THE POWER OF THREE

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  Then suddenly one day no one was there. My husband had to work, my woman friend wasn’t there that day, and my brother had to return to college in New York.

  Alone I woke and alone I lay listening to a baby’s footfalls as they rolled across the wood floor somewhere in the house. Pat…pat…pat. A pause. Pat…pat… I got up, searching, forgetting everything for a few minutes, forgetting my baby had died and was not running through the house. I called out, “Brady? Where are you?”

  I got to the living room of the house before I recalled he was dead, my baby was dead. He would not run again. If I hunted for him forever, across every floor in every room of every house, I’d never find him.

  I fell to my knees crying harder than I had ever cried before, harder than anyone can cry before it kills her. I cried out to heaven asking why this had happened, why had my baby been taken, why hadn’t I woken up sooner, how was I going to live, how…was…I…going…to…live…?

  #

  Apparently I was going to live in a daydream. Brady came to me weeks later. Again I was alone in the rental house, packing. I had talked my husband into taking us from this city where all the memories resided. We would move South, down to Florida, and I wouldn’t have to see the streets where I’d walked with my son, the park where I took him to play, the stores and restaurants where we’d eaten. He would sit in his high chair at our favorite café and bang the tray saying, “Eat! Eat!” Everywhere I looked he was there. The feeling of him. The memories of him.

  I had a cardboard carton half filled with church-donated sheets and pillow cases and towels when I again heard the pattering of little feet running across wooden floors.

  I shut my eyes hard and tried to make the sounds vanish. You’re not there, I thought. You’re really not there.

  “Mama!”

  I hadn’t heard his voice since the night before the fire. It had been months. I was not all right, would probably never be all right again, but I thought I had pulled myself together. I loved my husband just as much as ever. My love was a deep thing, loyal and true and real. I could live for him, if not for myself. He had lost a son, too. We grieved together and in that way made ourselves stronger. We were a couple again, not a family, but one day we would make a new family and without speaking of it, we knew that would happen.

  “Mama! Come!”

  Brady hadn’t known many words. He had been almost potty trained--almost. He could walk and climb and feed himself. He could say Mama, Daddy, eat, want, water, cup, come. He was unable yet to say whole sentences. For him to say, “Mama, come.” sounded like him. How could it be?

  My heart took a flip and saluted my breast bone. I caught myself with my eyes closed tightly, willing the auditory delusion away. Can’t be. He’s not here.

  “Mama?”

  The child’s voice was near. He was in the room, standing at my side. Calling my name.

  I opened my eyes, afraid what I would see. When I looked down my little boy was whole and alive and fine. His dark blonde hair shone with health. His brown eyes showed intelligence. His chubby body wrapped itself around my legs and held me tight.

  “Brady!” I dropped to my knees and took him into my arms. He had substance and weight. I could feel his flesh and his bones beneath. I could smell the baby smell of his fine hair. Maybe I had died and now we were together in some everlasting life…

  I pulled him away from where he was clutching my shoulders and looked into his eyes. There was a brief twinkle there that faded so fast I questioned if I’d ever seen it. “How are you here? They say you’ve gone, Brady.”

  “No, Mama. Here. Here.” He pointed to the place he was standing to assure me he was right in my arms, right in his place in the world, near his mother.

  “Oh, baby, my baby.” I hugged him close once more, eyes closed, surrendering to my physical senses. I could feel him, hear him, see him, and smell him. I didn’t have to taste him to know my own child. He was unburned. He was not in a grave moldering. He was here with me.

  And then he wasn’t. Just like that. My arms closed on air, sending me off balance so that I fell forward to the floor, catching myself with my hands. He was gone, even the scent of him. The air did not move. It lay stagnant in the room, shot through with shadow.

  I rose to my feet and tears came and went without my knowing. I was losing my mind. I had taken so much Valium I was turning into a zombie person, someone whose senses were no longer reliable. That was the only credible thing I could think since I was alone, and there was no child, no Brady to console me. I had dreamed it all up out of the dark deep pit of my guilt and grief. I had yearned to have him back so hard that I hallucinated him for my own frail selfish reasons.

  Or so I thought.

  #

  Florida’s west coast was a veritable paradise after living a few years up north in Michigan. Fiery colors of red and orange climbing bougainvillea hung pendulous and luscious against house walls. Palm trees swayed in an easy breeze. We found a tiny house with a living room-bedroom combination and a tiny kitchenette. We took it because it was on a canal—and because we were a couple again in no need of an extra room for a child.

  Behind the house we used discarded crab traps, baiting them with chicken necks, throwing them off the end of the short pier, and by evening hauled up our dinner. We ate boiled crab, crab salad, crab sandwiches, and crab stew. My husband found a new job and I pulled out my old notebooks to try to write again. They had discovered my old standard Remington typewriter undamaged in the spare bedroom/office where I threw Eddie out the window, but I wouldn’t take back anything from the house, nothing. If I lost my son there, then that life was over, and I couldn’t touch anything that had been in the house.

  I hadn’t published anything yet, but I had high hopes one day I would. I was young, married to a loving man, I still had dreams, and I had a future if only I could reach for it again.

