I make my way there now because I think that somehow I might feel closer to Mom if I sit there. That somehow we’ll be able to commune.
But when I get there, that spot is already occupied. A man sits there, reading the newspaper. Truth be told, it makes me crabby, thinking what nerve he has to sit in Mom’s favorite spot. And so I sit opposite him on another bed, twenty feet away or more, watching him, waiting for him to leave. I stare at him, thinking it’ll make him uncomfortable and he’ll go.
But he’s not uncomfortable because he doesn’t even see me staring. He’s too preoccupied by the newspaper in his hands.
I can’t say one way or the other if he’s tall or short because he’s sitting. He’s got his legs crossed, ankle to knee, and his clothes are all sorts of nondescript. Pants, shirt, shoes. Nothing noteworthy about them. They’re clothes. The sleeves of his shirt are thrust to the elbows. There, on his left arm beneath the cuff of the shirt, is a scar. It peeks out from beneath the sleeve, a six-inch gash that’s healed poorly. The skin around it is puckered and pink.
His face looks sad. That’s the first thought I have. That the expression on his face—that and his body language—is one of sadness. The way his mouth pulls down at the corners, a slight tug there at the edges of his lips. The way his shoulders slouch. I should know because each time I look in the mirror, I see the very same thing. On his face is a patch of hair, a tight beard, trimmed and tidy. It gives off an aura of mystery and regality. His skin is tanned like the hide of a moose, stretched and dried in the sun before being smoked over a fire. Like he’s spent too much time outside in the sun.
He isn’t thumbing through the newspaper, but instead he’s got his eyes peeled to some story on the top page, the paper folded so that he can hone in on it. Something bad has happened in the world, I think. Something bad always happens. I wonder what it is this time. Terrorist attack. Women and children being slaughtered by their own leaders. A shooting in an elementary school. Children murdered by their own moms and dads.
I watch his eyes, the movement of them as he scans the story. Moving left to right. Dropping down to read the next line. But his eyes are lowered, gazing down on the newspaper and so I can’t see much, none other than the lashes and the lids. He bites a lip. He bites hard so that the pain of the lip overrides whatever it is he’s feeling on the inside. I do that too.
He reaches for a cup of coffee set on the marble edge of the raised bed. I read the corrugated sleeve on the cup. A coffee bar on Dearborn. I’ve never been there before, but I know the place. I’ve seen it before.
And then he gets up to go, and I ready myself to make a move for his seat. He slips an orange baseball cap over the brown hair, though as he goes, he leaves his newspaper behind. Because he’s sad. Because he’s distracted.
He walks away and I notice a shoe is untied, the cuff of a pant leg stuck in the shoe’s tongue. He leaves it there. For a second or two I watch him go.
But then, standing and making my way to the raised bed, I call to him, “Sir,” while grabbing the newspaper so that the wind doesn’t have a chance to scatter it around the garden. “Sir,” I call again, “your newspaper.”
But he’s walking away and before I can run to him, something leaps off the page at me. It grabs me by the throat so that I can’t speak and I can’t move. I’m frozen in place, a bronze statue like the lions who stand before the Art Institute, guarding its entrance.
There on the top of the newspaper is Mom’s beautiful face. Her beautiful brown eyes and brown hair, both watered down by the black-and-white newsprint.
Her obituary. The one I put in the paper because I needed the world to know she was dead. To solidify it. To make it real. Because only then, when it was written in print for all of the world to see, would I believe it.
This man. The sad man sitting in Mom’s and my spot in the garden. He was reading her obituary.
He had the newspaper folded so that Mom’s face was on top, and it was these words his eyes spanned as he bit his lip so that he wouldn’t cry.
Mom’s obituary is what made this man sad.
I read over the words. Mom’s death notice, which was brief because there wasn’t a whole lot of information to provide. No memorial service. No one to send flowers to.
The final line reads “Eden Sloane is survived by her daughter, Jessica.”
My legs lose feeling. I go slack jawed. Because there’s one word on the newsprint that the man has circled and it’s my name. Jessica.
eden
July 12, 2003
Chicago
The park is named after some poet, I’ve come to learn. Though no one pays attention to things like that because, to most people, it’s just a park where kids romp around on the playground and, on the other side of a chain-link fence, boys play basketball, the repeated thump, thump, thump of the ball on concrete a steady refrain. They’re older boys mostly, teenagers, and they spout from their mouths a flurry of curse words at regular intervals, and I feel grateful Jessie is still too young to know what any of it means, though she pauses from time to time to watch them. To just stand on the playground and stare.
There are baseball fields off in the distance, and on the other side of a bridge, a path that snakes along the river where she and I sometimes walk, but not today. Today she played on the playground, and for the first time ever, found a friend. Not the kind of friend we’d keep in touch with after today or invite over for a playdate. No, Jessie and I don’t have those types of friends.
Rather she’s the kind of friend who, for fifteen or twenty minutes at best, is a bosom body. A soul mate.
I watched as Jessie and the little girl chased each other in dizzying circles, up the stairs and down the slide. Again and again and again. As far as I knew, they never exchanged names. Because that’s the way it is with kids. Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Easy.
There was no one else on the playground but the two of them, and the only ones sitting on the periphery of it were the little girl’s mother, pushing a newborn in an old-fashioned buggy, and me. It took some time, a few awkward glances my way, before she rose from her own park bench and came to mine, standing before me, offering a hello. I too said hello, staring down into the buggy at the infant sound asleep beneath a yellow blanket.
“How sweet,” I said.