His Mother's Son

She turned her face away from the garlands of lilies that heaped the dais, permeating the room with their inappropriately cheerful aroma, and surveyed the buffet table instead. More Swedish meatballs needed to be brought from the kitchen, and the apple slices needed freshening. They were beginning to brown and would be unappetizing soon. The cheese was becoming limp in the close, crowded room. She focused on the food, on the meatballs and the apples and the cheese so she wouldn't have to think about how unjust it was that caskets were made in such diminutive sizes. Seizing the empty silver tureen, its sides streaked with the viscous crimson sauce of the meatballs, she walked to the kitchen. Keeping her eyes fixed on the swinging kitchen door, she glided through the room, through the sea of hands that reached out to her, stroking her sleeve or squeezing her shoulder, gestures of support that felt like tethers forestalling her escape, drawing her back to the tiny coffin. She reached the kitchen and stumbled to the counter. She gripped the edge, her fingernails digging into the wood, attempting to find firm purchase that would hold, should someone try to force her back into that room--in which grief and pity hung like oppressive specters above the throngs of people dressed in staid suits and demure dresses, people who spoke in hushed tones about the food and the flowers and everything but the coffin in the corner.

Everyone said they understood how hard it was, to know how she must be feeling. She didn't understand how this could be possible, she did not even know what she was feeling, or if she was feeling. It seemed as if she had shrunk within her body, her entire being had pulled away from its physical encasement like a desiccated plant cell shrinking from its wall. She lived, she planned, she went through motions, but she had not really felt anything during this last week. She was tired of feeling anyway, and this automated numbness was inviting after the months of grief and anger and pain that had surged like electric currents through her body. Every word had stung, every pitying glance had burned, but she had borne them gladly so that he would not have to, sheltering his small body with hers, bearing the wounds inflicted by all those who knew the truth and had the gall to speak it. She had absorbed so much, but it only drained her further, shriveling her incrementally every time she gave him his morphine and watched his eyes become glassy, staring, like those of some world-weary addict, every time she combed his hair with one hand extended ready to catch the loosened tufts. She had felt it all, and she could not silence the tiny section of her mind that hoped she would never feel anything again.

She shook her head. It doesn't matter now. The meatballs matter now. What kind of hostess would I be if I ran out of meatballs? She took the Tupperware container of meatballs out of the refrigerator and dumped the contents into a saucepan on the stove. She watched as the sauce simmered, coursing around the meatballs in scarlet rivulets like blood flowing around globular cells: damaged cells that spread, swelled, blocked the blood . . . No! The sauce splattered upon her hand as she jerked the pan violently from the stove. Ignoring the sting of the boiling liquid, she poured the heated mixture into the great silver bowl, pasted a smile on her face, and carried the dish back into the crowded room.

She repeated the cycle all afternoon, picking up the trays of food she thought ought to be freshened, retreating to the kitchen alone. "No, I don't need any help, it's only a matter of slicing a few more apples," and returning with the same trays piled high with fresh contents. Her mouth was cemented in its bright smile, having forgotten a time in which it had not needed to mask bitterness and grief and had not been obligated to brighten a cheerless room. It was the smile perfected through so many long afternoons in sterile white rooms where joy and life were extinguished with every drop of the chemotherapy prolonging a tortured existence. Then, all she had wanted was to see a smile returned, even though she knew it would be as artificial as her own. Now, all she wanted was to see a face, even just one, whose forlorn expression would not remind her of the small oak box and its piteous contents. She bustled among the knots of women shaking their lowered heads and tut-tutting; she maneuvered between the stoic men who waited with moist eyes in the line to sign the guest book; she peddled her wares to anyone who approached her directly, tempting them with melon balls or deli ham before the name David could pass their lips. Some took the proffered food with a grave "thank you, Susan," and a heavy sigh after she had turned away; others declined, shaking their heads and following her retreating form with pitying eyes.

Jared's gaze followed her as she continued her laps of the room. His suit was rumpled from a long day of embraces and supportive shoulder claps, and his tie hung limp and loose around his neck. He had been struggling to loosen it just a little more all day, a nervous exercise for his hands to perform. The tie always felt slightly too tight. If it were just a little looser perhaps he could finally swallow this lump in his throat, and his voice would not be so broken and thin. His deep brown eyes stared, empty and glazed.

