Stranger

  “Don’t you know what time it is?”

  “Sure. I thought you’d be up by now.”

  “You must be joking. It’s the ass crack of dawn.”

  “Just getting in then?”

  My eyes snapped open. “Seriously. Are you stalking me?”

  “No. I’m just guessing that if you didn’t just get up, you’re just getting in. Because I know you don’t take men to your place.”

  “You are so fucking annoying.”

  “And you’re delightfully charming when you’re exhausted.”

  I rubbed the sand gritting into my eyeballs. “What do you want!”

  “To talk to you.”

  “Talk to me in a few hours,” I mumbled, burying my face against my pillow.

  “Grace.”

  I waited, but he said nothing else. I groaned. “What?”

  “Remember what I said about me not caring if you had a boyfriend?”

  It was my turn to be silent. “Yes.”

  “I’m ashamed to tell you, I lied.”

  “He wasn’t my boyfriend.” I paused, and went for it, with only exhaustion and emotion as my excuse. “He’s just someone I fuck on occasion.”

  Sam made a small noise. “Uh-huh.”

  “How about that?” I challenged. “Do you care about that?”

  “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”

  The night had been an up-and-down roller coaster, and the ride wasn’t over yet, even though my stomach had gone sick with the loop-dee-loops. “Goddammit, Sam!”

  “Do you love him?”

  “No!”

  “Does he love you?”

  I sighed. “I hope not.”

  “Good.”

  I wanted to scream at the smile I heard in his voice, but I bit it back. “I’m hanging up now.”

  “I’ll call later.”

  “Oh. My. God.” I writhed in my bed in an agony of frustration. “Why? Why would you do that?”

  “Because I want to talk to you,” came his mild answer. “Maybe take you to lunch. What do you say?”

  “I say I still stink from sex with another man!” I shouted into the phone. “What in the fucking holy seven layers of hell do you want to take me to lunch for?”

  “I thought a sandwich, maybe a bowl of soup—”

  I burst into laughter that sounded suspiciously like tears. “You are insane.”

  “Not insane. Crazy, maybe.”

  “Sam…” I trailed off. “This attention is flattering, if not a little creepy…”

  “Only a little though, right? Mostly flattering.”

  “You’re crazy,” I whispered, and yawned. “What kind of man says things like that for serious?”

  “A patient one.”

  “Patience implies waiting for something.”

  Sam laughed. “Don’t forget. I remember exactly what I’m waiting for.”

  He hadn’t said it seductively, but somehow that made it sexier. “I told you I don’t do that regularly.”

  “Yet you do have men you fuck on occasion. Why can’t I be one of them?”

  “If that’s all you want,” I told him, “why bother with lunch?”

  “Because I also like to eat. I figured I could kill two birds with one stone, as the saying goes.”

  “You…you are…” My mind refused to provide my tongue with what, exactly, I thought Sam was.

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “I have to go to sleep, Sam. I really do.”

  “Me, too.”

  I paused on the brink of unconsciousness, my finger poised over the disconnect button.

  “Tell me you stayed up all night.”

  “Oh, yeah. I just got home a little while ago.”

  This shook me into wakefulness. “You did?”

  “You’re not the only one who fucks on occasion, Grace.”

  This was not what I wanted to hear, though I had absolutely no right to complain. “The blonde.”

  “Was she blond? I don’t remember.”

  “Are you messing with me?” I asked, suspicious.

  “Does it matter to you if I am?” Sam said. “Ask yourself why.”

  I grunted. “You are not only crazy, you are a pain in the ass.”

  “Oh, my aim is much better than that.”

  Dammit. He made me laugh again, though it quickly trailed into a whine. “Sam, c’mon, I have to get some sleep.”

  “Lunch with me later?”

  “You’re taking advantage of my exhaustion. You know that, right?”

  “I’m shameless that way.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said finally, the words slurring. “Don’t call me. If you wake me up, I’ll seriously kill you.”

