Leaving Home: Short Pieces Read online

  Sarah sat down in the middle of the hall. She opened up the plastic shrink-wrapped robot, installed its batteries, and sent him careening into the bathroom. She opened the dress-up kit and wrapped a pink boa around her own neck; peered into the tiny heart-shaped mirror to apply the fuchsia lipstick and glittery blue eyeshadow, a whore's version of happiness.

  When the phone rang, she ran into the bedroom to pick up an extension. "How are you doing?" Abe asked.

  "Fine," Sarah said. In the bedroom mirror, she could still see the clown-red cheeks, the garish mouth. "I'm fine."

  She hung up the phone and went into the kitchen for a large black trash bag, big enough to hold a yard's worth of leaves, or a closet full of the future. She scooped all the unused toys for her daughter into the trash bag and carried it over her shoulder out to the garage. Because it was not Trash Day, Sarah drove all the way to the municipal dump, where she let the attendant punch her ticket once for the privilege of hauling the sack over the ravine's edge. She waited, until this bag full of what she lost nestled itself between other bags stuffed with the things people actually chose to give away.

  Pharmacists live in minutiae, which is why Abe had learned a whole system of measurement in college that most educated folks don't even know exists. Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple. Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries. Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.

  Abe was trying to count the twenty-four scruples, but they had nothing to do with the pills he had spilled before him on the little rubber mat from Pfizer, a freebee he'd gotten at some conference in Santa Fe. It was funny - a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics. It was that simple, he understood now. You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you'd been living your life all wrong.

  He regretted telling his daughter to clean up her room the day before she died. He regretted the fact that he hadn't hugged her in front of her friends after her Fall Concert at school, because he thought her embarrassment was more important than his pride. He regretted not taking his family to Australia, when they were still a family. He regretted not having been given the chance to meet a grandchild. He regretted having seven years, instead of seventy-seven.

  Abe pushed aside these thoughts and began to recount the pills. But he had to keep hiking up his pants - they were riding that low on his hips. Finally, ducking behind a wall of meds, he unbuttoned his white coat and notched his belt tighter. It would make sense that he was losing weight - he hadn't been eating, really - but the belt suddenly didn't fit at all. There simply wasn't a notch where he needed it to be; he'd grown that thin, that fast.

  Frustrated, he unwound some twine in the back room used for shipments and took off his belt, looping the rope in its place. He thought of going back inside and finishing the order, but instead he walked out through the back receiving door of the pharmacy and kept walking - around the block, and then down three more, and through the traffic light, until he came to a bar he passed every day when he drove home. Olaf's, it was called, and it was open, even though it was only eleven A.M.

  He was aware, as he walked through the door, that he looked like a poor man's Charlie Chaplin, with a rope holding up his pants. He was aware that he hadn't been to a bar during the day since he'd been a drummer a lifetime ago. There were five people at the bar, even in the morning, and they weren't the sort of folks you found in bars at night. These were the hard-luck cases, the ones who needed whiskey (a dram!) to get through another few hours of an ordinary workday; or the call girls who needed to forget before they went home to sleep off last night's memories; or the old men who only wanted to find their youth in the bottom of a bottle of gin.

  Abe climbed onto a stool - and climbed was the word; he must have been more exhausted than he thought, for all the effort that it took to get onto it. "Have you got Jameson's?" he asked the bartender, and the guy looked at him with a smile as crooked as lightning.

  "Nice try, kid," he said.

  "Excuse me?"

  The bartender shook his head. "You got any I.D.?"

  Abe was forty-two years old, he could not remember the last time he'd been carded. He had grey hair at the temples, for God's sake. But he reached for his wallet, only to realize that it was back at work, in his locker, like usual. "I don't," he said.

  "Well, then," the bartender said. "I ain't got Jameson's. Come on back when you turn twenty-one."

  Abe stared at him, confounded. He jumped off the stool, landing hard. The whole way back to work, he searched for his reflection in the shiny hoods of Buicks, in plate glass windows of bakeries, in puddles. When you lost a child, did you lose the years you'd spent with her, too?

  A week after their daughter's death, Sarah could not stop thinking about her. She would taste the skin of the little girl, a kiss, the moment before the chicory of the coffee kicked in, or the sweetness of the muffin blossomed on her tongue. She would pick up a newspaper and feel instead the rubbery band of small socks between her fingers, as she folded them over after doing the wash. She'd be in one room and hear the music of her daughter's voice, the way grammar leaped through her sentences like a frog.

  Abe, on the other hand, was starting to lose her. He would close his eyes and try to conjure his daughter's face, and he still could, but it was unraveled at the edges a little more each day. He found himself spending hours in her bedroom, inhaling the smell of her strawberry-mango shampoo still trapped in the fibers of the pillowcase, or poring through the books on her shelves and trying to see them through her eyes. He went so far as to open her fingerpaints, stand stripped to the waist in front of her tiny mirror, draw her heart on his chest.

