbled, casting an interrogatory glance at his father. “Jessica as in
Jess
?” As if he wasn’t sure.

“Our sister,” Biscuit put in helpfully, although for her it must be brand-new; she had been too little to have any previous memory of Jess.

“O-
kay
,” he said again. “Great. Hi.” He clasped his hands together audibly. It was a consciously comical gesture; he had recently discovered he had a knack for delivering a certain kind of stand-up, a flattened, staccato, affectless patter. It went over best with older audiences, his parents and their peers, and he’d begun to use it as a cover when he was feeling anxious or agitated. “So. Why’s Biscuit wearing a bathrobe, since when do we have a dog, who’s
he
?”—pointing at the red-haired fellow—“and by the way”—pointing at Jess—“that’s my mug.”

Jess, to his consternation and delight, did not seem flustered but hoisted the mug in small salute and gave him a nod.

Biscuit said, “The dog’s Gordie’s.”

His father said, “Paul, my son.This is Gordie Joiner. He helped your sister out today.”

The dude’s ears turned red. “Well, not exactly.”

Then, overlapping:

“Your sister skipped school—”

“Actually, it was my dog—”

“I can swim perfectly well—”

“Gordie was kind enough—”

“Newfs have this instinct—”

“—like I would have learned anything I cared about.”

The more confusedly their voices entwined the more stolid grew Paul’s silence. Jess, it was impossible not to notice, held herself equally still, so that through their very inaction, a commonality was forged. Paul stole a glance. She really looked completely different from the last time—the only time—he’d seen her. Then she’d been willowy, almost gangly, with hair to her waist. She’d worn braces on her teeth, been tan and freckled, towered above him. Now his father’s first child was his height or a hair shorter, and her skin moon-pale, and her figure filled out. She was solid-looking, the way a bird can seem plump without being fat. He forgot what their age difference was—ten years, eleven? She must be in her early twenties.

His father and Biscuit and the scrawny red-haired dude finished up their story. Paul waited a beat and turned to his father. “What does all that have to do”—inclining his head toward the stove—“with her?”

“Nothing,” his father admitted. “A coincidence. We’re having an unusual afternoon.”

“You think?” Paul knew his father would probably have welcomed some help juggling the company, but he did not feel it within him to offer any. He wasn’t sure why seeing Jess should make him angry, but he was aware of wanting to hit something. He flashed a sardonic smile. Then, in a manner he understood was rude, he crossed to a cupboard, leaving a trail of large damp sock prints on the floor, and got down an unopened package of Hydrox. He turned to face the room at large and executed a small bow. “A pleasure. Now if you’ll excuse me.” And strode through the doorway toward the front hall.

“Hey, Paul . . . ?” His father’s voice sought after him.

“Book report,” Paul yelled back, fraudulently. He grabbed his backpack and clomped up the stairs in the way his mother had spoken to him about many times. In his room he kicked the door shut, peeled off his wet cargo pants and socks, pulled on a pair of sweats, switched on his desk lamp, tore open the Hydrox, and inserted a cookie in his mouth, all in fluid progression.Then he sat very still, not chewing.

Though he’d met his half sister just once, a long time ago, the memory was vivid. It had been summertime; he must have been just about to turn six. Biscuit (precocious in many things but not in toilet training) had been, at three, still in diapers. They’d spent two weeks together, his whole family and Jess, upstate where his mother’s parents had a cabin on Cabruda Lake. Jess had been a teenager then and accordingly remarkable to him, with her guitar, her braces, her friendship bracelets, her long, heavy hair.

He’d felt rich on that holiday, rich with the sudden acquisition of her. He’d known, because his parents had told him, what “half sister” meant:
Daddy is her father but her mother is another lady
. Even so, he couldn’t fully dispel the impression he’d formed, upon first hearing the term, of a mythical being, half sister and half something else, the way a centaur or a mermaid was halfand-half. And half
his,
too, for that was what sister meant, only in this case the word seemed far more exotic and advantageous than in the case of his other sister, never mind that Biscuit was a hundred percent his: she cried and stank and was liable to put his things in her mouth.

This one played with him. She threw him like a torpedo through the water and taught him how to spit high in the air like a fountain. She showed him how to make food for the fairies she said lived in the woods, grinding pine needles and tree sap into a sticky porridge, which they set out on leaf-platters upon tablecloths of moss. She combed his hair, after swimming, into a Mohawk, and used some of her own mousse to make it stiff. She instructed him on how to dig fingernail X’s into the mosquito bites she couldn’t reach on her back. She sang along to folk songs she played on her guitar; other times, she let him strum it while she made chords. She teased him, too, as no one had ever done. She called him Paolo instead of Paul, said “Peeyew” and held her nose whenever he took off his shoes, and sang, with a pronounced, insistent twang,
“Why don’t you love me like you used to do?”
at random intervals to him during the course of the holiday.
“How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?”
When he’d shrug in hapless embarrassment she’d say, “That’s cold, man.” Her teasing had the strange effect of making him feel both overwhelmed by the privilege and on the verge of tears.