He watched her as she flitted around the buffet table at the center of the room, her face carefully averted from the flower-laden dais by the wall, and he hated her. He hated her composure, the cool indifference she exuded. He hated her perfectly arranged platters of fruit and crackers, and her crisp navy skirt and jacket. He hated the brightness of her eyes, their feverish glow, and he wished he could take those tears she refused to weep and pour them over the tiny coffin. She had not allowed him to help with the preparations. She had left him to sit alone in the den, staring at his hands, while she drew up her lists and made the arrangements. She had left him alone at night with little Bailey, trying to explain to the toddler why David hadn't come home this time, while she had paced the kitchen floor, stirring sauces, molding meatballs, and chopping carrots and cucumbers. He had been asleep when the footsteps had stopped and she had retreated to David's shadowy room, sitting on the edge of his bed, the book they had been in the middle of reading lying open in her lap. She had spent the night finishing the tale of Robin Hood, whispering the narrative to her unseen audience, keeping her promise to finish the book. But all he knew was that when he woke this morning, her side of the bed was cold, and her footfalls were beating out that same steady tempo from the night before.

He hated the way this was all just a task, just another line on her list of things to do that would be crossed out in a few more hours, leaving them both to look ahead to the next day's events. He felt weighed down by gloomy trepidation, despair that tomorrow he would have to watch the small coffin disappear from sight forever. He suspected that she felt burdened with nervous anticipation instead, worrying that the flowers would be wrong, or that one of the readers would bungle his recitation. It hadn't always been this way. She had not always been this hard, this cold, this unfeeling. He remembered laughter, passion, and her face lit up with easy joy during afternoon picnics. Slowly that had all stopped, as her laughter dwindled and was reserved only for David, and the picnics became TV trays precariously balanced on laps in the room upstairs wallpapered with Red Sox posters and Little League team pictures. Picnics for two, sometimes four, on the rare occasions she thought the antiseptic smell of disease and the vague trace of vomit in the room would not be too distressing for Bailey. Now even that laughter had ceased and this automaton had usurped his wife. He shook his head, embraced another well-wisher, and he hated her.

Night fell, and the guests left the house, promising Jared they would be there in the morning and praising Susan for her hard work and delectable fruit salads. "We know it must be so hard, dear, if there is anything we can do . . ." But she silenced them with a sharp shake of her head. Everything would be perfect tomorrow; she had everything under control. Her list was in her skirt pocket. She drew it out anxiously every few minutes, reviewing it to make certain her eyes had not skipped an unchecked line. She had missed one a few weeks before. They had forgotten David's teddy bear that always accompanied him during his treatments, enduring the needle pricks and endless hours of waiting with the small boy. He never wanted to be without his bear: Teddy brought him luck, helped him fight the bad cells. That last treatment had not been lucky.

Jared left to fetch Bailey from his mother's. They had decided that the child should not be there to see this, to see David's cold hands clutching his tattered bear, the livid bruises that once spread menacingly down his arms in sickly green and yellow fingers now deftly concealed, as if the IV needles had never been there. Bailey would not have understood; they had agreed on this point. And so Jared was not there when the funeral-home staff came to retrieve the casket. Only Susan's sister had stayed behind to hold her hand while they took David away. Only Ellen saw her face crumple, her resolve falter.

The oak lid of the coffin slipped from the mortician's hand and fell with a resounding bang. His head snapped around to face her, his face a plaster mask of horror at this break in decorum. She had merely smiled, nodding that she understood, mistakes happen. But meanwhile, the crash was resonating through her hollow chest, which, until that moment, had seemed to be filled only with an unfathomable emptiness. My heart has been ripped out, she thought. Piece by piece for months; that's just how it is. But other things took its place: bedpans, white cell counts, red pills, blue pills, green pills. But what is left to take its place now? And at that moment, there was only the crash.