  Although Sarah's M.O. was usually to do the opposite of whatever her mother told her to do, this time, she took her advice. She showed up at the church, shuddering as she remembered the hymns that had been played at her daughter's funeral; steeling herself for the absence of the coffin at the altar. She knocked on the pastor's office door, and he ushered her inside and gave her a cup of tea. "So," the pastor said, "your mother's worried about you."

  Sarah opened up her mouth to say something snippy and typically awful, but she caught herself in time. Of course her mother was worried. That was the job description, wasn't it? That was why she had come.

  "Can I ask you something?" Sarah said. "Why her?"

  "I don't understand..."

  "I get the whole God thing. I get the Kingdom of Heaven. But there are millions of seven year olds out there. Why did God take mine?"

  The pastor hesitated. "God didn't take your daughter, Sarah," he said. "Illness did."

  Sarah snorted. "Sure. Pass the buck when it's convenient." She could feel herself dangerously at the edge of breaking down, and wondered why on earth she'd thought it was a good idea to come here.

  The pastor reached for her hand. His were warm and papery, familiar. "Heaven's an amazing place," he said softly. "She's up there, and she's looking down on us, right now, you know."

  Sarah felt her throat tighten. "My daughter," she said, "can't ride a ski lift without hyperventilating. She panics in elevators. She doesn't even like bunk beds. She's terrified of heights."

  "Not anymore."

  "How do you know that?" Sarah exploded. "How do you know that there's anything afterward? How do you know it doesn't just...end?"

  "I don't know," the pastor said. "But I can hope. And I truly believe that your daughter is in Heaven, and even if she does still get scared, Jesus will be there to keep her safe."

  She turned away as a tear streaked down her cheek. "She doesn't know Jesus," Sarah said. "She knows me."

  Abe found himself defying gravity. He'd be standing in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, and he'd find himself rising to the balls of his feet. He could not walk fast down th
e street without starting to float between strides. He started to put stones in the pockets of his pants, which were all too long for him now.

  He was sitting on his daughter's bed one Saturday, remembering a conversation they'd had. Can I still live here when I get married? she'd asked, and he'd grinned and said that would be perfectly fine.

  But what about your husband? he'd asked.

  His daughter had considered this carefully. Well, we could set up the cot, like when I have a sleepover.

  The doorbell rang, and when Abe went downstairs, he found the little girl his daughter had considered her best friend - the last one who'd used that cot, actually - standing red-eyed beside her mother. "Hi, Abe," the woman said. "I hope this isn't too much of an imposition."

  "No!" he said, too brightly. "No! Not at all!"

  "It's just that Emily's having some trouble, with, well, you know. She drew a picture, and wanted to bring it here. She thought maybe you could hang it up." The little girl thrust out a piece of paper toward Abe: a crayoned drawing of two little girls - one dark haired, like his daughter, one fair, like Emily. They were holding hands. There was a melting sun overhead, and grass beneath their feet.

  Abe realized he was nearly at a level with Emily; he barely had to crouch down to look her in the eye. "This is beautiful, honey," he said. "I'm going to put it up right over her bed." He reached out as if to touch the crown of her hair, but realized that this might hurt him more than it would offer comfort, and at the last minute pulled his arm back to his side.

  "Are you all right?" Emily's mother whispered. "You look..." Her voice trailed off, as she tried to find the right word, and then she just gave up and shook her head. "Well. Of course you're not all right. I'm so sorry, Abe. I truly am." With one last look, she took Emily's hand and started to walk down the driveway.

  Abe held the crayon picture in his hand so tightly that it crumpled. He watched Emily kick the unraked leaves along the sidewalk, setting up small tornadoes; as her mother looked straight ahead, not even aware that she was missing this one small, wonderful thing.

  Sarah and Abe did not really speak to each other, not until Abe walked into their daughter's room and found Sarah taking the books off the shelves and putting them into boxes. "What are you doing?" he asked, stricken.

  "I can't move past this," Sarah said, "knowing it's all right down the hall."

  "No," Abe answered.

  Sarah hesitated. "What do you mean, no?"

  Abe reached into one of the boxes and took out a fistful of picture books, jammed them back into the shelf. "Just because you're ready to give her up," he said, "doesn't mean I am."

  Sarah's face bloomed with color. "Give her up?" she whispered. "Is that what you think I'm doing? For God's sake, Abe, all I want to do is function like a normal human being again."

  "But you're not normal. We're not normal." His eyes filled with tears. "She died, Sarah."

  Sarah winced, as if she had taken a blow. Then she turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

  Abe sank onto the floor, his fingers speared through his hair. After a half hour, he stood up and walked down the hall to their bedroom. He found Sarah lying on her side, staring at the sun as it shamefully scuttled off the horizon. Abe lay down on the bed, curling his body around hers. "I lost her," he whispered. "Please don't tell me I've lost you."

  Sarah turned to him, and rested her palm on his cheek. She kissed him, all the words she could not say. They began to comfort each other - a touch here, a brush of lips there, a kindness. But when their clothes had dissolved into pools on the floor; when Abe braced himself over his wife and took hold of her body and tried to settle her curves against his canyons; they did not come together seamlessly, the way they used to. They were off, just enough to make it uncomfortable; just enough for her to say Let me try this; and for him to say, Maybe this way.

