Grandmother Hannah’s ashes weigh 3.6 pounds. I carry them in her I Support Public Television tote bag, waiting for that moment when I unsnap the lid and surrender her remains to a crisp, willing breeze.

Grandmother Hannah’s body was pulled from ground zero after the 9/11 attacks. I’m fortunate to have this closure. Many other families don’t. What have I done to set aside my personal pain in the wake of the greater tragedy? Nothing.  Even my work as a hedge fund director has suffered, and nobody would be less forgiving than my grandmother. She preached personal responsibility from the moment she took me on—or rather over—when I was ten.

Riverside Park is a thin strip along the Hudson. The park of my childhood, when I lived on Amsterdam Avenue with my other grandmother, Nana Cammie. Here, I rolled down grassy inclines, opened my eyes when I bottomed out, and watched the sky swirl around me like my own personal magic trick.

Morning light flatters the grimy river. A cormorant perches on a piling, wet feathers spread wide, its posture still. Yesterday, if someone had asked me what a cormorant was, I would have shrugged. Now, watching it preen, I remember Nana Cammie’s voice in my ear as I bounced in front of the rail, willing myself to be longer so I could reach the marvelous creature showing off its wings.

I should be at work for my performance review. I’m trying to resolve my grief, stride in with proof I put this distraction in the rearview. My assistant, Sylvie, has called five times. Sylvie knows the truth about Grandmother Hannah, that there was never any love between my grandmother and me.

The cormorant’s black wings, two feet long, have a greenish tinge that glistens in the light, same as the water. I could stand at this rail and watch it all day. The Upper West Side feels like a separate island. My loft, in a converted office building off Wall Street, isn’t quite the jewel it was. The hot-metal stench of the fires has burned away the cilia in my nostrils, and the skyline appears in 3D, as sparks and grit are the smoke’s boon companions.

When I lived with Nana Cammie, we walked along this river promenade in good weather or bad. I loved the feel of her hand over mine, rough but not chafing, with veins like trail markers for when my fingers slipped. She believed in the war on poverty, rectifying injustice, and waving placards as she marched. Nana Cammie’s death tossed a grenade into my dead-mother-absent-father hole. Somehow, this space inside me seems larger than my body.

Grandmother Hannah brought me home, reluctant but dutiful. She believed in soldiering through adversity without complaint. She lived by her principles and never grumbled, but she was a bitter soldier, absent of anything resembling peace or joy. My father severed ties with her, too, when he left my mother and me when I was a toddler. A one-way trip to the movies broke three hearts.

Grandmother Hannah worked part-time in the records department at Cantor Fitzgerald, a position I found for her when I worked there myself, before I proved to be my father’s daughter and chased a better title and larger office. Somewhere safe from planes and fire. Whatever her failings, she took me in and I left her behind to die.

I hear an Air Supply medley, the torture tier in my assistant Sylvie’s hierarchy of programmed ringtones. There are emails, too, with the subject lines of “R U Dead?” and “WTF? Review!!!”

Nine weeks ago, on October 11^th, during the one-month memorial vigil, my apartment was robbed. So much for a kinder, gentler city united in grief. The thieves didn’t get much, just some jewelry I never wore and my old work laptop, but Grandmother Hannah’s ashes were moved from the bookshelf to the table. That’s why I carry them with me. How can I leave them vulnerable now?

A group of boys skate up along the path, jump and hook their blades against the rail, and then skate off to repeat this a few yards away. The cormorant squawks and ruffles its feathers before settling down. Those kids should be in school. I want to chase them down and take them there myself, tugging them along by their earlobes until I find the nearest junior high. That tween zone’s all elbows and independence, and I was exactly that age when I went to live with Grandmother Hannah. They were the worst years of my life, yet her commitment to busy fingers and routine served its purpose. She prepared me for corporate life. My current interns could use a dose of her discipline. I can’t imagine them taking anything but the world of food service by storm.

Grandmother Hannah thought my childhood grief was mawkish. I lit votive candles in front of Nana Cammie’s picture and prayed for her resurrection until the light flickered out. The picture on her laminated prayer card was the Perpetual Mother cradling the baby Jesus. I don’t know who picked it, but it was a heartless choice for a mother who outlived two children and left her only grandchild perpetually unmothered. I see a Madonna & child, I am forever ten years old in my rage.

I had a shrine for my father, too. I said Our Fathers because I liked saying the word. I didn’t get to use it much, except to say my father wasn’t around, and I never liked telling that story. Sometimes I said Our Daddys for the same reason, although it always felt wrong. I knew it took more than biology to be a dad. It didn’t matter. Prayer never brought him back, and it wasn’t as if he required a miracle to return.