The noise seemed to expand inside her, echoing and filling her empty body. It was the smash of the breakfast tray she had dropped when she found him on the floor; it was the ambulance door slamming shut behind the stretcher that last time; it was the clatter of the instruments on the metal trays as the pediatricians had gathered around his small body, poking, prodding, persuading him to hang on, to wait for that elusive cure that was "not far away, a few months, maybe more." It was the snap of a gate that had shut behind him, and for once she could not go first. Ellen had grasped her elbow, steadying her quivering knees as the casket was rolled out the door.

"Thanks, Ellie. I guess I'm just a little tired after all the preparations." Her voice was tremulous and not her own.

Ellen's eyes surveyed her sister's face intently, questioning, reassuring. "You know . . ." she said quietly, hesitating, cautiously selecting her words. "You don't have to be so strong, Suzie. You've been amazing through all this, truly. But, baby, no one is going to blame you if you need help, if you want to stop and just take some time."

"You should go," Susan replied. "I have a lot of clearing up to do."

"Suz, let me help you; let Jared help you. Please don't shut us out. I know it hurts, but we love you, Susan."

Tears welled up in Susan's eyes, as she recalled speaking some of the same words to David, pleading with him to take the medicine they both knew would only bring him worse pain. But now her name had taken the place of his; the script had changed and suddenly she didn't know her lines. The crash echoed from every side. The glint from the silver flatware drew her attention, and, gratefully, she was lured back into the part she had rehearsed so well. "The dishes are dirty. They need to be washed and you'd only get in my way." She twisted her arm out of her sister's clasp and retreated into the kitchen, attacking the dishes feverishly.

Ellen shook her head sadly and left, meeting Jared as he pulled into the driveway.

"I tried. She won't listen to me. God, I'm really worried about her. The longer this goes on, the harder it's going to be for her."

"I know," Jared replied with a sigh. He looked at the house and saw Susan's shadowed form through the curtains of the kitchen window. "I'll try to talk to her again. I just can't . . ." His voice broke and he paused to swallow the rising pressure in his chest. "Thanks for talking to her, though, El. I appreciate it. See you tomorrow?"

He watched Ellen's Toyota pull away from the curb, waving to her before he bent down to lift Bailey from the car seat. He entered the darkened house and walked into the comforting, warm light of the kitchen. Bailey's head, heavy with disrupted sleep, nestled against his neck. He spoke to Susan, tried to get her attention, but she had not even looked up when he entered the room. He turned and climbed the stairs, trying not to jostle the drowsy toddler as he went, leaving Susan alone among the dishes and the pans and the bottles of pills that had not yet been emptied.

It was two in the morning when she finally emerged from the kitchen. She surveyed the living room and watched as ghosts of the guests returned in throngs, huddled and gazing at the empty space where the casket had been, and their whispered condolences, already accepted, rose to the ceiling and gathered in the corners.

She drew a chair into the center of the room, scattering the specters, and sat down. The full moon's argentine beams enveloped her solitary figure, but she felt none of their magnetism. She thought of nights she had sat with David, comforting him as the nausea wrenched his frail body and he filled his Speed Racer trash can with vomit. She had stroked his fevered head and created fantastic stories for him about the elf that lived on the moon and slid down to earth on moonbeams to create mischief.

Now she sat alone, and the moonlight had lost its magic. Nothing more than white light, a combination of wavelengths, surrounded her as she sat, gazing at the crushed flower petals on the carpet. David has left for the last time, she thought, staring sightlessly at the broken blossoms. And I didn't even get to kiss him good-bye as he left. She cast her eyes despairingly around the room, searching for her little boy, willing him to come running to her from the shadows, looking for his kiss, as had been their ritual.

It was Jared who emerged from the darkness of the foyer instead, his eyes inky cavities in his pallid face. He walked to her slowly, cautiously, watching her as she, like a wild cat, considered him, mistrust in her eyes. He saw this flickering of emotion and misunderstood it as grief. The anger that had filled him this afternoon melted away, and he sought to open himself to her, to share their bereavement. In his eagerness to recover his wife, to reclaim her love, he quickened his approach, raising his arms in the promise of an embrace.

"Sue," he began in the cracked, unfamiliar voice. She jumped from the chair as if she had been stung.

