by James Smythe
‘I was busy,’ Lane says, but her voice is shaking and weak. She’s ashamed, whether she’ll admit it or not.
‘Get dressed,’ Deanna says, ‘you’re coming to the house with us.’
‘No,’ Lane replies, and Deanna is about to shout at her, and to shout at this boy, to tell him to get out of the room, when her own cellphone rings. It’s Laurence. She turns away from Lane’s room, hearing her daughter and the boy fumble for their clothes, and she answers. Dumbly, she listens to his slow, measured politician’s voice as he tells her what happened, or some version of it as best he understands it; that Sean is alive and being treated. He tells her about how he found him, and how he didn’t know. Deputy Robards came, and he held Sean’s tongue back, because their son began choking on his own tongue, and Sean nearly bit through the finger. Apparently that’s a good sign, Laurence says. He has bite marks, almost through to the knuckle; that detail, offered up. She didn’t need it but Laurence stresses: this is a good sign.
‘How long was he under the water?’ Deanna asks.
‘Minutes,’ Laurence tells her. ‘Six or seven minutes, maybe eight. I don’t know.’ He tells her to come to the hospital. She says that she will.
Lane stands in front of her mother. She can see it in Deanna’s face.
‘I need you to watch Alyx,’ Deanna says.
‘What’s happened?’ Lane asks. No antagonism, no challenge. She knows from the look she’s being given that this is serious.
‘Your brother fell into the lake,’ she says. ‘He’s alive.’ That seems enough; a thing to latch onto for all of them, and then she goes to the car and gets in and starts the engine. She doesn’t need anything else. She drives.
This is the first time that she’s had to go to hospital for one of the kids. They were lucky with Lane: ten years older than the twins, and Deanna and Laurence were ten years younger when they had her, ten years more stupid; but still they got through with her having nothing more major than a scrape or two. Nothing broken, nothing lost, no emergency trips to the hospital. Maybe, she thinks, they got complacent.
She thinks about the eight minutes that Sean was underwater. She wonders if eight minutes is a long time to not take a breath.
She doesn’t know the way to the hospital. She relies on the ClearVista app on her phone to tell her where to go. She listens to its voice and tries to let that be all that she can hear.
She parks in the short-stay – because, she thinks, that’s all this can be, because she’ll go in and they’ll be sending Sean home with some medicine or an inhaler or something, and a lesson learned about what to do and what to not and when to listen to your parents, because that’s the sort of injury that kids recover and learn from – and she rushes in, past the ambulance bay and into the ER reception. There’s a queue at the window, so she waits, and she looks for her son. Maybe he’ll be sitting out here waiting for her himself, because it’s not at all serious. They have let him go already, this was a false alarm. Instead, there are people with bloody noses and hands wrapped in bags of frozen vegetables, and one woman whose skin is almost green, her eyes rolling back in her head, froth around her mouth. There’s a television above them, tuned to the news. They’re talking about Laurence, running a special later on, about his political career so far. She hopes that she isn’t still waiting here to see it.
‘Miss?’ the woman at the desk says. Deanna doesn’t hear her. She’s somewhere else: imagining Sean in the water, imagining how he took his dive from the dock, and how he arced through the air; and why he didn’t come up again. She can picture it, as if she is there. She doesn’t know how. She is trying to imagine what was going through his mind. How lost he was, and how he needed her. Maybe he called her name through the water … ‘Miss? Can you hear me?’ Deanna turns. The woman behind the counter is impatient already.
‘My son’s here,’ Deanna says. ‘I don’t know where he is. My husband brought him here in in an ambulance. He drowned.’ Such finality in that phrase.
‘Name?’
‘His name? It’s Sean. Sean Walker.’ The woman types and stares at her screen. Deanna imagines the notes shared on these computers: even down to letting the front desk staff know how to treat the situations. The patient is fine. The patient is in stable condition. The patient is dead. Morgan – Deanna reads her name badge – doesn’t say anything for a while. Instead she follows the notes on her screen, and then she sighs. It’s almost imperceptible, but Deanna is watching for it. She’s so focused now on this moment and nothing more. No point in dwelling on what happened before. This is all about what happens from this moment on.
