The Cure for Grief: A Novel

Prologue

Let’s begin with the moment of contact; the moment of violence and release. After it all, before it all, despite it all, it becomes as simple as this. In the summer of 1998, on a stretch of boulders along a curve of beach in Bass Harbor, Maine, I push my brother Aaron and he falls. Look: here are my hands, my arms moving forward quick as trains, my palms, the fingers flexed and tense, coming against Aaron’s shoulders, fitting into the pockets of flesh just below his shoulder bones. Here is my face, wet with tears, my forehead wet with sweat, my eyes shut tight, my mouth twisted with fury.

This stretch of beach is where our family used to spend vacations when my brothers and I were young, though it is just the three of us—Aaron, my mother, and I—here today. Beyond us down the beach is the site of the house that our family used to own. The sun is high and hot, oppressive. The water, a few feet from where we stand, is a deep blue, an oasis of cool that we do not touch.

This is what happens, a simple moment with a simple consequence. Aaron, eight years older than I at twenty-eight, comes toward me over the rocks. He reaches for me, but I put my hands out; I use all my strength, I push him, and he falls. Our mother, standing a few feet away on a different boulder, tears streaking her face, gasps.

I push Aaron, and he stumbles—his foot comes behind him and almost catches him, his right Adidas sneaker with his golf-socked ankle reaching blindly for the boulder behind him, just barely touching it; his arms go out to the sides like wings, strained in a quick, awkward flap; his eyes widen, his thick eyebrows rise in fear, his head turns. There is the possibility for one split second that he isn’t going to fall, that he will catch himself, his arms flapping, his body wobbling like a perilously placed piece of driftwood, like some precarious thing, a leaf subject even to the gentlest wind. We are all three of us forced to witness a grown man’s strong body as unsteady as a twig.

Then, the inevitable fall, the unpreventable fall, Aaron’s body crumpling between the boulders like a puppet released from its strings, his head coming back quickly, hitting the corner of a rock like a discarded piece of fruit. I watch, I see the look on Aaron’s face in the moment that his head hits the stone, his eyes clenched tight, bracing for a hit. The lines by the sides of his eyes, his smile lines, the feature of his face that makes him most resemble our father, are outlined in clear definition. A thought is present in the back of my mind: how interesting, that smile lines would be as pronounced in fear as in laughter.

I stand where I am and watch my brother fall; I watch the consequence of my action unfold. Watching my brother fall is like watching time move—unstoppable time, unrelenting and inescapable time, time so utterly, so infuriatingly neutral. Here is time in effect; here is the personification of time: my brother’s falling body.

Then it is over, and Aaron is crumpled between the boulders, and there is blood on the back of his head. I have heard many times about lives flashing before people’s eyes in moments of grave danger or imminent death; for me, it is now, it is right now that I see it all, and that I feel the full weight of life’s terrible fear. Loss! Regret! Change! It is always just one movement away. I have expressed myself; I have released my anger, just this once, but it can never be enough. I stand there, before my brother’s fallen body, my hands still raised before my waist, fingers still flexed, my eyebrows, my father’s eyebrows, pointed upward in surprise. And now I know—this is helplessness, this is guilt, this is fear. This is the true impetus for change.

Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay’s feather in her hand?

W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants

1987

The Family Galaxy

Ruby Bronstein was nine years old the winter she found a gun. It was a Tuesday in December; she and her family were on vacation in Maine.

That morning, after breakfast, Ruby stood by the window of the closed-in side porch, watching her brothers. They were far out on the beach, moving across the expanse in front of the house and then stopping: a cluster of dark, stop-and-go bodies like raised, mobile moles on the pure flat of low tide.

It was always strange, she thought, to watch people moving outdoors when you were in. A window of cold, you saw faces huddled into collars and hands in pockets, and you understood it, you believed it, and sometimes, you became unaware of the warmth of your own body and more present in the sight you were witnessing, so that an exposed patch of skin was alarming, dry and bitterly frigid. She watched her three brothers move: she saw them laugh, Aaron throwing back his head, and with a gloved fist, reaching out to punch Nathan on the arm; she saw Abe point out to the distant mouth of the inlet, where the few boats moored in the harbor were just white dots on the dark water. Despite how far they were, she felt as if she were watching them from a few feet away.

