by Jack Ketchum
“Can I see?” Danny said.
I knew exactly where all of this was coming from. It’s not easy spending a day in New York with two nine-year-old girls and a seven-year-old boy around Christmas time when they know there is such a thing as F.A.O. Schwartz only a few blocks away. Even if you have taken them to the matinee at Radio City and then skating at Rockefeller Center. Even if all their presents had been bought weeks ago and were sitting under our bed waiting to be put beneath the tree. There was always something they hadn’t thought of yet that Schwartz had thought of and they knew that perfectly well. I’d had to fight with them—with Danny in particular—to get them aboard the 3:55 back to Rye in time for dinner.
But presents were still on his mind.
“Danny . . .”
“It’s okay,” said the man. “No problem.” He glanced out the window. We were just pulling in to the Harrison station.
He opened the lid of the box on Danny’s side, not all the way open but only about three inches—enough for him to see but not the rest of us, excluding us three—and I watched my son’s face brighten at that, smiling, as he looked first at Clarissa and Jenny as if to say nyah nyah and then looked down into the box.
The smile was slow to vanish. But it did vanish, fading into a kind of puzzlement. I had the feeling that there was something in there that my son did not understand—not at all. The man let him look a while but his bewildered expression did not change and then he closed the box.
“Gotta go,” the man said. “My stop.”
He walked past us and his seat was taken immediately by a middle-aged woman carrying a pair of heavy shopping bags which she placed on the floor between her feet—and then I felt the cold December wind at my back as the double-doors slid open and closed again. Presumably the man was gone. Danny looked at the woman’s bags and said shyly, “Presents?”
The woman looked at him and nodded, smiling.
He elected to question her no further.
The train rumbled on.
Our own stop was next. We walked out into the wind on the Rye platform and headed clanging down the metal steps.
“What did he have?” asked Clarissa.
“Who?” said Danny.
“The man, dummy,” said Jenny. “The man with the box! What was in the box?”
“Oh. Nothing.”
“Nothing? What? It was empty?”
And then they were running along ahead of me toward our car off to the left in the second row of the parking lot.
I couldn’t hear his answer. If he answered her at all.
And by the time I unlocked the car I’d forgotten all about the guy.
That night Danny wouldn’t eat.
It happened sometimes. It happened with each of the kids. Other things to do or too much snacking during the day. Both my wife Susan and I had been raised in homes where a depression-era mentality still prevailed. If you didn’t like or didn’t want to finish your dinner that was just too bad. You sat there at the table, your food getting colder and colder, until you pretty much cleaned the plate. We’d agreed that we weren’t going to lay that on our kids. And most of the experts these days seemed to agree with us that skipping the occasional meal didn’t matter. And certainly wasn’t worth fighting over.
So we excused him from the table.
The next night—Monday night—same thing.
“What’d you do,” my wife asked him, “have six desserts for lunch?” She was probably half serious. Desserts and pizza were pretty much all our kids could stomach on the menu at the school cafeteria.
“Nope. Just not hungry, that’s all.”
We let it go at that.
I kept an eye on him during the night though—figuring he’d be up in the middle of a commercial break in one of our Monday-night sitcoms, headed for the kitchen and a bag of pretzels or a jar of honey-roasted peanuts or some dry fruit loops out of the box. But it never happened. He went to bed without so much as a glass of water. Not that he looked sick or anything. His color was good and he laughed at the jokes right along with the rest of us.
I figured he was coming down with something. So did Susan. He almost had to be. Our son normally had the appetite of a Sumo wrestler.
I fully expected him to beg off school in the morning, pleading headache or upset stomach.
He didn’t.
And he didn’t want his breakfast, either.
And the next night, same thing.
Now this was particularly strange because Susan had cooked spaghetti and meat sauce that night and there was nothing in her considerable repertoire that the kids liked better. Even though—or maybe because of the fact—that it was one of the simplest dishes she ever threw together. But Danny just sat there and said he wasn’t hungry, contented to watch while everybody else heaped it on. I’d come home late after a particularly grueling day—I work for a brokerage firm in the City—and personally I was famished. And not a little unnerved by my son’s repeated refusals to eat.
“Listen,” I said. “You’ve got to have something. We’re talking three days now.”
“Did you eat lunch?” Susan asked.
Danny doesn’t lie. “I didn’t feel like it,” he said.
Even Clarissa and Jenny were looking at him like he had two heads by now.
“But you love spaghetti,” Susan said.
“Try some garlic bread,” said Clarissa.
“No thanks.”
“Do you feel okay, guy?” I asked him.
“I feel fine. I’m just not hungry’s all.”
So he sat there.
