by Owen Egerton
They asked what happened. We asked the same. What had happened?
“Did you hear anything in the night?” they asked. “A cough or a cry?”
“Nothing. Nothing,” Carrie said.
“He woke once,” I said. “He cried and I sang him back down.”
“And what time was that?”
“I don’t know . . .”
“Your best guess, sir.”
“Eleven. Maybe midnight.”
And they scribbled everything down.
We were given a death certificate. Cause of death read undetermined.
A rattling word. A useless word.
Those next days were the dark twin of Miles’s first days of life.
His death—his absence—turned the world weird. We found every detail confusing. I stumbled on floor stains. She gagged on her toothbrush.
People swamped us with casseroles and condolences. And my body, to my distaste, functioned. I was hungry, so I ate. I was sleepy, so I slept. My body was still alive.
We reached for a sponge and the cabinet door caught, our home still childproof. We opened the fridge and his yogurt cups lay in wait. We woke in the night to phantom cries, jumping from bed and tripping into the hall before remembering there’s no child to comfort.
Panic leapt out from any corner of the house. A light switch, a creaking step, the dropping mail would send us sweating and shaking and unable to name a reason. Something had to be done, now, right now! But there was nothing to do.
Jesus, oh, Jesus, I believed—as I had been taught by every film, every song, every Easter sermon—that love could conquer all. That love could survive all. It is not true.
The funeral was New Year’s Day. A cold, bright day.
People stared in awe at us. Carrie and I were an ocean of grief—incomprehensibly deep and long. They could not take it in.
The child’s coffin. Varnished. I think we chose it. Smell of furniture polish and the sick sweetness of air freshener. The minister at St. Christopher’s read some things, said some things, sentiment that fell into the ocean like rice. We stood by a display of photos and toys. We hugged and shook hands and somehow did everything we were supposed to do as if we’d been instructed.
People approached, curious and mouth-sick. Some touched us. Some hugged. How do you hug the ocean? Some threw lies and promises, believing they could fill us up. Believing that if enough he’s in a better places and God has called him homes piled up on the bottom, then the hollow would be at least partially filled. But as soon as the words left their mouths and disappeared into our eyes, even as we nodded our gratitude, they could see how dead their condolences were. They stepped away.
Others chose, even there in the church’s lunch hall, to share their own disasters. Lost loved ones, early deaths. I wanted to say to each of them, stop, please don’t say any more. Please don’t believe, as surely you didn’t believe, that this grief is one of a billion, that this death is one of a billion billion billion. Please. There is no comfort there.
At home, after the funeral, Carrie undressed and got into bed, though it was only five in the evening.
I paced the house. My study, books and books. I touched the spines, cool and present. I knew every word on every page was dead. Through the floorboards above me I could hear her cry in her sleep.
At sunfall I watched the light retreat from our backyard. The same yard, same trees and sky. The spirit had evacuated. The world still had all the parts, but the soft hum had gone. The world is a corpse.
There’s a thin veil between our days and reality. It’s woven from habits, meals, duties, chores, television shows, soccer practices, traffic jams, Christmas, coffee breaks, sex, and debt. Occasionally the veil rips and the cold sandy truth of it all blows through the tear. We race to mend it with a drink or a hobby or a book, then slowly reinforce the stitching with thoughtlessness and forgetfulness.
A big enough rip and you get more than just a gush of reality, you get a view. And it’s nothing. Desert dead. Less. Wind with sand. And love did not make me strong. My love for Miles has left me as exposed as a lidless eye.
The police called the following morning.
My wife’s sister had come by early with a bag of bagels and was trying to get us to eat. She chattered away, flitting about the house like a trapped bird. When the call came from the police station requesting I come down and sign some mandatory papers, I was glad for an excuse to leave.
I drove to the police station by the courthouse where I had once paid a parking fine. A polite police officer led me from the lobby through swinging doors and down a hallway. He opened a door to a beige-walled room with a table and three chairs and a two-way mirror. He told me to wait there and someone would soon be with me.
Then he left and I sat down, my stomach turning. I knew they were watching. What were they watching for? What did they think I’d done?
After ten minutes two men in dark suits came in and sat across the table from me. The taller, older one stared down his long, drooping face. The other man, young with thin, animated eyebrows, smiled as he straightened a manila file, tapping the pages into place.
“So,” said the younger one. “Want to tell us what happened?”
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” I said.
He smiled apologetically, his eyebrows arching. “I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat. “We’re trying to find out what exactly happened to your son.”
The other kept staring, his jowls sagging, looking as if he might doze off at any moment. The younger one cleared his throat again. “Wouldn’t you like to tell us what really happened that night?”
“What do you think happened?” I asked.
“We really don’t know.” He smiled, nearly chuckled. “But we’d like to find out.”
“One thing is certain,” the older one said. “Your son did not die of natural causes.”
The muscles in my neck clenched. I blinked and shook my head.
“Mr. Bonds,” said the younger one, looking down into the file. “Can you tell us why your son was doused with alcohol?”
