Remember The Moon

by Carter, Abigail;

  “It’s me,” she said.

  “Is something wrong?” Bethany asked, kids yelling in the background.

  “I’m having a crisis with Calder and I don’t know what to do. He’s under the table sobbing right now. I shouldn’t be calling you, but...”

  “I’m glad you did. OK. Tell me what’s going on.” Bethany listened as Maya told her about the baseball game and the knife.

  “Shit, poor little baby. Poor you,” Bethany said when Maya finished.

  “Any suggestions?” Maya asked as she cracked the door to peek at Calder, still under the table, but quieter now.

  “Seems like he’s playing you,” Bethany said. “Don’t buy into it.”

  “I get that, but I don’t know what to do now.”

  “Well, I’m not sure I can tell you that, Maya. He’s a kid who misses his dad and doesn’t know what to do with that. Some kind of weird behavior is to be expected. Maybe just try and be as normal as you can with him. Keep your voice calm when you talk to him. Don’t get emotional. Just be matter-of-fact with him. Boys respond to that. He probably just wants things to feel normal again and he doesn’t know how to express it.”

  “That makes a lot of sense. OK, I think I can do that. Thanks, Bethie.”

  “You’re welcome. I’m here whenever you need me, Maya. You know that.”

  “I do. Thank you.”

  When Maya went back into the living room, she ignored Calder. She walked into the kitchen and started tidying dishes. Calder peeked out to watch her.

  “It’s time to get ready for bed now, Calder.” Her voice was neutral, as if nothing had happened.

  “I don’t have to go see anyone, right?” Calder asked.

  “I don’t think either of us are in any shape to figure that out right now. You go get your jammies on and call me when you ’re ready. ”

  Calder crawled out from under the table and disappeared upstairs.

  Maya finished putting the dishes away and sat on a kitchen stool to have another sip of wine. “I can’t believe that worked,” she said out loud.

  Nice job, Maya.

  “Mama!” Calder called from upstairs.

  “Coming!” Maya called back as she made her way to the stairs, grabbing a shoe as she went and tossing it into the basket in the entry hall.

  After Maya turned out the light, I found Calder lying in his bed in the dark, hovering near sleep. I sat beside him. He stirred.

  Hey Calder.

  Daddy? Calder opened his eyes and looked around, blinking in the darkness, blind to me.

  Yeah, it’s me.

  Aren’t you dead? How can I talk to you?

  Yeah, I’m dead. But you can talk to me anytime.

  But I’m not talking out loud. I’m just thinking the words.

  That’s OK. I can hear your thoughts.

  Is this a dream?

  It might seem that way in the morning when you wake up.

  Why can’t I see you?

  I’m not sure.

  Will I remember that we talked?

  I sure hope so. Otherwise I’m wasting my breath. Not that I have breath, of course.

  Calder gave a snort. What’s it like being dead? Does it hurt?

  Nah. It’s kind of fun. There’s a lot of light and color. And I can see you and your mom.

  Weird. Can you see me peeing?

  Ha! No. I’m not really interested in seeing you peeing.

  Is it like being in space?

  Yeah, a little.

  Cool.

  You seemed to have a rough day today.

  Yeah. I hate baseball. Calder fiddled with a wrinkle on his Spiderman duvet.

  It’s not baseball you hate, Calder.

  It is so.

  No. It’s the fact that there were all those dads out there helping their kids and you don’t have one.

  A tear splashed onto Calder's pillow and he turned his head into the pillow to wipe it away. I hate not having a dad.

  I know, Beano. I’m sorry I had to go and die on you. I want you to know that I am really proud of you...

  He rolled into his pillow and another tear squashed under his cheek. I just want you here, Daddy!

  I know, Cald. I’m here.

  No, like, with me and Mama.

  I know, I know. I wish I could be alive so I could be with you too. But I’m always here.

  Like a ghost? That’s scary!

  No, not a ghost. Just... well, like a good friend who can talk to you in your head.