Wednesday night Susan went all out, making him his personal favorite—roast leg of lemon-spiced lamb with mint sauce, baked potato and red wine gravy, and green snappeas on the side.
He sat there. Though he seemed to enjoy watching us eat.
Thursday night we tried take-out—chinese food from his favorite Szechuan restaurant. Ginger beef, shrimp fried rice, fried won ton and sweet-and-sour ribs.
He said it smelled good. And sat there.
By Friday night whatever remnants of depression-era mentality lingered in my own personal psyche kicked in with a vengeance and I found myself standing there yelling at him, telling him he wasn’t getting up from his chair, young man, until he finished at least one slice of his favorite pepperoni, meatball and sausage pizza from his favorite Italian restaurant.
The fact is I was worried. I’d have handed him a twenty, gladly, just to see some of that stringy mozzarella hanging off his chin. But I didn’t tell him that. Instead I stood there pointing a finger at him and yelling until he started to cry—and then, second-generation depression-brat that I am, I ordered him to bed. Which is exactly what my parents would have done.
Scratch a son, you always get his Dad.
But by Sunday you could see his ribs through his tee-shirt. We kept him out of school Monday and I stayed home from work so we could both be there for our appointment with Doctor Weller. Weller was one of the last of those wonderful old-fashioned GP’s, the kind you just about never see anymore. Over seventy years old, he would still stop by your house after office hours if the need arose. In Rye that was as unheard-of as an honest mechanic. Weller believed in homecare, not hospitals. He’d fallen asleep on my sofa one night after checking in on Jenny’s bronchitis and slept for two hours straight over an untouched cup of coffee while we tiptoed around him and listened to him snore.
We sat in his office Monday morning answering questions while he checked Danny’s eyes, ears, nose and throat, tapped his knees, his back and chest, checked his breathing, took a vial of blood and sent him into the bathroom for a urine sample.
“He looks perfectly fine to me. He’s lost five pounds since the last time he was in for a checkup but beyond that I can’t see anything wrong with him. Of course we’ll have to wait for the blood work. You say he’s eaten nothing?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Susan said.
He sighed. “Wait outside,” he said. “Let me talk with h
im.”
In the waiting room Susan picked up a magazine, looked at the cover and returned it to the pile. “Why?” she whispered.
An old man with a walker glanced over at us and then looked away. A mother across from us watched her daughter coloring in a Garfield book.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I wish I did.”
I was aware sitting there of an odd detachment, as though this were happening to the rest of them—to them, not me—not us.
I have always felt a fundamental core of loneliness in me. Perhaps it comes from being an only child. Perhaps it’s my grandfather’s sullen thick German blood. I have been alone with my wife and alone with my children, untouchable, unreachable, and I suspect that most of the time they haven’t known. It runs deep, this aloneness. I have accommodated it. It informs all my relationships and all my expectations. It makes me almost impossible to surprise by life’s grimmer turns of fate.
I was very aware of it now.
Dr. Weller was smiling when he led Danny through the waiting room and asked him to have a seat for a moment while he motioned us inside. But the smile was for Danny. There was nothing real inside it.
We sat down.
“The most extraordinary thing.” The doctor shook his head. “I told him he had to eat. He asked me why. I said, Danny, people die every day of starvation. All over the world. If you don’t eat, you’ll die—it’s that simple. Your son looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘so?’ ”
“Jesus,” Susan said.
“He wasn’t being flip, believe me—he was asking me a serious question. I said, well, you want to live, don’t you? He said, ‘should I?’ Believe me, you could have knocked me right off this chair. ‘Should I!’ I said of course you should! Everybody wants to live.
“‘Why?’ he said.
“My God. I told him that life was beautiful, that life was sacred, that life was fun! Wasn’t Christmas just around the corner? What about holidays and birthdays and summer vacations? I told him that it was everybody’s duty to try to live life to the absolute fullest, to do everything you could in order to be as strong and healthy and happy as humanly possible. And he listened to me. He listened to me and I knew he understood me. He didn’t seem the slightest bit worried about any of what I was saying or the slightest bit concerned or unhappy. And when I was done, all he said was, yes—yes, but I’m not hungry.”
The doctor looked amazed, confounded.
“I really don’t know what to tell you.” He picked up a pad. “I’m writing down the name and phone number of a psychotherapist. Not a psychiatrist, mind—this fellow isn’t going to push any pills at Danny. A therapist. The only thing I can come up with pending some—to my way of thinking, practically unimaginable—problem with his bloodwork is that Danny has some very serious emotional problems that need exploring and need exploring immediately. This man Field is the best I know. And he’s very good with children. Tell him I said to fit you in right away, today if at all possible. We go back a long time, he and I—he’ll do as I ask. And I think he’ll be able to help Danny.”
