Signs of Life (6 page)

All my life, I’ve been the type of person who takes the accelerated route. I liked being in advanced classes. Normally it takes people five to six years to complete an education degree, perform the requisite student teaching, and earn teaching certification. I did it in four. When I decide to do something, I want it done quickly. I do not dilly-dally. When Dr. G. told me that grief takes time, I wanted to say, “But what about for the smart kids?” I took Advanced Placement Calculus in high school. Let’s talk Advanced Placement Grief. But one of the first things I realize about this stupid emotion is that AP Grief does not exist. Time goes by, weeks pass, a month passes, my belly grows, my hair grows, but when I wake up in the morning it feels exactly the same. Grief goes at its own speed. Because there is such a lack of progress in my emotional healing, I just want to see progress somewhere else. Every time Deedee leans against the wall with another paint swatch, I think that this may be the only way to compensate. My brain is royally screwed up and I feel completely unprepared to have this baby, but maybe paint is
the answer. It would be nice if something in my life—even if it’s just paint—reflects readiness for this child to come into the world. So the house becomes the project and my mother-in-law decides to spearhead the project with me waddling in tow.

We go to Benjamin Moore. Deedee picks out the colors. Skylark Song for the nursery, French Lilac for the bedroom, and Oklahoma Wheat for the office.

“Anything worth doing is worth doing right,” she says to me as she individually cleans the blinds in the baby’s room. She wants to clean the blinds before she starts painting. Every single blind. “Wednesday,” she says. “We’ll start Wednesday.” But it’s too humid on Wednesday, so we move it to Friday. The primer goes on. Then we wait. “Well, it needs another coat of primer, don’t you think? And you are going to paint the ceiling, right?” Again, a direction dressed in a question’s clothing. “Anything worth doing …” she says to me. I sneak out before she can start in on Benjamin Moore. A million different things come up. A million reasons why we have to postpone the paint. “You really can’t do molding all at once” or “You know, even the guys [how she refers to the people who work at Benjamin Moore] say that you should allow a full two days for drying.” She is insistent on the details of the process. I just want the results. I hate the process. Pregnancy, grief, paint. Every element of my life feels like I’m wading in molasses. But with the paint, that molasses has a name: Deedee. The AP Grief student in me is deeply, deeply frustrated.

Finally the ceiling gets done. Deedee yells for me to come in and see it. She likes to yell across the house. I walk in. She is standing in the nursery with her hands on her hips, admiring her work. If this were my own father or Josh or my mom, I would walk in and say, “Looks great. Let’s get going with the walls now.” But with Deedee, I can’t. There are these little unwritten
rules with her that I have to feel out. I remember my first encounter with her seven-layer Jell-O cake on Thanksgiving was almost disastrous. (“No, Deedee, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s just I’m not a big Jell-O fan. No, it’s not that I won’t eat
your
Jell-O cake, I just don’t like Jell-O in general.”) After a half-hour Jell-O conversation, I gave up and I’ve been eating it ever since. So now, here we are. She really needs me to stand here and take the time to appreciate this ten-by-ten-foot white ceiling, which I didn’t even think needed to be repainted and has just set us back by about ten days. She stares at it.

“It just makes the room feel warm,” she says.

“
So
warm,” I say, nodding.

“I think it really does it for the whole room.”

“
Totally
does it.”

“I just love it, don’t you?”

“Really really really love it.”

A lifetime of this
, I think to myself.
A lifetime of seven-layer Jell-O cake and drawn-out conversations with my mother-in-law and no husband
.

After the ceiling, things slow down again. I suggest hiring a professional. Out of the question, she says. Not only does Deedee work at her own pace, but she has to be in charge of every single detail. The dogs come back next week. I tell Deedee that I want to move in before they get back. I want to be settled before the dogs come home. I think she is so excited by the prospect of me being in my house again that she finally gets her act together.

Oklahoma Wheat starts to transform the office. French Lilac slowly fills my bedroom. I stand in the vacant nursery staring at Skylark Song, amazed at the progress of this little room. Miraculously, all three rooms of my house are completed before the dogs get back from their summer training camp. I walk
through my house. The paint sings from the walls. Deedee did an amazing job. As much as she drives me crazy, I am desperately dependent on her help. The only thing more frustrating than the presence of my in-laws is the fact that I really really need their help. I hate admitting this more than anything.