  “You’ll call me,” he said. “Promise?”

  “Yes, you annoying pain, yes. I promise.”

  “I’ll wait.”

  My chest got tight again. “Oh, Sam. Don’t wait too long.”

  “Oh, Grace,” he mimicked. “I have nothing better to do.”

  “Fine. I’ll call.”

  “Jesus doesn’t like liars, Grace.”

  “Jesus—” I coughed. “I thought you were Jewish.”

  “You’re not, though.”

  “I’m not particularly religious at all.”

  “Okay, fine. Kiki doesn’t like liars.”

  “Kiki?” It took me a few seconds for the sleep syrup in my brain to drain long enough for me to get it. “Oh, God.”

  “Go to sleep, Grace. And call me later. You promised.”

  “I promised,” I muttered, thumbing off the phone and falling asleep without another word.

  I didn’t sleep long enough, but the next time the phone rang it was the answering service and not Sam. I fought my way out of dreams to grab it up, listened to the message and fell back onto my pillow wishing this was a nightmare. That, at least, wouldn’t be real.

  I didn’t know the man who’d called me, but I knew the waver in his voice well enough. I didn’t have to say much, or lead him. He had all the information I needed. I was grateful for that, at least. It didn’t make it easier, but it made it faster.

  I showered fast and dressed, then took the van to the Hershey Med Center alone. I wouldn’t need Jared with me for this. I didn’t need help lifting the body of a child.

  They met me in the hospital lobby. A young couple, both about my age. Grief had stolen the color from their faces and left them pale, but the man’s handshake was firm when he greeted me. They wanted to know if they could meet with me right away to plan the service for their son.

  They didn’t want to wait, he said, his wife silent but nodding beside him. They had no family to come in from out of town and wanted to bury him as soon as they could.

  “It’s for my wife,” he said when she excused herself to use the bathroom. “It’s killing her, you see? We didn’t even know he was sick until two days ago. We need to…”

  He choked on the word bury, but though his gaze flared bright with tears, he didn’t weep.

  “I understand.” I rubbed his shoulder through the fleece of his pullover jacket and he put his face in his hands for a moment before pulling it together.

  “I have to be strong for her,” he muttered.

  He spoke to me, but the words were meant for himself.

  When his wife returned, it took only half an hour and a few phone calls to arrange for the service and burial the next day. The chief of the cemetery crew wasn’t happy about coming in on a Sunday. When I explained the need, he went silent on the phone for a moment before he agreed.

  The wife gave me a paper grocery sack filled with clothes. I left the couple, neither of them crying, in the lobby and picked up my young charge in the morgue. I’ve made hundreds of similar journeys and will admit to having gained a certain degree of callousness about my silent passengers, but not this time.

  I had never taken care of a child before. A few teenagers, a few young adults. But never a child.

  He was four years old when he died,
victim of a sudden and inexplicable fever caused by a particularly virulent strain of summer flu.

  My nephew, Simon, was four years old.

  In the hospital the boy had been placed into a body bag, but when I took him to the funeral home I had to lay him, naked, on my table and prepare him for burial.

  The parents had chosen to lay their small son to rest in his footy pajamas with his blankie and teddy beside him. I had to pad his cheeks with cotton to keep them pudgy, and my hands shook when I did it. I wept as I dressed him carefully and tucked the soft blue blanket under his arm, and harder when I brushed the soft curls over his cold forehead.

  Though I have often felt empathy and sorrow for the families who entrust me with their loved ones, it’s never been my own sorrow. Even when the dead person was someone I knew, a part of me larger than sadness understood grief is for the living. The dead are gone and can’t care anymore. Grief is for the ones left behind, and though I understand it, I’d never felt it for myself the way my clients did.

