Appetite

Desmond turns to us as we watch television and says, “I want another cat.” His lengthy eleven-year-old body reclines on our worn leather couch, hands clasped behind his head, his elbows spread like wings. After three days, his crying has subsided, and his confident expression suggests he has solved a problem.

“Chakra’s body’s not even cold yet,” his dad snaps.

 Lee’s response surprises me, reminiscent of the therapist telling us it was too soon to think about having another baby a few weeks after Riley died, when we mentioned it in a session. It pissed us off, and we didn’t listen to her. Desmond wants to create hope and bring new joy into his life, like we did after his brother’s death. And a cat is easier to acquire than a baby. No fertility issues to deal with. This I can do for him and Lee. I know my husband, and he just doesn’t realize he wants another cat yet.

Desmond researches cats and breeders. He sends texts and emails. We find a breeder we like (the least strange) and pay the deposit. New hope created with a Venmo payment, like a reservation made at a favorite restaurant that momentarily staves off craving.

The night Chakra died, we huddled around our placid eighteen-year-old cat. Her calico fur still appeared shiny as a kitten. She lay limp in the empty space below our recliner with her tongue hanging out, panting. Desmond yelled, “Chakra, don’t die!” and her paw jerked towards him as if she was coming back into her body. His face contorted with grief in a familiar way as he tried to hold back tears.

It reminded me of the night Riley died. Before the ambulance arrived, I hovered over Riley and yelled,” Riley, don’t leave me!” His arms reached out to hug me, but I could not find him in his eyes, like his spirit had backed through the veil covering the black hole of unknown where we imagine the dead go.

“I thought you’d be a mess when Chakra died,” Lee says.

“Me too. Maybe it hasn’t hit me yet,” I say, even though I know it’s not true. I was sad, but I wasn’t going to break down. What’s the point? The grief doesn’t go away. Crying won’t bring back the dead or diminish the loss.

Chakra had started walking toward me that night, when her whole body tightened and her leg froze mid-walk as if someone pushed the pause button. Until then, Lee had remained unrealistically optimistic that she was fine. Desmond had noticed her malaise first when she didn’t greet us at the door and he found her on the pillow in our bedroom with a sticky substance below her mouth. At first, he thought she had eaten some of his hair gel he dropped on the ground on the way out the door. Later we found out it was from heart failure.

“This is my first experience with grief,” Desmond says, wailing into the bathroom where I apply makeup.  

I try not to react to the gut punch.

“I don’t remember Riley dying,” he adds, even though I don’t ask. Desmond was only two years old when his six-year-old brother died from an AVM brain hemorrhage. We were told, more than once, that when Desmond turned five, his memories of his brother would fade. Up until that age, he remembered everything. I am grateful he doesn’t remember his young grief. That he doesn’t remember asking, “Where’s Bubba?” when his brother was gone. I am grateful he doesn’t remember chanting “Me first,” for his morning juice, the days following his death, usurping his brother’s coveted, empty chair.

Now, you will always be first, I thought, but not the way you wanted it—though his appetite, unlike mine, remained undimmed. 

I’m not grateful he has forgotten playing chess and light sabers with Riley after he died. “It’s Riley…he’s really here!” he’d insist. I wish he remembered Riley visiting him in his dreams. “Riley jumped on the bed with me last night,” he’d say, waddling out in his blue sleep sack with a pacifier dangling from his mouth. “Riley is sitting next to me. He wants juice first too.”

 After Riley’s death, Desmond resurrected Riley in a way we couldn’t. We indulged in the magical thinking that somehow Desmond was connecting with his brother, because he was closer to the veil. I’ve read that children are closer to the other side. I like to think it’s true.

I watched Desmond wail off and on for days after Chakra died, his eyes red and swollen as he sulked on the couch with a tissue box instead of his beloved cat. But I felt numb to his crying. I knew I appeared callous and hardened. I felt like stone. It was like I had built a dam to impede the never-ending river of grief. I didn’t want to let Desmond’s grief in for fear of a breach, and unleashing of its power.

Desmond walked into our bathroom while I smoothed concealer onto my dark circles. He groaned, “I hate crying. How did you deal with grief when Riley died?”  His glasses were off and he had more freckles than I remembered. He held a wad of tissues and leaned against the counter like he didn’t have the energy to stand.

 In the early days after Riley died, I sat in front of this same lit mirror, one day at a time, applying makeup. A woman in my writing class asked, “How do you even put on makeup or get pedicures? If my son died…”

 I was too grief-wrecked to muster a response. I remember thinking, You don’t know what you would do. I still have to get out of bed and take care of my living son. Do I have to look like shit because I have a dead son? Now, I wish I had said something sarcastic like, You won’t believe it but painting my toenails and putting mascara on makes me totally forget my son!

“I wrote poems,” I told Desmond, “And took care of you. I still had you and your dad.”

“Well, at least you’ll get a poem out of Chakra dying…you got that going for you,” he laughed.

