Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Escape (2007)

  Overall, though, my children are doing exceedingly well. Pat and Andrew are on the verge of getting their black belts in karate. Both are playing football this year, and Pat has been on the honor roll. LuAnne is in her senior year of high school. She’s been an honor roll student and is thinking now of becoming a lawyer. Her sister, Merrilee, is still collecting friends and has moved from her princess phase to tottering around in high heels. Bryson is in first grade. He played miniature golf for the first time recently and hit a hole-in-one. Harrison continues to make steady progress. He’s nine and finally beginning to walk. The other day I was driving the kids to karate and Harrison said “Mama” for the first time. I was thrilled. Betty is still with the FLDS. For the first nine months after she was gone we were in regular cell phone communication with her and saw her a few times. Because Betty was considered “contaminated” after four years of living outside the FLDS, she was not taken into the Texas compound right away. Instead, Betty was assigned to cook and clean for a household of FLDS boys who were working construction. Shortly after the raid on the compound she stopped calling us. But after a few weeks of terrible silence, Betty began calling her siblings again. She seemed angry and confused. I’m heartsick. When we escaped in 2003, I told Betty one reason we fled was that I could not protect her from being married at fourteen. Now she is seeing the extent of underage marriages within the FLDS and knows what I meant. Even if she can’t admit it, I think she realizes how wrong it is. To the best of my knowledge, she’s still not married. I have not spoken to Betty since a few days after the Texas raid. I feel I gave Betty life twice; once when she was born and again when we escaped. But there doesn’t seem to be much I can do now but keep my heart and arms open for her if she wants to return. For the first four years after our escape we rarely had calls from anyone in Merril’s family. But that changed after the Texas raid. My family has been inundated with phone calls, sometimes as many as twenty a day, from Merril’s other children and wives. They tell my kids their father needs their support and pumps them for information about me. One of my children’s half-siblings told LuAnne that she looks scary now in her contemporary clothes. Annie told her half-brother that what was scary was seeing photographs online of their half-sister being kissed on the mouth by Warren Jeffs when she was twelve. He said he didn’t see anything wrong with the pictures.

• From Hot Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction (2011)

