After Melanie Read online

  They were plunged into a despair they could not articulate. They mourned her with unabated, uncomprehending grief. Their life was refrozen into a tundra of unspoken words, unshared feelings. David slept fitfully and awakened trembling, frightened by phantasmagoric dreams he could not recall. Brian wept in Denise’s arms. Melanie’s photos were swept from the mantle and replaced with a single formal studio portrait. The refrigerator door was barren.

  Yet another chapter, Judith thought bitterly.

  Unable to sustain the solitude of sorrow, she sought out a therapist: wise, gray-haired Evelyn who listened intently and spoke very slowly, very softly.

  ‘Allow yourself to mourn. Let it out,’ Evelyn said, as though the grief was held captive in the secret dungeon of Judith’s heart. ‘Talk about it.’

  How patiently Evelyn explained what she called the fivefold acknowledged stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.

  Acknowledged by whom? Judith wondered. Mentally, she canceled out that learned formula stage by stage. She had not denied the reality of Melanie’s death. For anger she substituted agony. She had made no bargains, recognizing that she had no chips with which to gamble.

  Depression? She rejected that cold, clinical word. She preferred the simplicity of ‘sorrow’, the majesty of ‘lamentation’. She thought to quote Emily Dickinson to Evelyn. Tis not that dying hurts us so … Tis living hurts us more … But she would not challenge the therapist whose insights were too expensive to dispute. As for that final stage, acceptance, of course she accepted her daughter’s death – how could she not? – but never would she be able to make her peace with it – if that was what acceptance meant. But she would take relief wherever she could find it. Not acceptance but relief.

  Evelyn would be proud of her, Judith thought now, standing in the kitchen and thinking about David’s words. She had not argued with him. She had not disagreed. But sorrow had overcome her and, dutifully, she’d submitted to it. She was letting it out.

  Tears were coming. She wiped the counter clean and allowed them to fall. It was her nightly ration of grief, her earned release after a day of silent endurance. She wept as she restored the spices to the rack and hung the copper pots on their clever hooks. She wept as she swept the floor and wiped the counter yet again. Only when the kitchen was returned to pristine order did she reach for the crumpled Kleenex in her pocket and wipe her eyes. She was, she told herself, learning to take control of the days of her life, her new life. She was, after all, moving on.

  She roused herself from bed each morning, forced herself to eat breakfast, then vomited, rinsed her mouth and went to her therapy appointment. She sat at her computer and typed out research ideas which she deleted by late afternoon. She prepared careful meals, often forgetting that there would be only two for dinner. She shopped with a false intensity of purpose, consulting lists she did not remember composing. Slowly, very slowly, she was relinquishing the odd rituals of misery. And perhaps David, with his reference to Melanie’s room, was doing the same. The thought gave her pause, soothed her.

  She washed her face at the kitchen sink, dried it with a paper towel and stared at herself in the small ceramic-framed mirror that Melanie had placed on the windowsill between two small pots of African violets.

  ‘I like to see myself when I wash the dishes,’ Melanie had explained, and Judith had asked no questions. It was, she knew, a harmless pre-adolescent conceit. The rush of steam from the hot water turned her daughter’s fair skin a tender pink and curled the fringes of the dark bangs that hung unevenly across her high forehead. Melanie, standing on tiptoe, had looked at herself in the mirror as she rinsed glasses, now winking flirtatiously, now wrinkling her nose cunningly, now smiling, now frowning. She was a child rehearsing for what Jane Austen had called her ‘coming out’, her emergence into the complicated world of defined femininity. Judith, who had written extensively on Jane Austen, was amused to see Melanie behaving like a Bennet daughter – the mirror, of course, always an appropriate Austen prop.

  David, oddly faithful to Jewish ritual, had removed that small kitchen mirror during the shiva week, but Judith had set it back in place when the official mourning period ended. She had stared at it on that first day of an arduously resumed normalcy, as though Melanie’s moist and rosy face might look back at her. Magical thinking, she knew. It was her own stricken, uncomprehending visage that was captured in that steam-streaked mirror that she wiped clean each evening. It would, she thought, with an irrationality that she both recognized and condoned, be disloyal to Melanie to remove the mirror.

