Pavan hasn’t worn the Clean and Tidy scrubs for years.
The pants pull at the seams so she loosens the drawstring and slings them down on her hips, love handles bulging over. She grabs the fleshy roll, her fingers pinching like calipers. Disgusted by herself, she opts for leggings and a sweatshirt and pulls her long hair into a ponytail. She stares at her mirrored reflection, moisturizes and puts on her mascara and lip balm. She’s always been simple. She’s had the same layered haircut for twenty years and only ever wears more makeup on special occasions. She never mastered high heels, a sultry smoky eye, never even had a manicure. When she was younger this all registered as sporty or outdoorsy, but now it simply registers as her having given up. She’s like all the other athleisure suburban moms who wear yoga gear without ever seeing the inside of a studio. She turns away from the mirror and heads down the hallway to gather her cleaning supplies, stopping to knock on Ash’s door to remind him of the time.
“You’re going to be late for school.”
“I’m up,” he says. She opens the door and pokes her head in. He’s still in bed. “Ash, come on. Get going.” She crosses the room and raises his blinds.
“Jesus, Mom.” He covers his face with his pillow and she yanks it off.
“I’m serious.”
“Okay, okay,” he says, shooing her away. “Privacy, please. God.”
She leaves the door open despite his calls to close it. He gets up and slams the door shut behind her. A few minutes later he emerges dressed.
“Breakfast?” she asks.
“When have I ever. Besides, I don’t want to be late,” he says, mimicking her.
“Watch the tone.”
He throws his backpack on and leaves.
“Love you,” she calls after him. He doesn’t say it back and she watches him from the window. He has earbuds in, head down, shoulders curled in with the weight of his books as he walks down the street. He doesn’t look around, doesn’t notice the birds in the trees, doesn’t hear their morning song, doesn’t see that spring has made way for an early summer. He sees with a fisheye lens, the world curved around him. Pavan reminds herself that the teen perspective is one of ignorance and arrogance. She tries not to take it personally. It will pass. Everything does.
“Was that Ash?” Peter asks, coming in from a run.
“Lucky you, you missed the morning angst.”
“What are you up to today?” He’s talking loud, headphones still on, and stretches his quads one at a time. He’s soccer-player toned, legs chiseled like a doctor’s office anatomy chart.
“I’m going to see a client,” she says with slow precision so he can hear her over his music.
He takes an earbud out. “Sorry, what?” He’s still stretching and this annoys her.
“I’m going to see a new client.”
“That’s different,” he says, bending forward, releasing his hamstrings. “You don’t usually go on site anymore. Someone call in sick or something?”
“Yeah,” she says. She doesn’t want to tell him she’s going to Lisa’s to pack up the apartment. She hasn’t told him about seeing her, the journal — any of it. She certainly doesn’t want to tell him that she’s been driving Lisa to support group these last few weeks. She knows that if she told him, he’d attempt to life coach her, to try to get at the root of her feelings and pull up the unhealthy attachment, and he’d be right to try. She knows she shouldn’t have inserted herself into Lisa’s life, but after reading Jay’s journal she couldn’t stop thinking about him and how it all came to this. She meant to give the journal back to Lisa the first time she drove her to group but then they stopped for coffee, and listening to Lisa talk about Jay, witnessing her pain up close, seeing the serrated edges, made Pavan realize that giving it back in that moment would do more harm than good. What would Lisa get from it other than to see that her son wasn’t okay and that she, as his mother, should have noticed and that if she had, he might still be alive. Since then Pavan’s kept the journal in her bag, waiting for the right moment to return it.
“What time will you be back?” Peter asks.
She grabs her purse and keys. “Not sure. Go ahead and order in tonight.” Though the job won’t take all day, she’s hoping that maybe she and Lisa will have dinner, order in or go out. She tells herself that she’s being a good friend by listening and doesn’t name her darker motives — the graceless sympathy, the gratitude of better you than me.
