What's Mine and Yours(17)
At first, she asked for his forgiveness. It was her fault for getting him mixed up with her family—a crew of people she should have known to leave behind. She said sorry, and she cursed herself, cursed Wilson. Once, she was so loud, Gee woke up and crept into the kitchen without her noticing. She turned and found him leaning against the door, giving her a terrified look. She sent him to his room right away, told him everything was fine. She knew well that sadness was a contagion. So was rage. She couldn’t allow him to see her swallowed up by grief.
Now, she mostly asked Ray for help. Help to rise early enough to do all the things that he used to do: fix breakfast and pour milk and wash dishes and iron clothes. Help to carry on. Help to find peace, whatever superpower had made Ray able to smile at life, keep cool, and be satisfied. That wasn’t her. But she had to find a way now, for Gee.
And she was tired, so tired. It had been six weeks since Ray was gone, and she hadn’t felt this drained since her first days with a newborn. All those hours she spent alone in her mother’s house with a baby she didn’t know how to soothe or hold or feed. The only thing she knew then was that she had to control herself. She couldn’t lose her temper. He couldn’t see her weep. They learned about the world by looking at your face, listening to the tone of your voice. A baby couldn’t handle the raw force of her loneliness, her terror. And so, she had smiled at him, forced herself to stay calm when he spat up milk on her, to say sweet things she didn’t mean when she crawled out of the bed to feed him in the middle of the night. All that effort in those days, and still her son had wound up a boy with a father who was dead. Now, she found herself playing that same role again. She was even. She smiled at Gee. She turned to him even when she’d rather stay in bed. She pretended she didn’t miss Ray as badly as she did; she pretended it wouldn’t be near impossible for them to go on. She stopped herself whenever she felt she would overflow; it was far too much for such a little boy.
On her first day off since the funeral, Jade sat at the shrine and waited on Ray. She was hollowed out, dazed from another string of bad dreams. Sometimes, they were benign: She was looking for Ray, wandering the halls of her high school, a corridor of empty hospital rooms that opened one onto another. She saw Ray ahead of her, and she chased him, but he’d vanish every time, just before she reached him. But other times, the dreams were terrifying. There was a fire, and Ray was walking into a smoke-filled house. There was a storm, and Ray was charging toward the center. There was an earthquake, and he was standing on the road, unshielded. Every time, she ran to him. Every time, he was going away from her.
Jade sat cross-legged on the carpet, and she hurt all over. Her knees hurt, her hip bones, her jaw. Grief, she knew, could take over the body. The social worker had left her pamphlets that said so. The pamphlets included bullet-pointed tips, as if mourning were like starting a new diet. Check the boxes, and you’d be on your way. Talk out loud to your beloved was the one she tried each morning at the shrine. So was Lean on your higher power. Another bullet point encouraged her to sit still and observe her thoughts, but she quit that one quick. Her thoughts were a dismal parade. We never got married and I’m still a widow. Ray looked after me and it killed him. When I graduate from nursing school, nobody’s going to be there. I don’t want to love anybody else. Gee won’t ever be able to unsee what he saw. Ray, where are you. Ray, can you hear me. Ray, Ray.
Jade sat for a while, asking Ray for help, the only help he could provide—for an idea. She had to do something about the bills. Electricity, gas, the phone, the rent. She was late on everything. Things had been tight since she went back to school, but without Ray, it was worse. She and Gee were already on cups of noodles, canned beans, bread and peanut butter. The night before, Jade had scavenged dessert from underneath the sink: canned peaches that she and Gee ate together on the couch with spoons, taking turns to drain the syrup from the can.
It had been easy when Ray was alive to ignore how much she depended on him. She loved him—that was clear—but he had guided her, too, in a way she would never have admitted. He was the one who administered their lives, who bought Gee the next size up in shoes, who turned down the thermostat at night, who bought detergent and set alarms, who drew a blanket over her when she fell asleep with her books, a drink.
After several minutes of nothing at the shrine, Jade gave up and told Ray good-bye. The day was calling her, and Gee would be getting up soon. She kissed her fingers, touched them to his face. The photograph was from a day they had gone to the park with Gee. It was nothing but a flat field and a few oak trees, and she remembered being bored, wishing she were somewhere else, by herself for once, or studying. But Ray had amused Gee, making up games and running around, pulling up grass and tossing handfuls at their boy. It had moved her, how much he seemed to delight in Gee, how content he seemed with their life. She had taken the picture of the two of them.
Without any intervention from Ray, wherever he was, she had to go on with the only plan she had: to move Gee in with her and rent out his little square of a room. Jade sat at the kitchen table and wrote out an ad. She wouldn’t get much for it, but it was better than nothing. She wondered about the odds of finding a woman, someone safe enough to let in her house.
When she was done, she hauled herself to the stove, and made hot chocolate from two dusty packets she found in a cupboard. She browned bread in the oven, spread butter over the last two slices, and left the bigger one for Gee. She went to his bedroom and turned on the lights. “Up,” she said. A few minutes later, he was in the kitchen in his pajamas, frowning at her.