Signs of Life Read online

  “We’ll be okay.” I nod. I don’t know why I say this or what it means; it just comes out of my mouth.

  Josh’s aunt Barb looks at the pictures. She cries. I hug her and try to say something nice. “It’s okay, Aunt Barb.”

  She looks at me, her red eyes serious.

  “It’s not okay, honey.” She looks right at me. “It’s not okay.” She starts to cry. “It’s not okay. You were robbed. You were robbed.” I am not mad at her for saying this. I am not upset because I cry in front of people. She’s right. I know she is right.

  There are over a thousand people at the funeral. First Deedee and Chris speak. Then Pug, one of Josh’s best friends growing up, goes next. Then I speak. Somehow I speak.

  Then it is over and Vito, my dad, drives us all home. There are six of us crammed in his Volvo. The car is full of orchids, cards, flowers, and the posters with all of our pictures. I feel like we are in the car forever. I feel like I am going to throw up or pee my pants. I feel like I am suffocating in the backseat of my dad’s car. We get home. I run to the bathroom. I don’t throw up. I try to pee but can’t.

  I put all of the boards with pictures into my old room at my parents’ house. I shut the door. One by one I take all of the pictures down. One by one I look at each picture. I cry and cry and cry.

  His credit cards, our gym memberships, his cell phone, his car, his insurance, his bills, his work. Days go by of these phone calls.

  “Yes, my husband, Josh, died suddenly in an accident. I would like to cancel his debit card.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am. We’ll get that taken care of right away.”

  “Thank you.”

  I get seven copies of his death certificate. I sit in my old room and read his death certificate over and over: “Date of birth: December 21, 1979. Date of death: June 17, 2007. 1:21 a.m. Trauma to the head.”

  I call Social Security. I get a check from them for $273 and zero cents. There is a formal letter attached.

  “This lump sum has been issued to you as a result of the death of your husband, Joshua Raymond Taylor.” Another segment reads, “The marriage of Natalie Taylor and Joshua Taylor was terminated on June 17, 2007, due to the death of Joshua Taylor.”

  More days pass. My mom, Hales, and Moo come with me to my obstetrician’s office. I called and told them what happened. There are six doctors in the practice. Today I am seeing Dr. Ford. I’ve never met Dr. Ford before.

  We crowd into the small examination room. I lie on the table. My mom sits next to me. Moo and Hales stand in the corner. A tall, slender man with thick black glasses slinks in the door. He has a large forehead and looks awkwardly at the four of us. He doesn’t say anything. I take a deep breath. We all sit in silence for a moment and wait for Dr. Ford to say something. Or are we supposed to say something? Great, I think to myself. Of course the one time I need a doctor who has a sense of emotional connection, I get the scientist. This jackass has no idea what he has just walked into. My throat starts to tighten at the thought of my mother and sister trying to explain what has happened to me. Finally the silence breaks.

  “I know,” he says in a clear, soft voice. “I know what happened.” He pauses. “I’m very sorry to hear about your loss.”

  “Thank you,” I mutter.

  A few moments of silence go by. Then he starts to talk.

  “How’s your brain?” he asks. He stands still as he says this.

  “It’s okay,” I shrug.

  “That’s a lie.” He then slides down the wall behind him and sits on the floor, still holding his clipboard. In any other context, it would be completely bizarre and inappropriate for any doctor to sit on the floor with his knees pulled to his chest. But right now, it feels completely right. He has put all of us at ease. He just wants us to know that this is not a normal doctor’s visit and he realizes that.

  He goes on to tell me that my body is fine. Everything is moving along wonderfully. He says I can get an ultrasound today or any other day I want. I tell him I’m nervous. I’m nervous because my whole body is in so much pain, it’s hard to imagine something growing inside of it. I have this strange anxiety that my grief will somehow physically manifest itself and attack the baby. He does not acknowledge this as a crazy emotion, which I deeply appreciate. I tell him I haven’t been eating as much as I used to, my appetite has decreased substantially. He says, “Natalie, there are women on this earth who eat dirt and ice for nine months and deliver perfectly healthy babies. You will be fine. Your body knows exactly what it needs to do.” He pauses. “But you need to work on your brain. Your brain isn’t fine, and it shouldn’t be.”