“With what?”
“Had you been drinking that night?” he asked. “Christmas Eve. You’d been drinking, right?”
“I had a drink or two.”
“Mr. Bonds,” the older one said. “You took out a fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy on your son.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’ve made a hefty profit from all this.”
“The insurance?” I asked. It all made no sense. “It was a package deal the university offered. I . . .”
“Of course, of course,” said the younger one. “We just want all the facts out there.”
I looked from one to the other—dancing eyebrows to drooping jowls.
“Shouldn’t I have a lawyer?”
The younger one’s eyebrows stretched high. “Of course, if you’d like. Or we could just talk it out. Work it out right here.”
“I think I’d like to have my lawyer here.”
The younger one looked at me as if I hadn’t said anything. As if I’d come to my senses and talk. I did nothing. Finally he looked to his partner, who gave the slightest shrug. The younger one opened his folder and made a mark inside of it.
Without another word they left me the room.
I sat alone, cold panic pumping through me, a strange icy terror. I stood and paced the room. Why was I there? I should have been with Carrie. I needed to call her. I needed to go home. I stepped toward the door just as it reopened and the two men reentered. The older man asked me to turn around and placed handcuffs on my wrists as the younger one explained I was being arrested on suspicion of the murder of Miles Bonds.
The world went muffled and unreal. They led me down the hall into a bright, fluorescent space where officers took my wallet, my phone, my keys. They pressed my fi
ngers to ink. They photographed me. There was waiting and papers and hallways. I found my body doing whatever they asked. Standing, walking, turning to the left, urinating. I would have done anything they said.
Within an hour my lawyer, Tom Hobart, arrived, and we were left to talk in a different beige-walled jailhouse meeting room. This one had no mirror.
“They think you killed your boy,” he said. “They’re going for negligent homicide.”
Tom had been our lawyer since a car accident Carrie had been in six years before, a not-so-serious hit-and-run by a drunk driver. He was a ruddy, robust man, fifteen years my elder, with constantly red and irritated skin as if he’d just shaved with an overused razor.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”
“They’ll formerly charge you today. I’ll aim for a reasonable bail so we can get you out of here.”
“But what did I do wrong?”
“Felony cases go to a grand jury first. They determine whether there’s enough question to go to trial. This won’t move fast.”
“They said he didn’t die of natural causes.”
“The autopsy was inconclusive, that’s all. Inconclusive,” he said. “It’s standard that they investigate the closest relatives.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“My God, Oliver, stop saying that. I know.” Tom rubbed his cheeks with one hand. “But the autopsy was inconclusive and, well, God damn it, little boys don’t just up and die.”
“Why do they think . . .”
“A parent is always the first suspect in these cases. Nine times out of ten it’s one of the parents.”
“I didn’t hurt my son.”
“I know, I know.” Tom reached out and patted my hand. His hand felt warm, almost feverish. “We’ve got a long way to go. A lot of little bureaucratic steps.” He sighed as if he were already weary of the process. “How’s Carrie holding up?”
I shook my head.
They charged me—a judge, young and well-groomed, sitting behind cheap wood panels—charged me with negligent homicide. It happened quickly. No fanfare, no thunder. Just a poker-faced judge telling me the state aimed to prove I killed my son.
After the proceedings, before they took me back into my cell, Tom turned to me, puffing out his cheeks and exhaling.
“This happens,” he said. “Happens to good people. To good parents, just like you. Could happen to anybody. My kids are all grown now, but, oh, there but for the grace of God go I.”
I sat in my cell and I thought about that phrase—there but for the grace of God go I. I had used the phrase. Carrie, I remembered, had said the same thing when our neighbor had wrestled his son from out of our living room. I know its intent. Tom was trying to comfort me. But the phrase’s meaning is wretched: Oliver, I’m just like you. Except I have God’s grace upon me and so do my children.
Or more concisely: If God didn’t love me, I’d be you.
An hour later, I walked out of jail. Carrie paid my bail, thousands more than I thought we had. She drove me home, speaking constantly.
How dare they. Goddamn them. Outrageous.
She was furious and energized. That vast expanse of pain was directed like a river into this injustice.
“I talked to Tom,” she said as she parked the car in the drive. “He’s optimistic. It’s just a political stunt, that’s all.”
I wanted to be angry, as indignant as Carrie, but I was pitted. The week had carved me empty and the day had boiled me out with doubt. What had I done? I had done something. Babies don’t just die. Things happen for a reason. Things happen.
We walked toward the house and a new quiet fell. We stepped inside. It was silent, empty. A universe of empty. A flower arrangement from the funeral sat on the dining room table smelling foully sweet.
I started to cry and she reached out and took my hand.
She made me a sandwich and left me at the kitchen table.
She called her mother and then her sister, telling them all we knew, repeating the phrase, “He’s optimistic. It’s just a political stunt, that’s all.”
I sat wordless. Restless and tight, these new doubts shrinking my skin. I went to bed and lay sleepless.
