14.
***
Lynette was numb. She felt like her mind was swathed in cotton, a layer of cloth that insulated her from seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling. In the short days between Robbie's death and his funeral, she had endured too many questions, too few answers.
What had happened? Doris had asked. And Lynette had no answer, because all she knew of the moment she lost her husband was that it had been a moment of insanity; a second of complete loss. Similarly, the next few days swept past in a torrent of activity that was so overpowering it actually intensified her feelings of disorientation and disengagement. Just as a car, when driven slowly over potholes will jitter and shake, but when driven at a reckless speed will drive more smoothly, so the many details that had to be attended to with Robbie's death rendered her almost a wraith, gliding across the surface of her life.
Robbie was gone.
That was the one thought that kept recurring, that kept waking her up at night and kept her wanting to fall asleep during the day as an escape from its rhythmic pounding.
Robbie is gone.
Robbie is gone.
Robbie is gone.
A mortuary had to be contacted, the body handled, and Robbie is gone.
The funerary arrangements had to be made, and Robbie is gone.
Robbie is gone.
Robbie is gone.
Robbie is gone.
Only Kevin seemed unaware of all the activity around him. As long as he had his cars and his two red balls, he was happy. Lynette hated those round red spheres, hated them for what they represented and the change in her life that they had wrought. Though of course they were in and of themselves neither evil nor even capable of any kind of action or activity, still she thought of them in the darkness of the night as being evil totems, mischievous spirits that had come to dwell with her child and in so doing had signaled the loss of her husband.
The funeral itself was almost impossible to bear. Not merely because she had to say goodbye to her beloved Robbie, but also because she had to reject her pastor's offer to eulogize him. She had no desire to hear of the tender mercies of God when it was that same God who had stolen her husband from her, and stolen him most cruelly. She gave the eulogy herself, as much as she was able, though she broke down crying halfway through and had to be helped away from the microphone.
Robbie was a much loved man among his students, among the Friends of Autistic Children, in their church, and in the community generally. So his funeral was a standing room only affair, full of well-wishers and grief-givers. But Lynette found no solace in the many hands that reached out to take hers; found no sharing of her grief possible, though many offered her their shoulders to cry on and to give them any of her burdens that they could carry for her.
But that was the problem. There were no burdens that she could shift. She was a single mother now, and had to find some way to take care of herself while at the same time caring for a son who had been hard enough to care for when that was all she devoted herself to.
Luckily - blessedly, her pastor insisted, though Lynette continued to keep her own opinions about God and His blessings - Robbie had been well-insured through his job. The salary of a teacher was poor, but there were perks to be found in the benefits. He left her with just over two hundred fifty thousand dollars, which was enough to permit her some time to grieve, and some time to figure out what to do with herself and with Kevin.
Kevin. He was asleep, his tired body not able to keep up with the single-minded intensity he brought to bear on every aspect of his activities. But sleep would not come for Lynette, no matter how hard she willed it. She kept reaching over onto Robbie's side of the bed, as though by doing so she could somehow call him back from the brink of eternity, could summon him to her side once again. No matter how often she reached over, however, she always found the same thing: an empty bedspread, cold and unruffled by her cover-hog of a husband. Finally, she took off her own covers and wadded them on his side of the bed, as though she were sleeping on one of the many nights where he had stolen the spreads from her. She shivered, and not from cold.
How can I go on? she asked herself more than once as the seconds ticked by in the night that seemed like it must last forever. How can I do this without him?
Each time she listened in the silence and darkness for an answer. Each time she was disappointed. There was no knowledge to be had in the deep, no enlightenment to be found beneath the light of a moon whose brilliance had seemed to fade in the last three days.
Then her shivering changed. It was a subtle effect, hardly noticeable at first. Then she became aware that she was shivering, not with cold or with the repressed despair that had threatened to swallow her up at any moment, but with a kind of manic energy. It felt as though she had stuck her finger in a light socket and was now serving as a living conduit for energies so strong that they should have burned her out from the inside. Instead of scorching and leaving her a dried husk, however, the force that possessed her had energized her, changed her from a being enervated by grief to one wound up by an unseen hand, like a clock whose spring was coiled too tightly and was on the verge of breaking.
Lynette became aware of a sound. The soft tones of a whispered word. She automatically looked beside her, half-expecting to see Robbie, speaking softly in his sleep as he had been wont to do from time to time.
But Robbie was not there.
Robbie is gone. Robbie is gone. Robbie is -
The thought was interrupted by the recurrence of the sound. Unable to convince herself that it was some sort of phantom noise, a memory made audible by her grief-riddled mind, she stood and tried to sense where the low, tumultuous sound was coming from.
Somewhere outside of her room.
She followed the sound out into the hall. The force that had previously energized her now made her feel logy, tired, adrift in a sea that she had no power to control. She was a tiny boat in the grasp of a wave that was drawing her inexorably forward. But whether the wave would deposit her safely on a beach or would toss her to be cruelly crushed on nearby rocks, she could not say. She only knew that, for the moment, she was not the pilot of her ship. If ever she had been.
Pulled by the magnetic force of the sound, she walked slowly down the short hallway in the home that had until recently been shared by her, Robbie, and Kevin. She put a hand out, touching the wall as though to steady herself, and was more than a little surprised to find it solid and whole. She half-expected to find it insubstantial as a cloud, unreal as a dream. Its solidity reassured her, reminded her that she was not insane, that some rules still applied, even in a world so mad that it had seen fit to steal her husband from her.
