A Simple Favor

by Darcey Bell

  It was a very different service from Davis’s. No relatives except me. No aunts or uncles or cousins. But Chris had had a lot of friends. An announcement appeared in the Madison paper, and a couple of Chris’s friends posted it on Facebook. It seemed as if half the class of his large public high school was there.

  They’d all loved him, and—except for one guy named Frank who had worked in construction with Chris and reminded me of him, a little—they were all surprised to learn he had a sister. They’d thought he was an only child, that his mom was a single mom. Which she was, in a way. But they were glad to meet me. They were sorry it had to be on such a sad occasion. They were sorry for my loss. As if they had any idea what I’d lost!

  There was one woman—an old girlfriend of Chris’s—who kept staring at me in a funny, excessively curious way. The weird thing was that she looked a little like me.

  I was sure that Chris’s former girlfriend knew or sensed something . . . off . . . about me and my brother. But the guilty always think that someone knows their secret.

  None of them seemed aware, and I saw no reason to tell them, that my husband had died in the same wreck as Chris. I pretended that it was only Chris in the car when it hit the tree. It seemed easier that way—less explaining to do, less unwanted pity. There was enough of that already.

  After the service, we went to a local bar. Everyone bought rounds and gave tearful toasts to Chris’s memory. Everyone got roaring drunk. I stuck very close to Chris’s friend Frank, clinging to the phrases and gestures that reminded me of my brother. We were the last ones left at the bar.

  That night I did something I was later deeply ashamed of. I told Frank that I was too drunk to drive back to my motel, which was true. But I also invited him to my room where, I said, there was a minibar. We could have a nightcap. I knew that wasn’t true. The motel was too cheap to have a minibar.

  As soon as the door closed behind him I started kissing him. He knew that I wasn’t in my right mind, and he was a decent guy. He kept saying, “Are you sure you want to do this?” I think he knew that it was all about Chris and not about sex—or about him. So maybe he was feeling a little used, the way we think only women do.

  We lay down on the bed. He lifted my blouse and pulled aside my bra and began to suck on my nipple.

  “Excuse me a minute,” I said. I went to the bathroom and got violently sick.

  Frank wasn’t insulted or even upset. We were both grieving for Chris. He waited till I got into bed, and he tucked me in. He gave me his cell number and told me to call if I needed him. Or if I wanted to. We both knew I would never call.

  I woke up with a blinding headache and a major case of self-loathing that hurt worse than the headache. Unconsciously, I realized, I had taken off my wedding ring and put it in my purse before Chris’s funeral. And my guilt got even more intense when I realized that I’d been so drunk the previous night—and so busy doing the totally wrong thing—that I’d forgotten to call Davis’s mom and make sure Miles was all right.

  I made coffee in the pathetic in-room coffee machine with the chlorine-tasting water from the tap. I drank both cups of coffee, then made the decaf and drank that too. And then I threw up again.

  I phoned Davis’s mom. No one answered. I knew something must be terribly wrong.

  I called a cab and somehow managed to find the bar where my rental car was still in the parking lot. I drove to the Madison airport. I tried Davis’s mother again, and again no one picked up. I tried her landline. Nothing. It was all I could do to stave off my growing panic.

  I have never been so sure that my plane was going to crash. I was positive that I would never see Miles again, and that this would be my punishment for what I had done the night before—my punishment for what I had done all those nights and days with Chris. I no longer knew what I believed in. But that day, as the plane took off, I prayed.

  Please let me live to see my son, and I will never do anything like that again. Please let him be all right. I would exist only for Miles. I would swear off men. I would never again have risky, inappropriate sex with the wrong people. The only happiness that would matter to me was Miles’s happiness. I would give up everything else. Just let me make it home.

