Chapter Five
"Nick."
I shook my head into my pillow.
"You gotta get up."
I shook my head again.
"Nick I've been here for two days and I still don't think you know I'm here at all."
I didn't move.
Suddenly there was a blinding flash of light. The window shades had been opened. I squeezed my eyes shut and smashed my face into the pillow, trying to block out the nasty sunlight. I grabbed the blankets and tried to pull them over me, but before I could, they were pulled away. Promptly followed by my pillow.
I rolled onto my back and stared up at Kevin standing over me, looking down at me with an expression of worry. "You need to get up," he said.
"I don't want to get up," I answered.
Kevin frowned in a way that I think was supposed to be understanding and sympathetic but I just wanted to kick him and make him go away so it seemed more annoying to me than anything. "I know it's hard, Nick, but you gotta keep living and --"
"I do not, I do not," I argued, shaking my head, "I do not need to keep living. She didn't keep living, why should I?" I reached my hand for my pillow, planning to rip it back out of his hands, but like a matador he moved it just before I got it and took a couple steps back.
"Because you are alive," he replied. "You are here, and that's what she would want you to do if she could tell you what to do right now."
I shook my head stubbornly, "I don't care what she'd tell me to do. She left. I'm not listening to her. Or to you. I don't need a fucking pillow." I rolled over and curled myself into a ball. "I'm fine with just the mattress," I muttered. "It ain't like you can take that away."
Kevin sighed heavily. I heard the pillow drop to the floor and a moment later the far side of the bed shifted under his weight as he sat down. I wasn't entirely sure I was comfortable with it, but he laid down and he was stretched out behind my back on the mattress. I curled tighter, hugging my knees to my chest. "Then I'll sit shiva."
I wanted to ask what that meant, but I didn't wanna talk to him.
I fell asleep at some point and Kevin must've got bored of sitting shiva because when I woke up he was gone and the late afternoon sun was coming through the window instead of that God-awful morning stuff that had been there before. I got up because I had to go to the bathroom and when I came back out, Kevin was just setting a tray of food down on the night stand, a TV tray table folded under one arm. He looked over as I waddled across the room and crawled back onto the mattress. He'd put the pillow and blanket back on the bed. I punched the pillow into submission and flopped back down into it face first.
"Here; eat before you go back to sleep," Kevin said, and I heard him put the tray on the TV table and move it all over near the side of the bed.
"Not hungry," I muttered around the pillow.
"Nick you need to eat."
"Not hungry," I repeated.
"Don't make me take the pillow and blanket again, man," he threatened.
I sighed and rolled over and stared at the tray. Soup with a handful of oyster crackers and a glass of cranberry juice. It looked so incredibly unappetizing. And the cranberry juice was CowBelle's. It was low tart because she hated the supposed after taste of regular cranberry juice. I stared at it, remembering going shopping with her and how she'd been so excited that Ocean Spray had low tart cranberry juice now and that it was on sale. Like we couldn't have afforded it if it wasn't on sale. She liked sales, even though we had plenty of money, she cherished a bargin. She liked shopping in thrift stores for things we could get brand new.
Kevin stared at me, waiting for me to eat.
I picked up the spoon, it felt like it weighed a hundred thousand pounds. I ate slowly, methodically, in a pattern. Two sips of soup, sip of juice. Nibble an oyster cracker. Two sips of soup, sip of juice. Nibble an oyster cracker. I did that until Kevin looked satisfied and I dropped the spoon into the bowl with a clang and rolled back over. "There, I ate, you happy?" I asked.
"As a clam," Kevin replied. He took the tray and left the room.
I rolled until I was staring out the huge picture window. The sun was setting, the stars were coming out. I felt my throat swell with frustration as they became brighter and brighter in the deep midnight velvet sky. I found Sirius and followed the path up to Bellatrix and watched her shine, my throat constricting.
When Kevin returned, he went back to sitting shiva, but this time he sat in the chair in the corner, his iPad glowing from his knees, one side of his ear buds in, a blanket over his legs and a travel pillow behind his head. I hugged my pillow under my head.
