Grief

By Kelly Easton

The woman had lost her son in the war.  It was never a clear war to her mind: a president, a dictator, a dry parched land, weapons of mass destruction that were there and then not.

She walked along the beach, empty except for a couple who sat watching the red and purple ridges of sky against the sea.  How foolish they were, she thought, joined together like twins, wallowing in sentimentality.

At the edge of the town was a small overgrown cemetery.  She walked the three miles there every day, stopping only at the jetty to catch her breath.  The cemetery was not of her faith.  Wooden crosses and artificial flowers littered the place; the occasional flag.  Of course, the woman’s son was not in the cemetery.  His body parts had been misplaced in the country where he died.  The government said that a faction was hiding them, but assured her that they would find them.

Still, the cemetery was a sanctuary shaded by dogwood trees whose pale bleeding petals scattered light against the headstones.  She would rest against the stones, and watch the orbs of blue and white light filter through the trees.  Beneath her breath, she’d chant the Kaddish, as if she were a monk and this her mantra.  Eventually, the words the light, all became one in an airless colorless swoop, and she ceased to think or feel.

Had there not been a caretaker, an old man who did little more than lock the gate at night, she may have even slept there.

The woman passed a fisherman drinking beer, and a young boy with a sheep dog who pounced toward her, then away.  She calculated a way to avoid the tacky boardwalk and its crowds.  If the tide were right she could take the beach, wading a few yards around the manufactured wall that divided one strand from another.

She reached her vantage point, but the tide was too high.  She would have to go around.

As spring grew warm, activity unfolded on the boardwalk.  Couples were occasionally arrested for copulating under the carousel.  The mayor had gotten drunk and peed on the wall of the fun house, but was forgiven by the easygoing residents.  The town, which virtually closed down eight months of the year, became alive with revelry.  She had come here, originally, for those eight months of silence muffled only by the waves.  She’d rented a room from a quiet old woman who brought her coffee in the morning and cheese and fruit at night, a glass of port.

And she liked the old town library whose antiquated books dealt with innocuous facts from the past–the cycle of the butterfly, a history of transportation—and the occasional obsolete novel.  She read one recently called The Face in the Mountain that told of how a mountain in Ecuador grew human features and spoke.  A native came upon it and the mountain guided him to an abandoned cabin where a skeleton stood in front of a calendar, as if marking off the days.  According to custom, the native dutifully buried it.  When he returned to tell the mountain, though, the features, the voice, melted into nothing.  The native was disappointed; it was as if he had lost a friend, a lover, a child.

The woman reached the boardwalk.  Sailors strolled in packs.  Fisherman jeered.  Young girls flirted.  Children ate cotton candy while their parents drank in makeshift bars.  A juggler tossed bowling pins and cans of beer. Throughout her life, people had watched the woman.  It had brought her pleasure at one time, or was that really her.  Even now, against her will, she appeared very stylish.  With faded cords, Cape Cod jacket, and wild black hair, the woman was a presence.  She moved through the crowds not noticing the attention.  The town idiot leapt after her, touched her jacket.  The stench of popcorn, hot dogs, beer, and urine reached her and she walked more quickly.  The lights of the Fun Zone flashed on.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” the psychic had asked, and the woman answered, “No.”

“You don’t have to believe for them to speak, get it.  Reality is not based on what you perceive.”

The woman merely shrugged.  Her husband, always a pleaser, replied, “Of course not.  Who knows what reality is.”  Then his feelings took him further down the stream of his thoughts.  “He is our only son. An A student.  He was a boy scout.  We took him to the lake every summer.  He could catch a trout in two seconds flat.  Something about him.  The trout just came…”

“You are a doctor?” the psychic asked.

Her husband nodded, impressed.  The woman remembered a Swedish movie, about an old man, a doctor.  He faces his past in a series of vignettes and finds that he’s been exceedingly harsh.  In a nightmare scene, he replies to an examiner, “A doctor’s first duty is to beg forgiveness.”  The word duty turned her to stone.

“Can we get on with this?” she pressed the psychic.

“Everything continues,” the psychic offered.  “There is no beginning, no end.”  And when she was a girl, the woman had written an essay on God.   God is heat, she had written, the sun on your back.  God is the month of August.  God lives on in memory.

The jetty was getting closer.

“Are you going to kill yourself?” her husband asked when she was leaving, his body blocking the rectangle of light at the door.

“If I thought that it would end something, that the hole, the falling, the space would be filled, I would.  But no.  I don’t believe that it would end anything.”

“Then why are you leaving?”

She had only shrugged.  A couple of phrases from books popped into her head.  Call me Ishmael.  Tomorrow is another day. And even Achilles returned the body of Hector; his heart grew merciful from Priam’s tears.

The jetty moves toward her.  She climbs the slippery rocks.  The edges are sharp against the sole of her shoe.  There is nothing that can stop the sensation of alive, and the psychic’s eyes had rolled like some epileptic.  “I’m receiving the message.  Your son is fine.”  Her husband’s sigh of relief.  “A handsome boy,” the psychic continued.  “Happy and laughing.  He is thinking of you.”

“Our son is alive!” her husband repeated.  She knew in that moment that he was dead.

“Two hundred dollars, please,” the psychic concluded.

She knew that he had died for no reason.

The woman leans back against the jagged stones.  The tide pulls against her fingertips.  She closes her eyes against the bright sun.  The spray from waves sprinkles on her face, her hair.

In a hospital corridor, her husband huddles.  His white coat gleams in the artificial light.  There are patterns to the x-ray, which only he can decipher, a secret code of bones and cartilage.

Against her will, the woman shivers from the water.  Her forehead itches.  She resists the urge to scratch it.

Drowned by the sound of the waves, she doesn’t hear footsteps as they move toward her.  A man seizes her, yanks her to her feet, then he stumbles backwards when she struggles.

“I’m sorry,” he says.  “I thought that you were dead, or half-drowned.  I’m not being melodramatic.  We have found people out here.  The bodies get caught on the rocks.”

She peers at him, his lined face.  He is one of the year-round residents, an astronomer of some sort, if she remembers correctly.

He wonders is she’s deaf; she stares at him so long.  Her face is very beautiful, from a far away time.

“No,” she finally assures him.  “I’m not dead.”

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Originally published in Frontiers, volume XVII

Filed under: Kelly Easton, Short Fiction Stories, Words, Fiction, Grief, Kelly Easton, Short Story, War