Behind her, in the kitchen, her mother was washing the dishes. Rube, why don’t you go join them?

The sound of her mother’s voice made Ruby aware of how intently she was watching her brothers. Her mother’s voice cut through the air and, like a lasso, pulled Ruby back from the beach. She was warm; she was standing at the window.

And she did want to join them, she did, despite having earlier given in to the feeling of being left out. When her brothers had moved to go out to the beach, when Aaron had said, Let’s go outside, and the three of them had gone into the closet by the porch, rummaging underneath the coatrack for hats and rubber boots, Ruby had sat at the table pretending to read Bridge to Terabithia.

But now, with a decisive movement, she turned from the window and moved from the porch, past her mother in the kitchen, past her father, reading a Hebrew book in the living room—their dog, Wally, lying awkwardly in his lap—and up the stairs to her bedroom to dress. In the closet off the porch she slipped her feet into a pair of too-big rubber boots; grabbed a coat, hat, and mittens; and moved to the back door. She stepped into the swirl of cold air outside as into the darkness of the house at night when, after getting up to pee, she had to make her way, blind, back up to her room, holding her arms out to feel for walls.

Ruby’s brothers often moved as a unit when they were in Maine, with nowhere else for them to go, no other friends for them to escape to, and no way for them to distinguish their three separate worlds. At home in Massachusetts they were wildly different boys. Abe, nineteen and a college freshman, was tall and serious, with thick eyebrows that nearly touched at the bridge of his nose. He was the one with the brains, as their parents put it, a virtuoso violinist by the age of six, the favorite of all his teachers, the one who excelled at everything he tried without much effort. He used to be obsessed with his appearance, taking multiple showers a day (prompting the nickname Mr. Clean from Nathan), but in the past few years he had developed terrible acne and grown his hair long. Aaron was skinny and precocious and covered in freckles; he was the most active of the three; already, at seventeen, he’d been to the emergency room four times for stitches and once to remove a fishing hook from his earlobe. Nathan was fourteen, with a thick body and a head of blondish curls. He was a cellist and guitarist, a lover of music, completely uninterested in school. Constantly calm, rarely angry or tense, he found humor in the subtlest details—words, facial inflections, body language. He created all the family nicknames and was the one Ruby felt closest to; her eldest brothers were present but much more distant stars, Nathan the telescope she could hold and look through at the whole family galaxy.

At home, it was easier to ignore, but in Maine, the division between Ruby and her brothers was more pronounced. The boys came together as if they were not three stars but a planet, and when Ruby was with them, she was a satellite moving in their gravitational pull. She could never completely be with them as they were with one another—she was the girl, the little one, the one they used as a prop in their games (a favorite a few years ago was Blintz, where they’d roll her up in a thick blanket and then push her down the stairs). Yet to be with them was intoxicating, no matter what it entailed (tears, Indian sunburns, bruises); to be with them made her part of an undefeatable team.

Ruby’s brothers, after all, were most of the reason she was who she was. They were the reason she raced all the boys at school during recess, letting her curls puff up wildly with the dust of the playground while the other girls stood around and watched; they were the reason she liked the Grateful Dead more than she liked the New Kids on the Block. They were the reason she loved video games, and basketball, and playing the violin, which Abe had played before her; they were the reason her best friend, Oscar, was a boy, and why she never got that into Cabbage Patch Kids.

Outside, she stood on the wooden landing and looked around her. Her brothers seemed farther away now than they had when she was inside. The smaller house next to theirs sat still, the window boxes filled with dried and cracking dirt coated with a layer of frost. The curtains in all the windows were drawn.

Ruby’s parents rented the smaller house to a mother and son, the Kanes, whom the Bronsteins hardly ever saw. A few times, Ruby and Nathan had tried to spy under the curtains—crawling on hands and knees around the Kane house, the grass prickling their skin, creeping up the sides of the house to the windowsills. These missions always ended in fits of giggles, or with Nathan saying Run! in a hoarse whisper, the two of them diving frantically across the lawn and into the safety of their own house. Ruby imagined now that she was being watched, tried to see movement in the curtains, a glimpse of eyes or hands. She saw nothing, but raised her hand to her forehead anyway in a salute the way Abe’s friend Dan, who had joined the navy, had taught her.

