After the burial, the small group congregated at the house, eating the cheese Danish and the hard knots of rugelach that Carol had somehow found the time to buy, and speaking in shocked, muted voices. Later, when everyone was gone, Natalie knew that the only things left for her to contend with were infinite space and time; it was August, and most of Natalie’s clients were already off on the vacations she had planned for them. Friends called, but no one could speak with any real authority or conviction.
Sara’s friends kept phoning from the summer house: Adam, sobbing and apologizing and saying something incomprehensible about a raspberry pie, and Maddy, with a voice as soft and hesitant as a child’s. She cried with them on the telephone, then at the end they all hung up, feeling no better. Some of Natalie’s friends dropped by to hold her hand and bring fruit, then retreated meekly. Hard, shiny pears, apricots, and grapefruits as big as bowling balls littered her kitchen counters. Even Harvey Wise ambled in, mumbled and held her one last time, then fled. He said he was “no good with death.” It frightened him, and he clearly wasn’t up to being heroic with this woman he had slept with only once.
A fountain of coffee was continually brewed and served, and the house took on the aroma of one of those new coffee boutiques that had begun to pop up everywhere lately. After the first week of mourning, the volume of visitors diminished. Soon no one wanted coffee; soon it was just two tired women in this large house in a suburb that now seemed far from civilization.
It was Carol who suggested they go for a drive. Natalie hadn’t been outside since the trip to the cemetery. She hadn’t even gotten dressed, but had simply stayed in her nightgown, padding slowly around the house. But now Carol handed her a set of clothes which she dutifully donned, and combed her hair for her and walked her outside, where the sunlight struck Natalie as both pleasurable and deeply inappropriate. They went to Natalie’s dented but intact car; Carol took the wheel.
“Where to, kiddo?” said Carol. “A movie, maybe? There’s that thing at the sixplex with Brad Pitt as Disraeli.”
But Natalie shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Then where?” said Carol. “Come on, I’ll take you anywhere.”
“Anywhere? Really?” asked Natalie.
“Yes. What did you have in mind?”
Natalie paused a moment before answering, and then she said, “The house.”
“But the whole point was to get you out of the house for a while,” said Carol.
“Not my house,” said Natalie. “Sara’s.”
“What?” said Carol. “But why?”
“I don’t know,” said Natalie. “I just suddenly feel as though I’d like to see where she went every summer. To see the place, finally.”
“Shouldn’t we call first?” asked Carol.
Natalie shrugged, then quietly said, “I’m her mother.”
The drive to the house seemed endless; Natalie felt like an impatient child needing distractions. She itched to change the radio station, even when a song came on that she liked. That was what death had done: It taken away the possibility of complex and sustained thought, leaving her simpleminded, with basic, constantly shifting needs. The only complex topic she could think about was her daughter’s death, and that was too awful, so she shut her mind off, let it lie slack. She sometimes thought she could almost feel her mind sloshing around in its own pan of chemicals.
“Let’s stop at the grocery store first,” Natalie said, as they came to a massive Price Chopper. “You know kids, how they like to eat.
“They’re hardly kids,” Carol said, but then she knew enough not to say more. Sara, at least, would remain a “kid.” She was not fully formed as an adult—the shell hadn’t had time to harden. She would be a girl forever, and all of her adult traits would slowly be loosened from her, so that finally Natalie would imagine that she had lost a literal child—a preschooler drowned at a neighbor’s pool, or an infant who had succumbed in the night to crib death. Natalie would join that large, unconnected club of mourning parents. They were easy to spot; they were the ones who looked like the living dead, wandering through shopping malls and the carpeted halls of offices where they worked. People gave them a wide berth when they passed to use the water cooler or the copy machine: Step back—grieving mother coming through.
Now, inside the supermarket, Natalie walked the wide, ice-cold aisles with a kind of wonder. “Look at this,” she said, plucking from the shelves all sorts of junk food that she hadn’t even known existed. These were the kinds of items that were always advertised during the Saturday morning cartoons. “Frooty Rollers,” she read aloud, picking up a package of some fruit-flavored candy item that contained no actual fruit and appeared to be made of latex. “Now,” she read, “in bright blue jazzberry flavor!”
