This ereader document contains both the short story Under the Wave and the essay Friends, Family and the Communion of Saints.

Under the Wave

By Lauren Groff / from The New Yorker

It came up through the ground in the night. The worst things never wait for sunrise.

She had soothed the bad dream from her little son until he breathed smoothly in the dark and then crossed the floors to the bed and climbed in without brushing the sand from her feet. The house sat alone in the marsh. They couldn’t afford the beach a mile away, and so their consolation was the birds. The great herons, the cormorants, the lit candles of ibis. As she drifted off, she thought of the birds sleeping out in their nests, although by then they were no longer there; they’d already fled.

She was almost asleep when she felt a great tongue licking the edges of her body, and she opened her eyes to see a bloom of black, her husband’s face in a silent shout already moving away, underwater.

And all was stripped from her and all she was was wildness and pain and her lungs bursting in the cage of her chest and her body battered by a hundred invisibilities and the terrible swirl.

Out of the wildness, the branch of an oak plucked her from the water and she clung there, animal, as orange dawned over the marsh made alien with mud.

• • •

And then there was a span of time that was mostly a low and rolling dark fog. She moved through it, she breathed, but she couldn’t say what happened or how or where or why. There was the knowledge of thirst, pain, hunger, only the body articulate.

Images accumulated. A woman in filthy panties limping down a road with a bone knuckling out of her arm. A mass of faceless people huddled around a fire. The gray vinyl of a bus seat, scored like aged skin, and the strange flat brown landscape passing dreamily by the window.

Finally, a warehouse with a concrete floor that was still shining wet with bleach, metal walls that breathed behind her back with the storm that had fallen down on them in extra punishment, a bruised boil of purple sky in the high windows. The survivors poured in and poured in and packed their bodies so tightly to sleep on the bare floors that their breath alone warmed the air. She searched the faces for the two beloved ones, but something told her softly that she wouldn’t find them.

She sat in the corner, head bowed. All around her through the day people spoke quietly and wept and some of the refugees with medical backgrounds tended to the wounded, and others passed through sleep and into death. At night, still others turned to their neighbors and fucked as quietly as they could, in desperate affirmation of living.

There were few children in the warehouse and only one baby, who lay rigid in his swaddle and didn’t cry.

• • •

A sandwich in plastic appeared between the woman’s legs, a bottle of water, an anemic nectarine. She didn’t move.

People stirred in the morning and went out into the yard and returned when night fell, but she remained frozen. She relieved herself where she sat, but the human reek was such that no one noticed. Another sandwich, another water, another halfhearted fruit, and she sat with the whole accumulation between her legs and no one tried to take it. Human decency could still overcome hunger, then.

Late in the night, she opened her eyes to a dim sea of sleeping bodies. She became aware of a darkness creeping through, too large to be a rat, too small for an adult. Cloud unpeeled from moon through the high windows, and in the new light she saw a child rifling among the clothes of others. From the pocket of the woman’s sleeping neighbor the child pulled a granola bar and ate it swiftly. Then she saw the woman’s lapful of food and reached out hungrily. The woman caught the tiny wrist in her hand and held tight, though the child struggled in silence with tears running down her small pale face. At last she stopped struggling and lay panting beside the woman for a while, her muscles loosening, until the watchfulness fell from her and she was asleep.

The woman let the girl’s delicate wrist go and even in the dark saw the bruises already pooling under the skin. She brushed the muddy hair from the girl’s face. All sleeping children are as alike as siblings, unformed, soft in the cheek. The woman noticed her sandwiches and ate them, drank the water, ate the fruit, and didn’t sleep, just sat staring into the dark until it was light again. Something had begun to vibrate within her.

And when the child opened her eyes the woman looked at her and touched her forehead gently and with a voice gone rusty said, Hi.

• • •

Then she stood and the two held hands and picked their way over the sleepers and went out the door and into the dusty yard, first to the ad-hoc showers, while the water was still warm. The woman put powdered soap all over their clothes and stomped the filth from them with her feet, then wrung them with her strong arms until they were almost dry. When they went back into the yard, the girl trotted behind her, a good dog. They visited the porta-potties, then they went to the men who were solemnly unloading boxes of food from a truck at the gate. No, the men said, looking away. They couldn’t take the woman and the child with them. They had to be registered, they had to wait for the Red Cross to come.

