On the evening of Dylan’s funeral on Saturday, we stripped the beds, packed up our pets, and left Ruth and Don’s basement apartment in order to return to our own home. Byron followed, in his own car.
We approached our house with trepidation. The media swarm had not abated. Journalists had surrounded the houses of our friends, bombarding them with business cards and messages. One blocked a friend’s driveway when she refused to speak to him, and then followed her as she ran errands until she threatened to call the police. More than once, a friend called to tell us in a whisper that a famous news anchor was sitting right there in their den.
I understood the world was united by a single question, which was to know why the shootings had taken place. I understood they expected us to provide an explanation, though we had none to give. All we wanted was to be left alone to mourn the loss of our son, as well as those he had killed and injured. Thankfully, our driveway was deserted as we approached that night; after a fruitless four-day vigil, the journalists had given up and gone.
Our homecoming brought no relief. I’d expected us to feel better, just by virtue of being home again and closer to Dylan’s things. Instead, as soon as the front door closed behind us, I felt more vulnerable than I had at Don and Ruth’s. Our large picture windows looked out over the spectacular Colorado scenery surrounding the house. We’d never covered them; privacy wasn’t an issue out where we were, and we hadn’t wanted to obscure the views. Now, all I could think was how unprotected those windows made me feel. Once the house was lit from the inside, anyone outside could see right in.
The lamp Tom had left burning in a front window while we were gone served as our only source of illumination as we moved through the deserted house. Tom found a flashlight, but, confusingly, our entire supply of batteries was gone from the kitchen drawer, so we resorted to the half-burned taper candles I’d saved in case of a power failure. Out of habit, I still kept the wooden matches on a top shelf, away from small children who had outgrown me years earlier, but the matches, like the batteries, were gone. The police had confiscated anything in the house that might provide evidence of bomb-making.
Rummaging around in the darkness, I found a set of old sheets, a few flannel blankets, and newspapers destined for the recycling bin. I groped around in drawers for thumbtacks and masking tape. We tackled the kitchen first, standing on chairs and using the light of the open refrigerator to hang a set of makeshift curtains. With candles lit from the gas stove, the three of us moved from room to room, using whatever scraps we could find to block sightlines into our house. Only when we were sealed in this patchwork cocoon did we finally turn on another light at the very back of the house.
After helping us to get settled, Byron went back to his own apartment. It was hard to let him go. I was sure his physical similarity to his brother and our distinctive last name would mean he’d never again have a normal life, and his grief and confusion frightened me far more than my own. I’d lost one son, and was terrified by the new possibility that I might lose another to despair.
I wonder, too, if I wasn’t clinging to Byron because the simple fact of his presence restored me to myself. Despite everything, when I was with Byron, I was still someone’s mother.
Now alone, Tom and I wandered through the darkened rooms. Driving home, I’d imagined I was going to ground, like a hunted animal, but I felt more like one so badly injured that it crawls into a burrow to die alone. Our house no longer felt like a home. Covering the windows had changed the acoustics in the rooms, and the absence of sound in our suddenly childless home felt like an absence of oxygen. I kept thinking I heard the refrigerator door open, one of the many fantasies I would have over the years that Dylan was still with us, in body and soul.
From the ground floor we could see upstairs to the mezzanine, where furniture, books, and papers spilled out of Dylan’s room into the hallway. His mattress, stripped of sheets, leaned against the second-floor banister. The bed itself was in pieces next to it. As much as we had wanted to be close to his belongings while we were at Don and Ruth’s, neither of us had the strength to go near his room that night.
It hurt too much to remain conscious, so Tom and I went to bed. We kept the light on, because our bedroom overlooked the road and we were afraid the press or a vigilante would notice if we shut it off. When its glare made it impossible for us to sleep, we finally agreed we were being foolish.
? ? ?
It’s hard to imagine we slept at all that first night home, but the mind eventually shows mercy and shuts down. As it would be for years, waking was the cruelest moment of the day—the split second where it was possible to believe it had all been a nightmare, the worst dream a person could ever have.
That first morning in our own bed, Tom’s hand crept across the coverlet, and we lay there together in silence, staring at the ceiling and gripping each other’s hands. Finally, one of us swung our feet to the floor, and together we ventured out of the bedroom. I flinched as I walked through the house in the daylight and confronted photographs of the boys—hiking and fishing with their dad, in their baseball uniforms, whitewater rafting with another family, standing on the rocks near our house. From table surfaces and bookshelves, Dylan’s impish, joyful face beamed out at me.
The main room of our beloved house, the place we’d lived in for more than ten years, home to countless classic movie nights and homework skirmishes and family dinners, was unrecognizable. We could not have survived without the privacy, but the blocked windows made the wide-open space look dark and sinister. The clean sunlight that usually flooded the house bounced off the newspaper and filled the air with the dirty smell of wet dog. I could hear birds at the feeder outside, but I couldn’t see them.
The short journey from the bedroom to the kitchen exhausted me, and I gripped the counter to hold myself up. Standing there, I thought suddenly of an unsettling moment I’d had years ago in the hospital, right after Dylan’s birth.
He’d been born in the early morning of September 11, 1981. As with his older brother, Tom and I had named our second son for a poet, the Welsh playwright Dylan Thomas. The sheets in the hospital birthing room had yellow flowers on them, and Dylan’s arrival was so quiet and uneventful I could hear the whispers of nurses in the hallway while I was in labor. He cried out once before settling into my eager arms and squinting into the light.
Like every new mother, I was delighted to meet this brand-new creature I already had such an intimate relationship with. The next morning, we finally got a minute alone, and I was thrilled to kiss his smooth cheeks and wonder at his tiny, perfect fingers and toes. But as I held him, I experienced a deep and unsettling sense of foreboding, strong enough to make me shiver. It was as if a bird of prey had passed overhead, casting us into shadow. Looking down at the perfect bundle in my arms, I was overcome by a strong premonition: this child would bring me a terrible sorrow.
I am not superstitious by nature, and this was a feeling I had never experienced before, and haven’t since. I was so startled by it, I could hardly move. Was this a mother’s intuition? Was my seemingly healthy baby sick? But everything checked out fine, and the hospital sent me home with my new little boy.