My poor, tiny girl. My little Tre.
I took her out of the drawer and held her against my chest. I rocked my baby’s cold corpse, and I pictured every minute that I could remember of her three months of life.
I tried, but I couldn’t envision her in a safe, warm place with her father, or anywhere with God.
Chapter 58
TORI WRAPPED her arms around me as Tre was taken away, and she walked me with me down the labyrinthine corridors and through glass doors to the street.
A black car was waiting, and once we were inside the apartment, I stripped naked and got into the vast, empty bed where I had awoken this morning with my husband.
I thought of our little one, who had been sleeping safely in her crib, just next door. My broken heart seized up again.
I have known so many mothers who have wept over the bodies of their dead children. I had sympathized with them. I had tried to console them. I had prayed with them, and I had held them while they cried out from the depths of their souls.
But there was no preparing for this.
I awoke sometime later to hear Tori speaking in the outer room, on the phone with her husband, Marty. I heard her crying. Then she was in the doorway saying that Zach was on the line.
Zach’s voice was in my ear, saying, “I’m so sorry, Brigid. I’m just so sorry.”
I managed to thank him and say good-bye. There was nothing more I could say. Nothing.
I went into the master bathroom that I had shared with Karl and cut off all my hair. I used his razor and shaved my head, after which I gulped down Valium and went back to bed.
The next day, Tori brought me coffee and told me that she’d been in touch with Karl’s lawyer. She made arrangements with a funeral home, and I’ll never be able to thank her enough for keeping me safe in a dark room during the most terrible days of my life.
Three days after Karl and Tre died, I got out of bed. I dressed in black. I covered my head with a scarf, and I buried my husband and my child in the Lenz family plot, in a Lutheran cemetery in Zehlendorf, just outside the city. I shook hands and hugged Karl’s weeping friends and family. I had depleted my reservoir of tears, and I had nothing to say to God.
Back in our apartment, Karl’s lawyer let me know that Karl had left everything to me. I didn’t care about the money, and I couldn’t live in our place anymore. It would be unbearable to walk through the rooms where I had been happier than at any time in my life.
I told the lawyer to sell our apartment and everything in it, to provide for the actors in Der Zug, and to put the rest into BZFO and other charities of Karl’s.
He said, “Karl wanted you to have money, and, like it or not, you have a bank account and a credit card. The bills will come to me. I’ll make suitable donations to his charities, and I’ll make arrangements as you wish for the bulk of his estate.”
I signed documents, and I booked a flight. I changed into pants and a sweater. I packed a bag and tucked in my journal, my laptop, and a framed photo of myself with my husband and child. Then I buttoned myself into a hooded black alpaca coat.
Tori and I went to the airport together, and when her flight to Rome was open to board, I hugged her for a long time. We both wept at the gate. And as soon as her plane was rolling down the tarmac, I called Sabeena.
“I wish you had let me be there for you,” she said.
“I was happy to think of you at home with Albert and the girls. You can’t imagine, Sabeena, how much that meant to me. Kiss everyone for me.”
My voice broke, and Sabeena murmured soothing words that couldn’t soothe.
“You deserve happiness,” she said, her voice flooded with tears. “Have faith.”
“I’m out of faith,” I said. “I need proof of His love, of His existence, or I’ll turn my back on Him as He has turned His back on me.”
What could anyone say to that?
After I said good-bye to Sabeena, I went to the flight lounge and pulled up the hood of my coat so that no one would dare talk to me.
The last time I had worn this coat, I had dropped one of Tre’s rattles in the pocket. It was pink plastic, shaped like a little barbell, hand-painted with blue forget-me-nots.
I clasped the rattle in my fist and shook it incessantly, as if she might hear it and cry out for me. I shook the rattle and jiggled my feet and waited for my flight to board.
Chapter 59
I ARRIVED in Cairo at night and hired a car to take me to Mt. Sinai. My destination was the Orthodox Chapel of the Holy Trinity, built in the 1930s over the ruins of a fourth-century Byzantine church.
Legend has it that beneath the church is the very rock from which God had taken the stone tablets that He inscribed with the Ten Commandments and handed off to Moses. You could say that the tablets were the bedrock of Judeo-Christian teachings.
It was a good place to look for God.