In front of Ruby, on the Kanes’ lawn, was a wooden dinghy, resting just where the land began to slope toward the beach. The boat looked out of place, she thought, on the frosted winter grass, like something from another planet. She imagined, briefly, the boat falling from the sky and landing there—whooomp!—intact on the lawn. The earth was so still it was hard to imagine that anyone would be disturbed by things, even boats, falling from the sky.

Ruby moved carefully down the wooden steps—the boots awkward on her feet—and across the lawn to where the beach began. This was always a place for careful footing; at the edge of the grass the ground grew deceptive, promising solidity where there was none, small peninsulas of earth flopping over the mud boundary at the top of the beach. She moved off the grass onto the slope of tiny rocks that began the beach, willing herself not to look for skipping stones, and with one tentative boot she stepped off the rocks onto the low-tide flat, testing the mud as she would test the temperature of a swimming pool.

The land the Bronsteins’ houses sat on was private; the only other houses within sight were along the bank across the water maybe two hundred yards away. In front of the houses was a wide inlet, like a lake with mouths on either end, one mouth leading out to the ocean and the harbor—they could see boats moored there in all seasons—and the other leading around McKhekan and Hutches, the lumber company, to a less familiar area where the water rushed under a bridge and out to a marsh. The beach out beyond the lumberyard was where they once found a giant jellyfish that Ruby’s brothers made her poke with a long piece of driftwood. She braced herself for the shock, vaguely proud to be the one to take the hit, but when she poked the stick into the jelly, nothing happened.

The open water in front of the property was wide, and when the tide was out, the inlet drained, the edge of the ocean moving back, back, exposing the water’s muddy undersides—its secret rocks, its pockets and pools and vulnerabilities—to the world. The ocean drained like a bathtub and showed its insides, its seaweed and mussels and clams and creatures, exposing all the subtle movement and life of its body beneath its skin, inviting exploration of even its most private places. Ruby thought of their frequent exploration of the muddy low-tide flat as a violation of the ocean’s privacy; she thought of the harshness of their booted feet sinking into its mud like hands plunging into an open wound, and when they pulled their boots out, when they sometimes had to reach down to hold on to their boots as they yanked so they didn’t pull their feet clean out of them, Ruby felt the violence in this pulling, the fight between mud and human, and how humans always won. They pulled their feet and the mud made a farting sound as it tried to hold on but had to let go, and then they plunged them in again.

This was how she made her way then, across the flat toward her brothers, who had split their cluster and were walking at small distances from one another. She kept her head buried in the collar of her coat, her hands in her pockets, concentrating on each step. The mud was not sucking now, perhaps because it was too cold. She didn’t understand why the water didn’t freeze; she thought the temperature must be way below freezing. Was it because there was so much of it, or did it have something to do with the salt? Did salt water ever freeze? She thought she should remember to ask someone: maybe Abe knew.

Her brothers had their backs to her and their heads down, Abe and Aaron in thick dark coats, Nathan’s an army green, ripped in two places, she knew, and then sewn. Suddenly, looking up at them, she felt a swoop, as if she had become for an instant a large bird, gliding over the expanse, looking down at her brothers and herself. How tiny she was, down there, bundled inside that puffy red coat! In a flash she felt the inlet as small, she saw the water pouring into the ocean just beyond the far mouth, she swooped out to the ocean that went on and on, and there were whales out there and whole islands and boats that were lost and would never be found, and that ocean didn’t even know about this part of it, this part wasn’t even a fingernail of that ocean’s body, not even a fingernail. Then she swooped back and there she was, standing in the tiny inlet in front of her family’s house, behind her brothers, who were themselves small. For an instant she was dizzy with it, and then it passed.

At her feet, wedged in the mud, she saw the intact carcass of a crab, legs and all, which she did not bend to pick up. Then she heard Abe’s voice through the wind: Hey Rube!

