Deb

DECEMBER 16, 1986

We all grieve differently, Deb thinks, walking up that snow-covered path, Danny’s hand in hers, but inside she wants to break something. She wants to scream. She wants to give up—toss herself over the bridge and float downstream. At the cabin she turns on every light and settles Danny on the couch with all the blankets she can find wrapped around him. She starts a fire with newspaper and, because she can’t find any kindling, takes a kitchen chair and slams it onto the living room floor so hard that it shatters, then picks up the pieces, lays them on top of the newspaper, and covers them with hardwood until a fire is blazing. She goes to the gas stove, puts milk into a pan, dumps cocoa and sugar in, stirs until the milk is dark and thick, then brings two steaming cups to where Danny sits next to the fire. What can she say to him? She’s been trying all day, but the words, for the first time, seem lodged. She hands him the hot cocoa and he takes it. She puts her free arm around him and holds him close to her body.

There were times when he was a baby (so many) when she felt her body was all she had to offer: her breast, her arms, her lap. Times when she had been too tired or overwhelmed to sing to him or play with trucks on the floor and so she had simply laid herself down on the bed and brought him to her and let him suck on her breasts and find what comfort and warmth he could while she closed her eyes and let her mind drift elsewhere. In those moments she had escaped, thought of the places she had loved before she came here: her childhood bedroom with its white muslin curtains. A lover by the Monongahela River in high school. That bed on the porch at Farther Heaven, waking alone in the mornings to crickets, roosters, crows. She had always felt half-guilty in those breastfeeding escapist moments, but should she have? Isn’t the body sometimes as much a comfort as anything else?

Finally he turns to her. He doesn’t say anything but reaches around her waist and puts his hand up under her shirt to the soft skin of her belly and holds it there. When he finishes his cocoa he hands her the cup and leans across her body and puts his face into her stomach and Deb strokes his hair and ears and neck and shoulders until she feels his body become heavy with exhaustion, and then she feels the small shudder that lets her know he has slipped into sleep, and she stays that way all night, by that fire, holding her son’s body, until the hillside blushes pink with dawn.

SHE WONDERS, FOR A WEEK OR TWO, IF THEY WILL GO somewhere else, move back to her mother’s house outside of Pittsburgh, take Danny across the country in her rusted Datsun, find some cheap apartment in the desert somewhere, but she and Danny stay there, in the cabin, on their own. She clears most of Stephen’s things out of the closets and begins wearing the things she keeps; his too-long jeans, which she crops at the ankles, his wool shirts and sweaters. On a Tuesday in January she drives to the library in Nelson and asks if they are hiring, says maybe she can help out for free for a while until a position opens up, and the green-eyed woman at the desk looks at her for a moment, an all-knowing and pitying look, then glances down at the book in front of her and says, “Sure.”

Small towns, Deb thinks. They are a bitch this way.

Other people have died, she reminds herself while splitting and stacking firewood. Other husbands. Other fathers and sons, she tells herself while washing dishes at the kitchen sink, while reshelving books on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Other people have suffered and lived on beyond the window of their loved one’s lives. In small towns, even. She knows a woman whose husband killed a man, shot him in the head in broad daylight, and that woman lives here still. Visits her husband, whom she manages to still love, once a month in the prison north of Rutland. That woman has come to love, she once told Deb, while checking out a book at the library, living alone. She told her that solitude is the only thing that brings any comfort anymore. But that it does—in abundance: geese on lakes; herons on ponds; boots on leaves in cold weather.

Eventually the library hires her and Deb makes enough money to buy their food and firewood. Her mother sends her money sometimes, and Deb doesn’t turn it down. She empties the stinking water under the sink. Takes her old car to town to get it fixed. Their lives become quieter, hers and Danny’s, more rhythmic, in many ways more peaceful: no longer reaching out for Stephen’s love. No longer trying to touch his sadness or assuage his anger. In the evenings they read books, play board games. Deb drinks wine, too much of it, she is sure, but enough so that she can fall asleep early beside Danny’s body and sleep deeply. She listens to Stephen’s favorite records—John Prine, Townes Van Zandt—and her own—Ruth Brown, the Nina Simone album Bird sent her in the mail, Georges Brassens—and sometimes she and Danny dance around the cabin. Shuffling and laughing by candlelight. Sometimes they laugh so hard, they both end up in tears.

He is a boy lost at sea, her son, and she his only anchor. “Come,” she says, pulling him toward her, his face the same contours as Stephen’s, his hands the same, his legs the same. She holds him, and sings him the songs she sang to him as a baby, and ten years old or no, he lets her.