“I know!” Luke called out. He glanced from the tape of He-Man and to Nina, his attention divided. “If Grandpa Tom’s grandpa gave him the money, then Grandpa Tom should give me the money, right? I’m his grandson. Then Daddy can make the bets.”
Made sense to Nina. Luke smiled at them, pleased with himself, convinced he had found the answer.
“You left the office,” Nina said to Eric. “Where have you been all day?”
“Daddy picked me up from school!” Luke said in a shout of joy.
“We went to the park, we went to Forbidden Planet and got a toy. We had fun, right, Luke?”
“Yep,” Luke said. “I got a new space toy.” Luke hooked her hand and gently tugged. “I’ll show you.”
“Why don’t you bring it out here and we can keep talking to Daddy?”
“Okay,” Luke said in his high trill of good cheer. He skipped out of the room.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“I don’t know what to do,” Eric said. He didn’t look at her. He was ashamed.
“I love you,” she said. But that wasn’t enough. That wasn’t enough for him.
“I guess I have to stay. Can’t pay the bills otherwise. I’ll go in tomorrow and eat whatever I have to eat from Joe.”
Maybe it’s for the best, Nina thought. She went over to Eric and kissed his hot and worried brow. Eric leaned his cheek on her hand and closed his eyes.
“I love you,” she whispered.
He has us; he doesn’t need anything else.
PETER’S FORTRESS of truth was under siege. They kept trying to break in, and tell him lies. But Peter was busy. He had to take Byron to Philadelphia for Lily’s funeral; he had to explain Lily’s death in advance.
“You’d better tell him,” Diane had said. God, she sounded awful. Enervated, frantic, desperate, hopelessly lost, intensely focused on errands — as if her emotional keyboard had no chords, just atonal keys played by a chimp.
Peter’s mother called. Peter hung up at her hello.
Peter’s stepfather called. Peter hung up at his hello.
Then Peter turned on the phone machine. He ignored Byron’s insistent interrogation: “Why didn’t you talk? We’re here. Why don’t you answer?”
Peter shut off the phone machine speaker so he and Byron wouldn’t hear the pleas for him to pick up.
He gave Byron a bath. Byron sat in the water on his knees. He poured, he danced toys on the surface, he splashed them under the faucet’s torrential waterfall. Byron sang to his pretend things: oh, no, look out! Duck! I’ve got you now, you evil one! The tips of Byron’s mop of sandy hair got wet. The water darkened their color; the curls were glued to his neck and ears.
Do I tell him now?
“We’re going to Philadelphia tomorrow to see Mommy,” Peter said.
“Yay!” Byron shot up with pleasure, his lean stomach, perfect penis, and strong legs silky from the water. “We’re gonna see Mommy!”
“Yes. Won’t that be great?”
“Yeah,” Byron said, and looked solemn. “She’s been away a long time.”
“Well, she’ll be coming home with us.”
“Yea! Yea!”
(How do I tell him, Kotkin?
(Explain it simply. Don’t hedge. Tell him what you know and what you believe, but keep it simple. If it makes him unhappy, comfort him, but let him be unhappy. Don’t make him pretend he isn’t.)
“Will Grandma be there?” Byron asked.
The phone rang again. The machine picked it up.
“Well, you know Grandma’s been very sick. And she got sicker. She’s—” Peter couldn’t say the word — such a naked, ugly word.
“She died!” Byron’s eyes became circles; his mouth and jaw squeezed. He looked furious.
“Yes.”
“Because she got too old,” Byron said, his face set, very angry.
“Well …and sick too. We’re going to miss her.” Peter felt his eyes water. He had hated Lily. Well, not hate, but she was a silly woman with stupid values, and her presence was sandpaper on Diane’s skin.
“Why are we going there?” Byron complained. “If Grandma’s dead, why are we going there?” His body was stiff. He had tucked his elbows in and closed his little fists. Like Diane, he wanted to fight unhappiness.
We made him together. He has my hair. He has her eyes. He loves to be in the audience and watch a spectacular, like me. He wants everyone to do things his way, like her. We made him together and so he’s both of us at once. He’s someone else, but he’s our soup, our brew.
“When people die, it makes everyone who knows them sad. So they get together and …” Do I have to say bury? Do I have to tell Byron Lily will be put in the earth, this woman who loved him more simply and absolutely than I did, who loved even the idea of him, do I have to tell him we will put her in the dead ground, alone?
“And cry?” Byron said. He collapsed, broken at the middle, brought his hands to his face, and wailed into them. “I don’t want to go!” he screamed. “I don’t want to miss Grandma!”
Peter snatched Byron from the water. The body folded in his arms, huddled in his lap. Peter’s clothes soaked the water from Byron. Byron cried and shivered. Peter pulled a towel off the rack and covered him, tented Byron within his heart. Peter stroked his back and sang: “It’s okay to miss Grandma. She loved you. It’s okay to miss her.”
The phone rang.
Peter closed his eyes and soaked up his son’s water, the tears of life’s final betrayal, and waited for happiness to return. He knew it would.
18
A YEAR after Lily’s death, Peter, Diane, and Byron went down to Philadelphia to unveil Lily’s tombstone. A similar ceremony had been held for Diane’s father a year after his death, and Diane felt she should repeat for Lily what Lily had done for her husband. A rabbi was there, but no one else was invited, just as only Lily and Diane had gone years ago.
Peter gave his arm to Diane for support as they walked on the manicured lawn up to the gravesite. He had gotten into the habit of helping her at Lily’s funeral and during the recovery period following her car accident. He continued to, even though she had healed months ago. Diane’s leap backwards had given her legs, rather than her head, to the impact. Her last act, at the final moment before contact with the trees, had saved her life. Whenever she wondered about her desire to live, given her suicidal decision to drive home the night her mother died, Diane recalled her dive to the back seat, her twist away from death; she never again doubted her desire to be alive, to be Byron’s mother, to be a woman, to feel whatever she must.
At odd moments, when she listened to Byron play the piano (at Byron’s own request he had begun lessons shortly after Lily’s death), when she watched Byron blow out the candles at his fifth birthday, when she held his hand crossing streets, when she missed him at her job (she had joined a public-interest law foundation to represent women’s causes), Diane felt, in a burst of heat in her breast, horror at how close she had come to losing all the happy things that surrounded her.
The accident must have also changed how she saw Peter, because he seemed so different. Peter claimed his therapy had helped. He told her what he had discovered about his parents’ divorce and said that knowledge had released him from a prison of conflicted emotions about marriage. He certainly treated his mother differently: he refused to have Gail over to the house, to see her in any way. She took Byron to Gail’s every few weeks, and they were received with almost excessive deference and consideration. But the most startling change in Peter was his desire to have another child. Diane, however, didn’t believe that Peter’s therapy or this reversal of information as to which of Peter’s parents had first cheated on the other could really be the reason Peter seemed so changed to her. She was convinced that during the first years of Byron’s life she had suffered from her own madness, her own distorted way of seeing things — that in those days, she hadn’t really known Peter.