She looked up at him. There was a strip of his face visible between his hat and the zipped-up collar of his coat. Aaron and Nathan raised their heads and turned, stiff like mummies, scanning the landscape until they found her, and she waved to them, a little wave with her hand at her side. Her arrival did not disturb or surprise them. Abe waved back to her.

It was then, just as Ruby began to cross the remaining distance to her brothers, who were now, she felt sure, beginning to be bored and therefore close to heading back to the house, that she caught sight of something sticking up from the ground: a small, roundish shape, a stark reddish orange against the dark brown of the mud. She bent to get a closer look; whatever it was, it was heavily rusted, and the shape of it protruding from the mud made her think of the round rubber triangle that Dr. Robb used to check her reflexes, hitting the pointiest edge against the soft pocket beneath her kneecap. She used her foot to try to dislodge the thing, digging her boot into the mud and lifting, and the top of it moved; she saw that the body of it was longer than Dr. Robb’s triangle, it was attached to something that wouldn’t pull free.

She took off her mittens and bent, taking hold of the triangle with her fingers and wiggling it. As soon as her fingers were exposed to the air they were painfully cold, cramped against the metal; she thought they might crack off if she didn’t get the thing loose. She put her left hand in the pocket of her coat and felt it warming as she used her right one to pull. The mud was loosening, loosening, slowly letting go of its hold, she could see the thing emerging in a clump of mud, and she switched hands, using her left one to work on it. She was crouching now, all of her concentration focused, she wiggled it and pulled, and then with a sucking sound the mud offered it up in a big clump and it was free.

She felt a quickening in her chest as she looked down at it. For a moment she put both hands into her pockets, warming them. Her breath came out in a white cloud. She puckered her lips and blew it out like smoke.

What you got, Rube? she heard Abe call from a short distance away, his voice slightly muffled beneath his coat.

She didn’t want her brothers to come over, not yet, not until she was sure what she had found. Not sure yet, she called back.

Swiftly, then, she moved her fingers into the cold mud, which dropped away in wet clumps. There could be no more doubt as to what she had, but still she couldn’t quite believe it, even as it was there, in her nearly frozen hands: a gun. A gun, rusted over and defeated but unmistakable. She held it; she forgot, for a moment, her freezing fingers, the ache in her knees, the cloud of her breath, the itch of her wool hat against her forehead. The gun sat in the bowl of her palms. It was hefty and real and she was holding it.

She thought of her father, whose aversion to guns was intense. He reacted to them on television shows, in movies, and in any way they appeared in their home—the cap guns her brothers had been obsessed with a few years back, the BB gun they’d kept hidden from him until he caught them with it outdoors shooting squirrels (grounded for two weeks). He told them over and over again never to point guns at each other, even fake guns, even in jest, even if it was just their fingers in the shape of a gun. He always looked so serious when he said it, he always looked at them each so sternly when he said never, and when they asked him why, what was the big deal, he always said Guns are not a joke and Don’t ask me why, just don’t do it.

Now, with her brothers coming toward her, Ruby knew her find would be discovered, and she raised the gun with a rush of energy and pride and defiance. Still covered with mud, it was barely recognizable, but its shape was clear. With both hands, she pointed it in the direction of her brothers. Get ’em up! she squealed, standing.

They stopped, feet from her; Ruby saw the surprise in their bodies, the hesitation, as if a guard dog had leapt at them. It was just an instant, but the control thrilled her, and sent a warm shiver through her body. Then they relaxed, and Abe stepped in front of her.

Jesus, Ruby, he said.

What is that? Nathan asked. He reached out to take it from her, and she gave it to him. Though she had forgotten how cold her hands were, when the gun left them they came back to her in searing pain. She put her hands into her mittens, mud and all, and shoved them into her pockets to thaw.

Holy shit. Nathan put his face down into his scarf while he moved his gloved fingers over the gun, cleaning more of the mud off the rusted metal.

"Is that a gun? said Aaron, next to them now, speaking through his cinched hood. His voice was muffled but insistent. No way! Is that real?"

It’s real, said Ruby. I just found it! It was just sticking up in the mud! She was happy, now, to be sharing it with them.

