Living here is a bit like inhabiting a Cheever story. The electricity of summer storms. The audible glee rising up over the community pool down the road. The cloak of suburbia (minus the alcoholism and bewildered regret). But there’s something to the quality of this Eastern air and the way it settles, thick, on your skin. It’s not “home,” but it induces nostalgia. In this case, for stories read and underlined a long time ago, for another lifetime of my own. I went to college in Boston, I lived in New York City for two years and change afterward. I am not a novice on this coast. But now a decade has past. I’ve gone off and written about other places, I’ve met my husband, we got a dog long before I thought we would because we lost our baby boy. Now, we have our daughter.

 

June 2 marks two years since holding Lorenzo. It does not get easier or better (better for whom? I always want to ask). Something about it grows milder, I’ll say, like a burn’s metamorphosis into blister, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t crying my heart out two weeks ago with my grief group. Four of us, who have only known each other in the common struggle we’ve communicated over the phone and online over the past year, finally met face to face. We spent a weekend talking about our babies as fluidly as I ever have, their names and stories weaving in and out of the conversation with the facts of our lives. Only now, face to face, did we inquire about our jobs and how we met our husbands and where we went to school. None of that has mattered as we’ve grieved together and as all of us, it has turned out, have lost more than once. Our babies, strictly, have mattered. Together, we could experience the refreshing absence of speed bumps when our grief did resurface in the conversation. There was no sense that we should wrap it up. No shock over hearing how we all wished we had held our babies longer. Seeing only beauty in the photos we shared. Our babies, ourselves, truly seen.

 

Last year, I was hesitant to wonder about what would transpire between the first June 2 without Lorenzo and this, the second one. I was hesitant to hope. But here H. is. Strong and full of smiles. Rolling over and shaking rattles and finding her toes. Resembling her father, but also his father, another person who is gone. Spending time with her has filled the part of me that cracked open and ran dry. I watch as her personality emerges, her happiness and preferences already so distinct. She loves it when I sing. Shocking, as my voice is terrible, but she doesn’t know that yet. She can’t judge. She is simply soothed by the voice she heard first and the music her father plays. And so I sing, making up songs like I did for Ruby when we first brought her home and she cast an unfadeable light on those dark days.

 

Two years into this marathon, I know that rituals also cast a light. Taking Ruby to the park. Writing on the page and in the sand. Posting hearts. Opening a memory box and then tying its dark green ribbon closed again. Until now, I’ve always walked where at some point in some way, Lorenzo walked with me, too. I miss that terrain. But here are new paths to chart with Ryan and H. and Ruby in this different yet familiar weather. Thankfully, there are always new hearts to find.

 

“It would storm. The stand of cumulus cloud—that city—had risen and darkened, and while he sat there he heard the percussiveness of thunder again. The de Haviland trainer was still circling overhead and it seemed to Ned that he could almost hear the pilot laugh with pleasure in the afternoon; but when there was another peal of thunder he took off for home. A train whistle blew and he wondered what time it had gotten to be. Four? Five? He thought of the provincial station at that hour, where a waiter, his tuxedo concealed by a raincoat, a dwarf with some flowers wrapped in newspaper, and a woman who had been crying would be waiting for the local. It was suddenly growing dark; it was that moment when the pin-headed birds seem to organize their song into some acute and knowledgeable recognition of the storm’s approach. Then there was a fine noise of rushing water from the crown of an oak at his back, as if a spigot there had been turned. Then the noise of fountains came from the crowns of all the tall trees. Why did he love storms, what was the meaning of his excitement when the door sprang open and the rain wind fled rudely up stairs, why had the simple task, of shutting the windows of an old house seemed fitting and urgent, why did the first watery notes of a storm wind have for him the unmistakeable sound of good news, cheer, glad things? Then there was an explosion, a smell of cordite, and rain lashed the Japanese lanterns that Mrs. Levy had bought in Kyoto the year before last or was it the year before that?” — “The Swimmer” by John Cheever