The Duck Bench
by Haley Mak.

           There are two black-and-white photos tucked away in the basement, one nearly a replica of the other, only changed by the metamorphosis of growing up. When she passed, we wanted each household to have a remnant of that sacred memory which seemed to be the epitome of my grandmother. Time must have escaped us, though, because both photos remained down there, in that place of lost things and moments stored away. It would be simple, really, to give the other half of my family their picture. We weren’t those types of people who only saw each other out of familial obligation; I saw my cousins as much as my twin brother, it seemed, and my aunt and uncle as much as my parents.

           Perhaps—although it had gone unsaid—we all know those pictures would never belong in our homes, on walls that weren’t pastel yellow or on a credenza noticeably lacking in Ukrainian easter eggs. The original photo had belonged in a small-scale condo that was no longer ours, to a grandmother no longer there.

            Even so, I find myself down there a lot, rummaging through bins of yarn or stockpiling gluten free snacks. Where those images had once left a gaping hole of grief, time had unearthed something else. I stand in the chill and expect a haunting. Jarring LED light glares over photo canvas painted in monochrome. My grandmother isn’t in the picture, but I see the old gray of her eyes and the glint of her reading glasses, the rumply black yarn stitching of her favorite beanie.   

            I think about how hard it is to feel loss when she continues to exist everywhere, even down here in a place so full of clutter and artificial light. How even still that loss remains.

           “We should go back there,” I’d said to her one day some years ago, not yet understanding the chest caving in, the silent tears on my pillow, the regret, of too late. We’d been sitting on her couch watching TV after breakfast, the sweet smell of cinnamon rolls lingering in the cozy space of her condo. My feet were unconsciously stretched out atop a circular wooden coffee table. Sprawled across the carpeted floor, my brother and cousin had laid tapping away at their phones, a poof of thick brown hair and a smooth sheaf of jet black just visible over the polished wood lip.

           There’d been a jaggedness between solitude and loneliness then. Shafts of morning sunlight leaked through the blinds, warm and feathery rays flitting about the room. My Nana had sat peacefully next to me, hands folded neatly in her lap, perhaps painfully aware of the absence of her two other grandchildren away at college and work, disconnected from the childhood realm Nana governed. But if it pained her so, she never showed it. At least not completely.

           The original black-and-white photo hung on the wall by her patio door. Five pairs of little feet hovered in the center of the picture, toes glistening with sand and mud in a coalescence of ombre hues. Our lower bodies and the bench on which we sat completed the image. Wisps of a much more real sunlight had reflected off the waxy topcoat, coaxing my previous words from my mouth.

           Nana’s thoughtful gaze had slid away from the muted static of her old television screen, thin brows furrowing. “Go where?” And I swear it, that same soft voice reverberates in the stillness of the basement, and in her photographs and prayer cards, in the patterned Ukrainian easter eggs I vowed to preserve for her. Never a haunting, always a remembering.

           I’d twirled a strand of my thick hair between my fingers then. “To the duck bench.” Although the two boys on the floor had given no indication of hearing my pondering, I knew I had caught their attention.

           Nana’s silvery gray eyes had widened. She remembered too.

            And so, the notion of time escaping us becomes distorted, absurd, really, because it feels more like time returning.         

           The same cozy condo, only much earlier in the youth of our dreamworld. A cacophony of high-pitched laughter, and five pairs of tiny feet shuffling about the room, pulling on socks and tying shoelaces. Nana clattered around the kitchen, stuffing a lime-green cooler with sandwiches, oranges, pretzels, and a bag of bread—sometimes bagels, too. Keegan, my youngest cousin, tackled his older brother Mason to the floor while my own twin brother pelted him with random shoes. My eldest cousin Olivia sat at the kitchen table with me. The ritual always began in this similar manner.

           Once Nana successfully herded us out of the condo, we walked to the park. Running ahead down a twisting hillside, a trail on the outskirts of our small town, to a sidewalk curbed by a sandy riverbed where the duck bench stood firmly in the ground. The gentle trickling of water echoed in my ears, and I glanced at the slow-moving stream to find a couple ducks nestled on the grassy slope. Despite my pleas for an attempt at stealth, the boys’ ensuing raucous sent them flying away. 

           I froze. “No!” I shouted. Eyes brimmed with tears. “They’re all gone!”

           “They’ll come back, cutie.” Nana appeared at my side, placing a comforting hand on my shoulder. “Let’s eat for now.”

           I didn’t believe her at the time, but I soon forgot about the ducks as we ate our sandwiches and chatted happily. The boys scampered back up the hill to pass a soccer ball around, leaving Nana, Olivia, and me on the bench. The river continued to gurgle under my gaze, and the water glittered like crystal candy. 

