Say Her Name by Francisco Goldman Read Free Book Online

Aura’s death, at one of the little jewelry stores on the Zócalo, I’d bought a sturdy silver chain to wear around my neck and strung our wedding rings onto it there at the counter. (The horrible alacrity with which I’d set out on my daily mourning errands during those first weeks, as if furnishing a new home and life for my new sweetheart: getting prints made of digital photographs, searching out grief books in English and Spanish on the Internetand in bookstores, shopping for dark clothes, hiring a tailor to make me a mourning suit, trying out religions, sitting in churches, reading the Kaddish, going to meditation at the Centro Budista in Colonia Nápoles.) The jeweler used some tools, including a diminutive saw, to alter the clasp so that it couldn’t be opened with just your hands. Our rings were platinum bands, engraved on their insides with our names and the date of our wedding: Paco & Aura 20/8/2005. In Brooklyn, after Valentina found the engagement ring, I decided to add it to the chain along with the wedding bands. I pulled the silver chain off over my head—it was the first time I’d taken it off. At the kitchen table, I inserted a nail into the tiny hole in the clasp, jostled it around, probing for some tiny catch, and tapped on it with a hammer. The clasp opened. I added the diamond ring to the chain, then closed the clasp and pulled against the chain with both hands until I was satisfied that it would hold.
    I wore the diamond around my neck for a few days. Why did I think that doing that would make me feel better, or that my mourning chain now had more significance, or a new magic, because I’d added that ring to it? I didn’t feel any better, I woke up every morning to the same sadness and grim stupor of disbelief, to which was now added the anxiety that that ring always seemed to awaken in me. What if one day I was robbed and the chain was stolen and I lost the engagement ring along with both wedding bands? It wasn’t the value of the ring that stressed me, though it was worth enough to buy a Subaru if that was what I wanted. I thought, Then I’ll be left without anything. Left without anything? They’re just things ! But I took the diamond ring off the chain and put it back where Aura had kept it.
    I still had the shampoo Aura had brought with her to the beach. Tea-tree mint treatment shampoo in a little Sanborns bag. Whenever I was faced with some event or errand that seemed like it was going to be especially trying, I’d take the blue bottle into the shower and use just a small dollop of Aura’s shampoo. I dreaded the day when the bottle would be empty, as if then I would have used up all that was left of the protective power of Aura’s love too,which led to some tense inner debates—while the water in the shower warmed, or over morning coffee—about whether or not an occasion really merited using up more of the shampoo. She’d left two jars of face scrub in the shower, too. The first time I opened the pinkish jar, the larger of the two, I found the indentations of Aura’s scooping fingers like fossils in the scrub’s slushy, coconut-hued surface; I screwed the lid back on and put it away on the top shelf of the shower trolley—sometimes, though rarely, and only when the shower wasn’t running, I opened it to stare at the imprints of her fingers again. And sometimes, in the shower, I dabbed face scrub from the smaller jar onto my skin, the gritty lemony paste bringing back the soapy-citrusy morning smell of those cheeks I’d pressed my lips to.
    I know now what a shrink might say: that I was grasping for external replacements for the internal Lost Object, and for that part of me lost along with the autonomous Lost Object. That via shampoo and face scrub voodoo, I was trying to bring back being loved by and loving Aura, along with everything else that, with her death, had been lost and couldn’t be a part of me anymore. Such is life in the shadow of the Lost Object. But I would never