“Here you are, Charles.”
“Thank you,” he said. “I cannot stop staring at those flowers.”
“Oh, yes,” Mrs. McGucken said. “My violets … they do keep me busy …”
Charles followed her over to the window and was treated to an impromptu lecture on the joys of Saintpaulia ionantha. Mrs. McGucken identified each distinct plant variety and spoke about their soil and light requirements, emphasizing that although African violets had a reputation for being horticultural prima donnas, it was completely undeserved; they were, in fact, easy to grow—certainly less high-maintenance than orchids. They were also long-lived (some of her specimens were decades old), and, perhaps best of all, their diminutive size made them perfect for small, dimly lit dwellings such as this.
She was obviously an expert, but Charles had the sense that the subject of flowers wasn’t a source of pride for Mrs. McGucken so much as a way of initiating a conversation with someone she hadn’t seen for fifty years. It had taken all his courage to come. Possibly, inviting him had taken all of hers.
“You’ve converted me,” Charles said as she concluded her lecture, eliciting from Mrs. McGucken the most delightful and surprising response: a low-pitched, throaty chuckle.
“I so enjoyed that article in the newspaper,” she said, leading Charles to the sofa and settling herself in a nearby chair.
They went on to chat about all the expected, safe topics. At Mrs. McGucken’s urging, Charles talked about his long history as a City Prana teacher, his students, this year’s impressive slate of senior-project advisees. Mrs. McGucken filled in the details of what sounded like a very busy life, especially for someone who had to be in her eighties: her volunteering obligations at the nearby elementary school and the public library, her active membership in a society of fellow African violet enthusiasts.
About forty-five minutes into their visit, she got up to pour them each another cup of coffee and then said, “Come.”
Charles followed her around the partial wall; on the other side, as he’d expected, was Mrs. McGucken’s bedroom. What he hadn’t expected were the photographs; in this private area of her tiny apartment, the walls were covered with them.
“I don’t like to talk about him with everyone,” she said by way of explanation, “so I keep these out of sight. Please, look.”
Charles immediately recognized Dana in baby pictures, as a toddler, and of course at elementary-school age, but then—it couldn’t be—there were pictures of Dana as an adolescent, a teenager, a young man.
“What is it, Charles? Are you all right?”
“These pictures,” he said, pointing. “Is this … ?”
“Yes, that’s Dana. He must be, oh, maybe twelve or thirteen in that one.”
“But I thought … I thought …”
“Charles. Sit down, please. You’ve gone quite pale. Let me get you something.”
Charles sank onto the bed, staring. It was Dana, without question: older, grown far past the age Charles had continued to imagine him for almost fifty years, but still, the same face, the same radiance, the same white suit in gradually larger sizes.
“Here,” Mrs. McGucken said, returning with a glass of water.
“I thought … ,” Charles began again, but his mouth was parched; he had to take a drink before he was able to go on. “After what happened on the playground … when I saw you in the office that day and you told me he was in the hospital … I just thought …”
“You thought he’d died? Oh, no, Charles, I’m so sorry.” She placed one of her hands over his. “No. No, dear, Dana recovered from those injuries. He had a severe infection, and it was touch-and-go for a while, but … I thought you knew. I called your mother to tell her, in case you were worried.”
“You told my mother?”
“Yes, I—”
“You told my mother that Dana was all right.”
“Yes. I’m sorry, Charles. I’m really so very sorry that you didn’t know. I kept Dana at home for a while after what happened, but then a school opened up on Shaw Island, a school for special children run by an order of Benedictine nuns. Dana lived there until he was eighteen—those were very good years for him; here’s a picture of him there—and then he moved back in with me.”
In the photo, Dana looked to be about sixteen. He was sitting at a picnic table next to a nun. She was writing; he was watching. In the far distance was an expansive view of undulating pastures dotted with grazing sheep; in the midground, a plain wooden structure, the schoolhouse, perhaps; on the porch, another nun was helping a young child hold a watering can over a window box filled with flowers.
Charles looked up and began surveying the photos again. It was then that he noticed: there was a certain point after which Dana did not advance in age.
“What happened to him?” he asked.
“He died in 1980, at home. He was twenty-seven years old. The diagnosis was sudden unexplained death in epilepsy. It’s not uncommon for children like Dana, who have a history of seizures, to go that way. He died in his sleep, very peacefully, from what I could tell. I didn’t hear him cry out that night, and I always did, I always heard him. When I went to rouse him in the morning, as usual, he was gone.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be. Really. Brief as Dana’s life was, it was very rich. He was loved; he had friends.” She gave Charles’s hand a gentle pressure. “And as far as what happened at Nellie Goodhue, he seemed to completely recover. It didn’t change him in the least. But then, as you might remember, Dana had a great gift for … Oh, how can I say this? For happiness, you know? He was so utterly himself, so completely at home in his own body and spirit. He was a kind of angel, I think. An angel on earth. At least, he was in my life.”
She reached up and rubbed the tears from her eyes, temporarily displacing those large, black-rimmed eyeglasses Charles remembered so clearly.
