Eventually she did find the piece of paper with the address—she’d put it in the canister with her teabags—and she managed to get herself dressed. It was one of the outfits she regularly wore to church, and it bolstered her. But even with these improvements in her condition she discovered that her hands weren’t working properly—they trembled so badly she dropped her fare by the bus driver and he had to pick it up for her. And maneuvering her feet down the narrow moving aisle proved difficult, her shoes feeling oversized and full of stones.
Her son’s building was shabby, but not as bad as she had expected. A sharp odor of urine in the lobby made her clasp a tissue over her nose and mouth. She was relieved to find that the odor did not follow her up the stairs. She stood outside her son’s door, sniffing self-consciously, then made herself stop. She rapped the door. It wasn’t a very loud knock, but it was the best she could manage.
He didn’t say anything when he first opened the door and looked down at her. He was wearing the kind of baggy shorts he’d always liked, except much bigger, of course, man-sized. And a T-shirt—it had always been hard to get him to wear anything but T-shirts. This one had some logo she did not recognize, whose jagged lines and garish colors made her uneasy. When she looked away from it she found herself following his long, sturdy legs down to the floor, to the huge, dirty gray, and almost disintegrated tennis shoes. She stopped there, staring, somewhat sickened by the look of the rotting canvas and rubber, and wondering if the tennis shoes were exaggerated, or if his feet were actually that big.
“Hi, Mom.” His voice had a phlegmy sound. She looked up into his expansive face, the tall forehead, the soft doughy cheeks and chin. The eyes buried inside that face appeared tiny, dark, and feverish. “I didn’t know you were coming.” His oversized head bobbed unsteadily on the thin neck when he talked.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes tearing. “I should have come before.”
His eyes blinked rapidly before focusing. “Do you want to come in?”
“Oh. Of course, honey.” The honey was meant, and deliberate, and caused her pain.
He stood aside awkwardly to let her by. He seemed not to know what to do with his hands, like he didn’t know how to invite someone into his apartment—he didn’t know how it was done. So he raised them above his head and allowed them to hang and flutter there. Then, before she had a chance to step inside, he asked, “Are you coming to the wedding?”
She stared up at him, feeling very much a small woman. It seemed to her she had always been a small woman alongside her son, even when he was a little boy. She did not say anything for a time, but watched his face intently.
“I will be there,” she said finally, “because I think that’s the right thing for me to do. But you must not get married, Charles. You really mustn’t.”
He blinked and looked away, and she thought about how raw and sore his tiny eyes appeared. When he was small he’d get these terrible colds and eye infections, and it just seemed like they would never go away. “Mom, my name is Charlie. I want to be called Charlie now.”
“I apologize, Charlie. That’s a very nice name and I will call you that from now on. But Charlie, you just can’t get married. That’s something you must not do.”
“I’m old enough.”
“Yes, you are old enough, but that’s not the point.”
“She says she loves me, and I told her I love her, too. I promised. So did she.”
“Oh, Charlie, I’m so glad someone said that to you. Really, I am. But you can’t do something like this.”
“We have to, now. Everything’s all ready. There’s a party after, but you can’t come if you keep saying things like that.”
“I have to be honest with you, Charlie. I loved you when you were a little boy and I love you still. I have always loved you and I will always love you. You will always be my son. Forever. But you just can’t get married.”
“Why?” He said it looking around the room, looking everywhere but at her. She looked down at his feet wrapped in those terrible tennis shoes. He was rocking back and forth on those two huge feet, lifting one and then the other.
“You can’t marry, honey, because you passed away. You died when you were just six years old.”
He blinked his eyes a couple of times and then started rubbing them with the swollen mitts of his hands. Soon he was rubbing them so hard she was afraid he might hurt himself—a genuine, but ridiculous fear. She thought she knew now why his eyes were so raw, so red, so small. He let his hands flutter up above his head, stretched, and yawned deeply, with all his body, like someone awakening from a long and extraordinarily deep sleep, unable as yet to muster the power of speech. He stared at her, frowning. Finally she looked away, not knowing how to interpret the look in his eyes.
“We never talk about that,” he finally said. “It’s just too silly.”
“Charlie,” she said with a sad smile, “that’s my fault. At first, well, of course I wanted it that way—I wanted to pretend. The alternative was just unacceptable. But then when I couldn’t pretend anymore I still couldn’t talk to you about it. How could I? I suppose I thought if we didn’t talk about it, it would, well, take its own course, and that things would evolve as they were intended, in a more natural way, if natural means anything at all in your case. Charles, oh Charlie, do you understand what I’m trying to say?”
He looked vague, or bored, or perhaps he was trying to pretend he was bored. “You think I’m stupid.” His lips contorted in an ugly way. “A lot of people think I’m stupid. But I’m not.”
“No, of course you’re not, honey. It’s all my fault, this whole thing. I’m your mother—it was my obligation to help you... adjust to this in some way. I just thought that, I always assumed that, you did not know you were dead.”
