The Rules of Inheritance (18 page)

In three years my grief has grown to enormous proportions. Where in the very beginning I often felt nothing at all, grief is now a giant, sad whale that I drag along with me wherever I go.

 

It topples buildings and overturns cars.

 

It leaves long, furrowed trenches in its wake.

 

My grief fills rooms. It takes up space and it sucks out the air. It leaves no room for anyone else.

 

Grief and I are left alone a lot. We smoke cigarettes and we cry. We stare out the window at the Chrysler Building twinkling in the distance, and we trudge through the cavernous rooms of the apartment like miners aimlessly searching for a way out.

 

Grief holds my hand as I walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn't mind when I cry because it's raining and I cannot find a taxi. Grief wraps itself around me in the morning when I wake from a dream of my mother, and grief holds me back when I lean too far over the edge of the roof at night, a drink in my hand.

 

Grief acts like a jealous friend, reminding me that no one else will ever love me as much as it does.

 

Grief whispers in my ear that no one understands me.

 

Grief is possessive and doesn't let me go anywhere without it.

 

I drag my grief out to restaurants and bars, where we sit together sullenly in the corner, watching everyone carry on around us. I take grief shopping with me, and we troll up and down the aisles of the supermarket, both of us too empty to buy much. Grief takes showers with me, our tears mingling with the soapy water, and grief sleeps next to me, its warm embrace like a sedative keeping me under for long, unnecessary hours.

 

Grief is a force and I am swept up in it.

THE ONLY THING that anchors me is Colin. And he does so fiercely.

 

When we fell in love it was exactly like that: falling. Deep and dreamless, love was like an opiate, rendering each of us powerless against the other. It was like we were the only two people in the world who spoke the same language. It was like we had no choice about falling in love.

 

But there's always a choice, isn't there?

 

Three years later we are at the bottom of a very deep abyss, each of us quietly looking for a way out.

 

Colin is moody and intense. He is confident and confrontational. He moves with purpose. He is aggressive in a quiet way. He is suspicious of everyone, and about this he is not apologetic.

 

Colin is never apologetic.

 

He is demanding and intimidating and he rarely compromises.

 

If Colin discovers a weakness in a person, he cannot help but confront it. His eyes will glow and a small smile will edge the corners of his mouth.

 

He once told me a story about taking acid with a group of friends in high school. It was the middle of the night and they were hanging out on the banks of a river, tripping on the moonlit scenery and the rushing water. One of the girls was having a bad trip and had chosen to cling desperately to a plastic water bottle as her talisman.

 

After an hour or so Colin ripped the bottle away from her and threw it in the river. Even as he tells me the story, his mouth curls into a little smile.

 

Colin tells me what to wear and, more specifically, what not to wear. He is critical of my friends and suspicious of their intentions. He is withholding in his affections, and often I have to barter for hugs or comfort. Colin drinks too much and when he drinks he becomes explosive.

 

I am often scared of Colin.

 

Yet it is these qualities that also draw me to him.

 

Colin loves me the way you love a child: ferociously and with a sense of propriety.

 

A decade from now I'll be a psychotherapist in a little clinic in Los Angeles. I'll take on a client one day who lost her father when she was a teenager. Her mother deteriorated after that and my client and her sisters scattered into the arms of whoever happened to be nearby.

 

When I come to know this client, she will be in her early twenties, living in a sparsely decorated townhome with an abusive boyfriend who closes his hands around her throat on a nightly basis. He follows her every move, seething with anger when she does not obey his instructions about who to be friends with, where to work, what to wear, when to come home. Every week she says she is going to leave him. She never does.

 

I'll immediately recognize in her that same need I had at age twenty-two. The need, not just to be loved, but to be owned.

COLIN DOESN'T WANT to talk about Darren. In fact he doesn't want to talk at all. He pours himself another drink, vodka with just a splash of soda water, and he pulls a chair in front of the stereo.

 

These are the nights that frighten me the most. There is a rage building quietly inside him, like logs in a fire that have been lit from within. I curl into the futon in the living room, bracing myself for whatever is coming next.

 

Sometimes Colin simply sits there until he is too drunk to do anything else, eventually heaving himself up and into bed.

 

Other nights he becomes explosive.

