The Mourning After (2 page)

“I didn’t get to the store this week,” she says, wistful and likely drugged.

They are the first words Madeline Keller has spoken to her son since they left the cemetery earlier that morning.  They are a question, an accusation, and an order all rolled into one.

Levon’s response begins in the hollow of his stomach and rises like fire through his throat where it is stifled by a deep swallow.  What she really meant to say was the same thing she screamed in the hospital so that everyone within earshot turned away: “How could you?  How could you do this?”  Then she broke down, sobbing uncontrollably, falling onto the floor where she lay until two nurses and a doctor carried her off to an empty room for proper sedation.

Levon had been sobbing too, though she hadn’t seen that.

The police officers at the scene were as perplexed as his mother.  When they approached Levon’s father in the hospital, they were quick to ask if he wanted to press charges against the underage driver who killed their son.  Levon’s plight turned into horror when his father answered, “He’s my son, officer.” The men, formerly businesslike, intent on delivering justice, grew compassionate.  For a split second, Levon actually wondered if his father would turn his back on him too.

If not for the track of stitches across Levon’s cheek, no one would ever have believed he was also a victim.  That he got out unscathed was a Pandora’s Box that no one dared rifle through. 

He stares at his mother, who’s asking him to go to the store; he can’t find her once tight, unflawed features.  All of her friends used to tell her she resembled the famous author Danielle Steele.  Yet, the face bearing down on him is more bloated than smooth, and it’s swollen where it used to be firm.  He is surprised that he only now notices the wrinkles that line her eyes. Maybe they are his fault too. He hears the indiscreet humming of whispers filling the room, the question on everyone’s tongue: why did God take the handsome, golden boy?

“Levon, did you hear me?”

He wants to cut her some slack, to hug her, to apologize to her again, but he is in pain too—a quiet suffering—and some mercy on her part might heal him instead of making him want to grab a handful of chocolate rugalah and shove it into his mouth.  As she fumbles through her pocketbook for some money, Levon tries to say something.  His eyes are blinking at her.  If she bothered to meet his in return, she would see the tears pooling over and the ache inside of him.

When she finds the right denomination of bills, she tosses them in his direction without looking at him.  The wadded up money lands on the floor by his feet.  Getting her to notice him has always been a practice in both humility and futility, and now, Levon’s defining act is sealed: he will always be the boy who got behind the wheel of the car that killed David. 

Levon closes his eyes and feels David in the air. David wasn’t just a muscled, lean, good-looking teenager.  He possessed a presence that extended well beyond that of his seventeen-year-old physique.  Belying the stereotypical young superstar in his prime, he was kind, he was good, and he was going places.

Levon worshiped his brother.  And despite their obvious differences, Levon never begrudged his brother’s popularity or the plethora of talents that came to him so easily.  Levon was proud to tell people he was David’s younger brother, and he would have done anything for David, anything, even if it meant leaving Chloe alone in the house to help him on that fateful night.

“You know I can’t,” was Levon’s first response, when David called from a party asking him to come pick him up.

“It’s not a big deal, bro.  You have a restricted license.”

Levon knew everything about it was wrong, yet the desire to help David, to swoop in and save the day, chipped away at his ordinarily conservative streak.

David never had to ask Levon more than once to do anything.  This time, though, there were serious consequences to consider.

David continued, “I need to get home.  It’s only a mile away; just get here soon.”

Something in David’s voice triggered a response in Levon that was both foreign and dangerous.  The desperation had Levon thinking heroic thoughts—now was his chance to help David out of a tough spot, just like David, so many times, had helped him when he was having difficulties.

“Mom and Dad will never know,” David went on, “don’t worry.”

Levon’s body shuddered in response to what his mind began to wrap around: David was in trouble.  He checked in on Chloe and made note of the time.  She wasn’t due for a feeding for three more hours; his parents weren’t due back for two.  He didn’t allow himself to consider contingencies, like how a flat tire could render Chloe straddling the fence between life and death.  Instead, the excitement and anxiety settled in his belly.  The idea of embarking on a private mission for his brother negated all other dangers.  He got up and reached for the jeans that were strewn across the foot of his bed.  He pulled them up and around his waist and didn’t remember them being as snug as when he had put them on that morning.  He reached for his favorite T-shirt—the one that read Fat People Are Hard to Kidnap—pulled it over his shoulders, and grabbed his wallet and the keys to David’s car.

