by Helen Brown
Jessie was on the mend after a week in bed with the flu. Like a Victorian heroine in her white nightgown, she stretched on the covers and made the most of her semi-invalid status. We drank soup, talked and laughed about our kids. Her boys were older than ours, well into high school and turning into artistic rebels. I imagined Sam and Rob would be getting up to similar antics in the not-too-distant future.
Somewhere a phone rang. Jessie’s husband, Peter, answered. I was vaguely aware of his voice in the background. His tone was clipped, then jagged. He seemed to be receiving some kind of bad news. Wondering if he’d lost an elderly relative, I arranged my face in what I hoped was a sympathetic shape as he entered the bedroom. He looked pale and on edge, like someone being devoured by a drama he wanted no part of. He glanced at Jessie, then at me. His eyes were black as onyx. The phone call, he said, was for me.
There’d obviously been some kind of mistake. Who’d ring me at Jessie’s house? Hardly anyone knew I was there in the first place. Confused, I walked into the hallway and lifted the receiver.
“It’s terrible,” I heard Steve’s voice say. “Sam’s dead.”
His voice reverberated across space into every cell of my body. His tone was measured, almost normal. “Sam” and “dead” were words that didn’t belong together. I assumed he was talking about some other Sam, an old man, a distant cousin he’d previously forgotten to mention.
I heard myself scream into the telephone receiver. Steve’s voice arrived like rounds of artillery fire in my ear. Sam and Rob had found a wounded pigeon under the clothesline. Sam had insisted on taking it to the vet. Having seen the Disney film The Secret of NIMH the day before, he was feeling even more attuned than usual to the suffering of animals.
Steve had been making a lemon meringue pie in preparation for lunch. He’d told the boys if they wanted to take the bird to the vet, they’d have to do it themselves. They’d lowered the bird into a shoebox and carried it down the zigzag. Lennel Road was a main route into town from the outer suburbs. In a less car-obsessed age, a town planner had decided to wedge in a bus stop for people wanting to travel up the hill out of town. The road narrowed so dramatically at the footbridge that there was only room for a footpath on one side of the road. Any pedestrian wanting to go farther down the hill into town had no choice but to cross the road at the bus stop. It was a perilous crossing with no signs to make traffic slow down.
As the boys arrived at the bus stop at the bottom of the steps, a bus pulled in on its way up the hill. Rob told Sam he thought they should wait until the bus had moved on before they tried to cross. But Sam was impatient to save the bird. Determined to reach the vet’s rooms down the hill as quickly as possible, he told Rob to be quiet, and ran out from behind the stationary bus. He’d been hit by a car coming down the hill.
The words were like pieces from different jigsaws that didn’t fit together. A nightmare voice that wasn’t mine yelled down the phone, demanding to know if Rob was okay. Steve said Rob was fine, though he’d seen the accident and was badly shaken. A shudder of relief jolted through me.
When people receive ghastly news, some say a sensation of disbelief sets in. Perhaps it was the simple harshness of Steve’s language, but his words hammered through me straight-away. My mind collapsed into different compartments. From a position high on Jessie’s hall ceiling I watched myself wailing and screaming below. My head felt about to burst. I wanted to smash it against the glass panels of Jessie’s front door to stop the pain.
At the same time, I registered the incongruity of the situation. The purpose of my visit had been to cheer Jessie up. Now here she was, standing in her white nightgown, trying to soothe me. Having trained as a nurse, Jessie switched into practical mode. She rang the hospital’s accident and emergency ward. When she asked if Sam was D.O.A. the logical part of my brain deciphered the abbreviation. I’d heard it as a cadet reporter late at night on the police round. Dead On Arrival. Leaden with resignation, she put the phone down.
I wept and raged, but couldn’t encompass the grief. No collection of human tissue was resilient enough to endure such pain. My life was over. Time squeezed up like an accordion. We waited for Steve and Rob to arrive. Refusing offers of tea and alcohol I watched light filter through a window and listened to the bellowing from the back of my throat. Part of my mind was curious about the noise my body made, and the way it seemed to go on like a chant, for infinity.
