Language Arts (42 page)

“I'd best be going,” he said, getting up, and the water emptied, downward, a liquid weight pooling briefly in his feet and then releasing into someplace far below.

Mrs. McGucken made as if to stand; when she seemed to be having difficulty, Charles reached out and took her lightly by the elbow.

“I have one last thing to give you.”

She reached down and laid hold of a decoupaged wood box that had been sitting on the coffee table between them.

“Inside are Dana's letters to me, from the time he lived on Shaw Island.” She held the box out to him. “I'd like you to take some.”

“Oh, Mrs. McGucken, I can't—”

“Please, don't worry,” she said, smiling. “Dana wrote lots of letters.”

Charles opened the box; it was filled with half sheets of lined manila paper, the very kind they'd used in Mrs. Braxton's class.

“I wish I could translate what all of it means,” Mrs. McGucken said, “and it surely all meant something to him. I just wanted you to know that you taught him well; he made those loops right up until the day he died.”

As they stood at the door, she clasped his hand. “Your mother,” she said. “Is she still alive?”

“Oh, no. She's been gone a long time.”

Mrs. McGucken nodded, and then looked intently into his eyes. “Don't be too hard on the dead, Charles. It's not easy for them to say they're sorry or ask for forgiveness, although I do believe they try.”

She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before saying goodbye.

Charles sat in the car for a long time looking at Dana's letters to his mother. At the end of every indecipherable piece of correspondence, he had written his signature:

•♦•

Dear Emmy,

I'm sitting on the front-porch steps watching the first blush of morning light, a rose-colored flatline on the near horizon.

It's been another insomniac night. I've just come home from watching a movie at Pinehurst Palace; there's a VCR player over there, and the movie is an old one, available only in that format.

My sleeplessness commenced around midnight, when I awoke from a dream, a version of which I've had frequently over the years. This time, however, there were several significant changes.

The dream began with me standing at the base of a huge, towering fortress of mildewing cardboard boxes. I was aware, as always, that my mother was inside, but I had no idea if her seclusion was forced or voluntary. Was I meant to rescue her or let her be? (These are questions that plagued me when she was alive; they remain unanswered, so it's no wonder that they've continued to haunt me long after her death.)

I noticed a space, a small point of entry, a gap in the fortress's façade that I'd not seen before, just big enough to crawl through.

I heard my mother's voice—“Charles? Charles, is that you?”—and the tinkling of ice cubes. I saw spiraling wisps of smoke rising from inside the enclosure and knew them to be a signal of some sort—but this time, they were not a sign of distress but a kind of visual prayer, an offering.

“Charles,” my mother repeated. “Why are you standing out there? Come inside.”

And so I crawled in, becoming younger as I did, and once inside I found myself in the living room of a house I'd lived in until I was ten. My mother was dressed up—wearing an outfit I remembered watching her iron one night before she went out on a date with my father—and there, laid out on the glass-top coffee table, was a silver tray of face snacks, the kind I used to make for your brother.

“Hi, Dad,” another voice said. I turned, and it was you! Seventeen years old, dressed entirely in white, in the corseted, long-skirted style of a nineteenth-century lady. A cartoon bubble hovered over your head; your words appeared inside the bubble as you spoke them. “Here,” you said, “wear these.” And you handed me a tall stack of tasseled caps in an assortment of colors.

As you and your grandmother and I sat down to Hamm's beer served in tiny porcelain cups, I could hear, not too far away, the sound of young boys laughing, of paper being torn, of noodles being smashed, of clinking glasses . . .

After awakening, I knew it would be difficult to go back to sleep, and I decided not to try, no homeopathics, no herbal teas; there was nothing for it but to get up and go down there, downstairs, down to the crawlspace. It was time to open the last boxes.

I knew where to find your things, as well as a few other items of significance, archival documentation of our little family's history.

In fact, I'd known all along.

And there they were. Not a towering fortress of boxes, just three.

I brought them upstairs and out here to the front porch, one at a time. They're sitting next to me.

In the first box (the one on which I found your tea set resting way back in September when I first began this archaeological project): the bluebird mobile, the yellow-and-green layette, the silver rattle, the Beatrix Potter books sized for a child's hands—a gift from my mother.

The contents of the second: the Post-it note (
It's a girl!
); the ultrasound image (
Hi, Daddy!
); the photograph album your mother assembled after your baby shower; the congratulatory cards; the videotape I watched earlier this evening. These items went into the box in the crawlspace a few months after you were born.

I'd come home from school one day to discover your mother's car in the driveway; when I walked in, there she was, lying on the living-room sofa, dozing, a cup of tea on the table next to her.

“Hey. You're home.”

“Yes,” she said drowsily, “I'm home.” Her eyes were puffy, her face flushed.