She traced figures on the wall as she walked. Gradually she became aware that she was writing the word "Robbie" over and over again, as though her hand was, of and for itself and independent of any of the thoughts of her mind, aching for the need to touch him, to feel him beneath her fingers, to trace her hands upon his broad chest and back.
She stopped herself from writing the name, holding her hand tightly against her chest. Forget being the captain of her own ship, apparently she could no longer even control the movement of her own body.
As though to confirm that suspicion, she felt a pressing in her body, and realized that she needed desperately to urinate. But she knew she would not be able to use the bathroom until she found out what the noise was that was still drawing her forth like iron fillings to a magnet.
The noise grew in volume as she walked down the hall, and gradually she realized where it was coming from.
Kevin's room.
She flashed to the image of the gray man who had appeared out of nowhere three days before. She had not confided in anyone what had really happened, sure that if she did so she would immediately be at risk of losing Kevin as well as losing her husband. She could not let that happen. Not for the world. Kevin was all that she had left, and without him she really would be lost, afloat and adrift in an endless sea of solitude and misery.
So no, she did not tell anyone what she had seen. She merely said that Robbie had slipped. Had fallen in a puddle of water from one of the party-goers and slipped and died in a tragic accident. No mention of the gray man. No mention of the threatening manner in which he loomed over her son. No mention of the last brave lunge that her husband took in what she knew intuitively to be a protective move that had gone horribly awry.
Doris, the hostess of the fateful party, had been aghast. But in the sick, litigious society that inhabited the southern regions of the state of California, Lynette had been unable to tell if the horror had been at the fact that Robbie had died, or born of a fear that Lynette would sue her because the accident had happened on her property.
Lynette had no such desires. For one, she believed that Robbie would not have condoned any such action. But more importantly, she knew that it was in no way Doris' fault. Somehow it was the fault of the other man. The intruder.
The gray man.
The thought of the interloper who had turned her life so completely inside out gave speed to her feet and quieted her trembling. She moved quickly now, on legs as fleet as those of Hermes, messenger of the gods of old. She ran the few short steps to Kevin's doorway, then turned the handle and was inside his room in an instant.
Kevin insisted on perfect darkness when he slept. As though, even as a toddler, he had already not only passed through the fear of the dark that troubled most children, but had actually grown contemptuous of it. So when she entered the room, only darkness greeted her.
Darkness, and the sound.
She reached for the light switch, found it almost instantly, but something stopped her from flicking it up. She felt a sudden dread, not at finding the source of the sound, but at the prospect of frightening it away before she could examine it more closely. So rather than turn on the light, she froze in place and listened, gradually becoming aware that the sound was coming from Kevin's direction.
She put a hand in front of her and sightlessly began feeling for the toddler bed that Kevin lay in. She felt it with her shins first, a good sign since a part of her fully expected to feel the rumpled fabric of the gray man's suit with her fingertips before she ever found the bed.
But no, the gray man apparently was not there. Normally, this would have comforted Lynette immensely. Now, however, it somehow only increased her sense of dread. If not him, what? What other scourge had this unjust creature called God chosen to castigate her with? What else could happen?
She kept questing sightlessly as a queen termite, feeling with her fingers for something, anything, that would give a clue as to what the sound was.
Finally, she found it. She felt the thing that was making the noise, and her stomach clenched into a tight knot within her. The feeling of needing to urinate that had seized her before was now so strong as to be almost impossible to withstand. But she had to, she could not afford to leave this room. Not until she had reached the bottom of this mystery whose surface she had just scratched at.
The noise was coming from Kevin. At first she thought it was just a random jumbling of sounds, the nonsense burbling and babbling that any normal two year old might engage in. But as she listened, she became aware that the sounds were not random. They were precise, though delivered through the soft palate and undeveloped tongue of a young child.
"Witten was white, witten was white, witten was white," he said. The boy who had previously said only one word - "Gray," the word he had spoken as though in a warning of the imminent appearance of the man who would signal the end of Robbie's life - was now sporting a veritable cornucopia of vocabulary words.
"Witten was white, witten was white, witten was white...."
The words repeated over and over, and now that she was acclimating to the complete darkness of the room, her other senses were sharpening to compensate for the loss of her sight and she grew more and more certain that the strange words were, in fact, emanating from her son. She could feel his breath as he exhaled the words, could hear him inhale as he prepared to repeat each phrase in the free-verse poem of his sleep.
"Witten was white, witten was white, witten was white...."
Then the words cut off. Suddenly and without explanation, they stopped.
The silence stretched out forever, an interminable length of quiet that seemed to go on and on and on.
Then Kevin spoke again. And this time the tremulous chills that gripped her turned to bright light in her breast as Kevin said a new word, the fifth word of his life.
"Mommy," he said, and Lynette felt a pride and love in her heart that almost managed to push aside the crippling grief that she had been struggling against since Robbie's death.
In the next moment, however, her feelings spiraled downward again, and the tremors that shook her were no longer the galvanizing sense of movement that had propelled her to this instant, nor were they the loving quivers of a mother whose pride for her son knows no end. This time, they were the shivers of fear, pure and white as icicles in her heart.
Kevin sat up. She felt rather than saw the movement, but in her mind the vision was as clear as if she had witnessed it in broad daylight. He sat, and she could imagine him staring at her, silent eyes staring blindly in the blackness, yet with a gaze that still somehow found its way to her face.
"Mommy," he whispered again, then, awake this time, and in full sense of what faculties he possessed, he whispered urgently, "Witten was white."
***