by Susan Conley
But what the boys did was climb underneath the bridge and walk on the railroad tracks, suspended over the water in all this metal caging. There was a gap between two of the wooden ties. A break where a boy could fall through. This is what happened to Liam. He fell.
There is no other way to say this. I have gone over it and over it, scouring it for more information, and there is none. He fell.
It took almost everyone we know who owns a boat searching for two days in the high seas before they found his body. May he rest in peace.
He was a beautiful boy, with almond skin like his father’s and a photographic memory for song lyrics. Name a song. Once, after he’d started playing Kit’s album collection in the house, he told me that the band he and Sam had started was going to sing complicated harmonies like Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Sam on guitar, their friend Robbie on piano, and Liam on drums and vocals.
Liam and Sam had the same longish dark blond hair and the same way of leaning their heads slightly to the left when they laughed. People confused them from the back. Liam’s mother, Sally, told me last month that her young girls still see Sam at school and think he’s Liam.
Sally and her husband, Jorge, own a vegetable farm on the peninsula, with gardens that go all the way down to the ocean. It’s become a destination, this farm. We all stood in their biggest field and said goodbye to Liam in the most moving ceremony. Sally asked people to share stories of him and what he meant to them, and Sam was silent the whole time. He told me afterward that he’d wanted to say many things about his friend but he couldn’t speak.
Sam became afraid of falling after that. You could see it in his body. Tense in his shoulders, like he was going to fall off the boat or the float or the house. He’d lived through something so big on the bridge and couldn’t explain it to us. I did not know what he was thinking. I wondered constantly what he’d told himself about what he’d seen.
There was an anxiety that crept into almost everything he did, and I saw how much he needed me and didn’t want to need me. When he finally went back to school, he met with the school social worker in her office with the brown corduroy couch and told her that he should have drowned, not Liam. He said he didn’t feel like he had a self anymore now that Liam had died.
Sam had many sessions with Nettie. She was a twenty-six-year-old recent graduate of the University of Maine’s School of Social Work, with a deceptively casual way of speaking to teenagers that got them to confide in her. She told me once that Sam said he felt so alone after the drowning he was almost suffocating in the aloneness.
It was Kit’s and my job, Nettie said, to validate him. This meant we had to tell him things like he was not alone and he did not have to be strong.
Nettie said many of the kids she saw at school needed this kind of attention and were not good at asking for it. Lots of the boys had distorted ideas of what being strong and being masculine meant, and they suffered when they didn’t need to.
I told Sam, I am here. And, This is real, this sadness you’re going through. I’m going to help you however I can.
Nettie said even if he pretended not to hear us, some of it would get through. I think this has been true, though it hasn’t been easy to get Kit to understand how to do it, and I know Sam hasn’t always felt understood. Maybe that’s the job of teenagers, to feel misunderstood by their parents.
Sam never cried in front of us after Liam died. When I asked him about this, he said Jimmy told him that real men don’t cry. Only weak ones.
Jimmy is a short, bearded gnome of a man with piercing eyes who hauls six hundred lobster traps a day and appraises people based on physical strength. It has been my job to help Sam unlearn many of the ideas about manhood that Jimmy has taught him.
During the first weeks, Sam slept on a blow-up mattress on the floor next to our bed on the island. Twice he woke us up yelling for Liam in his sleep. Then he moved back up to the loft and refused to talk about it anymore. So the sadness became something he keeps to himself.
We often try to guess what he’s feeling now. But I think the biggest mistake I make with Sam is to assume he isn’t feeling things just because he’s not talking.
You could say he grew up when Liam drowned, but that would make it sound too easy. He was only fourteen. Boys don’t become men overnight. Sam has a willingness to self-sabotage that he didn’t have before Liam died. This is what Nettie calls it. And he goes through new phases of not talking. But there’s this emotion inside him that wants to come out, which is why I’ll help him with his essay.
“It’s supposed to be an essay on American hubris. Whatever that means.” He’s still got his hands over his eyes while he talks so he looks like me when the boys make me watch a horror movie with them on the laptop.
“Hubris?” Charlie says through the door that separates the living room from my bedroom. He likes to do his homework in there on my bed. Says it’s quieter and he can get a break from us. “Sam has a lot of it.”
“Of what?” I’m over at the sink trying to scrub what’s left of the enchiladas in the baking pan.
“Of hubris,” Charlie says.
“Charlie, please shut up.” Sam sits up.
“It means he thinks highly of himself!” Charlie laughs at his joke, but there’s nothing funny about Sam writing an essay.
“Enough,” I say. “Charlie, you know we can’t stand it when you try to talk to us through the door. Please do your homework or go clean up the mess in the bathroom.”
He’s been trying out a home experiment involving what he calls salinity and electrical conductivity, which means vats of ocean water spilled on the bathroom floor and lots of black rubber tubing.