His mother despised the shirt, however he found that self-deprecating humor and self-loathing worked well together.  Somehow, they canceled each other out.

Levon drove no more than fifteen miles per hour with both hands glued to the wheel.  The party was not a mile away—it was more like three.  Levon could hear his mother’s rumbling voice, “Most accidents occur within a five mile radius of your house,” as the odometer’s numbers gradually increased.

When he approached the driveway of his destination, David was already outside. 

Levon was always struck by the sight of his brother.  He had read about Adonis— the baby that had an unearthly beauty and how measures were taken to safeguard him. Sometimes he’d see David from his parents’ perspective, and, in their eyes, he was an Adonis.  “What’s wrong with you?” Levon asked, as David hobbled to the car, his face showing only a vestige of its usual calm.

“I feel like shit.”

“You look it.  What happened?”

“I gotta get out of here.”

Levon is huffing and puffing on his bicycle en route to the nearby Publix supermarket. It is fall in Miami—at least that’s what the calendar claims—and it remains unseasonably hot.  A sticky moisture packs the air and fuels the tropics with storms that have innocuous names, like Erin and Irene.  Wilma had thrashed ashore two years ago in October, bringing rampant power outages, school closings, and general misery with her.

Pedaling faster, Levon thinks about how much he hates riding his bicycle.  The effort tires him. Because of the accident, he’s pretty sure he’ll never get a driver’s license in any state.  Now with his restricted license revoked, the bicycle is his only means of transportation.  He can already see his mother calculating the number of calories he’ll burn by the end of the summer.

Madeline is a substitute teacher at their high school. Levon has had great difficulty conjuring up the image of his cool, indifferent mother in front of a classroom and being taken seriously while tackling subjects like logarithms and deciduous forests. He was blown away when he learned that Mrs. Keller was the favored substitute across all four grades.  This can’t be his mother they’re praising, he tells himself.  She’s one of the most impatient, self-absorbed women he has ever known.  She should
suck
as a teacher!  Levon dares not speak these harsh words aloud, instead, he writes about it in his journal:

My mother is uninterested, unresponsive.

My mother is a ridiculous woman who has managed to hold her place in our community with the flimsy bobby pins that clasp her updo.

I am invisible to my mother; when she chooses to look at me, she sees everything I’m not.

Rounding the corner of Sixty-ninth and Collins, the wind whips past Levon, and the smell of the ocean streams into his nose.  His eyes rest on the valuable piece of untouched beach that sleeps cozily between two of Miami’s latest trendy boutique hotels.  Miami Beach has become more of a concrete jungle than a land of sand and surf, as residential high-rises and tourist destinations sweep the city and its expansive views from sight.

“The Beach isn’t what it used to be,” his father would repeatedly say to him.

Everything changes
, Levon thinks to himself, glimpsing the crisp turquoise that a week ago could at times fill him with hope.

Turning from the ocean, Levon steers into the strip mall’s parking lot and pulls up alongside the rusty bicycle rack.  On any other day, he would, without question, run into someone he knows in the store.  They might say hello and ask about Chloe or applaud David for his most recent victory on the football field.  Then, they would turn abruptly, pretending not to notice him hovering over a display case with the Chips Ahoy or Nutter Butters.  But today, most everyone he knows is sitting shiva at his house.  Today, he could walk the aisles and purchase whatever he wants without public humiliation.

“Hey, Levon,” comes a friendly voice from behind the customer service counter.  It is Sally, and Levon instinctively knows it is Tuesday.  The flow of days is confusing, though he is sure it is the first day of mourning, the third day since he last spoke to his brother.  And it is Tuesday because Sally always wears her platinum hair stick-straight on the day she religiously visits the beauty parlor to have it ironed.

“Hi, Sally,” he waves.

“I heard about your brother,” she drawls.  “What an awful shame.”

