Pictures of You

by Caroline Leavitt

  He looked over. Sam was wavering in the doorway. Charlie crouched beside him. “Are you okay?”

  Sam nodded.

  “No asthma?”

  Sam shook his head. “Where’s Mommy?” he asked, and Charlie gently pushed Sam’s bangs out of his eyes.

  “Where were you going with Mommy in the car?” Charlie said carefully.

  Sam didn’t move. “Is Mommy still at the hospital?”

  “Did you pack clothes for winter or for summer? A lot or a little?”

  “I didn’t pack anything.”

  Charlie tried to swallow the panic rising along his spine. “Mommy packed for you?” he asked. “Where were you going? Why did she take you out of school?”

  Sam stepped back. “I don’t know!” he said.

  Sam shut his eyes and Charlie heard him humming, low and deep, the way he did when he wanted to shut people out. Today, it was one more closed door that made Charlie feel he was about to break into pieces. “Come on, Sam. You do so know! You were there! What did your mother say? What did you talk about before you left? What did you talk about in the car? Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

  “You’re hurting me, Daddy!” Sam cried, and instantly Charlie loosened his hands. He stood up, his body shaking. Oh God, what kind of a man was he to grab his own child like that? What kind of a father? “Sam, I’m sorry. Sam—” he said, but Sam ran out of the room, back to his bedroom, and when Charlie got there, he wouldn’t open the door.

  Never had Charlie hated himself so much. He stared at his hands and then he tapped on Sam’s door. When there was no response, he tried to open it, but the door was locked. “Please open the door,” he begged. “I’m so sorry. Please. I’m right outside.”

  He waited outside Sam’s door for ten minutes and then finally tried the door again. This time it opened, but Sam was asleep again, sprawled on his bed. Charlie lifted him up and slid him under the covers. He bent down to kiss his son’s cheek.

  Charlie went back into the kitchen and put the kettle on. He didn’t feel like coffee or tea. He didn’t feel like straightening the house. Sick with grief, Charlie called his parents. As soon as his mother answered, he started sobbing.

  “Honey.” His mother never called him honey. She had never cared for April, but as soon as he told her, she got efficient, the same way she was with her garden clubs and book groups. “We’ll be there tonight,” she said. “We’ll help however we can.”

  Charlie didn’t know what that meant. With his parents, it usually meant money—taking care of the bills, going out to eat, hiring help, all of it somehow under their rules, as if he were still a boy instead of a man. It always ticked him off, but right now, he was frankly too exhausted to be anything but grateful. Money wasn’t a problem, but he could use the help. And Sam could use the extra attention, two adults who weren’t tearing apart at the seams the way Charlie was.

  Charlie picked up the broken plates; he swept and washed the floor. When he got to April’s clothes, he didn’t know what to do with them. He couldn’t hang them in the closet, but he couldn’t bear to throw them out, so he put them in a bag and stuffed it deep in the closet. In a few hours, the house was tidy, but Charlie still wasn’t tired. He was cleaning up the spare room when he heard Sam in the kitchen.

  “Hi, Daddy.” Sam was setting the table, clumsily folding the paper napkins, anchoring them with forks, all the while his eyes glued to the little TV on the counter, which showed a cartoon hand wearing a pair of pants and dancing around. Sam moved his bandaged arm awkwardly. “I set the table, Daddy,” Sam said. Charlie saw the three plates, the multicolored cereal bowl April loved. His head reeled and he sat down. “You don’t have to do that,” Charlie said quietly. He cupped Sam’s head in his hands and tried to sit him down.

  “It’s my job,” Sam said. “Are you going to eat with me, Daddy?” Sam carefully poured some soy milk into a puddle on his cereal. He picked out a handful of blueberries and carefully spelled out “Hi!” with them across the top of his bowl. Then he took a spoonful of cereal and lazily chewed.

  “Sam.” He put a jar of honey on the table and Sam looked up at him. “We have to talk,” he said. “Your grandma and grandpa will be here soon. Other people are coming, too, and I want us to have some time together first.”

  Sam nodded, his eyes flickering. He tapped his spoon on the edge of his bowl, a disjointed rhythm. “Guess what song this is?” Sam said.