  I spent evenings sitting on the pier above the canal writing short stories in my notebook. Often I’d pause, pushing back my hair, staring out at the jungle of green across the canal, just thinking. I thought about Henry Miller in Paris with his women and about Truman Capote eating watermelon in a sunny Alabama field. The days in Florida were long and lazy. They brought no profound understanding of the world and why death lurks around every corner, but those calm days helped me grow stronger. I had stopped taking the tranquilizer and some nights I was even able to sleep. I didn’t hurt any less. I merely tried to embrace life more, seeing what beauty I could and ignoring anything disturbing.

  “Mama?”

  He was behind me where I sat on the pier. I hadn’t been thinking of him, not this time, my mind embroiled in the fictional story I was trying to write in the notebook.

  I sucked in and held my breath. He wasn’t there. His voice was a freak occurrence produced by my creative mind. I ignored it. I chewed the eraser on my pencil, tasting the pink rubber on my tongue, frowning. I wouldn’t turn around.

  “I’m here,” he said.

  He wasn’t there. He couldn’t be. If he was there or I thought he was then I was sick, I was mentally ill, and I was going to have to tell someone. I couldn’t go on hiding this kind of thing.

  “Mama, please.”

  I had taught him manners. I had taught him to use his spoon to eat. I had taught him to pull on his pants and put his arms through the sleeves of his shirts. I had taught him to love me.

  I turned, dropping the pencil. It went clattering to the old boards of the pier, rolling and leaving a little splash behind when it fell into the green water.

  He was there, I would have sworn to it in court. I twisted from the waist and took him into my arms. My notebook slid from my lap onto the pier. “Baby.” It’s all I could say, choking up again with those unshed tears rushing down to constrict the muscles of my throat.

  He talked to me this time in sentences. I didn’t care why. He was older now, almost three. That was probably why he was more articulate, or at least that was my reasoning, as inva
lid as it turned out to be.

  “I want to stay, but I can’t,” he said.

  “Why can’t you stay with me, baby? I’ve missed you so much.” I talked around that tightness in my throat. I swallowed hard and mentally refused the overwhelming emotions that caused it. I forgot all about being mentally ill. This was too real. Could mad people touch that which was not there?

  “They won’t let me stay. They say you need to come with me.”

  I opened my mouth to question him, but he began to fade. He was but a ghost really, that’s what I could see now, what I recognized. He was no more real than a nightmare or a daydream. “Don’t…” I meant to protest his going, but before I could, he was gone. There one second, gone the next. Nothing in his wake was left disturbed. Even the breeze had ended and warm air lay around me, snuggling me close, stealing my breath.

  I gasped. I let the unshed tears flow. The wound of his loss was open again and bleeding. It would never heal as long as I kept seeing his ghost. This had to end. I’d tell Grant, my husband Grant. He would know what to do.

  #

  Grant hadn’t cried until the day of our son’s funeral. This is what they told me. He was dressing and he broke down and wept. His mother, emotionally stunted and hard as a weathered stone, admonished him to act like a man. My own mother, having flown to Michigan from New York for the funeral, got into a fight with Grant’s mother, questioning her heartless reproof.

  I had seen Grant cry only once before, long before we had Brady, when we’d argued and I’d threated to leave him.

  Now he cried when I told him I kept seeing Brady.

  “I’m sorry…” I shouldn’t have told him. Unlike me, easy to weep and mope, he had been strong and resilient, holding his loss close and private. We hadn’t talked about the fire or our loss. We couldn’t bear to say the words. I think we both hoped that day would just slide down into our memories and be buried there, caked with scars, covered with cobwebs, forgotten.

  “You aren’t really seeing him.” Grant wiped his face, cleared his throat, and straightened his shoulders. “You know that, right?”

  “I can’t be sure. I can see him, hear him, and even touch him. Then he vanishes. Maybe I should see a doctor.”

  Grant thought I should. The next week I went to a psychiatrist and laid out the background and the problem. He said what I thought he would. I felt guilt and that guilt was bringing the boy back to me. As long as I could conjure him, I could hold off my feelings of guilt. What I had to know—and believe--he said, was it truly wasn’t my fault. Between the time Grant left for work at seven and when the fire started a little before eight, the boys were up and playing. It was a horrible accident. It was life. It was what happened sometimes without rhyme or reason.

  “How do I get rid of the guilt then?” I asked. “I have to do something.”

  “You say you’re a writer. Write it out. Keep a journal about your days and note when bad thoughts intrude or when you feel sad. Write about your son.”

  “I can’t do that.” He was surely a fine shrink, but he was not a mother. Asking me to write about these things was asking me to enter a torture chamber and submit myself to horrendous suffering.

  I went away from his office without any of the help I thought I’d find. He could prescribe something for me, he said, and I declined. I could write about Brady, he said, but I couldn’t. And that was the limit he was able to offer. I lied to Grant, letting him think the visit had fixed everything. I lied because if it happened again, if Brady came again, I just wouldn’t tell anyone. It would be my secret. If this was insanity, I accepted it.