  I feel the tears well up in my eyes.

  He asks me a few questions. Then he takes a card out of his breast pocket: DR. ELLEN GURIZA, PHD. PSYCHOLOGIST.

  “I’m not suggesting that you go see her,” he says. “I am instructing you, as your obstetrician, that you have to go see her. The sooner the better. Call her today. If she doesn’t answer the phone, leave a message and say that I referred you and that you would like to come in as soon as possible.” I nod. He looks at my mom.

  “Make sure she does this. It is imperative that she does this.” She nods too.

  I don’t go back to my house. I stay at my parents’. I sleep on the futon in my old room every night. Maggie sleeps with me every night. Mathews doesn’t go back to work. He spends the night in my parents’ basement for over a week. He and I never talk about Josh, but in a strange way he is the most comforting person I have. He is the only person who can make me smile. A few days after the funeral we went out to dinner with our friends from out of town. Mathews and I sat next to each other. I told him if he was still single at thirty and hadn’t found a man yet (he’s gay), we should get married for the tax break. We could be Will and Grace, but I’d be a much more pathetic, less attractive version of Grace. Maggie overheard us and said she wanted to marry Mathews too; we’d have to flip for it. After she turned away, Mathews leaned toward me and said, “I’ll marry you, but I am not marrying Maggie.”

  During the days before the funeral, people kept dropping off food. Platters and platters of fresh fruit, cheese, lunch meats. It was so generous. We never had to think about food. After a few days Dubs (Moo’s husband, David—we call him Dubs) asked if we could do something different for dinner—he was “kind of sick of cold cuts.” Mathews and I heard him say this and exchanged a look, a “what a jerk” look. Later that night, Mathews found me in my room, lay down with me, and said, “Nat, are you so sick of cold cuts or what?” Mathews provides me with glimpses of relief. A few seconds where I smile. These moments are nearly impossible otherwise.

  I lie on the futon in my old room. I cry hysterically. I heave and sob. I can hardly see. My mom is there next to me. She cries too. Her hand is on my head.

  She says, “If I could take this away from you I would.” I know she would.

  “If I could do this instead of you, I would do it in a second.” She sounds desperate, as if she is truly negotiating with someone.

  “I never want to be alone again,” I say, through my heaves of air. She shakes her head. “You don’t have to be. You don’t have to be.”

  I look at the ceiling. I try to wipe my face off. “I never want to go back to my house and I never want to be alone again.”

  The last book I read with my eleventh-grade class before school got out a few weeks ago was The Color Purple. In the beginning of the book there is an epigraph based on Stevie Wonder’s lyrics that reads: “Show me how to do like you, show me how to do it.” After reading the book, it is obvious that the epigraph speaks to the larger themes of self-discovery. The main character, Celie, is a poor black woman living in rural Georgia at the turn of the twentieth century. She is physically, sexually, emotionally, and psychologically abused. But she “finds herself” and she has a sexual, emotional, and religious reawakening owing to the help of some tremendous friends. People show her how to do things. I think of Celie all the time. I t
hink of that epigraph every day. Will someone please just show me how to do this? I want to go around asking people who have gone through this, “Okay, what is the second month like? What is the third month like? How about six months? What happens after a year? What did you do to make yourself feel better? What did you eat? What did you drink? How often did you pee? How do I make myself feel like I’m not going to throw up all the time? What movies did you watch? What books did you read? Who did you talk to? Can I have their numbers? Just tell me how you did it, and then I can do it.”

  Susie Daniels, one of my fellow teachers, lost her brother in a car accident when she was sixteen. She called and asked if she could take me to breakfast. Thank God! Maybe she can give me some answers. Or I want to call Dennis, another co-worker. He lost his sister in a plane crash. He’ll tell me how this works. But nobody does. They just shake their heads quietly and try not to cry.