No, the men said for the next five days. On the sixth, the oldest of the men, having carried the weight of saying no to this woman, this girl, who had nothing at all, found his no too heavy to bear and put it down. He sighed and cut his eyes toward the back of the truck. They climbed up. In the roaring dark, the girl light on the woman’s lap, they rumbled many miles until they came to a church in a town. The driver opened the door and escorted them into the office of the church, where he found food in the refrigerator for them, and took the collection cash from the safe and handed it wordlessly to the woman.

The girl and the woman held hands in the back of the bus and at each stop shared their food—a hamburger and fries, then a slice of pizza, then a submarine sandwich—and the girl fell asleep with her head on the woman’s thigh and the woman’s eyes burned as she looked into the quiet fields the bus moved through in the night.

• • •

It was dawn when the bus sighed and knelt, and they descended into the city that had been the woman’s home. They walked until the girl was too tired to go on, then the woman hoisted her onto her back. The people lifting up the metal gates on the stores looked at these two passersby—the dark woman with her imperious hawk’s face, the tiny paperwhite of a girl—saw how scantily they were dressed against the cold morning, and many of them almost said something, but each looked again and swallowed the words, and turned away. The woman carried the girl warm on her back until the street lights flicked out and the birds began to sing.

By midmorning, they were on the last sidewalk, and the woman set the girl down, then typed the number into the pad, and they went up the stairs and she found the hidden key and they went inside.

The girl saw a look on the woman’s face that in the future she would think of every time someone crumpled a sheet of paper into a ball.

Mail was heaped on the floor, and the son’s sippy cup from the day they’d left was still in the sink.

The woman undressed the girl and put her into her son’s pajamas, then into his bed, and pulled down the shade and turned on the light that shined constellations all over the ceiling. The girl slept immediately.

The woman took a shower that was so familiar in all its details—the heat, the pine scent of the soap, the precise discoloration of the grout around certain tiles—that it seemed to wash away all that had happened to her. When she stepped out of the shower she stepped out of the resolution she had silently come to when she opened the door and saw that nobody had been in the apartment since she’d left it.

The woman woke in her own bed to the girl’s thin laugh. She was watching cartoons on the television, and the woman drank a pot of coffee, watching her.

She gave the girl a good bath and then dressed her in her son’s clothes. The girl was maybe two years older than her son had been, but she was sickly and tiny for her age, and he had always been huge, with his parents’ great height and muscular build. The clothes fit. She looked decent.

All they did that day was eat, sleep, watch television, buy groceries. The bagger, a bright old man who had always loved to flirt with the woman, said, Long time no see! And she didn’t answer, only smiled thinly, because she could never, given a hundred lifetimes, have explained to him the distance she’d come.

• • •

The next day, they visited a preschool in the opposite direction of the one the woman’s son had attended. When the principal asked how old the girl was the woman, without thinking, said her son’s age. The little girl grew watchful and sucked in her lips, but she didn’t say anything. “My child,” the woman called the girl, and the principal looked at this very dark woman and this very pale child and thought about how genes were miraculous and strange, but was afraid of being racist and saying anything. The afternoon was busy when the woman faxed over her son’s vaccination forms and birth certificate, and the principal, who had had a day overfull of primary colors and singing, who was thinking already of her cat, her takeout tortellini, her favorite show, didn’t read them carefully before filing them away.

• • •

The woman showed up at work in a suit on Monday, and people who had vaguely known she was going away said, You’re back! How was the vacation? But the woman, who ate lunch at her desk, who never spoke of her private life, hadn’t told them where her family was going and they just nodded when she said, Oh, fine. She avoided the break room, where people still talked of the rescue efforts, the people they knew who had been swept away. One woman who chewed with her mouth open and gave everyone cruel nicknames had lost both of her parents and was given a mental-health month off, and when she returned she was hugged by all with solemn tenderness.

Before, the woman had had a few friends; her husband had family. There was a small, sad wake at a bar that they flew in for. When she disappeared from them soon afterward, they thought they understood her grief, having been swamped by their own, and they let her turn away from them.

