Disaster Falls

by Stephane Gerson

  Q  And given that you believe that it had something to be fearful about, do you believe that this rapid poses a risk of death?

  A  I would say, yes, this rapid poses a risk of death…

  Q  Do you instruct your guides to tell the passengers on—when they’re scouting this area, that this—these rapids pose a risk of death?

  A  No. But it is very clear—

  I want to tell the director that nothing is very clear in such situations, least of all the inner life of an eight-year-old. But would he understand? I let his words seep out into the surrounding woods.

  This leaves Owen by the gushing waters.

  Owen left to decide if the whole thing looks runnable.

  Owen left to assess risk of death.

  Owen left to determine whether the emotions he feels at this moment—fear or excitement or perhaps something else altogether—should govern what he says to the father who, as he put it in his third-grade journal, is scared a lot. Owen is so alone that I want to do now what I did not do on the river. I want to rush over, hold his body, kiss his cheeks, and also scream, wail, and then fall to the ground, flattened on the dirt.

  I do not scream, I do not wail. But I drop to my knees in the studio, body folded, face on the floor, hands behind my neck. I remain that way for a long time. Then I stand up, straighten my back, and for the first time I hold everything at once: the political economy of rafting trips, the necessary anger, and the indelible sadness of it all.

  This is not much when it comes to a disaster of cosmic magnitude, a disaster without justice for Owen, a disaster whose story is bound to remain insufficient. But as I look out one last time at the quarry, now shapeless and purple in the crepuscular forest, something inside me feels complete.

  Ryan: How do you feel now?

  Julian was in college by the time I read the deposition. When we began touring campuses, around his sixteenth birthday, he was leading the full life of a teenager, flourishing in his new high school. One evening, he folded pillows under his covers, told Alison that Owen was with him, and asked her to kiss them both good night. It may have been when things went well, when he was forging ahead, that Julian had to touch base with his brother.

  Over time Julian spoke about Owen less, especially at school, where he only told a handful of friends that he had a brother. Julian needed to reinvent himself as someone else besides the kid who had lost his only sibling. I knew this, and so did Alison, but we still winced when, returning home after a night out, we found our framed photographs of Owen piled on our bedroom dresser. Before inviting friends over, Julian had cleared the living room of all signs of his brother’s existence. It was too much for the other kids, Julian said, too awkward with girls.

  Alison and I wondered how Julian would eventually look back upon the years that had immediately followed the accident. This would become a short chapter in his life, all things considered. In a senior-year English essay, he explained that he had felt so alone during the first year. “My parents, wracked with grief, did their best to console me, but I often found myself doing the consoling,” he wrote. Perhaps he still felt the same with college looming and worried about leaving us on our own, without anyone checking in every day. Or perhaps he wondered what he would do now that he no longer had to console his parents. It is also possible that Alison and I were the only ones fretting about such matters, late in the evening, while returning photographs of Owen to our walls and bookshelves.

  We encouraged Julian to choose an out-of-state college in order to decide for himself who should learn about Owen. We did not tell him, however, how much his impending departure frightened us. Alison’s mediations and my scholarship still felt too hollow or perfunctory to provide direction or purpose. There were still days when it seemed as if one enterprise alone, ensuring Julian’s well-being, lay within our reach.

  Regardless, Julian would leave home, and the two of us would stay. We would stay with Owen, keeping his room dust-free while following the growth of the Japanese maple we had planted in his memory. We would stay in case one of his grade-school friends dropped by without warning, and also in case Owen came out of his room one night and stood in the living room doorway, alone and silent until one of us noticed and smiled and got up to take his hand and walk him back to bed, where darkness and sleep awaited, as foreboding that night as every other night.

  Owen did make an appearance one night. In a dream, I spotted him outside a movie theater. I did not recognize him at first, but there he was, walking with friends. When I ran over to embrace him, he seemed pleased to see me but distant, as if he could not remember what it had been like to live with us. When I recounted this dream to Alison the next morning, I left out one thing because it seemed almost indecent. As I ran toward Owen, I had felt not only joy and incredulity, but also euphoria: Owen’s story would end with his return from the dead. It would be a story for the ages, a miracle, atonement for the deaths of all children, the antidote to all horror stories.

  —

  My dream did not come true. But a month later Alison missed her period. She did not really believe she was pregnant, not at age forty-six. Women of her age have less than a 1 percent chance of natural pregnancy. The likelihood is even lower for those who, like Alison, have a history of fibroids, which can enlarge the uterus and make it difficult for embryos to implant. I had learned these statistics when we tried to conceive a few months after the accident. The two of us felt that something fundamental had been interrupted. We were not done parenting, and we worried about Julian’s solitude.

  Choosing to have another child had not been straightforward. Wherever I looked, I saw toddlers running unsupervised before garage entrances and children roller-blading down streets that flowed into busy thoroughfares. Some evolutionary mechanism must prevent parents from understanding exactly what it means to release a child into the world. Once this mechanism breaks down, it seems inconceivable that anyone would take on such a responsibility. Would we hold a celebration—a celebration for ourselves—once our new child reached the age of nine?