  I sit at a table at Caribou Coffee with Battersby and Jen. Battersby lost her mom in a car accident three years ago. She’s been giving me practical advice in all of these very strange situations. Right before the first viewing, she told me that she was giving me an invisible stack of STFU cards, which stands for “shut the fuck up.” So when people come up to me and say, “How are you doing?” or “This was God’s plan” or “Why wasn’t he wearing a helmet?” I could politely smile and hand them an STFU card.

  We sit and drink Caribou Coolers. We used to come here all the time in high school. During college when we would come home for breaks, we’d meet here and gossip and catch up on one another’s lives. Now they ask me questions about how I’m doing, but in a way that doesn’t merit an STFU card. Finally I ask Battersby, “What is this like? How long does this take?” She shrugs.

  “Nat. It’s going to be different for you. You know I can’t tell you any of that.”

  “How long was it before you started to feel okay again?” I ask her. I can tell she is hesitant to give me an answer.

  “It took three years until the first thing I didn’t think about when I opened my eyes in the morning was, ‘My mom died.’ ”

  Fuck, I think to myself. Three years. Three years.

  I sit on a very nice leather couch in Dr. Guriza’s office. She is a slender woman with short black hair. She sits in a big chair across from me.

  “Okay, Natalie. Why don’t you start by just telling me what happened.”

  I start to talk. I get through the first three words, and then my voice cracks and I start to cry.

  “My husband, Josh.” I put my head in my hands and cry for a while, maybe a few minutes. I try to talk again, but my voice is very high. I tell her the story. Again, tears and snot everywhere.

  • • •

  It has been three weeks since Josh’s accident. I go see Dr. G. again.

  “Tell me about Josh. What kind of person was he?”

  “He was amazing. He was a real man. You know how there are not a lot of real men these days? He was a real man.” I go babbling on through my tears, telling her about how he would do everything—garden, cook, clean, play sports with me, read, joke, bike. He didn’t want anything more out of life than to be a dad. He was the best at everything.

  “I know you think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. Ask anyone who knew him. He was the best at everything.” I go on to tell her about his bike trip across the country to raise money for a charity, about how he had such good balance, about how he was a great driver, surfer, soccer player—anything. I cry. I cry and cry. She tells me that it is really important for me to go through these memories. I nod. But sometimes, I think to myself, nothing is harder than remembering. “You’re going to cherish these memories. You may not now, but you will.” I nod again, but I don’t really believe her.

  I get home. Hales asks, “How was she?”

  I shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Do you think she can help you?”

  I shrug again. “What do you mean, help? No, I don’t think she is going to help me. I think I’m just going to go and ball my eyes out and every now and then she’ll say something nice and insightful and that’ll be it.”

  Hales nods.

  In the state of Michigan there is a long-standing tradition of traveling to the northern part of the state when the weather gets warm. People camp, stay in cottages, rent condos or hotel rooms. Most northern lakeside cities are lined with lodging for out-of-towners. Most read NO VACANCY from Memorial Day weekend until after Labor Day. We call it “going up north.” For my entire life, I have been going to Ludington, Michigan, for summer vacations. Ludington is a small town on the coast of Lake Michigan. My grandmother’s grandfather built our cottage in 1899. My grandparents don’t come up anymore, but this is the place we would see them every summer growing up. It is the most beautiful place on the planet in the summertime. It beats the Mediterranean, the beaches of Oahu, the coast of Saint-Tropez. Not that I’ve ever been to any of those places, but I don’t need to when I have Lake Michigan. And it’s not just the scenery that makes it great. We never turn on the television. We go for walks and talk to neighbors. The same people come up every summer; families have known one another for generations. We slow down and eat dinner after the sun goes down so it doesn’t interfere with lying on the beach. When I think about life up north I have an image of my mother shucking corn on the steps of the cottage in her bathing suit.