“What about Dad?” I tell Sam. “You could write about Dad and his accident.”
“It has to have conflict, Mom. Something in the essay has to show a change or something.”
“I think many things have changed since Dad’s been gone.”
I don’t add that I believe any time three humans are asked to live together on a small island in a former fishing shack with bad, really expensive electric-baseboard heat, where at night it gets down to twenty-five degrees and where the fourth human in the house is in another country recovering from surgery, it will require the humans to be willing to change. Maybe Sam most of all.
“Just so I have this right.” I try to keep my voice upbeat. “This essay is really due tomorrow?”
Please let me go to bed. I don’t want to help write a high school essay on hubris.
I grab the empty water glasses from the table and carry them to the sink. Outside the sky and sea are black, and my heart sinks. We don’t mind the cold in Sewall. We don’t mind the rain or snow, but we mind the early dark in October.
“Yeah, and I really need your help.”
“Why do you do this? Why do you wait and tyrannize me?” I sit down on the rug and stare into the metal slat on the woodstove where you can see the flames.
“I can’t even say that word. It’s like a Shakespeare word, Mom.” A flap of hair hangs down over his eye like a little flag. “Who actually believes in Shakespeare anyway? Who actually believes in school?”
“I think you should actually go to bed. I don’t think nine o’clock is the right time to start a five-page essay.”
I try to stay calm. The upbeatness is getting harder.
“I think you go to bed, and you tell Mrs. Curtis in the morning that you need an extension through the weekend, and that you’re very sorry things got away from you.”
“Things got away from me? Thanks, Mom. This is the one thing I need your help on.” He stands and puts his hands on his narrow hips. “Thanks a lot.”
“I am helping you. But not tonight. Tonight you need to apologize.”
He goes into the kitchen and opens the fridge and gazes into it like it holds the clue to his future. “Apologize
for what?”
“For being cruel to me. I do not allow cruel.”
“I can’t take it anymore.” He rests his head on the fridge door.
“Take what?”
“The girls. They answer everything in class. They have their hands up all the time. I can’t keep up. I’m never going to school again.”
This is another one of his strategies. To divert the conversation away from him to something only tangentially related to what we’re arguing about.
“Don’t worry about the girls. The girls know everything now. Later, if they’re like me, the patriarchy will start to wear them down and they won’t be sure they know anything.”
He rolls his eyes. “Please, please, no more speeches.”
I point to the ladder. “To bed now.”
He stares at me, then smiles and opens his arms out wide. “Let’s hug it out, Jillian.”
He only calls me Jillian when he wants my attention or pity. It makes me crazy.
But then he comes to the couch and leans down and puts his arms around me. I don’t say anything.
“You’re so thin. When did you get this skinny?” It’s like he’s discovering me for the first time in weeks.
If he would let me hug him like this each night, I’d never worry about him again.
“Do we like have any food in here?” He walks back toward the fridge.
“We just finished dinner. Please don’t get out more food. Please just go to bed.”
Did we really just hug?
“But I’m starving.” He gets the jar of peanut butter down from the shelf and takes a spoon from the drawer under the counter. “I’m starving, and there’s like no food here.”
AFTER SAM CLIMBS UP to the loft, I lie on the couch and look at his Instagram. He’s posted a video of the best NBA dunks of 2019. And then a photo of himself in the passenger seat of a brown sedan outside McDonald’s, smoking what appears to be a thinly rolled joint. #feelingIrie #RastamanVibration My skin starts to feel prickly.
I GET VERY LITTLE sleep after that. At three in the morning I break down and plug the space heater in. When I wake for good, it’s still dark out and I see Kit alone in his hospital room.
I’m still getting pieces of information about the boat, but I know there was water vapor in the gas line and then someone lit a cigarette. Kit was in the bow fixing a cable and got thrown in the explosion. His right femur broke, and when they got him to the hospital they found the internal bleeding.
The call came while I was in the village filming Woody Gilman down on Jimmy’s wharf. Woody is probably Jimmy’s closest friend, a lobsterman with the bushiest silver eyebrows, who demands your full attention. He told me that his catch was off 40 percent this year because the lobsters were staying out in the deeper fathoms. He said he knows men now who get up at 2 a.m. and drive their boats seventy miles out to sea to haul traps. “We can pretend climate change is just political,” he told me, “but everyone knows the water’s warming.”
He got a call on his cell phone then from his wife, Edna, who’s been Sewall’s postmistress for thirty years. Woody always takes Edna’s calls. It was eleven in the morning, and I got out my own phone. I was distracted by the things Woody had said—thinking about the lobsters and all the fish that have stopped migrating, and I had this sense of my own inaction again. Such regret about the warming water. But I was also in denial over it.
I played the message on my phone, and a man’s voice said my husband was gravely injured but would likely make it through the night. I needed to come right away.
