Detective Meltzer was not yoked to sentimentality. His heart simply beat while mine thrummed with complex feelings. I understood the difference now. For him, death was a mystery to solve, not an experience to suffer through. After the detective left, confirming that he’d find me at Lane’s with any new developments, I felt that raw ache of loneliness all over again, standing at the kitchen sink, listening to the shuffle of my children’s feet above me.
Like teeth gnawing on my soul, I had lost parts of me piece by piece. At first, it was the joy in small things, like my first cup of coffee each morning. Then it grew into the big things, like not caring when Elise earned straight A’s, or when shy little Jackson made a friend at school. Before I knew it, I had stopped doing more than just existing, every memory and emotion leading back to a time I couldn’t reach. Back when my life was whole.
“Moooom!” I was convinced Elise’s voice could travel light-years. With her penchant for drama and unnaturally strong vocal cords, she was destined for the theater. “Mom, Jackson’s just sitting there and won’t help!”
“But I’m tired!” Jackson whined.
“Can we be done already?” Elise again.
I had lost count of her complaints. She didn’t want to move to a new house. She didn’t want to pack. She didn’t like Candace—and refused to call her Aunt Candace. I couldn’t blame her. I’d dragged them out of the only home they knew, told them to pack up their lives and given them no choice in the matter. After six hours of being in our Hendricks Way house, with memories encroaching on us in every room, even I was ready to leave.
Only two boxes to go and the kitchen would be done. The counter was littered with the contents of the junk drawer, along with silverware and dishes that I needed to find another box for. How had we accumulated so much crap? Upstairs, I heard the bang of toys hitting the floor as the kids—as far as I knew—organized their possessions into three piles: Keep, Throw Away, and Not Sure. I was pretty sure Elise only had one pile: Keep. The girl had inherited Ben’s mom’s hoarding tendencies, God rest her soul.
“Why are you so weird?” Elise screamed at Jackson from the second-story landing, then plodded down the stairs. “Mom, make Jackson answer me!”
It was time to intervene. “Elise, don’t talk to your brother that way. His quiet is just grief. Be a little kinder to him.” I had lost my cool two hours ago when they were fighting about a stupid toy, the details of which I had drowned out with silent tears as I sealed all our family pictures in boxes.
“But, Mom, he drew all over my Barbie’s face in permanent marker. I can’t wipe it off.”
“You don’t even play with Barbies anymore, Lise,” Jackson said, pleading his case from halfway up the staircase.
“That doesn’t mean I want them ruined.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. Constant bickering, endless whining. “I’ll get you a new Barbie. Just please, no more fighting.”
“He keeps destroying my stuff, then saying he didn’t do it. What am I supposed to do?”
Turning to yell up the stairs at my son, I found him at my hip and startled back a step. “Hey, buddy, you scared me. You’ve got to stop doing that—sneaking up on people.”
“I’m not sneaking. You just don’t see me. No one does.”
Oh boy. I couldn’t add therapy to today’s to-do list. I leaned down, nose to nose. “Jackson, sweetie, I am trying my best. We’ve all been through a lot, though. How about you go outside and play.” Then I pointed to Elise. “You, keep packing up your room. If you can behave for one more hour I’ll take you both out for ice cream after this.”
“But ice cream makes me sick,” Jackson whined as Elise stormed up the stairs.
“It doesn’t make you sick,” I growled. It was always something with him. Ice cream made him sick. Pizza made him sick. Food that most kids loved made Jackson sick. And anything he simply didn’t want to eat made him sick. I’d lost count of how many times I had watched him force himself to throw up from something that made him sick one day, but he was fine eating another day. My mother said it was probably to get attention, but it was irritating navigating his food maze of eats and won’t eats when I had more pressing matters to deal with, like how we were going to pay our mortgage.
“It does so make me sick.”
“Then what would you rather have?” I huffed.
“A soft pretzel. With cinnamon.”
“A soft pretzel. For real, Jackson? They don’t sell those except for at the mall. Please don’t ask me to take you to the mall after this. I just want to grab something quick on the road and go home.”