  Also: Were we simply trying to replace Owen? And did we deserve another child?

  If Alison asked such questions the first year, she kept them to herself. She also refused to let my apprehension about the health risks of midlife pregnancy stop us. “You can’t live in fear,” she said before undergoing the first of three procedures to remove her fibroids. Soon afterward, Julian (age twelve at the time) overheard us discussing the matter and asked whether we were really planning to have another child. The news threw him into a frenzy. He fired off one counterargument after another, as if he had uncovered a plot he might still disrupt through swift action. His friends would tease him, he said. The baby would keep him up at night. His schoolwork would suffer. Pregnant women of Alison’s age look ridiculous. We could not replace Owen. And finally: “Things are so good now between the three of us.” Julian could not envision another disruption of our family unit.

  Alison and I tried conceiving for a year, until things petered out without either one of us saying much about it. We did not go back to contraception at the end of that year, but neither did we opt for invasive procedures, hormones, injections, in vitro fertilization, egg donors, surrogate mothers, or adoption. It was not that we decided against any of it. It just happened that way because neither one of us had enough strength or confidence to convince the other that another child would resolve anything. We chose by not choosing.

  Three years later, Alison purchased a pregnancy test one morning and asked her gynecologist for confirmation that same afternoon.

  —

  The prospect of a baby reopened a spigot of emotions about the contours of our family. I could not yet detect the lighter breath, the larger footprint, the emboldened sense of self I associated with a new child. But I did not feel quite as old anymore. I could now imagine a world that did not revolve around death.

  When we told Julian about the pregnancy, he asked—seriously and playfully—how this c
ould have happened given that he was always around the house. The news pleased him, not least because, as he put it, the baby would give Alison and me something to do after he left. Julian could not recall his earlier misgivings about a new child, not even when we reminded him.

  When we told friends and relatives that we were expecting another child, they used words like magical, mythic, and miraculous. One deemed it biblical, as if Alison had joined the elderly Sarah, mother of Isaac, and Elizabeth, mother of St. John the Baptist. Another friend said he might start believing in some force at work in the universe. “You are having another kid, you will never die.”

  More than one friend told me I now had the ending to my story. The end imbues the story with its moral; it is “everywhere the chief thing,” Aristotle famously wrote. Short of Owen returning, this was indeed the most satisfying conclusion to a tale about a dead boy and his family. Over the years, I had heard about bereaved parents who regained joy after having another baby. I heard it secondhand, never from the parents themselves, but is it not true that a new child alone can compensate? People now told us they felt pure happiness for us, a kind of peace they had not known since Owen died. An acquaintance confided that she had been so sorry for us when she heard about the accident. “But now!…”

  No one forgot about Owen, but our family story seemed to morph all too easily into a wondrous fantasy, filled with the illusion of reparation and the expectation of renewal. “Your life has become a novel that writes itself,” a friend said. This ending was also a beginning, but how were we to launch something new without believing in the possibility of fresh starts, freed from the past? How would we carry the memory of a dead child while remaining open to the possibilities of a new life?

  I wondered whether I would allow myself to experience the full immersion in parenthood that I observed in young couples. If so, where would this leave Owen? If not, if loyalty to his memory and fear of pain held me back, what kind of father would I be this time around? Children deserve insouciance and the belief in a better future and a world in which mistakes do not necessarily yield disasters.

  These qualms were not mine alone. Alison was not certain she would dare to love another child with abandon. She was moved after hearing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time but also found the prospect of a new life daunting. Julian grew edgy and explained that it was because Alison and I were starting a new family just as he left home. For the first time since the accident, we had begun something without him. Secrecy reigned in the house, Julian said.

  —

  And yet, the pull proved so strong. Alison and I allowed ourselves to picture Julian sharing family stories with his new sibling. Julian in turn joined us in conversations about the baby. The day he submitted his first college application, he put his hand on Alison’s belly to feel the fetus kick. By then, Alison was entertaining the idea that Owen had waited until we were ready to send us this child.

  Alison looked different, too. Her cheeks had filled in, her eyes had softened, her dark hair caressed the back of her neck and framed a face that had regained its proportions. After meeting Alison for the first time, an older woman told her she had a remarkably open face. It was so open, this woman said, that strangers must feel compelled to tell her everything.

  All I could tell Alison when she spoke of feeling daunted was that I would not be able to protect this child—another boy, as it turned out—from the perils of the world or assure him that a long life lay ahead. I might never look at his face without searching for traces of Owen’s features. Until he reached the age of eight, I might remain unable to touch his body without picturing Owen’s in the background. And one day I would lose him—not a physical loss with any luck, but a loss nonetheless, perhaps sudden or more likely at the end of a slow process, an accretion of tiny daily losses that escape detection. I could hold this child’s hand as tightly as I wanted in subway stations and atop canyons, and it still would not change a thing.