I could hear her below—another call, same words. I could hear her anger running out, her steps slowing, like an engine on an empty tank.
Finally she came to bed. She crawled in next to me and we listened to the house. I wanted to sleep for years and wake up not feeling all this. But the sleep was cracked—dreams and half dreams. Both of us fitful and sick.
At some hour we crawled into each other half asleep like two drowning men. Her body hot and mine shaking, making silent, grasping love. Not a word or sound until I came inside her and she screamed. A terrified scream.
I rolled away—bile in my throat. I understood. Oh God, I understood what made her scream. To conceive that night would be a horror. It would produce a ghost child, an unwanted echo of Miles. But as we lay there in the dark, both stricken, both alien to the other, even at that moment a baby was beginning inside her body.
Olaf and his father sailed farther north, away from the barricade of ice. The weather grew warmer with each day, becoming nearly tropic. Massive colorful birds, unrecognized by either, flew overhead, calling out to one another in high squeals and whistles. A pod of narwhals lumbered past, graceful and large.
“We’ve reached Avalon, Father!”
Their compass jumped from limp to frantic, then pushed upward against the glass and refused to move. After ten days, it corrected itself and pointed straight north. But Olaf’s father was sure that they had passed the northern tip days before. Surely they were now sailing south.
They came to one patch of land, their first in a month—a dot of jungle rimmed by white sand. Here they anchored, restocked their supplies, and slept on solid earth for the first time in months.
In the dull predawn light, they sailed on. As they skirted the shore of the island, a solitary boy, naked and tall, stepped from the foliage, his skin as translucent as wet paper, nearly glowing in the soft morning light. Olaf called to him, waving his arms. The boy watched, not moving or returning the calls but for a slow smile. His teeth were black, as black as unfinished ebony and sharpened to points. Black small teeth in a red, wet mouth.
‘We have come into our own,’ my father said to me. ‘This is the fulfillment of the tradition told me by my father and my father’s father, and still back for many generations of our race. This is, assuredly, the land beyond the North Wind.’
—Olaf Jansen
As I’m walking down the gravel drive from the shed, Jenny steps from salon and calls out to me.
“Yo, Ollie. You got a call this morning. A guy named Martin. He nearly coughed a lung through the phone line.”
I take a deep breath and step toward her door.
“Friend of yours?” she asks.
“Dear friend,” I say.
Using the salon’s counter phone, I call. Martin sounds groggy and slow.
“Were you sleeping?” I ask.
“Been up since five.” He coughs. “Having trouble getting moving today.”
“You need anything?”
“Chemo. Metro says I didn’t reserve a ride. I know I did. I always do.” He coughs again. “I don’t mind. I hate that shit.”
“Martin. You can’t skip these.”
“I’m actually feeling pretty good.” He coughs so loud I have to hold the phone from my ear. Jenny cringes.
“Is Sam . . .”
“He’s not here. Just me.”
“What time is your appointment, Martin?”
I get the information, hang up and call Lyle.
“Dude,” he says. “Get your ass to REI.”
“The camping store?”
“Get on a bus and get here n
ow!”
Tents hover in a suspended rapture and the vast room smells of nylon and trail mix. I hear Lyle almost immediately.
“Oh no, I want the neon one. Something you’ll see in the snow.”
I find him near the back towering over a young woman in hiking shorts and a worn smile.
“Does this glow in the dark?”
“No, sir.”
“It should. That would be awesome.”
“It would make it hard to sleep with a glowing coat in your tent.”
“Oh shit, that is so true—Ollie!” He slaps my back. “This is Janet. She’s helping us stock up. Janet, I’m going to need a matching coat—Teflon, is that right?—a matching one but a few sizes down.”
Lyle is decked out in a neon green jacket, a felt camping fedora, and yellow polarized glasses. He hands me the glasses off of his face.
“Try these. They actually make things brighter. It’s amazing.”
“Lyle, these glasses cost four hundred bucks. How are you going to pay for these?”
He whips out a Visa credit card. “I’m not.”
“You know how those work, right? You do pay, eventually.”
“Not if I don’t come back.” He turns to a full-length mirror and admires himself. “I woke up this morning thinking, Jesus, I’m so worried about money. Why? We’re either staying down there—and you know they don’t have money—or we do come back, we’ll have proof, we’ll be getting money thrown at us. Either way, my days of material worries are coming to an end. And there it was in the mail. Visa begging me to spend their money.”
“It’s not their money you’re spending.”
“I made the call and got the card. It was more than easy. They said they could only advance me five thousand as cash. I’ve got these credit checks. I figure we send one to Horner, or give it to him in person at the book signing. It doesn’t quite cover even the down payment, but it shows we’re trying.” He turns back to the mirror. “He’s got to respect that, right?”
“Sir,” Janet says, handing me a neon coat. “Are you going to need the thermal underwear and . . .”
“He needs it all. We’re going into the ice, Janet! Fortress of Solitude ice.”