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Campbell is the one who actually answers the doctor. "I have power of attorney for A
SARA
IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parent who loses a child.
They bring her back down to us after the donated organs are removed. I am the last to go in. In the hallway, already, are Jesse and Za
Brian and I walk inside, where A
Brian comes up behind me. "Sweetheart, she's not here. It's the machine keeping her body alive. What makes A
I turn, bury my face against his chest. "But she wasn't supposed to," I sob.
We hold each other, then, and when I feel brave enough I look back down at the husk that once held my youngest. He is right, after all. This is nothing but a shell. There is no energy to the lines of her face; there is a slack absence to her muscles. Under this skin they have stripped her of organs that will go to Kate and to other, nameless, second-chance people.
"Okay." I take a deep breath. I put my hand on A
When along the pavement,
Palpitating flames of life,
People flicker round me,
I forget my bereavement,
The gap in the great constellation,
The place where a star used to be.
—D. H. LAWRENCE, "Submergence"
KATE
2010
THERE SHOULD BE A STATUTE of limitation on grief. A rule book that says it is all right to wake up crying, but only for a month. That after forty -two days you will no longer turn with your heart racing, certain you have heard 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 cuts you fresh again to see it. That it is okay to measure the time she has been gone, the way we once measured her birthdays.
For a long time, afterward, my father claimed to see A
And me, well, I began to hate myself. It was, of course, all my fault. If A
For a long time, I was sick. The transplant nearly failed, and then, inexplicably, I began the long steep climb upward. It has been eight years since my last relapse, something not even Dr. Chance can understand. He thinks it is a combination of the ATRA and the arsenic therapy—some contributing delayed effect—but I know better. It is that someone had to go, and A
Grief is a curious thing, when it happens unexpectedly. It is a Band-Aid being ripped away, taking the top layer off a family. And the underbelly of a household is never pretty, ours no exception. There were times I stayed in my room for days on end with headphones on, if only so that I would not have to listen to my mother cry. There were the weeks that my father worked round-the-clock shifts, so that he wouldn't have to come 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 shrunken raisin and graham cracker crumb, and she went to the grocery store. My father paid a bill or two. I sat down to 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 fu
See, as much as you want to hold on to the bitter sore memory that someone has left this world, you are still in it. And the very act of living is a tide: at first it seems to make no difference at all, and then one day you look 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 and Julia, even went to their wedding. If she understands that the reason we don't see them anymore is because it just plain hurt too much, because even when we didn't talk about A
I wonder if she was at Jesse's graduation from the police academy, if she knows that he won a citation from the mayor last year for his role in a drug bust. I wonder if she knew that Daddy fell deep into a bottle after she left, and had to claw his way out. I wonder if she knows that, now, I teach children how to dance. That every time I see two little girls at the barre, sinking into plies, 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 of film she'd just developed of my high school graduation. We sat down at the kitchen table together, shoulder to shoulder, trying not to mention as we looked at all our double-wide grins that there was someone missing from the photo.
And then, as if we'd conjured her, the last picture was of A
My mother and I sat at the kitchen table staring at A
My mother let me have that picture of A
There might be a morning when I wake up and her face isn't the first thing I see. Or a lazy August afternoon when I can't quite recall anymore where the freckles were on her right shoulder. Maybe one of these days, I will 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 kidney working inside me and her blood ru