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

her in the kitchen and have her look so diminished, so ordinary, had been like having a trick played on him. It was like something Stephen Boyd might do: set him up in order to deflate him. It wasn’t so much that Paul had exalted her in his memory; it was that his memory of her had functioned to exalt him . That holiday at Cabruda Lake had become, in the uncanny way of a select few childhood memories, a storehouse of symbolism. They had fallen for each other, the little boy and the teenage girl, in a way that remained unparalleled. He believed that no one since, no friend or teacher or babysitter, not even his parents, not even Baptiste, had seen in him such promise, or reflected back at him such delight. The notion of this Rapunzel, this distant half sister vaguely in need of rescue, who’d seen him more purely than anyone else before or since, had been itself like a promise.
    For her to show up now as she was—shorn, short, pale—and see him as he was—overweight, awkward, acned—was a double blow. He felt duped. He longed for Baptiste to have come home with him, but whether as buffer against Jess or in order to flaunt him before her, Paul didn’t know.
    The cookie had become a perfect disk of chocolate-andcream paste on his tongue. Paul swallowed and inserted another. He slid open the top drawer of his desk, removed a spiral sketchbook and a bottle of Winsor & Newton Black, selected a pen from a mug full of drawing tools, and stuck in a nib. Then he flipped open the sketchbook and riffled through its pages, more than half of which were covered with drawings, or bits of drawings, fits and starts of images and designs that had coalesced, collage-like, into a world of his and Baptiste’s making. There, on one page, crouched the black panther, muscular and scowling in the shadow of a garbage can. There, behind him, stood the private eye, lantern-jawed and stubbled, slouched in his trench coat. Paul dipped his nib in the ink, then blotted it on an old waddedup T-shirt he kept for this purpose. His breath slowed and he brought his head so low the fringe of his bangs brushed the paper. There, on the facing page, with no idea yet of what it would contain, he began to sketch in the next frame.

5.
    R icky never crossed the bridge from east to west without seeing herself driving off it. This didn’t happen when she was going in the opposite direction, on the way to work each morning, for example, or when they went to Tarrytown to visit John’s mother, or to Manhattan to visit her parents. But without fail every time she spanned the Hudson in a westerly, homeward direction, she imagined herself pointing the car—or allowing the car to point itself, more like—toward the shoulder, bursting through the guardrail, nosing toward the waves, disappearing from sight. She didn’t imagine anything beyond death, beyond breaking through the silvered surface of the water. She never considered particulars such as the rate at which the car might sink, or flood, or for that matter what the physical sensations would be: the impact, the temperature of the water, how drowning would affect the heart and lungs. The engine of her imagination always cut out at the moment of the car shooting beneath the river’s skin, the moment of her vanishing.
    She’d begun having this fantasy almost a full year earlier, as soon as she’d started back to work after the baby. For the first few months it would come on so strong, so like a premonition or compulsion, she would begin to sweat as soon as she’d passed the tolls at the entrance to the bridge. She was convinced that only the most dedicated act of concentration would keep the car in its lane. Her palms would be wet on the steering wheel, her back muscles tight with effort, the whole way across. Over time the vision of a fatal plunge did not fade, but its fearful grip abated. After a while, not only did it no longer induce sweats, it no longer even disturbed her. In fact its effect was reversed.