The morning my wife’s hair began to fall out, Chloe was in the bathroom with her. Our daughter  was sitting on the closed toilet watching her mother brush her hair, whispering the word “Mississippi” with her small breath as she gauged the cadence of each stroke. Chloe noticed it first.

“Mommy,” she had giggled, “don’t brush so hard. You’re snowing.” 

They hadn’t noticed me, leaning there against the bathroom door jamb. I had loved watching them together, stealing their private everyday moments. The bad dreams I had only heard my wife soothe from the warmth of our bed because I was too tired to get up. The strings of Christmas lights snaked like cheap fallen stars on the rug of our darkened front room because Chloe and she had insisted every branch of the tree be wrapped in tiny light.   

But not that morning. 

We had been warned because doctors are good at warning. We had told Chloe about what might happen, had showed her the sycamores in our front yard that October. We stood with her in the faint Los Angeles chill while she looked up at the near naked branches, at the leaves that had grown fragile and brown and ready for the wind.

“But Mommy’s not a tree,” she had said.

No. Mommy’s not a tree. Mommy’s like the weather. And I couldn’t breathe that morning because Mommy was snowing. 

That had been the end of it. The end of doctors and their roulette game of prognosis, their too quick blades and rounds of orange melted popsicle poison. 

“I can’t do it anymore, Brian,” my wife had said. Steady. God, she was so steady when she’d said it. “It’s my body. And I’m done with this shit.” Chloe was crouched on the bathroom floor swirling her mother’s fallen tresses into a nest only worthy of crows. 

“I get it,” I had managed to say. But only barely. The words had ridden up over the fist in my throat.

“Jesus, Brian. Please don’t cry. If you cry—” 

We lost our families too that morning, although that was a slower train coming. They had hated all our choices, all our stupid, liberal LA actor-like choices. Homebirth, family bed. We had lost my wife’s mother when we had refused to get Chloe vaccinated. My mother tapped out when she came to Chloe’s fifth birthday party, watching in horror when Chloe slipped into my wife’s lap and pulled out a breast and began nursing. She had left with the candles on the vegan cake still lit. 

Convincing my wife of the practicality of a double mastectomy had taken every ace I had. But the oncologist had refused to do it if we didn’t agree to a full round of chemo. We. My fear had made it we. It should have been her all along. I had fallen in love with her fierceness and strength. I had to fall in love with those qualities all over again that false winter morning. 

I watched her late into the night while she trolled the internet for every alternative cancer therapy blog she could find. Listened to her tout the recuperative punch of cold-pressed juicing and tissue alkalinity. I had no idea how she was going to beat stage three with nothing but garnish in her system. She doubled her hot box yoga, joined a raw foodist survivors group in West Hollywood. Marveled as she spoke with fluency about white cells and T-cells and the nuclear fear C-cells had of green lights and unshakable intentions. She turned me. She won me. She had been right all along. Her doctor had given her four months after her initial diagnosis. She had lasted two years.

Chloe was sleeping with her mother’s thermos when my phone rang. I didn’t have to look at the caller ID to know who it was. The correctness of the ring was enough of a clue. My sister was calling and I knew what she calling about. She was campaigning for closure. Not my closure. Her closure. Other people’s closure. After our last choice of refusing traditional cancer therapy I had heard very little from her. That had been hard for me. My sister had been my only ally growing up. She had been the metronome that marked what little normalcy we’d had during our parent’s furious divorce. She’d baked me crappy devil’s food cakes in her EasyBake oven on the shag carpeting of her room when our parent’s raised voiced breached the dry wall. When our dad moved out she made sure I went to bed after watching Night Gallery. She made the dinners, did the dishes.With a cup of weak coffee and a PopTart, she had braved the stale mornings of our mother’s room when our mom was too depressed to get up for work. So it hurt. I needed her. I knew I was in trouble. But I couldn’t answer that phone because I knew where talking to her would lead. 

Separation. Ceremony. Burial. 

She didn’t know where my wife’s ashes were reposing. She would have hated me for that. A thing like a loved one’s ashes in a kitschy child’s thermos was simply not done. And I didn’t have the courage to tell her that Chloe’s hot dreamy hug was the closest to a formal interment my wife was likely to get. 

After the phone stopped ringing I heard the chime that meant I had a message. At least I had that to look forward to. The house was cold, dark in a way that was new. I didn’t want to name the newness. That would be too much. So I walked down the hall to check on Chloe. I pushed open her door. The pie-shaped light wedged into the room, weak from the single bulb in the vintage chandelier. It was a sanctuary light from 1910, rescued from a demo-ed church in Los Feliz we had bought at an estate sale. It was meant to be dim, meant to burn all the time. Even when whispered prayers grew dim. I had been a stranger in this house before. What married man who has foolishly, wastefully argued with his wife or worried about mortgage and utility bills hadn’t? But I was on the surface of the moon. My daughter’s room seemed my only beacon. But I couldn’t go in. Not yet. Not like a thief. 

