Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

April turned to him. “It’s just for a few minutes,” she said, her voice low. “Look how happy he is. I went home to get him.”

  “He’s in the hospital, April. He’s in an oxygen tent!”

  Her face changed. He saw it, how she telescoped away from him. She turned and gently took the bear from Sam, just as a nurse glided in.

  “No stuffed animals in here,” said the nurse.

  “He was just leaving,” April said. She slid the bear into her pocket.

  “Ricky. I want Ricky,” Sam started to cry.

  The nurse shot April a look. “Now, now, you don’t want to give yourself an asthma attack, do you, Sam?” the nurse said.

  April drew herself up and walked into the hall and Charlie followed her, touching her arm, making her stop and turn and look at him. “He was happy. For five minutes. Is that so terrible? Is that such a crime for him to be a normal boy for ten minutes? He’s had that bear for years without problems. His own doctor said it was okay as long as we kept it clean. He’s not wheezing from his bear.”

  Charlie’s mouth opened and then closed.

  “Where were you?” he said. “It didn’t take that long to just go home and come back.”

  “I went for a drive,” she said.

  “You went for a drive? Now?”

  She took off her coat. “I had to get out.”

  “You couldn’t tell me? April, do you realize what’s going on here?”

  She handed him her coat, damp from the night. “I’m back now and don’t you criticize me. Don’t you dare tell me I’m not a good mother.”

  She walked back into the room to look at Sam again. Charlie followed her in, and they sat together beside Sam, who’d fallen asleep. Just outside the doorway, the nurses were talking.

  “What a pain in the ass,” one nurse said. April looked at Charlie. “Why do the nightmare moms have to be on my shift?” the nurse continued.

  “Remember that woman here with the little girl who had Munchausen’s by proxy?” the other nurse said. “Sweet and pretty, everyone liked her? She couldn’t do enough for her daughter? If we hadn’t called social services, that kid would have died.”

  April froze. Charlie stood up. April had told him that the nurses didn’t like her, but he had thought she was just being oversensitive. This remark, though, seemed uncalled for. He knew what Munchausen’s by proxy was: parents who deliberately made their kids so sick that they had to be hospitalized—monster mothers who sacrificed their kids’ lives to fill their own need for attention.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Charlie said to April, and April followed him into the corridor.

  The nurse was folding towels on a cart. Charlie tapped her. “What did you say about my wife?” Charlie said sharply.

  The nurse stacked the towels. “Excuse me, I’m very busy here.”

  “We heard you. Munchausen’s by proxy. What are you implying about my wife?”

  The nurse piled the towels on the bottom rack. “I’ve been here for six years and I’ve dealt with a lot of parents. All I’m saying is you don’t bring stuffed animals to a child with asthma in a hospital. You don’t give him a peanut butter sandwich when he’s allergic to it.”

  “What peanut butter?” Charlie said.

  “Like I said, I’m very busy,” she said pointedly, and wheeled the cart away.

  For a while, after she left, neither April nor Charlie spoke. April leaned against the wall. She reached out for Charlie and then let her hand drift back down. Charlie couldn’t stop looking at her, as if she were a door closing on him. “You gave him peanut butter?” he said finally, and she waved her arm.

  “He wouldn’t eat his lunch,” she said softly. “It was just the thinnest layer and he ate every bite. You should have seen how happy he was and it didn’t give him asthma.”

  “April, do you know how serious this is? Are you crazy? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Out of my mind?” She drew herself up. “How can you speak to me like that? I don’t sleep anymore, worrying about Sam. I can’t think about anything else all day. I’m on the computer for hours every day trying to find answers, to fix this. If I’m out of my mind, I’m out of my mind with worry. What have I done to those nurses? I try to make sure everything is done right and because I make one mistake, they act like I’m deliberately trying to harm my son!”

  He touched her arm but she jerked away.