I wanted to compose myself for Rob’s arrival. The poor kid had seen enough. But my mind and body refused to obey instructions. I’d become a roaring animal. We waited maybe twenty minutes for Steve and Rob to appear in Jessie’s hallway. It felt more like twenty years.
They materialized like a pair of ghosts, a sad man, hunched over as if he’d been shot in the stomach, holding the hand of a traumatized child. I’d seen that body language before in photos of refugees and war victims. Steve’s face was blank as a wall, his eyes empty like a marble statue’s. Rob seemed to have shrunk into himself. I looked into the boy’s face, so passive and contained. Falling to my knees, I wrapped my arms around our surviving son, and wondered what nightmares were whirling inside his head. He’d just seen his brother run over and killed. How could he ever recover?
Clutching my son, I sobbed. My body shook. The intensity of my grip must’ve been frightening. He wriggled and withdrew from my embrace. Trying to regain composure, I asked Rob what had happened. He explained how he’d tried to stop Sam crossing the road, to wait on the footpath until the bus had gone, but Sam wouldn’t listen. His last words to Rob were “Be quiet.”
Sam had looked like a cowboy lying on the road, Rob said, with red string coming out of his mouth. It took a while for me to understand what he’d meant by red string. His young mind had interpreted the scene as a Western movie. Sam had become John Wayne, flat on his back after a gunfight, with stage makeup trickling down his chin. It was my first glimpse of how differently a child perceives death.
As we staggered numbly towards the car, Rob asked if he could have Sam’s Superman watch. I was shocked, but he was only six years old.
The road unfurled beneath us like licorice. Houses peeled away at drunken angles. I hated this town with its hills and twisted streets. Everything about it was harsh and ugly, on the brink of destruction. I didn’t want to go back to the house. Couldn’t face the zigzag and the sight of Sam’s possessions. But there was nowhere else for us to drive to.
When Steve asked if I wanted to see the footbridge I hammered my head against the car window and screamed. I never wanted to go anywhere near that thing. He drove the long way home so we wouldn’t have to pass under its shadow. People might still be there, shaking their heads, looking for stains on the tarmac.
Accusations shot like flames from the back of my throat. I yelled at Steve, demanding to know why he hadn’t driven the boys to the vet. He’d been busy with the lemon meringue pie, he replied. Wild as a she-wolf, I accused him of caring more about lemon meringue pie than his sons. A cooler part of my mind knew that my behavior was cruel and irrational.
Absorbing my recriminations without the retaliation they deserved, Steve pointed out that the vet was only a short walk down the hill. He reminded me the boys knew the road rules, and there was no stopping Sam when he got an idea in his head. “We both know what Sam is like—was like—with animals.” Steve’s change of tense was an obscenity.
Like an octopus, my mind scrambled for possibilities. Maybe there’d been a mistake and Sam wasn’t dead. Steve refused to be dragged into my fantasies. He’d spoken to the ambulance driver, who’d told him he was sorry but our son had passed away.
Passed away? The words unleashed a fresh onslaught of fury. Back in journalism school our tutors had drummed into us that dead meant dead, not passed away, passed over or sleeping in God’s arms. How could an ambulance driver who saw death every day use such euphemistic language?
Ignoring my raving, Steve continued to repeat what the ambulance driver had said. If by some mira
cle Sam had managed to survive such a severe head injury his only triumph would have been to spend the rest of his life a vegetable. My subconscious snared that snippet of information.
Dead. Lifeless. Gone. Such final words. If our son really was dead, then someone had killed him. My mind boiled, desperate for someone to blame. A murderer who deserved punishment. I created a Hollywood villain inside my head, a man full of hate with a history of crime.
“It was a woman,” Steve said, “a woman in a blue Ford Escort. She’d been driving back to work after lunch. There was hardly any damage to her car. Just a cracked headlight.”
A cracked headlight for my child’s life? I’d kill her.