  “Oh, yeah, right. Something came up.” “And tutoring on Monday?” “Something else came up.” He didn’t grin but he might as well have, and I felt a hot stab to my middle because I knew what he meant. He’d had another man’s dick, one preferable to mine. “Are you telling me…” I couldn’t finish the question because I feared the answer. He stood up. “I don’t think I need any more tutoring. Got the hang of it now.” I shut my eyes because I was dying inside and so was the Carl that had come alive in me. It was all imploding and I had to sit there and take it, allow shrapnel to tear my guts to pieces, all because this little shit had found somebody better. And probably younger. “I suppose you do,” I managed, and he shrugged and was gone. Roger Bruxton found me sitting, slumped, when he came in to start his French Literature class. “Merrill? Are you all right?” “Yes, of course.” I stood but my knees nearly buckled and Roger, fifteen years my junior, rushed over. “I’m fine,” I insisted somewhat harshly, then apologized and he dismissed my attitude with the good humor of a young man indulging an older one. I gathered my papers and briefcase with some effort and hurried from the room, rushing to my car where I burst into tears. Now I suffer the worst kind of déjà vu, abandonment rising up to consume what has just begun to sprout. People are passing by the car and when one looks in I start the engine and drive away, wiping tears so I can see the road. I don’t go home, though. I drive to the beach where I don’t get out but sit looking at the water, hating what Cody Morse has done to me even though this day he himself has done nothing. But circumstance has made him plow under the best day in years, burying promise under the muddy past. I try to calm myself by watching seagulls swoop and dive against a hazy sky. Below, wave after wave breaks on the shore and I attempt comfort in the predictability of the roll and spew. Life is more than my little upset, I remind myself. This is Carl’s wisdom, how minuscule our individual lives, no matter the drama or hurt or even joy. Life itself is huge, and we must pull in more to gain balance. So I attempt this, thinking of the ocean’s other end lapping against Japan and the islands where other people live with other lives and other hurts. Is there some Japanese professor likewise disappointed in love? Has he been pulled asunder just as he emerged?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  She’d said, “I love you, are you okay, I love you.” She had wrapped her arms around Francisco while Hartjes sat there holding his head. He had felt like he was full of wet sand. And Simon had rolled on top of him and kissed him and said, “Are you still waiting for her to turn to you, too? To say she loved you? You gotta let this go, man. It’s done.” Hartjes had wanted to say that if it was easy to get over your mother discarding you, then the whole world would be a different and stranger place. That hurt had a weight to it, a gravity as essential as the Earth’s, and it was a kind of natural law that kept them all doing as they should. But he just kissed Simon’s throat. But now she was dead. It was a different thing to speak ill of the dead. In his family, one did not speak the name of the dead after they had been buried. It was a summons. A beckoning. And who knew what the dead might take with them when they left again. When his grandfather had died, they had burned not only his possessions but almost everything he’d ever touched, all of it that could be burned. What made no sense to burn—the tools, the guns, the tractors, the car—they wiped and cleaned. They laid it all out on the benches and worktables in the back and scrubbed everything down with alcohol and bleach, with oil and polish, wiped and wiped as if that might erase history, time, possession. His family took down all his grandfather’s pictures, stored them away. When a person died, anything at all might be a way back, an anchor, a reason for fitful sleep. His grandmother had kept something, her wedding ring, and she woke every night for a month with his grandfather’s ghostly image standing beside her bed. And finally, as she took the ring off and slipped it into a sock and buried it in the yard, she said that, looking at him, at that sad look on his face, that expectant look, she knew that she had to either join him or let him go. • • • ON THE PORCH he gave Simon his beer, but he wouldn’t let go when Simon tried to pull it loose from his hand. Simon snatched again, and Hartjes held on tighter until he saw Simon bare his teeth, the slick, pointed canines. His eyes narrowed. The vein at the base of his neck bulged. His skinny fingers were strong. The beer sloshed. Hartjes let him have it. “Fucker,” Simon said under his breath. Hartjes sat roughly on the bench. It rattled under his weight. “Work tomorrow,” Hartjes said. “He’s getting back on his barge,” Simon said, drinking. “Call me Huck Finn,” Hartjes said. “You ever get sick of it?” “No,” Hartjes said. He worked construction down on the river, where they were putting up a new footbridge.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Well, her phrasing was less childish than her hand, I thought, as though the letter were a composition in class that concerned me in no way. Even as this attitude broke over me but before I was drawn into another, more troubling one, I had time to notice she said I was one of her very best friends, an honor I’d been unaware of until now, as who had not: I registered the social gain before the romantic loss. Unless (and here I could taste something bitter on the back of my tongue)—unless the “mature” advice (“I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while”) was actually a denial of the consolation prize, a way of keeping me out of her circle at the very moment she was pretending to invite me into it. Could it be that the entire exercise, its assured tone, the concision and familiar ring of the phrasing, figured as nothing more than a “tribute” (her word) she had piled up before the altar of her own beauty? How many people had she shown my letter to? But then all this mental chatter stopped and I surrendered to something else, something less active, more abiding, something that had been waiting politely all this time but that now stepped forward, diffident yet impersonal: my grief. For the next few months I grieved. I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for? I cried during gym class when someone got mad at me for dropping the basketball. In the past I would have hidden my pain but now I just slowly walked off the court, the tears spurting out of my face. I took a shower, still crying, and dressed forlornly and walked the empty halls even though to do so during class time was forbidden. I no longer cared about rules. I let my hair grow, I stopped combing it, I forgot to change my shirt from one week to the next. With a disabused eye I watched other kids striving to succeed, to become popular. I became a sort of vagabond of grief or, as I’d rather put it, I entered grief’s vagabondage, which better suggests a simultaneous freedom and slavery. Freedom from the now meaningless pursuit of grades, friends, smiles; slavery to a hopeless love.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Gee, you sure let me have it!” “Too much for you, young fellow?” my father asked, chuckling. He winked at me. The children of visitors (and sometimes their fathers) were usually called “young fellow,” since Dad could never remember their names. Old Boy, who had been squinting into the wind, his head stuck out beyond and around the windshield, was now prancing happily across the cushions to receive a pat from his master. Kevin, sitting just behind my father, said, “Those fishermen were mad as hell. I’d’ve been, too, if some guy in a big fat-ass powerboat scared off my fish.” My father winced, then grumbled something about how they had no business … He was hurt. I was appalled by Kevin’s frankness. At such moments, tears would come to my eyes in impotent compassion for Daddy: this invalid despot, this man who bullied everyone but suffered the consequences with such a tender, uneducated heart! Tears would also well up when I had to correct my father on a matter of fact. Usually I’d avoid the bother and smugly watch him compound his mistakes. But if he asked my opinion point-blank, a euphoria of sadness would overtake me, panicky wings would beat at the corners of the shrinking room and, as quietly and as levelly as possible, I’d supply the correct name or date. For I was a lot more knowledgeable than he about the things that could come up in conversation even in those days, the 1950s. But knowledge wasn’t power. He was the one with the power, the money, the right to read the paper through dinner as my stepmother and I watched him in silence; he was the one with the thirty tailor-made suits, the twenty gleaming pairs of shoes and the starched white dress shirts, the ties from Countess Mara and the two Cadillacs that waited for him in the garage, dripping oil on the concrete in the shape of a black Saturn and its gray blur of moons. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party (“Ask this young fellow, he reads, he’ll know”). Then why did his occasional faltering bring tears to my eyes? Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing? Perhaps, despite my timidity, I was in a struggle against him. Did I want to hurt him because he didn’t love me?