  Staring at her own reflection, she saw that the frozen mask of sorrow that had, for so many weeks, held her face rigid had melted. Her hazel eyes had lost the glaze of bewilderment peculiar to the newly bereft. Her skin was burnished by the harsh sunlight of new spring, a result of the very long walks she obediently took each day on the recommendation of wise and expensive Evelyn. Her dark hair, newly styled and attractively layered – yet another of Evelyn’s suggestions – framed her oval face.

  She toyed with a wayward strand and remembered a friend of her mother’s, Bertha Lefkowitz, a plump woman whose thick hair had once been coiled into a jet-colored bun. It was said that when Bertha Lefkowitz received a telegram informing her that her son, Milton, had been killed in Vietnam, her black hair had turned snow-white, even as she stood in her doorway, clutching the yellow slip of paper that changed her life forever.

  Remembering Bertha Lefkowitz, Judith marveled that her own dark hair had not lost all color when the very young doctor told them, with sorrow in his eyes and death on his lips, that their daughter was lost to them. That she had been spared. Only a very few strands of silver shimmered in her night-dark hair. Was her grief, she wondered, less profound than that of Bertha Lefkowitz? Had she loved her daughter less than Bertha Lefkowitz had loved her son? Stupid, foolish thought, she knew, and she grimaced at herself punishingly.

  She dimmed the kitchen light and wandered into the living room where David, pale and sad-eyed, sat with the Times unopened on his lap as Mahler’s Fourth filled the room with symphonic sorrow. Her heart turned to see how tired he looked. He was a tall man, but his shoulders were rounded now as though weighted by the burden of unremitting sadness. His narrow face was ashen. His eyes were closed as though he did not have the energy required to lift his pale lids, or perhaps because he did not think there was anything in his silent and tasteful living room that was worth looking at.

  His fatigue did not surprise her. Except for the week of mourning, he had taken no time off, plunging into a difficult arbitration. She supposed that the complex arguments of his profession absorbed him and provided a barrier against his grief. That, at least, was Brian’s explanation. But she knew that David’s work and the long commute into the city had always been a strain. He had complained of it for years, had even spoken of perhaps buying a studio in Manhattan.

  It was, in fact, Brian, all those months ago, in the distant era of before, who had suggested an alternative. Why shouldn’t his father work from home now and again?

  ‘Dad can’t deal with the traffic,’ he had said. ‘He should work more days at home. Less stress. It would give him more time with you, more time with Melanie. Denise thinks so, and so do I.’

  Newly engaged, Brian rushed to introduce his fiancée’s name into every family discussion. Denise thinks. Denise says. Judith reproved herself for resenting Denise’s new presence in the life of their insular family and simply nodded her agreement.

  A doable idea that David should work from home, she had thought then, more convenient and less expensive than an urban pied-à-terre. They had a den or they could build an extension for a home office. She had imagined David interrupting his work to help Melanie with her math homework. Perhaps they would take a late-afternoon bike ride, father and daughter pedaling down sun-streaked roads. In the evening the three of them would gather around the table for an early dinner, and they would listen with amusement as Melanie
bubbled over with anecdotes of her day, imitating her teachers, complaining about her friends.

  That idea had coalesced with the approach of Judith’s long-awaited, hard-earned sabbatical. There would be no need to review lecture notes, to grade papers. Their evenings could be leisurely. It would be good for David, good for Melanie, good for her, good for all of them to spend time together. David working at home, she free of all academic obligations, both of them focused on Melanie. But, of course, all those plans had been formulated before.

  Before Melanie’s death … Before that last morning when she had raced out to catch the school bus, clutching her half-eaten Pop Tart and waving a peremptory goodbye. Her face was flushed, her ponytail swinging, one blue knee sock sliding dangerously down her chubby calf. It had been an ordinary morning. They could not have known, they would not have believed, that she would be dead before the end of the day.

  Unbelievable. Judith clung to the word. Even now, all these months since Melanie’s death, and despite the agonizingly slow passage of time, it was beyond belief, although the events of that last day were frozen in memory.

