bestseller lists and she knew that it had been translated into at least thirty different languages. At this very moment, people in Ethiopia were probably reading about John’s theory of using the “mind-body connection” to overcome loss and suffering. The funny thing was, Pam was the one with the doctorate in biology. John was just a high school science teacher with a message and he had through some fluke taken his message to the world.
“Grief,” John told an agreeable Larry King, “knows no one particular language.”
He had written a book about losing Zack, then losing his wife. Pam thought that’s what she resented most: being lumped in with Zack as if she had died, too. She hadn’t had that luxury, had she? She had been left behind to go to the morgue so that she could identify her son’s body because John could not. She had sorted through Zack’s address book to find his friends from soccer camp and baseball camp and band camp so that they could be notified. She had been the one to go to the mailbox and find the letters, a hundred at least, from Boy Scouts and pen pals that Zack had accumulated throughout his sixteen years of life. Because John had been so incapacitated by grief, it had been Pam who had chosen the suit for Zack’s eternal rest, then bought the new one when the funeral director kindly explained that it was several sizes too small.
The suit had been two years old. She had bought it when Zack was fourteen so that he could wear it to his cousin’s wedding. Fourteen to sixteen was a lifetime. In two years, he had grown from a boy to a man and as she had taken the dark blue suit and tie out of the cleaner’s bag where it had hung in the closet for two years, Pam had not even considered the possibility that Zack had outgrown it. The running jokes about his eating them out of house and home, the fact that he needed new shoes every two months because his feet kept getting larger, had been lost to her, and standing in his room, smelling his sweaty teenage smell that clung to his sheets and thickened the air, she had almost smiled at the thought of the old suit and taken it off the closet rod with some relief because that was one less decision out of the way.
John had to be sedated so that he could go to the funeral. He had leaned against her as if she were a rock, and because of this, Pam had made herself rocklike. When her mother had taken her hand, squeezed it to offer support, Pam had imagined herself as a block of granite. When a girl who had been in love with Zack-one of many, it turned out-had collapsed, sobbing, against Pam, she conjured in her mind several slabs of marble, cold, glistening marble, and built a fortress around herself so that she would not fall down to the ground, weeping for her lost child.
Pam had been the strong one, the one everyone turned to. She steeled herself against any emotions, knowing that if she allowed them to come, she would be overwhelmed, stoned to death by the guilt and grief and anger that would rain down.
“Write about it,” she had told John, begged him, because she could not listen to his anguish anymore without unleashing her own. “Write it in your journal.”
He had always kept notebooks, and just about every day he jotted down his thoughts like a little girl keeping a diary. At first, she had thought this habit strange for a man but later came to accept it as just another one of his endearing eccentricities, like his fear of escalators and belief that eating raw cookie dough would cause intestinal worms. When it started, she was glad when he stayed in his office writing all night instead of coming to bed, where he invariably cried himself to sleep, tossing and turning from nightmares, calling out Zack’s name. She had ignored these terrible nights as long as she could, wished them away because to acknowledge them would be to acknowledge the loss, and she could not bring herself to do that, could not admit that they had lost their precious boy.
Finally, in the heat of an argument, she had mentioned John’s fitful nights and he had turned on her like an animal, accused her of being cold, of not dealing with her emotions.
There was a switch.
John was always the rational one, Pam the emotional one. He had always used logic to defeat her and invariably won every argument because he didn’t let his feelings get the best of him. Even nine years ago, when Pam had found out that he was cheating on her with one of the front office secretaries from school, he had outlogicked her.
“You’re not going to leave me, Pam,” he had told her, arrogance seeping from every pore. “You don’t have enough money to raise Zack on your own, and you won’t be able to teach at the same school as me because no one likes you there. They’ll all be on my side.”
Sobering to hear from the man you love, not least of all since every word he said was true.
Through almost twenty years of marriage, he had consistently been the more reasonable one, the one who said, “let’s just wait and see” when she was certain that a raspy cough from Zack’s room in the middle of the night was lung cancer or that the rolling papers that fell out of his notebook one day in the kitchen meant he was a meth freak.
“Let’s wait and see,” John had said when she told him she thought Zack had taken some wine from the refrigerator.
“Boys will be boys,” John had said when she found an empty bottle of vodka in the back of Zack’s closet. The cliche had made her want to scratch out his eyes, but she had listened to him, made herself calm down, because the irritated way John glanced at her, the quick shrug of his shoulders, made her feel like a hysterical mother instead of simply a concerned parent. At school, they both dealt with overreacting parents on a daily basis: mothers who screamed at the top of their lungs that grades must be changed or they would go to the school board; fathers who tried to bully teachers into not failing their sons by threatening to sue.
The phone call had come at nine o’clock on a Friday evening-not one in the morning, not a panicked, wake-up- to-catastrophe time of night. Zack had left home earlier with Casey and some friends, and John and Pam were watching a movie.
“I’ll get it.” John jumped for the phone-he always liked to answer it-as Pam fumbled with the remote control to mute the television.
“Yes, it is,” John had said, his tone of voice low, slightly annoyed. A telemarketer, she thought, then John’s face had turned white. What a silly phrase, Pam had thought, as she sat on the couch, her feet tucked underneath her, to say that someone’s face turned white-but it had. She sat there watching it happen, a line of color draining down his neck like a sink being suddenly unplugged until all the red was gone from John’s usually ruddy skin.
Then, he had whispered, “Yes, we have a son.”
“We have a son.” The first words John had said to her when she had come out of recovery. The birth had been difficult, and after sixteen hours of labor, the doctor had decided to do a caesarian. Pam’s last memory had been the sweet relief of the pain being taken away by the drugs (she would have freebased heroin by then), and John’s crouching trot beside the gurney as they rolled her into the OR, tears in his eyes as he whispered, “I love you.”
He whispered again into the phone. “We’ll be right there.”
Only he wasn’t right there. It was the ghost of John who had sat in the passenger seat of the car as she drove to the county hospital. It was his ghost who had floated through the front doors and waited for the elevator to come. Pam had taken his hand, shocked at how cold it was, the skin clammy, his calloused fingers like ice.
Zack, she thought. This is how Zack’s hand will feel.
John had stood frozen outside the morgue. “I can’t do it,” he had told her. “I can’t see him like that.”
Pam had, though. She had looked at her son, stroked back his thick, black hair and kissed his forehead even though it was caked with dried blood. His eyes were slit open, his lips slightly parted. A long gash had flayed open the line of his jaw. She took his hand and kissed his face, his beautiful face, then signed the papers and took John home.
Pam’s second trip to California had been very different from the first one. First-class was a whole new world to her, from the hot towel to wipe her face to the warmed nuts to the endless supply of alcoholic beverages. A well- dressed man stood in baggage claim, her name on the placard he held in front of him. The black Lincoln Town Car was spotless, a bottle of cold water waiting for her as she climbed into the back seat.
This was John’s personal driver, she gathered. Bestselling millionaire authors didn’t have to drive themselves around, especially when they lived in the Hollywood Hills. Pam took no delight in the palm-tree- lined streets, her first glimpse of the famous Hollywood sign. She felt like a whore for taking John’s money. At the dissolution of their marriage, she had insisted they split everything down the middle: selling the house, the cars, their meager stocks so that it could all be done in cash. Money had been the noose he kept around her neck for years. They couldn’t go
