Other People’s Pain

Vera wants a cup of coffee. And a muffin. She leaves her phone at her desk, runs a comb through her hair, and peeks at herself in the mirror at the front door before leaving. After months of self-imposed hermitage, grieving and working from home, today she’s tired of her own company but leery of the world. She can’t seem to go anywhere without someone recognizing her. 

 Aren’t you the lady whose daughter 
Weren’t you on TV the other 
CSPAN? 
Weeping in front of Congress about gun 
TODAY Show? 
The anniversary 
Did it do any 
Is there anything I can 

This morning it’s the woman in front of her at the coffee shop. Frosted gray hair in a ponytail, exercise leggings, zipped into a turquoise Patagonia windbreaker. 

“You were so brave on TV.” 

Vera’s is one in an arsenal of gun control non-profits, but what else could she do with all that sorrow? A wide-open mouth waiting to swallow her. She lost herself in research instead, fundraised, lobbied Congress. For the shooting’s first anniversary last week, she hit the TODAY Show. 

“Your daughter, too, of course,” the woman in the coffee line prompts her with a straight-line smile. 

People assume Vera wants to talk about what happened because she’s spent the better part of the last year talking about it for any forum that would host her. People assume talking to them is the same as talking to the world. That it costs her nothing. 

“So brave.” 

It’s true that Mina was brave, but that’s not why she died. She died because she was kind. Kindness she didn’t learn from Vera. It started after Vera’s husband left, when she curled into herself, ashamed to be too grief-stricken to parent properly, and Mina ferried cereal to her bedside, parroted her favorite Annie songs, performed impromptu dances, making Vera laugh and breaking her heart all over again. No one should be so good at shouldering other people’s pain, so good at soothing it. Vera should’ve stopped her. 

“Thank you,” Vera says. 

She’s learned to purse her lips tight after speaking, then focus on some distant object to demonstrate disengagement. Between the woman ahead of Vera and the cashier, the line extends five or six deep. They’ll be stuck together a while, and she’d like to seal the distance between them as quickly as possible. 

The steamer blasts at the counter, its noise a screen to hide behind, and Vera allows her eyes to scroll the menu. This shop stands around the corner from her house, but she hasn’t been inside since before the shooting. Everything is eerily the same and completely different at once. Her eyes rest on the listing of flavored syrups. Too sweet for her, but Mina had loved them. Honey lavender, her favorite. 

For days after it happened, the TV ran story after story about the hero who sacrificed herself for the rest of her office. “One of only two deaths,” reporters kept saying, as if two were a small number of people to be shot dead at an ad agency on a Thursday afternoon. 

The other death was the shooter. Vera recognized his name from stories Mina told about the buffalo-shouldered fact-checker at work who talked slow and fumbled his hands. 

“He’s embarrassed about the way he talks,” Mina said, “so he hardly ever does.” 

But he talked to Mina. He told her how his parents locked him out of the house when he was a kid anytime he got in trouble. How he sheltered under the back deck with cold rain streaming between its slats, shivering until the sun rose and he braved tapping at the door. How his father or mother would let him in. “Take a shower,” they’d say. “You smell awful.” 

Vera imagines Mina and Malcolm huddling toward each other over wilted sandwiches pulled from paper lunch sacks under the oak tree outside their office building. She pictures Mina patting Malcolm’s sturdy arm and imagines words she must have used to assure him that he’d be okay. Corny words about tomorrow, because she never lost faith in the future. 

“They think he’s dangerous,” Mina told her, another reason people at the office steered clear of him. “He thinks they hate him.” 

“Do they?” Vera had asked. 

Mina snorted a laugh. “They don’t know him, Mom, but they think they do. You know how stubborn people can be when they think they know who you are.” 

Tox reports showed Malcolm was high on a wild cocktail of drugs. Too high to see what was in front of him, Vera likes to think. The conglomeration of workers and office furniture must have smeared into an indistinguishable muddle of colors and shapes. Mina racing toward him, waving her hands for him to see her and stop, just another blur. Only afterward could he have realized what he’d done. 

The sound of tamping grounds raps like gunfire and Vera jerks in surprise. The woman in front of her lasers her best understanding glance Vera’s way, as if she’s made the same connection. Even though neither of them was at the office building that day. TV cop shows are as close as Vera has come to hearing real gunshots, and she doesn’t watch them anymore. 

She imagines her daughter’s dying thoughts were silent pleas with the universe to keep Malcolm from pulling the trigger on himself. “Tomorrow,” she would have thought at him, as hard as she could, while light guttered and dimmed, her heart slowed, and blood drained out of her. “Tomorrow will be better. It always is.” 

The line has crept forward, and the woman in front of Vera is finally next, but she will not look away, no matter how hard Vera trains her eyes toward the highest point of the chalkboard menu on the wall behind the counter. She won’t look away and she won’t move aside to let Vera order. The cashier beyond them taps a black-lacquered fingernail against his iPad, waiting. 

Vera wishes now she had stayed home, ignoring more emails and phone calls from news programs and talk shows and newspapers whose people caught her on the TODAY Show and want to offer her another platform. She’s as incapable of doing nothing as she is of believing that doing anything will matter. With Mina gone, everything anyone does comes too late. 

“No, really,” the woman in front of her says. “You must be so proud.” 

Today all Vera wants is a coffee and a muffin and a quiet place not to be the woman whose daughter died in yet another preventable American tragedy. She wants to walk away onto an empty street against a blank sky and never see anyone or anything again. 

“The proper word for it is devastated,” Vera says. She meets the woman’s eyes with what she hopes is a fury hot enough to set the woman’s hair on fire. Then her eyes pool and her vision smears. She’s so sick of crying. 

“I know, I know,” the woman says, reaching to brace Vera’s forearm, then catches her when she slumps forward. “It’s not the same,” she says into Vera’s hair. “But I lost my cousin. He shot himself last summer. There are too many guns in the world.” 

Of course she needs soothing, too. Everyone needs. 

At the funeral, Mina’s officemates lined themselves up and blubbered their gratitude and admiration, leaking their grief down her shirt collar, into her hair. Clutching her toward them like she could save their lives all over again. 

As if she would. Vera would trade every last officemate survivor for a single coffee date with her daughter. Some days she thinks she could shoot them all herself if it would bring Mina back. 

Vera gasps air back into her lungs. Wipes tears with waxy coffee shop napkins. First her own, then this stranger’s. They sidestep out of line. Vera steers them to a little bistro table in a private corner. 

The cashier brings ice waters and a tissue box foraged from somewhere, and Vera listens, the same way she imagines Mina would have. She listens until this woman’s pain fills some chamber inside her that somehow has room to hold it. 

When she’s so full she’s afraid she can’t hold any more, she closes her eyes and concentrates until she can almost feel Mina, from far above the coffee shop, above the clouds, thinking as hard as she can at her mother about tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. 

JODY HOBBS HESLER

Jody Hobbs Hesler lives, writes, and teaches in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her debut story collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. Her other work appears or is forthcoming in The Millions, Necessary Fiction, Atticus Review, The Los Angeles Review, The Bangalore Review, Arts & Letters, CRAFT, Pithead Chapel, The Rumpus, Gargoyle, Raleigh Review, The Georgia Review, [PANK], and elsewhere.