By Nadja Maril

I lift the turquoise and purple shawl out of the storage drawer and drape it over my shoul­ders. The caress of the soft yarn against my skin trans­ports me to an earlier time and place.

I hear the click­ing and buzz of insects through our back­door screen as I put away the last of the dinner dishes. It feels like summer, but in Mary­land our moist green sur­round­ings are the norm for Sep­tem­ber and it’s the begin­ning of a new school year for my two sons. I need to leave for Back to School Night. I get as far as the front hallway, cotton dress stick­ing to my shoul­der blades, fid­dling with my car keys, telling myself to open the front door.

My feet refuse to obey. I don’t want to go. Please, a ter­ri­fied voice inside me calls to my more ratio­nal self, do I have to go?

I picture the faces of the other parents, every­one staring at me. Or maybe it is the reverse, and I am the one staring at them. Why is it that they get to have a life so normal they just assume tomor­row will be like yesterday?

The other parents, like my neigh­bors, will try to avoid getting close enough for con­ver­sa­tion. Even the lawyer who handled our house pur­chase, dashed across the street, keeping his head down, when he saw me down­town. Why should tonight be any different?

Maybe he was crying. I know, it’s sad. A nice family with young chil­dren moves to a small city to run their busi­ness, restor­ing antique lamps, and then one summer while they’re back in Mass­a­chu­setts working and vis­it­ing family, the husband dies of a stroke.

A single parent family is not what our foreign student, Giu­liana, signed on for six months ago when we exchanged letters, but she has taken it in stride. An accom­plished roller-skater and a side­walk chalk artist, she is reading the boys the orig­i­nal version of Pinoc­chio one chapter a night. Nine months into her time with us, her father will commit suicide, forcing her home early. Perhaps the uni­verse has chosen us inten­tion­al­ly, to show her a family living through trauma.

I start for the door until I remem­ber my older son’s first day of school a few days earlier. I replay the scene in my mind, stand­ing alone awk­ward­ly, snap­ping pic­tures with my husband’s camera. Another mother com­plains to her friend, “My husband is always trav­el­ing. Always trav­el­ing. It’s not fair.”

I strug­gle to main­tain my com­po­sure. The woman’s thought­less words incite my heart to beat faster and faster. I want to leave, but I stay and watch a little boy strug­gling to keep his new back pack square on his shoul­ders. The girl beside him is trying to loosen her braids. I imagine a kindly grand­moth­er who must have pulled them too tight, striv­ing for per­fec­tion. I sense the children’s antic­i­pa­tion and their fear, and it moves through me like a wave. They are at the begin­ning of some­thing that is both won­der­ful and fright­en­ing. Will they fit in with the others? Will they make a new friend?

I never fit in. Slight­ly dif­fer­ent from the other girls in what I liked to do, in kinder­garten I played Super­man with two of the boys. We’d tie our nap blan­kets around our shoul­ders and run around the play­ground with our capes, pre­tend­ing to fly.

As I grew older, I’d attempt to share some excit­ing news with one of the girls in ele­men­tary school, and they’d respond with a long drawn out So? Ashamed, I stared down at the floor. Boys seemed less judgmental.

“Step on their toe,” was my Grandmother’s advice. “Don’t let them bother you,” she said, “And then pretend it’s an accident.”

I will remem­ber this advice at the Grief Work­shop held at the Com­mu­ni­ty College in October. The facil­i­ta­tor will tell us to think of all the people in our lives we’ve lost. Instead of think­ing of my dead husband, I see my grand­moth­er: blue eyes, fine pink skin, white crimped hair tinted blue, smelling like Lilies of the Valley. She never held back on taking action when required. My Grand­moth­er told me she once paid a woman a dollar, in the days when one dollar was a lot of money, to stop playing the piano. Was she really that bad? I remem­ber asking. Nothing fright­ened her. I will let nothing fright­en me.

The retired podi­a­trist who lives across the street, greets me the week after my return to Annapo­lis with a ques­tion. “What are you going to do now?”

I strug­gle to make eye contact. “I’m going to keep going,” I say. “Take care of my children.”

Can people really be this obtuse? I replay the con­ver­sa­tion repeat­ed­ly inside my mind. His lack of sen­si­tiv­i­ty seems to mirror eighty percent of the world. Each time I inter­act with someone new, I wonder on which side of the per­cent­age chart they will fall.

2.

