For someone I was angry at for so long, someone I rarely saw—I miss her.
It’s amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It’s standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love.
But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real.
The day that we get a message saying my mother’s ashes are ready to be picked up, The New York Times runs her obituary in their Covid section, Those We’ve Lost. They talk about her rise as a feature photographer and her Pulitzer Prize. There are quotes from colleagues from The New York Times and The Boston Globe and the Associated Press, from Steve McCurry and Sir Don McCullin. They call her the greatest female photographer of the twentieth century.
The very last line of the obituary, however, is not about her art at all.
I take the paper with me into the bedroom, crawling under the covers. I read that sentence, and read it again.
She leaves behind a daughter.
For the first time since I got the call about my mother’s death, I cry.
FIFTEEN
Go away.
SIXTEEN
My eyes are swollen shut.
The sun rises.
I don’t.
SEVENTEEN
Am I the only person in the world whose mother has died twice?
EIGHTEEN
“All right, Rip van Winkle,” Finn says. “Let’s go.”
He yanks the covers away from me and I groan. When I scrabble for them again, he sits down and curls my hand around a mug of coffee.
I’ve been here before, I think.
How easy it would be to follow his lead. I roll over and blink up at him.
“You’re going to take a shower,” Finn orders, “and then we’re going to go for a walk.”
We are on day nine of quarantine. We have five more left, before we can leave the apartment. “How?” I ask.
Finn smiles shyly, and I realize he is telling me that he’ll bend the rules for me. That he knows why I had to, when I visited my mother. “One step at a time,” he says.
I’ve spent three days in bed, after she died. I was asleep more than I was awake.
Not once did I ever slip back to the Galápagos, or see Beatriz’s sunburned face, or hear the lilt of Gabriel’s accent.
I am not sure why I thought, while I was drowning again—this time in grief—this alternate reality would come for me.
I’m even less sure what it means that it didn’t.
Finn and I walk along Ninety-sixth Street, under the FDR, toward the East River. We wear our masks and leave extra distance when we pass by people, because even if Finn is being a rebel, he’s still too much of a do-gooder to risk infecting anyone. We pass a couple of guys shooting up, and a lady with a jogging stroller. The grass along the edge of the walkway is lush and green, and flowers crane their throats to the sun.
There is nothing like early summer in Manhattan. There are usually pop-up concerts—boys with drums made of five-gallon containers, hip-hop dancers defying gravity; businessmen eating shawarma during fast lunch breaks; little girls with shiny white patent-leather shoes clutching their American Girl dolls. There are taxi drivers who wave instead of shout and sprays of daylilies and everyone has a dog to walk. Now, people are out and about, but moving in furtive, cautious bursts. No one lingers. The few people who wear their masks beneath their noses are glared at. It is leaner and less crowded, as if half the population has been removed, and that makes me wonder if this is the way it will always be.
The new normal.
“Do you think we’ll ever go back to the way it was?” I ask Finn.
He glances at me. “I don’t know,” he says thoughtfully. “When I used to talk to patients before surgery, they always asked if they’d be able to do everything they used to do before the operation. I mean, technically, the answer should be yes. But there’s always a scar. Even if it’s not right across your belly, it’s in your head somewhere—the brand-new knowledge that you weren’t invincible. I think that changes you for the long haul.”
We have reached Carl Schurz Park—one of my favorites. There are trees and green velvet gardens and two sets of curved stone steps that always feel like a spot where a fairy tale should start. There’s a playground for kids. A bronze of Peter Pan.
We sit down on a bench across from the statue. “You were right. I needed to get out.” I knock my shoulder against Finn’s. “Thanks for taking care of me.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” he says.
I take a deep breath through my mask. “I’ve always liked this park.”
“I know.”
He leans back, tilting his face to the sun, his hands in his jacket. If not for the fact that we are still mired in a pandemic, it would be an absolutely perfect day.