Grief

Angie has retreated to our bathroom upstairs, the huge double slipper tub we’d put in when she was pregnant, soaking there now as if she’s sailing away, adrift on uncharted currents. I listen for the occasional slosh, some sense of her not having disappeared altogether, but hear only the water draining as she adds more hot, over and over, hours’ worth, as if she’ll never be warm again. The whole emptied house to myself, the water rushing down the pipes, I do nothing but keep my eyes above any possible trace of Jason, stare at my father’s tools, his working tools Angie had mounted in shadow boxes when we cleaned out his place. Antiques all, these things he used every day, able to build or fix anything.

But even this is not safe. When Angie first put them up, Jason couldn’t get enough of them. He had me bring them down again and again, let him touch them, come so close to their dangerous edges. Bench planes, edge bevels, mortising chisels, brace and auger bits, all honed to razors, the wood polished with only the oil of my father’s skin. He’d taught me their names, tried to train me in their uses, but they remained as foreign in my hands as ever.

Jason begged me to use them, build him a tree house. But after standing side by side beneath our crab apple, my father’s carpenter saw dangling useless from my hand, the cape of his Batman jams fluttering in the breeze, he let me off the hook, said he’d really rather have a cave under the house. Bats. A manservant. He took to calling me Alfred.

I shut my eyes, listen for that final pull of the plug, when I’ll go up to meet Angie in our bedroom. Week after week of water drying her skin to something she might slough off, I’ve brought home creams and ointments, prescriptions, hopes I apply with the same incapable hands. She bears the applications, sitting silent on the bed, nude, rolling this way or that, as instructed. I might as well be rubbing marble, polishing the Pieta. When I finish she pulls the sheet over herself and stares at the wall, the ceiling, whatever direction my ministrations have left her. I have tried talking, but we’ve left that beyond the horizon now, too. The doctors said time, one even rolling out how it heals all wounds. We did not go back for a second session.

The tub, the tools, the lotion, the incredible drag of the clock’s second hand, this is what is left to us after the rush, the flowers, the memorials on every corner, the entire city a mortuary, not a soul knowing what to say to any of the twenty families. We with no clearer trail back to the world, no real interest in making the trip.

The reporters are long gone, their headlines, even the tire tracks of their big satellite trucks vanished, the earth risen back up beneath the grass. They won’t return until the next, like at Virginia Tech this time, asking those parents how they’ve dealt with it. Questions as pointless and unanswerable as any ever asked.

The baths, as unable to heal as time, do at least seem to soothe. Angie never says so, but why else? Why spend all your idle hours ensconced in our old tub, the room steamed around you, its memories held as tight and dank as some cloying tropical disease, your skin pruned and puckered as the dead’s?

It’s those questions that draw me upstairs, to the rooms I’ve avoided ever since the day, a hope of a glimpse of who Angie has become. On one of her rare ventures out, a trip for groceries, the inhuman drive to keep the body alive, I take a book, my reading glasses, and head up like in the old days, when Angie and Jason were off somewhere and I would steal this precious scrap of time alone, no idea how much of it...