“There is no such thing as a jazzberry,” said Carol, disapproving. “And, as you know, this color blue does not exist in nature.”
“For God’s sake,” said Natalie, “I’m not looking for nature here. I’m trying to buy them something they’ll like.”
She kept on like that, loading the cart with ranch-flavored chips and jumbo bags of red licorice. She realized that she did not know what sorts of things Sara’s friends ate, in actuality, but actual food held no appeal to her, so how could it to them? This was novelty food; if you ate it, it was better than nothing, better than subsisting on air. From her perch by the register at this unfamiliar supermarket, the checkout woman in her green smock took a cursory look at the items on the belt and said, knowingly, “Houseful of teenagers?”
“Yes,” said Natalie quickly. “That’s right.”
“I can’t get mine to eat anything decent either,” the woman went on, dragging each item over the price-code light buried under glass. “Kids today, their teeth rot in their heads, they kill themselves with drugs and I don’t know what else.” She shook her head, and Natalie shook hers too, momentarily enjoying the solidarity, enjoying being able to convey the impression that she, Natalie, still had a child. Kids today, she thought.
But she felt sorry for these “kids,” these thirty-year-olds to whom she was bringing gifts of near-food. She had refused to let them come to the burial—it was too overwhelming to imagine them all there, standing in the sun and crying, and then she would have had to have them to the house afterward. But they had plagued her with phone calls, telling her of their sorrow, wanting her to know about it, and finally, today, she understood that their sorrow was real. So she would attempt to placate them with Frooty Rollers and other such things. Her arms full of shopping bags, she walked from the cool of the store into the startling heat of the parking lot. The blacktop felt spongy and soft in the heat.
“Natalie, wait up!” Carol said from somewhere behind her. Carol was a faithful friend who was becoming less relevant to this mission, Natalie thought as she loaded the trunk of the car with shopping bags. Carol hurried over to Natalie. “I’m here for you, you know,” Carol said, but the comment was something of a non sequitur.
“No,” said Natalie simply, “you’re not.” She closed the car door and let herself in the front passenger side.
“How can you say that?” Carol said, her voice getting shrill as she herself went around and opened the driver’s door.
The two women faced each other in the little box of heat. “Because you still have a daughter, and I don’t,” Natalie said.
“Natalie, I barely have a child,” Carol said. “I mean, let’s face it, Tina is not exactly what I would have chosen.”
Natalie stared. “How can you say that?” she asked.
Carol’s remark reminded her that the world had divided, separating the devastated-by-loss from the untouched-by-loss. Carol had a daughter; her daughter had a heart that still beat inside her chest. It was true that Carol did not approve of Tina, and that while she claimed to love her, the love seemed founded more on ancient history (a Mary Cassatt vision of bathing a pink baby) than on anything that still lasted. For the pink-complected Mary Cassatt baby had t
urned into a large Doberman of a woman—a lesbian with a particular interest in self-defense issues. Tina ran a dojo near her home in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her hair had been sculpted into a brush cut, giving her the look of a handsome male pilot for a commercial airline. She seemed corporate, strong-jawed, and yet she lived outside the mainstream culture, in a small two-family house with an older woman named Ronnie, who taught feminist film criticism at a local college.
Who knew why children chose the paths they did? Why had Tina become a lesbian, and Sara been attracted to men? But why, too, was Tina in a committed, live-in relationship at thirty—a marriage, of sorts—while Sara, unattached, lived every summer among her college friends?
Carol had vowed to take care of Natalie, living with her during August and continuing to heat the array of international casseroles that the neighbors had delivered. But suddenly Natalie didn’t want that sort of aid—she wanted to reject it, bitterly. It seemed unfair to hurt Carol’s feelings, she who had done so much for her already. But chance had given them separate paths: the hectic, commuter’s pace of the untouched-by-loss, and the slow, Thorazine shuffle of the devastated-by-loss.
