Page 6 of On Fire Island

When the elevator opened on our floor, my formidable cousin Shirley blocked them in the hallway like a linebacker. She was carrying a traditional tin wash cup and bowl that, along with her accent, resembled an artifact from a Polish shtetl. Ben tried to avoid her, but even he didn’t have a chance.

“You must not enter the house until you have washed your hands,” she insisted. “You cannot bring death into the house!”

He made two fists, pulled them to his chest, and pushed past her. He wanted to keep my death with him. I worried he may never wash again. The others consoled Shirley and apologized for Ben’s behavior. They all washed their hands. Twice.

Ben entered the apartment and grimaced at the covered mirrors and traditional low mourners’ chairs. My great-uncle Morris saw Ben’s bothered reaction and approached him.

“Benjamin, if there is anything I am sure of in this world or the next, it is that Jewish practices of mourning are invaluable. If you follow them, they will help you get through this.”

Morris mistook Ben’s blank stare for interest and launched into a lengthy explanation of each detail. I knew better. When he finished, Ben asked the question that had clearly been plaguing him since he walked through the door.

“Where’s my dog?”

Uncle Morris smiled. “In your bedroom.” He placed a loving hand on Ben’s shoulder. “I’m sure Sally will say all the right things.”

As Ben shut our bedroom door behind him, Sally, our sixty-pound bordoodle, jumped him and cried as if she knew what had happened. Ben locked the door and lay on the bed. Sally snuggled next to him, her head in his lap. I’ve never been so thankful for rescuing that dog as I was on that day. I immediately pardoned her for the Manolo Blahnik incident in exchange for Ben not having to be alone.

He reached over for my pillow and placed it over his face. At first I worried he was trying to off himself, but as he took long deep breaths through his nose, I realized it was infinitely sadder. He was inhaling my scent. He sat up abruptly, his eyes fresh with panic as he pulled off the pillowcase and folded it up as compactly as possible. Sally followed him to the surprisingly empty kitchen, where he walked over to the cabinet that housed the ziplock bags. He removed a large one and squeezed in the pillowcase, sealing it to protect my smell from fading. The ziplocks sat next to the poop bags, prompting Sally to wag her tail in anticipation of a walk. Ben smiled at her, a real smile that seemed to come with a cartoonlike light bulb overhead. He grabbed the Fire Island Ferries schedule taped to the fridge and shoved it and the pillowcase in his pockets. He clipped on Sally’s leash and took a deep, cleansing breath for strength. In the kitchen doorway his gaze went from the front door to my family to the yet-to-be-lit yahrzeit candle onthe entranceway credenza. The Rabbi’s words, “This candle will light the way for Julia’s soul,” ran through his mind. He suddenly wondered if the things the Rabbi had been filling my head with for months were more than mere words to ease my fears. He wondered if I was with him.

I wished so much that he believed. I’d explained to him many times over the past few months that death was not the end, that my soul would not perish with me but live on eternally. I even asked him to join me and the Rabbi on occasion to hear her expertise on the Kabbalah, the afterlife, and death itself, firsthand. It made me much less fearful of dying, and I knew it could make him less fearful of losing me. After a while, I stopped talking about it. He wasn’t a believer, and I needed to be all in. I was determined that, when the time came, I would not go kicking and screaming but in fact go gently into that good night. This is not to say I didn’t try to live; God knows I tried to live. But when there was no possibility of doing so, I wanted to leave in peace.

Ben now found himself praying that it was all true. He decided he couldn’t risk taking off without the yet-to-be-lit candle, if so, possibly leaving me behind. He waited for a heated discussion among my family members to distract them, which took all of two minutes, slipped the candle under his suit jacket, and left, mumbling “Walking the dog,” to anyone who may have been listening. As he exited through the revolving door of the lobby downstairs, he anticipated being weighed down by the afternoon heat, but he felt immediately lighter. He hurried to the corner, turned, and headed for our parking garage, where he officially became...

The Shiva Fugitive.

four

The Pretty Way

Rush hour had already begun when Ben escaped the city. Between the gridlock and having to pull over on account of not being able to see through his tears, there was no way that the Shiva Fugitive was catching the four o’clock ferry. As he usually did when he realized we weren’t making the boat, Ben took an alternate route out east, the “pretty way,” as we had taken to calling it.

The pretty way, a two-lane highway called the Robert Moses Causeway, is a bucolic slip of mid–Long Island road flanked by the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Great South Bay on the other. If you were dropped there from above, you would probably guess you were somewhere on the coast of California or the Florida Keys. Long Island often gets a bad rap—people think of strip malls and endless traffic, but parts of it are breathtaking. Driving this length of road offers the opposite aesthetic to sitting in traffic on the Long Island Expressway, plus it had the added benefit of not passing the cemetery again. I pictured him seeing the exit and pitching a tent next to my freshly dug grave.

