“Even if he didn’t say anything,” Rick added, “we could tell.”
“But he didn’t say anything,” Brian insisted.
Jack looked from one boy to the other. “Danny didn’t seem unusually upset or worried?”
“No,” Brian assured him with less certainty than Jack would have liked. Or was it sadness that he heard in Brian’s voice, or confusion? “He was Danny.”
“It might have been very subtle, something that you might not have noticed at first. Think for a minute.”
Brian shook his head. “I didn’t notice anything like that.”
Rick echoed Brian.
“Danny would have,” C.J. whispered timidly.
“Danny would have?” Brian said back to him.
“If it were one of us,” C.J. answered, “he would have noticed. He would have known why.”
Brian frowned at him. “Don’t, C.J. Come on.”
Rick frowned, too, and looked over at Brian before he volunteered, “All C.J.’s trying to say, Dr. Owens, is Danny was awesome.”
They were boys acting like little men, or trying to—Jack could imagine Danny acting the same, speaking in the same somber tones—the way they’d seen adults behave. But only their awkwardness showed. Rick seemed more gawky and jangled. Brian’s self-command seemed forced and false. C.J. looked fragile and morose. It was painful to witness, painful to be a part of.
“If Danny was acting strange,” Rick began, “we’d have—I mean, he never acted, you know, weird or like—”
Brian broke in, “He was…He always made us laugh,” and remembered something Danny had done just the week before. Rick remembered Danny’s impersonations, and one story followed another, Rick and Brian talking about when they’d become Danny’s friends, and when they had sleepovers and told scary stories, Danny was the last to admit he was scared. In the seventh grade, when everyone teased Brent Ackerman because he stuttered and didn’t do well in school, Danny went out of his way to invite Brent to the movies or to play ball, even though he was uncoordinated “and was always tripping over himself.”
“Danny was awesome,” Rick said.
“He was the best friend we ever had,” Brian whispered.
“He was the best, period,” Rick added.
Jack waited a moment before he asked, “Did he ever talk about—Danny asked me which was more important, honesty or loyalty? Did he ever talk to you about that?”
Brian shook his head and looked over at Rick, who shook his head silently.
C.J. whispered something, unsnapped his backpack and pulled out a blue Hawaiian shirt. He might as well have pulled out a ghost, the way the other boys stared at it. “Danny lent this to me,” he said, in a voice that made Jack shudder and the other boys sit back up in their chairs. “I guess you want it.”
“Why don’t you keep it,” Jack answered. “I think Danny would have liked that.”
C.J. held the shirt tightly, bunching it in his fist. His hands were trembling and he started to cry. Brian and Rick got very quiet for a minute or two, then Rick said, with adolescent certainty, “I know Danny’s in heaven right now looking down at us and he’s at peace.” This did nothing to stop C.J.’s crying and the other boys stayed quiet and still for a minute longer, except for their eyes, which darted from one to the other. Brian and Rick mouthed something to C.J., C.J. cried and clutched Danny’s shirt. Rick got all fidgety while Brian glanced over at him and glanced over at C.J. Then they were hitching in their chairs, sitting forward and back like they couldn’t wait to get the visit over with, all the while their eyes kept on working, Rick glancing over at Brian, Brian glancing over at C.J., who returned the shirt to the backpack and looked even more frail and mournful.
Jack realized their sadness was making them restless and his was making them uncomfortable. He was sure they could see his sorrow, that they knew how much he wanted them to sit with him. That must have been why they didn’t know what to say or how to act, why they looked from one to the other. Why they didn’t know how to leave. Or were they waiting for Jack to dismiss them? But Jack wasn’t ready to let this small piece of Danny walk off his front porch. He wanted to invite them inside and stand with them in Danny’s room and breathe the air that had been Danny’s air. But he didn’t invite them inside. He only tried to find Danny in their faces and hear Danny in their voices. To see Danny in their eyes, in the jeans and T-shirts and the sneakers they wore. But all he saw were the faces of three boys who were not his sons, trying to figure out what to do next, waiting for Jack to let them go, but he kept them there a moment longer before he finally said, “Goodbye…Take care of yourselves…You know you’re always welcome here…” and watched them hop on their bikes and ride down the road, further and further away from their friend and his house, leaving their childhood behind.
