by Nancy Star
one red and one blue. Both had white piping around
the edges. Cartoon chairs, she thought, which made her
laugh. She felt a presence and turned around. Doctor
Bruce had joined her.
“I’m laughing because of the chairs,” she explained.
He nodded. “You should see how it looks when I sit
there. The children seem to enjoy that, me sitting in a
chair that’s way too small.”
Lane tipped her head and read the title of the book
that lay on the seat of the blue-piped chair. Where Did My Dog Go? Did Henry know she sent away a puppy?
Did Doctor Bruce know? “We don’t have a dog,” she told
him. “Should we have a dog?”
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“If you want a dog.” He shelved the book and gestured
toward the small office. Lane took a seat in the visitor’s chair and the therapist sat behind his desk. He swiveled
for a moment as if centering himself. “How are you?”
“Fine thank you.”
“Henry is delightful.”
“Thanks. Did he speak to you?”
“No. I didn’t expect him to. We played. Best way to
learn is from play.”
“Did you learn anything helpful?”
“Everything’s helpful.” He smiled. He had a kind
smile but its effects were undone by his beard.
How could he not know that his patchy beard was
distracting. Not everyone looked good in that kind of
beard. Now he was staring at her. Waiting for her. He’d
said something she’d missed and he was waiting for her
reply. “Pardon?”
“I was asking about siblings.”
“One. A sister. She lives in London. We don’t see her
much. She doesn’t like to fly.”
He seemed confused and then smiled. “I meant does
Henry have siblings?”
“No.” She wondered if it would be helpful if he did.
What could she do about that?
“You said no pets.”
“Right. I don’t have anything against pets. It’s just,
Henry’s never asked for one and I work full-time and
now, being a single mom, it doesn’t seem to make sense.”
He wrote something down. “Anyone else live with
you?”
“No. Why? Did Henry say someone did?”
“Henry didn’t say anything.”
“Right.”
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He took more notes. “And his father?”
“Died.” How could he forget that? “I told you. On
the phone.”
“Yes, but not the circumstances.”
Lane filled him in on the basics: date, time, cause.
He was scribbling faster now. “How did Henry hear
about it?”
Lane would have preferred never to think about that
day again but she was here for Henry so she recounted
the details: How Henry had been at Milo’s. How in ret-
rospect it was a blessing, what with all the phone calls
and the trip to the hospital.
“And while you were at the hospital and making
phone calls, what was Henry doing?”
“Having dinner? Watching TV?”
“Are you asking me?”
“Sorry. He went out to dinner and he watched TV.
Milo has a big TV.”
“So you told him in the morning when you picked
him up.”
“No. Not at Milo’s. Because, Milo.”
“So as soon as you left?”
“No. Because we got in a taxi so, the driver.”
“Okay, so in the taxi did you chat or were you silent?”
“We chatted.” Was that the right answer? Was there
a right answer? It was clear she’d handled it wrong.
“Chatted about…?”
“Taxi talk. What Henry ate for dinner. What I ate for
dinner. I couldn’t remember what I ate so Henry tried to
guess. Was it Chinese food? Was it Indian? We do a lot
of takeout. You think it’s awful that I don’t cook.”
“Not at all. I’m just trying to get a full picture. We’re
on the same side.”
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She didn’t want to be defensive. He was trying to help.
“We went into our building and the doorman waved, but
he didn’t say anything. Usually when the doormen see
Henry they say, ‘Welcome back, Mayor.’ They call him
Mayor because he’s so friendly. He used to be friendly.
But that night the doorman didn’t say anything so I just
hurried Henry to the elevator. There was an old couple
in the elevator. Very fond of Henry. Like everyone. I was
worried they were going to offer us their condolences, but they didn’t.” She stopped. “This doesn’t matter, does it?”
The therapist smiled. “I’m just listening.”
She nodded. “And then we went inside the apartment
and I closed the door and locked it and Henry took off
his shoes and hung up his backpack on the hook on the
wall and I told him we had to have a talk.” Doctor Bruce
probably wouldn’t understand why she’d waited until
Henry hung up his backpack before she told him. He
probably lived in a huge apartment with a big hall closet
where you could just toss in your shoes and backpack,
willy-nilly. In their tiny apartment if everything didn’t
get put in its proper place— She stopped. Okay. She
was avoiding the next part. She forced herself to go on.
“I walked him to the living room and I told him I had
some very bad news and that it was very sad and that it
was okay if he cried. And we sat down on the couch and
I told him. I said, ‘Your father was in a car accident last night and he died.’”