  I picked Miles up at his grandma’s house in New Hampshire. I asked why she hadn’t answered the phone, and she told me that, in her grief and distraction, she’d let her cell phone run out of power and had forgotten to recharge it. And her landline went out every time it rained heavily, which it had last night. She apologized for how worried I must have been. I wondered why she hadn’t thought to call me. I’d always suspected that she never really liked me. And now that her son was dead she probably liked me even less.

  Miles shrieked with joy when he saw me, and I hugged him so hard that he yelped. I was so relieved that my knees went weak, and I had to grab onto the arm of the sofa to keep from toppling over, or fainting. All the way back to our house in Connecticut, Miles stayed awake in his car seat, using the few words he knew to tell me (I think) that his grandma had taken him to see a pony.

  I was so glad to be alive that it wasn’t until we walked in the door of our house that I remembered: Chris and Davis were dead.

  I kept my promise. No more men. No more bad choices. It was all about Miles.

  Until Emily disappeared and I got to know Sean.

  Maybe loss unhinges me. Maybe grief sets loose some demon that would otherwise stay hidden deep inside me.

  20

  Stephanie's Blog

  An Update on . . . Various and Sundry Things

  Hi, moms!

  I’m sure you moms must think I’m the world’s worst blogger, not having posted for so long. But I’m back, with lots to tell you. So much has happened since you heard from me last.

  I always believe that it’s better to be honest and open, even if there are some moms in our community who might have a problem with what I’m about to say. I’m asking them to soften their hearts and broaden their minds and hear me out—to try to understand before they judge me.

  Sean and I have moved in together. Who is to say there is anything wrong when kindness and cooperation turns into love? And as we know, the heart wants what the heart wants.

  Nothing will bring Emily back. Sean and Nicky and I will never get over our loss. But we help each other become other, better people. Sean and I and the boys can be a family. The children can be brothers. Neither of us wants to give up our house and the memories it holds, so we have decided to divide our time between our two homes. The boys’ school is closer to my house, so I do most of the dropping off and picking up.

  The boys have their own rooms in both houses. They can bring what they want back and forth, and they have doubles of toothbrushes and socks and stuff. I know it seems wasteful, having two houses when so many people in the world don’t have one. But anything else would mean making a decision we can’t make right now. Though at some point, I will. We will.

  Sometimes Sean and I spend nights apart. Sometimes alone, sometimes with both kids or just our own kid. I wasn’t sure I would like this way of living, but I do. I like being with Sean—and I like being alone with Miles.

  It’s an unusual arrangement, but for now it feels right. We are doing our best to give two little boys the best childhoods they can have, under circumstances that no one would ever have chosen. Neither boy has to give up his own house or his alone time with his own parent.

  Nicky’s therapist has been very helpful. Still, Nicky is sad, which he has every right to be.

  If any of you moms out there want to share your story or have advice about how to talk to a child about death, please post a comment below.

  After I drop the boys off at school, I drive Sean to the train. He’s gone back to the office part-time, which is great for everyone, especially Sean, though Nicky cried at first when he got home and his dad wasn’t there. The company has promised Sean that they’ll cut way back on the travel, and he’s promised me that I won’t often be left alone wi
th Miles and Nicky.

  After Sean leaves, I have to check the house for whatever act of mini-sabotage Nicky might have done. The toy fire truck thrown down the toilet. The TV remote at the bottom of the toy chest.

  The dark looks that Nicky gives me now and then would turn anyone’s blood to ice. And he’s developed a series of finicky OCD-like habits. He’ll eat only with certain forks, or else there will be an hour of tears. Or he’ll only eat radishes. Or homemade french fries. He tells us what he wants, and he’ll starve before he eats anything else. He counts the steps up to his room and the steps from the front door to Sean’s car. His therapist has suggested that we put off medicating Nicky—Sean asked specifically—until he’s had a chance to work through the stages of grief.

  I’m glad Nicky is seeing a therapist, but we don’t need a professional to remind us that the poor child’s mother is dead. I’ve been spending my precious spare time searching the web for useful sites offering help with the job of being a stepmom to a newly bereaved five-year-old.