VIII
It wasn’t Danny in the casket, it was only an empty body. All the things that made Danny Owens Danny Owens had been sucked out and emptied into the plastic grocery bag four days ago. The living Danny was gone, and if there were such things as spirits and souls, they were far removed from this graveside where Jack and his father, Grace, Lois and Aunt Adele stood with their mouths set tight, their heads bowed. The old man leaned on his cane with one hand and gripped Jack’s hand with the other. He read from e. e. cummings and Dylan Thomas in a halting, quaking voice. Jack read from Shakespeare. They weren’t crying. There had been nothing but tears last night and this morning, but here beside Danny’s grave, tears were not sufficient.
The casket was lowered into the ground. Jack tossed a fistful of dirt into the grave, his father tossed another…
“Breathe…breathe…again. That’s it.” Jack held Anne’s hand. He wiped her forehead with the towel. “Easy now,” he said softly. “Keep breathing. Easy.” Anne lay on the hospital bed and screamed with each contraction. She cursed God for making her a woman. She cursed Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital and the nurse for going along with this “fucking-asinine-natural-bullshit-child-bir—Oh shit.” She gripped Jack’s hand tighter. Jack told her to breathe with him, deeply and quickly. Anne’s screaming grew louder. Anne, who had turned to him in the Fine Arts building and literally took his breath away when they were students at Gilbert College, was now giving birth, giving breath, to their baby.
“Nice deep breaths,” Jack told her. “Nice deep breaths and…push.”
Anne screamed so loud it seemed she would tear her throat apart.
“Easy,” Jack said. “Breathe nice and easy. Think about the week in Eleuthera when we sang to each other in the hammock. Think about that. Okay?”
Anne screamed, her face contorted and pained.
“Think about the soothing pink light surrounding you.”
Anne only screamed.
Jack started singing, “Breathe in the good breath…Exhale the pain…”
“Oh God,” she cried.
“Breathe in. Breathe—”
“Fuck you.” Anne’s body heaving. She screamed. Perspiration dripped off her face. “Fuck all of you. I want drugs.”
The nurse’s face got tense. She whispered something to Anne. A moment later the top of the baby’s head appeared, and its neck and shoulders. Anne exhaled.
“Keep pushing.”
Anne let out a loud and exhausted cry.
“Push. Push. Keep pushing and breathing. Easy…Easy…”
The nurse held up the dark-wet body, more like larva than flesh. She shook it gently into awareness. “A boy,” she announced.
Later, after the nurse had wiped the baby dry and wrapped him to keep him warm, she presented him like a little trophy, and said to Anne and Jack, “I’ll leave you alone for now.” But they weren’t alone, there was a baby with them, lying on Anne’s chest. Jack sat on the edge of the bed and ran the back of his hand across Anne’s cheek and curled his finger around the baby’s tiny wrist. Anne whispered “Oh my God” as she cradled the baby against her neck and chest.
They stared at the tiny face, wrinkled and red, his bo
dy squirming so slightly, flexing his incredibly small hands. We have a baby, Jack thought, a living, breathing person; and he was overcome with the kind of damp panic that only an irreversible act engenders.
He was Daniel Benjamin Owens on the birth certificate. It was “To Daniel Benjamin Owens” that Jack’s parents toasted and his friends and colleagues toasted. But to Anne and Jack he was: The Baby. He lay on his back gurgling contentedly at the square of blue sky Anne had painted on the ceiling. He watched with alert and deep eyes all who had come to drink to his health, to his long life. “To Daniel Benjamin Owens.” But it was The Baby who Anne held in her arms. The Baby to whom Jack toasted while the three of them posed, the happy triumvirate, for the camera.