  Well don’t do it all the time. I might get confused about who’s talking. I laughed. Calder smiled.

  Beano, you need to let your mom get you some help, OK? Calder shrugged and hugged the pillow closer. It won’t be so bad. It might be really nice to have someone else besides your Mom to talk to.

  I have you, Daddy.

  You know what I mean.

  I guess... Calder struggled to keep his eyes open, his blinks becoming longer, his breathing deeper. I wondered if he would remember our conversation when he woke up. I wondered if I had it in me from this strange vantage point to fulfill Maya's wish and help our son from becoming the closed-off man Maya seemed to think I had become after my father’s death. Had she ever articulated this to me? Did I know this was how she saw me, as a man burdened with underlying sadness? How then must I keep my child from being buried by my loss? Was his drumming the key? Why had I dropped it all those years ago?

  The thought had me sitting on a small vinyl stool, a shaggy, Dorito-colored carpet under my feet, enclosed in a fake wood paneled box, the basement rec room of my best friend, Nigel. The drumsticks in my hands were smooth with wear, one tear-shaped end chipped, but the drum’s thick white skin was impervious to sharp edges. I loved the snares – the chain-metal stretched across the bottom skin creating vibrations that produced ocean-waves-on-beach-pebble sounds. I needed to be careful of the rim, so I didn’t gouge the stick further. Time ceased to exist as muscle memory made my wrists pliable and I held the rhythm of the song steady as Nigel squealed his Fender. His dark hair hung limply over his face, his lower lip jutted out in concentration, eyes closed, his body a question mark shape encircling his guitar, trying to reproduce a Hendrix complexity of shrill cries. I was his Mitch Mitchell, intuitively riffing off his sounds, collaborating my jazzy beats with his undulations. The amp turned to ten so our music could be felt viscerally – an external heartbeat pumping sound through our veins. No longer boyish, my knees and legs were still stick-like in Adidas shorts, but a yellow tank shirt sweat-stained with a rip near the belly button strained against my widening chest. My feet in red Chuck Taylors looked huge on the pedals and the size of my man hands startled me. Momentarily clumsy, I fumbled a beat, and Nigel’s guitar squeaked painfully as he spun around to glare at me.

  “We had it going on, man!”

  “Sorry dude. Shit. I just lost it there for a sec. Should we take it from the top?”

  “Nah, man. I’ve lost it. Fuck. That was so sweet.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, Nige.” Nigel lifted the guitar over his head and leaned it against the wall. He walked over to the amp and turned it off. I laid the sticks across the snare and clasped my hands over my head, stretching backwards, banging my head into the wall behind me. I had forgotten how cramped the place was and how big I’d become. I felt like a giant, so different from my kid-sized baseball memory. Nigel flung himself onto the baby-shit-brown couch, the one held up in the corner by a stack of old encyclopedias, and flipped his head to the side in an attempt to get the hair out of his eyes, but with his straight, fine hair the flip achieved little. He peered at me with the one eye still visible under its curtain, looking uncertain.

  “Man, I don’t know if this is working out,” he said.

 
“What? Practicing here?”

  “No, man. You playing in the band.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Shit, dude. I dunno. Mike always makes me do his dirty work.”

  “Dirty work?”

  “Yeah, man. He’s found this drummer dude. He’s really awesome. He’s played at the Horseshoe. Supposed to be some hot shit.”

  “But we have it going on.”

  “Yeah. I know, dude. It’s nothing personal. It’s Mike’s band, you know?”

