Page 2 of Second Edition
The studio had grown cooler as the light faded. Beyond the open door, my garden had begun to lose its clarity, flowers and hedges blurring into shadow. The roses were no longer pink but dark shapes against the fence. Somewhere in the neighborhood, a screen door opened and closed. A car passed slowly on the street beyond the house, tires whispering over pavement.
I cleaned the wheel, scraping away slip and bits of clay, returning everything to order. Sponge rinsed. Tools washed. Towels hung. Water bowl emptied. The ruined vessel remained on the table, almost mocking.
I could cover it with plastic or throw it back. Instead, I stood there looking at it, irritated by the foolish ache of failure it had left behind. After all, it was only clay. However, that was the comfort—and cruelty—of my work. Clay could be remade. Reclaimed. Pressed back into itself and started over, only to be as much of a failure as the first attempt. Which, inevitably, was more painful than the first disappointment.
I turned off the studio lamp and stepped into the garden, locking the door behind me, breathing in the scents of mygarden. The path back to the cottage curved through copious flower beds I’d planted when we’d first moved in. Working in the dirt that first spring and summer after we lost Jon saved me. Now the garden had grown into itself, lush and slightly unruly despite my best efforts to impose order. Lavender brushed the stones. Foxglove lifted its freckled bells toward the fading light. Hydrangeas crowded the path in heavy green mounds, not yet in bloom, while roses climbed the arbor.
The house waited at the end of the path, warm squares of light glowing from the kitchen windows, its pale walls softened by shadow and vines. I had bought the cottage after losing Jon, telling everyone it was practical, smaller, easier to maintain. All of that was true. It was also true that I had needed a place with no memories of him sitting in a chair, standing at a sink, walking into a room, or the scent of his cologne that clung to drapes and rugs. This house and garden had become my sanctuary and salvation. For that, I had endless gratitude.
I stopped to look at my bed of peonies, still in tight buds, waiting for the right time to burst into bloom. And once they did, it was best not to blink, or one risked never seeing them at all. Jon had given me the seeds long ago, when he still believed my love could save him. I’d planted them in pots, waited three years for them to bloom and, when they did, burst into feathery petals of dark pink; I’d thought they were the most beautiful flowers in the world. From then on, they went with me wherever I went. Once I’d moved into the cottage, I’d planted them in the ground, where they would live for another hundred years. According to experts anyway. I couldn’t imagine them still blooming when I was long gone.
Inside, I washed the clay from my hands until the water ran clear. Then I stood at the sink a moment longer, watching the last gray traces disappear down the drain. Through the open kitchen door, the garden reminded me of its presence, damp,bursting with colors and alive. Annie would be home soon, smelling of bonfire smoke and salt air. For now, I let myself enjoy the quiet in the last hours of a summer day, in the cottage I had turned into a refuge.
2
DORIAN
The leader of the suicide-loss group was very specific about the rules. Speak only if we wanted to. Do not fix anyone. Do not compare grief. Do not describe the worst of it unless the room could bear it. One might think they’d be hard promises to keep, but I found the rules helpful. Without them, I might have struggled to keep myself from offering solutions rather than listening. And anyway, who was I to tell anyone else how to handle their grief? I wasn’t exactly a poster child for moving through it with grace. Maybe no one could. Grief robbed us of control, dignity. There was nothing to be done about it either. Except, as my therapist often reminded me,to do the work.
I’d been confused at first about what that meant, other than a buzz word I heard way to often from self-help gurus and celebrities who took it upon themselves to share intimate details about their lives. I mean, the wordworkin itself was problematic. To me, it implied there was a craft to making a way through the treacherous waters of sorrow and loss simply by spending hours upon self-reflection. How didworkfix a broken heart? Or erase the memory of the last phone call I ever had with my best friend? Or keep the nightmares from waking me screaming at five a.m.?
My therapisthadexplained it to me this way.Doing the workmeant stopping and looking at patterns instead of just checking out. Examine the same fights, the same kinds of people you keep choosing, the same feeling you can't shake, the same way you check out when things get hard. Getting curious about where they came from—usually childhood, family, early attachments—and then actually trying to do something to break the unhealthy chain.
