“The baby,” said Ken. “Yours?” He meant to say it with sympathy, with soothing tones that would show he understood. Instead they came out flat, toneless. The words of a man who had no sympathy to give, because every bit of pity was devoted in that moment to salving his own wounds.
Christopher’s sobs stopped almost immediately. He wiped his eyes, and his spine turned into a steel rod. He transformed to one of the supports in their shrinking bastion of humanity, rather than one of the burdens.
Ken wasn’t surprised. Even in a society as purportedly developed and professedly forward as the one they all came from, men were trained to push through what had happened to Christopher. What was still happening.
Women lost babies and it was a tragedy and they wept.
For the fathers it was a tragedy as well, but one that many felt they were expected to muscle over the same as they would any other sticky issue they confronted. That was how men dealt with things. They muscled on. They pushed through. Women pushed through as well, but they often allowed themselves to push through a wall of tears, like a waterfall they had to part around them, a veil of grief they had to cut through to find a valley of healing beyond.
Men, whether culturally or just because of the way they were wired, more often felt the need to hold back their anguish. No waterfall allowed; they built a dam at the top of their feelings, shut all the control gates and let their grief drown them in isolation.
It might not be the right way – Ken knew teachers at his old high school that would debate the rightness and wrongness of it until they passed out from oxygen deprivation – but it was reality. It seemed that most men swallowed their grief, tamped it down, and let it eat at them from the inside. It was what Christopher was doing now.
It was why, when Ken finally touched his shoulder, the younger man didn’t do anything. Didn’t lash out, didn’t push him away. Just stood a little straighter. Don’t worry about me, the motion said. I’ll deal. I’m a man. It’s what I do.
Maggie was a woman. She had to walk through that waterfall, and she expected others to do the same. So she wouldn’t let him drown quietly, and Ken loved that about her.
She reached for Christopher. He didn’t respond to her, either, but she didn’t take that the way a man would have. She didn’t understand it as “Leave me alone,” but rather as “Try to understand, try to be with me.”
“That’s why you were in town,” she said. “It wasn’t just so you could be part of a photo op with your parents.”
He nodded. The nod was so fast you would miss it if you blinked, an up-down that was more twitch than response. But Ken saw the motion as hopeful. Even such tiny movements kept you afloat when you swam through grief and despair.
“I made that red bracelet for her,” he said. His voice carried no emotion. No sadness, no fear. He sounded like he had already joined the ranks of the dead. “I put it on her myself.”
“The mother?” said Maggie.
“She was one of the reasons Mom and Dad always hated me.” Christopher grimaced. There was no joy in his face, only a reservoir of self-loathing so deep it likely had no bottom. “She was great when I met her. Wonderful. High school.” For a moment his face shone, memory past made vision present. “I loved her. I loved her so much.”
He stopped, his mouth working dryly. Maggie put her other hand on his shoulder. Little Liz was sandwiched between them and Ken more than half-expected the toddler to come awake and start screaming the way she always seemed to do when he and Maggie started fooling around.
But no. That was a thing from Before. A thing she would have done before she –
(started Changing started Becoming)
– had been caught up in this madness.
Maggie had stopped walking, and so had the rest of the row. They had to stop, they were all linked in a mass of arms and legs. One stopped, they all stopped. One fell, they all fell.
“I went to college and when I got back she was a junkie.” The grimace returned to Christopher’s face, if possible less cheerful than the first had been. “I didn’t know about her problems until after she was pregnant. I tried to get custody, but she was careful enough that I couldn’t prove the drug problems so the courts defaulted to her as the mother. And Dad didn’t want to create a stink that would hurt his reelection chances, so he helped her. Helped her keep my baby away from me.”
He beat a fist against his thigh, hard and fast. “She died a few days ago. OD’d. And they found the baby in the apartment, dehydrated and starving and holding onto her mom. They took her – Carina, that was her name, the baby’s name, Heather named her after her grandmother – to the hospital, that’s where she was, she was in the hospital, critical condition when….” What had been a babbling sentence, a fear-and guilt-ridden monologue drifted off. He waved, taking in the entirety of the ruined world in one gesture.