  Josh’s family follows this tradition also. Josh’s grandparents, Margaret and Ray, bought a small cottage on Elk Lake shortly after Josh was born. Elk Lake is a small inland lake, about eight miles long and two miles across. It is obviously not as large as Lake Michigan, but Elk Lake and its neighbor, Torch Lake, have this brilliant color to them. On sunny days in the middle of summer, you’d swear you were looking at the Caribbean. Once Josh and I were married, we split our Fourth of July time between Ludington and Elk Lake. We’d stay in Ludington to see the fireworks and then leave the next morning for Elk Lake. Deedee, Chris, and Ashley are at Elk Lake for the Fourth of July, but there’s no way I can go there. I don’t know if I can ever go there again. Everything in that cottage is Josh.

  As we have done every single year since I can remember, my family and I head to Ludington for the Fourth of July this year. Everyone goes. My mom and dad, Adam, Moo and Dubs, Hales, and me. Adam and I drive up together. Adam’s fiancée, Ellie, is in Los Angeles working out wedding plans. Adam and Ellie are getting married in two weeks in Aspen, Colorado.

  The dogs, Louise and Bug, are with a dog trainer in another part of northern Michigan. The month before Josh’s accident, he and I had arranged for them to be sent to a trainer for four weeks. Josh had taken both dogs up north multiple times that spring. He took them fishing and out on walks on the local trails, which they obviously loved. As they had gotten older, keeping them close by was getting more difficult. I was getting increasingly frustrated with them on walks. We found a guy who trains dogs to walk off-leash and it just so happened that they were scheduled to be picked up shortly after Josh’s accident. It was so strange to see them before they left. I felt like they kept looking around me. Their eyes darted around my parents’ house as if to ask, “Where is he?” I am relieved I don’t have to worry about taking them with us or boarding them. I hardly feel equipped to take care of myself, let alone two animals.

  The weather up north is beautiful, but even the beach and the water can only do so much. I wake up. I eat. Sometimes we go out for breakfast. I sit around the cottage. I walk. I try to read stupid magazines. I talk to my family about celebrity gossip. I laugh, I smile. But all of the time, all of the time, I am sad. Sad has taken up permanent residency in my body. I keep thinking about Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. There is one part where he describes growing up in Memphis and his mother doesn’t have enough money for food. He says, “I would wake to find hunger at my elbow, standing at my bedside, staring at me gauntly.” That’s me, only it’s not hunger.

  We do manage to find things that prove to be therapeutic. We constantly
work on a puzzle. Halfway through the week we complete the Coca-Cola puzzle, which to Hales’s dismay was missing three pieces. After the Coca-Cola puzzle, we buy two new puzzles. The day before we leave we finish Lighthouses of the Great Lakes. Moo misses the inserting of the final piece of the lighthouse puzzle and is sorely disappointed.

  We work on crossword puzzles on a daily basis. Every morning someone goes into town to get a Detroit Free Press or a Ludington Daily News. We work on the crossword, put it aside, and eventually, among the seven of us, it is complete by the end of the day.

  Every day, every single day without fail, I go through a stack of pictures of Josh. There are probably twenty-five pictures in the stack. Most of them had been taken in the last two years, and there are several from a few summers ago. I go through the stack slowly. I look at each picture and I cry. I cry and sometimes I get a knot in my stomach because I have memorized the order of the pictures and I don’t want to see certain ones, but I look anyway. Like the one of us dancing at our wedding. We’re looking at each other. Just at each other and people are in the background smiling at us. I hate that picture. I hate it and I love it.

  Once we get home from Ludington, we start preparing for Adam’s wedding in Colorado. Maggie, who had not originally planned on going, books a flight. I am happy she is coming with us, but I fear the entire trip.

  Josh had been looking forward to this trip for months. He was an avid outdoorsman, and Colorado is the doorway to everything he loved to do, and the most appealing part was that he could be with Chris. The two of them had talked endlessly about fishing outings, where they could go rafting, if Ads would want to rent inflatable kayaks, and then they both laughed about Ads in an inflatable kayak. They were going to go biking and climbing and hiking. All of us were excited to be together for the week. Now, without Josh, this trip seems torturous.

  On the other hand, I want to go because I will be with my family at all points of the day. I don’t have to worry about not sleeping with someone. All meals will be with big crowds of people. I am excited to go. I tell Dr. G. all of this. She listens and then initiates another topic.