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Grace reaches for an orange slice, pulls the white pith from it, and makes a small pile on the table. She sometimes is struck by the irony of this new arrangement, staying with Big Davis after treatments, waiting for her mother. Somehow, at the age of twenty-five, she’s reverted to her childhood self, the one who waited after school at her grandparents’ house until her parents came for her. Often they were so late that the sun was going down by the time they arrived, their eyes red, faces tight and hot. She had been relieved to get away from all that once she and her brother got old enough to look after themselves, but neither ever forgot those long, hot hours in their grandmother’s kitchen, the endless days of waiting to be retrieved, wondering if they’d get to go home or if they’d have to stay. But Enid has been better these last ten years. She is not who she once was, though that version of herself remains in this kitchen, as if conjured up out of their collective memory, as if in this family one is powerless to resist its curious gravity. Grace feels a small flicker of pleasure at watching Enid shift uncomfortably. “Let’s just stay,” Grace says to her mother, “it’s easier.” Enid’s expression is one of betrayal, but it passes. Grace puts the orange in her mouth and sucks the juice from it, as if in penance. It stings and slides down the back of her throat, alleviates some of the dryness but leaves only a sense of unslaked thirst. “We’ll stay, then, if it’s no trouble.” “Good,” he says. “I’ll help,” Enid says. “What do you need?” He hands her a bouquet of turnip greens, bits of dirt dropping to the floor. They are still warm from the garden. “You handle that,” he says. “I got this going.” The rain grows heavy, dropping into the windowsill behind her back, splattering her in fragments of cool. “What’s for dinner?” Grace asks, and they are elated. A sign of appetite, of hunger. “Turnips and some of this roast I made last night and some corn bread,” Big Davis says, and he’s proud of it. Enid is the one cutting up the greens and the turnip roots, which have always been Grace’s favorite. Her brother hates greens of all varieties, and he especially hates turnips. He says they’re too bitter, and Grace always has to remind him that he’s thinking of mustard greens, not turnips. But Davis hates to be corrected more than he hates greens, so he does not hear her, which usually results in a protracted silence over the phone.

• From Escape (2007)

  Jeffs sent some of his goons to my father’s house to tell him that he had been kicked out of the work of God. He was no longer to manage the local grocery store, which he’d done for more than eighteen years. His home was to be turned over to the FLDS. Jeffs’ emissaries told my father to delineate all his sins in a letter to the prophet, leave the community, and repent. He was instructed to pray constantly for God’s forgiveness and with sweetness in his heart thank God and the prophet for their grace in allowing him to repent. My father asked the men if they would give Warren a message for him. When they agreed, my father said, “Could you sweetly tell Warren Jeffs to go to hell?” The goons looked scared. How dare my father speak like that to the prophet of God! Didn’t he understand the risk of eternal damnation? His complete disregard for Warren Jeffs was like a body blow to them. Merril was soon on the phone to my father to say he was taking over the store. My father had no objections to that but told Merril he was planning to take his retirement money with him. During his years running the store my father had accumulated a substantial retirement account. Merril told my father the money should go to Warren Jeffs. My father refused and said Jeffs would have to fight him in court. Warren had ordered my fathers’ two remaining wives, Rosie and Muriel, to turn themselves in for reassignment to other men. My father told them they were free to do whatever they wanted. He said he’d never owned them; he had become their husband through a covenant with God that he was still prepared to honor. The choice was theirs. My father had raised thirty-six children in his life, eight of whom were stepchildren. Unlike Merril, his children mattered to him. So did their mothers. Rosie decided she would stand by my father and had no interest in becoming a pawn in Warren’s sick games. Muriel decided she could not risk her salvation and surrendered to “the will of God.” She placed herself and her four children at the mercy of Warren Jeffs. I do not know if she’s been reassigned in marriage. I do know that women who were ensnared in Jeffs’ web did not fare well. Several women whom I knew had been reassigned as wives more than once, some to as many as five different men. One woman said she felt like she had become a “priesthood prostitute.” My father’s heart was shattered. He wept for days. His family was torn apart. Warren Jeffs had made a mockery of the faith and community my father loved.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  I was appalled by Kevin’s frankness. At such moments, tears would come to my eyes in impotent compassion for Daddy: this invalid despot, this man who bullied everyone but suffered the consequences with such a tender, uneducated heart! Tears would also well up when I had to correct my father on a matter of fact. Usually I’d avoid the bother and smugly watch him compound his mistakes. But if he asked my opinion point-blank, a euphoria of sadness would overtake me, panicky wings would beat at the corners of the shrinking room and, as quietly and as levelly as possible, I’d supply the correct name or date. For I was a lot more knowledgeable than he about the things that could come up in conversation even in those days, the 1950s. But knowledge wasn’t power. He was the one with the power, the money, the right to read the paper through dinner as my stepmother and I watched him in silence; he was the one with the thirty tailor-made suits, the twenty gleaming pairs of shoes and the starched white dress shirts, the ties from Countess Mara and the two Cadillacs that waited for him in the garage, dripping oil on the concrete in the shape of a black Saturn and its gray blur of moons. It was his power that stupefied me and made me regard my knowledge as nothing more than hired cleverness he might choose to show off at a dinner party (“Ask this young fellow, he reads, he’ll know”). Then why did his occasional faltering bring tears to my eyes? Was I grieving because he didn’t possess everything, absolutely everything, or because I owned nothing? Perhaps, despite my timidity, I was in a struggle against him. Did I want to hurt him because he didn’t love me? Within a moment Kevin had made things right by asking Daddy how he thought the hometown baseball team would do next season. My father was soon expatiating on names and averages and strategies that meant nothing to me, the good spring training and the bad trade-off. When Kevin challenged him on one point, Dad laughed good-naturedly at the boy’s spunk (and error) and set him straight. I rested my arm on the rubber tread of the gunwale beside me and my chin on my arm and stared into the shiny water, which was busy analyzing a distant yellow porch light, shattering the simple glow into a hundred shifting possibilities.

