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Timetable

Deidre Jaye Byrne

I


    Had she been aware, even remotely, of the passage of time, she’d have roused herself from the near-catatonic state of the past six hours. It was the end of February, a month of pervasive dark and striking cold which had worn the patience of winter enthusiasts and had gone completely unnoticed by Kerlynn.
    Around her the kitchen walls, a crisp, soft, pistachio green, set off cherry cabinets, flecks of grey from the countertops echoing the faint tint of slate that brought the green to sage, and were now nearly olive in the first light of day. Days ago the clock stopped ticking, its battery worn down by time’s insistent march, yet Kerlynn took no notice. Heat in whispering crackles tiptoed around the room’s perimeter while the hot water cycled through the baseboard heat. Once or twice each day the tomb-like stillness of the kitchen was disturbed as the refrigerator stirred, moaning and keening, running through its defrost cycle. The sink held a few dishes. The slow dissolution of rotting food and still water resting in assorted neglected bowls and cups, a fetid smell warning that time had slowed, but not yet stopped. Decomposition haunted the atmosphere around her.
    In the midst of the stillness decay tempted the future; the new widow sat, rusted in place by tears and time. Anchored to her chair, a too big sweater provided warmth, and comfort also. Her arms in the sleeves once worn by her husband, this weakly knit hug all that remained of him for her comfort. Unaware, or maybe unfazed, she was uncaring of the days passed since the last of the mourners slipped away, the ritual of chatting and prattling around trays of useless food and unhelpful compassion completed, leaving Kerlynn here at the table where she sat staring at nothing. At her whole life.
    Between her hands a mug, hand-thrown by an artist she and Tom met on vacation last month. Or a hundred years ago. Or maybe, never. The mug was cold, its contents still, the coffee having long surrendered its heat to the room, faint stain of milk congealing atop the coffee’s surface. Kerlynn had no intention of drinking it; she knew as much when she’d poured it that morning, cold from the coffee maker and then reheated in the microwave. Twelve cups in the pot a few days ago, fewer now. It didn’t matter; Kerlynn didn’t drink coffee, never had, though Tom did. She only liked the smell, and once the steaming was over and aromatic coffee scents finished serenading her senses she remained there, clutching the mug, which, finally having reached its coolest point, she believed would change no more.
    In the midst of all that had changed since Tom’s death, the spinning, tilted, remote senseless events, this one mug with its cold coffee was the only thing Kerlynn could grasp. Dawn came, tentative light showing itself shyly in the window, reluctant herald of this new day. Stoically, as dawn gave way to faint sun, pulling dusk along, until night had finally announced its impending arrival, she sat. A dramatic play of the sun’s arc crossed the sky and all Kerlynn knew was an unsettling uncertainty born of withdrawal from the workaday world. Taking dim notice of the receding light, she was unsure whether the day was done or had refused to begin at all. It didn’t matter; her days and nights were without distinction, one and the same. Still she sat. How long would she stay? Grief with no timetable.