  But for that small boy whose eyes had closed too soon, I wept. When his parents came to see him, a woman and a man driven apart by the awfulness of their relentless pain, I wanted them to see him as he’d been, not how he was. I didn’t want them to know about the cotton in his cheeks, or how beneath his pj’s crept a line of stitches like railroad tracks from where the doctors had cut him open trying to save his life. I wept as I placed him in the smallest casket I had. A nicer one than they could afford…but I wouldn’t tell them that. I wept in silence, with hot tears slipping down my face and pooling salt in the corners of my lips as I worked. I wept, too, as I called Jared to let him know he’d need to come in the next day to help me.

  I wanted them to see him as he’d been, to offer them that small comfort and save them from further pain. I wanted to tell them he was safe and in a better place where he couldn’t hurt any longer, but I didn’t believe that. I knew he was gone. Just gone.

  I told them that anyway, an easy lie because I knew it was expected and would layer over them with the hundred other whispers of something better beyond. Because it would help, if not then but later, when they looked at his photos and told each other not to forget the sound of his sweet, small laughter even as they already had begun to.

  I couldn’t make myself believe it, so I did what I could, instead, which was help them, too.

  Night had fallen by the time I was done, and I went to bed still weeping, and woke with my pillow damp from tears. I’d arranged for a 9:00 a.m. viewing, and at the families’ request a 10:00 a.m. burial.

  At nine forty-five, ten minutes after we needed to leave for the cemetery, people were still arriving to say goodbye. The husband and wife seemed overwhelmed by this show of support, some of the mourners strangers who’d known the parents as someone to say hello to on the street. Every chair in the chapel was filled.

  I didn’t cry during the service. It wouldn’t have been appropriate, and they didn’t need my tears. They needed me to make sure the hearse had gas in it and the driver knew where to go.

  They needed me to fill out the forms making their son’s death official, as if they needed ink on paper to make their loss true. They needed me to greet the other mourners and direct them to the chapel, to point them to the restrooms and the guest book, to make sure everyone sat when they were supposed to and got to where they needed to be. That man and woman whose world had torn itself to pieces needed me to help them hold it together for just a few hours, and I did the best I could.

  They’d planned no eulogy; after all, what four-year-old had accomplishments to brag on?

  But as the room filled to overflowing, the boy’s father looked around and asked me if it would be all right if he said a few words before we left to go to the cemetery.

  He got up in front of the crowd in an ill-fitting navy suit that looked borrowed. If he’d wept at all, his face showed no signs of tears, though his eyes burned as bright as they had in the hospital lobby. He cleared his throat once, then again, and all of us waited, silent in our respect for what he would say.

  “He never did learn to put away his blocks,” the man said. His grief welled up, then, in great shining waves that spilled out of his eyes and down his face to wet his lips.

  I knew what that tasted like.

  A single sob broke free from his wife and she stifled it with her fist. She was not the only one crying. Her husband cleared his throat again but made no attempt to wipe his face. Tears glistened and dripped off his chin.

  “He was my son. And I loved him. And I don’t know what we’re going to do without him.”

  He looked around the room and nodded once, as though satisfied, then reached for his wife. They wept together then, but they weren’t alone with it. Not the way they’d been in the hospital, or the way I think they believed they’d been.

  When we were done at the cemetery and the line of cars with their lights on and the purple

  “funeral” flags stuck with magnets to the hoods had gone, I went home. I closed the door and went to my apartment. My cell phone hadn’t rung all day. No message blinked on my answering machine. I hadn’t eaten enough. Hadn’t slept enough. I teetered on the edge of exhaustion, my nerves raw and my world tipped upside down.

  I sank onto the couch and put my face in my hands, and I wept again, this time forcing tears that didn’t want to come so I could put it away.

  I had to put it away.

  My fingers fumbled the number twice before I managed to finish dialing, and the phone rang a long time without being answered. So long I feared I would get nothing but static or a voice mail, and I couldn’t leave a message. I counted the rings, thinking I would hang up after three. Four. Another, just one more.