Those first weeks the loft was rarely without people eating, drinking and celebrating. Jack’s parents brought a crib, toys and clothes. Aunts and uncles and cousins brought toys and clothes. Anne’s staff brought toys and clothes. Jack’s students and colleagues brought toys and clothes. Toys that made noises and toys that did nothing at all. Toys for next year and the year after that. Mobiles that jangled or merely sparkled in sunlight. Puppets and dolls and stuffed animals. Little red coats and blue coats and mittens for winter. Hats and pajamas and bibs and jeans. Baseball caps no wider than a teacup and football jerseys the size of a child’s doll. Jack’s editor brought books that squeaked and books that grew into buildings and trees. People showed up to sit and watch the baby do nothing but sleep. They stood and watched him wake and gurgle.
He was a good baby. As though he’d been in on all the discussions, as though he knew the indecisions and decisions; as though he were a visitor in his parents’ home, he was determined to be the perfect little guest. He cooed when he was hungry but never cried. He slept through the night. When Jack woke in the morning, the baby slept until it was time to curl up with Anne and be fed. At night, alone, with the baby sleeping between them, Anne and Jack would marvel that anything so small could have lungs that breathed so deeply, a heart that beat so strongly, a brain that dreamed. Anne would sit in the rocking chair her father had sent from Dorset, hold the baby in her arms and feed him while Jack sat cross-legged on the floor next to them. Chopin, Brahms, played on the stereo.
Standing over the crib, Anne would run her lean finger along the baby’s smooth skin. “He’s so very small,” she said, in a voice that had only to do with love. When she said, “Look at him, Jack. So fragile,” she had tears in her eyes. “So helpless,” she whispered, and lifted the baby out of the crib, held him against her heart. “He’s a wonderful baby,” she said. “He’s a beautiful baby,” and, turning her eyes away quickly and just for a moment, she said, softly, “Oh, Jack. I’m so happy.” And if there were any doubt in her voice that she wasn’t happy, Jack hadn’t heard it.
Except for Jack’s father, Aunt Adele and Lois, none of the people who fifteen years before had brought Danny gifts and drank to his long life were there to mourn him.
“May he rest in peace,” Aunt Adele breathed against Jack’s cheek. She pressed her face against his, she hugged him. She said, “It’s so awful. It’s just so awful.” She said Danny was a very deep boy and would be greatly missed. “It’s just such a horrible loss. Terrible.” She never spoke the word suicide.
They walked down the gravel path to the car, Jack with his father, who took small, hesitant steps, like a child, everyone else walking ahead. They passed headstones with cherubs, headstones with bouquets and names carved on them, to loving mothers, adored husbands, cherished grandfathers. Jack thought: This is no place for a boy. How far from home I’ve brought him; and he felt the living Danny slipping away from him.
His father said, “He was an extraordinary boy.” He held on to Jack’s elbow. “I’m not saying that because he was my grandson. He was very astute—” He took several hard, forced breaths. When he spoke, his voice was painfully hoarse. “In the early days, when you and Anne used to leave him with your mother and me—he couldn’t have been more than eighteen months old—we could see he had an ability, a sensitivity for figuring people out—he knew what was going on. He understood. You don’t see that in many children, not when they’re that young. You don’t see it in a lot of adults either.”
“I failed him,” was all Jack said.
“Everyone failed him,” his father answered.
“It must have been there all along, and I couldn’t see it. He couldn’t have just woken up on Thursday morning—”
“We didn’t know,” his father said with sad resignation. “We didn’t know until he told us, and he told us by killing himself.” His eyes were moist, from age, from grief. “You did everything you could do. I want you to remember that.”
They walked further along the path, the old feet sliding against the gravel. The old body trembling. Across the way, dozens of mourners were gathered three deep by a family plot listening to the intonations of a minister.
Nine limousine drivers, obviously attached to the funeral, leaned against shiny black cars, smoking cigarettes, laughing softly with each other, while the bereaved commenced the obsequy. Jack’s father watched the scene for a moment and held Jack’s hand. His flesh was cold and smooth.
Jack said, “It happens to everyone, doesn’t it? But it’s not supposed to happen like this.”
“This is a miserable day. There was no one better than Danny.” His father coughed more than a few times, stopped walking and leaned one hand on his cane and the other against a stone bench. “Sit with me for a minute, Jackie,” and balanced himself on Jack’s arm as they sat side by side. “We were never a religious family,” the old man said, “and it would be hypocritical to fall back on a God we don’t believe in in good times, so you’re going to have to have faith in yourself and your—” He coughed a few more times. “A terrible thing has happened, and you’re going to live with it for the rest of your life.”