  I keep thinking that Emily would have known what to do. But I can’t even talk it over with Sean for fear of making him feel worse. He doesn’t need to know how many hostile things his son does. I’ve been trying to spare him. Is that wrong?

  Which is why I’m asking you moms: Have any of you been in this situation? What did you learn that helped? Can you recommend a book about this? I’ll be grateful for advice in any form.

  Thank you in advance, dear moms.

  Love,

  Stephanie

  21

  Stephanie

  When you live in a family, it’s easy to stop noticing things, to quit paying attention. That’s one way you know it’s a family. We take things for granted. Some people call that tolerance, or laziness, or being in denial. I call it getting through the day.

  I soon got used to how difficult my (unofficial) stepson was being. His bad behavior was mostly directed at me. He was always nice to Miles. They loved each other as much as before. Like brothers. If their friendship had started unraveling, I might have been quicker to bring it to Sean’s attention.

  Sean was making up for lost time at work. He wasn’t home all that much. He’d left Nicky to me for a while. And when Sean was around, Nicky wasn’t going to waste what little time he had with his dad on a display of anger or unhappiness.

  Dealing with that was my job, and I took it on gladly. For Sean, for Emily, for Nicky. But I couldn’t help feeling that something was going to happen, that something awful was going to shatter the calm before the looming, dangerous, unpredictable storm.

  Whenever people got on the subject of dogs and how smart they are, my brother Chris used to tell a story about visiting a friend in the Southwest and going on a hike in the desert with his dogs. The dogs were barking; the birds were making bird noises; the breeze was blowing, and all of a sudden the noise just stopped. The dogs and the birds fell silent. Even the wind quit blowing.

  Chris looked on the ground, and not twenty feet away was a coiled rattlesnake, hissing. I remember him saying that silence could also be a warning, louder than a siren.

  I found the story compelling and sexy. Chris told it when we were with Davis, and Davis looked at him with such hatred and scorn that for a heartbeat I was sure that Davis knew about Chris and me.

  All this is by way of saying that I got used to Nicky’s mini-aggressions and never lost my sympathy for him—or my patience. It was when he stopped acting out that I got scared.

  One afternoon Nicky came home from school and seemed to have become the best little boy in the world. Most days he hardly spoke to me and refused to answer when I asked what he’d done in class. But that afternoon he asked me how my day had been and what I’d been doing.

  A child asks an adult what she did that day? Really? I didn’t tell him I’d wasted hours trawling the internet for advice on how to deal with him. I said I’d spent part of the day straightening up the house, which was true.

  At dinnertime, Nicky said he would eat whatever I cooked—even if it was vegetarian. He was totally unlike the angry kid he’d been just the day before. It made me happy. Time was working its healing magic. We were taking small steps forward, tiptoeing out of the darkness into the light.

  And yet . . . and yet . . . I had an uncomfortable feeling. Something was wrong. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did. A mom’s intuition.

  It was as if the world had gone silent, and I’d heard the rattlesnake hiss.

  The boys were hiding something. I knew it. I was always catching them whispering, like evil conspiratorial children in a horror film.

  What weren’t they telling me? Why was Nicky suddenly acting so thoughtful? When they were playing and I walked into the room, the boys looked up as if I’d interrupted a secret conversation.

  One night, when both boys were staying at my house—Sean was working late in the city—Nicky padded into the living room and said he couldn’t sleep. Would I read him a story? I took him back to the guest room that I’d turned into his room. I read him one book after another, as many as he wanted. I waited till he said he was tired, which kids hardly ever do. I turned off the light and tucked him in. I stroked his smooth, slightly damp forehead.

  Many people (including children) will tell you things in the dark that they would never say with the lights on. I asked, “Has anything fun or special—or maybe upsetting—been happening in school?”

  Nicky was silent for so long I wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  Then he said, “I . . . saw my mom today.”