• From Escape (2007)

  A nurse stayed at Harrison’s bedside continually at St. George. When one left, another took her place. I finally felt safe. This was one of the few breaks I had from three months of nonstop crisis with Harrison. An ambulance was waiting for us when our life flight landed in Phoenix. We were rushed to Phoenix Children’s Hospital, where fifteen specialists were on standby. Test after test was done to rule things out. Each time a test came back negative, that specialist was dropped from Harrison’s case. After two days of testing the diagnosis was narrowed down to a genetic disorder or cancer. On the third day Harrison was diagnosed with a spinal neuroblastoma, a fatal cancer. The next day a test was done to pinpoint the location of the cancer. Harrison had a tumor growing next to his spinal cord—but it had yet to invade it. I was told that this was an extremely rare cancer that most children do not survive. The doctors explained that Harrison had been born with spinal neuroblastoma but symptoms don’t appear until the tumor begins to grow. Merril called occasionally and asked a few questions but without much interest. His attitude was that Harrison’s death would humble me and then I would learn not to treat my priesthood head with disrespect. A doctor came into Harrison’s room that first night to do yet another test. I was sitting alone in a chair and sobbing uncontrollably. He stood there with compassion in his eyes and said, “I wish I could give you the answers I know you want to hear—that your son is going to be all right. But I can’t tell you that, and I understand that this must be hell for you, watching your baby go through something no one should have to endure.” I nodded. I couldn’t speak. When he left the room I thought how much kinder and decent this doctor had been to me than Merril or anyone else in his family had. Why was I at the hospital alone while everyone else was home and no doubt judging me as a sinner? In their eyes my son’s cancer was proof that I was being condemned by God. For thirty-two years, I’d believed that every person on the outside of the FLDS community was evil. It was not lost on me that the only people willing to fight for Harrison’s life and help him survive were outsiders. But doctors and nurses weren’t the only ones who were kind. A social worker at the hospital came by to make sure I had money for meals and had a change of clothes. Merril never asked me if I had enough money to survive while I was in Phoenix. I’m sure he thought that as long as I was in rebellion, I was on my own.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  My sister resented the interest some of the girls took in me and banned me from the meetings held beside the empty swimming pool choked with dead leaves. When I disobeyed her and toddled smilingly into the assembly, she spanked my bare legs with a hairbrush. My father, resolved that his son should hold his own, pinioned my sister’s arms behind her and ordered me to switch her on the back of her legs with a stinging branch. But I knew that soon enough he would disappear again, my mother drive off, the maids look away; I dropped the branch, howled and clattered up the stairs to my room. I think I also knew that my father preferred my sister to me and that his interest in me was only abstract, dynastic. My sister was his true son. She could ride a horse and swim a mile and she was as capable of sustained rages as he. Still better, she was as blond as his mother. My grandmother had not wanted my father; as she told him, she’d pummeled her stomach with her fists every day while she was bearing him. Nonetheless, my father somehow got born and survived to serve his mother humbly and lovingly, washing the family’s sheets in the bathtub when he was still only a child and brushing out her blond hair every night. One night, soon after my grandmother died, I stole into my father’s study and found him standing behind my sister’s chair, brushing her hair and crying. Right now I’m looking at an ancient photograph of my sister and me. I’m three and she’s seven, both of us bundled up for winter and posed against a door under an ominously black Christmas wreath. She’s much taller than I. My sister is dressed in a fashionably cut camel’s-hair coat belled out above black leggings. She’s sporting a matching hat bordered in brown piping, the front brim flipped up and the whole thing placed rakishly far back on her head. She’s smiling a thin-lipped, obviously forced smile. Her eyes, so blue they’re bottomless and white, express the pain of an unhealed convalescent, as do the shadows, like bruises below her temples—bruises forceps might have left.

