Madeleine replies, “It means ‘owl.’”
Miss Lang winks. “And what do owls say?”
“Who.”
“Who killed me, Madeleine?”
Mike wakes her, pulling her from the undertow. “Move over, Rob.”
He drives them back to the suburbs as the sun comes up — big lawns dewy and rich in the morning mist, backyard pools slumbering under blue plastic covers. He drops her just as their father pulls out of the garage in his Oldsmobile, the automatic door closing behind, his wheels yielding, cushiony, over the curb of the driveway. Jack turns to Madeleine and touches two fingers to his forehead in the old casual salute. He doesn’t look at Mike.
Madeleine says, “He’s going golfing.”
“Give Maman a kiss for me, eh?” says Mike. “Je t’aime.”
Then he drove away.
MIA
HIS PARENTS CANNOT SAY, “When Mike died,” because if he is dead, he did not “die,” he was killed. But they cannot say, “When Mike was killed,” because they don’t know for certain that he was. They don’t say, “When Mike went missing,” because that sounds as though he simply wandered off.
When is mourning?
When you are waiting, watching to see a flower open, a leaf unfurl, or attending the slow folding down of a dear, dear one who seems so much better today, the waiting is painstaking. This long blossoming, or extinguishing of a beloved face feels endless; each small movement gauged, exaggerated, compared or denied, but one thing is sure — the plant will open, your dear one will die, it is only a question of when, and of many acts of loving vigilance.
Absence is different. You can’t watch over an absence. Care for it, help it on its journey, love it. You can only watch life flow around both hope and dread, softening edges, eroding grain by grain all expectation, awaiting the merciful time, which may never come, when one can say, he is gone.
The soreness deep in the chest. The falling asleep over a book, unable to keep one’s lids open, only to reawaken deep in the night with a fresh release of sorrow. Slow, warm, adrenal. Like a gentle hand. Wake up. Wake up, friend owl. Sore, sore sorrow.
And still there is no funeral, no emptying of grief; no shaking droplets from the trees, followed by the steaming up of loss, gentle respiration of memory. Grief-in-waiting is a tap left dripping, the unstaunched hope, drop by drop, perhaps, he might, what if, it could. Friends can only do so much. Those who are experienced, unembarrassed by grief, know not to dispense bromides, wear long faces or chat with plastered grins. They behave like good dance partners. Life goes on. That’s the way it is. You do not forget, neither do you dwell; be there, that is all. Stop with the casseroles and too frequent phone calls after a while, but do not disappear. Be there.
Waiting is exhausting. Like living in a language not your own. You translate continually, filtering the present through the hypothetical, if Michel were here … when Mike gets home…. Soul and sinews poised. Prepared for sudden joy, or sorrow. It does no good to wish you had appreciated life more before the misfortune, we are not made that way. We are made to desire; to cherish and to disregard by turns. Some of us have a talent for happiness — this has little to do with circumstance. Few have a talent for waiting.
Wincing at the sound of the phone, the knock at the door, the clank of the mailbox. But there is no news. No relaxation of soul or sinews. There is, instead, the loss of elasticity. The bow pulled back for too long, once released, sags or snaps.
Grief is a fulcrum. The joint in time between the vanishing of hope and the beginning of loss. Missing link. Allows the living to move forward, and the dead finally to return, smile and open their arms to us in memory.
There has yet to come a moment when his family has been able to say, he is dead. Instead, hope has shaded to the next phase, wherein his parents cannot recall when it was they began to say, “When we lost Mike.”
“How did it go at the benefit Monday night?” asks Nina.
“Fine.”
“No problem with the ‘thing’?”
“The what? Oh. No.”
“What are you feeling, Madeleine?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
HIS
The other was a softer voice,
As soft as honey-dew:
Quoth he, “The man hath penance done,
And penance more will do.”
JACK IS A MAN without a shadow. It died of neglect. Like a puddle on a hot day, it grew smaller and smaller.
He listens to the news; reads and watches it constantly. More than a strategy of masculine retreat, it fends off curdling panic. He regards his wife warily. Like the keeper of one of a set of dual keys, she can trigger his grief. Her grief can end the world. But the news is soothing. Piecemeal and manageable, with a few sweeping arcs reminiscent of the narrative structure of soap opera — the world turns and nothing changes. The occasional twinge pierces the anesthetic — Walter Cronkite declaring that the war over there was unwinnable, And that’s the way it is…. Flick of the remote as Jack switches the channel.
He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know how he has changed. How he looks from the car behind him, through the eyes of a driver he has just punished by slowing down. He didn’t know his staff in Ottawa were afraid of him. He didn’t know his son loved him.
The news allows you to forget. Tirelessly reordering the world, which crumbles daily. Reporters are the king’s horses and men who put Humpty together again, every day, several times a day. News imparts the reassuring illusion of time passing, of change. No need to tap into the undercurrent, which is slower and so much stronger and costs us grief and knowledge. News is a time substitute, like coffee whitener.
He knows who killed his son. The Americans. Their arrogance, their false innocence. Their short-sightedness, their love of tyrants, their greed, their lies. As surely as if Richard Nixon had come into his home and murdered the boy. Because before Vietnam, everything was fine. Crinkle.
Now he is drowning slowly, sitting in his chair. His lungs have been filling quietly, like the North Sea rising over the land. Congestive heart failure.
When mines are abandoned, they often become flooded. Caves fill from within, water leaching from the earth that has been gouged and left for dead. This happens to lungs when the pump begins to fail.
The only way for the earth to heal itself is to flood or to cave in, or both. This is a slow process that begins immediately upon abandonment. Drip, drip, slight shift, crumble and line of scree. Millions of small changes underway, brought to bear suddenly one day in a great fall of earth and stone; or quietly, when the water in the cave finally rises to kiss the roof of its mouth.
The spirit who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.
HERS