The Knitting Circle (12 page)

Up the stairs to the front door, and just as Ellen had described, Mary found three doorbells, none of them marked. “Ring the middle one and wait for me to buzz you in,” she’d said.

Mary pressed the buzzer, and waited. It was 10 a.m., exactly the time she’d been told to come. Even with getting lost and circling the park twice before finding the house, she’d managed to arrive on time. She marched in place to keep warm. She rang the buzzer again. The windows in the bottom apartment were decorated with press-on snowflakes, already peeling.

When the buzzer finally did ring, she grabbed the doorknob and quickly yanked the door open. Inside, the smells of gas and cabbage. A dark hallway with scuffed parquet floors. The stairs were covered in cheap dark green carpet. An open door awaited her at the top and she moved toward it, the way she moved toward everything these days, slowly, as if walking through gauze.

“Hello,” Mary called. Then, when she got no answer,

“Hello?”

“Back here!”

Mary stepped inside, into a living room filled with musical instruments. A cello, a fiddle, two banjos. Other stringed things Mary didn’t recognize. She had to step over them to move in the direction of the voice that had called to her. More instruments lined the wall that ended at the kitchen, a small ugly room with ancient appliances in avocado green and a strange collection of plastic hoses, measuring cups, and bottled water. Through the kitchen and down a dark hall with closed doors, and then finally, at the end, a smattering of light, an open door.

“I made it, Ellen,” Mary said.

But when she walked into the room at the end of the hall she found not Ellen, but a young girl in a hospital bed and a boy in a chair beside her.

“Oh,” Mary said, stepping back.

The girl smiled. She was fourteen or fifteen, with long pale blond hair, sunken cheeks flushed red, and two thin tubes snaking into her nose. Mary recognized the gurgle of an oxygen tank, the smell of sickness, and she stepped back even farther.

“I’m Bridget,” the girl said. “You’re looking for my mom?” She rolled her eyes. “She always does this. She forgets to tell me someone might show up. I mean, I could have put twinkly lights on my oxygen or something.”

“She was going to help me make socks,” Mary said, struck dumb to find herself in the very place she most hated to be—around a sick child.” Ellen hadn’t mentioned a daughter, she was certain of that. Certainly not a sick daughter. She held up her bag. Knitting needles lay in the girl’s lap, and a long train of sparkly yarn.

“Socks,” Bridget said, rolling her eyes again. “They’re impossible, you know. I’m making the world’s longest scarf.” She held it up for Mary to see.

“Pretty,” Mary said, wanting to flee.

“Have you ever heard of Sadako?”

Mary shook her head no.

“Really? She’s this amazing girl who survived Hiroshima. You know, the A bomb? Only to be struck with this horrible deadly cancer. I guess a lot of survivors got it. From the radiation. So her friend decided that if she made a thousand cranes out of origami, Sadako would live, despite all odds. So all of her friends, and then all these Japanese schoolchildren, and eventually the whole world started making origami cranes. But they didn’t reach a thousand and she died. I can’t do origami so I’m knitting this scarf until it’s a thousand feet long.” She lay back, out of breath, and closed her eyes. “Jeb, how many miles are a thousand feet?” she said without opening them.

“I don’t think it’s
any
miles. I think a mile is like
five
thousand feet,” the boy said. His hair was dark and curly; beneath it his eyes shone green above a narrow face.

“Drat,” Bridget said. “It would be nice to knit a mile-long scarf.”

“Could you tell your mother I came?” Mary said.

“She had to go to the drugstore and stuff,” Jeb explained quietly. “Sometimes things get a little worse. You know.”

Mary found herself watching Bridget’s shallow breath, the small up-and-down of her chest, the way she’d sat and watched Stella, willing her to keep breathing. She had grown short of breath herself that long hospital night in her frantic attempts to keep her daughter alive.

“That’s all right,” Mary said, wanting to go but unable to shift her gaze from Bridget.

“So I’ll tell her that who came by?” Jeb was asking.

Mary inhaled deeply. Exhaled. Finally turned away. “Mary,” she said.

IT WAS ENOUGH to send her into her bed. Ellen had a daughter and that daughter was very sick. Mary didn’t want a friend with a sick daughter. She didn’t want to know a young girl who was going to die.

