Stories: All-New Tales

IN THE GATHERING HALL at the church, Abe thought there were obscene amounts of food, as if pastries and deviled eggs and casseroles could make up for the fact that nobody really knew what to say to him. He stood holding a plate piled high that someone had brought him, although he hadn’t taken a single bite. From time to time, a friend or a relative would come up to him and say something stupid: How are you doing? Are you holding up okay? It won’t hurt as much, in time. Things like that only made him want to put down his plate and punch the speaker until his hand bled, because that kind of pain he could understand better than the empty ache in his chest that wouldn’t go away. No one said what they all were truly thinking, when they furtively glanced over at Abe with his bad-fitting black suit and his Styrofoam plate: I’m so glad it happened to you, and not me.

“Excuse me.”

Abe turned around to find a woman he’d never met before—middle-aged, with wrinkles around her eyes that made him think she had smiled, often, in her youth. Maybe one of Felicity’s church ladies, he thought. She was holding a box of daffodil bulbs. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, and she held out the box.

He set down the plate on a chair beside him so that he could take the bulbs. “Plant these now,” she said, “and when they come up in the spring, think of her.”

She touched his arm and walked off, leaving Abe holding on to this hope.

SARAH HAD MET ABE when she was new to Los Angeles, and some friends had taken her to a cigar club that was so exclusive you had to enter through a corporate office building and give the doorman the password to be let into the correct elevator bank. The club was on the roof of the building, and Sarah’s friends had tried to cure her East Coast homesickness by showing off Mel Gibson’s humidor. It was a dark place, one where actors who fancied themselves to be musicians were likely to pick up a guitar and jam with the band; one that only made Sarah even more aware of how much she hated this city, this new job, this departure from where she really wanted to be.

They sat at the bar, pulling up stools beside a good-looking guy with hair as dark as ink and a smile that made Sarah feel like she was caught in a whirlpool. Sarah’s friends ordered cosmos and tried to outflirt each other—getting him to reveal that he was the drummer in the band, and that his name was Abe. When one of the girls came back from the bathroom and exclaimed, Have you seen all the stars? Abe leaned over and asked Sarah to dance. They moved like smoke over the empty dance floor, to a canned jazz track. “Why me?” Sarah asked simply.

His hand, resting on the small of her back, pulled her just that much closer. “Because,” Abe said, “when your friend started talking about stars, you were the only one in this whole f**king place who looked up at the sky.”

Three months later, they moved to Massachusetts together. Six months later, they got married, amid many toasts and jokes about Abraham and Sarah and their destiny to create a tribe. But like their biblical counterparts, it took years for them to have a child—eight, to be exact. Just long enough for Sarah to believe it was time to give up trying. Just short enough for her to be overwhelmed with the news of her pregnancy; to never give a second thought to the fact that this might not be the end of the struggle, but instead, the beginning.

ON THE WAY HOME from the church, Sarah turned to Abe and told him to stop at the grocery store. “There’s nothing in the house,” she said, as if this wasn’t obvious on so many levels. They were too numb to think about how they looked, at one in the afternoon, moving through the frozen foods aisle in coat and tie and pearls and heels. They wandered through the store, picking out the items that seemed to scream normal: eggs and bread and cheese and milk; things any family could use. In the cereal aisle, Abe started to automatically reach for the berry Kix, her favorite, until he realized that they didn’t need it anymore; and he covered gracefully by taking instead the cereal box beside it, some god-awful bran thing that looked like straw and that he knew he’d never eat.

They went to the line with their favorite checkout girl, the one who didn’t mind when their daughter helped scan the bar codes on the soup cans and the frozen peas. She smiled when she saw them. “Wow, look at you two!” she said, glancing at their clothes and winking. “Don’t tell me food shopping is what passes for a date without the kids nowadays…”

Abe and Sarah froze. This woman wouldn’t know—how could she? She thought, as would any other stranger, that their daughter was home with a babysitter, watching The Princess Diaries for the six hundredth time or pretending the Tupperware was a drum set. As Abe signed the credit card receipt, the checkout clerk reached beneath her cash register and pulled out a lollipop. “She likes blue, right? Tell her I missed her.”

“Yes,” Abe said, grasping it so tightly that the stick curved. “Yes, I will.”

He followed Sarah as she pushed the cart outside, where the sun was so bright it brought tears to his eyes. Sarah turned to him, speechless and staring. “What?” Abe said, his voice raw. “What did I do wrong?”

THREE DAYS LATER, SARAH woke up and pulled on her favorite sweater only to realize that her arms now stretched a good three inches past the ends of the sleeves. Annoyed—did Abe shrink it in the wash?—she pulled out another only to realize that she’d outgrown that one, too. She stared at herself in the mirror for a moment and then pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, where she could not see anything wrong.

She tried to pretend that she didn’t notice when she unloaded the dishwasher and could, for the first time in her life, reach the top shelf of the cabinets without having to stand on a stool or ask Abe for his help.

ON HIS LAST DAY of paid bereavement leave, Abe remembered sitting in the hospital with his daughter. There were starfish painted on the window glass, and while they waited for the doctor and Sarah read a waiting-room magazine from the turn of the century, his daughter had wanted to play I spy. It had gotten to the point, in the past seven years, where Abe could almost do this semiconscious—since his daughter had a habit of changing midstream what her target object was, anyway, the game didn’t make any linear sense. He guessed the exit sign over the door, the bathroom knob, the starfish on the far right, getting more and more impatient, and wishing the doctor would just come in already so that he didn’t have to play one more damn round.

It had only been a sore throat. Her fever wasn’t more than 101. That was the criteria—you weren’t supposed to worry about a fever until it spiked past 102, something Sarah had learned the hard way when she’d call the pediatrician early on, freaking out over everything from hangnails to cradle cap. But over the course of their daughter’s life, they’d weaned themselves into health care confidence. They didn’t rush her into the office at the sign of the first cough; they made her sleep overnight on an earache to make sure it was present the next morning before they went to get it checked. And this time, Sarah had kept her home from school waiting to see if it was a virus, or strep throat. They’d done what they were supposed to do as parents; they’d listened to the doctors; they’d played by the rules—and by dinnertime, the rules didn’t apply. Children weren’t supposed to die of strep throat, but then again, you did not have to look far for the shouldn’ts. All over this world there were tsunamis sweeping entire countries out to sea; there were Eskimo women with breast milk full of mercury; there were wars being fought that had been started for the wrong reasons. All over this world impossible things were happening that never should have.