Her name was Jessica Safransky, impossible to resist chanting several times in a row, and Paul had chanted it a lot, during that holiday and in the weeks following, after they’d returned to their respective houses in different parts of the state. Jess had been only on loan, it turned out, from the Safranskys. That was the curious phrase his mother had used, as though Jess were a library book. During their time at Cabruda Lake Paul had given no thought to the provenance of her last name; it had seemed fitting that such a fantastic being should come bearing her own distinct appellation. Only afterward did its implications dawn on him. Weeks after the vacation he’d asked when they would see Jess again, and was by way of indirect answer given this piece of information: the Safranskys lived in a town far, far up the Hudson River, past Albany. Albany: even the word sounded distant, milky and cool as a train whistle. He’d envisioned a citadel on a hill, white flags rippling from the spires. But, wait—Safranskys, plural? Well, yes: Mr. Safransky was Jess’s father, having married Jess’s mother long ago. But wasn’t Daddy her father? Daddy, it was explained, had never been married to Jess’s mother. He had once been Jess’s father, it seemed, but now there was another who’d taken his place. And so. In this way Paul lost his early sureness about the world. Fathers could be interchanged; sisters could come in fractions. The easy manner with which his mother explained these things made them only more distressing.

Still, Paul had hopes of a repeat holiday. For a while he persisted in asking every now and then when they might get together with Jess again. “We’ll have to try to work something out,” his father would say. But when the Ryries went back to Cabruda Lake the following summer it had been without Jess, and no other plans for a visit ever transpired. He began to think of her less frequently, though when he did, the thought still caused a great prick of interest, and continued, in a vague way, to seem like a treat yet to happen, a promise on the horizon. Then one day when he’d been in second or third grade his mother had replied to his latest inquiry, with what he took to be inexcusable offhandedness, that the Safranskys had moved some time ago to California. After that he’d stopped wondering when Jess might visit them again. If he wondered anything, it was how that single summer’s holiday had ever come to happen.

As he grew older, a few more details of the story had filtered through: how young his father had been at the time of Jess’s conception, and how foolish. That it had been the mother’s decision to raise the baby alone, that she’d actually refused his father’s involvement.That only when the teenage Jess had rebelled, insisting on meeting her birth father, did the mother begrudgingly allow it. And that mere months after the summer at Cabruda Lake, the Safranskys uprooted and moved clear across the country. So that the picture Paul formed of Jess’s mother was of Rapunzel’s witch: a woman so jealous she locked her daughter away from the rest of the world—or, at least, away from the Ryries.

To see Jess today in real life, real time, to stand before her in the kitchen and have her look so diminished, so ordinary, had been like having a trick played on him. It was like something Stephen Boyd might do: set him up in order to deflate him. It wasn’t so much that Paul had exalted her in his memory; it was that his memory of her had functioned to exalt
him
. That holiday at Cabruda Lake had become, in the uncanny way of a select few childhood memories, a storehouse of symbolism. They had fallen for each other, the little boy and the teenage girl, in a way that remained unparalleled. He believed that no one since, no friend or teacher or babysitter, not even his parents, not even Baptiste, had seen in him such promise, or reflected back at him such delight. The notion of this Rapunzel, this distant half sister vaguely in need of rescue, who’d seen him more purely than anyone else before or since, had been itself like a promise.

For her to show up now as she was—shorn, short, pale—and see him as he was—overweight, awkward, acned—was a double blow. He felt duped. He longed for Baptiste to have come home with him, but whether as buffer against Jess or in order to flaunt him before her, Paul didn’t know.

The cookie had become a perfect disk of chocolate-andcream paste on his tongue. Paul swallowed and inserted another. He slid open the top drawer of his desk, removed a spiral sketchbook and a bottle of Winsor & Newton Black, selected a pen from a mug full of drawing tools, and stuck in a nib. Then he flipped open the sketchbook and riffled through its pages, more than half of which were covered with drawings, or bits of drawings, fits and starts of images and designs that had coalesced, collage-like, into a world of his and Baptiste’s making. There, on one page, crouched the black panther, muscular and scowling in the shadow of a garbage can. There, behind him, stood the private eye, lantern-jawed and stubbled, slouched in his trench coat. Paul dipped his nib in the ink, then blotted it on an old waddedup T-shirt he kept for this purpose. His breath slowed and he brought his head so low the fringe of his bangs brushed the paper. There, on the facing page, with no idea yet of what it would contain, he began to sketch in the next frame.