“But maybe she’s recovering from something,” Dylan had said.

His optimism made her angry.

In the morning he would leave for work and she would pretend to get up. She would even get dressed, like she had somewhere to go. She would sit at the kitchen table eating toast, feigning interest in the newspaper. She would comment on a headline, or read a piece of a review to him. Sometimes he quizzed her cautiously. “So you’re going to hang out with that woman from knitting?” he’d say. Or, “So you might call Eddie today?” And Mary would nod and pretend that anything was possible. When Dylan bent to kiss her goodbye, Mary smiled up at him as if she were going to have a good day.

From the window, she watched him drive away, a man in a suit going to his office. A man who didn’t have a clue that his wife was getting worse. A man, she thought, who could still go into an office every day and defend clients and write briefs and go to court and even have friendly cocktails with his partners after work. She watched Holly pull up and leave Christmas cookies on the front step and Eddie slide an invitation to the office Christmas party through her mail slot.

Across the street, the neighbors had put electric candles in all the windows and they glowed bright all day. They had put a big fat wreath on their door. Not just a basic wreath, but a complicated one made of greenery and small blue berries and gold ribbon. And the house next door had the biggest Christmas tree anyone had ever seen, an obscene tree, really, with tinsel and garland and colored blinking lights.

She couldn’t even knit. Instead, she put on the television and watched chefs on the Food Network make impossibly complicated meals. One made pudding out of mortadella. One made marshmallows from scratch. Mary hated these chefs, with their efficiency and creativity. They demonstrated how to core a pineapple, peel a mango, split a vanilla bean and remove its seeds.

When the phone rang, she listened as people left her messages. “Let me take you Christmas shopping,” Jodie shouted into the answering machine. “Scratch that. It’s a stupid idea. I’m sorry.” Eddie called several times, reminding her to come to the Christmas party. “I left an invitation,” he said. Scarlet asked her to come to knitting; that was how Mary knew it was Wednesday and that she’d been in bed for almost a week.

The next time the phone rang, Mary answered it. If it was Eddie, she would accept an assignment. If it was Scarlet or Lulu, she would agree to go to the knitting circle. The phone seemed, suddenly, important. A lifeline. A way out of bed, at least.

But it was her mother.

“Do you know what day today is?” her mother was saying.

“Wednesday,” Mary said.

“No,” her mother said. “Well, yes. But I mean the date. It’s Pearl Harbor Day,” her mother continued without waiting for an answer.

“Pearl Harbor
Day
?” Mary said.

“You know something, Mary? You mince words. You’re too particular. It’s not Pearl Harbor
Day
, like an official holiday or something. It’s the anniversary. Don’t you even turn on the TV?”

Mary’s eyes drifted to her television screen where a chef was making a salsa out of strange ingredients like peaches and ancho chiles.

“All morning it’s been Pearl Harbor this and Pearl Harbor that. Personally, I’m sick of it. Enough already.”

“Thank you for that, Mom. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m in the middle of something—”

“I hope this isn’t what your life is, Mary,” her mother said.

“Not doing anything at all day after day. Not staying connected to the world or people or—”

“My daughter died, Mom, and I don’t give a shit about what day it is.”

“I know,” her mother said.

“You don’t know, okay? So stop trying to help me. Please. Stop.”

“Listen, honey, I could come up there for Christmas,” her mother said.

The chef was putting the salsa on lamb chops of all things.

“Don’t do that,” Mary said. “I don’t have the…” The what? she wondered. Stamina? Energy? Patience? “…the holiday spirit,” she said finally.

“On the Weather Channel the whole Northeast is one big blue cold front coming in from somewhere freezing. You and Dylan can go somewhere warm and get away from all the cold weather and the commercialism of the holiday. My friend down here, Kay? You’ve heard me speak of her?”

“I’ve got to go,” Mary interrupted. “I’m making this really complicated dinner. Lamb chops with a peach and ancho chile salsa. You have no idea.”

Her mother was quiet for so long that Mary thought perhaps her mother had hung up on her. But then she said, “I know, Mary-la. I know.”

When she was very young, her mother would whisper this name to her. Mary-la, her mother had said, her first small offering of comfort since Stella had died.

