I’m fully awake after my exchange of texts with Becca. No use fighting it, so I head downstairs. Adrian stayed over again last night—that makes two nights in a row—and he’s standing over a frying pan of French toast.
“More quality time, Danny,” he says by way of a greeting.
This is our private little joke. Emphasis on little. “Quality time” is Dad’s thing. “I want us to spend some real quality time as a family”—this weekend, this holiday, this vacation, whatever the occasion happens to be.
“So the difference between ‘quality time’ and ‘quantity time’ is what, exactly?” Adrian asked me one Thanksgiving weekend a few years ago. It wasn’t a real question, though, because he answered it himself immediately after asking it.
“In ‘quality time,’ say a Monopoly game, you don’t know when it’s going to end, or if it’s ever going to end,” he said. “Whereas in ‘quantity time,’ say going to a movie, you know you’re committed for about two hours and then everyone goes their own way again. It’s like the difference between torture, when your kidnappers black out the windows and take away the clocks so you end up going crazy from losing all track of time and a sense of reality, and a regular jail sentence.”
Adrian would opt for quantity time any day. I don’t have such strong feelings about it. But I also don’t have the headbutting relationship with our parents that Adrian does. I don’t feel like everything I do is a disappointment to them. I didn’t move out of the house the day after I turned eighteen.
Of course I didn’t. I haven’t even turned fifteen yet.
Our parents join us in the kitchen.
“What would you think about going over to see the Dankers for a quick condolence call?” Mom asks.
Oh.
“Should I?” I ask.
“I think it would be appropriate,” Mom says.
“Have you talked to them yet?” I ask.
“No,” Dad says. “We’ll come with you, of course.”
So an hour later the three of us walk to the Dankers’ house. Adrian stays behind. (“I’ll go another time,” he says, drawing an unconvinced look from Mom.) There are cars parked outside the house. Good, it won’t just be the Dankers and the Snyders. When Mom taps on the front door, an unfamiliar woman—a youngish woman, maybe in her late twenties—answers. She leads us into the living room, to the left of the front hall. It’s a room I’ve never been in during the two months this summer that I’ve been babysitting. Although the Dankers never told me to stay out of it, I always had the sense that it was off-limits to Humphrey, and if it was off-limits to Humphrey, it was off-limits to me. It’s the grown-up room.
Mrs. Danker is sitting on a sofa. Another woman I don’t know—someone around her age—sits next to her, holding her hand. A friend. Mrs. Crenshaw, the next-door neighbor with three kids, who are not here, is on the big sofa, too. She looks uncomfortable; not physically uncomfortable, but not at ease. She looks strangely glad to see us enter the room.
“Clarice,” my mother says to Mrs. Danker. “We’re so very sorry.” Mom bends down to say this softly, and to take the hand that isn’t being held by Mrs. Danker’s friend.
“Thank you, Jan,” Mrs. Danker says.
Mom straightens up and moves to one of the chairs. Next, my father squats down beside Mrs. Danker.
“So sorry,” he says quietly. “What a great kid.” Not that Dad has any idea, really, whether Humphrey was a great kid or not.
My turn. Just then Mr. Danker enters the room with the young woman who answered the door and another man. The man looks like Mr. Danker, minus about, I don’t know, twenty or thirty years. He has the same rectangular head, with the same kind of hair—like a grown-out crew cut, thick hairs standing at attention, only Mr. Danker’s is salt-and-pepper and the younger man’s is dark brown.
Dad is getting up from his squat when Mr. Danker walks in. “Tom,” Dad says. “My condolences.” He pivots to do one of those elbow-grabbing non-hugs men give each other.
Mr. Danker nods.
Mom jumps up when she sees Mr. Danker, and she, too, offers her condolences—as well as a hug. He doesn’t say anything to Mom, either, and he stands straight as a general for her hug before he sits next to his wife on the sofa, squeezing Mrs. Crenshaw out of the way. He has to brush against me slightly to get between the coffee table and the sofa. He seems not to notice me.
It’s still my turn, though. I scrunch down on my knees. The rug is thick and forgiving.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m so very sorry.”
Mrs. Crenshaw, who is still sitting on the sofa, only now appearing physically as well as psychically uncomfortable, looks at me expectantly. That’s when I realize I haven’t actually said anything out loud. It seems I’ve been having this problem since Friday night. I try again.
“I’m so sorry about Humphrey.”
Mrs. Danker looks at me blankly at first. I’ve put on a skirt and blouse for the condolence call; could it be that after all these weeks, she doesn’t recognize me without my T-shirt and shorts?
No, of course she knows who I am. “Danielle,” she says, and immediately she starts to cry. “Oh, you poor thing. We know it wasn’t your fault. Right, Thomas? Humphrey could be so—so …”
She trails off.
“Humphrey could be a bit out of control,” says Mr. Danker.
No. No, he could not, not really.
“Yes, but,” Mrs. Danker says. “What five-year-old has great impulse control …”
Again she trails off. Her friend nods and squeezes her hand. Mrs. Crenshaw shakes her head, but I know that she, and the friend, and my father (who is also nodding) all mean to agree with Mrs. Danker’s statement.
But not me. No. Humphrey’s impulse control was excellent. Vraiment.
“Perhaps if we’d focused on that,” Mr. Danker says. “On self-control.”
“You can’t do that, Tom,” my mother says. “You can’t second-guess.”
Mr. Danker looks at her directly for the first time since we walked in. “I can,” he says. “It’s very hard not to.”
Mom’s face turns slightly, but noticeably, red.
“We can’t help but second-guess,” Mrs. Danker says. “What if this? What if that?”
“What if someone had trained him never to run into the street?” Mr. Danker says. “What if we’d trained Humphrey to stay with the adult, or—whomever”—gesturing toward me—“when walking on Quarry Road?”
What if the stupid babysitter had held on to the boy’s hand?
“Well, it’s understandable,” my father says. “Of course it’s understandable that you wonder ‘what if.’”
After a few more minutes of this agony, we leave. We leave Mrs. Danker swallowed up by her enormous comfy sofa. We leave Mr. Danker sitting next to her, his straight back and neck resisting the sofa’s embrace, his hair relentlessly at attention, a tiny army of soldiers on guard all over his rectangle of a head.