Part Two: The Bag
Three days after the funeral, I heard a car in the drive.
I was in the kitchen. I had been in the kitchen for most of those three days, which was where I went when I did not know what to do with myself — not to cook, because I had not been eating with any regularity, but because the kitchen was where the tea was and tea was the one thing I wanted consistently, and because the kitchen was the warmest room in the house and warmth, in those days, seemed important in a way I did not examine.
I heard the car, and then I heard the gate, and then I heard footsteps on the path — small footsteps, two sets of them, with the specific rhythm of two-year-olds who are walking somewhere they were told to walk rather than running somewhere they want to go.
I opened the door.
Hugo and Luc stood on the doorstep in their pajamas. Blue pajamas with small dogs printed on them — I knew these pajamas, I had bought them in September for their birthday. They were wearing them at three in the afternoon, which meant they had not been changed today, or possibly the day before. They had their stuffed animals — Hugo had the bear that had been his since before he could ask for things, the bear that had a name I could never remember because Hugo changed it regularly as the bear’s biography developed. Luc had the rabbit with the missing eye, which had always been his and which he held by the ear with the specific grip of a child who has decided this is the correct way to hold a rabbit and has not reconsidered.
Behind them, Claire.
She looked — I searched for the word then and have not found a better one since — clean. Not grieving, not exhausted, not the version of herself I had seen at the funeral, which had at least produced the external presentation of loss. Clean. Put together. The look of someone who has made a decision and is in the process of executing it and has moved past the emotional phase of the decision into the practical phase.
She was holding a bag. It was the bag I recognized as the one they kept in the twins’ room for overnight trips — the canvas bag with the blue straps, bought for the summer they had all come to stay for a week.
She put it in my hands.
“I’m not made for this life of poverty,” she said.
I looked at the bag. I looked at my grandsons. Hugo was looking at the climbing rose with the complete, focused attention he brought to interesting things. Luc was looking at me with the dark eyes he had from Théo, which was something I could not always look at directly yet and was doing anyway.
“I want to live my life,” Claire said.
She got in the car. She drove away.
I stood in the doorway with the bag in my hands and my two-year-old grandsons on the doorstep. Hugo had turned from the rose and was now looking after the car with an expression I could not read and have thought about many times since. Luc still looked at me.
“Grand-mère,” Luc said. He said it the way two-year-olds say words they have been practicing — carefully, with the satisfaction of a word that is exactly the right word for the current situation.
“Yes,” I said. “Come inside. It’s cold.”
I picked them both up, one on each hip, which was a significant physical undertaking that I accomplished through the specific motivation of having no alternative and that I was sore from for three days afterward. I carried them inside. I set them on the kitchen floor. I made tea.
I did not cry. I had been crying for three days and I had reached, in those minutes in the doorway, the specific place beyond crying where there is only the next necessary thing.
The next necessary thing was to feed them.
Then to put them to bed.
Then to figure out the rest.