           Minutes later, Olivia poked me in the side, tilting her head towards Nana on the other end of the bench. “See? They always come back.” My gaze broke away from the stream and settled on two chubby ducks now squabbling at Nana expectantly. Olivia pulled some bread from the cooler and handed me a piece.

           I unleashed a delighted squeal as more and more ducks surrounded the bench. The two of us fed them most of the bread, and when Olivia offered a slice to Nana, she only shook her head. She’d rather watch.

           Nana’s smile grew wider with each squeal I loosed. And it only blossomed bigger each time we ventured out to the duck bench. A tranquility would settle over her, and that sunlight would dance in her eyes for the rest of the day.

           “Oh, I remember those days.” Nana had sighed longingly, and I’d caught a hint of that light in her faded eyes once more. I noticed that the boys had at last put down their phones. Again, a scrape of loneliness returned, and I found myself wondering if Olivia thought about the duck bench, all those miles away in D.C. at school. Or Mason, who busied himself with work and snowboarding nowadays.

           The memory held firm in my head. On those five pairs of tiny feet that once belonged to five young children. Five grandchildren who meant the world to my Nana and couldn’t possibly understand in their youth how often the image would replay itself in her mind.

           Five children who grew up way too fast.

           Our basement of lost things trails a loving hand over my shoulder, and some warmth returns to me.

                                                                    *****

           “Happy birthday, Nana,” I whisper into a spring breeze, letting my words be carried by the river on to someplace far away. It’s been four months since my Nana’s passing.

            My brother and I sit alone on the duck bench, the gap between us stretching with words caught in our throats and space that would never feel full again. Landen and I had grown to be vulnerable with each other in our own way, and our grief slipped into this like bittersweet syrup. Late night talks on the road with the windows down and music coursing through our veins. The exchange of little text messages and videos that were sometimes silly and absurd, and other times profoundly meaningful even if that wasn’t the intent. It is also the silence hanging over our meals, or walking to class, and the shared iCloud photo album we created with our cousins.   

            “I really miss her,” he says then, though he doesn’t have to. Maybe he needs to.

            “Me too.”

           We’d driven to the duck bench just the two of us, perhaps to allow our mother and father to grieve or celebrate in their own way. Perhaps to allow us to do the same. Could this still be a celebration? The implication felt raw and achy in my chest. I imagine grief in the form of a moss-coated skeleton sitting in the gap between my brother and me, donning a glittery pink party hat. Yellow would be more fitting—it was Nana’s favorite color.  

           Landen’s phone appears in his hand. “Let’s take a picture. We’ll photoshop her in after.”

           He labors away on his phone while I spend some minutes listening to the chitter of critters and the distant laughter of children at the nearby playground. I eventually glance at my own phone to see the freshly edited image sent to our family group chat. We huff with halfhearted glee at their loving responses, but the happiness remains heavy. I wonder in a moment of panic if the feeling will ever fade, and the wish riddles me with guilt.

           “Look.” Landen nudges me suddenly in the side and points to the left of our bench down the riverside, where I expect to see some ducks waddling up to us, that hungry curiosity blinking in their beady eyes. My gaze lands on a bench just like ours. An elderly woman sits in solitude wearing a puffy pink jacket and black beanie. I say it was an elderly woman, but in reality, I am not positive at all, for her back is to us, and our bench is a couple paces up the shoreline behind her. That jacket and hat though…they bear unmistakable resemblance to the ones Nana wore so often, cheering on the sidelines of our soccer games or passing out candy on the porch Halloween night. Landen knows it too. She loved her knit beanie so much, with its woven purple flower, that we buried her in it, and when everything had felt wrong and fractured, like the closing of a book or waving goodbye from a frostbitten station as a train carries her away…that little decision—to bury Nana in her beanie—had been right.

           I want to tell Landen it’s like seeing a ghost, but there is nothing ghostly about this woman. If this is the haunting I’d been awaiting, it is masked in river light and memory. She can’t know how sacred this place was. She can’t know about the photo and our pairs of sand-tickled feet. She can’t know that we’d made a copy of the original so that both of our families had something to hold, to keep.

           They always come back. The thought isn’t shocking, like an epiphany from on high. No, it is the quack of ducks and giggles, it is the kicking of a soccer ball across well worn grass, and it is the stickiness of orange juice and pretzel crumbs between fingers. It is my cousin Olivia assuring me that our ducks would come back, just as Nana’s grandchildren always do after years of growing up, traveling, working, exploring; then returning to our youth like the ducks to their bench, knowing they will be cared for and loved there. I want those ducks to know how much joy they gave that little girl.       

           As my brother and I stroll back to the car, the hole of grief inside seems to change. I don’t believe it shrank or dissipated, and I don’t believe it is beginning to heal either, for I’d slowly come to understand that it won’t, despite the greatest of attempts. Perhaps it is there to remind us of what it once was, and that although the loss will remain, so too will Nana and our duck bench.