For Grandmother Hannah, I light no candles, offer no prayers, angry or otherwise. In the absence of tears, there should be something beyond duty to mark her passing. At least the cormorant feels ceremonial. Would Grandmother Hannah consider this sentimental, too? Have I finally learned from her example, or does she feel slighted by my dry eyes? Is she proud or silently raging? I imagine her beside me, standing in a park instead of sitting in the guest chair beside my desk. Affect my work performance? Of course I’m still a chump.

Grandmother Hannah left precise end-of-life instructions. No wake and cremation, which stunned her priest. He insisted she would never go against church doctrine. He thought I was being cruel, but maybe she couldn’t enjoy being all righteous and heavenly if the worms were feasting on her body down below. She was a ferociously tidy woman, and she had a mind for those small, often overlooked details. She’d have been a keen businesswoman if born in a different era, not a records clerk. Grandmother Hannah groomed an executive, but she knew the limits of second-hand accomplishment. She wasn’t fooled.

I tilt the box up over the rail, and get the smell of brine and grease in my nostrils, which I expect—and something else, like sour milk, which I don’t. I look down, and there are five hunks of surplus government cheese bobbing among the waves. I put the tin of ashes back inside the tote, and slap my hand against the rail. The cormorant looks at me accusingly before it disappears into the horizon.

---

 

As I walk into the office, my coworkers pirouette away from my tote bag. For a few weeks everyone indulged my behavior, carrying the tote bag wherever I went. Grandmother Hannah was part of our public grief, but so many dead have no space among the living. New Yorkers are scrappy. We’re supposed to persevere, show the world we can’t be broken.

Even when we are.

Sylvie charges me as I walk into my office. “Are you crazy? Picking today to be late!” She unstraps my laptop case from my shoulder and I offer her the tote bag. Sylvie refuses it without breaking stride. Minding the dead is not in her job description. It’s not surprising—Sylvie avoided Grandmother Hannah when she was alive. “Miller’s temp is in the bathroom begging for Xanax and Unisource has an Edgar filing emergency they need to talk about.”

I send Sylvie to pacify my boss while I call my client. I get voicemail, but don’t leave a message. I sit at my desk and stare at the I Support Public Television logo on the tote bag. I still find it difficult to believe. Grandmother Hannah never watched public television. She didn’t value art or music. She was fond of cop shows and courtroom dramas. She liked to see the guilty punished. If she’s conscious in an afterlife, she’ll want her death to be avenged. She never let a grievance go.

She thought I should remain with Cantor Fitzgerald, wait to be promoted slowly. I jumped ship and lived and she remained and died. What retribution would she mete out to me, her second-generation deserter? If we meet again in an afterlife, I expect no mercy. Loyalty is her weakness, her white-hot place, just as Madonna & child is mine.

Sylvie ducks her head in. “Now he’s uber-pissed cause you sent me. Uni could have waited.”

“Clients come first, right?” I say, in my cheesiest rah-rah voice. I shrug the stiffness from my neck as I come out from behind my desk. “I can handle a slap on the wrist.”

Sylvie touches my arm, and I startle. We are not demonstrative. “Remember when I was screwing up after my sister’s accident? You said you didn’t want to see my grief take anything more away from me?”

“You think I’m screwing up?”

I see the hesitation, tongue resting against the roof of her mouth as she considers. “It’s so hard right now, but…brave face, right?”

When I moved on from Cantor Fitzgerald, I brought Sylvie with me. She has a brilliant mind, and nobody from her years of Queens public schooling ever noticed. She finishes my reports, distinguishes between client crisis and catastrophe, and hands me what I need as quickly as I comprehend its necessity. She is more partner than an assistant ought to be, but the corporate world is full of women like Sylvie, of greater worth than their circumstances have allowed them to achieve. Usually men are the benefactors of their hidden depths, their gratitude, or dependence, expressed through marriage. Would Sylvie be better off with one of them? Maybe. Marriage, when the end comes, offers alimony. For all her loyalty, Sylvie’s severance will be a pittance of what her labor’s earned.

“You’re one of the smartest women I know. Maybe—” I fan the space between us, creating a gesture for the unclose closeness we share. “You should channel your energy into finding a job where you have an assistant of your own.”

She spins, clicks her heels hard as she leaves. I try to forget her tears because she’d hate that I noticed. I feel the depths of my own arrogance—judging her ambitions and presuming I’m holding her back—as sudden indigestion. My selfishness probably plays a minor, irritating role in her life. I doubt she sees my choices as something worth emulating. I think of Nana Cammie and Grandmother Hannah, two women at war inside me.

Whose child am I?

That’s when my tears come, heavy and slow from the wait.

---

 

I faced up to my review. Were my eyes red when I walked in? If so, it didn’t matter. After, I head for food. I pluck a salad from the rack and squeeze through to the end of the deli line, which snakes back along the already-tight corridor.

