The Beginning of After

Chapter Twenty-six



Peach, peach, and more peach.

Light peach on the walls. Dark peach carpet. Even the lights in long rows on the ceiling shone a yellow-pink, peachy keen glow.

Maybe it was all supposed to distract you from the smell, which I think could have made me throw up if I took too deep a whiff. That was the smell of medicine and bad food and unwashed bedsheets and indoor recycled air. It was the smell of hopelessness and attempted dignity, and of life in limbo.

“Can I help you?” asked the woman at the third-floor reception desk. She was actually wearing a peach-colored nurse’s tunic.

“I’m here to see Gabriel Kaufman,” I said.

“Oh, yes!” said the nurse, her face brightening. “You called earlier.” She opened an appointment book and I glimpsed my name, scribbled in the middle of a page. I got the feeling this was a part of the Palisades Oaks Rehabilitation Center that didn’t get many visitors.

“Is it okay to bring these?” I asked, lifting up the bouquet of flowers I’d brought. Nana had insisted we stop to buy them before getting on the highway. I went along with it because she’d been so quiet and helpful after I told her what I wanted to do. She’d offered to drive and wrote a note getting me out of school and work for the day, and made sure she got excellent directions from David’s grandparents. And here the flowers gave me something to do with my hands.

Now Nana was shopping at some nearby mall—she couldn’t stand these places, she’d seen too many of her friends die in them—and I was alone in the Peach Palace.

“Of course, sweetie. They smell lovely. He’ll like them, I’m sure.”

The nurse got up and motioned for me to follow her, down another long hallway. At the very end I could see a huge picture window with sunlight streaming in, and I had a sudden urge to take off running, running, until I could crash through the glass headfirst into freedom.

“Here we are,” she said. She knocked twice on a door that was slightly ajar, paused, then opened it all the way. “I’ll leave you two alone, but please let me know if you need anything. I’ll be back in a few minutes with a vase and some water.”

I peeked slowly around the door and first saw furniture—a dark wooden dresser, an overstuffed flowered armchair. Then a bright window draped in gauzy white curtains, the sun coming through so strong I almost had to look away from it. Next, a machine that whirred and beeped quietly but intensely, and the rising and falling chest of Mr. Kaufman, moving to the beat of what I realized was his respirator.

I came all the way into the room and looked at the carved wooden headboard of his bed, his navy blue pajamas with white piping, his closed, frozen eyes. The wedding band on his left hand and the framed photograph of himself, Mrs. Kaufman, and David peering down on him from the nightstand. I recognized it as their holiday card photo from two years ago, posed on a ski slope somewhere, all three of them making the kind of face that could either be a smile or just squinting into the sun.

I stood over him for a minute, watching this robotlike sleep he was in—the respirator even made it sound like he was snoring—and reminded myself of why I hated him. This jerk, I thought. This jerk who had all that scotch at seder and killed my parents. Killed my little brother, just a kid who still liked making fart noises with various parts of his arms. Ruined my life. Not to mention what he did to his own wife and son.

You got what you deserved, and now you’re basically broccoli.

There was a knock on the door again, and the nurse came back in with the vase. She placed it on the nightstand behind the photograph and smiled at me as I handed her the flowers.

“You said he’ll like them,” I asked. “Can he smell?”

“That depends who you ask,” she said as she lowered the flowers into the water. “A doctor might tell you no, Mr. Kaufman can’t smell anything because he’s in a vegetative state.” She glanced up at Mr. Kaufman’s face. “But if you ask me, he looks better when there’s something new in the room. Something pretty or that smells good. I noticed it once when his mother came in wearing a very strong perfume.”

The nurse moved to leave and I almost stopped her. But she was out the door fast and I was once again alone with the sleeping man and the loud machine. I’d lost the thread of that anger and now just felt nervous, so I sat down in the armchair and started saying the first things that came to mind.

“Hi, Mr. Kaufman,” I said. “It’s me, Laurel Meisner.”

I paused, like I expected him to answer. Just one of those things you do because you’re trained to do it.

“I saw David. He was planning on visiting you, but he got a job opportunity and had to leave really fast.”

I considered adding, Actually, your son ran away from something. I hope it wasn’t me.

What would David have told his father, if he’d come?

“Your parents sold the house. I hear it’s a young couple with a baby. It’s a great house for a family who’s just starting fresh. I think there are some other babies in the neighborhood, so that’ll be good, like a whole new generation of kids.”

I thought of David and Toby and me, of Megan and her sister Mary, Kevin McNaughton, and the Henninger twins, who now went to some private Catholic school and nobody ever saw anymore. A whole crop of children on two little streets, getting big and moving on. We grew into ourselves and away from simply being neighbors who all liked lawn sprinklers and swing sets.

I was stuck again for something to say. Just talk! He can’t hear you anyway!

“Did you know that for a while, the police were looking for another car? They thought maybe there was someone else involved.”

Now I could grab hold of my anger again, more sure of my strength.

“Too bad you can’t tell them. Because they couldn’t find anything, and now they officially blame you. You were drinking that night; we all saw it.”

We did all see it, but nobody thought to mention that perhaps he shouldn’t get behind the wheel. God, how many drunk-driving videos had I seen? And where were my parents in all this? Didn’t they have the guts to say something to big-shot Mr. Kaufman, the guy my dad would never admit he admired?

It had been so easy to think about blame when I wasn’t sitting across from the very fingers that had been curled around the steering wheel when the car went off the road. The foot that had been on the gas pedal and the brake. Those eyes that had seen the world spinning past the windshield, and the ears that had heard the shouts and cries my family might have made as they died.

But it was like looking at a frog laid out for dissection in biology class. Everything I knew about what was in front of me was just truth and facts, with nothing behind them. All my fury didn’t make a difference. We were both still in the same place, unchanged.

Except that now I felt a little lighter, unburdened, by having said these things to him. I got up and pulled my chair a little closer to Mr. Kaufman’s bed, then folded myself back into it, cross-legged and ready to stay for a while.

“David kissed me,” I said to him. Hearing the words out loud, feeling the breath it took to form them, made it official now; it had happened.

Mr. Kaufman’s machine whirred and dinged, like a Hmmm, tell me more, so I did. I told him about Nana wanting to go home but not letting herself, and the secrets Meg and I were keeping from each other now, and the Andie Stokes crowd. I told him about Joe and the way I sometimes caught him looking at me, like it stung. I talked about my job at Ashland and how it made me feel like I was not wasting the lucky draw of being alive, like I was finding something in myself that I wouldn’t have found otherwise. And then I told him about how Dad always envied him a little for his fancy car and his well-kept yard and expensive cigars.

Then that reminded me of Mom and the cigarettes she kept hidden in two different spots in the house, so I told Mr. Kaufman about how I’d caught her once, and instead of giving me a lecture about “Do as I say, not as I do,” she just said, “Laurel, I hope you find something like this, a little self-destructive habit you can turn to every once in a while, when you’re tired of being good. It will keep you sane.”

I told him about the band Toby wanted to start someday. It was going to be called the Dangling Participles, and they were only going to play songs about grammar and spelling.

It wasn’t until I noticed the light turning a different shade that I realized how much time had passed. I turned to the window and saw that the sun was setting behind the hills, and took out my cell phone to call Nana.

“Did you get the job done?” she asked.

“I think so,” I replied.

“Then I’m waiting downstairs to take you home.”