  “We have to talk about the accident.” Charlie swallowed. Give him time, the nurse at the hospital had told Charlie. He’s in shock. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I was just upset,” Charlie said.

  Sam banged his spoon to the table, refusing to look at Charlie. “I don’t want to talk. What are we going to do today?”

  Charlie got up from his chair and went and kneeled beside his son. He could smell Sam’s breath, sweet and milky from the cereal.

  Charlie felt something sharp nicking at his throat. “You know there was an accident. A terrible accident. You know how lucky it is that you’re alive.”

  Sam nodded. “I know Mommy got hurt,” Sam said, his voice small.

  Charlie swallowed. “Mommy died,” Charlie said.

  Sam twisted away from Charlie and dug his spoon into his cereal. “No, she didn’t.”

  “There was a crash—”

  “I know that,” Sam said, letting the spoon clatter. “I saw it.” Sam got up from the table. Sam walked to the sink, his back to Charlie.

  “Sam—” Charlie said, but Sam clapped both hands over his ears, shaking his head, refusing to turn and look at him.

  Charlie stared at Sam, trying to swallow down his grief. He got up and gently turned Sam to face him. Sam’s eyes were squinched tight, and Charlie carefully peeled Sam’s hands from his ears. “Look at me,” Charlie said.

  Sam’s eyes opened. “I saw her after the accident,” Sam said, his voice strained.

  “Sam, no, you didn’t see her. You couldn’t have.”

  “I did so. I was there and you weren’t. I know what I saw.” Sam drew his mouth into a thin, tight line. “I’m not hungry anymore,” he said. “I don’t want the rest of my breakfast.”

  Charlie waited until Sam left the room, and then he shut the TV off and collapsed into the chair. He put both hands over his face. He thought about what it would do to Sam when he really understood his mother was dead, when the grief would really hit. Was it so terrible if Sam was in denial—at least for a little bit longer? Wouldn’t Charlie do anything to be able to be that way himself?

  His cell phone rang and Charlie reached for it automatically. His mother. Friends.

  “Mr. Nash?” The voice was clipped with irritation. “It’s nearly ten.”

  He pressed the cool plastic of the phone against his cheek. “Charlie, were you planning on coming today or not?” the voice said.

  His mind skipped, and he glanced at the Humane Society calendar hanging on the kitchen door, a picture of a white kitten mewling. Oh, Christ. Today was Monday, wasn’t it? Work and school and normal life and he had planned to put in a kitchen for the Liversons. Oak cabinets, adobe tiles. Was his crew there already? Ed would never tell clients personal business. And Charlie hadn’t told Ed he wouldn’t be coming in. “My wife—” Charlie said and then stopped. How was he supposed to do this? “An accident,” he said finally.

  There was so much silence on the line, he thought she might have hung up, but then he heard her breathing. “God,” she said. He heard her waiting. “The crew’s there?” he said, and then he had her put on Ed.

  “I’m sorry,” Ed said. “I didn’t know how to handle this.”

  “Stud the walls,” he told Ed. “The sheetrock should be there, too.” He looked down at the notepad by the phone, flipping the pages idly, and then he saw April’s handwriting: Library. Shoe store.

  He couldn’t think anymore. “Please take care of it for me,” he said, and then, because he didn’t know what else to do with it, he put the notepad in a kitchen
drawer.

  CHARLIE KEPT WAITING for Sam to have an asthma flareup because strong emotions could set him off, but Sam was now quietly reading in the dining room. “You’re okay, kiddo?” Charlie asked, and Sam nodded.

  You never knew with asthma. Sam had been fine until he was four and then one day he’d started clearing his throat, which turned into a cough, and next thing they knew they were in the ER.

  The doctor had seen Sam immediately. He took one brief listen to Sam’s chest and in minutes a machine appeared. “It’s a nebulizer,” the doctor told April and Charlie. “It’ll open his lungs right up. Breathe,” he told Sam, handing him the mouthpiece. Sam, who looked as fragile as a pearl, breathed and coughed and noisily wheezed, his shoulders moving up and down.

  “Asthma,” said the doctor. He waved his hands. “Good you brought him in.” He glanced at Charlie and April.

