When you live in a family, it’s easy to stop noticing things, to quit paying attention. That’s one way you know it’s a family. We take things for granted. Some people call that tolerance, or laziness, or being in denial. I call it getting through the day.
I soon got used to how difficult my (unofficial) stepson was being. His bad behavior was mostly directed at me. He was always nice to Miles. They loved each other as much as before. Like brothers. If their friendship had started unraveling, I might have been quicker to bring it to Sean’s attention.
Sean was making up for lost time at work. He wasn’t home all that much. He’d left Nicky to me for a while. And when Sean was around, Nicky wasn’t going to waste what little time he had with his dad on a display of anger or unhappiness.
Dealing with that was my job, and I took it on gladly. For Sean, for Emily, for Nicky. But I couldn’t help feeling that something was going to happen, that something awful was going to shatter the calm before the looming, dangerous, unpredictable storm.
Whenever people got on the subject of dogs and how smart they are, my brother Chris used to tell a story about visiting a friend in the Southwest and going on a hike in the desert with his dogs. The dogs were barking; the birds were making bird noises; the breeze was blowing, and all of a sudden the noise just stopped. The dogs and the birds fell silent. Even the wind quit blowing.
Chris looked on the ground, and not twenty feet away was a coiled rattlesnake, hissing. I remember him saying that silence could also be a warning, louder than a siren.
I found the story compelling and sexy. Chris told it when we were with Davis, and Davis looked at him with such hatred and scorn that for a heartbeat I was sure that Davis knew about Chris and me.
All this is by way of saying that I got used to Nicky’s mini-aggressions and never lost my sympathy for him—or my patience. It was when he stopped acting out that I got scared.
One afternoon Nicky came home from school and seemed to have become the best little boy in the world. Most days he hardly spoke to me and refused to answer when I asked what he’d done in class. But that afternoon he asked me how my day had been and what I’d been doing.
A child asks an adult what she did that day? Really? I didn’t tell him I’d wasted hours trawling the internet for advice on how to deal with him. I said I’d spent part of the day straightening up the house, which was true.
At dinnertime, Nicky said he would eat whatever I cooked—even if it was vegetarian. He was totally unlike the angry kid he’d been just the day before. It made me happy. Time was working its healing magic. We were taking small steps forward, tiptoeing out of the darkness into the light.
And yet . . . and yet . . . I had an uncomfortable feeling. Something was wrong. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did. A mom’s intuition.
It was as if the world had gone silent, and I’d heard the rattlesnake hiss.
The boys were hiding something. I knew it. I was always catching them whispering, like evil conspiratorial children in a horror film.
What weren’t they telling me? Why was Nicky suddenly acting so thoughtful? When they were playing and I walked into the room, the boys looked up as if I’d interrupted a secret conversation.
One night, when both boys were staying at my house—Sean was working late in the city—Nicky padded into the living room and said he couldn’t sleep. Would I read him a story? I took him back to the guest room that I’d turned into his room. I read him one book after another, as many as he wanted. I waited till he said he was tired, which kids hardly ever do. I turned off the light and tucked him in. I stroked his smooth, slightly damp forehead.
Many people (including children) will tell you things in the dark that they would never say with the lights on. I asked, “Has anything fun or special—or maybe upsetting—been happening in school?”
Nicky was silent for so long I wondered if he’d fallen asleep.
Then he said, “I . . . saw my mom today.”
I got the chills. Nicky’s therapist had warned us about how much trouble children have accepting the fact that a loved one has died. And now, without Sean here to help me, I was going to have to deal with it. I was going to have to tell this suffering child that however much he wanted to see his mom, he couldn’t have seen her. She was gone. Gone for good.
I took a deep breath.
“I’m sure you thought you saw her, sweetie . . . We often think we see people we love even though it can’t really—”
“I saw her,” Nicky said. “I saw Mom.”
The important thing was to keep him talking and encourage him to confide in me, to tell what he so desperately wanted to be true that he’d convinced himself it was true.
“Where?” I asked him. “Where did you see your mom?”
“She was just outside the school yard fence when we went outside for recess. They let us go outside to play today because it was warm. I wanted to run to her. But recess was almost over, so they were yelling at us to hurry up and get back inside.”
“Are you sure it was your mom? Lots of people look like people they aren’t really . . .”
“I’m sure,” Nicky said. “I could read her lips. She was saying, ‘See you tomorrow. Tell Stephanie hello.’”
“She said that? Tell Stephanie hello?”
“Yup. I saw her there before . . . a couple of days ago . . . the last time they let us play outside. I told Miles. He thought I was making it up. I made him swear not to tell.”
Nicky believed every word he was saying.
It was hard for me to sort out my complicated feelings. Mostly, I was sad. I had so much sympathy for Nicky. But I was also frustrated. Nicky had made no progress toward accepting the loss—the permanent loss—of his mom. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that he’d imagined it, to try to explain (to a five-year-old!) the concept of hallucinations brought on by wishful thinking. Anyway, that was Sean’s job. He was the dad.
I kissed Nicky’s forehead and pulled up the covers.
When Sean got home from the city, I poured him a glass of scotch. A double. I snuggled against him on the couch.
I said, “Something disturbing happened this evening. When I was putting Nicky to bed, he told me that he saw Emily outside the school yard.”
Sean sat up very straight. He stared at me. I saw so many warring emotions in his eyes: shock, disbelief, hope, fear, relief.
He said, “This is disturbing. It can’t be good for him. It’s unhealthy. He was with me when we scattered Emily’s ashes. What am I supposed to do now? Teach him about DNA? Explain that his dad sent Mom’s toothbrush and the coroner made a positive match?”
I’d never heard him sound so raw and out of control. “Stop,” I said, “I can’t stand it. Enough.”
“Oh, that poor boy,” said Sean. “My poor son.”
I turned out the light, and we sat in the dark. I held him in my arms, and he leaned his head against my shoulder.
Finally Sean said, “Let’s not break his heart so soon again. If he wants to live in that dream for one more day, let’s not force him to wake up.”
The next night, at bedtime, Nicky said, “I saw Mom again today.” He said it very simply and calmly. As if he was stating a fact.
This time I explained to Nicky that people had dreams in which they thought they saw people who weren’t there anymore—or ever. I said, “They seem so real, and they speak to us as if they’re actually there. But they’re not real. It’s just a dream. A fantasy. And when we wake up it’s always sad. We miss them more than ever. But we understand that they are still with us, if only in our dreams.”
Nicky said, “No, you’re wrong. My mom was there. I saw her. I ran over to her. I got as close as I could with the stupid fence between us. She touched me through the fence. She touched my hair and my face. Then she told me to run back and join the others. And . . .”
“And what?” My voice sounded strange to me. Anxious, strained . . . and scared. But what was I scared of, exactly?
“And she told me she would never leave me again. She told me to tell you and Dad that.”
I leaned over to kiss Nicky’s forehead.