She tells Peter goodbye and walks out. There’s always relief in leaving, shutting the door tight behind her. She remembers that same feeling when she was seventeen and walking to school, the brisk fall air, the faint smell of burning leaves, the momentary feeling of freedom. To be alone in her thoughts never seems quite possible — Peter, the boys, the house, the meal planning, the cooking, the cleaning, all of the thankless doing crashes in and crowds her out. Her life is robotic, both empty and full, yet in the rare moment when she’s not needed, she doesn’t know how to feel. The only time she’s ever heard anyone else voice those same thoughts was at Lisa’s support group last week. While she loitered by the open door, waiting for the session to end, she stole glances at the circle of grieving parents. “I just don’t know how I’m supposed to go on,” said the woman who lost her daughter to cancer. “Everything was for her, all of my time, and now I’m just not sure what to do.” Pavan knew she couldn’t and shouldn’t relate, but she did and felt quietly ashamed about it and went up into the chapel to keep from eavesdropping. The church was empty and sad-looking, as plain as she remembered it from Jay’s funeral. She walked to the front and stared at the crucifix that loomed above. She knelt down, bowing with her head to the ground as if she was in the Gurdwara. She attempted a prayer but couldn’t get beyond the word help. A voice from behind startled her and she bolted upright.
It was the minister.
“I’m sorry. I probably shouldn’t be here. I was just waiting for my friend Lisa. She’s downstairs.”
“Of course. Please don’t let me interrupt your prayers.”
“Oh, no. I’m not . . .”
“Praying?”
“No, I’m not religious or anything.”
“Or anything . . . and yet, here you are.”
Pavan’s mouth tightened into an uncomfortable smile. “Yes, here I am.”
“Right, of course. I find a lot of people who aren’t religious come in to pray, to talk, to share space.”
“Is that so?” Pavan tried to match the minister’s calm demeanor but she didn’t have his faith, his confidence, and it made her wonder how someone as young as him could have so much assurance unless he was just a born believer. Maybe he was an easy baby who slept through the night and never cried, and maybe some people were just lucky that way, bestowed with a wellspring of certitude.
“I’ve seen it time and time again: loss makes people question everything, and over time they look to the church for guidance.” He took a few steps toward her and she instinctively backed up.
“Yes, I can see that might happen, but I haven’t lost anything.”
“Haven’t you?” He looked at her in a way that made her feel entirely exposed. Her knees felt weak and she grabbed the top of a pew to steady herself. “The whole community has lost something in Jacob’s passing.”
“Passing? You mean death?”
“You think it’s a euphemism, but it’s not; he is passing. This life is not the end — temporary, yes, a place we move through as we find our way to God.”
“Right.” Pavan nodded, remembering her own religious upbringing that left her faithless and alone. “But tell me, where was God when Jay needed him? Let me guess, free will and all of that?”
“God doesn’t abandon us. It’s us who abandon him.”
“But maybe he could just give us a sign once in a while. You know, a signal that everything will be okay.”
“Isn’t your being here a sign? Bearing witness to Lisa’s pain is an act of goodness and healing.”
Pavan smiled, knowing that it wasn’t God who brought her here. It was fear, shame and guilt — the loveless emotions that edged out hope. “Speaking of Lisa, I should go. She’ll be waiting.” Without saying goodbye, she headed back downstairs where the group session was ending.
Lisa was putting on her coat. “Thanks for this — for driving me again.”
“It’s no trouble. I’m happy to help.”
“Well, I appreciate it. Most people say they want to help but don’t actually want to. It’s awkward. It’s like they’re curious about me, you know? I catch them staring at me in the grocery store, but then as soon as they see me see them, they look away or walk the opposite direction as if I’m contagious or something. But not you. You actually care.”
“I do care,” Pavan said, shame crawling up her neck. It was true: she did care, but she was curious too. Curious the way people are when they watch 60 Minutes or CSI, always taking mental notes on how not to be a victim.