“Help him do what, doctor?” Susan said. I could sense her losing it. “Help him do what?” she said. “Find a reason for living?”
Her voice broke on the last word and suddenly she was sobbing into her hands and I reached over and tried to contact that part of me which might be able to contact her and found it not entirely mute inside me, and held her.
In the night I heard them talking. Danny and the two girls.
It was late and we were getting ready for bed and Susan was in the bathroom brushing her teeth. I stepped out into the hall to go downstairs for one last cigarette from my pack in the kitchen and that was when I heard them whispering. The twins had their room and Danny had his. The whispering was coming from their room.
It was against the rules but the rules were rapidly going to hell these days anyway. Homework was being ignored. Breakfast was coffee and packaged donuts. For Danny, of course, not even that much. Bedtime arrived when we felt exhausted.
Dr. Field had told us that that was all right for a while. That we should avoid all areas of tension or confrontation within the family for at least the next week or so.
I was not to yell at Danny for not eating.
Field had spoken first to him for half an hour in his office and then, for another twenty minutes, to Susan and I. I found him personable and soft-spoken. As yet he had no idea what Danny’s problem could be. The gist of what he was able to tell us was that he would need to see Danny every day until he started eating again and probably once or twice a week thereafter.
If he did start eating.
Anyhow, I’d decided to ignore the whispering. I figured if I’d stuck to my guns about quitting the Goddamn cigarettes I’d never have heard it in the first place. But then something Jenny said sailed through the half-open door loud and clear and stopped me.
“I still don’t get it,” she said. “What’s it got to do with that box?”
I didn’t catch his answer. I walked to the door. A floorboard squeaked. The whispering stopped.
I opened it. They were huddled together on the bed. “What’s what got to do with what box?” I said.
They looked at me. My children I thought, had grown up amazingly free of guilty conscience. Rules or no rules. In that they were not like me. There were times I wondered if they were actually my children at all.
“Nothing,” Danny said.
“Nothing,” said Clarissa and Jenny.
“Come on,” I said. “Give. What were you guys just talking about?”
“Just stuff,” said Danny.
“Secret stuff?” I was kidding, making it sound like it was no big deal.
He shrugged. “Just, you know, stuff.”
“Stuff that maybe has to do with why you’re not eating? That kind of stuff?”
“Daaaad.”
I knew my son. He was easily as stubborn as I was. It didn’t take a genius to know when you were not going to get anything further out of him and this was one of those times. “Okay,” I said, “back to bed.”
He walked past me. I glanced into the bedroom and saw the two girls sitting motionless, staring at me.
“What,” I said.
“Nothing,” said Clarissa.
“G’night, Daddy,” said Jenny.
I said goodnight and went downstairs for my cigarettes. I smoked three of them. I wondered what this whole box business was.
The following morning my girls were not eating.
Things occurred rapidly then. By evening it became apparent that they were taking the same route Danny had taken. They were happy. They were content. And they could not be budged. To me, we’re not hungry had suddenly become the scariest three words in the English language.
A variation became just as scary when, two nights later, sitting over a steaming baked lasagna she’d worked on all day long, Susan asked me how in the world I expected her to eat while all her children were starving.
And then ate nothing further.
I started getting takeout for one.
McDonald’s. Slices of pizza. Buffalo wings from the deli.
By Christmas Day, Danny could not get out of bed unassisted.
The twins were looking gaunt—so was my wife.
There was no Christmas dinner. There wasn’t any point to it.
I ate cold fried rice and threw a couple of ribs into the microwave and that was that.
Meantime Field was frankly baffled by the entire thing and told me he was thinking of writing a paper—did I mind? I didn’t mind. I didn’t care one way or another. Dr. Weller, who normally considered hospitals strictly a last resort, wanted to get Danny on an IV as soon as possible. He was ordering more blood tests. We asked if it could wait till after Christmas. He said it could but not a moment longer. We agreed.
Despite the cold fried rice and the insane circumstances Christmas was actually by far the very best day we’d had in a very long time. Seeing us all together,
sitting by the fire, opening packages under the tree—it brought back memories. The cozy warmth of earlier days. It was almost, though certainly not quite, normal. For this day alone I could almost begin to forget my worries about them, forget that Danny would be going into the hospital the next morning—with the twins, no doubt, following pretty close behind. For her part Susan seemed to have no worries. It was as though in joining them in their fast she had also somehow partaken of their lack of concern for it. As though the fast were itself a drug.
I remember laughter from that day, plenty of laughter. Nobody’s new clothes fit but my own but we tried them on anyway—there were jokes about the Amazing Colossal Woman and the Incredible Shrinking Man. And the toys and games all fit, and the brand-new hand-carved American-primitive angel I’d bought for the tree.