It took some time, but the woman understood that the child was funny in her diffident and sideways way; the child understood that the woman was a terrific cook. In the dreamy world of before, there had never been quite enough. But, Eat, eat, the woman urged, and, no matter how much the child ate, the food never ran out.

Mama, the child shyly began calling the woman; and the woman, in return, said Monkey, which had been her son’s pet name.

• • •

Not long after they came back to the city, the woman took the child to a barbershop and said, Shave it, and out of the masses of pale stringy hair the face emerged, elfin and quick. The child smiled at the new self in the mirror, this bright face with its velvety scalp, the last prettiness gone.

The preschool teachers all thought the child a prodigy, because no other children at that school had ever been so adept or known so many words and numbers at such an age. What detailed drawings! they exclaimed. What extraordinary focus! But the child soon learned that the woman would not look more than once at a drawing with water in it or at anything that hinted of a life lived before the wave. The child learned to make pictures of pure lightness—unicorns and suns with grins and houses with fences, the woman’s own face in careful brown circles with a giant slash of red for a mouth. Each picture was signed with the name that the teachers called out at circle time, that was written in wooden letters on the wall of the bedroom.

• • •

About six months after they’d returned, while they were walking slowly in the street on a hot afternoon, the child was dreaming of Popsicles and wind on the skin. There was a red light at a busy intersection, but not in the daydream, and the child stepped out into the street, into the path of a bus. The woman felt a dark horror seep into her and screamed her son’s name. The child, who lived in a world with that name carefully written into her clothes, scrawled on the finger paintings still hanging on the refrigerator, paused, then leaped back. The bus swerved in a screeching of brakes and stopped. The driver ran down the steps, yelling with his face hovering only a foot from the child, his cheeks gone purple and spittle shooting from his mouth and onto her. All the sentences he said in his rage were broken: What is wrong with, and I could have killed, and Fucking get your kid in hand, lady.

And the woman’s quiet and gentle exterior seemed to break in two and something else emerged that expanded to fill the street. Her face was terrible in its fury and she opened her mouth and curses came out so bitter and fast that the driver shrank and recoiled and ran up the steps of the bus. He pulled off without looking back. The child watched the woman fold into herself and begin to weep. She crouched, pulling the child to her, and whispered that the child mustn’t ever do it again. Never. Never. Never risk your life for anything. It is too precious. The woman would die if the child died. The woman would lie down with a broken heart.

They went to a movie then, to sit in the cold and to make their bodies stop shaking, and when they came out twilight was falling on the city. A co-worker passed and stopped to say hello. This is my son, the woman said calmly, and rested her hand upon the child’s head.

• • •

And so they lived, turned only toward each other. The wind blew ice down the city’s streets and the trees budded and the lake shone with heat, then it shed the heat in layers and the wind blew cold again. The apartment never changed. There was food in the refrigerator, there were stars on the ceiling in the night. The woman started singing again to herself when she cooked.

Sometimes the child felt a second self inside, a watchful and small and crouching thing. It was different from the child who ate and grew and slept, who walked bravely into kindergarten taller than the other children and already knowing how to read. Hobbies emerged, boys came over for sleepovers, there were remote-control cars and a skateboard under the Christmas tree. The child went alone into the men’s room at restaurants and, without having been told, used the stalls there. But the edges of the second self were becoming vague and one day it would vanish altogether.

• • •

Then, when the child was eight, they sat eating strawberry ice creams in the shade at the outdoor mall. People went by, slow and squinting in the sun. A man was playing a piano that had been painted purple and yellow and left there for this purpose, and every time he missed a note the woman and her child looked at each other and laughed. The child’s head, sunburned under the blond velvet, rested on the woman’s strong arm.

Then out of the crowd rushed a woman who knelt and looked into the child’s face. She was large and soft, with thick yellow hair to mid-arm, trailing other children who looked uncannily familiar. This woman’s face wobbled. At first she whispered, then she said out loud a name that made the child’s breath stop. Is it you? she said. She said the name again and watched the effect.

And the mother felt the thing that had been vibrating in her for so long cease entirely. She felt the strawberry ice cream drip down her hand, but she couldn’t blink or move. Through the skin, the child felt this change in the mother, the stiffening, and was confused.

