Hazel
2012
There was no Summoning.
No lightning bolt zapped down her spine.
When it happened, Hazel was sorting laundry with the TV on mute. As she folded Alma’s school uniform, Luis’s boxer shorts, her own tattered bras, Hazel felt nothing. No heart-stopping pain, no flare of worry. She tucked Mattie’s socks into colorful little bundles as the television played an ad for a stationary bike. A sponge that washed itself. Auto insurance.
*
Hazel was crouched in the garden the next morning, her hands full of milkweed stems, when Luis appeared on the back porch. He was wearing his Saturday sweatpants and waving her phone in the air.
“Hazel,” he said. “Your mom’s called like six times.”
The dread was acerbic, her body’s primitive preparation. Her mother never called more than once—usually, she left a cheery voicemail. Her parents were getting old. Maybe someone had taken a fall. As she dialed her mother back, Hazel wiped her sweaty brow with a forearm. The ringing clicked into a gasping sob.
“Mom,” she begged, gut plunging. “Mom, please, what happened?”
“Oh, honey,” her mother heaved. “It’s Jenny. She’s dead.”
Hazel’s vision, half gone.
“Ansel. They have him in custody. She was at the apartment—a kitchen knife—”
Hazel did not recognize the wail that came from her own throat. It broke up and through her, visceral, a level of pain that had been waiting in her depths, unpossessed. Luis hovered as Hazel slumped to the burning wood of the porch. Her mother’s voice echoed tinny from the phone, which she’d hurled across the deck, now splayed ten feet away. Hazel stared at a spiderweb on the leg of the porch chair, grasping; the web was silky and translucent, a single fly swaddled motionless in the center.
Time warped. It stretched, faded. Morning churned into afternoon, stammering spurts of surreal minutes that constricted in Hazel’s throat like balloons. The body, Luis was saying on the phone with her father. An arrest. The hours passed, shell-shocked, incoherent.
The only person Hazel wished to call with the news was Jenny herself. Jenny would answer with a perky hello, chipper as she had been these last months in Texas. I met someone, she’d told Hazel, giddy. He’s a surgical nurse, and he’s so sweet. He cooks me dinner, we watch TV. You’ll meet him when you’re here. Hazel had been planning to visit with Alma for Thanksgiving—she’d booked the flights already. Now, she thought of Jenny’s earlobes, fuzzed and smooth. Her sister’s fingernails, ragged at the cuticles.
*
Grief was a hole. A portal to nothing. Grief was a walk so long Hazel forgot her own legs. It was a shock of blinding sun. A burst of remembering: sandals on pavement, a sleepy back seat, nails painted on the bathroom floor. Grief was a loneliness that felt like a planet.
*
Four days later, Hazel stood in her parents’ kitchen, surrounded by cold casserole dishes and distant voices. The afternoon had faded to a gloomy night, and the post-funeral reception was cast in the haze that had spread across everything, a scrim of white filmed over a pond.
Hazel had refused to wear black. She’d dug through the back of her closet instead, until she found the cotton dress she’d been gifted that long-ago Christmas. Heather gray to Jenny’s olive green. The service had been impersonal, almost offensively forgettable: Hazel had sat with her parents in the front pew of the church they’d attended maybe twice, while a priest made vague concessions to Jenny’s excellent character. Hazel had marched dutifully to the cemetery, where the coffin had been lowered slowly into the ground as the sky threatened release. Hours later, she still clenched the memorial program in her sweaty palm—a folded sheet of paper with Jenny’s photo plastered across the front, printed cheap in grayscale. Jenny perched on the edge of the living room couch, hands cupping her chin, her smile luminous, young and hopeful. On Jenny’s finger, that awful purple ring, winking coy at the camera.
“We can leave, if you want,” Luis said, a hand pressed to Hazel’s back as he passed her another paper cup of coffee.
Around them, neighbors gawked. Aunts and uncles hugged Hazel with spidery arms, murmuring apology. Most of these people had come purely for the spectacle—Hazel knew this was the worst and most interesting thing that had ever happened to their cul-de-sac, to her father’s colleagues, to the women from her mother’s swim aerobics class. They approached Hazel warily, a steady line. I’m sorry for your loss. The phrase felt blank and lifeless, like her loss was a cell phone left on the seat of a taxi.