An archipelago of tiny islands appeared on the bay side dottedwith quaint cottages where residents travel to and fro on motorboats. On the ocean side, the Atlantic peeked out between breaks in the beachgrass-covered dunes. Each glimpse of the sea took your breath away, again and again and yet again.

In normal times, we would open all the windows, allowing the week’s tension to be washed away by the cross breezes of the ocean and the bay, but these were not normal times. I wished Ben would at least crack his window, but he seemed dead set on not breaking the seal of grief.

With hours until the next ferry, and an overwhelming desire not to interact with other humans, Ben pulled the car off the road and onto the dunes, where he sat and watched the waves lapping the shore. Like the sea air, the ebb and flow and ebb and flow of the ocean usually took away his stresses, but short of a tsunami, there was no wave big enough to accomplish that today.

I watched Ben and Sally and the waves for a bit, and found myself wishing that things had been different between us. While I was grateful that we had spent so much time together—especially considering the hard stop that my death brought to the relationship, I sometimes wished that I hadn’t been Ben’s editor. While it had been a beautiful and very successful partnership, Ben would now lose his wife and his editor in one fell swoop. Either on its own would have been hard enough for him to bear; together, he was completely lost. He was supposed to turn in a new book proposal in the fall, the third in a three-book deal. Looking at him now, that seemed like an impossibility.

I thought about how different we might have been if Ben hadn’t given up his reporting job to become a full-time novelist. If he had been following a busy schedule of sporting events, prioritizing “the game” over birthdays, anniversaries, and even Thanksgiving, we would have been an entirely different type of pair. Ihad always looked at those “we have separate lives” couples with curiosity—the ones you find at cocktail parties standing at opposite ends of the room, deep into tales of their individuality. Ben and I stood so close to each other at cocktail parties that we may as well have been one person. In the spirit of the original celebrity super couples like Brangelina and Tomkat our host would often introduce us as Benlia, and we would all laugh about it. It wasn’t funny now. It had been years since either of us had spent a night apart. Even when I was in the hospital, he never left my side. I was frightened for him.

Ben let out a guttural sigh. Sally whimpered in response, and I decided I needed a break. I bailed and headed to the 4:00 p.m. ferry without them. It was selfish on my part, but hey, you only die once.

five

The Usual Suspects

People sometimes asked me why we put down roots on a barrier island where the threat of “one big wave” always loomed large, and I usually just smiled and shrugged, not wanting to reveal the secret. It’s not the beauty of knowing that the ocean is just mere steps away from wherever you are, or the benefit of living sans cars and therefore without traffic and pollution. It’s not the sound of the noon siren that reminds you to head to the market to pick up lunch, or the charm of the familiar scene when you get there. It’s not the fountain of youth effect that being surrounded by water seems to imbue, or how the minute you set foot on the ferry the weight of the world wafts away in the summer wind. And it’s not the sunsets over the bay, or the anglers lined up in the morning surf, or the fawns that dutifully follow their mamas across the ball field. The secret, the real secret of what makes this narrow barrier island so special, is the people.

Fire Island is a haven for warm souls and mismatched pairs, for neighbors, lovers, and kooks, and kook-loving neighbors. It’s a community of people who spend the winter dreaming of their return. If you were lucky enough to have been born to it, odds areyou would find its sand between your toes for the rest of your days. And if you came upon it through your own volition, as I did, your odds could be similar. It was a magical place, and if you believed in it, if you felt the magic, you could become a lifer as well.

I really never thought I would see it all again, and as I arrived at the ferry terminal—nothing more than a parking lot, a ticket booth, and snack counter—I nearly kissed the ground.

There was a small crowd waiting for the boat, many of whom looked as if they had come straight from my funeral. An interesting selection of the usual suspects. I scanned the group and homed in on Pam and Andie and baby Oliver. I had yet to get a good look at him. I peeked into his carriage but could barely see him bundled up under a hat and blanket. Even though they had him dressed for winter in June, I knew they would both be great moms. They had so much love to share.

Pam and Andie had known each other forever, literally forever, but only became a couple about six years back. Their coming-out trajectories were very dissimilar. Andie could barely remember a time that she didn’t know she liked girls, changing her name from Andrea to Andie sometime in the fifth grade, while Pam got with every guy she could straight through college. She joked that she was a bit of a slut, but in the end she was just trying to feel something, anything, which she didn’t until the first time Andie kissed her.

---