Kate
2010
T HERE SHOULD BE A STATUTE of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, butonly for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you haveheard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk;take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass—if only because it cutsyou fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way weonce measuredher birthdays.
For a long time, afterward, my father claimed to see Anna in the night sky. Sometimes it was the wink of hereye, sometimes the shape of her profile. He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved they weretraced in constellations, to live forever. My mother believed, for a long time, that Anna would come back toher. She began to look for signs—plants that bloomed too early, eggs with double yolks, salt spilled in theshape of letters.
And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault. If Anna had never filed that lawsuit, ifshe hadn’t been at the courthouse signing papers with her attorney, she never would have been at thatparticular intersection at that particular moment. She would be here, and I would be the one coming back tohaunt her.
spaceFor a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then, inexplicably, I began the long steep climbupward. It has been eight years since my last relapse, something not even Dr. Chance can understand. Hethinks it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy—some contributing delayed effect—but Iknow better. It is that someone had to go, and Anna took my place.
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the toplayer off a family. And the under-belly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to mymother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn’t have tocome home to a house that felt too big for us.
Then one morning, my mother realized that we had eaten everything in the house, down to the last shrunkenraisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat downto watch TV and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh.
Immediately, I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse,sitting beside me on the couch, who said, “She would have thought it was funny, too.”
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are stillin it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day youlook down and see how much pain has eroded.
I wonder how much she keeps tabs on us. If she knows that for a long time, we were close to Campbell andJulia, even went to their wedding. If she understands that the reason we don’t see them anymore is because itjust plain hurt too much, because even when we didn’t talk about Anna, she lingered in the spaces betweenthe words, like the smell of something burning.
I wonder if she was at Jesse’s graduation from the police academy, if she knows that he won a citation fromthe mayor last year for his role in a drug bust. I wonder if she knew that Daddy fell deep into a bottle aftershe left, and had to claw his way out. I wonder if she knows that, now, I teach children how to dance. Thatevery time I see two little girls at the barre, sinking into pliés, I think of us.
She still takes me by surprise. Like nearly a year after her death, when my mother came home with a roll offilm she’d just developed of my high school graduation. We sat down at the kitchen table together, shoulderto shoulder, trying not to mention as we looked at all our double-wide grins that there was someone missingfrom the photo.
And then, as if we’d conjured her, the last picture was of Anna. It had been that long since we’d used thecamera, plain and simple. She was on a beach towel, holding out one hand toward the photographer, tryingto get whoever it was to stop taking her picture.
My mother and I sat at the kitchen table staring at Anna until the sun set, until we had memorized everythingfrom the color of her ponytail holder to the pattern of fringe on her bikini. Until we couldn’t be sure we wereseeing her clearly anymore.
My mother let me have that picture of Anna. But I didn’t frame it; I put it into an envelope and sealed it andstuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It’s there, just in case one of these days I start tolose her.
There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn’t the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoonwhen I can’t quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulder. Maybe one of these days, Iwill not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.
When I start to feel this way I go into the bathroom and I lift up my shirt and touch the white lines of my scar.
I remember how, at first, I thought the stitches seemed to spell out her name. I think about her kidneyworking inside me and her blood running through my veins. I take her with me, wherever I go.
The End
2010
T HERE SHOULD BE A STATUTE of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, butonly for a month. That after forty-two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you haveheard her call out your name. That there will be no fine imposed if you feel the need to clean out her desk;take down her artwork from the refrigerator; turn over a school portrait as you pass—if only because it cutsyou fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way weonce measuredher birthdays.
For a long time, afterward, my father claimed to see Anna in the night sky. Sometimes it was the wink of hereye, sometimes the shape of her profile. He insisted that stars were people who were so well loved they weretraced in constellations, to live forever. My mother believed, for a long time, that Anna would come back toher. She began to look for signs—plants that bloomed too early, eggs with double yolks, salt spilled in theshape of letters.
And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault. If Anna had never filed that lawsuit, ifshe hadn’t been at the courthouse signing papers with her attorney, she never would have been at thatparticular intersection at that particular moment. She would be here, and I would be the one coming back tohaunt her.
spaceFor a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then, inexplicably, I began the long steep climbupward. It has been eight years since my last relapse, something not even Dr. Chance can understand. Hethinks it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy—some contributing delayed effect—but Iknow better. It is that someone had to go, and Anna took my place.
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the toplayer off a family. And the under-belly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times Istayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to mymother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn’t have tocome home to a house that felt too big for us.
Then one morning, my mother realized that we had eaten everything in the house, down to the last shrunkenraisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat downto watch TV and watched an old I Love Lucy and started to laugh.
Immediately, I felt like I had defiled a shrine. I clapped my hand over my mouth, embarrassed. It was Jesse,sitting beside me on the couch, who said, “She would have thought it was funny, too.”
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are stillin it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day youlook down and see how much pain has eroded.
I wonder how much she keeps tabs on us. If she knows that for a long time, we were close to Campbell andJulia, even went to their wedding. If she understands that the reason we don’t see them anymore is because itjust plain hurt too much, because even when we didn’t talk about Anna, she lingered in the spaces betweenthe words, like the smell of something burning.
I wonder if she was at Jesse’s graduation from the police academy, if she knows that he won a citation fromthe mayor last year for his role in a drug bust. I wonder if she knew that Daddy fell deep into a bottle aftershe left, and had to claw his way out. I wonder if she knows that, now, I teach children how to dance. Thatevery time I see two little girls at the barre, sinking into pliés, I think of us.
She still takes me by surprise. Like nearly a year after her death, when my mother came home with a roll offilm she’d just developed of my high school graduation. We sat down at the kitchen table together, shoulderto shoulder, trying not to mention as we looked at all our double-wide grins that there was someone missingfrom the photo.
And then, as if we’d conjured her, the last picture was of Anna. It had been that long since we’d used thecamera, plain and simple. She was on a beach towel, holding out one hand toward the photographer, tryingto get whoever it was to stop taking her picture.
My mother and I sat at the kitchen table staring at Anna until the sun set, until we had memorized everythingfrom the color of her ponytail holder to the pattern of fringe on her bikini. Until we couldn’t be sure we wereseeing her clearly anymore.
My mother let me have that picture of Anna. But I didn’t frame it; I put it into an envelope and sealed it andstuffed it far back into a corner drawer of a filing cabinet. It’s there, just in case one of these days I start tolose her.
There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn’t the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoonwhen I can’t quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulder. Maybe one of these days, Iwill not be able to listen to the sound of snow falling and hear her footsteps.
When I start to feel this way I go into the bathroom and I lift up my shirt and touch the white lines of my scar.
I remember how, at first, I thought the stitches seemed to spell out her name. I think about her kidneyworking inside me and her blood running through my veins. I take her with me, wherever I go.
The End