‘Okay,’ Morgan eventually says, ‘so you’re going to come with me through here now.’ She stands up from her desk and lifts the entry flap, and she puts her hand on Deanna’s elbow to lead her through.
‘Is Sean okay? Can I see him?’ Deanna asks.
‘Your husband is through here,’ Morgan says, ‘and the doctor will bring news as soon as she’s got some.’ They pass bays of beds where doctors fix the damaged and then reach the room. It doesn’t have anything printed on the door: there’s a darkened glass window in it and nothing more. There are three more of them adjacent, Deanna sees, but she can’t see if they’re vacant or not. The door creaks on the swing, and Laurence is there and he rushes to her. He’s still damp, wet from having dredged Sean out of the water, but he’s got his suit jacket back on. He shakes, a towel wrapped around him, and she holds him. It’s not his fault, she tells herself. It’s not. He sits down, and she does, and they don’t talk.
The room is pale and bare. There are six chairs arranged as if for dinner, one at the head of the table, one at the foot, two on either side; and the table in the middle is low, cheap wood, covered in coffee stains. There’s a green plastic box in the center filled with tissues. The box, Deanna notices, is glued to the table. There are no magazines, no television, no water cooler: this is like no waiting room Deanna has ever been in before. The chairs are covered in a fading red woolen fabric, but the arms have started to be unpicked, the strands pulled out and played with; worried. The carpet has, around the table, been worn into a path, like a running track. The ceiling tiles are yellowed with cigarette smoke. It’s been decades since you were allowed to smoke in buildings like this, and nearly twenty years since Deanna last had a cigarette; but now she looks at that and she misses it, because if ever there was an occasion it is now.
‘I have to see if there’s news,’ Laurence says. ‘I’ve spoken with Amit, asked him to come.’
‘Okay,’ Deanna says. He stands up and leaves, padding into the hallway – she watches him, sheet draped over his shoulders, looking for all the world like any other patient of this place – and she takes out her phone. She texts Lane – No news xxx – and then opens the ClearVista app. Predict anything with our groundbreaking algorithm, it reads. The numbers don’t lie. She logs in and selects Sean’s name from the drop-down list of her dependents, and then starts to type what she’s looking for. Predict how long you can survive, she types, and it fills out the rest for her, guessing at her request. Without breathing, the second most requested search beginning with that phrase. She clicks the completed sentence. The little icon spins around (While you are waiting, did you know that ClearVista can help you predict your chances of love with a new partner to a ninety-three percent accuracy?) and then it gives her its answer.
We predict that Sean Walker can survive for 102 seconds without breathing, it says. She turns the Internet browser off and puts the phone back into her pocket. She fingers one of the tissues from the box, and she feels how thin it is, and somehow that’s what sets her off.
Deanna looks out of the window. There’s only one, and it looks out onto the gray concrete rear of the buildings. The fans from the air vents, the delivery area for medical supplies, a chain-link fence. There’s nobody walking past, gawking in, which is a relief. The afternoon sun, briefly, shining through the window and onto her face. She’s looking out when the door to
the room opens and she sees the doctor’s face reflected in the glass. She turns. The doctor takes her glasses off before saying anything, and she shakes Laurence’s hand, and Deanna’s, and Deanna thinks how warm her hands are. She keeps thinking about that warmth all the way through the explanation of what happened: that there were two sets of injuries to deal with: because when he stopped breathing it caused an embolism; and then his lungs were flooded as well, because before he stopped he tried desperately to breathe, taking water in where it should only have been air. The doctor is amazed that Laurence managed to get him breathing at the scene. She says something about Sean being artificially alive; or how he was. She doesn’t say the words about what exactly happened after was, which makes it worse for Deanna, somehow. Everything sounds as if she is at altitude and her ears have popped, fading off into a fog of words that carry no meaning.
