The Push
You repeated it again to me slowly once he left, your voice cracking: “Blythe, it was an accident. Just a terrible accident.”
I was in this alone.
* * *
? ? ?
On our way to the park the weekend before, Violet had asked me a question at that very same corner, one she already knew the answer to.
“Do the cars only stop when the light is red?”
“You know that, you just turned seven! You know cars stop at all red lights. And a yellow light means be cautious because it’s turning red soon. That’s why it’s dangerous to cross the road unless the cars are completely stopped at the red light.” She had nodded.
I thought about how curious she was becoming about the world around her. I wondered if we should start teaching her about maps. We could walk the neighborhood and look for street names and directions. How fun that might be for us to do together.
As I sat in the family room of the emergency department, I thought about that question over and over.
You took Violet home, but I couldn’t leave. My son’s body was still in that building.
Under a sheet? In the basement? On one of those trays that slide into the wall like an oven rack? Was my baby on an oven rack, and was he cold? I didn’t know where they put him, but we weren’t allowed to see him. Benny was in a plastic bag on my lap, his white tail stained.
45
I threw up everything I ate for eleven days. I cried in my dreams, and then I woke and I cried in the dark. My body shook for hours at a time.
The doctor came in his street clothes on a Saturday morning, someone whose house you had designed who had offered you the favor. He said I must have had a stomach bug, that it wasn’t just grief, that sometimes the immune system can be compromised when dealing with something like this. You agreed and thanked him with a bottle of wine on his way out the door, and I didn’t care enough to tell you both to fuck off.
Your mother came to stay with us. She brought me tea and tissues and sleeping pills and cold cloths to press on my face. I said what I needed to so that she’d leave the room. I’ll be fine, I promise. I just need some time to myself. She tried her best, but her presence took up space in my brain, distracted me from the only thing I wanted to be thinking about. Him. Anger made it hard to breathe. Sadness made it hard to open my eyes, to let the light into me. I belonged in the dark, I was owed the dark.
Your mother took Violet to a hotel for a few days, thinking the change of scenery would help. I hadn’t seen Violet since the hospital. The morning you went to pick her up, I sat under the window in our bedroom with a blade from the modeling kit you left on your desk. I lifted my shirt and I cut a faint line in my skin from my ribs down to my waist. I yelled for Sam until my voice was raw. The blood formed a perforated line, and tasted rancid, like I’d been rotting inside since the minute he died. I couldn’t stop putting it on my tongue. I smeared the blood all over my stomach and my breasts and wanted more. I wanted to feel like I was murdered, like someone had taken my life and left me to die.
When I heard Violet’s voice downstairs, I had to hold my hands tightly together to stop them from shaking. I locked the bedroom door and then I showered and put on a shirt that I had bought the week before Sam died, one I’d taken him out in the slushy frozen rain to buy, because I had felt like I had nothing to wear anymore. When that kind of thing had felt like a problem. I forgot his snacks. I had hushed his hunger impatiently in the long line and had made him late for his nap.
“Mommy’s upstairs,” I heard you tell her. You so rarely called me Mommy and neither did she.
You were wearing black sweatpants and a red flannel shirt. You didn’t change your clothes for weeks after he died. That was the only thing about you that looked any different than before, although I know you were hurting immensely. I listened to you walk between the den and our bedroom and Violet’s room and the kitchen. You never went into his room. A loop around our house, making the same creaks in the floors and the same noises: the toilet flushing, the hallway window opening, the fridge door shutting. Maybe you were waiting, respectfully, for someone to tell you that life could go on again, that you could set your alarm for the job you loved, and go to pickup basketball on Tuesdays, and laugh with Violet as loudly as you had before. Or maybe you never expected to find these joys in life again.
Do you know you spoke to me just four times? Four times in almost two weeks. There was too much pain to bear in the sight of each other.
You said you didn’t want a funeral. So we didn’t have one.
You wanted to know where Violet’s thermos was kept.
You told me you missed him, and then you lay down next to me on the bed, naked and wet from the shower, and you cried for nearly an hour. I lifted the blanket up, the only invitation I’d given you since he died, and you rolled in close. I held your head to my chest and realized that there would not be space for you in me, not that day, and maybe not ever. (This was the last time you would ever say those words to me—I miss him—of your own volition. “Of course I miss him,” you would recite back at me for months after that, whenever I worked up the courage to ask.)
You asked if I would make dinner for Violet the night she came back, because you would be going out, you would be leaving the house at five o’clock. I told you no, I couldn’t, and you left the room.