  Judith had been thinking about dinner that afternoon, the very first day of her long-awaited sabbatical, when the phone rang. She had lifted the receiver as she stood beside the open freezer touching the packaged meat, pondering whether to defrost veal or lamb, chicken or steak: thoughts that were never completed, decisions that were never made for a dinner that was never prepared.

  ‘Am I speaking to Judith Mandell, the mother of Melanie Mandell?’ A telemarketer, Judith had thought, but she did not hang up. Her fingers stuck to the icy parcels as she listened to words that she could not assimilate. The caller, a woman, identified herself. She was a volunteer, a hospital volunteer, she explained and, in a gentle voice, laced with practiced sympathy, she added that it was important, very important, that Judith come to the local hospital at once.

  ‘It’s about your daughter, Mrs Mandell. Your husband is already on his way.’

  ‘My daughter? My husband? But why? But what?’

  Her heart plummeted. Her hands trembled. She did not know what questions to ask, and there were, of course, no answers. The phone had gone silent. She hung up, slammed the freezer shut. Dizzied, she clung to the metal handle for support and the phone rang again.

  David’s voice was tight, his tone harsh. ‘Don’t drive. Take a cab to the hospital. I’ll see you there. I’m already on the highway.’

  ‘Why a cab?’ she asked, but he had hung up.

  She called a cab, grabbed her purse and sat at the edge of the cracked leather seat next to the driver, urging him to drive faster, faster, tossing a handful of bills at him as she hurtled out the door when they reached the hospital. She did not hear him call after her. She raced up the steps into the reception area where David, his face beaded with sweat, his car keys jangling in his trembling hand, waited for her. Someone led them to an elevator. Voices murmured. They heard words they could not understand. Chairs were offered and declined. A nurse motioned them toward a waiting room, but they shook their heads and stood huddled together in the sterile hospital corridor. A doctor, a very young bespectacled man, too thin for his oversized white jacket, too young perhaps to be a father himself, joined them. He answered their agonized questions in a steady, calm voice. His account was succinct. He had perhaps attended a training session on how to inform parents of the death of a child.

  He told them that Melanie had been rushed to the hospital from her school where she had collapsed so suddenly that an ambulance had been summoned even before a stunned administrator could call them. She was dead on arrival in the emergency room. An aneurysm had exploded in her heart.

  ‘She did not suffer, not for a moment,’ the young doctor assured them. ‘It was a gentle death.’

  He spoke softly as though offering comfort of a kind, but David would not be comforted. Judith swayed, held her hands to her ears, blocking out the words he spoke with such calm finality. She refused to hear those words. She refused to believe them.

  ‘Thirteen-year-old girls do not die!’ David’s voice, shrill and furious, had reverberated, drowning out the hospital sounds, the supposedly soothing muzak, the hum of lifesaving machines, the rhythm of slow-moving rubber-wheeled gurneys. The nurses, in their gay pastel jackets, paused and stood stock-still; the parents of other patients moved away, as though his grief might be contagious and place their own children at risk. Judith had clutched his arm and together they had followed the doctor into the room where their daughter lay on a white-sheeted bed, her ponytail unloosened, her dark hair falling about her face, now cold and white as alabaster, drained of all expression. Both her blue knee socks curled about her ankles. Judith, crazily, pulled the socks up, straightened them, and even thought to comb her daughter’s hair because the ponytail had become undone. Instead, she had pressed her face to Melanie’s, had kissed each smooth cheek, already death-frosted, and lightly touched the rosebud lips with fingers that would not stop trembling.

  David had wept as they drove home, but he had not wept again, not at the funeral – a blessedly brief service, the rabbi at a loss as to how to eulogize a child. He had not wept during the prescribed days of mourning, and even now, months later, his angular face was expressionless, his narrow gray eyes dry.

  Evelyn had suggested that he was perhaps unwilling to dilute his grief with tears. It was, Judith thought, a probable explanation.

  She herself had learned how to portion out her sorrow, how to weep alone in her very clean kitchen. She pitied David even as he angered her. She needed words, she needed comfort; he offered only silence and the darkness of denial. His struggle was solitary, his stresses unshared. It was not his fault. It was not her fault.