“But we are home.”
Oh, my sweet boy. If only he understood that Daddy was never coming back to us, that we were never coming back to this house . . . When I looked at their sweet faces, it brought back memories of little arms wrapped around my neck, kissing boo-boos away, nightly giggles during tickle-fights. I wanted to capture the past in a snow globe and live in that moment forever.
Wasn’t I changing diapers just yesterday? Or laughing at their gummy smiles as I dangled a toy above them? Now I was taking them to therapists and bribing them with ice cream to leave their home. Part of me wanted them to need me forever, but my hugs and kisses no longer solved their problems. Their problems were just too big. They would never love me in the all-consuming way they did when they were small children. But the scarier truth was that I wasn’t sure I could ever love them the way I used to either—with every breath, every heartbeat, a bigness vaster than space. Life had stolen that part of me, the heart of me, when it sent death after me.
“Jackson, we can’t stay here anymore. Mommy needs a fresh start. We all do. So for a little while we’re going to stay with Uncle Lane and rent this house out to a family who needs it.”
“No one needs it more than us.” Jackson had inherited his father’s persistence. “And I don’t want to live at Uncle Lane’s. I don’t like his girlfriend.”
“Wife, honey,” I corrected. “And I don’t like her either, but sometimes we have to put up with people we don’t like.”
“But I don’t want to sleep in bed with Lise,” he whined. “She steals all the covers and kicks me all night.”
“I do not,” Elise grumbled as she descended the stairs and jabbed him with her elbow in passing.
“Ouch!” Jackson yelped. “Lise hit me!”
“It was an accident.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Guys, knock it off!” I screamed, nearly cracking my voice. I couldn’t take another minute of the fighting, the whining, the snide comments, the demands . . . I was trying to pack all my memories and dreams after losing my husband and I just needed quiet. One friggin’ moment of quiet. Was that too much to ask?
“Outside, both of you! Now!”
They both jumped in shock or fear . . . or a little of both. Apparently they knew I meant business, as they darted out the back door without another word. I returned to the kitchen to finish cramming whatever I could in the only box I could find.
The creak of a gate drew my gaze upward to the window facing the in-ground pool. The wrought-iron fence that surrounded it was overtaken by wisteria where crispy vines clung to it in dead patches. Once upon a time it had been tenderly maintained with gorgeous landscaping and trellises of Knock Out roses and fuchsia mandevilla. Now, weeds jutted up between fissures in the concrete around the algae-infested pool that resembled a wild habitat. Vacant and neglected, much like my soul.
A movement caught the corner of my eye. Jackson wandered the perimeter of the pool patio, then paused at the deep end, staring at something in the water below. I imagined all the frogs gliding through the murky water. Jackson had always held a fondness for creepy crawlers . . . until recently, when he simply stopped caring. I understood this but, because I was a mother, I didn’t have that same liberty to simply give up. They say kids bounce back, that they’re resilient. Maybe for Elise that was the case, but they’d never met Jackson. No one could anticipate the toll of death on him, how it left him hollow.
I envied my son for that freedom to empty himself. Though what darkness it would eventually fill him up with instead, I didn’t know. I was too lost in my own grief to pull him out of his.
I watched as Jackson opened his arms wide, as if catching the breeze and sun that both cooled and warmed the spring air. Maybe some of his childhood innocence had been salvaged after all.
Glancing down at the sink, my gaze was transfixed at the way the chrome sparkled beneath tiny water droplets clinging to the metal. I felt myself slipping, my sight glazing, my senses numbing, my brain shutting off, Elise’s chatter from the porch slurring into garbled nonsense. I missed Ben. I missed our old life. I couldn’t do it anymore—the single mom thing, figuring it out all on my own. How to pay bills. How to keep moving forward. How to fix Jackson. How to push through my depression. How to float upward instead of sinking under. For a long moment I hung between reality and mental space, until something dragged me out.
Screaming.
My name.