• From Escape (2007)

  Warren saw him as becoming a threat to his own power and tried excommunicating him from the FLDS church. The bishop had thirty wives and more than a hundred children. He told his family what had happened and said they could leave if they liked, but everyone chose to stay. Warren felt the bishop was in total defiance and appointed the bishop’s half brother as his successor. The half brother refused to take the position. Warren bullied him until he finally relented and came to be ordained. The story that circulated around the community was that when it came time to ordain him, Uncle Rulon, who was so demented he didn’t even recognize the man, put his hands on the man’s head and did far more than make him a bishop. He made him a high priest, apostle, patriarch, first counselor, and finally bishop. Then he topped it off by giving him the keys to the priesthood and, in his final blessing, making him the prophet of God. This made him more powerful than Warren, which of course Warren could not stand. He told the new bishop to forget about everything he’d been ordained to beyond bishop. The new bishop told Warren he was a complete fraud. One day I was on the phone talking to someone about Harrison’s physical therapy when Merrilyn came into the kitchen crying. I asked Cathleen if she knew what the problem was. “Warren has sent her back to Merril because Uncle Rulon never wants to see her again. She’s Merril’s problem now.” Merrilyn and I were both thirty-four. For nine years, she’d been married to a man sixty years her senior. I hadn’t wanted to marry Merril, but I cherished my eight children. Merrilyn had no children. My sweet, innocent classmate, who had once tried to charm our teacher at the pencil sharpener, had been forced to spend the best years of her life in an old man’s harem. Now she was cast out. Merril banished her to his motel in Caliente. After several weeks of cleaning rooms, she decided to leave her father and her religion and fight for the life she’d never had. Merrilyn found a ride into St. George and hooked up with the party circuit. The following week she went to Cedar and tried to get her own apartment. A boy who was still in the FLDS was helping her try to get settled. After three days, Merrilyn had a job. But then Merril came and required that she come home. The next day he took her to see Warren Jeffs.

• From Born on the Fourth of July (1976)