‘I’m sorry,’ the doctor says. That’s all they need. Laurence holds Deanna, and he cries into her shoulder, and he falls to his knees and he screams but it comes out like he’s gasping for air; but Deanna cannot soothe him. She is still picturing Sean stuck under the water, looking up at her, calling his father’s name, desperately clawing at the surface of it, unable to break out; knowing what is coming as he drowns.
3
The next year is the worst of their lives.
The funeral happens a week to the day after his death. Sean’s skin was a shade of gray when they looked at it in the hospital. The make-up artist tells them he is one of the best and Laurence wonders what scale that’s on: town, or state, or country, or even the world. He asks, bitterly, if there are competitions to decide such a thing: a parade of bodies lined up to be perfumed and preened? When they finally see Sean, his skin is the abnormal pink of a child’s doll. They refuse an open casket, then, because this isn’t their son any more. Laurence can’t stand to look at him, or even at the casket as it lies on the table. They invite anybody who wants to come to the funeral, and pretty much the whole town does. They all bring trays of pies and pasta and salads, and they leave them piled up in the kitchen, shake Laurence’s hand and kiss Deanna’s cheek, say how sorry they are. Everybody in the town knows them; most remember Deanna from when she was a child. And they all knew Sean, and they all want to say goodbye to him. Everybody steps up to the closed box on the table and stands over it; they tell Sean whatever it is that they have to say. Alyx doesn’t come, because Deanna doesn’t know if that’s right. Deanna explains it to her.
‘Sean’s gone to heaven,’ she says, almost without thinking, and that starts a conversation that she then feels pitiably unable to deal with, but she tries. She buys a Bible for the express purpose of giving Alyx the story about how it works. She argues with Laurence that grief needs an outlet and that this might be a good one for Alyx. Laurence doesn’t like it – he’s practical about religion, pragmatic, as badly as that plays with the South; and now he’s more stubborn. Any shot at belief that he maybe once had is devastated by the loss of their son – but, Deanna argues, that’s beyond the point. The point is: Alyx needs it. She was a twin, and she is now missing the person she was closest to in the whole world. She’ll never know that closeness again.
Once Sean is finally put into the ground, Deanna and Laurence take the girls to his grave, to do something that’s small and private and just for them. They stand around the stone – the dates make Deanna feel sick to look at, so she avoids that – and they all tell stories about Sean and why they loved him. They have decided to bring some of his toys, to put them in the soil with their hands. Alyx buries one of her own toy ponies, the one that Sean always used to steal when he was younger; Lane chooses a dinosaur that he claimed he didn’t like any more, but that he had absolute trouble letting go of as he grew older. They don’t say why they’re doing it, but they think that it might help. As they bury them, scooting the soil on top of them, pushing them under, Deanna feels a rip in herself: so much of her beloved son now relegated to the ground. She will miss the toys, because they would have reminded her of him. She thinks about coming back at night, when the rest of them are asleep, and pulling them from the soil; but she wonders where she would stop, or if she would just keep on digging.
They sit Alyx down and ask if she would like to talk to anybody about her brother, because they’ve heard too many stories about what happens if children are left to bottle up their emotions, how dangerous it can be. They hire a therapist, a specialist in childhood bereavement, and Lane is allowed to do whatever she wants for a while. Three weeks after her brother’s death, Lane shaves her head almost down to nothing and she doesn’t bat an eyelid when Laurence shouts – screams – at her about it.
‘We had a deal!’ he yells, and she doesn’t respond or even acknowledge it. Deanna’s listening and that evening they have a conversation about his career.
‘What was that about?’ she asks, when he gets off the phone then, because they haven’t yet spoken politics yet. She had assumed. They’re in bed and he’s propped up like always, tablet on his lap. The ClearVista survey deadline has long expired; all of that stuff was forgotten in an attempt to find relative peace in the wake of Sean’s death.
‘The delegates called,’ he says. ‘They still want me to run.’
‘This year?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know.’ She knows that this works in the party’s favor; that their loss will be used, Sean an inadvertent sacrifice to the voting gods.