II


    It had been almost two weeks since word came of Tom’s death.
    Their house overlooking the bay gave testimony to Tom’s success and it formed the center of their lives together. Easy summer parties with friends lounging on the deck and cozy insulated dinners in winter marked the weeks and weekends of their lives. Kerlynn loved Tom, and loved their life together in a way that enlarged her spirit and filled in all the gaps. A wholeness of place and purpose grew from her life with Tom and allowed her to believe the future would just unfold, in whatever time the universe intended, peacefully and purposefully, with Tom by her side. Always with Tom by her side. If she dared to look at the future now it was like an old photo where one person was torn away, leaving the picture ragged and incomplete.
    He’d been a successful salesman for years and had recently switched from selling pharmaceuticals to artificial hips for replacement procedures. The training had been intense; six weeks in Chicago and then another few with a more experienced rep. His first week on his own in the city he walked out of a surgeon’s office as a cab jumped the curb and crushed him against the side of the building. One instant, one error, one miscalculation; one life over and a yawning, tearing wound had been slashed forever across another’s whole world.
    It was evening before Kerlynn heard from Tom’s boss, four dirty martinis under his belt, liquid prelude as he prepared to deliver the news. His voice was thick and distant, a man reading a script he’d never seen before, in a language he’d been taught but never practiced. Kerlynn asked him to repeat himself four or maybe five times; it seemed to her near the end of the call that he was becoming annoyed by her failure to absorb the news. Certain Tom’s boss was mistaken, she settled for the name of the hospital and set off on her own. A mistake. He must have meant to say, “dead tired,” was all. She’d just need to get to the hospital, sign Tom out and bring him home.
    But it hadn’t been like that. The entrance to the emergency room was crowded with police, a news crew, and onlookers everywhere. Another ambulance pulled in and released its portly occupant, sitting nearly upright on the stretcher, alert as an actor waiting for the director to shout, “Action!” before lying down to begin his part. Kerlynn felt herself swept unwillingly into the confused scene and further on into the triage lobby before she was able to find someone to ask about her husband.
    At the mention of Tom’s name two things happened at once. The nurse stretched one hand across the counter and while, picking up the paging phone with the other, grabbed Kerlynn’s gloved hand, “I am so sorry.”
    It was a weak bridge and it did not sustain her. That was the one thing, as she was later to recall it. The second thing: Kerlynn felt her knees wobble, the room swirl and darken; a whoosh of wood-patterned Formica rushing past her as the floor approached. The rest did not matter. Time passed. Her friend and colleague, Casey, along with Tom’s brother, Steve, came through the haze. There were papers for signature, and people talking in warm slow voices. Sympathetic voices in tones that confused her, though she didn’t know why. A switch had gone off in her brain. Why she was there? Where was Tom? Who needed these papers she was signing? At no point did Kerlynn ask; to do so would be to volunteer for a part she did not wish to play. In dreams we are a part of and not a part of the unfolding events. Kerlynn felt that separation, that detachment, and found herself caught.
    Then there was a warm car where Kerlynn tried to understand why she was in the back seat and why there was no sense to be had of anything else, her head in soup, her chest cleaved in two while her heart beat limpingly along, a faint throb with each passing streetlight. The streetlights appeared as rays from heaven; she looked past the front seat, through the windshield and saw each beam of light fasten upon the hood of the car, drawing them onwards through the black night until the next streetlight’s beam reached out to pull them further still. In silence she rode, passive passenger, as light beams drew her toward a future she’d not anticipated and away from the future she’d had.

