After Annie

by Anna Quindlen

Annie always said that her daughter had a vivid imagination, but she didn’t, not really. It was worry that made Ali think about things like this, not imagination at all.

He knew people said they didn’t believe in ghosts, and he didn’t either, not the woo-woo kind that made noise in the attic. But he couldn’t stop feeling like she was there, there all the time, and then gone, like a song from the radio of a car flying by.

You didn’t really talk about the big things because nothing started big. Everything big in their lives had started small. Annie leaning against the wall at that one party, saying, “Do you think Bill Brown is cute?” It was like a seed, and now there was a tree. “He’s a plumber,” Annemarie had said, and “Don’t be a snot,” Annie had replied, playing with the necklace she always wore, with the gold A hanging from a chain. Now the necklace had four letters, AABJ. Life got made that way, bit by bit, at the party, the doctor’s office, the stop sign, the grocery.

“Vintage,” his mother said every single time she drove past. “They called that secondhand when I was growing up.”

Maybe mad is just sad in disguise.”

“One need never be ashamed or afraid of grieving. Those who do not grieve cannot feel.” “My mother said you had an amazing life,” Ali said. “Yes,” the woman said, and her fingers moved in patterns again across the afghan in her lap. “She has newspaper clippings,” said the woman with the walker, “and a map with stars for all the places she went on tour. She went to Russia and China!” “Many times,” Miss Evelyn said. “Hard to believe for someone of your age, isn’t it? I will show you if you come to visit. All of us here, we were all someone else once.”

The incessant drumbeat of women talking to other women. It never ended, except when one of them died, and then the silence left by that one woman was as big as the sky.

Maybe grief was like homesickness, something that wasn’t just about a specific person, but about losing that feeling that you were where you belonged, even if where you belonged seemed as everyday as brushing your teeth.

There was no way to know how to move on, which everyone insisted you should do, without leaving the person behind, so that the further you got into this new, different, strange, impossible existence, the fainter they got, like a ghost in a movie that at first had clear edges and a discernible face and then was a cloud, and then smoke, and then nothing.

Becoming a man seemed to mean becoming a person who would be poisoned by loss and heartbreak and still pretend that neither existed.

It was amazing, how fast you could get old, or older. The years between twenty-two and thirty-seven made a universe.

No man ever likes his wife’s best friend, because that friend knows her in a way he never will, and because he will never have that kind of friendship with his own friends, even his oldest ones.

“I have eight children, and the best times are when I see them as they are now and don’t think about someday.”