It’s my first night alone in my house. The dogs come back tomorrow morning. I know I have to do something. I can’t just sit around and stare at old pictures. I need to fall asleep with some sense of accomplishment. I decide to frame the pictures and hang them on the wall.

Last Christmas Deedee bought me a box of ten black frames. Three five-by-sevens, four four-by-sixes, one eight-by-ten, and two two-by-threes. Anyone who knows me can tell you that there is a reason why I let Josh make all of the redecorating decisions. I have a horrible concept of spatial relations. It is very difficult for me to envision and estimate how much space something will take up. A couch, a table, a frame, whatever it is, I have a difficult time figuring out how one thing will look, or if it will fit in a different place. Josh would often tease me about this. He would roll his eyes when I wanted to rearrange furniture, but still he would help me move chairs and tables around, only to laugh when everything had been reassigned to its new location and the couch stuck out two feet into the doorway. And then, laughing at my deficiency, he would help me move it back.

I consider all of this as I look at my stack of ten frames. I consider how if Josh were here he would hammer in all of the nails. He wouldn’t even need to think about how he would arrange them first. He would just stand there quietly, hang one frame, look at it, and then hang the next. By the end, it would look perfect. I consider how I am sad that he is not here, not just to hang the frames but that he can’t stand in this hallway anymore. He can’t look at these pictures with me and laugh about
how mad I was that day we went fly-fishing. He can’t tell me that he doesn’t want to use the one from last Christmas because he was chubby or that he wants to hang the one of Ashley from last summer in her bathing suit because she was chubby and he knows she’ll hate it. He can’t do any of this. He will never do any of this again. How am I supposed to sleep here tonight? How am I supposed to do anything again, knowing he can never share it with me?

But I get out the toolbox and I take the plastic off the frames. I don’t know why this is so important. I don’t know why I make myself do this. It’s like everything else I do lately. Taking out the garbage, emptying the dishwasher, putting wet laundry in the dryer—every motion that I go through in the house reminds me that Josh used to be here, but I still make myself do it because I want to remember what it used to feel like and I need to know what it feels like now.

I arrange the frames on the floor of my bedroom. I come up with a few arrangements.
Wait and see what Mathews thinks
, I tell myself. But then my body takes over again and I hang the first frame. I measure everything on the wall. I make pencil marks all over the wall. I want to make sure it looks perfect. I want to make sure I know how to make it look perfect. I measure the distance from one frame to the next. I measure the center of the frame. I measure how far down the hook is from the top of the frame. And then finally, I hammer the nail.

As an amateur in the business of hammering nails, I am annoyed at how difficult it is to hammer a nail in straight. The first three nails do not go well at all. The whole wall shakes and it takes me about fifteen strikes with the hammer to get it into position. A couple of times I hit my fingers, bend the nail, or shift it off center. Again, I get sad and frustrated that Josh isn’t here to do this. I can picture myself in a parallel world somewhere
yelling his name. And he walks up from the basement and silently takes the hammer from me and finishes the rest of the nails. And then when he’s done he does something funny like pull up his shirt sleeve and flex his bicep or flip the hammer in the air and catch it after one full turn. I can see all of this. And then I become angry that I can’t see any of this. I will never see any of this again. They’re just nails and a hammer, just frames on a wall. But he’s always there no matter what I’m doing. He’s always there reminding me that he can never be there again.

An hour and a half later all ten frames hang on the office wall. They look perfect. I stand back and look at my work. I am impressed with myself, a little surprised also. I toss the hammer back in the toolbox, a lofty, cocky toss, as if I am its new master.