III


    The radio proved insufficient distraction for Bethany, driving to work alone for the ninth day in a row. In the domino aftermath of Tom’s death Bethany’s entire morning routine had become unstable, uncertain, and left her feeling fragile in a way she recognized as both unaccustomed and undeserved. Nearly two weeks of riding solo should have become, or could have qualified, as a new routine; yet she made herself believe it was temporary. To consider the alternative, that Tom’s death would impact her own life, change her world in some permanent way, was to entertain the idea that her security would not hold.
    Kerlynn, Tom, Bethany, Max—how long had they been together? How long had they been colleagues, neighbors, friends? Ten years? Fifteen? Bethany wasn’t sure. Long enough to have assured her that this life was real, permanent, secure. And security was very, very important to Bethany, whose consciousness occupied a fragile plane, perpetually balancing fear and caution on a fulcrum of the unknown. Security was the counterweight to her chaotic and frightening childhood. This world, she believed, held only a fixed amount of happiness. Bethany hoarded what she perceived to be her spare allotment and would not risk her portion.
    Caution defined Bethany. As a religion practiced daily, her devotion was a rigorous, visceral thing and it allowed her to maintain a façade of confidence as a monk displays his affect of calm in the midst of worldly calamity. Bethany kept chaos at bay by being prepared, ready for all emergencies. A fully stocked closet of supplies was her church, preparation a religious virtue, a prayer made without ceasing.
    Max’s unwavering support of his wife, even at her most eccentric, led him to build a large storage closet in the garage containing all the emergency supplies Bethany expected to need for almost any situation. Bottled water, powdered milk, canned goods, batteries, a hand cranked emergency radio, a go bag, plastic ponchos, a first aid book, a first aid kit, flares, a small shovel, iodine tablets, photocopies of important family documents were all secreted away as was a substantial amount of cash. Each item an amulet or totem she believed would protect her and Max. Now she was faced with a different kind of emergency.
    The random, unaccountable fact of Tom’s death challenged all Bethany had believed in, worked for and clung to. Did she mourn Tom’s death or the death of something else, something she could sense, but not yet name? Sadness unsettled her and she could never be still long enough to consider what the difference might be.
    Tom’s sudden death— not from illness, not from carelessness, not from lack of care and exercise— was a shock to her sensibilities. A random force from a too wide and chaotic world. It wasn’t that she didn’t know such things happened, it was there in the papers every day; it was that she’d never allowed that these things might happen within her sphere. She’d created for herself the illusion that she could keep a bubble of protection around them all, never considering that a bubble would almost certainly burst. Her illusion of security now was shattered into an uncountable number of shards. A massive mallet the force, the weight of it, the directness of the blow, the scatter pattern of its spent energy destabilized her world and left her grieving: for Tom’s death, for Kerlynn’s loss, for her own folly in thinking her efforts could hold back the tide.
    This thing that happened to Tom was a catastrophe Bethany had never imagined, and in being forced to take it on, to add it to her list of things to ward off, she found the task to be of a magnitude whose challenge she was unable to articulate; it sent a chill up her spine. No one announced when a train would go off the rails, no one announced when the plane would crash and now she learned, no one announced when a cab would jump the curb. She just hadn’t thought of that before, always putting her trust in seat belts and air bags, security checks and constant vigilance.
    Now she tossed and turned at night, anxiety teasing her from dreams and the dark allowing her imagination to morph out of control. Night after night she’d lie in bed trying to soothe herself, a supplicant at the altar of stability, reciting the catechism of her precautions, preparations, and prayers.
    The days passed but still her anxiety, her fear of the next unknown thing grew within her, haunting her nights and stalking her days; she tossed and fretted and clung to Max so fiercely, so unrelentingly, that in the mornings her exhaustion was outpaced only by Max’s eagerness to be gone from the house, from the grief he did not understand, and away from the suffocating, arresting force of Bethany’s fears.
    As if Tom’s death had released a contagion of danger and unpredictability, Bethany fell into a state of total distraction. The several days after Tom’s burial had been marked by sleeplessness and confusion of an order which in and of itself began to constitute an emergency. Max could not assuage her distraction. All manner of unforeseen tragedy lurked within her timorous, terrified heart. She began to believe she recognized dangers previously unnoticed emerging now everywhere. She plunged headlong into mourning far beyond anything equal to Tom’s death, its manner or its suddenness. Sitting across a table from Max would send her mind wondering in a downward spiral: how would she cope without Max? How could she bear a table set for one? Who would hold her in those hours when neurotic needs made her frantic and afraid? What would be her reason for living? Max tried over and over to assure her all was well, but to no avail. Now she saw death everywhere. Daily she was drained.
    What she did not know, could not know, was that in six months’ time she’d come home to find Max gone, dead of an aneurysm, hidden predator, enlarged and ruptured, a silent ticking time bomb undetected, stealthily preparing to steal away her last illusion of security. Grief with no timetable.