"Do you have a pressed suit for tomorrow? You simply can't go in that crumpled thing you wore this afternoon: what would people think? I should iron a suit for you. And Bailey, I should find her velvet dress and give it a wash. She only just wore it to the Christmas service. I think it's still in the hamper." The words tumbled out of her mouth in a desperate torrent as she brushed past Jared, leaving him in the center of the darkened room, arms still slightly opened, now trembling, though he couldn't tell whether it was with anger or anguish.

She had flicked on the kitchen light in her rush back to the laundry room, and the yellow glow now cast his shadow before him, tall, thin, and frail. He stared at this solitary black outline. It mocked him. The man he had been, now attenuated by mourning, had been swallowed entirely by this blackness that had spread within him from his fingertips to his very core, leaving only this apparition. And he was alone. He turned on his heel and followed her back into the laundry room, where she stood fervently scrubbing a cranberry sauce stain from Bailey's Christmas dress.

"Could you hand me that detergent, Jared?" She knew why he had followed her there, and her eyes were pleading with him not to speak, not to interrupt her action.

"No. You don't need the detergent right now, Susan. We need to talk."

She looked away from him, back down to the red stain on the dress, and kept scrubbing, her mouth pressed in a thin, determined line.

"Susan, you can't just keep ignoring this," his voice was quiet, yet firm. He would not be turned away this time. "You can't just not accept this, Susie: it won't go away. I wish it would, too, but it won't." He paused for a second to let his words sink in. "And it's not fair, Sue. It's just not fair." There was a growing edge beneath his restrained tone, hardening his voice to match the expression in his eyes.

She slowed her scrubbing, recalling the weeks after learning of David's diagnosis. She had not wanted to hear that some indistinct shadow on an x-ray was a living mass, spreading its tentacles insidiously through David's brain, a brain that all his teachers had said was bright enough to merit selection into a magnet program when the time came. She had refused to listen to the prognosis, immersing herself in constant activity and the numbing anesthetic of ritual.

"You left me with the bad parts, Sue. You kept your life; you ignored the cancer. And I let you do it. God, I was jealous, but I let you have the illusion. I didn't get to pretend, Suz. I had to wear the black hat, be the bearer of bad news. I got the conversations with the doctors, the chemotherapy options, the side effects, the life expectancies. The life expectancies, Susan!" She flinched at this last remark and thought about how desperately she had tried to keep things normal for David, tried to let him be just a boy, instead of that boy, the sick boy from whom the people averted their gazes and withheld their handshakes and embraces. I threw him elaborate birthday parties, drove him to meetings with Cub Scout troop 1173, and packed nutritionally balanced lunches. It was all I could think to do.

Jared saw her hands pause, growing still for the first time in a week, and decided he was getting through to her. Worrying that he was being too harsh, but unable to stop, he pressed on.

"Do you know how long I have mourned that little boy? He's been dead a few days, but I've mourned him for years, Susan. Every time a doctor suggested a new medicine or gave us a new estimate, I had to see the pallbearers, the flowers, the grave. I've been to his funeral too many times to count, just so you wouldn't have to. But I'll be damned if I did all that just to go through it alone again!"

His voice broke, and she stopped scrubbing, but kept her back to him. The scene he had described was not unfamiliar to her either. She recalled every time the funeral had played in her mind, a horrific movie from which she could not avert her attention; every night she had finished a new chapter in the book they were reading together and said a small prayer that David would still be there for tomorrow night's installment; every day that she counted the minutes that David would be gone, away at school, at a friend's home, or spending the afternoon with his cousins, knowing that any one of those moments could bring the phone call she so dreaded.

He reached out his hand and gripped her shoulder tightly, bringing her back to this tiny, close room with its thick smell of heat and soap. He needed a physical connection to his wife, who still seemed so distant, so unreachable. He tried one last time, massaging her tense shoulder as she spoke.

"I need you, Susan; I can't do this without you. Come back to me, Susie. Please?"

She turned to face him and her eyes were blurred with tears.

"David still needs me, too." Her voice was flat and final as she resumed her assault on the cranberry sauce stain.