Oh, my God. Abe reached out his hand. Nate, let me see that.

Nathan paused, then shrugged one shoulder and passed the gun across to Abe’s waiting hand. Abe held it, bobbled it to feel its weight, and turned it over. He had exposed his face, his collar under his chin. The scars from his acne looked raw, red mounds on the landscape of his face.

Wow, he said. "This thing must have been buried here for years. Look—he held the gun up to Aaron’s eye level—it has barnacles on it."

Yeah. Aaron peered closely at it, the front half of his body angled over toward Abe. He was hungry for the gun, Ruby could tell. Can I see it?

Abe pulled the gun back and turned it over again. Aaron held out his hands. "Come on, man, let me see it." Abe passed him the gun, looking at it as he let it go.

Aaron held it up close to his face and peered at it. Eagle Eye, Ruby thought, which was the nickname their father gave Aaron for his gift of observation. His eyes were quick and always focused—he could spot a crab in a tide pool from fifteen feet away. Whenever their family stayed in a hotel, their father enlisted Aaron to sweep the room before they left to make sure they didn’t forget anything. Eagle Eye, he would say, inspect, please.

Aaron inspected the gun as if he had created it, as if it was one of his sculptures from the class he used to take at the art school near their house. He held it up in front of his eyes and turned it over. "Wow. I can’t believe this. Right here in the freaking mud. He grinned, his hood showing a round oval of his face. Good find, Ruby! How did I miss this?"

Ruby shrugged, grinning too.

How do you think it got here? asked Nathan, his hands back in his pockets.

Someone was trying to get rid of the evidence, said Aaron. That’s the only explanation.

They were silent for a minute, imagining this. Ruby saw a man in a rowboat, holding the gun in his lap and then dropping it into the water, peering over the side of the boat as it sank. What did it look like, the metal falling through the murky water, like a fish? A few summers ago Aaron had caught a shark off the side of their father’s boat—it was a little one, but still about half Ruby’s size at the time. She was leaning over the side of the boat when he reeled it in, and she saw it slowly materialize from the depths, at first just a vague flash of color, then a strange twisting shape, and then slowly, a fish, growing larger and larger, rising headfirst toward the surface. Nathan, leaning over the side with Ruby, yelled, It’s a shark! It’s a shark! and Abe, who was lying back in the rubber dinghy, tied to the boat and trailing behind it, shot up immediately and yelled, Pull me in! Pull me in! When the shark came up from the water, and Aaron was holding the line high so the slick body flopped helplessly, their father laughed at Abe, saying, Look, he’s just a little baby shark. But Ruby had agreed with Abe, there was danger about the shark, even after Aaron laid it out on the deck and took the line from its mouth. She never took her eyes off of it, and when Aaron leaned over the side to release it, Ruby leaned out too. As she watched the shark disappear into the depths, becoming once more just a wave of color and then nothing, she felt a sense of relief and of sadness.

Now, each of them was looking at the gun in Aaron’s hands.

Oh, this is so cool, said Aaron. He raised it toward the opposite shore, aiming it as if he might be able to spot a target, a tin can to shoot at all the way from here. Wow—he wriggled his face free from the hood—it’s so heavy when you hold it up like this.

Let me try, Nathan demanded, but Aaron said, Hold on. Ruby could see his face forming into its concentration pose.

Ruby heard her father’s words, not even in jest. Aaron! she said, and the sound of her voice surprised her, high-pitched and whiny, a tone she hated.

What? He lowered the gun and passed it to Nathan.

Nathan raised his arm to aim, and it made Ruby even more uneasy: gentle Nathan pointing a gun. This was wrong, she felt suddenly with certainty; she should not have pried this thing from the ground. Nathan was smiling. Cool.

She tried to make her voice low and strong. "Come on, you guys, just…just give it back."

"What are you going to do with it?" said Aaron.

I found it, she said, and then couldn’t stop the next words from rushing out. It’s mine.

They all looked at her. Nathan lowered the gun. Aaron shook his head, then reached out and took it back from him. He raised it again and aimed at the horizon as he spoke, his back to her. "Sorry, Rube, you’re just too