He scratched his belly absently. He wasn’t skinny, he had a bit of a bulge there, and she wondered how that could be when, as far as she knew, Charles did not eat. And if he was eating now, she did not want to think about what he might be eating. “I dream sometimes I’m dead, I think. Or maybe I just remember it. And sometimes when I want to care about something, I can’t. It’s like some things I think about are just movies, and I’m not in the movie, I’m just watching it. Sometimes I lean on one side when I walk, and I think I’m going to fall over, but I don’t, and I always think about that, but I don’t want to. It makes me scared and mad.”
“When you were six years old we were having the downstairs re-carpeted. I was in the kitchen and you had wandered away from me.” Her face felt suddenly wet, but she didn’t try to wipe away her tears. “We had a conversation pit, they called them that back then. They were somewhat popular in the seventies. They had put the huge roll of carpet down on the edge of it and gone back to the truck for something or other. We never found out exactly what happened, but when we found you, you were at the bottom of the pit, the end of the carpet roll on top of you.”
All through his mother’s explanation Charlie felt around his head, his fingers finally settling into a particular spot three inches above his left ear. “I have this place here.”
“Yes, Charlie. That was one of the results of...”
“Couldn’t you have gotten it fixed? I don’t like it at all. My cap never fits right, and my hair grows funny.”
“Charlie, you were dead. There seemed no reason.”
“It’s not your head, Mom. You don’t have to comb your hair over and over again until it looks right.” His mouth suddenly seemed like this uncontrollable thing. He turned his head to the mirror just inside the apartment, and she watched as a sneer spread across his face in the glass. He turned back and frowned at her. “You should have watched me better. When Ellie and I have kids you better bet we’re going to watch them better than you did me.”
His mother trembled. “I made a mistake!” she cried. “And I have paid for it every day since then. You have been a constant reminder and a knife in my heart! But I never complained—I never even told you. I have only lov
ed you.”
He backed up a few steps. It pained her to see. “You let me die,” he said, his hands held up between them.
“I’m your mother, Charlie, and I’ve always loved you. And I know it’s sad, it’s terribly terribly sad, but you just can’t have children. Just think of what they would be like. Something like that was never meant to be. My own grandchildren.”
“They’d be like me, Mom. Maybe they would look like me. What’s so bad about that?”
She gazed up at him, drying her eyes on the edge of her sleeve. “Oh, nothing, nothing, sweetheart. I’m sorry I got so upset.”
“Do you want some tea? Ellie likes it, so I have a lot of it. You can see my place. That’s what Ellie calls it—‘Charlie’s place.’”
“That would be very nice, Charlie. Thank you for inviting me.”
He held the door open for her as if he were a doorman at attention. She stepped inside carefully, watching her feet. Once inside, she sniffed. It was a bad habit. Her son had no smell, virtually none. He never had. But the mind plays tricks, and after he’d died she’d found herself attributing almost every unknown smell to him.
There were also no cooking smells, or smells of garbage, or unwashed clothing or unwashed body smells, the smells she generally associated with young men. There was a strong aromatic mix of soaps and disinfectants. Her son was no corpse. He was something else. He was his mother’s son, and no son of hers could be referred to as a corpse.
Charlie’s apartment was profoundly neat. The area appeared completely without clutter, the rug well-vacuumed, spoiled by not even a thread of lint, her son’s few personal items (if an empty vase, a stapler, and a battered dictionary could be termed “personal”) equally spaced on a single white plastic shelf mounted on the wall. There were a few toys—some cars, a plastic soldier, a yo-yo, scattered by the bed. While she was looking, he walked over and nudged them under the bed with his foot. “I don’t play with those,” he said. She gazed at the neatly made bed. “I have some cookies here, Mom. I used to like cookies. Ellie likes to have a cookie with her tea when she stays over. Would you like a cookie with your tea, Mom?”
“That would be nice.” She noticed his politeness, and noticed how his politeness pleased her. She went over to the bed, trying not to look at it too directly. On a small table beside the bed was a young woman’s photograph. She picked it up gingerly, as if it might go off. In her experience the most innocuous things sometimes had a tendency to go off, ruining everything. She stared at the image of the creature who chose to “stay over” with her dear, dead son. She didn’t like to think of these things, but how could she avoid it? The young woman in the photograph had a shy smile, and the saddest eyes she had ever seen. She put the picture down quickly.
“Here, Mom.” Charles walked awkwardly into the room with a cup of steaming tea on a small metal platter along with what appeared to be a spotless plastic ashtray with a single cookie resting inside. He went over to a large chest in front of the single window and set it down. “You can feel the wind when you sit in front of the window. I always like feeling the wind on my face. I don’t have any chairs. Do you want to sit on the floor?”
“That will be fine. Your floor is—very clean.” She sat down on the floor by one end of the chest and he sat down at the other. She started sipping her tea, which had a dry, dusty flavor, but she smiled and nodded at her dead son as she drank. The cookie was stale and hard, but at least the ashtray it sat in appeared quite sanitary.
