Celeste sat on the blue braided rug in her son Joey‘s bedroom. Baseball paraphernalia lay piled in the farthest corner of the room, the sunniest one in the small house on Garibaldi Street. The sheets on his bed a soft rumple, where the cat liked to lay. Celeste was folding and refolding last year’s summer clothes, putting them into boxes and then taking them out again. It was the end of the summer, the season all but gone. School had started which always meant the end to the frenetic baseball season and a bit of peace for the Anastasio’s. Celeste glanced at the window with the sunbeam aimed straight at her on the floor, as if God pointed it there his very self.
Celeste heard Al’s heavy, slow footsteps coming up the stairs, heard his heavy breathing through the narrow, dark hallway. She wondered what to say to him, how to act, how to pretend that she was on the mend, that there were things you could handle, like the death of your son. She tried to manage it. In her desperation she reduced it to balancing her check book or going to the grocery store to pick up milk and bread: she didn’t feel like doing it, but ultimately, it had to be done. She couldn’t handle her own grief, let alone someone else’s. Al had said almost immediately, “We only have each other, now, Celeste. We need each other more than ever.” And she had hated the pleading in his voice, the tears that came too readily, even in the wake of such horror, and the way his chin, with its ever present dark stubble, quivered. Where was his period of disbelief? Hadn’t he heard of the Five Stages of Grief? Why had he skipped the steps everyone, no matter the magnitude of loss, experienced? She felt she could never forgive his precociousness, as if he had jumped to the head of the class, leaving her behind, doomed never to catch up and get beyond it all.
Al appeared in the doorway of the bedroom with a pinched look on his face. “Permanently pinched” was how Celeste thought of both of their faces, how the facial muscles were now immobile, as if they had a memory of the event all their own and refused to budge. Celeste remembers how when she was a little girl, she’d cross her eyes and stick out her tongue. Her mother would say, with what seemed like real terror, “God forbid, Celeste, the Lord is going to make your face stay that way!” Well, screw him, too. Al was breathing heavy and sweating. His arm was extended over his head as he leaned on the door frame, his body slumped as though he were no used to the burden of it.
“Celeste.”
“Al.”
“How’s it coming along?” he asked with a gentleness that only enraged.
“How the hell do you think it’s coming along, Al? I’m packing my dead fourteen year old son’s clothes in boxes. Now lucky boys who are still alive can wear them. How’s that answer?” Celeste grabbed her cigarettes and lighter and looked up at him from the floor with a jeering smile, as if he himself were the enemy.
“Don’t,” Al started to say, but stopped.
“Doesn’t make a difference now, does it Al? Dead sons can’t breathe in second hand smoke. It doesn’t make a bit of difference.” She began choking out a few sobs and frantically waving her hand to disperse the smoke. Al shook his head slowly and dropped his arms to his side. She hated him. She hated his resignation, but she feared it, too. If he walked away, if she couldn’t get herself together eventually, she’d lose Al, too. Whether that was blessing or burden was yet to be determined.
“Go downstairs, Celeste. I’ll take care of this. I’ll get it all together and into the boxes. Go down and have your cigarettes. Cry or don’t cry, I don’t give a good goddamn.” He kicked an empty box against the wall, Florida oranges with a smiling orange face on the side, with a ferocity long dormant. The hard, empty, hollow sound was reminiscent of something, but Celeste couldn’t remember what it was and the effort to think was too much. She looked at her husband, white knuckled, shaking, trying to control himself and wondered when it would all end. She suddenly craved the company of the hordes that descended on their small row house the day they fished Joey out of the pool. She was grateful for their meatballs, for their bread, their ambrosia salads, their sincere and tear-streaked faces. She saw the fear in the other mother’s eyes, and she had a sense of how she must have repelled them as they held her close and whispered “I am so very sorry,” because it meant that they, too, could find themselves with a dead child, because, through no fault of her own, she brought them just that much closer to the possibility. “We have all woken up, we are disenthralled,” she thought to herself at the viewing, the last thought she had that she thought was real or genuine or made any sense to her at all.
Joey. Her hard to conceive baby, their utter joy. On the day he died, she remembered marveling at his long, lean body in his baseball pinstripes, nut brown skin, and how his hands had veins that bulged. And she got a glimpse of the man he would be. She had no doubt, sitting at the kitchen table that day smoking a cigarette, watching him open he refrigerator and drinking straight from the carton of orange juice, that there was no end to the very essence of him. He would grow and continue to bring them joy. She remembered his broad back proud and straight, his stance, as if he knew he was being watched. She never had the confidence to preen like that at his age. She called him back for a kiss before he walked out the kitchen door, duffle bag over his shoulder. His team would head to the swim club after practice. ‘Be careful, Joey,’ she’d told him, as she always did. ‘Always,” he’d said. “I love you, Joey,” she’d said in her mocking mom voice. He laughed. “Love me, too?” she cajoled. “Always,” he’d replied giving her the appropriate reply with a thumbs-up , still maintaining his teenage boy cool. Her heart leapt. She was supposed to pick him up at the swim club at nine that night, but by six that evening he had passed into the realm of the unknown, forever out of her protective reach. Alone.
Al packed the boxes and carried them downstairs past Celeste laying face down on the living room rug with a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray near her head. She heard the swish of the screen door. In just three trips, all of her son’s clothes were packed and on their way to the waiting, charitable hands at the St. Vincent De Paul Center. She heard the slam of the trunk out at the curb and she waiting. Soon, she opened her eyes and saw Al’s feet, in sneakers.
“Celeste, he was my son, too.” He said this so quietly and with such control, Celeste drew herself to a sitting position.
“I’m aware of that, Al.”
“We are going to need an ocean of time to get over this, Celeste.” Celeste winced at the mention of great expanses of water.
“It’s the two of us now, just the two of us. I need you. We can grieve together. Or you can be married to your grief and leave me behind. It’s up to you.” He had started out strong, but couldn’t maintain the resolve. He never really could. He had ceded his place in their household when their son was born. He’d seen a side of Celeste awaken the first time she held the boy in her arms, the golden child. Al looked at his wife, wishing he had the energy to stride off, like his father would have done to his mother. Show ‘em whose boss. Be the real man of the family. The only man left. Celeste looked straight in his eyes, as if seeing something for the first time. She was considering him, looking at his face as if she might excavate more meaning. She knew that he felt as though he might have broken through the thick membrane of grief.
She got up off the floor and grabbed the car keys out of a startled Al’s hands. She walked straight out the front door, onto the porch, out to the curb, past all of the neighbors outside watching their misery as if it were a spectator sport. Popping the trunk, she lifted each box with no effort at all and sat them on the curb. She’d take them back upstairs one by one. She walked past her husband who looked as if he had just seen a ghost, hands plunged into his pockets. It would take her no time at all to unpack them and put all those clothes back into their rightful place.