  I got the chills. Nicky’s therapist had warned us about how much trouble children have accepting the fact that a loved one has died. And now, without Sean here to help me, I was going to have to deal with it. I was going to have to tell this suffering child that however much he wanted to see his mom, he couldn’t have seen her. She was gone. Gone for good.

  I took a deep breath.

  “I’m sure you thought you saw her, sweetie . . . We often think we see people we love even though it can’t really—”

  “I saw her,” Nicky said. “I saw Mom.”

  The important thing was to keep him talking and encourage him to confide in me, to tell what he so desperately wanted to be true that he’d convinced himself it was true.

  “Where?” I asked him. “Where did you see your mom?”

  “She was just outside the school yard fence when we went outside for recess. They let us go outside to play today because it was warm. I wanted to run to her. But recess was almost over, so they were yelling at us to hurry up and get back inside.”

  “Are you sure it was your mom? Lots of people look like people they aren’t really . . .”

  “I’m sure,” Nicky said. “I could read her lips. She was saying, ‘See you tomorrow. Tell Stephanie hello.’”

  “She said that? Tell Stephanie hello?”

  “Yup. I saw her there before . . . a couple of days ago . . . the last time they let us play outside. I told Miles. He thought I was making it up. I made him swear not to tell.”

  Nicky believed every word he was saying.

  It was hard for me to sort out my complicated feelings. Mostly, I was sad. I had so much sympathy for Nicky. But I was also frustrated. Nicky had made no progress toward accepting the loss—the permanent loss—of his mom. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that he’d imagined it, to try to explain (to a five-year-old!) the concept of hallucinations brought on by wishful thinking. Anyway, that was Sean’s job. He was the dad.

  I kissed Nicky’s forehead and pulled up the covers.

  When Sean got home from the city, I poured him a glass of scotch. A double. I snuggled against him on the couch.

  I said, “Something disturbing happened this evening. When I was putting Nicky to bed, he told me that he saw Emily outside the school yard.”

  Sean sat up very straight. He stared at me. I saw so many warring emotions in his eyes: shock, disbelief, hope, fear, relief.

  He said, “This
is disturbing. It can’t be good for him. It’s unhealthy. He was with me when we scattered Emily’s ashes. What am I supposed to do now? Teach him about DNA? Explain that his dad sent Mom’s toothbrush and the coroner made a positive match?”

  I’d never heard him sound so raw and out of control. “Stop,” I said, “I can’t stand it. Enough.”

  “Oh, that poor boy,” said Sean. “My poor son.”

  I turned out the light, and we sat in the dark. I held him in my arms, and he leaned his head against my shoulder.

  Finally Sean said, “Let’s not break his heart so soon again. If he wants to live in that dream for one more day, let’s not force him to wake up.”

  The next night, at bedtime, Nicky said, “I saw Mom again today.” He said it very simply and calmly. As if he was stating a fact.

  This time I explained to Nicky that people had dreams in which they thought they saw people who weren’t there anymore—or ever. I said, “They seem so real, and they speak to us as if they’re actually there. But they’re not real. It’s just a dream. A fantasy. And when we wake up it’s always sad. We miss them more than ever. But we understand that they are still with us, if only in our dreams.”

  Nicky said, “No, you’re wrong. My mom was there. I saw her. I ran over to her. I got as close as I could with the stupid fence between us. She touched me through the fence. She touched my hair and my face. Then she told me to run back and join the others. And . . .”

  “And what?” My voice sounded strange to me. Anxious, strained . . . and scared. But what was I scared of, exactly?

  “And she told me she would never leave me again. She told me to tell you and Dad that.”

  I leaned over to kiss Nicky’s forehead.

  I noticed something familiar. It took me a while to realize what it was, to identify a memory that was already beginning to fade.

  I nuzzled Nicky’s skin and hair. I smelled Emily’s perfume.