IV


    Casey closed her classroom door against the undisciplined noises from the room across the hall and sat down to grade the spelling test she’d given earlier that morning. Kerlynn’s substitute was really no substitute at all, just an inexperienced child with a degree in education hoping for a job. Casey had tried to help, to show her how Kerlynn had set things up, and give her some tips to control the children. They weren’t a difficult class, but they saw their teacher’s absence as both a holiday from the usual rules and routines as well as a chance to toy with the youthful surrogate, much as a cat might play with a ball of foil. Unlike Bethany, whose life’s work was to ward off all possible threats to health and happiness, Casey’s ambition was to bore in on one issue, one cause, one problem, and fix it. And by her methodical labors she planned to save the world—or at least her world. Casey was a fixer; a perseverator with the ability to analyze a problem, isolate its component parts to their most elemental state and then dissect even that bit of minutia until all that remained was dust. And her ulcer. Larger problems, more pressing problems could require her attention and clamor for resolution, but if it was not the problem Casey had in her sights it simply did not exist.
    Kerlynn’s complete withdrawal since Tom’s death had become the focus of Casey’s concentrations. With each day that slid by the distraction took up more and greater residence in her heart and her mind.
    Once at home, alone on her sofa, tumbler in hand, Casey worked to consider the problem at a distance; a way to get a clearer look and also to still the selfish heartbreak brought on by Tom’s death. Not because of any particular affection for Tom, but because he was the locus of all Kerlynn’s joy and strength; without him Casey had also lost Kerlynn, her most dear and cherished friend, a soul mate in a life of loneliness and struggle, a life she had been trying to fix herself for so long.
    Surely one cannot grieve forever, or else all the world would have stopped a million years before. Now Casey took the dilemma of Kerlynn’s refusal to rejoin the world and snapped it out before her with the force of a charwoman shaking out a rug, determined to loosen whatever was clogging her friend’s brain. A tiny voice in Casey’s mind tried to tell her that Kerlynn could be moved from her entrenched place of sadness. She’d not plummeted to despair; she was just stuck in place with her grief. Yes, but for how long, Casey asked herself. The question circled through her brain unsteadily, uncertainty shifting the trajectory so that each time the question rebounded from the walls of her mind, with a harsh and callous echo that informed her that this time, maybe, she was defeated. Kerlynn had not returned a single call since the day of Tom’s funeral. Maybe, Casey thought, this was finally the place where she could not make a change. Maybe at last life had handed her something she could not fix. But if she could not do this one thing for her friend then what good was she?
    How to help? What to say? The physical part of comforting and caring for a broken and hurt friend, that was easy enough for Casey to play out in her mind. What Casey could not figure out was the words. What words could possibly be useful now? Must some words be spoken or is it the silence that courts the grief, accentuates and extends the places cracked open in the wailing heart? What stops the clock of grief? What are the magic words that call for a time out? What calendar tells us when grief will have run its course?
    Engaging the problem more deeply, Casey pushed herself to think about the forces that fed grief, the unravelling of a life, tattered bits of memories never fully formed, thrown away into a burned out future never to exist except in dreams. Grief, Casey saw, was a bleeding wound in reverse, all the pain coming in, not pouring out. And so the healing cannot be seen, there is no scab slowly forming over the injury, no way to measure whether or not the wound is closing and how much more time may be needed.
    Casey remembered when her mother had returned home after surgery for a ruptured appendix, the incision still open. The risk of post-surgical infection prohibited the incision from being stitched closed. Daily a nurse came to cleanse the wound and change the dressing, every few days measuring the depth of the healing incision. The wound was open, it’s inner place visible less and less. As time passed layers of skin closed in upon themselves. Maybe Kerlynn’s grief was like that, Casey considered. Maybe it just opened you up and you had to heal on the inside first, lest too much sadness be trapped below the surface to fester.