  We have been a generation of violence and madness, of dead Indians and drunken cowboys, of iron pipes full of matchheads. There is a tremendous downpour just outside of Houston that almost tears the windshield wipers off the car. And after the rain there is one of the most beautiful rainbows I have ever seen, and then a second rainbow appears—a magnificent double rainbow above our heads. I am certain I want to be alive forever. I know that no matter what has happened the world is a beautiful place, and I am here with my brothers. We drive into Louisiana through the little towns, past waving schoolchildren and smiling gas-station attendants flashing the peace sign and faces looking curiously at us from windows, not angry just curious and friendly, surprisingly friendly—the ordinary working people who want the war to end too, the glory John Wayne war. But I am scared in Louisiana. Like a lot of the other guys I think the KKK is all over the place and someone says there is no difference between the Klan and the cops, they are both the same thing. He probably hated niggers, the corporal from Georgia. All through the South, these roads, the memories are talking. He probably hated niggers. Pushing shoving, moving grooving, sliding diving into the coffin, into the soft earth of Georgia. Brought him back in and some guys sent him down the river where all of the dead went to, all the nineteen-year-old corpses who had to be fixed up, shot full of stuff and preserved real good so they could be packaged like meat in the deli to be sent back home where their mothers and their sisters and their fathers and their wives could stand and pray and talk about what they were like when they were alive. She’d probably remember better than most of them what it was like to hold his hand, walk with him, kiss him on his soft lips that were now cold and dead, planted six feet in the Georgia mud. Nothing will bring him back, nothing on earth will bring him back. The corporal’s dead and he’s dead because of me. Oh god, oh Jesus, I want to cry, I want to scream, I want him to be alive again, I want him to be alive again I want him to be alive again oh god oh Jesus oh god o god ogod help me, make him feel, bring him back, bring him back wailing and talking, breathing and laughing again. Who who who who who is he? Now he’s finished in the earth, in the ground. Try not to think about it, the thought, the dead thought. Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn fuckin’ southern bigot. They were all that way in boot camp. Yes yes I remember.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  Even as this attitude broke over me but before I was drawn into another, more troubling one, I had time to notice she said I was one of her very best friends, an honor I’d been unaware of until now, as who had not: I registered the social gain before the romantic loss. Unless (and here I could taste something bitter on the back of my tongue)—unless the “mature” advice (“I think it would be best if we did not see each other for a while”) was actually a denial of the consolation prize, a way of keeping me out of her circle at the very moment she was pretending to invite me into it. Could it be that the entire exercise, its assured tone, the concision and familiar ring of the phrasing, figured as nothing more than a “tribute” (her word) she had piled up before the altar of her own beauty? How many people had she shown my letter to? But then all this mental chatter stopped and I surrendered to something else, something less active, more abiding, something that had been waiting politely all this time but that now stepped forward, diffident yet impersonal: my grief. For the next few months I grieved. I would stay up all night crying and playing records and writing sonnets to Helen. What was I crying for? I cried during gym class when someone got mad at me for dropping the basketball. In the past I would have hidden my pain but now I just slowly walked off the court, the tears spurting out of my face. I took a shower, still crying, and dressed forlornly and walked the empty halls even though to do so during class time was forbidden. I no longer cared about rules. I let my hair grow, I stopped combing it, I forgot to change my shirt from one week to the next. With a disabused eye I watched other kids striving to succeed, to become popular. I became a sort of vagabond of grief or, as I’d rather put it, I entered grief’s vagabondage, which better suggests a simultaneous freedom and slavery. Freedom from the now meaningless pursuit of grades, friends, smiles; slavery to a hopeless love.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  Its fur was soft gray, and it had a pink tint to it. When she asked Davis why he’d brought it to her, he had only shrugged and said he’d grown bored with it, that he’d found it in the woods and played with it until he got tired of it, and he didn’t want a cat, anyway. All that long summer, she carried the kitten around with her, stroking it and petting it and saying that she loved it. Giving the kitten everything she didn’t have. Until her grandmother got sick of seeing her loving up on the kitten and pulled it from her hands and flung it out the back door. She said that girls had no business holding on to things with all them fleas. And cats would make a girl hot, and Grace was already fast enough. She never saw the kitten again. It was the last summer they stayed with their grandparents. The last summer that her father was alive. So much had come to an end that summer. Grace should move to the bed, but she is so tired. She’s got one of her grandmother’s old blankets tossed over her legs. The window emits a cold chill that turns the room bluish in its light. She will regret falling asleep in this chair. Her body will torment her in the morning. But her legs refuse to cooperate. Her arms too heavy. She sinks low in the old chair and closes her eyes. She will rest a moment. Just a moment. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance. One of those rickety white boats out back, the kind she and Davis had taken across the pond, shouting and squealing so loud, they scared all the fish away. Such a boat had no purpose on the sea or a river, where the water was too wild and would rend it to pieces. She dreams of a boat going farther and farther into the distance, disintegrating all the way, leaving behind a trail like a comet, the shrapnel that a life leaves behind as it burns itself out. And now she feels herself beneath the weight of the invisible world, stuck. After all these years, stuck. She might have known it would happen, might have known to prepare herself for this, but she did not. Beyond the periphery of the dream, though her eyes are still closed, Grace feels suddenly that she is not alone. There is some sort of presence in the far corner of the room. Some barely there shift in the room’s air pressure, the impression of space being taken up. She cannot make her body move, cannot get her eyes to open.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  It seems a tragedy to say good-bye to that full-body shudder, that brief glimpse over the edge of herself down into eternity. She’d had it for only a few years before they found the tumor, before her slow withdrawal from life began. She doesn’t feel angry about it all the time. Rather, it’s as though she’d booked a cruise that is, at the last possible moment, canceled—or, more precisely, that her ticket alone has been canceled. The particular agony of it all is that she has to stand on the beach and watch as everyone she loves drifts out to sea without her. They go on eating. The clink of their silverware on the good plates. The rain and wind whipping through the trees outside. Thunder. And the blue glow of lightning rippling overhead. They go on in their strained quiet, and Grace watches the beautiful motion of Big Davis’s hands. The way the knuckles shift and bob like buoys under his skin. And Enid’s sharp, anxious cutting and piercing. They are the last of their kind, she thinks. Her father is gone. Her grandmother. Davis. All that remain are the three of them, and soon these two will have nothing drawing them together. Grace sees in their stiff awkwardness a premonition of her own demise, and her vision briefly grows dim. She feels as though she’s being drawn too quickly up the length of a well. Vertigo. “Gracie?” Enid asks. Grace closes her eyes, waits for the spinning feeling to abate. “I’m all right.” “You don’t look it.” Big Davis presses his hand to her forehead. He hums. “You’re warm.” “I’m fine,” she says, pulling away, but the motion makes her stomach burn. She’s going to be sick. She knows it the moment before it happens, that gurgling, burning retch. She presses her fingers to her mouth, bites down to hold it all in, but it is of no use. Hot acid pulses at the back of her throat, and she feels a blinding, white anger at the fact that she cannot even have the privacy of excusing herself. She must be on display even when she’s about to vomit. This moment of horrible weakness belongs not to her but to them. She hates it. Big Davis jumps up, reaches for the red bucket on the counter where he keeps the scraps. He shoves it under her face, and the smell of it—the rotting, wet food from breakfast and lunch, the woozy smell of grease and stale bread, the soggy, sad grits—draws the vomit out of her, and she empties herself into the bucket. Her stomach clenches. Her chest clenches. Fire spreads through her veins. She leans back, her vision all splotches and luminescent squiggles. Enid presses a wet cloth to her forehead. Grace reaches, holds her hand and sighs. “Just call him,” she says. “Just call him, please.” “Now isn’t the time, Grace,” Enid says.

