Eventually I moved to Brooklyn, after I got the job I have now. David and his band stayed on tour for another year. They barely broke even. When he was in New York, he temped to help supplement the rent, but we all knew Greta was supporting him. I don’t think being out of money bothered him much; we’d always struggled as a family, squeezing every last penny out of our food stamps. And he got to go all over the world. The stories he told! Greta flew to meet him in Japan, a place she had never been and had always been dying to visit. He went on to Australia and New Zealand, and when he came home he proposed to Greta. She said yes, of course.
They had their wedding on a farm upstate. The only parent present was my mother; our father, the gray-haired intellectual/jazz musician/junkie, deceased now for years, as were Greta’s parents, heart attack, cancer, too young their deaths, which was not a thing they said about my father, who had been asking for it for a long time. At the reception Greta toasted them in absentia and everyone cried, even the people who had never known them. The bride wore flowers in her hair, the groom went tieless, and I slept with another of David’s bandmates, although this time nobody found out.
A few months after they got married, at a crowded Thanksgiving dinner, Greta announced she was pregnant. (My mother shrieked.) Here was the plan: David would not go back to his low-paying temp work. Instead he was going to do a solo album and promote it himself so he could work out of the house most days. He had friends who made a better living taking control of their own careers, rather than leaving it in the hands of record companies, who had no idea what to do with someone like him anyway. He would take care of the baby solo, too. Greta would continue to work at the magazine, where she had now risen, in part due to her stoic Nordic nature in the face of drama.
Greta took all her prenatal vitamins and glowed through her pregnancy. Her hair grew as thick as a lion’s mane. At her baby shower I held her hair in my hand. “It’s not human,” I said. “It’s something else,” my brother said. It was a month before the baby was due. “Are you so ready?” I asked. I sipped my third mimosa of the afternoon. “I am,” she said. She rubbed her enormous belly. “Come out soon, little baby. We are ready to meet you.”
A month later Greta delivered a baby girl. They named her Sigrid after Greta’s mother. Sigrid was very sick from the beginning. She had a congenital heart defect, small, rare, and undetectable. Almost immediately she suffered a series of strokes, one of which damaged her brain. She was not quite lifeless. Technically, she was alive. Her doctor said she had about three years to live, perhaps five if she was lucky. (“What does any of this have to do with luck?” said my mother.) The baby was set up to fail before she had even begun.
For the first few years of her life, I tried to know this child. I held her hand as she lay, unmoving, flat on her back on a small pad on the table in my brother’s kitchen, on Sunday nights, so that Greta and David could have a moment alone together in public, a glass of wine at a bar, a stiff drink to keep them erect. I talked to Sigrid and told her about my day. But I didn’t feel like she heard me, or recognized me. She was both unknowable and incapable of knowing. Greta and David believed they understood her, though. I thought they were fooling themselves.
My brother did the best he could. The baby needed all manner of assistance: food through a tube, shots, salves, hugs, prayers. They were cautious about taking her out in a stroller, she was so delicate, so tiny; David was often housebound with her. “I thought I was going to be one of those dads in the park with their kid,” he said to me once, in a rare admission of sadness. “Cool dad in the park,” I said. “With the cool sunglasses.” “I was going to be the coolest dad of all,” he said.
Greta’s magazine folded. On top of that, no one was buying David’s new record because people had stopped buying any records at all. Touring was impossible. Who would take care of Sigrid? Greta found freelance work, but she was just a hired hand and had no flexibility in her schedule anymore. My mother was still working: she had two more years to go, although she offered to retire early to help, but Greta said no, absolutely not, because that’s Greta. They couldn’t afford much childcare; their savings were easily depleted. We were a family falling apart, the Berns were. We still loved each other, but individually we were all in trouble. No one was happy, no one was healthy. And I can’t speak for anyone else, but I was drinking like a fish.
Then, out of nowhere, a distant relative of Greta’s died, leaving her a small sum of money and a house in New Hampshire. There was a respected pediatric hospital about an hour away, near Dartmouth. After little discussion, they decided to move. (My mother was not happy. NOT HAPPY.) They were exhausted with the city, with their lives there, and whatever they had gotten out of it by being a young creative beautiful couple was no longer available to them. They gave up their apartment, packed up their art and books and musical instruments and their eternally sleeping baby, and moved to a small town where they knew no one but each other. If you asked Greta it was a fresh start, and if you asked David it was purgatory, but either way, they both agreed: New York City was hell.
I helped them move up there. David handled the U-Haul, and I drove the station wagon they had purchased hurriedly off Craigslist. Greta, watching over the baby, sat in the back seat. We pulled up early in the morning. It was January, and there was a mountain of snow on the ground, big puffy white piles of it, but someone had cleared a path down the small gravel road that led to the house. I inched forward slowly, so as to keep the ride smooth for the baby, but still there were little pops and grooves in the road. With each jerk Greta winced in the back seat.
The house was a crumbling brick monster, uneven in appearance. It had one story with a bright red door at its center. I got out of the car and David got out of the van. I trudged through the snow on one side of the house and he on the other. There was a mountain in the distance, and a small set of woods nearby. The trees were barren, yet they were so dense I couldn’t see much past the first row. There was a gray sky above, a rich moist color, not gloomy at all, nearly purple.
David was staring at a small, rotting shack next to the house. “Where the fuck am I?” he said. “Do I live here now? I have a shack. Look at my shack.” It wasn’t purgatory anymore: he had his own playroom. I watched as he carried his record player and crates of vinyl straight into the shack.