  But before that moment, there was another opportunity to become a father—not necessarily better than Berl, but perhaps as open as he had been during his last days. In the story that filled my head as the birth approached, I allowed this boy to fall and fail, casting off the illusion that I could always protect him. In this story, I raised him without having to chronicle our lives or shape his into a narrative. In this story, Owen and I walked together at all hours, and his presence gave me enough courage to teach his younger brother to become a happy man.

  Samantha: What did you do on Owen’s birthday?

  On his ninth birthday, three months after the accident, we shared photographs and memories. Afterward, we wrote notes on a balloon that we released from a balcony and watched vanish over the skyline. It was difficult to let go. Zosia died that day.

  On Owen’s tenth birthday, night was already falling when we visited the cemetery, so we turned on the car’s headlights. We stood around the grave, our shadows painted on the flat gray stone.

  On his eleventh birthday, Julian told us that everything had changed. So many things are now worse, he said.

  On his twelfth birthday, we looked at pictures but barely spoke of Owen. It seemed difficult to take hold of him without rituals.

  I cannot recall what we did on Owen’s thirteenth birthday. That would have been his bar mitzvah.

  Owen’s fourteenth birthday fell one month before Alison’s due date and a week before the day we had set to repaint his bedroom, which would become the baby’s. We still had to empty his drawers, pack up his books, remove his posters, and place the postcards and photographs that Owen had pinned above his desk into an envelope for safekeeping. Alison had wanted to do this for weeks, but I had resisted. I was not done with this book, which I continued to write in Owen’s room. Another story was about to begin, connected but separate. I needed to finish this one first.

  When Alison asked if I had anything in mind for this birthday, I thought of the trip that Owen and I had taken to the Baseball Hall of Fame a month before the accident. Cooperstown loomed as a place of childlike innocence, intimacy, and discovery. That was where the two of us had talked about both planning and winging it—where I had learned about Owen’s relationship to the world and reconsidered my own. After the accident, I had kept away from Cooperstown. I found it difficult to pick up the wooden bat, black and red with golden engraving, that Owen had chosen in a souvenir shop during that visit. But once we found out about Alison’s pregnancy, I vowed to return before the birth. This left little time.

  —

  In the end, I did not go to Cooperstown. The trip remained too fraught, too full of imponderables. Five years was not enough time. I did not berate myself, but I wished that I had made it back. The trip would have provided a fitting coda, especially if I could sit in the bleachers in which Owen and I had sat and open photo albums for the first time.

  But regret did not linger because Owen was now inscribed within a story and a history in which a single day stretched across centuries and all generations responded to a man-made disaster by coming together around an eight-year-old boy. This story had to be written in order to be read, again and again, until nothing separated the past from the present, until nothing separated a world without Owen from a world that kept the uncertainty of his presence ever in view.

  One morning I would drive back to Cooperstown. I would not plan it; I would simply invite Owen along. This might happen within a year, or two, or more. But if three decades elapsed and I still had not returned, then it would fall upon Julian or his new brother to invite me on a trip I might never have intended to take on my own.

  —

  Here is what Alison and I did on Owen’s fourteenth birthday. After Julian left for school, we ambled west toward the Hudson. Alison moved more slowly now that she was eight months pregnant. At the corner of Sixth Avenue and Greenwich, we listened to a docent describe the house of detention that had stood on this spot until its destruction in 1973. The site is now occupied by a neighborhood garden we had never notic
ed.

  We ate lunch in a small French restaurant on Tenth Avenue. Upon walking in, we recalled that we had celebrated Alison’s thirty-fifth birthday there a few months before 9/11. In the afternoon, we ended up at the entrance of a gallery that was exhibiting photographs of watersheds, deltas, dry beds, irrigation sites, aquacultures, and mega-dams. The show made an argument about the sublime beauty and environmental costs of technology. A slight hesitation—and then we walked in.

  In the evening, the rabbi who would officiate at the baby’s circumcision met us at home. On the day of Owen’s funeral, he had led an evening prayer outside, everyone assembled in a circle. Now the three of us sat in our living room and talked about the impending birth and Owen and also Julian, who came home from school as we wrapped things up. Julian did not join us on the couch, but he seemed pleased when we invited him to hold the baby during the ceremony.

  Alison and I ended the day sitting side by side on our bed, feet planted on the floor. We talked about odds and ends—ordinary things on the least ordinary of days. Then Alison said something extraordinary, something that had never crossed my mind. Alison said she was relieved that Owen’s birthday had come and gone without her giving birth. This prospect had been troubling her for months.

  We sat and stared into the mirror a few feet away. Then I said, “It would have been unfair to the baby.”

  I cannot recall whether I framed this as a statement or a question, but Alison turned my way, her face soft and certain.

  “No,” she said. “It would have been unfair to Owen.”

  This book rests on personal experiences and memories as well as letters, emails, diaries, speeches, photographs, and legal documents. These source materials cannot fill all gaps, however. Some things are bound to remain unknown. I have not invented anything though I did change a few names and biographical details to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Following Owen’s death, I turned to literature and the past. The main sources I consulted, some of them mentioned in the book, are listed below.