Good-bye, Carol, good-bye, Natalie thought as they got back into the car. Suddenly she was in a hurry to get to the house of Sara’s friends. They were a mess, they had said on the telephone, and so was she. They could all be one big, unwieldy mess together.
Natalie buckled herself into the seat, making sure she heard the unambiguous click of the safety belt, and then they drove to the house without stopping.
3
The Friends of Sara Swerdlow
For three days and nights following the accident, Sara’s sorrowing friends lived like squatters in the darkness of a tunnel. They fell easily into a pattern of drinking—repetitively lifting and lowering a glass to the mouth, something they had done in college and still knew how to do without much thought. In the rooms of the house they let themselves collectively fall. Down, down, down they went, to a place at the bottom where there was no light, just further thoughts about their friend and housemate Sara and how they would never see her again.
It was on day three that Maddy found herself up on the roof of the house with Adam. In the past, they would bring a boom box and a cooler of beer up here, and cover themselves with either a high-SPF lotion or a slick of melanoma-welcoming oil, then lie on towels spread on the slanting roof for much of the day, looking down on the tips of trees and the street, and the thin strip of ocean in the distance. But now, when staying in the house seemed intolerable, yet going out into the real world seemed even worse, Maddy and Adam—who had both been hit the hardest by the news—opened the hatch that led to the broad slope of shingled roof. Hoisting themselves up, they sat in the early morning light with the unbearable world beneath them. This was the first air they had gotten in three days; death, by nature, was an airless event.
Adam had been largely unhurt in the accident, and so had the young vacationing investment banker who had backed out of the driveway. They had stood in the road together with the police lights spinning and Sara in the car. Adam was sobbing and the banker clumsily tried to comfort him, but he was inconsolable. At the local hospital, a nurse asked if Adam “wanted something,” and he swallowed a tiny orange pill gratefully. He cracked his knuckles and paced the small room they had put him in, waiting for the pill to take effect and his friends to arrive.
“Remember her voice,” said Adam softly now, not a question. Sara’s voice had been unusual, a smoky, laughing voice; she was much smarter than the voice might let you believe. Hers was the voice of a beautiful waitress in cutoffs at a cowboy bar, someone you would always have a good time with.
“And remember the song?” said Maddy. “Her backwards song? She sang it that first night at college, as we lay there in that little room in the dark. It was so weird, and I loved her immediately.” Now Maddy began to sing the backwards version of “Tears on My Pillow” that Sara used to sing: “Uoy t’nod rebmemer em / Tub I rebmemer uoy / Ti t’nsaw gnol oga / uoy ekorb ym traeh ni owt…
Adam closed his eyes. The bruises on his arm had already faded from the dark plum color of a fresh accident to a paler, less alarming denim. He had been spared in the accident, “miraculously,” people tended to say, although if he had been on the drivers side she would have been spared, not him. If he had been driving it would be his voice that would be missed, not that sweet, reedy voice of Sara’s, remembered for having sung a backwards song in the middle of the night.
“I know that life will simply go on without her,” Maddy said, “but I also know that I am going to be different now. I’m not sure how, but it’s already happened.” She reached into her pocket and took out a crush-proof pack of cigarettes, aware, as she did, that there was a total absence of wind up there on the roof. The morning was calm, utterly still, as if poised on the edge of something. She handed a cigarette to Adam and he took it, even though he had never been known to smoke. It didn’t matter; identifying traits were no longer reliable. Anyone could do anything now, and no one would be surprised.
They sat on the roof and smoked for a while. “Why didn’t her mother let us come?” said Adam suddenly. “That’s the thing I don’t understand. I know there’ll be a memorial service eventually, but I wanted to go to the cemetery.”
“On the phone her friend said it was private, just for family,” said Maddy. “Apparently, Sara’s mother is having some sort of nervous breakdown, and she didn’t want anyone else around to see. I can understand that, can’t you?”
