Death and Other Interruptions

Chapter Three

I woke up the next morning feeling refreshed. Hopeful, even. The shittiest thing had already happened, so now the only thing to do was look forward. I could make plans. I could be positive, embrace life's lemons, adopt an orphan with a cleft palate. Lists started forming in my head. I seized my phone to write them down, and saw an email from my sister. "Seen this?" the subject line read. Below that was a link to a Washington Post article about Al. Detailing his life and that he was a suspect. Apparently mainstream media had caught on and gotten official confirmation for the tabloid's suspicions of yesterday. The word "Iranian" was mentioned five times in the first two paragraphs. Subtle. There was more, but I couldn't finish. Any thoughts of embracing or planning turned black with an impressively powerful sense of hatred for everyone and everything. Her kindness the night before notwithstanding, Amy could be a real idiot. I threw my phone down, yanked my blanket over my head, and turned off my brain.

The next few days shaped themselves into a pattern, if not moving could be considered a pattern. I grieved. I was a seething mass of emotions, and my thoughts were reduced to the ebb and flow of my own hurt. I took comfort in my pain. There was nothing remarkable about my sorrow. I imagine it was, in fact, rather ordinary. I wept. I slept. I would fall asleep crying and I would wake up crying, the tears coming even before I was fully cognizant of why I was crying.

My mother and sister bustled around me with nervous energy, unused to so much emotion in their midst, responding to my grief with action and movement. They brought me all my meals in bed, though I barely touched them, and replaced the tissue box next to my bed when I was through with the first one. I had a feeling if I asked them to go to the bathroom for me they would have done that as well. I pictured them checking things off a to-do list, with the firm belief that when all things were crossed off, I would be better. My family holds absolute power in productivity; we are a family of action, not of words. If something was broken, the Shores didn't fret and we didn't weep: we fixed it. When Dad died, Mom spent the week afterward going through his closet and donating everything to Goodwill, including some things I would have gladly kept for nostalgia. I had been in high school, stayed home for a month and cried myself to sleep every night. But Mom was a whirlwind of activity, and it was best not to interrupt my mother when she had her mind set on something. It's been eleven years, and I have yet to see my mother sit down and mourn, at least in the traditional sense. Wallowing in grief was seen as more or less useless—it won't fix anything—but they were kind enough to humor this bizarre ritual in their own family.

Mom kept a respectful distance, but Amy plopped herself down on my bed the second day and announced I was to open up to her.

"Look," she said, "I wasn't really there for you when Dad died and by the time you and Al got together I was busy with my own life. So if you don't want to talk to me, I get that, but I think you should talk to someone. And I'm offering my listening."

Her forwardness caught me off guard. Already I was used to the deferential silence that comes with mourning, to being treated like fragile glass, at risk of breaking with the slightest loud tone.

"What do you want me to say?" I grumbled. "Life sucks. I miss Al."

Her tone softened. "Tell me about Al. Tell me what you miss about him."

Al. The greatest man I'd ever known, and the most frustrating.

"Everything," I said. "I don't know what I'm going to do without him." The tears started again and Amy handed me a tissue wordlessly as my voice thickened.

"He was-- he was perfect for me. He always knew the right thing to say. He was the first guy I dated who I really loved. Like, until him I just thought after a certain amount of time you tell someone you love him, but with him...I counted down the days until I could tell him I loved him. Because I knew it right away but I didn't want to scare him off. I just knew I could trust him and that he would always be there for me." Until now.