Since You're Gone

One weekend, I go and stay with Chasity at her apartment in Tulsa.  So late at night when I'd arrived, she was not awake, of course, but her husband seemed to understand in that forlorn silence men have when they know there's simply nothing else they can do to try and fix around on things.  

The next morning, I push open Chas's bedroom door, lean in to see if she's awake.  There is a flock of birds in the trees outside chattering outrageously, ruffling their feathers, cocking their heads in the too-bright way of the mechanical toy.  I have been at the living room window drinking weak coffee and watching them for a while, wondering as usual at the secret kind of consensus they seem to keep.  Who will decide, and at what moment, that they should take off together, fly obliquely across the winter sky in their ragged but purposeful formation?  Do they know where they are going?

Chasity is sitting up, looking out the window at the same tree I have been watching.   I nod a greeting, give her my coffee, then stretch out beside her.  There is a slat of sun lying across her face, the light illuminating the tiny golden hairs she still has left on her ear.  Below the curl of cartilage, I see the reddish glow of blood in her lobe.  I remember holding Molly when she was a baby and nursing her, seeing the same thing.  She held tightly onto one of my fingers, and we rocked slowly back and forth in front of her west-facing window in her nursery.  I used to think that if someone about to commit a crime looked up and saw a silhouette on the shade of a mother rocking a baby, it would be enough to stop them.  There was sometimes a wonderful breeze, and the curtain would billow out dramatically, then be pulled up close against the screen, tangolike.  I would watch Molly's face, think of all that lay ahead of her.  Someday she would say in words what it was she wanted; someday she would walk in the door, lunchbox clanging into her leg, and I would open it at the kitchen sink and see what she had chosen, what she had rejected, all without me.  Every maturational milestone seemed a miracle to me, because it was Molly who would be doing it.

Chas is quiet, sipping my coffee and staring straight ahead, and I close my eyes, continue thinking my own thoughts.  Today we are going to a cemetery.  I wonder how Chas's mother would feel if she were still alive, watching the daughter she held in the rocker die, driving her daughter to graveyards as though they were apartments for rent.  It seems the most unfair and impossible of things: how can a baby you bring into life leave it before you?  What sense is there in that?  Of course, if there is one lesson grief teaches, it is that there is no sense in some things.  Still, I know if Chas's mother were alive, she would have handled this.  Sue would have drawn from the reservoir of sacred strength that women are born with.  She would wear clothes whose very smell comforted Chas, she would put on an apron and make her soup and butter her toast and help her to walk to the bathroom when she needed it; and when things turned the worst, she would not leave.  Women do not leave situations like this:  we push up our sleeves, lean in closer, and say, "What do you need?  Tell me what you need and by God I will do it."  I believe that the souls of women flatten and anchor themselves in times of adversity, lay in for the stay.  I've heard that when elephants are attacked they often run not away, but toward each other.  Perhaps it is because they are a matriarchal society. 

I feel Chas looking at me, and I open my eyes.  She says, "You know what I was thinking?  I was watching the birds and then I started looking at the branches of the tree and I was thinking how much they look like nerve cells.  And then I was thinking how everything is so connected.  I mean that there must be one thing, somewhere that ties everything together."  

"Yes, I think so, too."

"Do you?"

"Yes."  

She readjusts herself on the pillow, takes in a breath.  "What I mean is that if you could just get at the real heart of one thing, you'd understand everything else. Like Kanye and cognac.  Like linguine would have something to do with linguistics.  There'd be a link there." 

"Yes, right," I answer, trying hard not to laugh at, with, ​AT my friend.  

"You've thought this, too?"  

"Yes," I say, and of course I have.  Only, nothing even remotely ssociated with Kanye West had ever entered my mind...   

She stares straight ahead, blinks.  "Oh.  I thought I was having profound death thoughts."