The therapist handed her a tissue box. She accepted
it and put it down on the desk.
He clicked his pen. “What did Henry say after you
told him?”
“Nothing. He got very quiet and he went to his room.”
“What did he do there?”
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“Not sure. I figured he wanted to be alone. He came
into the kitchen later while I was making dinner. I was
peeling carrots. He was crying. We went to the couch and
sat down and I held him and he stopped crying and told
me he was tired and could we watch a movie and I said
sure.” She hoped Doctor Bruce wouldn’t ask what movie
it was because she couldn’t remember. She also couldn’t
remember what they had for dinner besides carrots. Her
memory of that day was like her memory of many days,
like the electric eye at the Guild, sometimes lit up bright, sometimes off. Blinky. She glanced up and saw the doctor looking at her, expectantly. “Henry asked if I would
sleep in his room with him and I said yes. Aaron and I
used to sleep on the pullout.”
The therapist had nothing to say about that.
“And in the morning—this is going to sound strange—
he acted as if nothing happened. And that was that.”
“Doesn’t sound strange at all. Do you have anything
you want to ask me?”
“Yes. Is it normal? For a child to stop speaking when
they lose a parent?”
“Normal is not a helpful construct.” He put down
his
pen. “There’s things we know and things we don’t
know. What do we know? Your son is grieving. And
he’s anxious. Not surprising considering his father died
unexpectedly.”
“He said he’s anxious?”
“He didn’t say anything. But we know this, young
children who experience the loss of a parent can be anx-
ious for a time. They wonder—I’m speaking as Henry
now—Why did my father die? Was it something I did? Is
my mother going to die now? What can I do to prevent
that? Of course we know he didn’t cause it and we know
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he can’t prevent it. But he doesn’t know that. Not for sure.
And then we have the other piece. How he found out.”
“What’s wrong with how he found out?” There it
was again. Defensiveness.
“It’s not a matter of right or wrong. But imagine it
from his point of view. His mom was her regular self when
she picked him up at his friend’s house even though his
father had just died. She was her regular self in the taxi, in the lobby of the building, in the elevator.”
Did he think she should have told Henry in the eleva-
tor in front of the neighbors? In the taxi in front of the driver? In front of Milo? Was that horrid woman right?
Had the wrong parent died? She slumped in her seat.
“…how acting as if nothing was wrong,” the therapist
was saying, “could be confusing.”
Wait. He had it wrong. “Henry was okay after Aaron
died,” Lane told him. “He cried—an appropriate amount.
And then he went to school and he spoke to his teachers.
We went together. I told them the news and they asked
him how he was doing and he said he was doing okay. I
hung around for a while to make sure he really was doing okay and he was. I saw him talk to his friends. And when
we went to Florida he spoke on the plane. And when we
visited my parents he spoke to them.”
Why did she bring that up? The last thing she wanted
to do was to tell the therapist what happened in Florida,
that her father left out a box, and Henry climbed in it,
and— Is that why Henry stopped speaking? Because he
got tossed out in a box? She didn’t want to bring up the
box. If she told Doctor Bruce about the box, she’d have
to tell him about her father and her mother and every-
thing that went with it, and—no. She was not going to
get into that now.
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“Something else I should know?” he asked.
“No.” She slumped again. She had to tell him. At least
the part about the box. For Henry’s sake. “Something
happened in Florida. A crazy thing. Henry was playing
in a big box and he fell asleep and the box got picked up
by a recycling truck, which was terrifying, for him and
for me. He’s okay, obviously, but—could that be why
he’s not speaking? Because he got”—it was hard to say—
“accidentally thrown away?”
Doctor Bruce smiled. He had a very gentle smile.
“There’s a saying we use in medicine: When you hear the sound of hooves think horse not zebra. The box is the zebra.
Grief is the horse. Your son’s had a terrible loss. Why is it that first he spoke and then he stopped?” He shrugged.
“Why does any child stop speaking one second and start
another? We don’t always find out. But I’ve seen this before and I’m confident Henry will speak again. What you need
to concern yourself with—what we both need to concern
ourselves with—is what to do now. This time, now, the
time between when he stopped and when he starts, it’s
important. Are you ready to make a plan to help him?”
Of course she was ready.
