The Buffalo Soldier Read Online Free PDF

would pause before the images as she'd pass by them in the hallway or the kitchen, and grow oblivious to the grilled cheese that was burning on the stove or the bath that she'd started to run for herself minutes before. She had never actually allowed the water to spill over the sides of the tub, but twice she'd stared for so long at a photograph of the girls in a tree in her mother-in-law's yard that the hot water had run out and her bath had been tepid.
    Now, with the boy up the hill and her husband at deer camp, she sat on the couch beside the sleeping cats and flipped the heavy sheets that held the snapshots of the girls, occasionally dabbing at her nose with a Kleenex.
    SHE UNDERSTOOD THAT everyone responded to personal tragedies in personal ways. She understood firsthand the one universal: Grief comes upon a person in increments. Reality becomes more painful as the magnitude of the loss sets in, and the body slowly emerges from the shock that only briefly envelopes it. Things have to get a lot worse before they get better.
    But a loss this great? There were months when she didn't believe she'd ever get better--and, what was more important for everyone around her, it was clear that she didn't want to.
    For a time, for her, there had been Prozac. And there had been the church, though she wasn't exactly sure there had been God. She was haunted by, among other Sunday-school memories, the Lord God's dictum to Ezekiel that though his wife was about to die, he might sigh, but not aloud, and he should make no mourning for the dead. Still, she had found it helpful to sit with the pastor on weekday mornings before she would go to the animal shelter where she worked. The two of them would find seats in the last pew in the sanctuary, completely alone in the big room, and she would cry and talk and he would listen.
    One time she went to a bereavement group for parents in Burlington, but it had been a long drive for little comfort. She hadn't found it helpful to hear other women--and the group was entirely female--talk about the deaths of other children, and she hadn't returned for a second visit. Certainly some of her friends had tried to be there for her, but without children of her own anymore, her connections to them began to fray: She would never see these other women at the weekly Girl Scout meetings or T-ball practices or the annual "authors" tea at the elementary school. She would never run into them at the kids' swimming lessons or ballet, and there was no longer any need to speak with them to coordinate play dates and sleepovers.
    Besides, she didn't want their sympathy. She wanted only one thing in the world and that was her children, and no one could give her that. And so she retreated completely into a space that consisted only of the animals at the shelter and the work they demanded, her talks with the minister, and her evenings and late afternoons with her husband. She saw nobody else, and for another period after the girls' deaths there had been the rediscovery--the reinvention, actually--of sex with Terry. About six months after the flood, when the days were long and the summer still stretched out before them, she decided to stop taking her antidepressants, and suddenly she and her husband entered a phase in which they were having sex all the time. She was behind it, and that made it even better. She had felt incredibly powerful, because the sex was not for one minute about trying to re-create a family or have another child. They both knew that wasn't going to happen. She'd had her tubes tied when the girls were three, after she and Terry concluded that their particular family unit worked well with four people. There were two grown-ups and there were two girls, and this meant that (as Terry put it, only half-kidding) you could play a man-to-man defense. If they had another child, however, the grown-ups would be outnumbered and reduced to a zone.
    For a while, the sex alone had gotten her through it, and she was doing