The feeling I had was not unlike the feeling when Kit called from Dairy Queen to say Liam had fallen off the bridge. This sick kind of dread. But also the sensation that it wasn’t real. That it was not happening.
I drove seven hours with a terrible pressure on the back of my skull, but I did not think I’d find an injured man when I got to the hospital.
It was only when I saw Kit in the bed with the IV line and the oxygen tube going into his nose that I understood. They had his right leg suspended over the bed with this pulley system, and even then it took me several more hours before I really got the scope of his injuries.
I think the nurses thought I was crying because of how bad Kit looked, and that was a big part of it. But I’d also just missed him so much. His eyes were closed and his face was calm, the skin pale in a way I’d never seen. He’d lost a lot of blood by then and looked thinner too, his lined face more chiseled, the bones almost closer to the surface of the skin.
The first thing he said when he woke up was that he couldn’t believe I’d come.
I said of course I came.
He said I should have come sooner.
I said I came as fast as I could.
Then he said he should have made more money and that his way of life was ending.
He was delirious. On the verge maybe of some mental collapse. The blue in his eyes was darker. It was like something had broken loose in him. He was at sea in his mind and I was with him, but I was only watching.
His hair fell down over his forehead, and he looked like a replica of Charlie in the bed but also Sam, though how it was possible that he resembled both boys so closely when the boys are so distinct with their different coloring and shapes of their faces is still unclear to me.
I gave him my full attention and tried to forget the boys and any of the world outside the hospital. I tried to concentrate only on him. I watched everything the nurses and doctors did to him closely. Every procedure.
I know now that the femur is the largest bone in the body, and that when it breaks the pain is agonizing. The nurses gave my husband several different pain meds to help him sleep that first night before the surgery, and I think Dilaudid worked best. But I knew nothing about traumatic injuries then or what they can do to you.
The head nurse, Linda, came in to check on him often. She had dark skin and many beautiful, long, orange-colored braids that she pulled back in a black elastic headband, and she was very calm with Kit. Very intentional. She told me, “Injuries like this change people. Don’t be surprised if he seems different for a while. Sadder, even. The man has seen a whole lot in the last day.”
* * *
—
DURING THE SURGERY THE next morning, they cleaned the bone and the muscles around it to help stop any infection. Then they inserted a metal rod into the center of the bone to support the bone while it healed. There were no fragments surrounding the break, so none of the blood vessels had been damaged, thank God. Such a relief. And they were able to position the bones to fuse again.
When he was back in his room afterward, he woke up and looked at me every few hours, searching my face. But I knew he wasn’t really there. I could not believe how frail he seemed, and how much older. But I tried to make my face into my normal face whenever he opened his eyes, so that he wouldn’t see my shock.
Time slowed that day. It was a deep, greenish-black ocean at high tide, and Kit kept sleeping these dead sleeps and waking up with drug-fueled announcements. Around eight that night he looked at me. “You’re here? When did you come?”
I took his hand. “I’ve been here the whole time, baby.”
“Not true. I always know when you’re here.”
He asked me where the boys were.
I told him that I’d left them at Jimmy’s until he was through the surgery and feeling stronger, then I’d bring them.
“I just want to see their faces. I really, really need to see them.”
He didn’t say anything else for a minute, and I thought he was sleeping again. But then he said, “Who ever thought fishing would end in my lifetime?”
“It’s not over yet.” I bent down and kissed the side of his face. “You got hurt pretty bad. You got pretty injured.”
I worried that my tears might scare him. Then he’d know how da
ngerous the accident had been. But of course he knew. He knows everything about boats and engine explosions. He’d lost two friends that way.
His room had a heavy, laminate door that led to a little bathroom, and after he fell back asleep I went into this bathroom and stared in the mirror and tried to be honest. I told myself that things would need to change. They would have to. I mean, how could he ever fish again? He could not even walk. What was there for him to return to?
He woke up later that night and said he needed me.
He never usually said these kinds of things explicitly, and it made me smile and I could feel the solidity of our marriage. But it also disconcerted me, because these things were not him. Not the him that I knew.
He said he hoped I could forgive him.
What did he want me to forgive him for except for coming to Nova Scotia? I could not blame him for that. It had to be the Dilaudid.
I told him that I’d pull the boys from school and camp out in his room if it would help him get better faster.
He said I was crazy. The boys needed school.
* * *
—
THE SURGEON CAME BY the next morning while Kit was asleep. A tall, reedy, condescending man with sand-colored eyes who removed his bifocals and told me that he believed in early, partial weight-bearing on Kit’s leg. He said Kit would need to move several times a day and that the physical therapist would come to see him in the afternoon.
Then he paused and looked right at me and said my husband was lucky.
“Lucky how?” I asked.
“Your husband has been in a terrible accident. Did you not realize?”
It took a lot for me not to tell him to stop talking to me like I was a child.