Levon wants to back away from the counter, but Sally is leaning forward and her hand is stroking his shoulder.  She is pretty in a petite, pixie way; her veiny hands are a sharp contrast to her youthful face.  They resemble aged leather, coarse from sun damage.

“Your mom called ahead.  I have the box of CS ready to go.”

Sally liked to call Chloe’s medicine “CS.”  She thought cornstarch wasn’t befitting—not important enough, she’d say—for the serum that kept Chloe alive.

“I rode my bike…” Levon says.

“Don’t you worry, sweetie pie.  Take a bag with you now; I’ll drop a box off on my way home. How’s your mom doing?”

Levon hands Sally the wadded up money his mother had thrown at him earlier.  His mother was worse than ever, drowning in grief, but how could he tell Sally that? 

“She’s trying to make sense of it all.”

“It’s tragic,” Sally says, “utterly tragic.”

As if he needed Sally to remind him of that.  She hands Levon the bag, and the faraway look in her eyes can mean only one thing.  “I remember the day that precious little girl was born.”

Levon flipped the pages back in his mind.  All Madeline Keller wanted her entire life was to mother a daughter.  Two sons into her marriage, and the girl finally arrived: ten beautiful toes, ten tiny fingers, and too much gone wrong.

“A China!” shrieked five-year-old Levon, backing away from the pillowy softness of his baby sister’s skin.

“It’s a VA-gi-na,” said his big brother, accentuating the VA part, as if he were teaching a foreign language. 
Gross
soon followed as did
Don’t ask me to change the diaper; I’m not going near that thing
.

“Must we focus on her anatomy?” said Madeline, resting comfortably in one of the coveted suites at Mt. Sinai Hospital, overlooking Biscayne Bay.  “Look at this face.  Look at those perfect features.”

“She’s beautiful,” Craig said.  Meeting his wife’s glossy eyes, he smiled.  The upturn of her lips resembled something close to bliss.

“She looks exactly like David as a baby,” Madeline finally said.

“I looked old and shriveled like Great-grandpa Daryl?” David joked.

And they laughed, together, because it was true that most newborns resembled the elderly with their undefined features and squishy parts.  Most newborns, however, were budding flowers, their insides forming and growing.  But that wasn’t the case with Chloe.  Her insides contradicted her perfect exterior, and at three months, Chloe suffered her first seizure. It was a momentous day because it coincided with the afternoon that seven-year-old David scored the winning touchdown and brought his flag football team to victory by concluding the season at an unparalleled 10-0.  It was the beginning of what would mark a series of alternating highs and lows in the Keller household.

After the seizure, Chloe, the promising flower, began to wilt.  A series of tests led the Kellers to Boston Children’s Hospital, home to Dr. Max Gerald, the leading expert on Glycogen Storage Disease.  There it was confirmed that Chloe was among those afflicted with the much-overlooked and often-misdiagnosed illness.  Dr. Gerald explained that GSD is a rare genetic disorder of the liver, though to five-year-old Levon, it was the nameless, faceless foe that shadowed the entire family.

According to Dr. Gerald, the facts and statistics were grim: 1 in 100,000 children are born with the disease, 1 in 72 Jews are carriers.  His clinical summation was offered in vital, scientific terms.  Dr. Gerald would never have insulted the families with a terse explanation as to why their lives were forever changed.  To the contrary, he was long-winded and detailed, careful to explain every fact because he knew that while the wide-eyed, sleep-deprived parents were listening and nodding their heads, nothing was being processed.

Over a lengthy discussion in his pocket-sized office, Dr. Gerald explained that children born with this deficiency can’t release stored sugar from the liver because of a missing enzyme, making it virtually impossible to maintain normal blood sugar levels between meals without constant feedings.  The abridged version—the one saved for the curious ears of the uncomprehending children—was that if Chloe didn’t receive some special syrup every couple of hours, she would die.

“Cornstarch,” Dr. Gerald said.

“Cornstarch?” his perplexed parents repeated.

“Mixed with water or soy milk, which is free of dairy and fruit sugar. It’s digested slowly and provides a steady release of glucose in between feedings.”