FEBRUARY
Jacob was assigned to monitor Dr. Feingold’s eight-thirty a.m. group, which met in the common area — a few worn couches facing each other, a couple of easy chairs facing the windows. Jacob sat in the corner by the board games as the assembled patients named their greatest fears.
“Being alone,” said Jane with the Seconal-dead eyes.
“Polka dots,” called Annabeth, bulimic, at one point down to a mere eighty-seven pounds.
Jamal coughed and said, “Falling? Like off of a really high building or something?”
Dr. Feingold nodded in amicable fascination at each offering, as if it were both astute and deeply informative. He pointed his pen tip at a girl with glasses so thick they looked as if they could melt pennies in strong sunlight. Dr. Feingold always went around the circle in group therapy counterclockwise. Yet her hand was raised — five bitten fingernails confidently aimed at the ceiling. Jacob didn’t recognize her, but that didn’t mean she was new.
Corporate policy advised against fraternizing with the patients. A patient might try to use personal information. They were always wheeling and dealing for better food, private rooms, supervised trips outside. He couldn’t be bonding with them over their favorite films one minute and the next tackling them to the floor when they became gripped in a delusion that gorillas sent by their stepfathers had come to sell their kidneys on the black market.
But this girl didn’t seem that crazy. With seriousness that Jacob didn’t doubt, she said, “My greatest fear is dying without accomplishing anything important at all.”
Others in the group rolled their eyes quietly. “Thank you, Ella. That’s very brave,” the doctor said kindly.
Ella lowered her hand and folded it in her lap calmly. She turned politely toward the boy next to her, as he began speaking about his fear of scorpions.
Something about the girl bothered Jacob. Normally it was easy to pinpoint, as everyone in Anchorage House was off in some fairly obvious way: train-track scars on their wrists, vomit-stained yellow teeth, hair patchier in places where it had once been pulled out. Jacob knew whose tired eyes came from the morning’s dose of Xanax and which type of arm itching was a bad reaction to Ativan. But he couldn’t see anything obviously broken about this girl — Ella Yorke, according to his roster. She was sitting up straight, while everyone else slumped. She was smiling patiently, but not with the halcyon glistening of antianxiety drugs or the defensive smirking of the sarcastically imprisoned. As she nodded her head in empathy with the scorpion boy, the realization rolled slowly toward Jacob like a Tiananmen tank: hers was an actual smile. It felt like years since he had seen one.
Just before she turned to catch Jacob’s eye, he looked down, studying a chessboard, which had been abandoned midgame. He tried to work out who was winning. Black’s king was in a much safer position, but White was outflanking along the left side. He studied the board a little longer, trying to see what moves were coming up, but became stuck. He didn’t know whose turn it actually was. If it was White’s move, then White was in trouble, as both bishops were being threatened. But if it was Black’s turn, even if he did take either of the bishops, there was no move that wouldn’t leave his queen exposed to the White knight… Jacob felt his phone buzz twice.
Sara texted him now three or four times a week. When are you coming up to Boston? Write me a poem! Are you still dating that doctor? Why don’t you quit that stupid job and come up here to be a lobsterman? His responses were absolutely minimal. Where? No. Yes. Gross. She was very excited about the U.S. team’s chances for gold in Vancouver, wasn’t he? He’d typed a reply about how he’d been boycotting the Olympics since A.D. 393 when Emperor Theodosius had kicked out the pagans, but then he deleted it. How could she be bubbly? How could she be watching sports?
He was still annoyed that Sara had flipped out at him for not showing up at Irene’s wake last month (even though he’d said he wouldn’t come several times). Jacob hadn’t seen the point in getting drunk with a lot of arty scenesters who didn’t even know Irene except as the girl who took their coats at events. Jacob imagined them all standing around with their cocktails, sweating under layers of wool, wondering where is the damn coat-check girl? When the pictures went up on Facebook the next day, he was glad he hadn’t gone. How dare everyone be smiling? How dare they stand around in their Louboutin shoes, clutching their Michael Kors clutches with fucking lipstick smears on the rims of their goddamn plastic cups, playing a bunch of upbeat songs off Irene’s iPod?
Who were all these people? If these were her friends, where had they been all year? How dare they enjoy themselves while what was left of Irene sat on a back wall shelf in that monstrous, tacky metal urn that George had picked out from the funeral home catalog? A room full of artists, and nobody could sculpt a goddamn urn to put her in? Knowing that crowd, it was probably lucky her ashes weren’t suspended ironically in a bottle of urine. What a seismic waste of time, money, talent, and life.
Now Sara was talking about working with Juliette and Abeba to open a big show of all the artwork that Irene had left behind. To Jacob, this was the most unbearable. Not that he would expect them to understand. She’d made these things because she loved making them. For her, it had never been about getting recognition or selling pieces to collectors. Her work belonged in a museum. In its own museum. He ought to do it himself. Hang it all up somewhere in perfect spotlighting and then padlock the door before any else could ever see it.
Sara just wanted to let it all go. Paste it into scrapbooks and move on. Start a new life in Boston as Mrs. George Murphy, a woman unpained. She kept bugging him about meeting her to go through the storage units and Irene’s old books to figure out which should be kept and which should be donated. She kept asking if he’d reach out to William, who hadn’t been heard from since the wake. At least in the photos he had the decency to look as if he hadn’t eaten all month. Sara and George, on the other hand, had been radiant — and Sara, with her new haircut! An edgy flapper bob to go along with her new job as social media director for The New Bostonian. George with his stupid Harvard Crimson bowtie. Jacob couldn’t stand it. They, of all people, ought to understand. Irene cuts our hair! he’d wanted to write in the comments section. George, what’d you do with the suit Irene hemmed? But he wouldn’t snap. Let them wonder why.
“Wouldn’t have pegged you as a chess fan, Jacob,” Dr. Feingold said. “You any good?”
Jacob looked up and realized that he was alone in the room with the doctor.
“I’m actually Bobby Fischer in disguise,” he said. “Don’t tell anybody.”
“I think Bobby Fischer died.”
Jacob held his finger to his lips.
Dr. Feingold stroked his bald spot for a moment. “Listen. You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”
“Jacob Blaumann?” he laughed. “Irish Catholic, through and through.”
He grinned. “Hey. Sissy mentioned what happened to your friend.”
“Did she?”
“She sort of brought it up in our last doctor’s meeting.”
“I thought Sissy just had like an MFA in knitting or whatever.”
Dr. Feingold smirked. “Look, I was just wondering if you’d been to synagogue. I thought you might not know of a good one up here.”
“Thanks, but I’m not a templegoer, really.”
Still, Dr. Feingold looked quite serious. “You should go. Be with other people. Say the Mourner’s Kaddish and all that. Sure it’s all a little dusty, but they wouldn’t be traditions if they didn’t do something for the people who say them. My father passed away a few years ago. Pancreatic cancer. Brutally painful, but at least it’s fast, since there’s nothing you can do for it.”