Days of Awe: A Novel Read online

  “Sorry, babe,” Josie said, as she passed Mark an extra-large hunk of cake. His hand brushed hers. “Sorry about that.”

  And then everything was all right again; all was forgiven. We all felt it, the wave of ease that washed over us.

  “Oh!” Josie hopped up. “Izzy! I have one more present for you!” She had already given me an orange sweater, a bottle of pink sparkly nail polish, and an enormous slab of dark chocolate.

  Chris glanced at me, with an almost-imperceptible twitch of his lips. We both knew what this would be. In addition to teaching, in her spare time Josie was an artist, and every special occasion brought forth a brightly wrapped Josie Abrams original. In college, she’d received an honorable mention in an art department competition. That was enough to keep her going. Twenty years later, she was still at it. You had to admire the commitment, even if the product was sometimes inscrutable. We had seven Josie Abrams sculptures and five paintings on prominent display around our house, because in addition to making gifts for me, Josie was also in the habit of stopping in unannounced.

  She dashed upstairs and thumped around above our heads. “Close your eyes, Iz,” she called, coming back down the stairs. “This one’s not wrapped!” I looked at Chris, then at Mark. Mark shrugged, indulgent, fond. Don’t blame me, that shrug said. She’s your friend.

  Josie clomped into the dining room and pressed a large, rectangular canvas into my arms. I could still smell the paint on it. “You can open your eyes now,” she said. She was like a little kid, vibrating with excitement.

  I looked. It was a painting of thirteen women sitting together on one side of a long dinner table, in the style of The Last Supper but with middle-aged women instead of apostles. The women were wearing sweaters or high-collared blouses; they wore lipstick and had formal, old-fashioned hairstyles, updos and teased 1950s bouffants. They had vacant, pleasant expressions on their faces, and they were examining clear plastic containers of different sizes. “The Last Tupperware Party!” Josie said.

  “Oh!” I said, genuinely stunned. I had a fleeting thought about faith and impermanence, about ambition and disappointment. Those dopey-faced women tugged at my heartstrings. “I love it!” I said, and I meant it. I loved the brain that had imagined this painting, the hands that fashioned the women in their pastel tops. I loved Josie, who had baked me my favorite cake for my birthday, and Chris, whose heart was sometimes still a mystery to me, and Mark, who was like a brother. There were invisible tethers that tied us together, and they extended out from us to Hannah, to my mother, to my mother’s family, all lost. And beyond: they flowed out beyond us. You didn’t get to feel the tug of these ties very often, the fragile net that held us all.

  “Happy birthday, Isabel,” Josie said. She flung her arms around me, her skinny little body all ribs and hips and solid force. She stood on her tiptoes so her mouth could reach my ear. “I love you,” she whispered. “What would I do without you? You’re my family.”

  ···

  Josie and I met at my first staff meeting fifteen years ago. She sauntered in twenty minutes late, took a quick survey of the room, and plopped herself down in the third row, next to me. Bob Coffey, the principal of Rhodes Avenue Middle School, was in the middle of a story. He was in his mid-fifties and fossilizing rapidly. But he was worshipped, an institution in our district. You wouldn’t catch anyone saying a word against him. Mr. Coffey, parents would whisper reverently, Mr. Coffey, like sleepy addicts.

  All of his stories, I would soon discover, were about his dog. After taking care of faculty business, he would ramble on about Starbucks the spaniel for a few long minutes, turn the episode into an outdated parable about children and their charming inadequacies, and then adjourn the meeting with a hearty “You are released!” These weekly staff meetings were mandatory. Our school was small, and absences were noted.

  “Starbucks woke us up in the middle of the night on Saturday,” Mr. Coffey was saying when Josie walked into the room. He turned to her and nodded. “Thank you for joining us, Miss Bryant. As I was saying, Starbucks woke us up in the middle of the night on Saturday, demanding that we take him for a walk. ‘Don’t give in,’ I warned Anita.” To everyone’s delight, his wife’s name really was Anita Coffey. “But Anita gave in, and sure enough, Starbucks needed to empty his bladder. Oh, the chiding I took from her!” He had been walking up and down through the rows of chairs, but now he paused for effect at the front of the room. “Until Sunday night, that is, when Starbucks waltzed into our bedroom at four a.m. and whined to be taken out again. Only this time, he didn’t need to, he simply wanted to. The same thing happened on Monday night, Tuesday night, and Wednesday night, until finally Mrs. Coffey and I put Starbucks in his crate and broke him of this unpleasant habit.”

