Read Online The Grief of Others by Leah Hager Cohen - Free Book Online Page A

to dig fingernail X’s into the mosquito bites she couldn’t reach on her back. She sang along to folk songs she played on her guitar; other times, she let him strum it while she made chords. She teased him, too, as no one had ever done. She called him Paolo instead of Paul, said “Peeyew” and held her nose whenever he took off his shoes, and sang, with a pronounced, insistent twang, “Why don’t you love me like you used to do?” at random intervals to him during the course of the holiday. “How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?” When he’d shrug in hapless embarrassment she’d say, “That’s cold, man.” Her teasing had the strange effect of making him feel both overwhelmed by the privilege and on the verge of tears.
    Her name was Jessica Safransky, impossible to resist chanting several times in a row, and Paul had chanted it a lot, during that holiday and in the weeks following, after they’d returned to their respective houses in different parts of the state. Jess had been only on loan, it turned out, from the Safranskys. That was the curious phrase his mother had used, as though Jess were a library book. During their time at Cabruda Lake Paul had given no thought to the provenance of her last name; it had seemed fitting that such a fantastic being should come bearing her own distinct appellation. Only afterward did its implications dawn on him. Weeks after the vacation he’d asked when they would see Jess again, and was by way of indirect answer given this piece of information: the Safranskys lived in a town far, far up the Hudson River, past Albany. Albany: even the word sounded distant, milky and cool as a train whistle. He’d envisioned a citadel on a hill, white flags rippling from the spires. But, wait—Safranskys, plural? Well, yes: Mr. Safransky was Jess’s father, having married Jess’s mother long ago. But wasn’t Daddy her father? Daddy, it was explained, had never been married to Jess’s mother. He had once been Jess’s father, it seemed, but now there was another who’d taken his place. And so. In this way Paul lost his early sureness about the world. Fathers could be interchanged; sisters could come in fractions. The easy manner with which his mother explained these things made them only more distressing.
    Still, Paul had hopes of a repeat holiday. For a while he persisted in asking every now and then when they might get together with Jess again. “We’ll have to try to work something out,” his father would say. But when the Ryries went back to Cabruda Lake the following summer it had been without Jess, and no other plans for a visit ever transpired. He began to think of her less frequently, though when he did, the thought still caused a great prick of interest, and continued, in a vague way, to seem like a treat yet to happen, a promise on the horizon. Then one day when he’d been in second or third grade his mother had replied to his latest inquiry, with what he took to be inexcusable offhandedness, that the Safranskys had moved some time ago to California. After that he’d stopped wondering when Jess might visit them again. If he wondered anything, it was how that single summer’s holiday had ever come to happen.
    As he grew older, a few more details of the story had filtered through: how young his father had been at the time of Jess’s conception, and how foolish. That it had been the mother’s decision to raise the baby alone, that she’d actually refused his father’s involvement.That only when the teenage Jess had rebelled, insisting on meeting her birth father, did the mother begrudgingly allow it. And that mere months after the summer at Cabruda Lake, the Safranskys uprooted and moved clear across the country. So that the picture Paul formed of Jess’s mother was of Rapunzel’s witch: a woman so jealous she locked her daughter away from the rest of the world—or, at least, away from the Ryries.
    To see Jess today in real life, real time, to stand before