The back door opened and closed. The sun poured into the living room. I didn’t move from my position, lying on the floor. It didn’t matter much who was entering my house. I recognized my mother’s sensible brown shoes as she walked into the room and stopped a few feet from where I lay.
“Napping?” she said.
“Uh, yeah, sort of. What time is it?” I asked, pushing myself up into a sitting position. Her arms were filled with books.
“Three fifteen,” my mother said.
“Oh man.”
“I brought you some books,” she said. “I’m not saying you have to read them. I just thought they might be, uh, useful. Helpful.” She bent and placed the stack on the floor beside me. I picked up the top one. Finding Your Way after Your Spouse Dies.
Your way to what? I thought.
I eyed the rest of the stack with apathetic suspicion.
She gestured to them. “Just a thought. No pressure.” She straightened and her eyes swept over the room. I followed her gaze. Pillows from the sofa and a cotton blanket lay limp and crumpled on the floor. A pair of jeans and Kevin’s blue dress shirt mingled with the socks I had taken off last night. A bowl of congealed yogurt sat beside a half-eaten apple on the coffee table. The debris of despondence. I realized, too, the house smelled musty. The smell that hits you when you come home after being away for a week. It must have been obvious to her that I had been camped out on my living room floor since the funeral, more than a week ago. I offered no explanation.
My mother pressed her lips into a thin white line. I fingered a copy of Getting to the Other Side of Grief and felt a chasm open between me and my mother. Like we were castaways on separate islands, waving to each other from our beaches but unable to swim the distance to connect. I wondered what she was thinking. What she knew that she couldn’t tell me, that I’d have to find out on my own. I raked a hand through my greasy hair.
I suddenly envied my mother. Sure, she’d lost her husband, but she’d had the luxury of time with him. Forty-three years. Kevin and I had five years. She’d raised her children with her husband by her side. My arms were empty, my womb unattended. Self-pity writhed in my chest, pushing upward until it burned my eyes. I pushed the stack of books away with my big toe.
“Do you need anything?” she said.
Everything. “No. Nothing.”
She nudged the books toward me with her brown suede mules. “If you decide to look at them, start with these two.” She bent over and grabbed Experiencing Grief and The Heart of Grief. “They’re library books.”
Alone again, I pushed the pile of books as far as I could reach. The books Mom had read after Dad died. It looked as though she had surrounded herself with books. Fortified herself against her emptying future.
Dad. I hadn’t thought of him since before the hospital called to tell me about Kevin. Dad was sixty when he died. He had just up and died. That is what Mom said, “How could he just up and die?” Like it was his fault. In a way it was.
Dad’s death turned him into a newspaper headline: “Man drowns trying to save boy.” It was the kind of story that makes you give up reading. Right when you get to the part that tells you how both the seven-year-old boy and his would-be rescuer were swept downriver, fated to die in each other’s arms.
He didn’t know the kid. He and my mother had been walking by the river. He had heard the calls for help, saw the hand reaching out of the water and the brown head of hair going under. He left my mom standing on the riverbank, gaping in fear and unbelief, and threw himself into the river. And died.
Sitting on the laminate flooring in my living room, I shuddered at the suddenness of life. Regret and sorrow bodychecked each other in my mind. A part of me wanted to call Mom, tell her I would read the books, all of them, and any others she had. To ask her how she was doing. To tell her I remembered what she had lost. To step out of the container of grief surrounding me and … and what? What did I think I could do for her? For anyone?
We’d been close once. We used to call each other for no reason, just to touch base. She would pop into the Wee Book Inn bookstore, where I’d worked until a few weeks before Kevin died. She’d browse the shelves and wait for my break so she could buy me coffee. But Dad’s death had put a wedge between us. In her grief she stopped calling, stopped coming by the store, and I hadn’t known what to do about it, what to say. Now I understood there was little that could be said to a woman whose only desire was to see once more the face of the man she married.
I rolled onto my hands and knees and crawled to the bookcase that held my photo albums, gripped with the sudden need to see my father’s face. I selected an old one that was filled with pictures of my parents, many of them in black and white. I was searching for one particular picture, one with Dad, at Christmas, a long time ago. I turned to the page and studied the photo. He wasn’t looking at the camera, but off to one side at something or someone beyond the frame of the picture. His mouth was wide open in an exaggerated expression of celebration. He held his left arm up above his head, his right arm wrapped around his torso. His body was at an odd angle, his right foot high off the floor.
He’d been dancing when the picture was taken. He looked alive. Invincible. My heart contracted. Like trying to give birth to pain—to get it out of my body somehow. The album slipped from my hands and I lay down on the floor exhausted.
“Kate,” Kevin’s voice came from above me. “The day we told your dad we were getting married, his face turned purple. I thought he was going to have a stroke.”
I was sure I was dreaming. The scene flickered behind my eyelids.
“But he hugged us and yelled, ‘Wonderful!’” There was a chuckle in his voice. “You wore that red dress,” he said.
“Red,” I mumbled.
“Go to sleep, Kate.”
“I am asleep,” I told him.