 

One night he slammed his fist into the plywood door of the living room, leaving a dent there for our remaining time in the apartment, a constant reminder of the darkness that lives with us. Another night he hurled a tumbler so forcefully that it lodged itself right there in the drywall, Colin falling to the floor with the effort of it.

 

Sometimes he has night terrors, jumping out of bed in a daze, terrifying us both, yelling, and hitting out at the room around him, at the phantom intruder in our midst.

 

Other times he just makes broad and cryptic declarations about his mortality. In the beginning I used to argue with him, sometimes even try to soothe him.

 

Now I just do my best not to antagonize him.

 

On milder nights he lines up the evening's empty bottles in front of the door—a homemade alarm system built to alert us to intruders—and stumbles to bed. Colin is fanatical about locking doors, about safety. For years, after we are no longer together, I will leave every door open and unlocked, just because I finally can.

 

Tonight could be any of these nights.

 

Colin appears suddenly, swaying in the doorway.

 

I'll never fully understand what it was like for him to lose his sister. I may know grief, but not the kind he knows. Not the kind brought on by finding a sibling drowning in a pool of blood in your parents' living room.

 

I wish I could have killed him myself, Colin says about Darren, his voice slurred.

 

I believe him.

I WANT TO COMFORT Colin, but I know he won't have it.

 

On nights like this I feel trapped here, not that I have anywhere to go. Colin discourages me from making friends but I do anyway, being sure only to see them when he is working. I know he is afraid my friends will try to take me away from him.

 

He should be afraid. My friends try to do exactly that. Always at the end of some evening one of my girlfriends will lean forward in her seat.

 

Claire, she will implore, hapless concern in her eyes, can't you just leave him?

 

I shake my head. She doesn't understand. None of them do.

 

I don't understand either.

 

The truth is that I am afraid of staying with Colin, but I am more afraid of leaving him.

 

In a way Colin is all I have. After my mother died it wasn't just the house we packed up, her things that we got rid of. It was everything. For days I sifted through her clothes, beautiful designer dresses she had worn to elegant events with my father, scarves she bought in Paris, sweaters from Ireland. I opened and closed drawers, my hands roaming over the contents, breathing in the essence of my mother while the piles of her discarded belongings grew in heaps behind me.

 

We even had to find new homes for our two dogs, Welsh corgis named Russell and Rosie. They were nine and ten years old when my mother died, near the end of their own lives, but neither my father nor I could keep them after the way everything was dismantled.

 

I think about the dogs late at night, after Colin has fallen into a drunken, dreamless sleep. I remember when Tonia and I held a wedding ceremony for them when I was in fourth grade, and I weep to have abandoned them, weep because I have been abandoned too.

 

My father lives in California now, and not a day goes by when we don't connect in some way. Mostly we talk late at night, when I am on my way home from work, when it is still early on the West Coast. He is watching movies, drinking scotch, missing me and my mother.

 

He tells me about his appointments, about the neighbor kids who stop by in the afternoon to say hi to him. He tells me that he planted some flowers on his patio, that he hopes I'll come out to visit him soon.

 

I feel a twisting in my stomach when he says this. I know that I should be in California with him. I promise that I'll move there when I graduate. Two more years, I say.

 

He came to visit me once, the first summer I moved to New York. We had to pause on each landing as we made our way up the five flights to my apartment. Afterward he sat in the kitchen, breathing heavily, his face flushed with exertion. He was diagnosed with emphysema shortly after that, putting a stop to any more traveling.

 

On that one visit to New York he showed me around the city, taking me to places he used to go with my mom. We ate béarnaise burgers at P. J. Clarke's, and my dad pointed out the table where they were sitting the day Jackie Onassis came in. We stood in front of my mother's old apartment building on Twenty-eighth, and I tried to imagine him that morning, twenty-five years earlier, wearing the funny blue suit as he rang my mother's buzzer for the first time.

 

The plan is to move to California when I graduate.

 

It's where Colin wants to go too. He is a doorman at a club in Chelsea. He has been taking acting classes but hasn't found any parts. He thinks all that will change in California.

 

I think I will finally escape once we get to California.

 

For now, I just find freedom in little ways.

 

One of them is school. Colin couldn't care less about my writing, scoffing at me when I hesitantly ask if I might read something aloud to him, but I will have the same writing teacher for my entire four years at the New School. Joan and I meet in coffee shops for my independent study sessions, and I write furiously for her, reading aloud in my soft, breathy voice.