• From Escape (2007)

  The night Harrison was diagnosed, I lost it. After the kind doctor left Harrison’s room I couldn’t stop crying. There was a terrible downpour that night, and I stared out the window into the rain. I could see planes landing and taking off in the distance. Freedom to come and go. There had been no freedom in my life for fourteen years. In the last few months I had been tortured by the screams of my suffering son. I cried until I couldn’t cry any more. My sobs finally subsided. Harrison was quiet and sedated. I kept looking out the window because I was free to do that. It was a peaceful moment. I was tired, weak, and exhausted. But I knew I wasn’t broken. Nothing was going to stop me from fighting for Harrison’s life, and finally, at Phoenix Children’s Hospital, I knew I wouldn’t have to do it alone. The doctors wanted to move forward as quickly as possible. I signed papers the following morning to authorize Harrison’s treatment. If Merril had come to Phoenix with us, I’m sure he would have tried to block the surgery. Harrison was wheeled into the operating room on day five. His tumor was located between two main arteries and was partially encased in one of the veins that fed the spinal nerves. The surgeon explained to me that one of the risks of surgery was that Harrison could be paralyzed for the rest of his life. It was such a dangerous operation that Harrison was cut nearly in half to open him up wide enough. One of his ribs was removed. The operation lasted for several hours and I got regular briefings from a physician. The wait for me was agonizing. Merril had come and brought Barbara, several of her sons, Betty, several of my boys, and a few others. Merril was the only one allowed in the family waiting room with me. He told Barbara to watch the others, but she had a seizure and ended up being admitted to the Good Samaritan Hospital. When Merril heard what had happened he left me to stay with her. As soon as the operation was over, the surgeon told me he felt very confident that he’d removed the entire tumor. He was pleased and felt the operation had been successful. There was more good news when the tumor was biopsied: Harrison didn’t need any chemotherapy or radiation because his cancer was caught so early because of his spasms. The spasms had saved him. Without them the cancer might have progressed to a stage where it was incurable. But his immune system, along with fighting the cancer, was also attacking his nerve tissue. The spasms had been caused by his immune system identifying his entire nervous system as the enemy and launching a full-scale attack on it. The doctors felt Harrison’s immune system would now have to be suppressed.

• From A Boy's Own Story (1982)

  And what finally became of him and his stories? Was he absorbed one day into the Yucatán jungle? I’ve been told that in some Indian villages in Mexico homosexual men live in a separate compound where they take care of the tribe’s children; is Fred still living as some ancient nanny respectably obscured by pure white veils of beard and hair, his glasses long since broken and abandoned, his constant murmur unheard below the squeal of warm, naked toddlers who clamber over him as though he were nothing but a weathered garden god half-sunk into the creepers and vines, his notebook of handwritten stories open to the elements to scatter its pages as the leaves of a calendar in old movies fly away to indicate the passage of years, even decades? And Marilyn? The last time I saw her the color of her makeup had gone iodine, her lips had thinned, her hair had become a spiky black cap and her large, rolling eyes no longer seemed a coquette’s but those of a virgin martyr, protuberant, cast up, the whites wept clean, the lower lids sooty with despair. She told me that for the last two years she’d been living in a boardinghouse in a room next to that of a young violinist whom she loved and who loved her fraternally but, alas, not passionately. He was planning to become a Benedictine and she thought she’d follow him into Holy Orders. “This is the great love of my life—not a woman as always before but a beautiful young man who doesn’t want me. How ironic! We met through music. His beauty, his music, his indifference—don’t you see?” “Not exactly.” She smiled the hazardous, hard-won smile of the lover determined to have found a consolation: “He was sent to me to awaken in me an appetite only God can feed. I’ve been such a sinner—waiter, another round—but I never became coarse or jaded or thick-skinned. I was ready for God’s gift.” Her hair didn’t satisfy her. She studied it in her compact mirror, shifting the small round glass from side to side, top to bottom; a macula of light searched her face intensely and dissected it inch by inch, swerving here, hovering there, highlighting the withered cheek, the crepey neck, the hard, jutting chin. It moved where the glance of the contemptuous beloved would go. She propped the compact up between the oil and vinegar cruets and her fingertips touched her hair with wonderful delicacy as the reflection glowed steadily in her right eye and even seemed to travel surgically through it. At last she blinked and snapped the glass shut. “I still feel like a young girl, as though everything is about to happen. And don’t you see”—her dry, rough hand with the painted nails seized mine—“I am a sort of spiritual debutante.”

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  When he told the story at parties, he took his time: His mother and the other adults had been reading and rereading with increasing levels of despair and also hysteria a suicide note found in the hand of Lora Anne’s youngest son, an aspiring rapper and barber, who had shot himself once through the temple on the banks of the creek because he had been diagnosed with, among other rumored things, pancreatic cancer. Lora Anne was a preacher and drove miles upon miles to preach in nondenominational churches. Hartjes and his eleven cousins had been running around the rusty swing set, trying to coax it back into life, when out the wasps had come, and Hartjes, being slower and clumsier, had tripped and made himself an easy target. They’d stung him and he’d gone screaming into the house, and his mother had said it. “Then what am I supposed to say? I’m sorry?” Simon asked. “I just didn’t want you thinking I had lied about it, that’s all. I didn’t want you thinking it was a joke or that I’d made it up just to have something to say. I just wanted you to know that. I wasn’t complaining.” Hartjes drank the water he had been nursing, which was lukewarm now and tasted faintly of metal from the pipes. Simon hummed. He stirred the stew, which smelled to Hartjes like tomatoes and pepper, with the musky scent of venison. When Hartjes let his chair rock back and forth, balancing himself with the wide set of his feet, it sounded like a swinging door. His hunger felt distant, like it belonged to someone else.