  “Asthma?” Charlie said, astonished. The doctor scribbled something on a chart. He glanced at Sam, who was slumped over, holding the mouthpiece. Flutes of steam wafted from the other side of the mouthpiece, stopping only when Sam inhaled. Never had Sam looked so frightened. April folded her arms tightly around her, but Charlie abruptly picked up a few of the tongue depressors on the counter and fashioned them into a kind of figure, making them march on Sam’s leg until Sam gave a wobbly smile.

  “No one in our family has asthma,” Charlie said quietly to the doctor.

  The doctor shrugged. “They don’t have to. It’s not always genetic. It’s an autoimmune disease and sometimes just appears and no one knows why.” The doctor scribbled something on a prescription pad, and though April held out her hand, the doctor gave the sheet to Charlie, along with a pamphlet about asthma. “You can all go home and get out of those pajamas,” he said, half smiling. “Here, you take this.” He handed Charlie a blue inhaler in a bag, like a party prize, and then Charlie scooped Sam up from the table, letting the tongue depressors fall to the floor.

  The night they discovered Sam had asthma, they lay awake in bed, holding each other and talking. How could something like this happen so suddenly? Why hadn’t they seen it coming? April hadn’t touched a salt shaker or had a drink the whole time she had been pregnant. She had even made herself take walks every day to keep strong. She took vitamins and never missed a doctor’s appointment. Why couldn’t her little boy breathe?

  The older Sam got, the worse his asthma got. But it wasn’t just the disease that derailed Sam, it was the way it made him feel different. It broke their hearts when they saw the way he yearned after the other kids and their dogs, how he thrust his hands deep into his pockets because he knew he couldn’t touch the animals. They hated taking him to a birthday party and seeing everyone else eating sugary cake; Sam couldn’t have any because he was allergic to chocolate.

  “It’s not right,” April said. When Sam was seven and he came home crying because he wasn’t chosen for the soccer team at school, April marched right into the Blue Cupcake and persuaded them to sponsor a soccer team. “I’ll do all the paperwork and publicity and the only thing I want is to have Sam be on the team,” she told them. The team made Sam the water boy and he was so happy, he slept in his Blue Cupcake soccer shirt. She brought home two tiny blue fish in a glass bowl and set it right on his dresser. “Who needs a dog or cat? Bet you’re the only boy with these rare beauties,” she said. Sam’s mouth formed an amazed oh, and April wrapped her arm about him.

  “Oh, asthma,” she said, waving her hands as if it were nothing. “Why should we let that stop us?” When he was wheezing, she’d tell him the prince and the pauper story, acting out the parts in different voices. She made faces until Sam smiled. Charlie leaned against the doorway, watching them. “You’re amazing,” he told her, when she finally left the room, but she shrugged. “He’s the amazing one.”

  When Sam grew sicker, April got on the Internet. She started calling doctors and then healers and miracle workers. One day April told him she had seen a woman who told her that people with respiratory problems were troubled souls.

  “What? Sam’s not troubled!” Charlie said. “He gets happy just seeing dandelions sprouting in the grass.”

  “Well, she said these souls are unsure if they want to remain on earth. Breathing is our contract to remain here on this planet.”

  Charlie felt chilled.

  “We have to give him an incentive to stay. The woman told me that I’m his mother, that I should know what to do.”

  Charlie dismissed it as a crackpot theory, but that night he woke and April wasn’t in the bed. He got up and found her sitting beside Sam, holding his sleeping hand. “Please stay,” she was whispering, over and over again. He went and sat beside her and she rested her head along his shoulder. “Ask him to stay,” she whispered.

  April read article after article about how doctors didn’t always know the right thing to do. “Doctors make assumptions,” April told Charlie. “They can misdiagnose.”

  “He has to go to a doctor!” Charlie said. “He has a chronic condition!”

  “I’m not saying that,” April said. “I’m just saying that doctors aren’t the gods they’d like us to believe they are. We have to think for ourselves a little here.”

  Charlie remembered when he was sick as a boy, his father still left at six in the morning to go to work, and his mother had the maid look after him. His mother ducked her head in to say hello to him, calling, “I’m not coming in! I don’t want to get sick, too!” and then she was gone. April might be spending a lot of time with theories he considered nuts, but she still hovered over Sam. Anyone could see how concerned she was.