  Mike was our lead singer. The girls went crazy for him. He had an imposing stage presence. Unruly curls, prominent lips with unusually white, even teeth, a nautical roped choker against his Adam’s apple, wide leather wrist bands, and slim hips that gyrated in such a way that the girls that lined the high school stage where we played waved their hands at him, hoping to be noticed. He ignored them all except Felicity, our school’s resident Bohemian beauty in smushed Chinese slippers, long flowing batik shirts, snug tank tops that pulled across her boyish chest, and a blonde pouff of waist-length hair that seemed to enter the room before she did. She draped herself on Mike, his pliable accessory, smug in her prowess over him. They were a single organism, morphing and reforming after each school-required separation. He was not at the practice, most likely because his long legs were encircling her naked torso in his own family’s rec room, her pelt of hair spread across the shiny mattress covering of the pull-out couch. Not that I’d thought about them together. Or that I’d had my own fantasies about Felicity. Mike had it all. My popularity meter was directly linked to his. And now he was pushing me aside, out of the band.

  “Holy shit! So just like that, I’m out?”

  Nigel shrugged.

  “And he can’t even tell me himself?”

  “Well, the new drummer is dropping by later, and Mike’s supposed to be here... I just thought I’d better say something so it wouldn’t be, you know, like, awkward.”

  “Yeah. I get it. Thanks for being such a good friend, Nige. Really appreciate it. Christ.”

  “Dude, it’s not like that. Honestly. You’re my friend. It wasn’t up to me. I had nothing to do with it.”

  “Did you even stand up for me?”

  “What the hell could I say?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe ‘I quit’?”

  “Why the hell would I quit?”

  “Out of friendship. Shit, Nige, we’ve been friends since first grade. I thought there might be some kind of loyalty between old friends.”

  “Dude, this isn’t personal.”

  “Yeah. K. Whatever. I’ll be by tomorrow to pick up my set.”

  “Hey, Jay-man. It doesn’t need to be like that. We can still jam.”

  “Nah. I’m good. I’m done with this drumming shit.” I didn’t look back as I stormed up the basement steps, slamming the door behind me. I never went back for my drum set. I stopped hanging around with Nigel and Mike and found a new friend, Rob, when I joined the Rugby team. We all drifted apart after that. Mike went on to have a fairly successful music career, touring Canadian universities and outpost town halls. I lost touch with Nigel when he got accepted to Cambridge and moved to the UK. The last I heard he had a job working with Hewlett Packard in human design.

  I remembered the twinges of regret that followed me through my life, regret that I had simply walked away, with so little provocation, from something I loved. I took the rejection personally. I allowed it to rob me of an intrinsic piece of myself, a purity of spirit I could see had always been with me. I neglected this part of myself, abandoned it like an abused dog that had been kicked and beaten into submission, one who cowers at the challenges life throws at it. I tossed away so many beautiful opportunities to savor those flavors and sensations in life that I now missed so profoundly.

  Marcus had never stopped drumming; I knew from the drum set in his apartment. I didn’t want to know the truth about what was going on between Marcus and Maya. I didn’t want to think about how long it had been going on.

  I was suddenly overcome with feelings of regret. Turmoil coiled around me, clasping, its grip tightening until I had to pull away into a moment of white-hot thought. I was released from the grip and felt the sensation of falling backward. Curiously, I saw my emotions – regret, despair, jealousy – floating away from me, a didactic painting, abstract, separate from me, and yet clear depictions of these thoughts. I stopped feeling that familiar gut-crushing sensation of emotion, experiencing instead a swarm of microscopic red lights that I inherently recognized as my sadness swirling within my aura of pale yellow light. Regret appeared in a slightly more purplish hue of lights than those of the red sorrow. Awestruck, I reached out to touch them, forgetting I could not. The colors drifted around me, and I realized that each minuscule speck represented an individual thought, hovering, until without warning, the thoughts flared as a swarm and propelled themselves in a new direction, a colorful murmuration in an elaborate pedantic dance.

  Emotion is habit.

  The thought just came. Human emotion was a habit. I realized its truth. I had been hanging on to my human emotions and senses out of habit, remnants of my human self, once a comfortable home, now peeling and curling at the edges in its deterioration. I hung onto these emotions with the same tenacity that I clung to my senses, my last connection to my bodily form.