• From Filthy Animals (2021)

  The rain and wind whipping through the trees outside. Thunder. And the blue glow of lightning rippling overhead. They go on in their strained quiet, and Grace watches the beautiful motion of Big Davis’s hands. The way the knuckles shift and bob like buoys under his skin. And Enid’s sharp, anxious cutting and piercing. They are the last of their kind, she thinks. Her father is gone. Her grandmother. Davis. All that remain are the three of them, and soon these two will have nothing drawing them together. Grace sees in their stiff awkwardness a premonition of her own demise, and her vision briefly grows dim. She feels as though she’s being drawn too quickly up the length of a well. Vertigo. “Gracie?” Enid asks. Grace closes her eyes, waits for the spinning feeling to abate. “I’m all right.” “You don’t look it.” Big Davis presses his hand to her forehead. He hums. “You’re warm.” “I’m fine,” she says, pulling away, but the motion makes her stomach burn. She’s going to be sick. She knows it the moment before it happens, that gurgling, burning retch. She presses her fingers to her mouth, bites down to hold it all in, but it is of no use. Hot acid pulses at the back of her throat, and she feels a blinding, white anger at the fact that she cannot even have the privacy of excusing herself. She must be on display even when she’s about to vomit. This moment of horrible weakness belongs not to her but to them. She hates it. Big Davis jumps up, reaches for the red bucket on the counter where he keeps the scraps. He shoves it under her face, and the smell of it—the rotting, wet food from breakfast and lunch, the woozy smell of grease and stale bread, the soggy, sad grits—draws the vomit out of her, and she empties herself into the bucket. Her stomach clenches. Her chest clenches. Fire spreads through her veins. She leans back, her vision all splotches and luminescent squiggles. Enid presses a wet cloth to her forehead. Grace reaches, holds her hand and sighs. “Just call him,” she says. “Just call him, please.” “Now isn’t the time, Grace,” Enid says. “You have to call him. He’s afraid of you. But you have to call him.” Big Davis drops the bucket on the counter. Braces himself. “You better worry about yourself.” “Call him,” she says. “And say what?” “Tell him the truth. Tell him you love him,” Grace says. “If he doesn’t know that after all this time, that I love him, then that boy is worse off than you.” Grace sinks low in the chair. Enid is blotting her brow. “Well, that we can agree on,” Grace says. “You need rest,” Enid says. “You overdid it.” “She has a room,” Big Davis says.

• From In the Unlikely Event (2015)

  A plane had crashed in Elizabeth. Now they understood. There would be no reply. InterviewsLAURA BARNES AGREED to talk with Henry Ammerman. “You know when you marry a pilot, it could happen,” she told him. “You know, but you never expect it. He had so much experience. He was so smart and he always kept his head, never angry or quick-tempered, and on a milk run, of all things. I blame Newark Airport. Something has to be done about that airport before it happens again.” She was red-eyed but composed, Henry wrote. He didn’t tell her that her husband’s wrists had both been broken from trying to hold the controls steady. “Was it true what you wrote in the paper about the last three minutes?” Laura asked. “As far as I can tell.” Days later Laura had a miscarriage, brought on by stress, the doctor said. The house down the shore was put up for sale. Laura never wanted to see it again. She mourned her lost baby but not the way she mourned Tim. She would never love anyone the way she loved him. Henry requested a meeting with the pilot’s mother. He was told by her remaining son that she was prostrate with grief and could not be reached. Sometimes Henry hated his job. —CHRISTINA FELT NUMB. She stuck a fork into the underside of her arm to see if the numbness was in her mind or her body. She felt the prongs digging into her skin. But she didn’t care. When Henry Ammerman came to interview them at Battin, Christina told him what she’d seen. But unlike some of the other girls, animated and anxious to be heard, jumping up and down, giving the reporter details of how Madame Hoffman, the French teacher, had fainted at the window of her classroom when she saw the plane crash into the brick apartment house, and how they sat her up and fanned her face while the president of the French Club ran to see if the school nurse was still in the building, Christina remained subdued. Mr. Durkee proudly told Henry how calm his students had been, how they’d listened to his instructions to duck and cover, scrambling under their desks and staying there until after the last of the explosions. Christina didn’t contradict him or any of the other girls. “You know, Henry,” Mr. Durkee said, “just forty-five minutes before the crash, a thousand girls were dismissed from school. Be sure your readers think about that.” “Good point,” Henry said. As if he hadn’t thought of that himself. —JANE KRASNER, in New Jersey for her roommate’s funeral, talked to Henry about Kathy Stein. Pale, brown-haired, and slender, Miss Krasner was obviously grieving, Henry wrote. “Kathy was coming home to see a boy she’d met over the holidays. She really liked him. She wanted me to come with her but it was too expensive to fly and there wasn’t enough time to take the bus.