  I leaned forward in my seat. I had been concentrating so hard, trying to grasp the meaning in our principal’s strange homily. Only later would I understand that Bob Coffey viewed children as recalcitrant, barely domesticated animals who needed equal amounts of discipline, affection, exercise, and a protein-rich diet. He crossed his arms over his chest and smiled benevolently. “Children require patience, you see, but not overindulgence.”

  There were nods and murmurs, and Janice Van Dyke, the seventh-grade math teacher, let loose with an emphatic “So true!”

  “If we choose to give them an inch,” Mr. Coffey continued, “it is our duty to see that an inch is all they take.”

  I leaned over to Josie and whispered, “Or they get put in their crates.”

  Josie looked at me. For a second she seemed puzzled, and then her face opened with delight, her smile huge and toothy and as irresistible as the sun. She nodded to herself. “We need to have dinner,” she said quietly. “You and I. Tonight. I need to know you.” She reached over and squeezed my arm with startling intimacy, and I felt myself heating up, blushing with pleasure.

  That’s the way it is with certain people. They set their sights on you. They look at you straight on and they choose you, and they are dazzled by their own brilliant choice. It was the first time anyone had fallen in love with me like that. And I was powerless against it.

  ···

  Lurch forward exactly one year from Josie’s death: one tear-lubricated, misery-drenched, grief-addled dung heap of a year. Chris and Hannah and I are meeting Mark at the cemetery for the unveiling of her gravestone.

  “I will never get used to this,” Chris whispers, hunching over so I’ll hear him, his hand on my back, a familiar pressure.

  “I know,” I say, digging my fingernails into the soft flesh of my palm.

  Hannah drags her feet next to mine. She won’t look at me. The wind whips up around us. A few drops of rain land, dotting the hard ground of the parking lot, threatening more.

  I spot Mark from a few feet away—alone; I wasn’t sure if he would be—his hands jammed into his pockets, shoulders hunched. He looks up and starts walking toward us, and relief calms his features. “Hey, guys. Thanks for coming. I know this isn’t easy for any of us.” He hugs Hannah, then Chris, then, finally, briefly, me. And I feel relief, mixed in with everything else, because I wasn’t sure he would; we haven’t even spoken in more than three months.

  “Of course we’re here,” Chris murmurs. “God, of course.”

  Mark pulls away quickly and I examine his face, which, at least, at last, looks like his: today he looks like Mark, my friend, Josie’s widower.

  That word, he said to me once, drunk, in the midst of it. He raised his bottle of beer. Who is widower than I? Nobody!

  “Let’s go,” Mark says, and I can tell he hasn’t forgiven me, but we won’t talk about that today. Chris and Hannah and I fall into step next to him, picking our way across the pavement and through the dampening path toward the area of the cemetery where Josie is buried: a flat and blanched patch of ground in section E, row 20, as if this were a theater, only the seats are horizontal and the audience particularly unresponsive.

  Being only forty-two and in good health, Josie h
ad articulated no specific wishes for her final resting place, so we, her beloved friends and husband, improvised, and this is how she ended up here, at the Eternal Home Cemetery off the highway, may she rest in peace lulled by the honking of trucks zooming down I-94 and the faint but unmistakable smell of fried onions wafting over from Grandpa Zip’s Old-Fashioned Diner just across the frontage road. The grass on the western edge of the cemetery is always a lush green because of the year-round humid breath of exhaust. Burying Josie here has made us all wonder: Will we meet up here in a few years? Us, too? Here? Can we do no better than this? This death thing, it seems, never gets pretty, but it sure does have staying power.

  ···

  The rain is a steady, spitting drizzle now. We’re at the grave site, the brand-new pinkish headstone a shiny heartbreak. Karen Josephine Bryant Abrams. Josie rejected the name Karen in college and never looked back. She would have hated her headstone. Then again, who wouldn’t? BELOVED WIFE, it says. CHERISHED FRIEND.