  “I can see dust in the air in his room here!” she said. “What about that? Why doesn’t the hospital do something about that?” She drew her sweater tighter around her. “Thanks for being on my side.”

  “I am on your side! Of course I’m on your side!”

  “Are you?” she said, and before he could reach for her, she was gone.

  He told himself that she meant well. So she questioned authority. Was that so terrible? Was any parent perfect?

  THINKING BACK to those times made Charlie feel a little desperate now. Asthma mom, April used to call herself. Asthma mom. When she fought the soccer team to let Sam be the waterboy, if not a player. When she had to explain to him why he couldn’t go to a kid’s sleepover because it was held at a house with two cats and a dog. He knew Sam’s asthma wore her down, but why had she taken him out of school the day of the accident? Where were they going?

  He looked over at Sam, engrossed in his book, and then he went into the bedroom and shut the door so he could make some calls in private. Charlie called the school first, and spoke to Miss Patty, the principal. “I’ve been meaning to call you,” she said. “We’re all so sorry.”

  “What time did April pick up Sam on Friday?” he asked.

  Charlie heard a hum radiating through the wires. “She didn’t pick him up,” she said. “I told the police that.”

  “What? You told the police?” Charlie felt something burning in his stomach. “Wait … you just let him leave? Do you realize how serious this is? Don’t you watch out for your kids? Don’t you check where they are?”

  “Mr. Nash,” she said. “Your wife often came and got Sam, sometimes in the middle of the school day, often without signing him out. We had spoken to her about it.”

  “What are you telling me?” He thought of April, impulsively showing up, taking Sam somewhere. But where and why?

  “I have it on record that someone from the school did call the house to ask where Sam was and there was no answer. And that was—around lunchtime.”

  Charlie couldn’t speak. He gripped the receiver, his knuckles growing pale. “And you just let that go?” His voice splintered. “You didn’t follow up? You didn’t think to call me?”

  “Mr. Nash,” said Miss Patty, “I don’t know how this happened, but I assure you, we watch every child and something like this will never happen again. We are all so sorry and very glad that nothing happened to Sam.”

  “Something did happen to Sam,” Charlie said, and then he hung up the phone.

  He called the Blue Cupcake, and when Katie, the owner, answered, the first thing she asked was if they got the food basket she’d sent over.

  Charlie had no idea, but he thanked her. “Did April come in to work on Friday? She didn’t quit or anything, did she?”

  “No on both counts. I called the house around ten when we were getting busy, but there was no answer. I ended up waiting the tables myself.”

  He wanted to ask her if anything seemed wrong with April, if Katie noticed anything different lately, but the words jammed inside of him.

  How did things happen? He’d never been a religious person, though his parents had made him sit through church and had told him about God. He thought there might be something out there, some ordering force, but it certainly wasn’t a man in a beard who doled out punishments or who tested the innocent to see just how faithful they were. Still, he lived by a kind of code. He tried to be a good man, to do the right things, to make the world a little better than it had been before he had put his stamp upon it. You could be generous with the love you gave, with the care you took wit
h others. You could follow all the commandments that made sense to you and still the world could sideswipe you. There was no cause and effect. There was no karma. The truth was that he wasn’t so sure he understood how the world worked anymore.

  He and April had fretted so over Sam. Charlie shouted at cars that didn’t stop. He scolded the crossing guards for not paying good enough attention. He worried about Sam all the time.

  And maybe his mistake had been that he had never worried about April.

  “Daddy?” Sam’s voice flew into the room. “Can we have lunch?”

  Charlie put the phone back in his pocket and walked out of the bedroom. He couldn’t imagine eating anything, but Sam should.

  Around six, Charlie’s parents arrived, honking the horn of their rented car, a Lincoln town car of all things, and then rapping on the screen door, their faces expectant. They were dressed as if they were going to a party, his father still in his business suit and tie, his white hair swept back, his mother in a fancy blue dress, her bobbing reddish curls cut to her chin. They hugged him and then Sam, and then Charlie’s mother took his arm. “We’ll stay as long as you need us,” she said. “I’m telling you, you’re going to have to throw us out.”