Later on that night I am lying in my bed. I stare up at the ceiling. I can’t sleep. I can’t think. I get out of bed and try to find a book to read. I can’t read
The Godfather
at night. It scares me. The other day when I read the scene in which Michael has dinner with Sollozzo and McCluskey the cop, I had to stand up and walk around in the middle of it because I was so nervous for Michael. Tonight I just want to read something light and funny. I walk into my living room and look at the bookshelves. I see a small spine in the corner of the shelf. It says
Jelly Belly
in green writing.
Jelly Belly
is a book written for middle-school-aged kids. It’s about a boy who goes to fat camp and how he hides food in his swim trunks and stuff like that.
Jelly Belly
is one of my dad’s all-time favorite books. We have it in our bookshelf because he gave it to Josh to read. That’s the mark of a real gentleman. No matter what stupid thing my dad asked Josh to do—try on his new Keens, go shopping for orchids, or read a sixth-grade book about some chubby kid at fat camp—Josh did it. I open the book and right there in the front cover is a picture of Josh and me
dancing at our wedding. We are looking at each other, smiling. A pain pangs in my stomach. I can feel my throat dry up. I know exactly why this picture is here. Josh always used photographs as his bookmarks. So first, it tells me he picked this picture as a bookmark. I think of him looking at it, holding it and thinking,
Yeah, I like this one
, smiling to himself and sliding it into the book. That’s part of the crying. The second part is he picked out a bookmark for
Jelly Belly
, which means he had every intention of reading it. He didn’t just take it from my dad and say, “Oh yeah, sure,” and then throw it aside. He was actually going to read it because my dad wanted him to.

Earlier this month Dr. G. asked me what I thought of “spiritual connections.” I said I didn’t really know, but on the inside I was rolling my eyes. “Smoke and mirrors,” is what I wanted to say. She could sense my rigidity to the subject so all she said was, “Just don’t close yourself off.” I can’t remember the rest of what she said about it, but I remember that part exactly. I’m not saying I had a spiritual connection with Josh via
Jelly Belly
, I’m just saying I found the book and thought of Dr. G.’s words.

I don’t read
Jelly Belly
. Eventually I just get back in bed. I lie in bed, in the middle of the bed with one pillow. This is my life. The toolbox belongs to me. The bed only has one pillow and one body. I can only see Josh in pictures. I know I will make it, I know I will survive, but I hate my life. Somewhere, hours later, as I finally drift off to sleep I can feel Josh telling me, Don’t hate your life. It is his desperate message: Don’t hate your life.

The next morning Louise and Bug arrive, with wagging tails and boisterous barks. I know they are so happy to see me and I them, but they are also completely unsympathetic to me and my grief. They need attention and care and energy that I just can’t seem to summon. Jason, the dog trainer, comes over
once every two weeks to help train me in handling them. He tells me how to hold the leash, what to say to command them and how to say it. He emphasizes the point that the person giving the command (me) has to do so in a way that is calm and controlled. He says the dogs will respond to a calm, controlled command. Jason is a very nice man, but when he says this, part of me wants to look at him and retort, “Easier than it sounds, ace.” I am a lot of things right now and calm and controlled are certainly not on the list. But I lie. “Got it,” I tell Jason. I nod my head and say, “Sure, I can do that.”

When Jason walks with us the dogs are awesome. For the first couple of hours after he leaves they are great. Even the first walk or two with me at the helm is okay. I feel like I really am in control. But after he’s been gone for a few days, they start to come undone. Or maybe it’s me coming undone.

When Josh was here, he was the pack leader. Louise and Bug listened to him because they could sense his confidence. Anyone who knew Josh, dog or human, could sense his confidence. I tell myself I am going to be the pack leader, but I know I’m not made of pack leader stock. The dogs know this too. But we walk every day. We practice our new family every day.

Even with two animals in the house, it still feels very lonely. It is strange walking in the door and not having anyone to yell hello to, to fold laundry with no conversation, to go to bed by myself. Sometimes all I want to do is fill this house with people, but I know once everyone got here all I would do is scream for them to get out. Sometimes I resent how involved my in-laws are in my life right now. They are family—no, they are the Family—but it still feels like my in-laws are making an impossible situation more difficult. Ashley comes over and gives me coupons she’s collected from Carter’s and Target and tells me about how she went shopping for the baby on her lunch hour. I have to tell
myself,
She is only helping
, but really she makes me crazy. I feel like she’s constantly reminding me that I am not excited enough for this baby. Her loud voice—it’s like she talks that way just to try to get my attention. When she sits on my couch, I just think about how I want her to leave. Then when I sit alone I think about how it’s almost easier to put up with their uninvited visits than a silent house.