“You sick?” I dropped my school satchel next to my office desk and went to her to feel her forehead. It was clammy but cool.

She shook her head, rubbed the back of her neck, and readjusted herself on the sofa. She was holding a heating pad to her abdomen.

“Where's Cody?” I asked.

“Next door. I called Erik Bjornson and asked if he could watch him until you got home.”

“Did you work today?”

“No. I mean, yes, I went in, but I left early.”

“What's wrong?”

“I'm just a little tired is all.”

“I'll start dinner.”

“Don't fix anything for me. I'm not hungry.”

I was headed to the kitchen when I noticed a box by the front door.

“What's this?”

“Some things for the thrift. I meant to drive it over this afternoon, but . . .” She started to cry, quietly.

I opened the box flaps.

I remember feeling a sudden, sickening loss of equilibrium when I saw what was inside, as if I'd stepped into an elevator that immediately began plummeting from the top floor of a very tall building.

“Why are you giving this away?”

Your mother didn't answer.

“These are Emmy's things. Why are you giving them away?”

“We're not having any more babies.”

“You don't know that. We haven't talked about that.”

“We're not going to talk about it. That's where I was today. That's what I was doing. Making sure. No more babies.”

And that was when she told me she'd had surgery, a tubal ligation. She and I weren't supposed to have any more children, she said; Cody, your brother, was going to take all of our strength, and if I didn't see that, if I didn't accept that, well, I had to, there was no choice.

I remember thinking that I should feel very angry about the fact that your mother had made such a momentous, irrevocable decision without asking me, her husband, her supposed partner; that she'd drastically altered the blueprint of a life that we'd agreed upon, that we'd quite literally put our hands to on that first night we met—“I'll want to have children right away,” and I'd said yes, yes; to her, to the miracle of that possibility.

What I felt instead was a kind of stunned panic, an animal protectiveness, an urgent compulsion to shield you, hide you, get you as far away as possible from this person, this weak-seeming, weeping person on the sofa who had once been your mother but had somehow transformed into a predator.

“Where's the rest of it?” I asked.

“Charles . . .”

“You didn't,” I said. “Alison. Tell me you didn't.”

When she didn't answer, I rushed outside, pulled off the garbage-can lid, and made another horrifying discovery. I began extracting the remaining evidence of your existence.

When I passed through the living room carrying your things, she was still on the sofa, crying more fiercely now, but also saying something, words, I suppose, but whatever it was made no sense and I interrupted her. “We're not getting rid of Emmy's things,” I said. “We are not getting rid of her.”

I brought everything downstairs and hid it in the farthest, darkest corner of our meticulously remodeled, mycotoxin-free crawlspace. I didn't want your mother finding your things again; I suspected that she'd once more try to dispose of them, that someday in the future I'd come home to find that she'd erased you forever. This was a terrible thought to have about a person I loved.

So. The last box. It too has a story. It too represents a significant vertical slash on our family's timeline.

A few years later—you would have been about seven years old—I once again came home from school to find your mother's car in the driveway in the middle of a workday; again, she was waiting for me on the living-room sofa, upright this time and looking far from vulnerable.

Next to the door were two suitcases. Cody had already been moved into his first group home at this point, so the suitcases did not belong to him.

Next to the suitcases was this third box.

“I hadn't decided to leave, really, I hadn't,” your mother began. Her voice, I remember, was very matter-of-fact and practiced, a voice I realized she probably used often when deposing a witness for the defense, perhaps, or cross-examining an alleged rapist. “I was only thinking about it. I went downstairs, I'm not sure why, I told myself it was to see if there was anything down there I might want to take with me if I decided to go. And then I found them.”

She nodded her head toward the damning evidence.

There was no need for me to open the flaps of that box; I knew exactly what it contained. Not the treasure chest of sentimental savings that I started looking for months ago—those lost relics documenting your journey from toddlerhood through high school, the handmade birthday/Valentine's Day/Father's Day/get-well cards, the letters from camp, the school projects—but seven years' worth of unsent one-way correspondence, tucked into envelopes addressed to Emerson Faith Marlow.

Your mother went on to say that anyone who was this obsessed with a fictional child could not possibly be a good parent to a real one. “No wonder you can't be a father to Cody,” she said. “No wonder this marriage has failed. You wanted Cody out of the house—you've wanted that since the diagnosis—and now he's gone. You've wanted to be alone with a fictional, perfect daughter—fine, have at it . . .”

She said a lot of things that afternoon. I prefer not to remember most of them.

“It's
sick,
Charles,” she went on. “It's
pathological,
carrying her around like this,
thinking
about her,
writing
to her,
imagining
her like she's some kind of . . . I don't know . . .
character
in a story . . .”