What I Loved

apartment. Sometimes she mumbled, "I know I put it somewhere. It was here." But she never named the object. After a while, she would give up, walk to Matthew's room, climb into his bed, and sleep until morning. During the early weeks of her wandering, I spoke to her about it, but after a while, I stopped. There was nothing left to tell her, and my descriptions of her unconscious rummaging only made her suffer more.
    We didn't know how to give him up, how to be. We couldn't find the rhythms of ordinary life. The simple business of waking, retrieving the paper from outside the door, and sitting down to eat breakfast became a cruel pantomime of the everyday enacted in the gaping absence of our son. And although she sat at the table with her bowl of cereal in front of her, Erica couldn't eat. She had never been a big eater, had always been thin, but by the end of the summer she had lost fifteen pounds. Her cheeks sank into her face, and when I sat across from her I could see her skull. I nagged her about eating, but my prompting was halfhearted because I tasted nothing on my plate either and had to force the food into my mouth. Violet was the one who fed us. She started cooking dinner for me and Erica the day after Matt died and didn't stop until well into the fall. In the beginning, she knocked before she entered. After that, we left the door open for her. Every evening, I would hear her steps on the stairs and see her walk in, carrying pans with tinfoil over them. Violet never said much to us in the early days after Matt's death, and her silence was a relief. She would announce the names of the foods— "Lasagna, salad," or "Chicken cutlets with green beans and rice," and then she would plop the plates on the table, uncover them, and dish out the food. By August she was staying to encourage Erica to eat. She cut up her food for her, and while Erica took hesitant bites, Violet massaged her shoulders or stroked her back She touched me, too, but differently. She would grab my upper arm and squeeze it hard—to steady me or shake me, I don't know which.
    We depended on her, and when I think back on it now, I'm aware of how hard she worked. If she and Bill were going out to dinner, she would cook for us anyway and drop off the food. When they vacationed for two weeks in August, she arrived with dinners for our freezer, labeled with the days of the week. She called us every day at ten in the morning from Connecticut to check on us and closed her conversation by saying, "Take out Wednesday right now, and it will be defrosted by dinner time."
    Bill came to us alone. Neither Violet nor Bill ever mentioned it, but I think they did their duties separately rather than together so that Erica and I would have more hours of company. About two weeks after the funeral, Bill brought a watercolor with him that Matt had done during a visit to his studio. It was another cityscape. When Erica saw it, she said to Bill, "I think I'll look at it later, if you don't mind. I can't now. I just can't..." She left us, walked down the hallway, and I heard the sound of our bedroom door closing behind her. Bill pulled up a chair next to mine, placed the watercolor on the coffee table in front of us, and began to talk. "Do you see the wind?" he said.
    I looked down at the scene.
    "Look at these trees pulled hard by the wind and the buildings. The whole city is shaking with it. The picture is trembling. Eleven years old, Leo, and he did this." Bill moved his finger across the images. "Look at this woman collecting cans, and the little girl in the ballerina costume with her mother. Look at this man's body over here, the way he's walking, fighting the wind. And here's Dave feeding Durango ..."
    Through a window I saw the old man. He was bent over toward the floor with a bowl in his hands. Because of his stooped posture, Dave's beard hung away from his body. "Yes," I said. "Dave is always there somewhere."
    "He made this picture for you," Bill said. "It's for you." He picked up the watercolor and put it on my lap. I held it very carefully and studied the street with its people. A plastic bag and a newspaper were flying in the wind near the pavement and then, as I looked up, I noticed a tiny figure on the roof of Dave's building—the outline of a boy.
    Bill pointed at the child. "There's no face on him. Matt told me he wanted it like that..."
    I brought the paper closer to my eyes. "And his feet aren't on the ground," I said slowly. The featureless child