Staggering down the zigzag to the house I couldn’t believe I’d never again feel Sam’s weight on my lap, his arms around my neck. Never was such a finite word. Rata greeted us at the door, her head to one side, gazing up at us, questioning. I flung myself on her neck and wept. Her head drooped, her tail curved under her hind legs and she tumbled to the floor. Sam’s words echoed in my head. Animals understand…
Hands trembling on the receiver, I made the worst phone call of my life. Mum’s voice sounded nonchalant when she answered. There was no way to soften the news. Her cherished grandson was gone. I was the ultimate failure as a parent. I could hear her intake of breath. Her voice deepened. The tiny part of me that remained an observer was surprised by her calm response. She belonged to a more seasoned, tougher generation that through the horrors of World War II had developed strategies to deal with outrageous loss. She brought my yelps and wails to a halt and said she was on her way.
I fastened the Superman watch around Rob’s wrist and flung myself on Sam’s unmade bed, its sheets and blankets still in the shape of his living body. I drank the smell of his clothes, heard his voice in my head. Steve led me to the living room and coaxed a glass of brandy between my lips. Hot alcohol shot through my veins.
An hour or so later, two policemen, young and embarrassed, arrived on the doorstep. They said the pigeon was still alive and asked what we wanted done with it. What had gone wrong with life’s logic? How could a bird have more right to survival than our boy? Steve told them to take the pigeon to the vet as Sam had wanted. The police also needed someone to go to the morgue and identify the body. Steve steeled himself and went.
He arrived home ashen-faced. Sam still looked the same, he said. Beautiful. Nobody would have known anything had happened, except for the gash in the side of his forehead. Just a tiny gash. He’d meant to cut a lock from Sam’s hair, but had forgotten the scissors. I yearned for the lock of hair, anything that was part of Sam, but Steve was stretched like a rubber band about to snap. I could hardly insist he go back to the morgue.
Mum appeared at the door. She seemed weighted with triple quantities of sadness. On top of her own grief I could tell she was carrying concern for the rest of us. She would have been tired, too, after a five-hour drive. I expected her to burst into tears, but she squared her shoulders and raised her head. I’d seen actors do the same thing before stepping onstage.
“I saw the most beautiful sunset just now,” she said. “Glorious streaks of reds and golds. I thought Sam must be part of it.”
My ravaged mind interpreted her words as callousness. How could she surrender her grandchild to a sunset?
A funeral director turned up while she was unpacking. Harbor lights twinkled malevolently behind him as he sat in the corner of the living room asking for Sam’s measurements—height and breadth. Didn’t he have a nine-year-old son of his own to go by? White coffins, he said, were favored for children. There were fashion trends in death? I couldn’t face a church service. Not when there was so much business to discuss with God over this. Someone had recommended the new university chaplain. A short ceremony conducted by him at the graveside would do. The funeral director made no effort to hide his disapproval. While I was stunned by his coldness at the time, I now realize he probably had no idea what to say so was clinging to the framework of his professional training.
Soon after the funeral director strode into the night, the university chaplain stepped cautiously over the shag pile. He was young, barely out of school, and nervous. He told us he’d never buried a child before. We said we were in the same position. When he asked what we’d like I wanted to scream: “Isn’t it obvious? We want our son back!” But he was faced with a daunting task. There was enough sanity left in me to feel sorry for him. I offered to write a poem for him to read at the graveside.
Our family doctor arrived and scribbled a prescription for sleeping pills. Over a mug of coffee she mused that maybe it was a good thing from Sam’s perspective, because the adult world was so hard to survive in.
Steve mentioned he’d taken the Superman watch away from Rob—he hadn’t felt comfortable passing it on so quickly. I protested but he assured me Rob understood. Steve had put the watch away in a box inside his desk.
Rata collapsed across the boys’ bedroom doorway. We tried to coax Rob into his old bed, but he refused to sleep in the room he’d shared with Sam. His eyes flashing with terror, he said a dragon lived in there. Steve carried his mattress into our bedroom and placed it in a corner under the window. Like shipwrecked sailors we drifted into our first night without Sam. I thought falling asleep would be impossible, but unconsciousness dropped like the blade of a guillotine, delivering me into merciful nothingness.