I knew it wouldn’t be golden. I was prepared for their judgment, but could defend myself. I turned around three problem investments earlier this year, companies the board considered a loss.

I’m too warm and the line won’t budge, but I need something in my stomach to make it through the day. Miller refused to look at me directly as he discussed my obvious “difficulties.” As he explained the challenges of my situation to me, my brain looped through two thoughts, all I do is work and I am alone in this life, like those random tunes that enter a brain and won’t leave.

The line inches forward. The woman behind me brings her toes to rest against my heels. I feel her breath against my neck, and the vein behind my eye begins to pulse.

Nana Cammie had a knack with strangers. She asked questions, listened to their pain-filled stories. Every shared tale was a tragedy, revealed in operatic tones of outrage or disappointment, but her interest never seemed to wane. I try to connect myself to the mouth-breather behind me—consider the unseen contours of her private pain—but with each moist breath in and out, I grow more incensed.

I step out of line to increase the distance between us and I’m winged by a laptop case slung across a rushed, unapologetic shoulder. I want to rip that retreating arm from its socket and pound the woman behind me until she is a bloody, breath-free pulp.

My vision blurs, and the deli shifts around me. I toss my salad on the nearest shelf and push my way free to the door, gulping back fists of air. I want to shout to the strangers on the street that I have feelings, deep ones that are vastly superior to theirs. But that’s not true. As they weave around me, maintaining their private oblivion, I see myself.

I have my own sad saga to share. If I sat beside Nana Cammie on a park bench along the river of her afterlife, I’m sure she would listen, patient and polite as ever, but…would she love the me I am now?

---

 

When I return, Sylvie’s not at her desk and my voicemail is full. I play one message after another, too rattled to write anything down. I make a few calls, but hang up each time a person answers. I switch to email, but the words swell on the screen until they seem as real and invasive as the breather at the market.

Miller referred me to the Employee Assistance Program for mandatory counseling. Maybe I should tell the counselor I’d like to take a hacksaw to my life. Or perhaps my boss is the true problem. My performance has suffered, but I have a genius for this work. I create meaning from chaos, and raw data forms a conga line to my money-making beat. Miller waltzed and married the chairman’s daughter. He needs to be coached through every page of my reports, while Sylvie can glance at the figures and interpret my findings instantly. If the world were just, we’d work for her.

My appointment’s in an hour. I had a therapist once, but he pissed me off, sitting there looking so interested yet removed, saying nothing except to turn a question around. God, the sequel. What a crock.

In finance, the clock never stops. My first phone line flashes, then two more. I don’t answer. My Blackberry joins the fray and I step out again to look for Sylvie. She left her work heels on her chair, and I realize she won’t be back for at least another hour. I’m being reprimanded. This is our pattern, the dance of apology we play. She’ll take long lunches, leave early or arrive late until I’ve been properly rebuked. I consider all the ways we appease each other’s quirks and moods, and it strikes me that the most complex, intimate relationship in my life is with the woman I pay to anticipate and fulfill my needs.

Who needs a hacksaw? I have no life to wreck.

I pack up my laptop, grab the tote bag, and leave for the day. Fuck Miller and the Employee Assistance Program. I imagine myself in his ergonomic guest chair, being fired. The emotion that rises, dimly familiar, is relief.

---

 

Do criminals consider the people they steal from? I try to see my apartment through desperate, thieving eyes. The space is sparsely, if expensively, furnished. Did this person take in my Shaker furniture in honey-glazed oak, the virgin row of small appliances along the kitchen counter, the takeout containers in the fridge, and form a picture of my hamster-wheel existence in his head? My home has an unlived-in look that only the perpetually overworked can maintain. At the very least, he must have recognized the perfect target. There’s nothing within sight I would truly miss.

I sit on the couch, but middle-of-the-afternoon lounging still feels wrong. I shift to my desk and check my private email. There’s a buyer for Grandmother Hannah’s Hummels. She left behind fifty-three bucolic, cutesy figurines. Mostly of children.

Did they bring her any joy? She cleaned them every other Wednesday without fail. She handled them with care. For that alone I hated them. I stayed up nights plotting their demise—a conveniently clumsy fall, an anonymous cherry bomb through the window, a sledgehammer-wielding maniac on the run from the cops. Only their complete obliteration would have satisfied me. Now, they are mine. Dutifully packed and catalogued for sale. Handled with care. I look at the box at my feet and step back from kicking range.

I try to sleep, but as soon as I blot out the bars of light that squeeze past the tightly shut blinds, the messages from Sylvie begin. I silence my cell after the first emails, but she tries my home machine. The first two messages, ten minutes apart, she keeps casual.