  Afterward, when Sarah had fallen asleep, Abe sat up and stared down at the end of the bed; at his wife's feet hanging long and white over its edge.

  The next morning, Abe and Sarah lay in the dark. "Maybe I need to be alone for a while," Sarah said, although it wasn't what she'd hoped to say.

  "Maybe you do," Abe replied, although it was the opposite of what he meant. It was as if, in this new world, where the impossible had actually happened, nothing fit anymore: not language, not reason, not even the two of them.

  When Sarah got out of bed, she took the sheet with her - a modesty she hadn't needed for fifteen years of marriage. It prevented Abe from seeing what he would have noticed, in an instant: that the growth Sarah had experienced was exactly the same amount Abe himself had diminished; and that, if you could measure anything as insubstantial as that, it would have been exactly the same size and scope as the daughter they'd lost.

  Sarah reached the suitcase, even though it was stored in the top rafters of the attic. Abe watched her pack. At the door, they made promises they both knew they would not keep. "I'll call," Sarah said, and Abe nodded. "Be well," he answered.

  She was going to stay with her mother - something that, in all the years of their marriage, Abe never would have imagined coming to pass; and yet he considered this a positive sign. If Sarah was choosing Felicity, in spite of their rocky relationship, maybe there was hope for all children to return to their parents, regardless of how impossible the journey seemed to be.

  He had to pull a chair over to the window, because he was no longer tall enough to see over its sill. He stood on the cushion and watched her put her suitcase into the car. She looked enormous to him, a giantess - and he considered that this is what motherhood does to a woman: make her larger than life. He waited until he could not see her car anymore, and then he climbed down from the chair.

  He could not work anymore; he was too short to reach the counter. He could not drive anywhere, the pedals were too far from his feet. There was nothing for Abe to do, so he wandered through the house, even emptier than it was. He found himself, of course, in his daughter's room. Here, he spent hours: drawing with her art kit; playing with her pretend food and cash register; sifting through the drawers of her clothing and playing a game with himself: can you remember the last time she wore this? He put on a Radio Disney CD and forced himself to listen to the whole of it. He lined up her stuffed animals, like witnesses.

  Then he crawled into her dollhouse, one he'd built for her last Christmas. He closed the door behind himself. He glanced around at the carefully pasted wallpaper, the rich red velvet loveseat; the kitchen sink. He climbed the stairs to the bedroom, where he could stare out the window to his heart's content. The view, it was perfect.

  An Open Letter to My Oldest Son, As He Leaves for College

  You were in such a hurry to arrive. There I was, in the middle of a class IV hurricane a month before my due date, packing a bag for the hospital between contractions, as gusts of rain rattled the house. There was your father, videotaping through the windshield as he drove; the eerie bank of tollbooths on the highway unmanned and free for all. And then, suddenly, there you were: long and skinny and undercooked, still missing your eyelashes and fingernails. In all my life, I had never seen anything as remarkable as your life. As the doctors and nurses wandered the halls of the hospital, quarantined by the storm; as reporters on the grainy television overhead talked about waves breaking over the sea wall and coastal flooding; I held you tight. You, I thought, already have a story to tell the world.

  You were in such a hurry to arrive, and now, eighteen years later, I'm having a hard time letting you go. I know that the whole point of parenting is getting your child to the point where he can forge his own path. I know that a hatchling who is six feet tall and sports size twelve shoes is not really a hatchling anymore. And I know that the preparations for this moment have been ongoing - from packing up your clothes to selecting the desk lamp for your dorm room, from writing out directions to help you do your own laundry to opening up a bank account in your name - all these tiny hallmarks that let a stranger see, at close range, y
ou are no longer a child but an adult. Yet now that we're actually in the moment - driving to the school that will serve as a bridge to your future - I feel like there's something I've forgotten. Did I tell you that you have to change the bag inside the vacuum every now and then? Do you have any idea how to sew on a button?

  I have equipped you with extra long sheets and a television set and a credit card with your name emblazoned across the bottom. Boxes are piled high in the back of the car, full of your softest tees and your broken-in jeans, your favorite books and your iPod speakers, everything you assume you will need to recreate home. In a few hours, after we have unloaded and unpacked and made the bed and hung your posters on the walls, I am going to hold you tight and tell you for the thousandth time how proud I am of you. I'm going to paste a smile on my face and I'm going to say, Work hard! Have fun!

  There's so much, though, that I won't be saying to you today. It's the lump sum of the twenty-five year lead I've got on you - a quarter century of mistakes and triumphs. But unlike the litmus test for when you take a Tylenol versus when you call the doctor - something we discussed this past summer - these lectures aren't quickly memorized. They can't be tucked like notes between the folds of your comforter and the chapters of your paperbacks, inside the jewel cases of your CDs. Lessons of the heart are different that way; they have to be learned on your own.