  His deficits were not unfamiliar to her, as hers were not unfamiliar to him. It was perhaps, she thought disloyally, those very deficits that had drawn them together and locked them into a magnetic coupling, her strength his weakness, his strength her weakness, their love for each other nullifying any emotional inequities. It was a pattern set in place from their earliest days together. They had been so young when they met, so young when they married.

  Too young perhaps.

  The thought came unbidden, and its disloyalty startled her, filled her with guilt. This was no time to regret their marriage. They had Brian. They had had Melanie. They had each other. His love for Melanie had been equal to hers. His grief, too closely held, was weighted on the same scale as her own. This was yet another sad chapter but one that they would overcome. How unfair she was to David, how miserly her compassion. Standing in the living room, staring at her husband, she was overcome with regret.

  The last movement of the Mahler drifted into silence. David’s eyes were closed, but she knew he was not sleeping. She sat beside him, pressed her cheek to his, felt his hand soft upon her head, the tenderness of his touch a wordless forgiveness.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘You’re right. I’ll start clearing out her room tomorrow.’

  He nodded. ‘Wait for the weekend. I’ll help you. Or call Denise. She wants to help.’ His suggestion was quietly offered.

  ‘No. It’s all right. I’d rather do it alone. I have the time.’

  It was an understatement, she thought bitterly. She had nothing but time now – endless empty hours.

  The leisure of her sabbatical, a time she had thought to devote to Melanie, had morphed into a curse. Bitterly, she remembered her golden fantasies. She had imagined shared mother-and-daughter lunches, shopping trips, stolen weekends, family vacations; she and Melanie at the theater, walking through museums, cooking together. Their year together would be a gentle initiation, an adventure in bonding, calculated deposits in the memory bank.

  Now that expanse of empty time would be devoted to recuperation (Evelyn’s carefully chosen word) and perhaps, hopefully, reconciliation (the rabbi’s stuttered suggestion during his one brief and painful pastoral visit). She did not ask him if any mother he had encountered during
his years of pastoral counseling had ever been reconciled to the death of a child.

  She had no compass to guide her through the daylight hours, no agenda that demanded her attention. For the very first time in her life she awakened each morning with nothing to do, no place to go. She did not want to read. She did not want to write. She forgave herself for the disinclination.

  Sabbaticals, after all, were meant to provide time, to offer respite and renewal. She claimed the respite, but as yet there had been no renewal, and she had found no use for the time. But now a usage had presented itself. She would work on clearing Melanie’s room and then converting it into a home office for David. There would be meetings with carpenters, painters. It was a project, and she had always been very good at projects.

  ‘Brian said that Denise wants to be helpful, wants to feel part of the family.’ David was oddly persistent.

  ‘I’ll manage alone,’ she said.

  Denise tried too hard, gifting Judith with carefully wrapped copies of Tuesdays with Morrie, Songs and Sonnets and Blue Nights, books that remained unopened and unread. Judith, knowing herself to be unkind, thought Denise to be well meaning but intrusive. She did not want her in Melanie’s room, touching Melanie’s things. That was a task she wanted to accomplish alone.

  ‘All right,’ David agreed. ‘As you wish.’

  ‘I don’t wish.’

  She went to the window, drawing the drapes back so that she could see the wind gently stir the branches of the trees; their tender unfurled leaves glistened in the half darkness. The winter of their discontent, the long gray days of loss and longing, were nearing an end. Warmth hovered close. A new season was beginning.

  She felt David’s eyes follow her as she turned and left the room.

  TWO

  David awakened very early the next morning, relieved that Judith was still asleep. He dressed and moved stealthily through the silent house, pausing outside the closed door of the room that had been Melanie’s without going in. He ate a swift breakfast and drove to the station, looking forward, as always, to the soothing quiet of the half-empty commuter train and then his solitary walk from Grand Central. He found the quiet streets, not yet throbbing with the frenetic pace of urban life, calming after the tensions of the previous evening. He understood Judith’s need for comfort, but he despaired of assuaging her grief when he could not cope with his own.