I hold the smooth sharp car keys in jittery hands. Since I’ve returned to Mary­land to restart our life, I’ve avoided caf­feine, but still the shak­i­ness comes and goes and I’ve broken things. One of the casu­al­ties, a sweet lamp on my dress­ing table, pink and laven­der flowers and but­ter­flies painted on the inside of the frosted shade. I feel my dead husband’s ghost watch­ing me and shaking his head. What could I do? It didn’t mean any­thing, I tell him. The world means nothing without you. My trem­bling hands got caught under the silk wrapped cord. The only thing worth saving is the silver-plated base.

I break the shower door a few days later. How does a thirty-five year old women weigh­ing 120 pounds manage to shatter a door of tem­pered glass? I recall the door being jammed and my strug­gling to close it before water got all over the floor. I remem­ber staring at the nuggets of wavy glass cov­er­ing the black and pink tiles, grab­bing a towel and vacuum, embar­rassed and con­cerned someone might get injured. That after­noon I buy a fabric shower curtain.

Sleep is inter­mit­tent. When I do sleep I have vivid dreams. In one dream, my dead husband is stand­ing outside our house with the garbage cans, remind­ing me not to forget to put out the trash.

3.

I’m stand­ing in the hallway clasp­ing the car keys, looking out our front window, when I see a strange car pulling into the dri­ve­way. Prob­a­bly this car wants to turn around. But instead it stops and two people get out. I know them.

Karen is the mother of one of my younger son’s friends. We’ve met a few times and arranged play­dates, but she barely knows me. She and her husband were getting ready to attend Back to School Night and she thought of me.

She takes my hand and I feel my anxiety begin to fade.

“We thought it might be dif­fi­cult for you tonight,” she says, “and that it might be easier if you had some company. We’ll drive you.”

An angel. I am being visited by an angel. This angel has a broad face and straw­ber­ry blonde hair. Shorter and wider than me, she walks with deter­mi­na­tion. Karen is no stranger to loss. She has lost one breast, bat­tling cancer. It has been replaced with surgery, but the replace­ment didn’t take well, leaving ugly scar tissue. She under­stands how loss mag­ni­fies things. She tells me how loss makes life intense. Vividly beau­ti­ful is how she describes it.

When you are able to laugh, Karen tells me, you’ll know you’re start­ing to heal. Even­tu­al­ly I tell her about my neigh­bor, the retired podi­a­trist across the street.

4.

Karen and I become swim­ming buddies. Twice a week we swim laps while our chil­dren are in school, treat­ing our­selves to a high calorie lunch or late break­fast after­wards. Karen, once a com­pet­i­tive swimmer, keeps track of her laps with pennies slipped from a small pouch at the end of her lane. I com­plete one lap for her three, I am a salt­wa­ter mermaid strug­gling to nav­i­gate the cement edges and chlo­rine of the County Pool, I wind my long hair inside a latex cap and wear swim googles. Always the googles are fogging up, but I’m gaining stamina. I appre­ci­ate the routine.

Because she owns her busi­ness, a children’s con­sign­ment shop, she can make her own hours, so we dawdle over lunch, sharing life stories and aspi­ra­tions for our futures. Eight months later it is to Karen I confide, “I think I met someone. His name is Peter and our first ‘date’ was at the County Pool swim­ming laps.”

Another year passes and it is Karen who needs me. After six years of being cancer free, masses are detect­ed in her liver and her lungs. An autol­o­gous bone marrow trans­plant might save her life. What­ev­er it takes, she tells me she will keep fight­ing. But just in case, we shop for children’s books about loss and grief.

While waiting for the marrow trans­plant date, we pour over color charts and price shop her selec­tions for new fur­ni­ture. She plans a trip, a family cruise to Disney World and for her birth­day that year I give her a hand­wo­ven shawl of turquoise and purple.

She meets Peter, but dies months before our wedding day. She never holds our baby girl born the fol­low­ing year. But when her husband returns the gift I gave her to have as a keep­sake, I reluc­tant­ly accept it.

Com­fort­ed by the velvet texture of the soft yarn against my skin, I pull it closer. It’s been a long time since shawls like this were in fashion. But I keep this one, to remem­ber my friend.

This story orig­i­nal­ly appeared in Stonecoast Review Issue 19. Support local book­sellers and inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers by order­ing a print copy of the mag­a­zine.

Photo by Photo by Alexan­der Grey