  “I prepared a little speech,” Mark says, his eyes watery. He looks away and shakes his head. “But now…I can’t.”

  Chris moves a step closer to Mark and puts his arm around him, and Mark takes a ragged, heaving breath. “It’s okay, man,” Chris says. He’s a full head taller than Mark, long and lean where Mark is dense and sturdy. Chris’s sharp, even features were chiseled by some cold Northern European ancestral winds, a counterpoint to Mark’s dark hair and eyes, the craggy hollows of his face, his perennial stubble. Sometimes when I see them next to each other like this, I can’t help but think about the strange miracles of DNA.

  Chris removes his arm from Mark’s shoulders quickly and suddenly, the way men do, and rubs his hands together. “It’s okay. I’ll say something. Isabel will say something. Maybe even Hannah, if you want to, sweetie.”

  Here’s what I want to do: I want to scream. Chris looks at his feet. He looks up at me, his lips pressed together, and swallows. “She was Izzy’s best friend, and Mark’s wife, and Hannah…well, she was almost like a second mom to Hannah.” Hannah, who still won’t meet my eye, sobs quietly. “And I miss her for who she was to you all. But, you know, I loved her, too.” His breath puffs out into the cold air. “She was always at our house,” he says, and I find that I am panting a little bit, trying to contain my fury, trying to hold on to the rhythm of my own breath. As if that solidifies Chris’s relationship with her: Josie took up space where he lived!

  “She was always around,” he continues, oblivious. He takes off his glasses and wipes them on his shirt, then just holds them. His naked eyes are a surprise to me, vulnerable as a fish. “I didn’t, um, I didn’t have the same kind of relationship with her that you guys did,” he says. “Sometimes I’d wake up on a Saturday morning and go downstairs, and she’d still be there, crashed on the sofa from the night before.”

  An old man carrying a bouquet of pink roses wanders past us, head high, peering left and right, unbothered by the wind and the rain. He looks otherworldly to me, as if he’s searching for his own grave. I want to say this to Josie, and for the millionth time, I’m stunned by her absence.

  Chris falls silent for a moment, then clears his throat and starts again. “There was always a half-eaten container of something on the coffee table,” he says. “Sometimes she would have it for breakfast, no matter how much it had…” He waves his empty hand in front of him and smiles a little. “Congealed. She was always so happy in the morning.” He glances at me and I can read his mind: Unlike some people. “So easy to talk to. We’d have coffee together before Izzy got up.”

  That’s it? I want to say, grief and rage reacting chemically inside me, creating a new and volatile alloy, something bright and flaming. Furium. That’s it? Leftover Chinese food for breakfast? Coffee on a Sunday morning? Tidying up the living room together, maybe? She was more cheerful than my wife! I want to tear his glasses from his hand and fling them against Josie’s headstone. But now Hannah is crying harder, and she pulls up the collar of her red windbreaker and presses her face into her father’s solid chest, and I remember how on the night Josie died Chris wrapped his arms around me. We hadn’t touched each other in months, it felt like, and he just reached for me in that blank, horrible moment, with everything good that he had. Even if I had wanted to shake his arms off, he wouldn’t have let go.

  Chris rests his chin on Hannah’s head, and they stand there together. The geometry of holding your growing daughter is a changing thing: she fits in your arms a certain way when she’s four, another when she’s six, unwieldy when she’s nine, and hardly at all when she’s almost twelve. Some nights when she’s sleeping, sprawled out like a starfish on her bed, I crawl in next to her, stealthily, taking up just the smallest sliver of mattress, to feel the ghost of the baby she used to be. Motherhood has reduced me to such a pathetic creature that I don’t even care how pathetic I am. I’d like to share that thought with Josie. Having an eleven-year-old daughter is like pining over the college boyfriend who dumped you, I would tell her.

  Childless by choice, sweetie! Josie would say.