  And finally, at last, he answered, his voice not questioning who was calling, because it sounded as if he already knew.

  “Sam,” I said. “I need you.”

  Chapter 15

  He brought me matzo-ball soup in a plastic container and did everything but feed it to me.

  Then he ran the shower for me, hot, and put me under the water while I cried again. He pulled a T-shirt over my head and helped me into pajama bottoms, and he tucked me into bed where he spooned me.

  I was sort of delirious at that point, wrung out from emotion and exhaustion, and I know I rambled on and on about death, life, fate, the lack of white tunnels. The unfairness of a god that would take a child so young. The un-deservedness of grief.

  Sam was silent for the most part, his body tucked up against mine and his arm cradling me. The bed was rocking like a boat on the sea, and Sam my anchor, keeping me still. His breath touched the back of my neck.

  “If there’s no sorrow,” he murmured, “how can anyone appreciate the joy?”

  He was right. Of course he was. But there was no comfort in that for me that day. And though I knew this shattering grief wasn’t even mine, that time would pass and I would get over that child’s death faster than those who’d loved him, that did nothing but make me rage all the more.

  At some point, I slept, unable to stay awake any longer. The body wins out over the mind, always. I don’t remember what I dreamed, only that when I woke to the sound of Sam’s soft snores, I didn’t want to run away.

  I woke him with gentle kisses down the side of his neck and his bare chest—when had he changed? Further exploration below the covers revealed that at some point he’d stripped to boxer briefs, the front of which bulged a bit more and more as my mouth moved over his skin.

  There must be sorrow to truly appreciate joy. I knew it. He was right. But I was right, too, when I said that everything ends. Correct in my belief that grief is for the living, the ones left behind, and I hadn’t stopped being afraid of that. If anything, watching that man and woman put their child into the ground and seeing how they clung to each other for support had only stiffened my convictions.

  “Miz Grace,” Sam drawled. “Are yew tryin’ to seduce me?”

  About two minutes too late I realiz
ed I must look like the Elephant Man. “It’s not working?”

  “I didn’t say that.” He smiled at me.

  Mindful now of the fact I was sure to have awful morning breath, I didn’t move to kiss his mouth, though I did give in to the urge to nibble his chest again. Sam touched my hair, softly.

  “What time do you have to go downstairs?”

  “Shit.” I looked at the clock. “Half an hour ago. But I didn’t have any appointments this morning, so it’s okay.”

  He touched my hair again, just as softly. “I’d say after the day you had yesterday, you deserve to sleep in a little bit. I, on the other hand…”

  “Lessons today?” I sat up and chained my knees to my chest with my arms. They made a nice resting spot for my chin.

  Sam grinned and stretched and looked utterly delicious. “You know it.”

  He sat up and ran a hand through his hair until it stood on end. It’s really not fair how men can roll out of bed and face the day and even the least appearance-conscious woman still needs at least a shower.

  Here I was in bed with him, after months of flirting, and he wasn’t even trying to kiss me.

  I must look worse than I thought. I surreptitiously touched my eyes to check for puffiness.

  Sam, on the other hand, swung those long legs out of bed and started dressing. I noticed he’d folded his clothes neatly on the chair. I hadn’t even noticed him getting out of bed the night before.

  “I must’ve been really out of it last night.”

  Sam’s head appeared from the neck hole of his plain blue T-shirt. “You were.”

  I was suddenly, uncomfortably aware that strangers we had met and strangers we still were. Mostly. Sam seemed utterly at ease as he pulled on his jeans and shrugged into a button-down shirt he left untucked. He was acting as if we’d spent a thousand nights together already, but he hadn’t even tried to fuck me.

  I watched without saying anything as he finished dressing and helped himself to my bathroom. I heard him gargling and sat up straight. Was he using my toothbrush? Sharing saliva was one thing, but not on my toothbrush! He appeared a moment later and I smelled mouthwash on his breath when he leaned to kiss…my cheek.