So I often wonder if Joe had watched us that morning while we were playing Ship, in those bridging moments between before and after. Had he watched us from the massive redwoods he so revered, then from a cloud? Then from a star? The photographer in him would have delighted in the different perspectives, this after-a-lifetime chance to see that which is too deep and wide to be contained by any frame. Or was that him, that male fuchsia-throated Anna’s Hummingbird, Calypte anna, that hung around for days? He flittered inches from my nose when I sat on our porch, so close, I could feel his wings beating air on my cheek.
‘Joe?’ He took off suddenly, making giant swoops like handwriting in the sky. I know the swoops are part of their impressive mating ritual. And yet now I can’t help wondering if it was Joe, panicked, attempting to write me a message, frantically trying to tell me his many secrets, to warn me of all that he’d left unsaid.
Frank drove me home from McCready’s, then left to pick up the kids. I sat at our kitchen table, staring at the pepper grinder. A wedding gift from someone . . . a college friend of mine, I think. Joe had made a big deal about that gift, thought it was the perfect pepper grinder, and I’d made fun of him, said, ‘Who knew? That there was a perfect pepper grinder out there and that we would be so lucky as to be its proud owners?’
Zach and Annie pranced onto the porch, in the front door. Their singsong Mommymommymommy! broke through to me, through my new watery, subdued world, and with them, a slicing clarity. I forced myself up, upright, steady. I said their names. ‘Annie. Zach.’ Joe told me once that they were his A to Z, his alpha and omega. ‘Come here, guys.’ Frank stood behind them. I knew what I had to say. I would not try to sugarcoat this, like my relatives had with me when I was eight and my own father died. I would not say that Joe had fallen asleep, or had gone to live with Jesus, or was now an angel, dressed in white with feathered wings. It would have helped if I’d had a belief system, but my beliefs were in a misshapen pile, constantly rearranging themselves, as unfixed as laundry.
Annie said, ‘What happened to your knee?’
I touched it but couldn’t feel the bruise from the fall I’d taken in the hallway only a day ago.
‘You better get a Band-Aid.’ She gave me a long look.
I knelt down on my other knee. I pulled both of them to me and held on. ‘Daddy got hurt.’ They waited. Frozen. Silent. Waiting for me to reassure them, to say where he was, when they could kiss him. When they could make him a get-well-soon card and put it on the breakfast tray. Say the words. They have to hear them from you. Say them: ‘And he . . . Daddy . . . he died.’
Their faces. My words were carving themselves into their sweet, flawless skin. Annie started to cry. Zach looked at her, then sounding somewhat amused, said, ‘No, he didn’t!’
I rubbed his small back. ‘Yes, honey. He was at the ocean. He drowned.’
‘No way, José. Daddy swims fast.’ He laughed.
I looked up to Frank, and he knelt down with us. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Daddy is a good swimmer . . . Daddy was. But listen to me, Zach, okay? A big wave surprised him and knocked him off the rock. Maybe he bumped his head; we don’t know.’
Annie wrung her hands and cried, ‘I want my daddy. I want my daddy!’
I whispered into her hair, ‘I know, Banannie, I know you do.’
Zach turned to Frank. ‘It’s not true. He’ll swim back, won’t he, Uncle Frank?’
Frank ran his hand over his crew cut, covered his eyes for an instant, sat back on his heels, and took Zach onto his lap. He held him. He said, ‘No, buddy. He’s not coming back.’ Zach whimpered against Frank’s chest, then flung himself backward while Frank maintained his hold. Zach let out a howl that rang with the rawness of unfathomable loss.
I don’t remember what happened next, or I should say, I don’t remember the sequence of things. It seems that at once our long gravel driveway filled with cars, the house and yard with people, the fridge with chicken cacciatore, eggplant Parmesan, lasagna. Joe’s family took up most of the house. My extended family was just my mom, and she was still on a plane from Seattle. In a strange, sad way, the day reminded me of our wedding two years before, the last time all these people had caravanned up our drive, gathered together, and brought food and drink.
Joe’s family was loud – as they had been in the celebration of our marriage, and now in mourning, even in the early hours of disbelief. His great-aunty, already draped in black, was the only family member who still spoke Italian. She beat her shrivelled bosom and cried out, ‘Caro Dio, non Giuseppe.’
And then periods of stunned silence washed into the room while each person sat, anchoring his or her eyes on a different object – a lamp, a coaster, a shoe – as if it held an answer to the question, Why Joe?
His uncle Rick poured stiff drinks. His father, Joe Sr, drank many of those drinks and began cursing God. His mother, Marcella, held Annie and Zach in her large lap and said to her husband, ‘Watch your language, Joseph. Your grandchildren are in the room and Father Mike will be walking in that door any goddamned second.’
I sat in Joe’s favouurite chair, the old leather one handed down from Grandpa Sergio. Annie and Zach climbed up on me, curling themselves under my arms, the gravity of their small bodies like perfect paperweights, keeping me securely in place. Joe’s brother, David, kept calling from his cell phone in tears, as he and Gil, his partner, inched along in traffic on the 101.
Later, while the kids napped, David found me in the bathroom. He said through the door, ‘Sweetie, are you peeing or crying or both?’ Neither. I had stolen away for a few minutes and was staring at myself in the mirror, wondering how everything on my face was still as it always had been. My eyes sat in their assigned places above my nose, my mouth below it. I unlocked the door. He came in, shut the door. His arms hung at his sides, palms towards me. His face was ravaged and unshaven, but he was, as always, utterly beautiful; his Roman features so perfectly chiselled and his body so carved that his friends referred to him as The David. We leaned into each other. He whispered, ‘What are we going to do without him?’ I shook my head and let my nose run onto his shoulder.
That night, in bed with each arm around a sleeping child, my tears slipping back into my ears, I wondered how we’d get through this. But I reminded myself that I’d survived another grief that had threatened to undo me.
I had come to think of my seven-year marriage to Henry as The Trying Years. Trying to push a boulder up a hill. Trying to push Henry’s lackadaisical sperm up to my uterus. Trying to coax my stubborn eggs through my maze of fallopian tubes. The urgent phone calls to Henry to meet me at home for lunch. The awkwardness of sex on demand. And afterwards, lying on my back with my feet in the air, I’d will egg and sperm to Meet! Mingle! Hook up! (I was convinced by then that my eggs had shells, that I had tough eggs to crack.) I wanted children so badly that the want spread itself over me and took me hostage; it tied me up in it so that my days became as dark and knotted as I imagined my uterus to be: a scary, uninviting hovel.
Then I finally got pregnant.
And then I lost the baby.
I lay on the couch with old towels underneath me and listened to Henry make the phone calls in the kitchen, feeling as inadequate as the terminology implied. I lost the baby – like keys, or a mother-of-pearl earring. Or spontaneous abortion, which sounded like all of a sudden we didn’t want the baby, like we had made