“Here,” she said. “I have something for you.” She opened a bureau drawer and brought out a framed photograph: their fourth-grade class picture. “That’s yours to keep. I had a copy made. I thought you might like it.”
An objective observer would give the photograph no special weight except as documentary evidence of 1960s fashion and haircuts. But to Charles, the photo was revelatory:
It wasn’t him who occupied the choice position in that photograph, the place that, in the 1960s, was always given to the teacher’s pet. Nor was it the brilliant and myopic Astrida Pukis. The person standing next to Brax the Ax and holding her hand was Dana McGucken.
Here too was a window into a possibility that Charles had never considered: in her way, Mrs. Braxton loved Dana.
“I’ve gone on and on about my family,” Mrs. McGucken said after they returned to the living room. “So rude of me not to ask about yours. Did you marry?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Children?”
There was a story he could tell, about his son and daughter, but instead he nodded and said, “Two. One boy, one girl.”
They talked a while longer, until it became clear that Mrs. McGucken was tiring.
But Charles was tiring too, he realized; there was a strange, weighted feeling in his body, not exactly unpleasant, as if he were a boat that had been filled with water but was now emptying.
“I’d best be going,” he said, getting up, and the water emptied, downward, a liquid weight pooling briefly in his feet and then releasing into someplace far below.
Mrs. McGucken made as if to stand; when she seemed to be having difficulty, Charles reached out and took her lightly by the elbow.
“I have one last thing to give you.”
She reached down and laid hold of a decoupaged wood box that had been sitting on the coffee table between them.
“Inside are Dana’s letters to me, from the time he lived on Shaw Island.” She held the box out to him. “I’d like you to take some.”
“Oh, Mrs. McGucken, I can’t—”
“Please, don’t worry,”
she said, smiling. “Dana wrote lots of letters.”
Charles opened the box; it was filled with half sheets of lined manila paper, the very kind they’d used in Mrs. Braxton’s class.
“I wish I could translate what all of it means,” Mrs. McGucken said, “and it surely all meant something to him. I just wanted you to know that you taught him well; he made those loops right up until the day he died.”
As they stood at the door, she clasped his hand. “Your mother,” she said. “Is she still alive?”
“Oh, no. She’s been gone a long time.”
Mrs. McGucken nodded, and then looked intently into his eyes. “Don’t be too hard on the dead, Charles. It’s not easy for them to say they’re sorry or ask for forgiveness, although I do believe they try.”
She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek before saying goodbye.
Charles sat in the car for a long time looking at Dana’s letters to his mother. At the end of every indecipherable piece of correspondence, he had written his signature:
•♦•
Dear Emmy,
I’m sitting on the front-porch steps watching the first blush of morning light, a rose-colored flatline on the near horizon.
It’s been another insomniac night. I’ve just come home from watching a movie at Pinehurst Palace; there’s a VCR player over there, and the movie is an old one, available only in that format.
My sleeplessness commenced around midnight, when I awoke from a dream, a version of which I’ve had frequently over the years. This time, however, there were several significant changes.
The dream began with me standing at the base of a huge, towering fortress of mildewing cardboard boxes. I was aware, as always, that my mother was inside, but I had no idea if her seclusion was forced or voluntary. Was I meant to rescue her or let her be? (These are questions that plagued me when she was alive; they remain unanswered, so it’s no wonder that they’ve continued to haunt me long after her death.)
I noticed a space, a small point of entry, a gap in the fortress’s façade that I’d not seen before, just big enough to crawl through.
I heard my mother’s voice—“Charles? Charles, is that you?”—and the tinkling of ice cubes. I saw spiraling wisps of smoke rising from inside the enclosure and knew them to be a signal of some sort—but this time, they were not a sign of distress but a kind of visual prayer, an offering.
“Charles,” my mother repeated. “Why are you standing out there? Come inside.”
And so I crawled in, becoming younger as I did, and once inside I found myself in the living room of a house I’d lived in until I was ten. My mother was dressed up—wearing an outfit I remembered watching her iron one night before she went out on a date with my father—and there, laid out on the glass-top coffee table, was a silver tray of face snacks, the kind I used to make for your brother.
“Hi, Dad,” another voice said. I turned, and it was you! Seventeen years old, dressed entirely in white, in the corseted, long-skirted style of a nineteenth-century lady. A cartoon bubble hovered over your head; your words appeared inside the bubble as you spoke them. “Here,” you said, “wear these.” And you handed me a tall stack of tasseled caps in an assortment of colors.
As you and your grandmother and I sat down to Hamm’s beer served in tiny porcelain cups, I could hear, not too far away, the sound of young boys laughing, of paper being torn, of noodles being smashed, of clinking glasses …
After awakening, I knew it would be difficult to go back to sleep, and I decided not to try, no homeopathics, no herbal teas; there was nothing for it but to get up and go down there, downstairs, down to the crawlspace. It was time to open the last boxes.
I knew where to find your things, as well as a few other items of significance, archival documentation of our little family’s history.
