Stories: All-New Tales

THE LOUDEST SOUND IN THE WORLD is the absence of a child. Sarah found herself waiting for it, the moment she opened her eyes in the morning: that satin ribbon of a giggle, or the thump of a jump off the bed—but instead all she heard was the hiss of the coffeemaker that Abe must have preset in the kitchen last night, spitting angrily as it finished its brewing. She glanced at the clock over the landscape of Abe’s sleeping body. For a moment, she thought about touching that golden shoulder or running her hand through his dark curls, but like most moments, it was gone before she remembered to act on it. “We have to get up,” she said.

Abe didn’t move, did not turn toward her. “Right,” he said, and from the pitch of his voice she knew that he hadn’t been asleep either.

She rolled onto her back. “Abe.”

“Right,” he repeated. He pushed off the bed in one motion and closeted himself in the bathroom, where he ran the shower long before he stepped inside, incorrectly assuming the background noise would keep anyone outside from hearing him cry.

THE WORST DAY OF Abe’s life had not been the one you’d imagine, but the one after that, when he went to choose his daughter’s coffin. Sarah begged him to go; said she could not sit and talk about what to do with their daughter as if she were a box of outgrown clothing that had to be stored somewhere safe and dry. The funeral director was a man with a bad comb-over and kind, gray eyes, and his first question to Abe was whether he’d seen his daughter…afterward. Abe had—once the doctors and nurses had given up and the tubes had been removed and the crash carts pulled away, he and Sarah were given a moment to say good-bye. Sarah had run out of the hospital room, screaming. Abe had sat down on the edge of the bed with the plastic mattress that crinkled beneath his weight, and had threaded his fingers with his daughter’s. For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d felt her move, but it turned out to be his own sobbing, jarring the bed. He’d sat like that for a while, and then somehow managed to pull her onto his lap and crawl onto the cot himself, as if he were the patient.

What he remembered was not how still she was, or how her skin grew ashen under his touch, but how she had weighed just the tiniest bit less than she had that morning, when he’d carried her through the double doors of the emergency room. It wasn’t remarkable to think that he—a man who lived by weights and measures—would be sensitive to this even at a moment as overwhelming as that one. Abe recalled hearing medical examiners say a person who died lost twenty-one grams of weight—the measure of a human soul. He realized, though, holding his daughter in his arms, that the scale was all wrong. Loss should have been measured in leagues: the linear time line he would not spend with her as she lost her first tooth, lost her heart over a boy, lost the graduation cap she tossed into a silvered sky. Loss should have been measured circularly, like angles: the minutes between the two of them, the degrees of separation.

We suggest that you dress your daughter the way she would have wanted, the funeral director had said. Did she have a favorite party dress, or a pair of overalls she always wore to climb trees? A soccer uniform? A T-shirt from a favorite vacation?

There were other questions, and decisions to be made, and finally, the funeral director took Abe into another room to choose a coffin. The samples were stacked against the wall, jet and mahogany sarcophagi gleaming at such a high polish he could see his own ravaged features in their reflections. The funeral director led Abe to the far end of the room, where three stunted coffins were propped like brave soldiers. They ranged from some that came up as high as his hip to one that was barely bigger than a bread box.

Abe picked one painted a glossy white, with gold piping, because it reminded him of his daughter’s bedroom furniture. He kept staring at it. Although the funeral director assured him that it was the right size, it did not seem large enough to Abe to hold a girl as full of life as his daughter. It was certainly not large enough, he knew, to pack inside the turtle shell of grief that he’d armored himself in this past day. Which meant, of course, that even after his daughter was gone, the sorrow would remain behind.