Jack nodded his head.
“I don’t mean to make it sound so intellectual and didactic. It’s talk, that’s all. I just want to be with you for a few minutes, alone. Just the two of us.”
“Just the two of us. We’re all that’s left.”
They started to cry, softly. Two figures sitting on a stone bench in a cemetery, where there is never a shortage of tears. The old hand with the veins like aged roots, the thick fingers, which had never been anything but gentle, shaking against Jack’s arm. Words were choked back. It was only tears now, without resistance, without restraint. Danny’s sad lifetime unfurled in Jack’s mind like a piece of tapestry, only it hadn’t seemed sad when Danny was living it. Jack once believed he’d done all that he could to distract Danny from the sadness—was that all it was, distraction? He once believed he’d filled in the places that were emptied when Anne left. And before Anne left. He once believed that he could undo the damage. Now there was nothing left to believe.
His father cleared his throat, wiped the corners of his mouth with thumb and forefinger. He asked, “What are you going to do when you go back?”
“I have some work to finish. Schoolwork.”
“How much?”
“What I didn’t finish last week.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know. I did everything else so Danny and I could spend the extra week in Maine.”
“You can’t sit alone in that house all summer thinking about all the—I don’t think you should spend all that time alone.”
“My friends invited me to stay with them. The ones Danny and I were going to visit.”
The old man leaned heavily on Jack’s arm and stood up. “Just remember who you are, Jackie.”
IX
Jack could see the garden outside the windows of his study, where the flowers were in full bloom and the piece of field where the rows were plowed and the green of late spring covered the soil. For the third time that morning he sat at his computer with his folders, the videotape set in the VCR, trying to finish the critique, but he could not get to work. Even with the coffee brewed and his cup set o
n the coaster next to the phone, the script open, the storyboard spread out the way he liked it, even when everything was ready as though he weren’t at home but in his office and it was May and Danny was still alive. Even if he thought of nothing but the work ahead of him, he couldn’t get started, but it was more than just getting started. He couldn’t concentrate. Just as he couldn’t sleep at night and lay in the dark until daybreak and felt nothing; and couldn’t eat, except for a quick pass at a piece of toast and a cup of coffee. He could only think of Danny.
There were images in freeze-frame on the television screen next to him, and if only he could be in freeze-frame the moment before Hopewell had walked into his office. If only Danny could be in freeze-frame the moment before he breathed his final “yes.” Before his capitulation, before he put the plastic bag over his head—the moment before the moment—allowing Kim Connor those extra minutes to get to him, to stay his hand.
Jack pushed his chair away from the desk and walked out of the room. He sat outside on the back steps and heard the distant hum of interstate traffic on the far side of the field, the postman dropping the day’s mail in the basket on the front porch and the fading motor as the van drove away. He wanted to hear other sounds: the scrape of the bicycle against the garage. Piano music in the living room. The sound of Danny somewhere in the house.
He watched a flock of geese flying a black V-formation against the white clouds. Mutt chased after something in the rosebushes, came out the other side with nothing to show for his effort, ran under the fence and across the freshly tilled earth. Down by the creek, the sun was shining through the branches of the sycamores, and it looked so cloistered and comforting that Jack got up and walked out to the cool, muddy bank. He remembered the times he and Danny came here, where the air was always warm, or seemed so, and heavy with the smell of damp logs. They’d take off their shoes and socks, roll up their pants and wade into the cool stream. They’d watch tadpoles wriggling inside their jelly eggs, throw stones at the trees on the opposite bank. Jack threw stones at those same trees now, until his fingers were wet and cold. He sat along the edge of the water, pushing his hands through the deep, lazy moss. But he did not take off his shoes and socks, or wade in the creek or look for tadpoles. He clutched his legs up to his chest and rested his chin on his knees, unable, unwilling, to move from this spot, although there was no purpose for being here, no reason to stay other than to avoid work, the academic industry poised inside his study.
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