In fact, I’d known all along.
And there they were. Not a towering fortress of boxes, just three.
I brought them upstairs and out here to the front porch, one at a time. They’re sitting next to me.
In the first box (the one on which I found your tea set resting way back in September when I first began this archaeological project): the bluebird mobile, the yellow-and-green layette, the silver rattle, the Beatrix Potter books sized for a child’s hands—a gift from my mother.
The contents of the second: the Post-it note (It’s a girl!); the ultrasound image (Hi, Daddy!); the photograph album your mother assembled after your baby shower; the congratulatory cards; the videotape I watched earlier this evening. These items went into the box in the crawlspace a few months after you were born.
I’d come home from school one day to discover your mother’s car in the driveway; when I walked in, there she was, lying on the living-room sofa, dozing, a cup of tea on the table next to her.
“Hey. You’re home.”
“Yes,” she said drowsily, “I’m home.” Her eyes were puffy, her face flushed.
“You sick?” I dropped my school satchel next to my office desk and went to her to feel her forehead. It was clammy but cool.
She shook her head, rubbed the back of her neck, and readjusted herself on the sofa. She was holding a heating pad to her abdomen.
“Where’s Cody?” I asked.
“Next door. I called Erik Bjornson and asked if he could watch him until you got home.”
“Did you work today?”
“No. I mean, yes, I went in, but I left early.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m just a little tired is all.”
“I’ll start dinner.”
“Don’t fix anything for me. I’m not hungry.”
I was headed to the kitchen when I noticed a box by the front door.
“What’s this?”
“Some things for the thrift. I meant to drive it over this afternoon, but …” She started to cry, quietly.
I opened the box flaps.
I remember feeling a sudden, sickening loss of equilibrium when I saw what was inside, as if I’d stepped into an elevator that immediately began plummeting from the top floor of a very tall building.
“Why are you giving this away?”
Your mother didn’t answer.
“These are Emmy’s things. Why are you giving them away?”
“We’re not having any more babies.”
“You don’t know that. We haven’t talked about that.”
“We’re not going to talk about it. That’s where I was today. That’s what I was doing. Making sure. No more babies.”
And that was when she told me she’d had surgery, a tubal ligation. She and I weren’t supposed to have any more children, she said; Cody, your brother, was going to take all of our strength, and if I didn’t see that, if I didn’t accept that, well, I had to, there was no choice.
I remember thinking that I should feel very angry about the fact that your mother had made such a momentous, irrevocable decision without asking me, her husband, her supposed partner; that she’d drastically altered the blueprint of a life that we’d agreed upon, that we’d quite literally put our hands to on that first night we met—“I’ll want to have children right away,” and I’d said yes, yes; to her, to the miracle of that possibility.
What I felt instead was a kind of stunned panic, an animal protectiveness, an urgent compulsion to shield you, hide you, get you as far away as possible from this person, this weak-seeming, weeping person on the sofa who had once been your mother but had somehow transformed into a predator.
“Where’s the rest of it?” I asked.
“Charles …”
“You didn’t,” I said. “Alison. Tell me you didn’t.”
When she didn’t answer, I rushed outside, pulled off the garbage-can lid, and made another horrifying discovery. I began extracting the remaining evidence of your existence.
When I passed through the living room carrying your things, she was still on the sofa, crying more fiercely now, but also saying something, words, I suppose, but whatever it
was made no sense and I interrupted her. “We’re not getting rid of Emmy’s things,” I said. “We are not getting rid of her.”
I brought everything downstairs and hid it in the farthest, darkest corner of our meticulously remodeled, mycotoxin-free crawlspace. I didn’t want your mother finding your things again; I suspected that she’d once more try to dispose of them, that someday in the future I’d come home to find that she’d erased you forever. This was a terrible thought to have about a person I loved.
So. The last box. It too has a story. It too represents a significant vertical slash on our family’s timeline.
A few years later—you would have been about seven years old—I once again came home from school to find your mother’s car in the driveway in the middle of a workday; again, she was waiting for me on the living-room sofa, upright this time and looking far from vulnerable.
Next to the door were two suitcases. Cody had already been moved into his first group home at this point, so the suitcases did not belong to him.
Next to the suitcases was this third box.
“I hadn’t decided to leave, really, I hadn’t,” your mother began. Her voice, I remember, was very matter-of-fact and practiced, a voice I realized she probably used often when deposing a witness for the defense, perhaps, or cross-examining an alleged rapist. “I was only thinking about it. I went downstairs, I’m not sure why, I told myself it was to see if there was anything down there I might want to take with me if I decided to go. And then I found them.”
She nodded her head toward the damning evidence.
There was no need for me to open the flaps of that box; I knew exactly what it contained. Not the treasure chest of sentimental savings that I started looking for months ago—those lost relics documenting your journey from toddlerhood through high school, the handmade birthday/Valentine’s Day/Father’s Day/get-well cards, the letters from camp, the school projects—but seven years’ worth of unsent one-way correspondence, tucked into envelopes addressed to Emerson Faith Marlow.
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