Adam shrugged. “She never liked me,” he said lightly. “She thought I was preventing Sara from falling madly in love with some straight guy. But that’s not what prevented her.”
“No,” said Maddy. “She just hadn’t met that perfect straight man yet.”
“I don’t even know if she wanted that,” said Adam. “Anyway, you’re the only woman in North America with the perfect straight man,” said Adam. “Other than Peter, it’s slim pickings. Look at who she went out with—that record-label lawyer, and that creepy professor, and that guy Sloan.” They both sneered slightly at the idea of Sloan, and Maddy became aware that no man would have gotten past their sarcasm and contempt; in their minds, no one was acceptable for Sara. “We were talking about men right before the crash,” Adam went on. “How we’d both probably be dissatisfied with them for our entire lives.”
“You’ve got Shawn here with you,” said Maddy. “Isn’t he at all satisfying?”
“Oh, Shawn,” said Adam. “What we have with each other, it’s not love. I invited him out here for the weekend, and the whole thing was like a game of musical chairs in which he happened to be here when Sara was killed. So now he’s simply here in the middle of everything.” He shrugged, letting some ash flutter from his cigarette over the side of the house. “He’s very handsome,” he said. “But I don’t want handsome anymore. I don’t want anything. Sara and I were laughing, both of us, and listening to the radio. Van Morrison was playing,” he continued, “and we were happy because here it was the start of another August.” Suddenly Adam tossed his cigarette over the side of the house and stood up, wobbly on the incline.
“Sit down,” said Maddy, “you’re scaring me.”
“Oh, what’s the point?” said Adam. “I don’t even like anyone else. No offense,” he added quickly. “She was my best friend in the world, Maddy. You don’t generally get any new best friends after thirty. This is it; it’s over now.” They looked at each other in the morning light, these two rumpled people who had never felt great affection for each other, these two people whose connective tissue was Sara Swerdlow.
“She was my best friend too,” Maddy said. “But I’m not going to break my neck falling off the roof for her. Sit the fuck down, Adam.” And obediently, he did.
LATER, BACK inside the house, Duncan fussed in Maddy’s arms and opened and closed his mouth like a chick’s. It was astonishing to Maddy that even now, the baby still needed food. She took a swig
of vodka from a mug, then opened her blouse and let her breast spring out like a jack-in-the-box. While he drank milk, she drank vodka; it was the only way they could get through this terrible time. Her breasts still filled and emptied, even though Sara was dead; this fact was astonishing, but it was also a relief. As she looked down at the top of Duncan’s head, the place where the bones didn’t quite join, she thought of how fragile he was, and what a mistake it had been to bring him into the world. She was now terrified of something happening to him; when he slept in his Portacrib, she started at the receiver of the infant monitor, hypnotized by watching the red lights rise and fall with his breathing.
She remembered how, the moment Duncan was born, Peter had turned to her, his expression clearly overwhelmed and inconsolable, although he later claimed he had been merely happy. “This is my son!” he’d explained, and he’d gone on to insist that apparently all men felt a particular sensation of being overcome when their wives delivered a boy.
Lately Peter hovered over her again, as much a useless appendage as he had been during labor, when he had lurked in the background of the delivery room, a stooping, somewhat useless figure in green scrubs and silly paper clown shoes. He seemed useless right now, too, for although he had been crying and drinking constantly since the crash, he hadn’t been terribly close to Sara; she was Maddy’s friend, not his, and Peter had never even seemed to like her. But still, Peter was drinking along with everyone and crying and shaking his head in somber, inarticulate shock. So, for that matter, was Shawn, who had had no relationship with Sara at all—having only just met her the night she was killed. It became a house of drunks, the air itself taking on that familiar bad-breath stink of drinking.
The only thing that saved them from falling into total disaster, Maddy thought now, as Duncan tugged rhythmically and gratingly at her left nipple, was the fact that there was a baby in the house. Duncan had his clockwork needs, regardless of anything that was going on around him, and he forced you to turn away from your sorrow and pay attention to him.