    The only thing to do, Casey decided then, was to put an end to the space between them, the time out she had allowed Kerlynn needed to be over. Kerlynn had to come back to the living. Casey needed her, needed their friendship. The plan took shape. The fix emerged as a vision Casey played out while filling her tumbler a second time. All she had to do was go to Kerlynn’s house and ring the bell or knock on the door until Kerlynn finally opened up. She’d stand there all night if need be. And when Kerlynn finally opened the door, Casey would just walk in and hug her friend, just stand there, for as long as needed, hugging her. Casey could already imagine the magic healing in that hug, could feel the way she would softly rock her friend back and forth while they stood together in the front hall, crying together and rocking back and forth. Solace in the movement, solace in the tears. Casey could see herself leading Kerlynn to the sofa, bringing her pillow and blanket from the empty bed, tucking her in. Heating up some soup and cleaning up the mess she knows will be in the sink. She knows, just knows, Kerlynn has probably done nothing more than drink tea and maybe think to eat some toast. Casey would sit in the big chair, next to the sofa, a chair too big for the room, but a piece Kerlynn would not part with. Kerlynn liked its kilim pattern; it made her happy to sit and trace the patterns with her fingers on nights she stayed up late waiting for Tom’s return from a business trip.
    Propelled now by her carefully plotted solution to Kerlynn’s problem, Casey drained the tumbler, grabbed her coat and keys and, filled with the comfort of knowing at last the fix for her broken hearted friend, headed out the door.
    She drove along the highway, a road she’d traversed a thousand times. Her mind continued reviewing her plan: what she’d say if Kerlynn said this, what she’d do if Kerlynn said that. This was Casey’s strength, this drilling herself to the finest point of whatever she was concentrating on. She’d separated herself from the attention the road required, trusting memory and instinct to give her mind free range. Her thoughts had taken her past the exit for Kerlynn’s block. Casey surrendered to her detached auto pilot, paying little heed to her surroundings, her thoughts unfolding the problem, rehearsing her words, reviewing and reparsing each single day since Tom’s death. As she drew closer to her destination Casey began feeling lighter at the chance to bring back her friend. That hope fired her as she pushed toward the solution. Rain and wintery sleet mixed and assaulted the front glass but as her wipers dragged across the windshield the road dirt smeared. She swore and drove a little faster, impatient to reach her friend. Now she had a plan. Now she was ready for action. Charged with the certainty of her decision, elated at having figured out the fix, she needed only double back across the service road to retrace her path, compensating for the missed exit. She glanced over her shoulder and accelerated as she changed lanes, unaware of the truck merging on her right until the horn and shrieking brakes shocked her, until her car collided with the rig and burst into flames.
    The outrageous, obscene screeling of metal and brakes as the truck and the car met: no one would know who screamed louder or what frantic maneuvers Casey hoped would right the situation; it was only an instant, the car hydroplaning across the black space between the broken white lines, bouncing off the high concrete wall and catching against the back half of the tanker as it’s driver, unable to find the car in his mirrors, fought to control the truck. More screeching: brakes, metal, tires against the asphalt, metal and glass on concrete; a cacophony of disaster and death.
    The windshield lost the battle with the concrete divider. The impact locked the seat belt, the air bag snapped Casey’s head against the back of the seat as the tanker tipped on its side, pinning the car against the retaining wall, knocking Casey unconscious. Casey never felt the flames that overwhelmed her car, never heard the screams of the truck driver, crazy with shock and terror, who would never again able to get behind the wheel of a truck or even a car for the rest of his life. One moment a life; one moment a death. Grief with no timetable.

V


    For an instant something inside her stirred and Kerlynn thought she might get up, maybe turn on a light, maybe, finally pick up the phone and call Casey, her poor, dear friend Casey, whose repeated entreaties had only now begun to pierce the stultifying haze of her sadness. A flutter of life seemed about to take hold, the barest of sparks, but that impulse died too and Kerlynn retreated once more. Her hands held on still to the mug she’d alternately gripped and caressed since morning. The clock still silent. Whispering crackles of heat; faint fetid smells arising unchallenged from the sink. Kerlynn sat, stared. Too tired to make the call. Too uncertain of why she should. Another sun set, another sun rose. Grief with no timetable.



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