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Ben Stirling

I read the note again, shake my head, and scrunch it into a tight ball.

What was I thinking writing that? Aside from the obvious fact that I have no forwarding address, Liz is blameless in all this. I’m embarrassed I wrote it. Imagine if Luca found it. How the hell would I explain?

I guess I’d have to say, “ Well, son, I’m afraid that’s what the anger stage of grief looks like. Not pretty, not sensible, but powerful all the same .”

Talking of stages of grief, whoever coined the term did a real number on branding. Seriously, someone in PR or marketing should snap them up. They know their stuff. Stages, pfft . What a misnomer. Wildly inaccurate and factually wrong. It makes you think it’s a ladder. That there’s a start and an end. It makes you think there’s something finite about the process. A little graduation and then a bump up to the next level once you’ve cracked the previous stage.

Utter bullshit.

There’s nothing linear about grief. No pattern. No rhyme. Only an involuntary beginning without an ending.

The old me had no idea about things like this. The old me never really thought about this kind of thing. I certainly never thought about stages of grief and got angry about the fact that they aren’t stages at all. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and the ever-elusive acceptance. They sound like stages, but they aren’t. There’s nothing neat or tidy about them. You don’t get to be done with one and move on to the next. No. You get to flick back and forth. Sometimes, you’re stuck in one stage for weeks. Other times, you get to experience all of them in a single day. A single hour.

So, no, there are no stages of grief. Only a shitstorm of it.

The shitstorm of grief.

It doesn’t have the same ring to it, but it’s a lot more accurate, I guarantee that.

The house is quiet. A little too quiet, so I pad through the living room into the kitchen to see what Luca is doing to be on the safe side. I’ve almost finished unpacking in here, but the empty boxes and mounds of crumpled packaging make it look worse than when I started this morning.

I can safely say I’m at the point in moving where I can’t fathom how or why it’s legal for people to do this to themselves. It’s self-harm on steroids if you ask me. It shouldn’t be allowed. You should have to apply for special permission or a license to do it. A license that should only be issued after a strenuous psych evaluation.

I eye the kitchen tile above the stove warily. Each tile has been individually painted and fired. No two are alike. The designs are intricate. Complex geometric shapes that fan out from a single point in the middle. Straight lines and swoopy curves. All skillfully made but still wonky in their own way.

The overall effect is pretty and pleasing to the eye. A soft blue and white that gives the room a lived-in feel.

They have a lot to answer for, those fucking tiles.

I scoop up a big armful of packing paper and compress it into the box in the corner, clearing a path to the back door before throwing open the French doors and calling out to Luca. He pretends not to hear me. He’s standing close to the fence, face almost pressed against it. His head is cocked and he’s squinting slightly from the sun in his face. I watch him for a few minutes. His mouth is open way more than it’s shut.

I smile to myself. The little man has his yap on. He’s cornered the new neighbor and is making the most of having a captive audience.

One of his knees is bent and he has a hand on his hip. He looks like an old-timer in a Western movie. A tiny, pint-sized old-timer, which only makes it more comical.

Apparently, Liz’s grandpa Paul used to stand exactly like this when he was in a talkative mood. Her whole family gets a real kick out of the fact that Luca does it, especially because Paul died years before Luca was born.

Liz loved it when he did it. It made her so happy.

A few months ago, I found an album on her phone filled with nothing but pictures of Luca in this exact pose.

A thin blade of sorrow stabs my side, penetrating my lungs and briefly winding me. Fortunately, it’s a rage-y day, so my body quickly heats and smothers the sadness.

“Luca!” I call louder than I did before. He looks at me and pinches his lips together in thinly veiled irritation. “Come on in, buddy. It’s time for a snack.”

His lips relax and pull back, turning into a wide grin he reserves strictly for news about snacks, hockey, and visits with his cousins. He bids a hasty farewell to his new friend.

The fence is high, at least six feet. I can’t see the neighbor from here to gauge how welcome the interaction was, so I call out a halfhearted, “Hope he’s not bothering you,” and head into the house quickly.

I’ll get around to meeting the neighbors. I will. Just not today. I don’t have small talk and fake smiles in me today.

“So,” I say as Luca climbs onto one of the stools at the counter, “do we know why there are holes in the fence yet?”

It’s been a few days since we moved in, and the holes in the fence have been a mystery to us since the first time Luca did a thorough reconnaissance of the backyard. There are two holes, both approximately three or four inches in diameter and perfectly round. They’re placed almost directly in Luca’s line of sight and it’s clear they were deliberately cut into the wood, but for what reason, I don’t know.

“Aw yeah,” says Luca. The phrase is new. I haven’t heard it from him before, but from the way he scoots his mouth to the side when he says it, I can tell he’s pleased with it. “Jelly lives in a cottage in his aunt’s yard. She has two Great Danes—those are super big dogs, Dad, like really, really big, almost like a horse—and the people who used to live here had dogs too. Jelly’s aunt asked him to cut the holes in the fence so the dogs could talk to each other.”

