Night, Forgotten: Draft 1

Chapter 10: Then

            

Months ago, when the crocuses were just beginning to break through the dirt and the air smelled new, Diana made the trip from Boston to visit us for the day. Unlike her previous visits, which had been filled with trips to a museum or to the theater in Providence, this occasion was clouded by sorrow.

Owen and I sat unnaturally upright on our chairs, picking at our fingernails and clearing our throats nervously. Diana hunched over the kitchen table and held her forehead in her hands.

Her husband had killed himself and no one knew what to say.

I imagined Paul's kind face, his eyes that always seemed to be in the process of forgiving the world for what it had done to him. Despite his chronic depression, he had been deliberately friendly to me, as if he'd sensed how hard I tried to please his wife and wanted me to know that he understood how she could be.

But then the image of his face exploded in my mind, splitting open and spilling his bloody brains out onto the shiny mall floor. How many people had watched his body tumble downward and break?

Diana's shoulders shuddered. I pushed back my chair and retrieved an afghan quilt from the parlor, returning to drape it around her huddled body. I kept my hands on her shoulders for a moment and pressed tenderly, trying to communicate something I didn't have the words for.

I was sorry for her.

I was sorry Paul had decided to lean over the railing in the atrium of the busiest mall in the greater Boston area.

I was sorry that we were seeing Diana at her worst, devastated, when she usually took such pains to hide any hint of vulnerability, even from her family. I could never tell her how sorry I felt.

Diana had raised Owen in the tradition of the casually upper-middle-class Bostonian bourgeoisie, which meant that they never discussed the specifics of their wealth, used "to summer" as a verb when talking about their second home on Nantucket, and consistently performed a certain type of perfection. A month before, Diana would have been gravely insulted at the suggestion that her son's college choice hadn't been competitive enough, or that the finger sandwiches at her garden party were a tad dry. It had taken many years for her to bounce back, in her own estimation, from her divorce when Owen's dad left. With all the layers of reputation upkeep, her day-to-day existence just seemed exhausting to me.

I did not envy her the charade, which was complicated further by her devout Catholicism. I had been raised Catholic, as well – "culturally" Catholic, my parents liked to say, since we only went to mass on Christmas and Easter. Diana, on the other hand, only wore dresses with pockets because she needed somewhere to stash her rosary beads. She prayed often and publicly, reciting the rhythmic lines as her fingers moved over and over the beads.

Maybe saying those prayers felt like acknowledging all the terrible things she had to pretend weren't real the rest of the time.

She'd held a wake for Paul, of course. But the casket had been closed. I'd been relieved about that; even when a death isn't as messy as Paul's, I've always found the Catholic tradition of displaying family members' dead bodies to be disturbing.

We all wait in line for a chance to stare down into the dead person's waxy face, their skin yanked impossibly taut across the various holes in a human skull. We even kneel down to get right up close. Then we have to walk past a receiving line of the deceased's immediate family to look into their horrified eyes and tell them how sorry we are for their loss. The whole ordeal doesn't feel like the best way to mourn.

It had been two weeks since the funeral and clearly, Diana wasn't yet ready to smile for the sake of being polite. Soon, her obvious loneliness would start making other people uncomfortable and she would, I imagined, do her best to suppress it.