I backed down the hall and stood in the dark front room. The light from the street lamp drifted through the arched stained glass windows that fronted the house. She had loved that street lamp, had loved how it bloomed to life every night, silently, almost sentiently, like it could sense the coming darkness. It was old, as old as our stone house, planted there two years before the Great Depression when our house was still cradled in walnut groves and the street was mere gravel. I could see our wood burning fireplace in the gloom, smell the ghost of still-sweet smoke that drifted out of it. The built in book shelves lined with titles too dark to read. The vintage barrel backed chairs, the Limbert table we’d paid too much for when Arts and Crafts furniture was still at a premium. It was the only craftsman piece we had left. We’d sold all the rest when our first equity line of credit had run out. She hadn’t minded. The heavy mission style furniture had been too heavy for the house she had said. The whimsy of French Baroque had been her style. Hollywood regency. All the furniture now had ceded its sharp Stickley edges to the floral curves and ormolu legs of the silent film era. The sconces over our fireplace had come from the Hollwood Paladium before the tear down. I had gotten them for song. Stripped the grey primer down to the antique gold of the cast brass and put flame shaped bulbs in the candle-like sockets. She had loved them. That’s what the room needs, she had said. Some of you. Some of me. How had the house forgotten her already? How was it so silent on the subject of her? I could feel my breathing ramping, feel the familiar fist in my throat. How the hell was I going to fill this room with Christmases and bright summer days? How was I going to open all the doors again and let  in the the hot hazy Los Angeles afternoons, the hard sweet sudden winter rains? I wept as quietly as I could, standing there with my shoes barely beneath me in the silent half dark of a familiar room it would take all of me to re-invent. To feel was home once again. 

But I wouldn’t leave it. I would let it rattle me, seep into me, haunt me but also remind me, complete me, show me what to do next. I sniffed hard. Wiped my tears from my cheeks.

“Fuck,” I whispered out loud to myself. I had to stop. Tears have endless children. If you let one in they all will follow. Stop it. Breathe. You know this room. And it knows you. Get present. That’s what she would have said. Be with me, Brian. Here and now. 

I don’t know why, maybe it was obvious in some latent function of my brain, but I checked my phone. Two messages. When had I gotten the second one? The phone numbers were as I expected. I took a deep breathe and got ready to stomach my sister’s well reasoned and long winded scold.

It wasn’t my sister. It was her husband, Carl. 

I liked Carl. I liked the way he had smirked when my sister had sent him a typed letter via snail mail that outlined what flowers she would appreciate receiving now that they were  officially dating. I liked him when he asked me about what engagement ring he should choose before he popped my sister the question.

Anything nauseatingly traditional and just shy of over kill, I’d said. 

The Hope diamond, he had chuckled. 

Anything from Queen Elizabeth’s coronation crown would suffice, I had quipped. 

We had laughed but we both knew we weren’t kidding. Carl was a big man. Linebacker big which might have accounted for his confidence. But I never could quite figure out where his sweetness came from. He could both afford and handle my sister. He could handle her because he was a cagey E and O lawyer whose shy smile and deft humor socially was in marked variance to the bad news he always brought professionally. He could handle her because he understood  the wobbly upbringing that had made her grow up way too fast. He was the dictionary definition of a good guy. Solid and dependable but still easy and slyly self effacing. He didn’t care that our whole family had voted for Obama when he hadn’t. Just like be barely blinked when my sister revealed she was thirty-eight the night before she married him. 

“Hey buddy, it’s Carl,” his message began in his slightly halting but deep baritone. “Just thought I give a ring and check up on you. I know this is a perfectly shit time for you. But I just wanted you to know I’ve been thinking thinking about and Chloe so if you need anything—” His message trailed off, his tonal quality becoming less formal when he spoke again. Was he dodging my sister’s ear shot? “Listen, Bri. I know your sister might think this is inappropriate but I just wanted to share a little something I came across the other day.” There was slight fumbling, the crackling of paper. “Oh shit.” My phone beeped, cutting him off. I pressed the other message.

“Hey, sorry. I’ll make this quick. I found this in an old TV guide, Scott Baio on the cover. Or some one. Anyway listen to this. I thought this was nice.” His deep voice became slightly declamatory as he began to read. “ ‘Tonight at eight, pacific standard, Mega Girl takes on the Russian mafia, plot, plot, plot. Here it is. ‘...A sexy and athletic innocence whose winning homespun charm does much to augment the sometimes cheesy escapist fun’.” There was a pause  on his end as he waited for me to make sense of what he had just read into my voice mail. “That’s all about your wife, pal. They said all those nice things all about your wife. I thought that was something.” 

Next Chapter: Spooky Action At A Distance