They have The Daily Show on as they lie in bed and they both laugh at the same joke and immediately feel guilty, as if they’ve forgotten too quickly about Sean. Then Jon Stewart starts talking about Homme’s laughable efforts at beginning a campaign. He mentions Laurence dropping out and then he looks to the camera, full of actual sincerity, and sends out his best wishes to the Walker family. No jokes: just an appreciation of their tragedy. When they switch the set off, Deanna tries to sleep, but she imagines that she’s drowning: she can see the sky above her, but the water is between her and it, a fluid mass of tropical blue that’s destined to do nothing but end.
Amit, the man who would be Laurence’s Chief of Staff, comes to the house with a plan. It’s a year-long breakdown of their lives: of the things that they have to do and how they might set about moving everything forward. He doesn’t mention Sean either, but the boy is there, floating in the air above them. Everything that Amit says is tinged with the knowledge of how this might have been before and how it will be now. He has an argument that makes Deanna feel sick to hear: that this is a chance for Laurence to do something truly good, a chance to use his awful situation to his advantage. The words aren’t Amit’s: they come from the delegates, Deanna knows. They’re desperate to harness this. The tragedy can mark every facet of the campaign, should Laurence choose to step up again: the charities that he will vouch for; the events that he will attend; every single time that he mentions the word family in a speech. Nobody will be able to forget what has happened. Deanna is about to start arguing: that Laurence shouldn’t be running, that the family needs him, when Lane comes home. She walks into the kitchen in front of them and doesn’t say a word. A month after her brother has died and she’s tattooed herself again: this time across her right shoulder blade, a single word. It isn’t announced, but it’s flaunted, red and angry, on her thin skin, so much bigger than her past tattoos. Her parents freak out, shouting at her, and they get close to read it. She lets them, because this will happen sooner or later. It’s her brother’s name, clear as anything, in a slick, italicized script, framed on a bed of flowers and leaves, a vine stretching out and away from them. It leaves them breathless. Lane leaves the house again without saying a word.
In bed that night, Deanna asks Laurence how they can be angry with her for it. She wishes it was something else: a swear word, or the name of one of the stupid bands again. That would make it easy to have something to rally against. This, though? It’s grief, manifested as words and made indelible.
A
lyx seems fine, but they know that she is not; not quite. She talks to the therapist and sometime Deanna goes along and watches through the false mirror in the room that they use. Alyx talks about anything but Sean: even when pushed, it’s as if there’s a gap there, where she doesn’t know what’s wrong and why she should be talking about him. The therapist sometimes leads her into those conversations, but it’s always stilted, and Alyx is always unwilling to give anything up. One day they leave her alone in the office and Alyx doesn’t know that she’s being watched. The therapist and Deanna talk in the little room, Alyx playing behind them, past the mirror, and she talks to him. She says his name and she holds something out, a toy pony, and then she shakes her head. She agrees with the nothingness: it’s not the right pony. In the little hidden room both women know what’s happening.
‘This is relatively common,’ the therapist says, ‘especially with twins. This isn’t something to worry about.’ She squeezes Deanna’s arm, and Deanna thinks of the hospital receptionist leading her through to the pale room where they were told what had happened. The same squeeze that tells her that everything will be all right in the end, even if it isn’t right now. She’s not sure. They don’t tell Alyx that they know and Deanna doesn’t tell Laurence about it either. Instead she stands outside the twins’ room – No, she reminds herself, it’s only her daughter’s room now, because Sean is under all of that soil, face up, maybe even trying to get out, somehow – and she listens for what might be happening behind the closed door. She imagines a conversation, or a play and she wonders if Alyx sees her brother as he was, or if he’s something else, a vague and loose version of himself. She tries to fantasize Sean into being there herself while she listens, imagining him in front of her as she attempts to re-form him. Crouched on the floor, her eyes shut, she wonders if she can hear his voice herself if she tries. It would be so easy to go in and join Alyx in her fantasy.