“Jeanne, please. If you’re home, just check in. I told Miller you had a stomach virus this morning, that I got you in with your doctor after lunch. I took the blame for the mix-up. Just call me. We’ll get your appointment rescheduled for tomorrow.”

It takes five minutes for the next call. I pull the jack from the bedroom wall, but the ring continues in the other room. The second jack is behind the desk, and the Hummels are in my way.

“They told Liz to transfer me to word processing tomorrow. I’m leaving messages for you everywhere I know how. Please, Jeanne. You’ve got to come back in.”

I hate the fear in Sylvie’s voice, but she’ll find a better placement, with or without my help. I drag the Hummel box by one of its flaps, which tears off in my hand. Then I kick the box until the answering machine delivers its final beeps and there is silence. I unwrap a shepherd boy to check for damage and the ringing begins again. I hurl the figurine at the phone, which knocks the handset free. I hear Sylvie call out, “Jeanne? Jeanne, is that you? Please talk to me!”

Sylvie begins to cry, and one by one I launch the rest of the Hummels, still in their wrapping, across the room. When the last one crashes, I take the tote bag and whip it slingshot-style towards the shards. Grandmother Hannah’s ashes thud against the front door and slide into a heap on the floor. The only sound is the penetrating buzz of the off-the-hook signal.

I crawl under the desk and pull the jack. I stay there, surrounded by wood and dust, until my neck cramps and both my legs fall asleep. When the towers fell, did Grandmother Hannah hide beneath her desk or join a mad rush for freedom in the stairwell?

I think of myself, if I had stayed with Cantor Fitzgerald, in that tower—trapped, knowing I would die—Sylvie beside me, clutching both my hands. Even in my mind, I don’t choose Grandmother Hannah. I picture my father in the tower, a man who deserves no kindness, and I still choose him over his mother who raised me. How can I grieve someone I avoid in every incarnation? How do I avoid grief when she’s the last family member I knew?

I pick my way through the wreckage and crawl out to the kitchen. I get the dustpan and whisk broom and sweep up the ashes. The lid of the tin is bent, so I use Tupperware to hold what’s left of Grandmother Hannah. If there is an afterlife, she wouldn’t want her remains to spend any part of it in a leftover Thai soup container.

I put on my shoes and carry the container downstairs, where I hail a cab. “Evergreen Cemetery,” I say, as I climb in. “It’s in Queens.”

I hold the tote bag in my lap while I fend off conversation with the driver. When we reach Queens, the cemeteries stretch on, engulfing the borough’s core. One side of the road has miles of black spiked fence, with rows of tombstones peeking through the bars; the other side features attached houses and squat apartment buildings. Sylvie grew up here, and she still lives with her family on a street that fronts the graves. One day, she will have a job that lets her leave the dead behind. For all the years she served me, I will see this happen.

“Is closed,” the driver says to me when we arrive.

I count the money in my wallet. “I have $112 on me. It’s yours if you back up against the fence and help me climb over.”

“Give me,” he says.

I stand on the trunk, and from there it’s not too hard a climb. “Don’t leave,” I say, but he gets in the cab and his index finger makes the crazy twirl as he drives off.

It takes a while to find Nana Cammie’s grave. This section of the cemetery, for the poor, doesn’t have stones, just flat plaques in the ground. I have to rip away the grass and weeds to see the names, and I am wrong three times before I find the right row. I take off my jacket to clear the clumps and wipe away the dirt. If I move her to a place with perpetual care, erect a headstone or grand statue, will I visit more? In the park today I could summon her presence, but not here at her grave, not at the height of my childhood grief, and not now, either.

I doubt Nana Cammie is Grandmother Hannah’s dream companion, but I pull back the grass and dirt at the base of the plaque with the plastic lid of the container and pour Grandmother Hannah’s ashes into the hole I’ve created. The mad thrum in my head finally eases and I cry, even if my tears are about how poorly we shared our lives or the meager tenderness we each had to spare.

As I try to imagine them together, I grasp how desperately I want to put her death and my loneliness behind me. Or just away from me. I sit with this desire to leave my native city, now bound up with smoke and ash, and the clarity is a balm to every over-pumped vessel in my body. When the last light of dusk fades, I switch on my cell and call Sylvie. Not because I’m stuck in a nearby cemetery and need her help, which I do. I call Sylvie because the tote bag’s empty at last and she’s the only person I know who might truly care.

Valerie Fioravanti is the author of the linked collection of Brooklyn stories Garbage Night at the Opera from BkMk Press, which won the Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in many literary journals, including North American Review, Cimarron Review, and Hunger Mountain. Her work has received eight Pushcart Prize nominations and a Fulbright Fellowship to Italy. A New York City native, she lives in Sacramento, where she teaches workshops and coaches writers privately.

Header image: Suffering Is Optional by Sarah Basha