  Charlie got rid of the drapes in Sam’s room, the carpets, the books, anything that might gather dust. He cleaned the cabinets of all the foods that might jumpstart an attack, and when Sam cried bitterly, Charlie took him in his arms and promised him he’d take him to the movies.

  One day, April gave him the Pulmicort inhaler. Sam put his hands to his chest. “My heart’s all jumpy,” he said. April rushed him to the ER for the second day in a row and called Charlie, who arrived to see her pale and shivering, leaning against the wall. “The doctor’s with him now,” she said.

  Sam had to stay in the hospital for three days. He seemed lost in his little bed, a blue striped curtain around him, but April refused to leave his side. All April could talk about was that woman who’d told her that some souls pick up and leave because they aren’t sure they want to stay. Was asthma Sam’s way of wanting to leave? But why wouldn’t Sam want to stay? What hadn’t she given him? Why wasn’t it enough?

  “Sweetie, stop,” Charlie said, but April shook her head.

  “You’re a terrific mother,” Charlie insisted.

  She looked at him, her eyes huge pools. “Really? Then why do the doctors always want to talk to you instead of to me? Shouldn’t they want to talk to the mother? I’m right here!”

  “It’s because I’m calmer, that’s all.”

  April shook her head. “No, it’s not that.”

  He had tried to comfort her, but he had begun to notice, too, that she was right. The nurses gave her funny looks. He went out to get lunch and when he came back, she was in the bed with Sam, holding him tightly. “I’m right here with you,” she said.

  A nurse came into the room and stopped. “You’re pulling at the IV,” she said. April shifted on the bed. “You can’t be in the bed with him like that,” the nurse said.

  “Don’t tell me what I can’t do,” April said. “This is my son.” She hugged Sam harder. “Ma’am,” the nurse said, but April wouldn’t budge. Finally, the nurse reached over April and adjusted the IV.

  That night, Charlie slept in the orange plastic chair by Sam’s bed, but April slept in the bed with her son. Every few hours, a nurse would come in, and before they could tell her to get out of the bed, April would glare and say, “I’m not hurting him.” They woke Sam to give him antibiotics. Charlie held Sam’s hand, but April snapped at the nurses, “Can’t you be more gentle?” T
wo days later, the hospital released Sam. The whole ride home, April rode in the back with Sam, holding him close. “I’ll do my best so we never have to go back there,” she told him.

  Every year, Sam got worse. They were almost always at the hospital. When Sam first turned eight, he was so sick he was in an oxygen tent. “Every dream I had ever dreamed for him seems like it’s dying,” April said.

  “Come on, you don’t mean that,” Charlie said, but April shook her head.

  “When he was a baby, when I was in the house all the time, I kept telling myself, just you wait, because soon I could take him to the beach. We could ride horses. I could give him the kind of childhood I wished I had had. Now the best I can do is get him on a soccer team.” She took Charlie’s hand and laced her fingers through his.

  “You aren’t alone,” he told her.

  “I worry all the time. That something will happen to you. That something will happen to Sam. Nothing’s forever, is it?”

  Charlie lifted up her hand and kissed it. “We are,” he said.

  “Are we?” she said. “Are we, really? Promise me that we are.”

  “I want my stuffed bear,” Sam said, through the tent. “I want Ricky.” His eyes welled. April turned her wedding band around and around on her finger. “Oh, cookie,” she said, and her voice rose an octave. Charlie touched her arm and then she curled against him.

  Later that evening, Charlie came back from getting coffee and went to check on Sam. He heard the rasp of Sam’s breathing. The eerie blue light of the hospital machines glowed in the dark room. April was gone.

  A nurse walked by. “You looking for your wife?” she asked. “I saw her get in the car a while ago.”

  Charlie grew rigid. How could she have left their son when he was so sick?

  An hour passed. He walked up and down the corridor twice and then went back in the room, and there was April, her face flushed, her coat open, snow dotting her hair. She was laughing. “Where were you?” he said, and then he saw that Sam was hugging his stuffed animal, Ricky, to his chest. “What’s this?” he said alarmed.