MARY WOKE TO a chef telling a woman why her coq au vin never turned out right. He was going to help her. “This,” he told her, “is Food 911.” If only there was Grief 911, Mary thought. A number to call where a handsome energetic man would come to your house and explain everything you’d been doing wrong. Then he would fix your grief, your broken heart.

Wait. Someone
had
come. Mary squinted her swollen eyes to find Dylan standing at her side, his overcoat covered with a light dusting of snow.

“Uh-oh,” Mary said.

“You don’t get up at all?” he said, his face crumpled with worry.

She pointed to the TV. “That man makes house calls,” she said. “He fixes cooking disasters.”

Gently, Dylan took the remote from her and clicked off the television.

“Eddie called me at the office.”

Mary licked her lips, shrugged.

Dylan reached into his pocket and pulled out two airline tickets.

“Oh, dear,” Mary said. “Did my mother call you too?”

“No, I thought of this all on my own.” Dylan sat beside her on the bed. “I asked myself where was a place that made you happy and right away I thought: San Francisco. When I met you, you told me you could never live anywhere else.”

“And here I am,” Mary said. “Happy as a clam.”

“I need to feel happy again,” Dylan said. “I can’t go on feeling like this.”

Mary shrugged, wanting to give him that happiness, but unable to do it.

“We leave on Friday. Stay through New Year’s.”

Mary allowed this fullness in her chest to rise. “Thank you,” she said.

“When we come back, this fucking year will be over,” Dylan said.

Mary closed her eyes, let him cradle her in his arms, and tried to see it: the view from that hill. Blue sky. Sparkling bay.

BEFORE THEY LEFT, Dylan talked Mary into going with him to a grief group. Dylan had gone alone a few times, and come home red-eyed and exhausted, full of sad stories of loss. Children who fell out of windows, died without explanation, grew into adulthood only to die of heart attacks or cancer or an accident at work.

“How is this supposed to make me feel better?” she’d said.

But now, the promise of escape in a few days, of a New Year ahead, and her husband’s growing frustration with her, made Mary agree to go.

Oddly, the group met in the very hospital where Stella had died. Driving into the parking lot, Mary did not see the glow of the streetlights or the security guard watching the cars. Instead, she saw herself, sitting beside her daughter, telling her, foolishly, that she would be all right.

“I can’t go in there,” Mary told Dylan. “Who has a grief group in a hospital?”

“Once you get inside it’ll be fine,” he said.

Wasn’t that what she had believed just eight months ago when she lifted Stella into her arms and walked through those automatic doors for help? Then, thirty-six hours later, she’d walked out empty-handed, and nothing had been fine since.

Still, she let Dylan lead her through those very doors. Mary glimpsed a child on her mother’s lap, head resting against her chest; a boy crying; a toddler screaming; a woman with an infant in her arms.

“This way,” Dylan said, guiding her by the elbow in the opposite direction.

The elevator door opened and there was a folding table covered in pamphlets and officious-looking women bustling around with sign-in sheets, name tags, and smiles.

Soon, she was signed in and name-tagged and handed pamphlets.
Getting Through the Holidays. The Worst Loss of All. A Broken Heart Still Beats.

“Some of us,” one of the women said, “write the name of our child on our name tag.” She pointed to her own.
Frannie
, it said. Then, beneath it,
Sabrina
.

Mary did not want to write Stella’s name on this name tag. But the woman seemed to be waiting for her to do just that.

“Thank you,” Mary mumbled, and walked away.

Frannie, as it turned out, ran the meeting. She smiled and welcomed everyone, and then explained that they were going to go around the circle and each say their child’s name and age and how they died.

“I’m leaving,” Mary whispered to Dylan.

“Ssshhh,” he said, and squeezed her hand.

An Asian woman was crying and telling a complicated story in broken English. Then an older man started talking about the daughter he’d cared for with Lou Gehrig’s disease and he too started crying. Frannie nodded and passed boxes of Kleenex. Crying parents talked about mistakes they’d made: missing the signs of drug abuse, not checking if a car seat was buckled in properly, leaving their child alone for just five minutes.

And then without warning everyone was looking at her. She couldn’t speak.

“Our daughter Stella,” Dylan was saying, “was five years old.”