Come Away with Me. Karma Brown
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half, once again unsuccessfully.
My mother bustles into the kitchen and I glance up at the stack of tiny folded blankets, covered in green turtles and fuzzy brown teddy bears, she holds in her arms. “What would you like me to do with these?” She looks uncomfortable to be asking the question, even though I’ve asked her here specifically to help pack up the nursery—something Gabe and I are incapable of facing alone.
“Get rid of them, please,” I say as if I’m talking about tomato soup cans in our trash bin. “Give them away or something.”
My mom opens her mouth, then closes it as she fingers the fine, muslin blanket on top of the pile—the one I imagined swaddling our son in before rocking him to sleep. “I could just put them in storage, until you’re sure.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. The air in the kitchen is charged with tension. No one knows how to deal with me these days; I can’t say I blame them. If I could escape my body and mind, I wouldn’t look back. “Give them away. Or throw them out. I don’t really care, as long as they’re gone.”
“Are you sure?” Gabe asks. He looks sad. But I’m sure I look worse. I tuck my hair behind my ear again, smelling how long it’s been since my last shower.
My mom hasn’t moved. She’s standing on the other side of the island and staring down at the blankets, sweeping her hands across the top one to try and straighten out the wrinkles. It occurs to me she imagined wrapping her grandson in that blanket, too.
“Get rid of them,” I say with an edge this time. But I keep my eyes on Gabe, who has gotten up and is now standing beside my mom. I’m challenging him to argue. “Please don’t make me say it again.”
“Okay, hon, okay,” Mom says, looking apologetic before leaving us to finish the conversation I don’t want to have.
“I’m sorry, Tegan.” Gabe’s voice carries a sadness I understand but don’t want to deal with.
I pick up another biscotto and put it on the plate full of broken cookie pieces. “I know,” I reply, setting the knife directly in the middle of the cookie. I press down firmly and a large chunk of the biscotto flies off the plate, still intact. Finally. “But it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”
“I’ve never seen you look more beautiful.” Gabe is beside me on our couch. I’m looking at the collection of photos on my lap that have yet to make it to a scrapbook or album. I shuffle through the photos, stopping at one of Gabe and me in Millennium Park, in front of Cloud Gate, or what Chicagoans call “the Bean.” In it Gabe kisses my cheek, my one foot kicked up and my hands holding the dress’s frothy layers of material in a sashay move. Our image is reflected back in the Bean’s smooth, shiny steel surface, along with the Chicago skyline and a slew of strangers, now part of our memories. A day I’ll never forget.
“Aside from the tinge of green on my face,” I say. Remembering. It’s only been six months, but feels like a lifetime.
We were married at dusk, during an early September heat wave. The ceremony was on the rooftop of the Wit hotel under the glass roof, which, along with the potted magnolia bushes that were somehow in bloom despite the season, made it feel as though we were inside a terrarium. Glowing lanterns lined the aisle and guests sat on low, white couches that would later become seating for the reception. It was all much more than we could afford, me a kindergarten teacher and Gabe just out of law school. But his well-off parents insisted—and paid—so the Wit it was.
I was horribly sick at the wedding, throwing up most of the day—including right after the picture at the Bean, in a bag Gabe wisely tucked in his suit pocket, “just in case”—and only five minutes before I walked down the lantern-lit aisle. Luckily my best friend and maid of honor, Anna, grabbed a wine bucket just in time. My mother-in-law blamed the catering from the rehearsal dinner the night before, which my parents had organized. My mom, bristling at Gabe’s mother’s implication, suggested it was nerves, telling all who would listen I’d always had a weak stomach when I was nervous. As a child that was quite true. I did my fair share of vomiting before important school exams, anytime I had to public speak and, most unfortunately, onstage when I was one of the three little pigs in the school play. But I had outgrown my “nervous stomach,” and figured I’d just caught a bug from school. When you teach five-and six-year-olds all day you spend a good part of the year ill.
Gabe was so sweet that morning. Sending me a prewedding gift of a dozen yellow roses, a bottle of pink bismuth for my stomach and a card that read:
You’ve always looked good in green—ha-ha. You are my forever.
G xo
Even sick, it was the best day of my life.
We found out a week later it had nothing to do with food poisoning, or nerves, or a virus. I was pregnant. I’d never seen Gabe happier than when he opened the envelope I gave him, telling him it was a leftover wedding card previously misplaced. When he pulled out the card, which had a baby rattle and “Congratulations” printed on its front, at first he looked confused. Then I handed him the pregnancy test stick, with a bright pink plus sign, and he burst into tears. He grabbed me and spun me around, laughing and hollering with joy, until I couldn’t see straight. There is nothing like being able to give your husband, the man you’ve loved since the day you laid eyes on him, a dream come true.
We met at Northwestern in our first year, during frosh week. My dorm was having an unsanctioned floor crawl. Gabe, who had been invited by a friend who lived in my dorm, had backed into me coming out of the Purple Jesus room, his giant Slurpee-sized cup of grape Kool-Aid mixed with high-proof vodka spilling all over both of us. Shocked at the cold, rubbing-alcohol-scented drink sopping into my white T-shirt and shorts, I simply stared at him, my mouth open. But then we burst out laughing, and he offered to help clean me up in the women’s washroom, which also happened to be the orgasm shooter room for the night.
“How apropos,” Gabe said, wiggling his eyebrows at me and handing me a shot glass. I laughed again, tossing back the sickly sweet shooter.
“Thanks,” I said. “That was the best one I’ve ever had.”
While we’d been together for so many years after that, our lives intertwined, the day we were married was the day it all really began. If only we’d had more time to bask in that happiness. There was a carton of orange juice in our fridge that had lasted nearly as long.
I stack the photos back together, not bothering to wipe away my tears.
“Teg, please don’t cry.” Gabe shifts closer to me, but I can barely feel his touch. I’m so numb.
“Do you think I’ll ever be happy again?” I close the lid on the box of photos. Saving them for the same time tomorrow night. “I mean, really happy?”
“I know it,” he says. “You’re just not ready yet, love.”
I touch my necklace, still trying to get used to it. It’s a white-gold, round pendant, about the size of a quarter and a half-inch thick. It hangs from a delicate chain. And while the pendant was hollow when the necklace arrived, via a white-and-orange FedEx box nowhere near special enough for its cargo, it’s now filled with the ashes of a broken dream.
I chose the necklace off the internet shortly after I was released from the hospital, one late night when sleep was impossible. I considered an urn, but somehow it felt wrong. That’s how my grandma had kept Gramps’s ashes, in an ornate brass urn on her kitchen windowsill. “Where we can still kiss him every day, the sun and me,” she liked to say.
In truth, twenty-six felt too young to keep—or need, for that matter—an urn of any kind. I casually mentioned the idea of something a little more intimate to Anna, hoping she’d tell me wearing a necklace filled with ashes wasn’t at all weird, but her frown and pinched look suggested otherwise. Gabe hadn’t been much help, either. None of us wanted to deal with the horror, but I didn’t have that luxury because