Leaving what our world had become was the easy part. Returning to it was almost unbearable. Opening my eyes next morning, I heard a thrush call, its “took took” echoing across the hills. For an instant I imagined life was normal. I’d just woken from a nightmare of grotesque proportions. With sickening horror, the events of the previous day exploded in my mind and sent me plummeting into despair.
It was no easier for Steve. A few days after the accident I awoke under a waterfall of his tears. He’d never cried in front of me before. I should have reached out and embraced him then, but I was half-awake, unprepared. Distraught, momentarily confused, I simply asked him to stop. I didn’t imagine the request would be taken literally and he’d never express sorrow in front of me again.
Our house choked with flowers. As days passed I became weary of their sickening fragility. Water in their vases turned rancid in the summer heat, filling the air with the stench of stagnant ponds. In every room stalks drooped, petals dropped like tears on the floor.
Steve decided flowers upset me. Maybe he was right. He took to hiding freshly delivered sheaths of chrysanthemums, lilies and carnations, deathly in their perfection, under garden shrubs to keep them out of sight. It’s impossible to judge whose behavior was more strange—the grieving woman who went hysterical at the sight of floral deliveries or the husband who hid them under bushes.
The front door stayed permanently open as scores of people, many of them strangers, streamed down the hallway over the carpet I’d never liked. Some oozed platitudes or quotations from the Bible till I wished they’d go away. The only words that resonated with me were Shakespeare’s—“time is out of joint.” Other visitors appeared angry—among them a doctor who said he’d seen the accident. It affected him personally, he said. He had two sons of his own. His anger was irrelevant. Doctors seemed to excel at injecting negative interpretations into the atmosphere.
A few (women, mostly) claimed to be suffering similar levels of anguish. Spurting tears and demanding comfort, they thrust their sobbing faces at me. Their words were tactless: “I wouldn’t survive if it happened to me” “At least it’ll give Rob a chance to flourish. He was always in his big brother’s shadow.” I assumed they were self-indulgent, possibly even crazy, though I was no longer capable of judging the dividing line between sanity and madness.
A distorted remnant of what was left of me, a hysterical joker, wanted to screech with laughter at their pale faces and quivering lips. When they said they’d “felt the same” after their father/dog/grandmother died I wanted to slap them. How could the predictable death of an old person compare
with this?
Still others brooded silently out the window over the harbor. Immune to human suffering, the bay sparkled, ridiculously turquoise. I found no comfort in its beauty, loathed its shimmering indifference.
A Maori friend from journalism school, Phil Whaanga, turned up unannounced and simply put his arms around me. We’d never been particularly close, but there was more comfort in his embrace than the thousands of words I’d been forced to listen to. From a culture less afraid of death than our own, Phil didn’t feel a need to examine aloud the freakishness of what had happened. I was grateful to him.
Mostly I sat on the sofa, nursing the scar where my hand had been burnt making Sam’s birthday cake. It was impossible to accept the scar was still part of the living world while he was not.
Adding to the disjointedness of our situation was the lack of our bathroom door. Our bathroom was like our hearts, torn open for public viewing. Visiting mourners had no way of relieving themselves in private. Neither did we. Steve pinned a shower curtain over the door frame, but its flimsy floralness stopped well above floor level, exposing visitors up to their knees. I hadn’t realized what a substantial, noble piece of furniture a door can be. But then there were a lot of things I hadn’t thought about before.
Several days after the funeral I assured Mum we’d be okay. She nodded uncertainly and climbed into her Japanese hatchback. Steve’s mother phoned from England. I sighed when she said she’d been in a theater audience to see the famous medium Doris Stokes. Apparently Doris had called her up onstage and said she had a message from Sam. Doris told her Sam wanted us to know he was all right. I’d nodded impatiently when Steve passed this on. Every spiritual medium says the same thing. Doris went on to describe a strange new setup Sam was in. Like boarding school, but more fun. Just as I was about to make derogatory comments about English mediums and their tendency to re-create images involving pubs, tearooms and scenes that were quintessentially British, there was one more thing. Steve’s mother said she had no idea what Doris was talking about, but perhaps it made sense to us. Sam said it was okay. Rob could keep his watch.