That was all well and good, but I still didn’t know how that helped me with this aching sense of loss. Or simply, just missing the heck out of my best friend. Regardless, she’d convinced me to attend a group session over individual therapy. To my surprise, I found it immensely helpful to hear what others were struggling through.
Maybe that was thework.
For a year now, I’d attended a grief support group on Thursday evenings in the basement of the Presbyterian Church. I listened to others talk of losses and guilt. In a further surprise, I found it easy to talk about Nate and the hole he’d left in me. I’d opened up more than I ever would have expected.
That made the grief in this group all that much more powerful. Losing someone the way we all had is a special kind of cruelty. Not only do we mourn the loss but we have to maneuver through guilt and regrets and “what could have beens.” What we didn’t see until it was too late. Sadly, we all had that in common.
“All right, folks, should we get started?” Ellen, our facilitator, was in her early fifties, with a hippie mother energy in her dress made from hemp and comfortable sandals. No toenail polish for Ellen. Nor did she dye her hair. Wafts of patchouli filled the room whenever she moved. I adored her.
Before she could ask her opening questions, someone entered the room. I looked over to see that it was Annie Delacroix. My heart missed a beat. She was too young to behere. Fifteen, though she looked so vulnerable standing in the doorway with a canvas tote bag hanging from one shoulder and her dark hair pulled into a ponytail that she could have been much younger. She was an athlete, playing soccer on the same team as my friend Alex’s daughter Bella. Her mother was Delphine Delacroix, possibly the scariest woman I’d ever met. She owned the art gallery just up from my bookstore. In addition, she was a skilled and talented potter who sold her work up and down the coast. I’d recently seen some of her pieces at a shop in Cliffside Bay and had been tempted by a blue vase exquisitely crafted but had decided against it. For whatever reason, it felt like she wouldn’t want me to have something she’d made.
I’d like to have said Delphine Delacroix never crossed my mind, but that would be a lie. We ran in the same circles, mostly because several of my good friends were married to her best friends. For that reason, I was invited to many of the same parties and events as she. Seraphina Sinclair, who had done multiple book signings at Ink & Anchor over the years, was one of Delphine’s friends. She married Hunter, who had once run the local watering hole, but had resumed his career as a songwriter. Not that any of that was relevant. Nor was the fact that Seraphina had encouraged me to ask Delphine out.
When hell froze over.
Not that she would go out with me anyway.
Now, in the dank church basement, we all stared at her child, unsure what to do. However, Ellen quickly took hold of the situation.
“Hello,” Ellen said, as she rose to her feet. “Come in, sweetheart. You’re welcome to sit wherever you’d like.”
Annie’s gaze moved around the circle. She saw me and stopped. Recognition flickered across her face, followed by surprise that morphed into a flush of obvious embarrassment.
I gave her a small nod to acknowledge that we knew each other, but that it wasn’t a big deal. Kids were self-conscious enough without adults making it harder.
She chose one of the two empty chairs, directly across from me.
Ellen quickly resumed the meeting, reminding us of the rules of our group. After her little speech that never wavered, her eyes moved over each of us, resting finally on Annie.
“Since we have someone new with us tonight, let’s begin with names. If you’d like, you can tell us who you lost and how long it’s been. If that’s too much tonight, just your name is enough.”
June was there too, twisting the cap on her water bottle, a widow and mother of two teenagers. Mateo sat nearest the door, ball cap low, quiet as always, giving no hint to how his little sister’s death had stolen his youth and optimism.
Lorrie, knitting something yellow, needles clicking steadily, went first. She’d taken up knitting after her son’s death, telling us she’d been desperate for something to do with her hands other than chewing her nails until they were raw and bloodied. “I’m Lorrie. My son, Daniel, died eight years ago in September. Some weeks it feels like yesterday. Some weeks it feels like I was never really a mother.” She lifted the yellow wad of yarn in her lap. “He was thirty when he died. It’s hard to believe he would be almost forty.”