She picks up the keys from the building manager and lets herself into Lisa’s apartment. The living room is packed, boxes stacked halfway up the window, obscuring the view of transmission towers in the green belt. When the kids were little she’d take them to ride their bikes along the hydro corridor, the buzz and hum of currents running above them, guiding their way. Anik used training wheels when he learned to ride but Ash refused. He’d wobble and fall, push along with his feet, the pedals scraping his tender calves. It took him just as many weeks to learn as it took Anik and he came through it bruised and scraped like a warrior, while Anik had systematic precision. Very little has changed. Ash pushes through the difficulties, forging ahead while Anik always processes the way before he begins. Despite the challenges, she reminds herself to be grateful for everything she has, especially now.
She looks around, life packed up in boxes, the compartmentalized space of moving on. Jay’s room hasn’t changed since she was last there. She cracks the window, and the smell of the neighbor’s torka comes in, the cooking of onions and curried spices reminds her of growing up. To her, it seems unfair that she survived her childhood and Jay wasn’t able to survive his. She looks at his small desk and wonders if that’s where he sat to write in his journal. She’d kept a diary when she was younger, and when she reread passages, she was always ashamed for having written them and immediately tore out the pages. Something about seeing her thoughts in ink made them all too real and she decided it was better not to admit things, not to confess. Some things are better left unsaid. She once heard Peter encouraging a client to write out his feelings, saying that unexpressed emotions create dis-ease in the body and mind. She wonders if this is why she always feels unsettled even though she has no great secrets, nothing beyond her ordinary story of neglect and want.
She sits on Jay’s bed, reaches for the stuffed bear propped up on the pillow and inhales the matted fur. It smells like cigarettes and kitty litter. She hasn’t seen a cat and wonders if they have one and if that’s why her allergies are acting up. Lisa didn’t mention it but now she can’t shake the feeling of being watched.
“Here kitty, kitty.” She wanders around the apartment until she finds the black cat hiding under Lisa’s unmade bed. It’s scrawny and nimble, an unlucky-across-your-path type of cat, and hisses at her as she shuts the door. She never got used to being in someone else’s home without them, and though it’s her job, there’s something cold and ghostly about inhabiting their space when they aren’t there. When she was a little girl she peered into house windows and glanced at people as they drove by her in the rain, always wondering what their lives were like, where they were going in such a hurry. Now, having been inside hundreds of homes, having looked inside countless medicine cabinets and kitchen cupboards, she realizes that everyone is living some variation of learning to be okay.
In Jay’s room, she starts with the closet, folding all of his clothes into boxes labeled accordingly. She tries not to think about it, to not pay attention to his things, to not think about the journal, to not think about him, not in a solid way at least. Thinking about him like a person makes things hard, so she prefers to think of him only as an idea, an example, a simile. She reminds herself that movers and cleaners are efficient because they’re detached; they don’t assign memories to things so they can simply categorize. She tries to do the same, dumping the contents of his dresser drawers into boxes and quickly folding and sorting them so that when Lisa is ready to donate she can go through them just as quickly. After she finishes with his clothes, she untacks the posters, boxes up his tae kwon do medals and trophies and clears the dusty bookshelves. He has stacks of old National Geographic magazines and a collection of secondhand books with cracked spines and yellowed pages. She sits cross-legged on the dingy carpet and thumbs through his leather-bound collected works of Shakespeare, the dog-eared copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and tries to imagine him reading them. The National Geographics, all old library copies, have pictures and even whole pages torn out, and she wonders if he was using them for some art project. She remembers that he’d always been artistic. Jay loved to doodle and he and Ash spent one summer making comic strips. She wishes she’d kept some of them, but of course it’s hard to know what’s important in the moment, what evidence of daily life will be rendered meaningful when the time comes.
She places them all in a box and seals them with tape before taking a moment to survey. With everything packed and the walls stripped of personality, the room feels decidedly abandoned. She’s disappointed. She expected to find something, some clue, another journal or a letter, offering some insight into what made Jay different from any other boy. The longer she looked through his things, the more normal he seemed, the more tragic it all is or was. The only thing left on the wall is a photo of Jay and his mother at his grade school graduation. She remembers that day and how excited Ash and Jay were to be heading to high school that fall. She stares at the photo, thinking of all the plans they made, and leaves the picture hanging there.