In their plan, Henry would see Doctor Bruce once a
week after school. Lane was to avoid putting any pressure
on him to speak. She would set up a meeting with his
teacher and the school resource team to make sure no one
at school put pressure on him either. The school resource
team was to provide adaptations that would help Henry
communicate without making him feel ostracized. And
lesson learned: Lane would never keep anything important
from Henry again.
h h
h h
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She broke her promise the next day, but what choice did
she have? There was nothing to be gained by telling Henry
that a woman in the elevator had kicked her in the shin.
It happened when she got back from bringing him to
school. She wasn’t thrilled to see the lasagna lady standing in the elevator when she got in, but she met the woman’s
eyes and forced a smile on her face and asked her how she
was doing. She even admitted she’d forgotten her name.
It wasn’t an easy thing to admit, that even though they’d
seen each other regularly for years, she couldn’t remember her name. When people admitted to Lane that they forgot
her name, she thanked them. She saw the admission as a sign of courage. But the lasagna lady did not seem to
share that view.
It happened fast. The lady, who never did offer her
name, seemed to shake from the force of holding in her
fury and then her leg jerked out—it seemed involuntary
but it was clear she meant it—and she kicked Lane’s shin
with the pointy toe of her black kitten heels.
“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” Lane told her, as
if time had anything to do with it, as if it would have
made more sense to be kicked in the evening. “What’s
wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with you?”
The door closed and the elevator gave its little jolt and
began its slow rise. The two women stood facing the door,
Lane stunned, her shin throbbing, the lasagna lady’s eyes
fixed on the small rectangle above the door where the
floor numbers, made up of tiny dots, flashed on a screen.
Second floor. Third floor. Fourth floor. Surely no elevator in the world had ever moved this slowly.
“Your husband needed you,” the woman blurted out
as they passed the fifth floor. “Aaron needed your help.”
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Disoriented by the woman’s words, Lane found she
had none of her own. “Help,” she echoed.
“You need help? Give me a break. Because an old
lady gave you a little kick? Don’t pretend that’s not how
you see me. Old. Past my use-by date. Aaron was never like that. To him I was a person. I know how you see us,
Little Miss Uppity. We all know.”
Lane felt like she had cotton in her ears. “We? We
know what?”
The elevator door opened on Lane’s floor but she didn’t
get off because her feet suddenly felt like they were stuck in concrete. The door closed and the elevator resumed
its climb. When the door opened again they were on the
penthouse floor. The lasagna lady gave Lane a narrow
stare and stepped out. The door closed.
Lane’s shin burned. She lifted up the bottom of her
pants and saw the red mark on her shin. She dropped h
er
pants leg and stood motionless, like a fool, wondering
why the elevator hadn’t moved. It didn’t occur to her
the reason was that she’d forgotten to press the button.
She heard a sigh. The lasagna lady on the other side
of the door was waiting for the elevator to go down too.
Another moment passed. The bell dinged. The door
opened. The lasagna lady reached inside and pressed the
button for Lane’s floor.
“I wish you would just go away,” the lady hissed as
the door slowly closed.
h h
h h
Henry was silent on the way home from school but as soon
as he stepped inside, he asked if he could have hot chocolate.
He sounded positively cheerful, now that he was home.
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Lane warmed the milk in a saucepan on the stove.
With Aaron gone, their small galley kitchen felt like it
had doubled in size. The apartment was now plenty big
enough. But they couldn’t stay. And the rent increase
wasn’t the only reason. It was exhausting to be there. If
Aaron hadn’t been everyone’s best friend it might have
been different but he was everyone’s best friend. People were still upset. Some, like the lady in the elevator, were upset with her, as if his death had been her fault. She had to face it. She was living in what would forever be Aaron’s apartment in a building forever filled with Aaron’s friends.
“Here you go, buddy.” She put the mug of cocoa on
the tiny kitchen table that faced a small dark courtyard
with a view of the kitchens in the building across the way.
In the spring, when the window was open, the sounds
from those apartments were amplified so that they heard
everything. A woman stirring coffee. A man clearing
his throat.
“You ever think about what it would be like to live
in a house?” she asked Henry.
“Isn’t this a house?”
“This is an apartment house. I mean an actual house,
with a backyard.”
“Like Milo’s?”
Milo lived on the ground floor of a brownstone that
had a tiny brick patio in the back where his mother grew
herbs in pots. “Not like that. A separate house. With bed-
rooms upstairs and a big backyard and a basement with
toys and a garage where you could store your bike, which
you could ride to school. When I was a kid no matter
where I lived, I always wanted to ride my bike to school.”
That was true. What she left out was the part about how