  #

  It was a couple of months after seeing Brady on the pier that he came again. There was something subtly changed about him. He looked grayer, his flesh not as pink as before. His eyes were ringed with dark shadows. His hands hung listlessly at his sides. “Mama,” he said in a dull voice so small it came from the far end of a tunnel.

  I was in the easy chair reading a book. I put the book aside and went to him, stooping to hold him close. It was as if these times I could have him, ghost or not, were what I lived for. I feared he might not ever show himself again and in one way I wanted him to pass on to whatever there might or might not be after death. In another way I might fall into a desperate place in my soul and never climb out again without his infrequent appearances.

  “Baby.” I kissed his cheeks, his neck, his forehead.

  His shoulders were so small, his little body so slight. He seemed even smaller than he had been before he died.

  “Mama, come with me, I’m alone.”

  I shut my eyes trying to make these moments with my son last. “Where do you want me to go, Brady?”

  “With me. Come with me.”

  Did he mean I should die to be with him? I almost had. I had tried to die to join him. Now Grant and I had talked about having a baby and starting our family anew. One baby or a dozen babies would never replace Brady, never! But we had to move on or we’d fall apart. We wanted children. We longed to be parents again and to have a family. How could I turn my back on the one person who loved me most and make him suffer another loss?

  “I can’t come with you, baby. I have to stay here with Daddy.”

  He pushed back from my embrace and scowled. “You don’t love me!”

  It was the worst thing he might have said to me. It was a killing blow. “Of course I love you! I’ll always love you.”

  He vanished and was no more. I sank back on my heels and stared into the empty room. I stood and began to pace the small house from kitchenette to living room and back. I opened the back door and hurried down to the pier, just to be away from where I’d just held my son in my arms.

  Hadn’t I? Was my mind making it all up? That’s what Grant and the psychiatrist thought. It was two against one, good odds I was hallucinating.

  “I didn’t do it!” I screamed across the canal at the wall of jungle. “It’s not my fault!”

  Saying it didn’t mean I believed it. I could have gotten up sooner. I shouldn’t have been asleep with children in the house. Grant usually woke me before he left for work and this one time he hadn’t. Still, it was me who shouldered this blame alone. I could have prevented it all.

  The thought of my dying, of taking my own life, wasn’t a scary idea. I knew what waited after the last breath. It was a big black nowhere that gave the soul surcease from pain and suffering. So fear didn’t sway me. It was how betrayed Grant would feel, how he would have to struggle, alone this time, to get over losing both his son and his wife. We were the repository of his love. If I left him that way, I would be committing a grave sin.

  Still, it was Shakespeare who said, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” Was it nobler to be, to live? Was it nobler to not be, to pass out of this life?

  Who needed me most, the dead or the living? The solution lay in my hands. The dead child was young and alone. The living man was adult and might manage…

  I couldn’t think this way, leaning into the darkness that could snatch me into its depths if I let it. We are all liable for our actions, even the least of them, I thought, and taking that lethal action was against all my principles. It was one thing to wish to die, to try to die during a trauma and a heartbreaking loss, but to consider it during a time of good health when life was only finally beginning to mean something again was another thing entirely. I had been right to deny Brady his wish. I knew I had.

  Still…I missed him so much. It was like an emptiness in me that would never be filled, a piece of me lost…a darkness in me growing.

  “I want to start that family,” I told Grant in bed that night. He turned, holding me tenderly.

  “Are you sure it’s not too soon?”

  I didn’t answer. I moved closer, wrapping my arms around him, and we made love while the Florida moon rose, shining through the windows to cover our bed in silver.

  #

  I noticed I had picked up a fascination with one bright little object.
I began carrying around a pearl-handled pocketknife my brother had given me years before. It was a pretty thing, the way light glanced off the pearl and the stainless steel blade when I turned it in the light. I had taken it from my purse, where I usually carried it, and slipped it into the pockets of my clothes. If what I was wearing had no pocket, I carried the knife around in my hand, keeping it warm. It lay beside me on the pier while I wrote. I sometimes used it to sharpen my pencils. I put it on the seat cushion of the chair when I read. I lay it on the counter when I cooked, using it to slice tomatoes and to peel cucumbers.

  It’s handy to have around, I told myself, meditating on the little knife, admiring it.

  Back on the pier with my notebook I began a story that involved the knife.

  It was small, a ladies’ pocketknife, decorated with pearl on the handle. The shaft was four inches, hardly enough to be thought deadly.

  I liked suspense novels and was beginning one of my own. I didn’t know yet what the knife meant in the story or how it would be used, but it was interesting. Day after day I wrote on, following the physical object of the knife wherever it went and as it was owned by this person, and then that one. The last character to own it, a shady female wearing a trench coat and stiletto heels, found it on a park bench. She would use it for murder.

  I might be able to sell this novel, I thought. I haven’t read a story where a knife comes into different people’s lives and affects each one in some way until it becomes the property of a killer. This is great!

  I was so caught up in writing the story that most days I didn’t even think about Brady until it was bed time and I closed my eyes on the day. Then he came into my thoughts, staying until I fell into restless slumber.

  I returned to my writing. She picked up the knife from the bench, admiring it. (My killer would be female!) She could use this. It was no good for stabbing, but might work excellent for carving…