She sits at the desk and takes his journal out of her purse. She planned on putting it in one of the boxes for Lisa to find in due time. She imagined a year would go by before she was ready to go through them and by then maybe it would be easier to read. But now, as she rereads it, she knows that time won’t make it any easier. How can you accept that your child was not who you imagined him to be? That the light you felt for them was matched by some darkness, some shadow life? If only he had left her a note or a letter, something just for her that could be of comfort. She examines his penmanship, the curve and line of each letter, the erratic spacing, the fragmented thoughts. Pen in hand, she turns his journal to a new page and begins to write his final entry.
April 2
Dear Mom,
I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.
Dear Mom,
If you’re reading this, it means I’m gone. Please don’t think that you could have or should have done something. This is on me.
Dear Mom,
By the time you read this, I’ll be gone. There’s no way I can explain it to you that will make sense. I’m sorry.
Pavan drops the pen. She can’t find the right words, his words, and the failure, the forgery, makes her jittery, as if electricity is running through her looking for an outlet. She opens her purse and from the inside pouch takes out his remaining joint. Her hands shake and fumble as she lights it. She inhales until the swell and current of emotion subside. She puts the journal back in her bag and reaches for her phone, mindlessly scrolling. She sits on his bed and types Jacob McAlister into Facebook. His profile pic is him looking straight into the camera, tongue sticking out, hand in the air in a peace gesture. She scrolls down. His wall is full of condolences. His posts, all boarding and parkour videos, him and his friends skating and scaling walls. His Instagram account is more of the same — parkour, thrill-seeking, dangerous locations. As she scans through, seeing what he liked, who he was, she realizes how strange it is that even though he’s gone, his digital self still exists in a cloud, all bits and particles and uploads and downloads. It seems depressing to her that online lives go on. Every year his friends will get a reminder that it’s his birthday, memory notifications of past events and friends of friends will see him listed as “people you may know.” She puts the joint out on the mattress frame and lies down on top of the covers. They smell stale, in need of a wash, like gym clothes left in a bag. She wonders if that’s how Jay smelled and if Lisa sleeps here just to be close to him.
She stares at the cracked ceiling, mapping the water damage, connecting the stains like landscapes until her eyes feel heavy with sadness and sleep. She dreams that she’s moving boxes into a U-Haul, and each box is heavier than the next. She grabs a dolly and stacks them in the truck but each time she returns to the truck with more boxes, the others have fallen open, the contents of clothing and collectables spilling out. She panics and tries to stuff them back in but can’t. Suddenly the truck is a boat and the boxes fall off the deck one by one and sink. She jumps in after them, thrashing about, but can’t save anything. She wakes to the sound of Lisa’s voice calling her name with an upturned concern.
Pavan sits up, confused and embarrassed. Lisa is standing in front of her, holding the cat.
“Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I must have fallen asleep. I finished packing and then I . . .” Pavan glances at her watch. “I’m so sorry. I guess . . .” She pauses, aware of the skunky odor in the air and how it all must look. She closes her eyes for a second and tries to regain her composure. “I should go.” She gets up and reaches for her purse but drops it open-mouthed onto the floor. “Shit, I’m sorry.” Pavan kneels down to pick up the contents, stuffing the journal back in her bag before Lisa notices it.
Once in her car, she locks the door and exhales in short breaths. It’s all she can manage. Her chest is tight, her pulse racing and the more she tries to talk herself down, the dizzier she feels. A numbness sets in and she presses her head against the side window. “It’s okay,” she tells herself. “Just breathe. You’re okay.” She closes her eyes and focuses on her breath, counting it in and out. She opens her eyes and locks in on the children playing on the jungle gym in the park across the street. She watches as two boys race to the swings and propel themselves into the air, heads thrown back, legs pumping, higher and higher they go, until finally they can go no more and their legs go limp and they free fall.