  The swarms of thought disappeared as I separated from another piece of my humanness, and sunlight flooded my being. I laughed, realizing the obvious. So simple. How difficult I’d made my own existence. My need of emotion and sensation vanished. With their death, another freedom.

  Chapter Ten

  JULY 23RD, 2006

  Christ, it’s been a nightmare week. I don’t even know what to do right now. I wish I could talk to you about this knife business. That’s the hardest part about parenting alone. You don’t have that other person to talk you down. I so miss that partner thing we had. I miss having someone to tell about my days. This is such a lonely life.

  Calder and I sat at the dining room table, me writing in my journal while he worked on his homework. He banged back into his chair and kicked the table.

  “I can’t do it.”

  “C’mon, Calder. This isn’t hard. Let’s read the problem carefully. ‘In class today, only 18 of 26 students came to school. How many students were absent?’ What’s the first thing we have to do to figure it out?”

  I read from the first page of a stack of stapled-together pages that represented a week’s worth of homework that he could do at any time during the week. I had pulled few sheets of blank paper for working out the problems from the printer. I took a pencil from Calder’s pencil box, filled with partially chewed pencils and a well-stabbed eraser, and was poised for him to give me an instruction.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Well, if we write 26 at the top like this...”

  Calder was still slumped back in his chair, not looking at the paper.

  “...and 18 under it like this, what do you think we have to do now? Do we add them or subtract them?”

  Calder slid further down the chair until he landed in a puddle under the table. “I can’t do it. I’m stupid!”“You’re not stupid. You just have to sit up and put your mind on it. Help me figure it out.”

  “I hate math.”

  I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes. Should I just let him be for a while? Write a note to the teacher? “OK, maybe we should come back to this later.”

  “Nooooo! I have to finish my homework or the teacher will get mad!”

  “OK. Then why don’t you sit up and let’s get to work. I will help you.”

  “I can’t! I’m stupid. I don’t know how to do it!”

  Tears coursed down Calder’s cheeks and he pulled his hair.

  “Come here, sweetie. Come sit on my lap.”

  Calder made no effort to move, so I pushed my chair back and sat next to him on the floor a
nd pulled him into my lap. At first he fought me, but then gave up and sat crying.

  “Is this really about the homework, Calder? Or is something else bothering you?”

  He looked at me quizzically. “Homework, I guess. I don’t know what to do.”

  “Hmm. OK. Well I can help you, but you have to want my help. You seem to be upset about something. Maybe your dad?”

  “That’s dumb. I’m not upset about that. You always think I’m sad about daddy, but I’m not. He’s dead. How can I be upset? I don’t even remember him.”

  “That’s not true. Of course you remember him.”

  “No I don’t. I can’t even remember his voice anymore.”

  Calder began to cry again. And then he cried harder.

  “Are you scared that you’re forgetting him?”

  Calder shrugged.

  “I’m scared of that too sometimes,” I said. “I have an idea.

  Why don’t we watch the movie about him? The one they played at the funeral. Would you like to see it?”

  “A movie about daddy? I don’t remember a movie.”

  “Yeah. It’s pretty silly. But we can watch it and it will help us remember his voice.”

  Calder wiped his tears and nodded. “OK.”

  We snuggled into my big bed and I popped the DVD into the player and soon images of Jay flashed across the screen.

  I think it’s time that Calder saw a therapist. What do you think, Jay? Crazy? I seem to recall that you hated your mother for making you go to a therapist after your dad died. I wish I knew why. Your input would be really helpful right now. I just feel like his behavior is out of my realm and my own therapist can only do so much to help. I’m trying to put one foot in front of the other, just to get myself through this grief. And now I have to find a kid therapist. Margie from across the street recommended a guy that she sent Isaac to after one of his high school friends was killed in a car accident. She thinks Isaac liked him OK. But you know high school kids. They don’t tell their mothers anything. But right now, it’s the only name I have. I’ll give him a call tomorrow.