says, “You probably can’t see it just yet, but this place is good for you.”
One day, the memories that haunt every section of your town and your house, the memories of where you and Jesse met and fell in love as teenagers, feel contained and manageable. So you venture outside.
You head to your family’s bookstore.
You realize you aren’t ready for a full day out of the house when you break down next to the Shel Silverstein collection Marie put up in the back corner.
You don’t even know why you’re breaking down. Nothing about Shel Silverstein reminds you of Jesse. Except that Shel Silverstein wrote about what it meant to be alive and you feel like you aren’t alive anymore. Because Jesse isn’t. You feel like you stopped living when he went missing. You feel like the rest of your days are killing time until it’s time to die.
You know the only thing you can do is get in the passenger’s seat of your dad’s car and allow him to drive you back home and put you to bed.
But then you feel yourself growing stronger in that bed, as if you’re squeezing the tears out of yourself, wringing yourself dry of pain. You imagine yourself bleeding grief, as if the water from your eyes is the pain itself. You imagine it leaving your body and being soaked up by the mattress.
You wake up one morning feeling dry and completely empty, so empty that if someone knocked on you, you’d sound hollow.
Hollow and empty are terrible ways to feel when you’re used to being full of joy. But it’s not so bad when you’re used to feeling full of pain.
Hollow feels okay.
Empty feels like a beginning.
Which is nice, because for so long you have felt like you were at the end.
You ask your parents for a new bed. You feel childish doing it. But you don’t have any money because you have not pitched a story in a very long time and you quit working at the blog.
Your parents don’t understand why you’re asking and you can’t quite explain it to them. You just say, “This one is tainted.” But what you mean is that you feel like it absorbed your suffering. You know it sounds crazy but you believe your pain is in the mattress and you don’t want to absorb it back into your own body.
You know it’s not that simple. But it feels like it is.
Two weeks later, you have a new mattress and box spring. You watch your dad tie the old ones to a friend’s truck. You watch him drive down the street headed for the dump.
You feel better. Freer.
You realize this is called superstition.
You’re OK with that.
You know that you will never truly be free of the grief. You know that it is something you must learn to live with, something you manage.
You start to understand that grief is chronic. That it’s more about remission and relapse than it is about a cure. What that means to you is that you can’t simply wait for it to be over. You have to move through it, like swimming in an undertow.
Toward the end of Marie’s maternity leave, your parents come down with food poisoning. There is no one to open the store. You offer to do it. They tell you that you don’t have to. They say they can ask one of the sales clerks. You tell them you’ve got it under control.
When they say thank you, you realize that you have missed being relied upon. You remember the pride of being useful.
You wake up early and you take a shower and you get in the car. When you put the key in the door of the bookstore, you realize that Jesse is gone but maybe your life is still here. Maybe you can do something with it.
Three days before Marie is supposed to return to the store, she tells your parents that she doesn’t want to come back to work. She has tears in her eyes. She says she’s sorry that she’s disappointing them but she just wants to stay at home with her babies. She says she can’t imagine spending her days away from them. Your parents are caught off guard. They quickly become supportive.
That night, you overhear them talking about it. You hear your mother console your father, you hear her tell him that the store doesn’t have to go to you or Marie. She says it’s going to be fine.