About the Author
Laura Kalpakian is an award-winning novelist who has received a National Endowment of the Arts, a Pushcart Prize, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and the PEN/West Award for Best Short Fiction. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PART 1
Preservation and Invention
CHAPTER ONE
The St. Bernard
Our annual picnics look like any other. A little early in the season, perhaps. The ground is often spongy and the trees reluctantly budding, but if the weather's at all decent, we gather in the park, the picnic tables down by the lake. We have the red-checked tablecloths, the plastic coolers, the potluck tubs of coleslaw and potato salad, the little grill for hot dogs. The kids bring dogs and Frisbees. Maybe even a ball, a football often, though it's April and most people haven't yet unpacked their picnic baskets after Portland's long, wet winter. The park is pretty empty, and down at the lake, the ducks are not yet overfed and a filthy menace. (That's the nurse in me talking; can't be helped, hygiene, hand-washing fanatic, that's me.) But really, you would not have guessed that we all convene to commemorate a tragedy. We started out that brutal day five years ago, staring at one another, strangers newly endowed with our collective, our terrible title, the Families of the Victims. Slowly, we have become survivors. Most. Not all. Some have died. Some by their own hand. Some cannot bear the sight of the rest of us. But for those of us who live here in Portland, we find a bit of strength in numbers.
We keep it low-key. No grandstanding speeches. From the beginning, the first anniversary, everyone had enough sense to stay clear of that. Words would not bring back the dead. Often there's a priest and rabbi, prayers before we part. But you probably couldn't tell that this was a gathering of people who five years before had no connection whatever. Then, suddenly, we faced one another in an airport lounge that cordoned us off from people who had not suffered what we had suffered. All our lives were suddenly thrust into one another, rammed into each other as the plane had slammed into the sea.
From a distance people wave to Caryn and me as we get out of the car. We are a sort of duet. We have the same short hair, light brown, nondescript, no-fuss haircuts, and we have the athlete's springy walk. Instinct and training combined, I guess. Except that Caryn is blue eyed,
cf0broad shouldered, and long legged, and I still have a goalie's body. Big Nell they used to call me in college. Respectfully. Women's soccer MVP. Women's soccer was my ticket, all right. How else does a Polish-Irish girl from Gary, Indiana, get into Notre Dame where she meets the likes of Caryn Henley from Grosse Pointe? I put our macaroni salad on the picnic table and the beers and bottled water in the cooler while Caryn embraces everyone. We all hold each other just a little longer than necessary. We bite our lips. We smile. We tell everyone how great they look and they say the same to us. And in the midst of all this we peer into one another's eyes and ask the unasked and unanswerable: How are you living with this? Are you doing better than I am? Are you living past, living through, living beyond the crash?
And of course we notice the changes. Five years have passed. Fatherless kids have grown up. Sometimes these kids have new fathers, the widow remarries or shyly stands beside a boyfriend she didn't have last year. There's nothing ever said, but all of us, the Families of the Victims, we want the others to like the new people who have come into our lives. Once that's accomplished, then often they don't return. I've noticed that. And this year, I thought our numbers had seriously diminished. One hundred and twenty-two victims can have a lot of friends and family, though not everyone was from Portland, of course. That was the destination. I look around today's picnic and I start counting. Not just numbers, but faces.
The family that always brings the rabbi brought a different rabbi, and I wonder if the original rabbi got tired of these old prayers. The family that always brought the priest wasn't even here. Some people had new babies or toddlers, and I always hoped to see Caryn pick up one of these babies and hold it. But she didn't. She held back.
For me, this reunion picnic is a seminar. Really, like those update-your-triage-technique seminars that hospitals are always giving for nurses. I want to know what's worked for others, their survival strategies. I tuck them away to use for or with Caryn. She isn't my sister or my wife or my partner or any of that, but I see her as my responsibility. I'm the one still here. Five years later.
Caryn goes off to talk to another doctor. I wander among small groups, inquiring in a general fashion, asking in essence, who has found the Wonder Weapon to Slay Grief? Well, this year yoga is very big, but we've tried that, and the outcome was that Caryn could stand on her head. That was nice. Was it the Wonder Weapon to Slay Grief? No. Therapy is always a big topic. Someone has always found the most wonderful therapist or counselor. I hear the name of Kim Ogilvie with an all but audible round of applause. Caryn has done Kim Ogilvie. A couple of years' worth. In my opinion, Kim is an okay counselor, but really she's just as limited a human being as any of us. Kim talked a lot about grief abatement. Time does that. She was supposed to do more. When Caryn quit seeing Kim, she wasn't back to square one, no, but she was still treading water there in the sea of grief, and she still had not had the energy or wish to swim to shore.
So beer in hand, I move to another group. I overhear discussion of a book one guy endorses, called, oddly, "The Laughing Cat." He's rattling on about the laughing reflex and the author who maintains that humans are porous creatures, that experience and emotion come from both inside and outside the individual, and you needn't confine yourself to one or the other but approach the more accessible. "You have to think about the ordinary in an extraordinary way. You have to become not just conscious, but cognizant."
"What's that got to do with the cat?" I ask.
"Have you ever seen a cat laugh?"
"I don't think so," I replied, "but I've never tickled one, either."
I moved along to another group, hoping I'd find something better than guru rehash. Holding my beer, I join some remodelers, people who are really get-down engaged with the kitchen, the bathroom, the contractor. These people are really animated and into it and stepping out of grief, but we've done that too, Caryn and me. Years ago. Tore off the wallpaper, tore out the fixtures, redid her bedroom and her bathroom after Steve moved out. It was fine and cathartic, and expelled Steve (worth doing), but did it lift her from the sea of grief? No.
I find a pretty large gathering of people, maybe fifteen or so, who are concentrating on the lawsuit. Oh, yes, the Families of the Victims Lawsuit, which has been dragging on for years, dragging all through the courts and boardrooms like Marley's ghost dragging his chains. Class action. Or inaction. They're discussing the proposed settlement. Some people who had retained their own attorneys are doing better than those of us who went with the class action. These people are all p issed off. Their strategy for grief is to channel it into the courts and indignation and float it on a sea of briefs. It seems to help them. It's not Caryn's style, or mine.
I'm on my second beer when I start to understand that the people who really are doing fine are not here. They're doing so fine they don't need to come commemorate their losses with the other survivors. Those people will not be back.
I find a group who have been traveling this past year. That sounded promising. I can't remember the last time Caryn went anywhere except home to Grosse Pointe for the holidays. I haven't been to Europe in fifteen years. But best of all, said these survivors, it wasn't just Greece or Fiji, but that they could leave their sorrow at home. "We were on a cruise," said one woman whose fiance had died, "my sister and I, and she said to me, no one knows. Isn't that wonderful? No one knows about the plane crash unless we tell them."
"Did you?" I asked.
"No. I can't bear the obligatory condolences. When people find out what happened to you, they're shocked and they all say how sorry they are, and I can't bear it." She gave a rueful glance to the new bride of a man whose first wife had perished.
I looked at the bride and her husband; they would not be back next year.
Just then, I get accosted by Sam Fredericks, the Dirty Old Man of the survivors. I can write Sam's dialogue by now.
Copyright 2004 by Laura Kalpakian