  She tilted Sam’s chin. “You poor baby,” she said. Sam studied the ground. Charlie shot her a warning look. “Don’t you look tall!” she said quickly, and Sam stretched up to show her and Charlie felt a flash of relief.

  He gave them the spare room, new sheets for the double bed. He kept waiting for skirmishes that evening, but to his surprise, there were none. Sam seemed delighted they were around, and didn’t wait for affection but claimed it for himself, trailing after his grandma, taking his grandpa’s hand. Sam wanted to show them the garden in the backyard, his computer games, puzzles, and the books he was reading. “Whatever you need to do, you go and do it,” his mother told Charlie. “We’ll watch Sam.”

  “He acts like he doesn’t believe she’s dead.”

  “What do you mean he doesn’t believe it?” his father said. Both his parents stared at him.

  Charlie raised his hands. “He’s in shock,” Charlie said. “In denial. He was in the car with her. I tried to tell him, but he refuses to talk about it.”

  “You know, I read in the Times, recently, that even infants grieve,” his father said. “They experience loss. They may never remember their mother or their father who died, but on some deep cellular level, they know—and they grieve.”

  Charlie was exasperated. His father always pulled something out of the newspaper instead of discussing his own emotions. The few times when Charlie had come to his father as a kid, wanting advice, his father just quoted other people. “How do scientists know that?” Charlie asked, his voice rising. “How could anyone say that was for sure?”

  “I don’t know. They just do.”

  His mother took his hands. “Well, then, Sam doesn’t have to talk about it right now,” she said. She shook her head. “Poor baby,” she said, and, for a moment, Charlie didn’t know whether she was talking about him or Sam.

  Charlie stopped trying to talk about things with his parents, but he discovered right away that it was a godsend to have them there anyway. He took a nap that evening and woke to find his mother doing the laundry, though in Manhattan she had a laundress. Meticulously, she separated whites and darks, she poured in fabric softener and bleach at just the right time. “What, you think I never did this?” she said.

  His parents helped get Sam to bed, his mother reading Sam a story in a funny voice, his father making Ricky Bear dance. As soon as Sam was tucked in, his mother took Charlie’s arm. “Come on, let’s sit out on the front porch,” she said. “You need to relax. I brought some wine from our cellar, a perfect little red.”

  The night was cooling down and there were stars in the sky. Charlie’s mother opened the wine and poured it into glasses she set on the porch table. “Let it breathe,” she said, and then she moved her chair closer to Charlie, patting his arm encouragingly.

  “Does he seem okay to you?” Charlie asked, and his mother shrugged.

  “Leave the kid alone. Plenty of time for misery later,” said his father.

  “We haven’t talked about the funeral,” his mother said. “I know this is upsetting, but you can’t just leave the body at the funeral home. Would you like me to call people for you? Have the arrangements been made? Are you going to let Sam come? I think you should.”

  “No funeral,” Charlie said. He had only been to a few funerals in his life and every single one of them had seemed barbaric to him. “She was cremated.”

  “Cremated! But you still have to have a ceremony. People expect it. They need it.”

  “I don’t want a memorial. We’ll scatter the ashes when we’re ready.”

  His father studied him. “Charlie,” he said finally. “What are you telling us?”

  Charlie felt a flash of helpless anger at April. They had never even had a will until after Sam was born, and even then, it had been like pulling teeth to get April to do it. “Nothing’s going to happen to us,” she insisted. The day they had drawn up a will, she had stashed it deep in a drawer.

  “You need to have a ceremony. Have people there when you bury the ashes,” his mother said.

  “No.”

  “Why are you being so stubborn about this?”

  Charlie thought of April’s ashes, dust in a box. He wondered how long funeral homes held ashes, if he could leave them there forever, as if they didn’t exist. Why would you want to make yourself hurt more by making a ceremony out of them?