The kneeling woman started to weep. She took the child’s face in her hands and said in a hushed voice, Oh, my God, it is you, isn’t it, you look so much like my sister I’d know that face anywhere, no matter the haircut, they never found you in the cleanup, oh my God, tell me it’s you. Tell me, talk to me, we thought we’d lost you, too.

The child felt a pain just under the heart, and the woman’s face sharpened and came clear. The children, so blond and slight, gathered around.

But at last the child said in a measured and very small voice, No, I don’t know who you are. No, this is my mother.

And then the child said the name that felt right on the tongue, that sounded right to the ear, even though it was a gift from a previous child.

A curtain fell across the blond woman’s face, and she gasped and wiped her eyes roughly on her shirt. She stood and backed away, apologizing, saying a little bitterly, Oh, it would have been a miracle if it had been true. She and her children returned to the crowds of people who slowly flowed by. She stopped a few stores away and looked back, but the child would not look at her.

After some time, the child stood and took the melting ice cream from the mother’s hand and threw it away, then carefully cleaned up all the drips with a handful of napkins, dipping them in a cup of water and giving the mother’s skin a small shock of cold with each touch. The piano player wandered away.

Let’s go home, the child said. The mother let her child, her son, take her by the hand and lead her away.

Lauren Groff’s books include the novel “Fates and Furies” and the short-story collection “Florida.”

Family, Friends, and the Communion of the Saints

Excerpt from Chapter 3 of Wild Things Poems Of Grief and Love, Loss and Gratitude

By Roberta C. Bondi

How could any of us survive our losses without each other? We can’t do it, but we don’t have to. I didn’t always know this fact, however, and you may not have either.

I began my graduate work as a lonely person. Most of the other students were male, and they regularly informed me one way or another that I didn’t belong there. My parents didn’t approve, and it seemed at the time like no one else in the world did either. One night I had a short but telling dream. I dreamed that I was a star, millions of light years from earth, all by myself. I realized when I woke up that having learned about Origen, a writer of the early church who believed that the stars were alive, prompted my dream. Origen believed that stars’ work in the universe came in praising God continually. If his speculation is true, the stars may appreciate this task, but I still remember the terror and despair that dream generated in me when I looked out into black and empty space, cut off from any other living thing.

The fact is that none of us is alone. From the eighteenth century onward, modern folks have been encouraged to glorify the “self-made” person, “the rugged individualist,” and the singular people who seem to have accomplished great things with no help from others. Fortunately, this way of viewing the world is fading. Most of us realize to a certain extent that we couldn’t exist without one another, if only to provide us with roads, electricity, the rule of law, schools, medical help, groceries in the stores, clothes on our backs, and so forth. Real people who work in our world with us provide our necessities. But our lack of aloneness goes beyond these areas to include our spiritual and emotional lives.

A friend told me a story once while I was trying to live through a bad patch and felt close to despair. When he and his wife were young, they had wanted a baby more than anything. For years they tried, until at last, his wife was pregnant. They were happy until the baby actually arrived. From birth, it was obvious that in spite of his physical perfection something had gone awry with the baby. He couldn’t stand to be touched; and as he grew, he seemed unable to connect with his parents or anybody else in any way. Of course the parents loved him and raised him as best they could. When the boy turned eighteen, he wanted to live by himself, so they set him up in a garage apartment a block from their house. From that distance they could continue to feed him, do his laundry, and care for his other needs. After six months, my friend went to check on his son one morning and found him dead. He had killed himself beside a pile of magazines with articles underlined about the hopelessness of schizophrenia, which was his diagnosis.

My friend and his wife were worse than heartbroken at the time. He didn’t know how they would survive the death, but he told me how they lived through it. At the funeral, people said to him over and over, “Tom, you know your faith will get you through this.” He stopped for a moment, looked at me, and then said, “Roberta, it was not my faith that got me through it. It was the faith of my friends.”

I have never forgotten this generous sharing of his painful story at a time I needed to hear it, a time when I was not sure I could believe in much of anything positive. That I have been saved by the faith of my friends I have found to be true again when my hope, energy, and, yes, faith have failed me.