This drastic decision was clearly born when the idealism of my twenties collided with the shock of tragedy. A valuable life had been lost, and to make up for it, I had to find value in mine. That was the gist of the feeling. The doctorate, I decided, would be a worthless appendage. Besides, there were no jobs in linguistics, and even if there were, how was I bettering the world by teaching others to examine the intricacies of dead languages and the like?
To leave academia was a terrifying idea, however. It meant abandoning the dream my parents had nurtured in me since the age of six, that I would become a doctor of some sort. Within that doctorate were all the embellishments of my ego, my sense of worth, my place in the world, and hence all my worries as well, the fear that I would never be good enough, that I would forever be struggling to hide that I was a fraud, doomed one day to fail and reveal how inadequate I truly was. But if I left the doctoral program, what could I do instead? What could I do that was worth anything to anyone, including myself? I could see nothing.
I remembered that Pete had once suggested that I apply my linguistics knowledge toward working with disabled children. He had said this a month or so before he died. He himself had intended to make computerized equipment for people with disabilities. At the time, his suggestion held no appeal for me. I was not particularly fond of children, except as objects of research, and I knew nothing about disabilities.
But once I quit my doctoral program, I found a job listing for exactly what he had in mind: a language development specialist for a county program serving children, newborns to five years old, who had developmental disabilities. At the interview, it was as apparent to the administrator as it was to me that I was both overqualified and specifically unqualified for this job. When the interview ended and I stood to leave, I heard Pete telling me that I should simply tell this woman my motivations in applying for a job with exactly these challenges and unknowns. And out came my story of Pete’s death and my pledge to do with my life what he had intended to do with his. Ten minutes later, I was hired.
It was my job to observe the children, informally assess their communication skills, and then work with parents and teachers to devise a plan and help them carry it out.
I remember the first talk on language development I gave for the parents. I mustered all my knowledge, prepared a detailed examination of the steps and processes entailed in language acquisition, and delivered an impressive one-hour lecture to a dozen parents, many of whom had just been told their babies had Down’s syndrome, cerebral palsy, autism, or some rare congenital disorder that would lead to an early death. At the end of my talk, a mother came up to me and said, “You are so smart.” I never felt more stupid. You just have to learn how to learn, I heard Pete say.
After that, I would listen to parents as they discussed their hopes for their children, and then together we would cry before we set out to find new hopes. With the kids themselves, I learned to play, to discover what made them laugh, what they could not resist watching or touching or reaching for. I found myself observing not deficits but the qualities of souls. Over the next five years, I had opportunities to work with more than a thousand families, and from them I sensed the limitlessness of hope within the limits of human beings. I learned to have compassion. It was the best training I could have had for becoming a writer.
Of course, not everything about me had changed for the better. I still worried incessantly about every detail of my life, twisting the permutations of these anxieties into knots. I remember one day, some six months after Pete died, when I was fretting over money, or rather, our profound lack of it. I was driving across the Bay Bridge in our rickety VW bus, coming home from my job, which netted me barely enough for rent, utilities, and food. Lou was in law school, and what little he earned went toward his tuition and books. But now we had a crisis: Our recently adopted cat, Sagwa, had gone into her first throes of heat the night before, and in searching for her Romeo, she jumped out of our fourth-story apartment window. Luckily, she lived, but fixing the resulting broken leg was going to cost us $383. How would we pay for it? We couldn’t save that amount in a year. Why the hell did we get the damn cat?
I heard Pete say: “Come on, it was an accident. You worry about things over which you have no control.” By then, I had heard his counseling voice many times. In the weeks right after his death, I had believed he was speaking to me across the divide. But now, with the natural waning of grief and shock, I had returned to thinking it was merely my imagination conjuring what he might have said.
“Easy for you to say,” I responded. “You’re dead. I have real bills.”
I heard him laughing. “These things happen by themselves. They’ll take care of themselves.”
I was about to banter back when I felt something slam the side of the bus, and send me swerving across a lane of traffic on the bridge. I fought to regain control, finally pulled over, and got out of the car with shaky legs. A man rushed up to me.
“Are you all right? I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. Thank God you’re not hurt.”
We went around to the side of the VW that he had rammed. At first I could see no sign of damage, but when we bent down and looked at the panel that curved under the bus, we saw it: a long gash, barely noticeable in a vehicle riddled with dings and oxidized paint.
“Get some estimates,” the man told me. “Send them to my insurance company and they’ll pay.”
“It’s not worth it,” I said. “Even though it’s not my fault, this will be reported to my insurance company and my rates will go up.”
“I see what you mean,” he answered. “Well then, just get one estimate and send it directly to me. Here’s my card. I’m the vice-president of this corporation. I’ll send a check to you directly.”
Fair enough. I drove to the first body shop off the ramp. Ten minutes later, I heard Pete laughing as I stared at the written total for the estimate: $383.
I will relate only one more dream. It was the last.
On Lou’s birthday that year, the trial ended, with a conviction on two counts. First-degree robbery. First-degree murder. That night, I dreamt that I met Pete in a garage, a rather prosaic location for a farewell meeting. He told me this was the last dream, now that the trial was over. I protested, “These are my dreams. I get to decide when they end.” Pete ignored what I said, and went on: “You’re going to meet my friend Rose—”
“Rose!” I sneered. “Fat chance. She hates me.” When I had called her months before to tell her Pete was dead, she had been curt almost to the point of rudeness. Then again, I had been the same with the messenger who delivered the news to me.
“Rose is going to become very important to you,” Pete said. “She’s a writer, and she’ll be helpful to you when you become a writer.”
“Who said I was going to be a writer?”
“That’s all I wanted to say,” Pete told me, and then, as if going down to the corner store, he left me there.
After that, I still had dreams about him, but they were different, nothing at all like the dream-lessons. The new dreams conveyed the full horror of his death, for in them he was not dead, as I had feared, but alive, as I had hoped. Having survived near-strangling, he was brain-damaged, confused and suspicious, preferring to live as a beer-drinking recluse, unsure of who he was and uninterested in finding out.
Each year for seven years, on the anniversary of Pete’s death, I lost my voice. It must have been a psychogenic gesture for the horror I could not talk about. And yes, eventually, Rose and I did connect with each other, tentatively at first, through brief letters, and then in lengthy missives, both of us grasping to understand the transcendental experiences we have had since his death.
If you’ve followed this story so far, you have already understood