  Charlie’s father picked up a small plastic figure from the porch table, a Hawaiian hula girl swinging her hips that Charlie had bought to make April laugh. He studied it and then looked at Charlie. “You were only one when my mother died, so you don’t remember her, but I do. Even now. When my mother died, I visited her grave every single week for five years. You have no idea how much comfort it gave me. I don’t go so much anymore, but I like knowing she’s there. Knowing I could go if I wanted.” He touched Charlie’s arm. “You need to have a place for your feelings.”

  One place, Charlie thought? What about in the supermarket buying pasta and remembering how April made necklaces for Sam out of macaroni? What about driving to the gas station and remembering how April was always having trouble with the car but he never did? What about, even now, walking into the house and, for one terrifying and wonderful second, smelling the soap she used?

  Charlie took the hula girl from his father. “She wouldn’t be there, not in a grave.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong,” said Charlie’s father. He threw up his hands. “I’m going to shower and then hit the hay,” he said, rising heavily and going into the house. As soon as he was gone, Charlie’s mother leaned toward him conspiratorially. “I don’t understand it,” his mother said. “I’ve heard the story three times already, but still, I just don’t understand it. What was she doing on that road, anyway? Why would she let Sam run out of the car?”

  “Maybe she didn’t let him.”

  “What do you mean, she didn’t let him? What did Sam tell you?”

  “I told you, he won’t talk about it. Maybe it’s good that he forgets.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” his mother said, touching his shoulder. “You think he can forget?”

  “Did you like her?” he asked quietly. He half expected her to say “who,” but instead she shut her eyes for a moment. “What difference does it make?” she said, finally.

  “It makes a lot of difference to me.”

  His mother picked up her wine and sipped. “This wine is heavenly. I don’t know why no one is drinking it but me.”

  “What do you remember about her?” he asked. “Do you remember she used to always wear her cardigan sweaters with the buttons at the back? That she didn’t eat ice cream, but she could easily go through a box of Mallomars all by herself?”

  “Stop this,” his mother said. “Please.”

  “Tell me
about when she came to visit you that time in New York. What did you talk about? She was so excited. She spent days figuring out the perfect gift to give you, planning the things you could do together. She so wanted you to like her. Did you?”

  “Charlie,” his mother warned. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Don’t you have memories of Dad in your early days? Don’t you go over and over them? Relive them?”

  “Sometimes,” she said evasively.

  “You’re lucky you still have each other,” Charlie said. “You’re lucky you’re so close.” He looked thoughtfully at his mother. “You know that one thing April and I had in common. We both spent our childhoods being jealous of our parents.”

  “What are you saying?” His mother put her wineglass down, resting it carefully at the center of the table.

  “You and Dad. You’ve always been this unit with me on the outside. I felt so left out sometimes. I remember you kissing in the audience when I was in a school play once. I was so scared you wouldn’t look up in time to see me sing my song, and when you did I was so relieved I almost cried. I felt like my whole childhood was me shouting, Look at me! Look at me! I kept trying to get you two to notice me instead of each other.”

  “You’ve got the story wrong.”

  “How have I got it wrong? I know what I remember.”

  She lowered her voice. “You know what you want to remember. You saw what you wanted to see. Your father and I have had our moments, let me tell you. It hasn’t been all peaches and cream.”

  “What moments?” Charlie leaned forward. His mother was in her seventies, but she was still beautiful, her hair thick and lush and copper as a penny, her skin dewy. All her clothes were expensive, simply and beautifully cut, and she still turned heads when she walked into a room. She had once shown him pictures of herself when she was nineteen and had won Miss Coney Island, a gorgeous young girl in a polka-dot two-piece, the silky championship band draped across her. His father, a Columbia law student on summer break, had taken one look at her and that had been that: two weeks later, they were married and living in a two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment with a doorman. Love at first sight that had lasted.