It was probably an hour of silence like that when I finally whispered, "I'm never going to recover from this."
I heard him remove the one side of the ear buds and fold up his iPad. "You will," he said, "It'll just take a really long time."
"I've never loved anyone like that," I said quietly.
Kevin said, "She was one of a kind. A beautiful soul. Beautiful."
"I can't look at the stars without seeing her," I said.
He got up and I heard him walk around the end of the bed and he sat down on the floor near me, leaning against the mattress. He stared up at the stars through the window with me for a long moment.
"See the bright one?" I asked. "That really really bright one?" I wished I had CowBelle's laser pointer. I didn't even know where it was. Probably in her pocket, wherever her body was.
"I see it," Kevin said.
"Look just above it, a little to the right... see that next bright star?"
"Yes."
"That's her," I whispered. "That's Belle."
Sitting shiva, it turns out, is a Jewish custom where someone helps to take care of a mourner until they're healed. Traditionally, shiva lasts seven days. Apparently the word even means seven in Hebrew. For me, shiva lasted seven months. And for the most part Kevin stayed with me through it. He went home for a couple days a week, but he always came back.
I only got up and moved around when he was there at first, then in February I woke up one morning that he was gone and I felt hungry so I dragged myself downstairs and made a bowl of cereal, which I clutched to my chest and ate standing up in front of the sink, staring out at the dead grass of our backyard, thinking how we'd had big plans for kids to one day play back there. I left the half eaten bowl of cheerios in the sink and three days later when Kevin returned it was still there, mostly congealed.
At the end of February, I got a padded envelope from Ralph and Anita. Inside was Belle's engagement ring, a cut out from the newspaper with her obituary, and a note asking me to get in touch with them at some point. I taped the obituary and the note to the fridge and carried the ring upstairs where I put it on the night stand on her side like she always left it at night and pretended she was just in the bathroom, that she'd be right back.
I went grocery shopping by myself the first time on March 3rd. Kevin wasn't there for a whole week because Mason had some stuff going on and I was hungry and there was no food left in the house so I went for a ride to the Kroger and bought nothing but frozen stuff that I could make quick. Kevin came back to a stack of Dejorno frozen pizza boxes littering my kitchen counter.
He got me to go for a walk toward the end of March when there was a beautiful Spring day in the low seventies. He dragged me to Radnor State Park where we walked the two-mile long loop around the lake and squirrels crossed our path regularly. He smiled as we moved along the shady path. "Isn't this nice, being outside?" he asked, "Fresh air will do you good."
And from that point on he got on a fresh air kick so that every morning he was in opening the bedroom window at the crack of dawn and the sliding door that led to the patio was almost always open wide, sunshine coming in from every available window. "Get all that stagnent air out," he said, "Get this place smelling fresh..."
"It smells like her right now," I said.
Kevin didn't reply, but he didn't stop opening windows, either.
He started dusting, too, and cleaning. He went through the cupboards, threw away expired stuff and wiped the counters and the shelves. One day he cleaned the bathroom and the next time I went in there I found all the lip stick tubes and tampons and mascara wands and the rose-and-mint scented shampoos were all gone. I had a slight panic attack over that because I'd started sniffing the shampoo bottles every now and then to try to remember how her hair smelled a little, and now they were just gone. "You're not gonna get over her with her stuff hanging around like that," Kevin said.
In May, I was seeing less and less of her name on the mail that came.
In June, I was watching TV. It was some old movie I'd never seen before and this classically handsome guy was talking to this blonde bombshell of a girl and their conversation was funny and I laughed. Kevin looked up from the chair as I laughed, and that made me laugh, too, and the more I laughed the funnier it became until I couldn't stop laughing and tears were pouring down my cheeks and suddenly it wasn't funny, it was sad, and I started bawling and Kevin just watched as I fell apart, but for the first time the stuff I was feeling inside was finally, finally coming out of me as the tears poured down my cheeks.
When I was done, completely drained, sitting on the couch with soaked cheeks and blurry vision, Kevin sitting beside me, his hand on my back, he said, "Now you can start getting better."
Whitenoise by Pengi
