I had to sleep because I couldn’t live. Not with him gone.
But then, after three days of barely eating the sandwiches and fruit they kept delivering to the bedroom on that food tray, I did finally get up. I had to wake because Andrea was still alive—even if I wasn’t.
The gratitude I’ll feel for their protection during those first days after we buried Alex is something I’ll never forget, no matter how much some of the later events with Laurel nearly destroyed me. I try and remember that as I blink back the naptime sleep from my eyes and amble downstairs in search of Ellen. Funny how much today feels like a year ago; the same heat, the same shrouding coolness inside this steamship of a house, the same rhythmic ticking of the antique grandfather clock.
“You’re up already?” Ellen asks. She is sitting at the dining-room table sipping tea, a hardback open in front of her.
“What are you reading?”
She examines the novel’s spine. “C.S. Lewis.” Ugh. God stuff. Not what I need today. Settling across from her, I slide my newly discovered picture of Alex across the table toward her. “You see this one?”
She lifts it eye-level, smiling as she studies it. “That’s the summer he grew like a bean stalk,” she laughs gently. “At least six inches, I think.”
“You know what I noticed about it?” I ask as she hands it back to me, shaking her head. “That he was triumphant. On top of the world. Guess he always was.”
“Not always,” she answers wistfully. “But most of the time.”
Staring down at the image, at the way he’s riding high and confident on Casey’s shoulders, I say, “Bold as a mountain.”
“Bold as life,” she agrees. “Some people are born that way, Michael. They come to us for a brief, special purpose. We must accept that it was Alex’s way.”
I know she’s right. Alex, the speedy comet that trailed across my life, then burned out fast. He lived to the fullest, that’s for sure. No apologies, no hesitation, he reached for life with both hands and took it. Gusto should have been his middle name.
“It was the same way when he came out to me,” she continues. “He was gay, that’s how it was, and he hoped I’d still be proud of him.”
“And you said?”
“How could I not be proud?”
“You’re a great mother.”
“I had a great son.”
“Well, you won’t get any arguments from me about that.” I laugh, and our eyes meet. We shared a true love between us; the approach just came from different directions.
She gets a distant look on her face, staring past me at some unseen place. “He went at everything so intently, it was almost as if he knew he’d die young.”
“Yeah, maybe some people have a short lifespan coded into their DNA.”
I thought about that after he was gone. How fitting it was that he’d made a career of staving off death, of battling it, hand to hand; then, ever the victor in others’ lives, he succumbed finally in his own.
“I’m angry when I think of all the people he might have healed,” I say. “All the kids he could have saved. That really burns me up.”
“I receive letters from the parents, you know,” she says. “I had one just last week, from the mother of a thirteen-year-old boy he treated for leukemia. Her son has been in remission for five years now. Totally well. She wanted me to know how thankful she was for Alex.”
Slowly, she moves toward the credenza, easing a drawer open. There must be family silver and serving pieces in that thing, because it gives an uneasy groan, but she steadies it, pulling out a thin envelope. Everything Ellen Richardson does is deliberate, purposeful, elegant. Her movements are choreographed poetry. Like the way she runs her palm over the creased paper as she removes it from the envelope, ironing the thin paper with her fingertips as she lifts her reading glasses upward to the bridge of her long nose.
She settles into the chair again and studies the page, her eyes skimming over the words. “Your son gave me back my own son,” she begins. “For that I will always be grateful. But we are not alone. I know there are countless others like my family. Your son touched us all.”
Family. With that one word, tears fill my eyes. Ellen must sense my reaction, because she pauses, glancing upward at me. “Oh, Michael,” she soothes, covering my hand with her own weathered one. “I’m sorry.”
She blurs, becomes misty as I blink at the tears. I don’t want this woman, the only mother figure in my life, to see me cry. Her bony hand closes around mine, squeezing tight, and the tears won’t stop. Searching for my voice is a useless task; there’s only a tight raspy wheeze as I bow my head, dropping it into my palm.
Ellen rises from her chair and stands beside me, her familiar hand circling my tired shoulders. “You loved him so much, I know.”
“It’s not just that,” I manage thickly, glancing up at her. “We were a family.”
“You still are, Michael. You and Andrea.”