Moving Day
A Flash Fiction about Loss
It rained the day we moved to Chicago. I sat on the bed and looked out the window of our bedroom and watched the drops fall onto Ditmars Boulevard. The trees were naked except for a few stubborn leaves that clung to the branches like tired soldiers refusing to surrender. Below the window, I heard a mover curse as he struggled to fit our cream colored sofa out the impossibly small door of our Queens apartment.
“Are you packed?”
I turned around and saw Rebecca in the doorway. She stood with her arms folded, the sleeves of her old Rutgers college sweatshirt pushed up to her elbows.
I pointed to the black suitcase on the floor. Inside a handful of t-shirts and one stray tube sock told the tale of my packing efforts.
Rebecca shook her head, sighed and left the room.
The whole idea for the move was Rebecca’s. We need a change, she said one night over dinner, and I agreed. I just didn’t think it was necessary to switch cities entirely. All of our friends, my family, my work, all of it, was here in New York. Chicago offered absolutely nothing to us, nothing to me, except for Rebecca’s family, and that was something I could do without. Her mother was a tiny shriveled up shrew of a woman, and her father was a passive aggressive lump who had all the personality of a potato sack.
Spending Christmas vacations in Chicago was excruciating enough, I couldn’t imagine being in that city year round. It was god awful cold in the winter and broiling hot in the summer. Rebecca was taking a position at a financial services company in the suburbs that would pay one third less than she was making here in the city. None of the math adds up, I screamed at her one night before bed. It was the second worst fight of our six year marriage.
I looked across the hallway at the closed door to Jamie’s old room. Fight or Flight. A perfectly natural human response. Except how do you fight the death of a child? You can try ignoring it. Rebecca and I had gone down that road. In the six months since Jamie died, we had become world class compartmentalizers. Rebecca went to yoga class in Chelsea at least five times a week. I threw myself into my work as a copywriter, taking on project after project. I even won an award for my work on the new Sprint campaign. We should lose a child more often, I felt like joking to Rebecca when I brought the small plaque home, but the time for jokes had passed in our house.
I went to the oak bureau and pulled out Jamie’s small blue blanket from the sock drawer. I held it up to my face and breathed in deeply. Even after six months, I could still detect the soft, clean, fresh scent of my son.
Rebecca hated me for saving the blanket. After Jamie had passed away (in Rebecca’s world view, human beings never died, they only passed away), she made sure everything related to him had gone out the door in a well organized march to the Salvation Army.
I had rescued his sleeping blanket from her clutches and stowed it among my socks and underwear, threatening divorce if Rebecca laid her hands on it. She called me morbid and hung up in the past, but backed off after a few weeks when she could see I wasn’t going to give in.
It was a bittersweet victory. One of the few times I had defied her will. The move to Chicago was probably her way of getting back at me, I thought as I carefully folded Jamie’s blanket and put it back among the socks.
I suddenly yanked open the bottom drawer, grabbed a handful of khaki slacks and threw them at the suitcase. I continued flinging open drawers and throwing clothes. Jeans and t-shirts flew at the suitcase and landed all over the floor. I ripped open the sock drawer, tossed everything at the suitcase except for Jamie’s blanket. Suddenly, I looked at the mess of clothing in the suitcase and all over the floor. I clutched the blanket to my chest and slide down the bureau, crumpling into a ball on the floor. Tears streamed down my cheeks, and I wept softly into the blanket.
We had done everything right: read all the books on parenting, attended the lamaze classes, bought everything the baby industry told us to buy. Rebecca didn’t have one sip of alcohol from the moment she knew she was pregnant. We had done everything right. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. College educated, upper middle class Americans didn’t lose their children to crib death. What was this the Middle Ages?
I got to my feet and wiped the tears away. I folded Jamie’s blanket neatly and placed it on the bed. Working quickly, I folded my scattered clothes and placed them in the suitcase. I plucked Jamie’s blanket off the bed and placed it neatly on top of my khaki pants.
I took a moment and looked around the small bedroom of 21-48 46th street. Rebecca and I had lived here almost six years, almost the entire length of our marriage. Jamie had been conceived in this room.
Now it was over. Time to leave.
Suddenly, I snatched the blanket out of the suitcase, hurried to the closet and placed it on the shelf. I closed the door. For a second, a part of me resisted. I reached for the closet door. No. I hurried to the suitcase, zipped it up and lugged it out.
On the stairs, I passed a young mover who wore a red bandanna. “You done up there, sir?” he asked politely.
I nodded, trudged down the stairs with my suitcase and stepped out into the gray November rain.
This hits in a soft, tragic way — like the blanket — at grief. It also demonstrates how people deal with it in such different way, and how that drives a wedge between them. One wonders how the couple will fare as they head to Chicago.