“Maybe you should write a poem about Chakra. Write down your favorite memories…if you want.”

“Naw,” he said, “No thanks.” I remember he doesn’t share my appetite for the written word. Sports are his thing.

Driving home from Ventura with our new kitten, I am nervous and excited as we ride on the curvy highway alongside the rolling ocean waves. “The sky is extra blue,” Desmond declares.

I try not to look, both my hands gripping the steering wheel on the one lane highway. My Prius feels unsafe for new life, and I think about Lee’s running joke, “You need to get rid of that lawnmower you drive.” Maybe he’s right, but it’s been so reliable. It was the car I had when Riley was born.

“You know who’s going to love this cat the most?” I ask. “Me,” Desmond replies.

“No,” I say. “Your father.” He thinks he doesn’t want a cat, but I know he does…the same way I know he’ll be hungry twenty minutes after I am.

Cut to, “Who’s my good kitty? You are! Who’s the best kitty ever?” Lee says, reminiscent of the way he used to talk to Riley when he was a baby.

“You totally called it,” Desmond says.

Lee bends over and scoops her up. He’s wearing a grey robe I purchased for him, because of his complaints of being cold and turning the thermostat too high. He holds her on his shoulder like he’s about to burp her. She nestles into the robe’s shearling.

I did call it. I am right that he would love her the most. But what I didn’t foresee was that it would trigger a longing I couldn’t fulfill. He looks into my eyes with excess love—too much for me, Desmond, and this tiny cat. Before he says the words, I know what he is thinking, and the scent of baby wipes wafts through my brain. “I want a baby,” Lee says.

I look at the rug he stands on, once covered with Legos, superhero figurines, and other toys. It is now bare except for a yoga mat and bolster.

Ugh, I think. I thought we were done years ago with this. Short of using an egg donor, I did everything I could for three years after Riley died, to give him another baby. Once, during a consultation, a fertility therapist asked, “Would you consider using an egg donor? If you would, I can almost guarantee you that you would have another baby.” Lee’s face brightened.

I didn’t have to think before I responded, “No. You can almost guarantee that he would have another baby, but not me,” I said. “It wouldn’t be a level playing field.” She looked appalled by my response, and lectured me about how it would be my baby too…it would grow in my womb. I could pick someone who looked like me. It just wouldn’t be my biological child.

“Maybe if we used a sperm donor too,” I said, feeling selfish, but also knowing my capacity for bitterness. It would feel like settling. And in those future moments of frustration with motherhood, I could envision yelling, “It’s your child, not mine!” I know I would think it. I was sure it would ruin our marriage.

Neither of us felt like adoption was a good option for us, so after the sole frozen embryo didn’t take, I was done. I thought Lee was too, but whereas appetite is rational—we need it to survive—longing is not. I had the fleeting thought I know many couples have after losing a child. Maybe we shouldn’t have stayed together. Maybe he would be happier if he remarried and had more children. I heard somewhere, after Riley died, that eighty percent of couples who lost a child divorced. Later, I was told that it was a myth and the divorce rate is only fourteen percent. I have a feeling it’s somewhere in between.

I didn’t anticipate how it would feel having a kitten—the tiny and fragile being in our house. She feels like a cloud in my arms, as if she could float away or dissipate. “I love her so much. I don’t want her to die,” Desmond says.  

I lay awake at night worrying if she’s breathing like when the boys were infants. By bringing her into our lives, we have created hope, but also the risk of loss and heartbreak. 

“I don’t remember worrying about Chakra at all when she was a kitten,” I tell Lee. “We didn’t have a kitty playpen for her…we’d just let her roam.”

“We were just stupid kids then,” he says.

I see the younger us in our beach cottage on Walnut. My straight, blond hair tucked behind my ear. Lee’s dark facial hair shaved into a goatee, no trace of gray in either of us. I open the door for the pizza delivery guy and Chakra peers through my legs. “She’s so cute and little,” he says.

I laugh, giddy on too much red wine. Later that night, we’ll eat pink frosted cookies, stay up way too late, and try to get pregnant.

“Yes,” I agree, thinking about how we finally had Riley a few years later. Slightly older, no less dumb. And now this kitten in our middle-age, the sunlight shining on her fur and our undimmed appetite for life.

-Chanel Brenner

Chanel Brenner is the author of Vanilla Milk: a memoir told in poems, (Silver Birch Press, 2014), which was a finalist for the 2016 Independent Book Awards and honorable mention in the 2014 Eric Hoffer awards. Her work has appeared in The Good Men Project, New Ohio Review, Modern Loss, Poet Lore, Rattle, Barrow Street, Salamander, Spoon River Poetry Review, Literary Mama, and others. Her poem, “July 28th” won first prize in The Write Place At the Write Time’s contest, judged by Ellen Bass, and her poem, “Apology,” won first place in the Smartish Pace Beullah Rose Poetry Prize. In 2018, she was nominated for a Best of the Net.