But Tommy was gone.
Tommy was missing. She could hear herself calling out for him. She’d been spun around and dropped back in that place, in that day she had never left.
She’d thought she’d put it away, thought she had moved past it, around it—not forgetting, never forgetting, but taking the long way around so she could get through, so she could make it through each day, but she was wrong because it had always been there, playing out on the screen of her soul. She had never left it. That day.
Tommy!
She’d woken up to the sound of the boys arguing. Henry had come back the night before bearing last-minute gifts he’d found in some airport, and as usual he’d messed it up and Tommy liked Charlie’s better than his own. So the boys were fighting over it and she woke up to that, still half-asleep, and she’d thought, Damn. Not knowing. Not having the slightest idea what the day would bring. Just thinking, damn, because the kids were fighting and Henry was dead tired next to her, sleeping off all those late-night gigs yet another tour that had gone on and on, making her the single mother she’d never intended to be. They’d fought about it the night before, about him going back to teaching, making some steady money, being there for his family, fought about it in front of the boys as they had always tried not to do. “You’re taking away what I love,” Henry had shouted.
Taking away what I love.
And she’d awoken to the sound of the boys arguing and thought: damn, now I’ve got to go deal with this, no one else but me, so she stomped to the doorway and yelled out, “Work it out, boys, or you’re going to wake your papa.” And that’s how she’d started that day.
And Tommy wanted to play at Oscar’s and she said all right, you can go, because Henry was sleeping and the boys were fighting and she thought it might be better with him out of her hair for a while.
And so she had her day, her day with Tommy out of her hair. Charlie quiet, playing with his new toy. Henry sleeping. In the afternoon they’d had themselves a leisurely lunch and she decided to cook lasagna for dinner. While she cooked she’d looked out the window and the daffodils were blooming around the birdbath, and Henry was home, and the house was quiet, and she felt her own luck. There was Henry home and Charlie and Tommy and her house with the bird feeder and summer vacation soon and she felt her own luck at having this quiet moment, this life, this day.
Tommy!
But it was late afternoon, getting on toward evening, and she went to get Tommy to come home for dinner.
Walking leisurely down the road. There was no rush. It was Saturday. The green fields glowing in the dusk. Summer coming, and the air sweet with it.
She passed the barking dog next door and the mailboxes of the Cliffords and the McClures and turned into the cul-de-sac that Oscar lived in, a horseshoe of houses under tall trees swaying in the breeze. One of the trees must have been diseased; there was a man high up in it, sawing away at the branches. She stood and watched and thought what a shame it was, the limbs falling off that big old tree that had been around for centuries, while all around it spring was enveloping the world. In the cul-de-sac, the people were outside their houses, riding skateboards, listening to the radio, washing their cars. Oscar was shooting baskets on his driveway, his mom in her garden on the side of the house, watering the tomatoes. Denise could see the tomatoes as she walked up the steps of the house; they were small and round and green on the vine, like a promise.
She heard the basketball swishing through the hoop. The gush of water from one of the neighbors washing the soap off his car. The buzzing of the saw on the tree and then the slow cracking as a branch began to fall.
If you could go back—which you couldn’t—if you could go back, she’d go back to that moment, she’d live right there, standing on the driveway in the springtime listening to Oscar’s ball swish into the basket, waiting for Tommy. That moment before Oscar’s mother looked up from her tomatoes and Denise read the surprise written plainly on the other mother’s face, and her life cracked into two.
From then on there would always be the piece of life she was living and the other piece, the piece lived in darkness, in which something somewhere was happening to Tommy.
But it was happening all over again, had never stopped happening, that moment when Tommy had gone missing. She was locked inside it and there would never be any way out, no matter how many pills she took. She’d always be there, in that day, she had just imagined that she’d gone on, that she’d raised Charlie the best she could, that she’d kept on working.