Charles watched her as she consumed these things, occasionally peering out the open window, his eyes fixed and distant. Finally he said, “Mommy.” He stopped, closed his mouth and began again. “Mom, why aren’t I—” He closed his mouth again.
“Why aren’t you lying in some grave somewhere?” she prompted.
He nodded. “I want to know. Do you know?”
She was grateful for an excuse to put down that awful tea, even though her hand was shaking as she returned it to the platter. “I can’t tell you exactly,” she began, “because I don’t exactly know myself. We had the funeral, and it was very sad. I thought I would die, too, or that at least was what I deserved.” She paused then, looking for some reaction from him. As there was none, she continued. “For the next few days I stayed in bed while your father went to work. I knew he was suffering greatly, but I was in no condition to help him.
“At the end of a week, perhaps two—I really have no idea—I got up and made breakfast. Your father joined me at the table. No words were said. Then, after a few minutes, you walked in, much slower than normal, as if you had awakened from a hard sleep, and sat in your usual chair.” She stopped and looked at him. “Do you remember any of this?”
Without pause he replied, “I don’t remember. Was Dad surprised?”
“I thought he would have a heart attack.”
“Were you surprised, Mom?”
“No. No, I was not.”
“I think I knew you weren’t surprised.” She nodded. “Were you happy to see me?”
His mother did not know how to answer that question, and so she said other things she knew to be true. “For the first half hour or so your father cried and hugged you to him and told me how wonderful this was and what a joyful, joyful, thing it was that had happened to us that day, a true miracle. You, however, acted as if there was nothing unusual going on. You looked from one of us to the other, as if you hadn’t the faintest idea what we were talking about. Your father wanted to call your grandparents and all our friends and even neighbors who we didn’t know all that well.”
“Did they all come?”
“I wouldn’t let him call anyone. And just as I knew it would happen, over the second half hour or so, your father stared at you, and stared at you, until he became terrified of the sight of his own son, and he wanted to call the police and the doctors, but most of all he wanted to call our parish priest. But again, I would not let him. And though he said he could not bear it, he agreed to do what I wanted, and he did not make those calls.”
“What happened when our neighbors saw me?”
“The next day I got you up before dawn. I had packed some essential things, including a bag of your toys, even though you appeared uninterested, suddenly bored with everything you had had before. We left just before daybreak. I left your father a note, telling him the city I would be taking you to, to start a new life. He was welcome to come join us later, I said, but for the time being I didn’t trust him.”
“Did he come?”
“He did. After three months he got himself together, and one night there he was on our doorstep. But he was never the same, we were never the same, nothing was ever the same again. That’s not your fault, I want you to know that. That’s just the way it is sometimes. He couldn’t live with the change. And so he died.”
Charles didn’t ask how, as she had known he would not. Some things she understood instinctively, but there were so many things she did not understand at all. Charles stood quietly and took the tray with the cup and ashtray into the kitchen. She could hear water running, the sounds of vigorous scrubbing.
She looked at the trunk they’d been eating on. It was spacious and sturdy—she thought she recognized it as one they used to have at the house. Everything in the room was plainly displayed—there appeared to be no other containers than this. She pushed up the lid.
She recognized most of them—the few toys and books he’d owned when he died. And mixed in with these all the toys she had desperately given him after. All these toys for a child who would no longer play. But she thought about the toys shoved under the bed, and knew he had been playing, in secret perhaps, but playing just the same. She gently shut the lid, determined not to think of these toys again.
Charles returned and stood looking down at her. “I’m getting married tomorrow, Mommy. Are you going to be there?”
“Do you remember any of these things I have told you about?”
He was looking out the window again, distant, as if they w
ere in two separate locations, but he said, “I remember riding my tricycle down a long sidewalk, except it was longer than just long. It never stopped. And I was thinking ‘I can’t ride a trike. Mommy says I’m too little.’ You said I couldn’t have one until I was at least five, remember? But there I was in my memory, riding the tricycle better than any boy ever rode a tricycle before, down that brand new sidewalk and by the trees and these great big houses, these huge houses that I’d never seen before. But that’s all I remember, Mom. Did I ever go to elementary school?”
“You went to elementary school and junior high and high school—you did all of that.”
“Did I have many friends?”
“No, I’m afraid not.”
“Did I have girlfriends?”
“No, but you did lots of things—you watched television and you took the dog for walks—remember Corky, that spaniel I got you?—and we sat on the porch, and I played records for you, so many records—we had so much music in our life. And I told you so many things—I encouraged you. I told you how you would have a great career one day, and get married, and that you’d have many children of your own. You’d be a wonderful father. You’d make me a grandmother. I—we talked about all that. Tell me you remember at least some of that!”
He looked at her with what might have been a smile—it was hard to tell in that soft, doughy face of his in the failing light. “All I remember, Mom,” he said, “is riding that tricycle, and how good I was driving the tricycle, and how good it made me feel. That’s all I remember.”
She looked down at her hands. She’d been picking at her nails. It was a terrible habit—now her fingers were bleeding. “I’m sorry.”
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