Our dads were another thing Stephen and I had in common, both management consultants, both gone all week long, both leaving us to be tended to—and over-tended to—by our moms.
Dad picks up one of my old camping lanterns and looks surprised that it still works when he switches it on. Not exactly a coincidence. I inserted fresh batteries last week when I snuck up here with Noell. Mom wouldn’t let me borrow the car because it looked like rain and she doesn’t like me driving on wet roads. Everyone was home at Noell’s place so we came here for some privacy.
You know what makes zero sense?
I felt guilty about bringing her up here, like I was somehow disrespecting Stephen, like I should have asked his permission.
A wan glow flickers in the space between my father and me, casting ominous shadows behind us.
He says, “Kent, I never lost my best friend, but I understand loss. I’ve been so burdened with sorrow before that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. I sympathize and I’m so sorry.”
I already know what he means, but I ask anyway. “The babies?”
He nods mechanically.
My parents tried to have more kids for a long time after I was born. They wanted a big family, a house full of children. That’s why we moved to North Shore—because we’d have plenty of room here. They were planning ahead. They wanted a huge fireplace mantel, large enough to accommodate half a dozen Christmas stockings. They loved the idea of tall ceilings with lots of wall space, so they could take and hang a million family photos of us, all smiling in terrible matching sweaters. Maybe Dad could even finally talk Mom into a dog and we’d put him in a sweater, too. Dad told me that, when they first got married, their running joke was about forming their own Mathers family basketball team.
Didn’t happen.
Something went wrong after I was born and then my mom couldn’t carry a pregnancy to term. She lost five babies in seven years. Four sisters and a brother. After the first two didn’t take, my folks didn’t tell anyone until they were beyond positive the fetus was viable. After me and until my brother, Mom had never made it past the first trimester. By the end of my Mom’s eighth month, my parents finally exhaled, thought they’d reached the home stretch. They had a baby shower. They decorated a nursery in a jungle theme, with hand-drawn lions and elephants and giraffes dancing through an African veldt. They picked a name.
Hayes.
My brother was going to be called Hayes after my mom’s grandpa. I feel like Hayes would have been a cool kid, with our mom’s looks and smarts and our dad’s equanimity. (Sometimes I call him Father Dad, as he can sound more like a pastor than a consultant.)
Or maybe Hayes would have been a mini-me. I was so excited to be an older brother, psyched to teach him how to play chess, how to use the Big Dipper to spot the North Star so he’d always be able to navigate and find his way home, so he’d never be lost. I planned to educate him on why Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” is the greatest rap song of all time.
I’d help shape him in any way he chose to be shaped.
If Hayes had been my polar-opposite, that would’ve been awesome, too. Maybe he’d be tall and athletic, confident in every new situation. He’d be the leader and I’d be his follower. He could teach me.
I’d have been happy however he’d turned out.
After Hayes, the doctor said my mom had to stop, trying again was too dangerous. While my folks kept a lot of the specifics from me, especially the first few times, I was old enough to understand what it meant to lose Hayes. The doctor said his heart had forgotten to beat a couple of weeks before he was due.
I was really sad back then, but I figured if I couldn’t have Hayes, then Stephen would be my brother. So he was.
Now I’ve lost my brother all over again.
Now I feel like my heart has forgotten to beat.
Each miscarriage changed my mom. She used to be relaxed and even kind of funny. With every loss, she turned more serious, more regimented, more focused on me, to the point that my life became her singular obsession.
That’s why I don’t fight her when her comingled love and concern pull me under like a riptide. I get why she smothers me. I deal with it. I try to tell her what she wants to hear because I know it’s been hard. She’s a great mom and I owe her that respect.
But today, I just couldn’t.
I’m kind of glad to be up here, simultaneously freezing and starving, because my physical aching gives me something to focus on other than my conscience. I want discomfort.
“You won’t make sense of this right now, Kent,” my dad says. He grips my shoulders and looks me in the eye. “You want to, but it’s impossible. I know it’s your nature to reason things out—it’s mine, too. Sometimes you just can’t understand and you have to accept that.”
I want to let my dad take over and make it all better, like he’s done countless times before. But that’s what a child does. Today I need to man the fuck up. I have to face this head on, accept responsibility for my part.
I can’t push away my culpability.
I tell him why I deserve to wear the thorny crown of guilt. “We discussed suicide in my psych class last year. We talked about the warning signs. I knew how to recognize them. But I didn’t see them and that’s my fault.”
“No, Kent, this is not your fault. Do you hear me? You didn’t do this.”
“Yes, I did. I was a shitty friend. I turned my back on him.”
My dad is vehement. “No. That’s hindsight bias. You know the outcome now and you think that because you have this information, you could have changed the outcome. You couldn’t have. Doesn’t work that way.”
“I needed to try harder.”
“You did. I know that Stephen wasn’t always easy to be around, but you accepted that. You stuck by him when no one else did. You and him against the world. Even if you weren’t perfect, you were a friend to him, a good friend. The best friend. You are not responsible. Do you hear me? You are not responsible. You can’t control what happens in someone else’s mind. You’re not all-knowing and you’re not all-powerful and you have to forgive yourself.”
“What if there’s something else I could have done, Dad?”
“Like not eat sushi, maybe?” he replies.
“I...don’t understand.”
“Your mom used to love sushi, did you know that?”
What is he even talking about?
“No, she hates it,” I insist. She doesn’t even want to be around us after we have it. Makes us brush our teeth before we can even talk to her afterward.