The frigid wind made his tie flutter and rise, slapping him gently on the chest over and over again in a mockery of a heartbeat. The words of the priest rang hollow in his ears. He had been preparing for this for so long that now all meaning was gone. The coffin was covered in yellow roses and white daisies, raised above the hole incised into the frozen ground, the red clay of the sides mimicking an angrily swollen gash. He remembered with a weak smile a time when that was his worst fear, that David would fall while running the bases in T-ball and tear up his knees, blood mixing with the chalk of the baselines and the infield dust.

A muffled sob rose from the crowd and hung in the air as the priest scattered a handful of dirt on top of the vivid flowers and looked at Jared expectantly. It was time to say good-bye. He pulled the baseball from his pocket and nestled it in the flowers on top of the casket. He knelt on the frost-coated grass and bent his head, his lips moving silently, uncertainly.

She watched Jared as he hesitated in his silent monologue. He had never been good at good-byes. David was so like him, so open and welcoming. He would never allow people he loved to leave him, tugging at their hands if they tried to go, struggling to stop the progression of time. It was as if he knew his time was short, and he did not want to waste a moment of it alone.

They had shared a talent for painting, she and David, and she recalled the humid summer days they had spent sketching shapes in the clouds, birds flitting in the trees, and ladybugs that crawled up their legs. They had painted together in the hospital, too. They painted superheroes attacking evil green globs of cancer in his body, and luminous angels hovering around his bed, casting a golden aura over a happy blond boy. I lied to him, she thought. I promised that everything would be fine, that the angels and the supermen would never let the cancer win. But my angels were just paint and water.

Jared was rising from the coffin and turning his face to her. It was the face she had seen last night in the laundry room, drawn with pain, but now there was no laundry to distract her, no darks to be separated, no stains to bleach. She felt the grief on his face, and frightened, she broke her gaze, searching for solace in the face of someone else. She met the eyes of the priest, beckoning her to come forward and say good-bye. Complying stiffly, mechanically, she knelt beside the casket and whispered the farewell she had composed and rehearsed, as single tears began to slip down her cheeks.

Having reached the end of her prepared remarks, she was struck with a realization that swallowed her whole, enveloped her in its foreboding shadow. There was nothing left. That was the last thing she had needed to do, the last thing on her list. She had stopped: the one action she had not planned out in the past few days. Her tasks were finished, her cycle broken. Nothing remained for her to do but stop, and all of a sudden it was true: he was dead. He was cold, stiff, dead.

The first sob was painful and seemed to drop her keeling form to the ground as she bent and pressed her palms against the frosty grass for support. Her tears fell faster now, and the sobs rose quicker. She swayed back and forth on her knees, clutching her arms around herself in an embrace that felt too tight, because no one was clasped within it, an embrace that would never again encircle her son. Her mind reeled as she rocked herself, searching for something left undone, for some semblance of order, of routine, but there was nothing. She felt smothered by the cloak of grief that surrounded her body, squeezing every last resistance from her. She had fended it off for so long, refusing to become trapped in its snare, but now she found herself inextricably entangled. There were no more trips to the park, no more stories to read. The last puzzle had been put right, and now there was nothing left. She raised her eyes to the coffin, to the priest, and then to Jared, begging for something she couldn't define, but knew that she did not possess. He watched his suddenly disconsolate wife rocking herself like a lost and abandoned child, choking on her own tears.

She struggled in intuitive panic as she felt her chest constrict, unable to draw enough oxygen to support the lamentations that her grief demanded, but then capitulated when she felt herself slipping into a concentrated blackness. She welcomed the haze, willing it to drown her mind that grew quieter as the dimness advanced. Voices, images, emotions, everything slowly grew thin and insubstantial, and the urgency of her bereavement seemed to relax its grip. She felt as though she were gliding away, retreating from those faces, those voices; they were back where the pain was. She liked it here better. Jared had rushed toward her when she had begun to faint and had taken her in his arms, accommodating his body to the rocking of hers. She accepted his embrace, covering his hands with hers, as they moved together as one, giving life to their grief, but she knew she could not stay. The oblivion was too magnetic. The last thing she knew, as her mind wrapped itself in the succoring dusk, were Jared's tears and ragged breath upon her hair as he cradled her, and the child's hand tugging gently on her fingertips.