  “It’s all right,” I say now, to no one. “We all loved her so much.” To my surprise, my voice sounds clear and calm. Josie observed one of my classes once, as part of Principal Coffey’s peer-review program. It’s a wonder Isabel sings so terribly, she wrote in her assessment, with that pretty speaking voice.

  Mark and Hannah are both crying freely now, they’re a chorus of sobs, Hannah still pressed hard into Chris’s chest; we’re just a huddled mass of mourners in the rain, a single entity, despite all the ways we’ve been blasted apart over the last year. I’m thinking, with a sort of empty resignation, This is it, this is how it will be for the rest of my life, lost in this darkness. But then Hannah turns and looks at Mark, and there is a moment, a strange moment between them, and as if by psychic agreement, they both start giggling. It comes over them as quick as a cloudburst. Hannah first: a swipe of her nose with the back of her hand and a chuckle, her recognition of the sad ridiculousness of the occasion offering a glimpse of the kind of adult she will be, savvy and kind. Then Mark, a small part of him opening up to Hannah, a clearing in the bleakness, and then they’re both laughing, just shaking with it.

  Chris looks at me over Hannah’s blond head and raises his eyebrows and smiles. She is one thing we usually agree on, the best thing about us. Lately I find myself thinking about the night she was born, just flipping through the details in my mind. I’ve told her the story so many times: It was three a.m. Daddy blew through four red lights. One of the nurses was on the phone when we walked in, ignoring us, chatting. “Lasagna,” she said to the person on the other end of the line, and I thought, Who is she talking to about lasagna at three in the morning? She held up the “just a minute” finger to us, and Daddy yelled at her. You were upside down, breech, and they were preparing me for a C-section, and then, at the last minute, just for me, you turned. You were born howling, loud as a freight train. But then, when they set you down on my chest, you stopped crying, and we just looked at each other, familiar mammals meeting for the first time.

  I never tell her how Chris circled the parking ramp twice, looking for a good spot. I never tell her how as he walked me slowly down the hospital corridor he said, “Actually, I don’t think this is such a good idea, Iz,” and then laughed unconvincingly. Some details you keep to yourself; you polish them up in private, smooth, shiny jewels of resentment that you save for when you might need them.

  “Okay,” Mark says, after he and Hannah have caught their breath and their laughter has subsided and we have all swung safely back to the right side of miserable. “I think we can leave now.” It’s raining harder. Chris is trying to clean his glasses again. I fumble around for the small stone I’ve been carrying in my pocket and place it on Josie’s gravestone. We were here.

  Hannah is quiet in the car, texting. Chris drops her at the library to meet some friends. (Are you sure, sweetie? She’s sure.) And then he takes me home, driving slowly along
the silent streets. He pulls into the driveway and gets out of the car, and before I realize it, we’re walking together into the house, wordless routine and muscle memory. In the entryway near the back door he kicks off his shoes, then arranges them neatly on the mat. He shrugs off his jacket, takes mine from me, hangs them up. We’re performing the steps of our oldest dance. And even in this strange, sad, suspended state, I know that we are elegant at it.

  The house is cold. Someone left the light on in the hallway. Our socked feet pad together past the kitchen, which is still a mess from breakfast, up the stairs, into the bedroom, where the curtains are drawn, where although it’s two in the afternoon, it’s still twilit and dim: romantic or depressing, depending.

  “Well,” Chris says, moving toward me. “If there’s nothing else…”

  “Nope,” I say, inching closer. “Bye.”

  After fifteen years together, there is very little about this man that surprises me. His arms around my waist, hands tight against my back: not a surprise. His mouth on my neck, breath heavy and warm: not a surprise. The smell of his skin, like celery and oranges. They say you’re attracted to a mate based on his scent, that somewhere, in the simian recesses of your brain, you’re sniffing out the smell of genes complementary to yours, the intoxicating whiff of healthy offspring. So there’s always that, with Chris. And it, too, is not a surprise. The way he pulls at my clothes as if he doesn’t understand the mechanics of buttons and zippers. The speed of his heartbeat, animal desire, heightened now and all this past year, crazier than it has been in all of the fourteen years that came before: well, I guess that’s been a surprise.

  “Iz,” he whispers, the nickname that sounds like an existential proclamation. “I need you.”