“Mom!” Elise shrieked, her voice distant.
Blinking away the tears I felt coming, I scanned for her out the window, not seeing her bright pink shirt on the porch. My eyes darted, searching the backyard. I was used to hearing my name called for the slightest offense. Elise calling me to tell me Jackson was staring at her, as if I controlled the boy’s eyeballs. Or Jackson yelling about Elise calling him names, as if I could duct-tape her mouth shut. My name got more traction than a Hollywood scandal.
“Mom!”
Splashing.
Then the word that always got my immediate attention: “Help!”
Elise’s voice was shrill and panicked, and I followed it toward the edge of the pool where she crouched down on her knees, arms outstretched. Through the floating debris I saw arms flailing at the water’s edge, then sinking into the green waves. A ripple along the surface, a few bubbles, then . . . nothing. It took only a second . . . a second too long.
Jackson.
My mind sprung to life, urging me to run, to save my son. But my feet . . . my legs . . . they wouldn’t move, as if they had been tiled to the floor. My breath caught as a dread surged through me, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. I stood there, my mouth mute and my legs crippled.
Another splash, this one bigger, as Elise dove into the water headfirst. I watched it all unfold in my frozen state, a deer in headlights, my fight-or-flight instincts on pause. Adrenaline must have snapped me out of it because suddenly I ran, throwing open the back door, catapulting off the porch and through the gate. By now, Elise held Jackson up against the pool’s edge, pushing him up onto the patio. I grabbed his arms, hauled him up, then pulled Elise up after him. Jackson coughed up water, sucking in breaths as I leaned him forward and patted his back.
Elise, sobbing on all fours next to me, wiped water off her face.
“Mom, where were you?”
Where was I indeed? Why didn’t I react?
“I’m so sorry, honey.” I wrapped my free arm around her, holding a child in each, as if I could keep us together and safe with these arms. If only I was stronger. “I didn’t hear you. I’m so so sorry, sweetie.”
Her tears dripped from her chin, melting into the pool water puddling at her knees.
“He fell on purpose, Mom. Tell her, Jackson.” Elise’s voice held an edge of anger.
Jackson fixed his eyes on the concrete.
“Is it true, Jackson? Did you fall on purpose?”
He ignored me, so I placed my finger under his chin and lifted his face to mine. He looked up at me sadly.
“Tell me the truth.”
“I don’t know,” he answered. It was his answer for a lot of the strange things he had been doing lately.
“Did you mean to fall into the pool?” I needed to know.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Why?”
He didn’t answer at first. Just stared at me with blank, lifeless eyes. “Because I wanted to know what it felt like to drown.”
That one sentence brought a torrent of emotion. Did Jackson want to die too? Kissing his mop of black hair again and again, I pressed his head to my chest and wept. Elise wept. But Jackson . . . nothing. “Jackson, don’t ever do that again. Promise me you’ll never hurt yourself. You could have died . . . and Mommy can’t take another death. Please, Jackson.”
I begged, I pleaded, I needed his word . . .
“I promise.”
. . . and he gave it to me.
“Mommy loves you too much to lose you. It would break me forever.”
“I know,” he said.
We sat for a long moment, three soaked bodies sprawled on the concrete among the weeds, while the breeze licked our skin dry. My body felt weak from the post-adrenaline rush. I needed a moment alone. “Elise, take your brother inside, and both of you put on some fresh clothes before we head back over to Uncle Lane’s.”
As we all rose to our feet, Jackson sidled ahead into the house while I fumbled with the gate lock, securing it while Elise hung back at my side.
“Mommy?” Her voice was tiny, exhausted. Only moments before she had transformed into a lifesaving hero. Now she was back to my little eleven-year-old girl.
“Yes?”
She didn’t speak at first, a tell that something serious was on her mind.
“What is it, honey? You can tell me.”
When I looked down at her, her eyes were glassy, wet.
“Part of me wishes I would have let him drown.”
As her words fell between us, I saw my reflection in her eyes. And I wondered if part of me wished that too.