“Jelly?”

“Yeah, Jelly.”

“That’s the neighbor’s name? Jelly? Are you sure about that?”

He crosses his little arms over his chest and fixes me with a glare that spurs me to slice up his apple and celery at double time. Luca is generally pretty reasonable for a six-year-old, but the notable exception is when he’s hangry.

“Of course I’m sure,” he says as I scoop a large tablespoon of peanut butter onto his plate. “His other name is Je le ”—he pauses, curling his tongue carefully as he makes another attempt at the R sound—“Je we miah.” He clicks his tongue in frustration and wrinkles his nose. He shakes it off quickly and continues, undeterred, “Jelly says it’s a hard name for some people. He says he couldn’t say it either when he was little, so he called himself Jelly. He said I can call him Jelly too, so yeah, I’m sure his name is Jelly.”

“Ah,” I say. “I see.”

Once Luca’s had his snack, he tries to make a run for it back to the holes in the fence. I manage to distract him by asking him to help me unpack a box containing fun things like cookie cutters and measuring cups, but it’s clear I’ll have to go over to meet the new neighbor sooner rather than later. I can’t have my kid befriending him if I haven’t got the measure of him first. And even if I do get a good feeling about him, I need to check if he’s happy to have his ear bent on a regular basis by the most talkative first grader on the planet.

By the time we’ve eaten dinner and Luca’s bathed and in bed, I’m wiped out. I sit on the sofa, flicking through channels, as I try to ignore the unpleasantness making a home in my chest. I’ve been focusing on our bedrooms and the kitchen as those are the rooms we use most, so I haven’t organized the living room yet. The movers rolled out the rug and unwrapped the sofas before they left, but something about their placement feels off. The rug isn’t in the right place and the sofa I’m sitting on feels different.

We have two identical sofas. One Liz and I used to sit on together when we watched TV and another that was generally reserved for guests. The movers got it wrong. They placed the guest sofa facing the TV, and it doesn’t feel right. It hasn’t been worn in. It’s the same as the other one, but different. It’s like everything we own. It felt familiar and right in our old home, and now it feels wrong.

The unpleasantness in my chest burrows deeper.

It’s a feeling I know well. I felt it when I went on sleepovers that lasted for more than one night when I was a kid, and I felt it a lot in the first few years of my career when hotel rooms blurred into one another and I’d wake up in the mornings disoriented and unsure what city I was in. I felt it more when I met Liz, and suddenly, the thought of spending a night away from her was the end of the world. An emotion that only doubled when Luca was born.

Homesickness. That’s what it is. The feeling of emotional distress caused by being away from the person or people you know and love. In this case, it’s not just the people or the person. It’s the place too. Our old home. Our old city. The place where I met Liz. The place where Luca was born. The place where my team lives and practices and plays. The place where my blood, sweat, and tears were carved into ice.

My skin starts to crawl with emotion. I feel it coming. It’s approaching fast, circling me slowly. I pat the hair on the back of my head down repeatedly, pulling at the fistful of strands I’ve knotted my fingers in, hoping the sting will jolt me out of it.

It’s one of those times I can’t tell if I’m dreading or craving it. My breathing quickens and my chest tightens. The back of my throat burns.

And then…nothing.

I sit on the wrong fucking sofa, choked, strangled, throttled by a buildup of pain that has nowhere to go. Pain that’s stuck in my bones, in my blood, in the air in my lungs.

It’s awful. It’s one of the worst ways to feel, confusing and wretched, but at least it’s given me clarity tonight. At least, this time, I know whether I’m dreading it or craving it.

I crave it.

I need it.

I need to let this big, ugly thing inside me out.

I change channels again and try not to feel anything about the fact that I know exactly where they are. My team. I know who they’re playing. Who’s on the bench tonight. Who’s playing well, and who’s having an off week. Who the referees are, and what Coach’s mood has been like.

I slam my eyes shut when the image on my screen changes. The glare of the ice is too bright for a night like tonight. Too white. Too stark. I drop my head in my hands and feel the weight of my skull as I wait for the sound of blades slicing through ice to do their work.

Tonight, that’s not what gets me. It’s not the skates or even the dull thud of the puck connecting with carbon fiber. Tonight, it’s the crowd. It’s the low rumble of happy fans. The sound travels through me, shaking me, flooding me, drowning me in an ocean of salt water that has nowhere to go. It ravages me, beating against me in big tidal waves that wear me down and leave me raw.

The pain is acute.

The salt burns all the places in me that haven’t turned to stone yet.

I wait until I’m positive that tonight isn’t the night the dam wall breaks, then I turn off the lights, make sure the doors are locked, and go to bed.