Eva
He was a boy who did all the right things the wrong way. That’s a fair statement, looking back, isn’t it? In their own peculiar way, his mother and aunt had loyalty mostly to each other. Over me. Over their husbands. But Miles, well, Miles seemed to have empathy and loyalty for all creatures in the universe.
Still, it was no wonder it was hard to know him. Hard to get too close. He wasn’t cuddly. As a baby, he didn’t arch his back, squirm away, but neither did he nudge up next to you. No. He simply wasn’t the kind to lay his head on your shoulder or hug you back. There was an awkwardness to how he moved, how he thought. Watching him sometimes, when I’d pick him up from school or take him out for ice cream—these things we might never do again, at least not in my own car if my daughters have their way—I often thought of giraffes. Of sloths. Long-necked things. Ungainly things. Not without affection, mind you; not with complete judgment. More with detachment mixed with wonder. What was it like to raise a boy? What had I missed out on and never learned? The Mars of males, so alien to me. So much I could see that I didn’t know. So much.
Would there always be awkwardness in Miles? Possibly. Hard to say. Girls certainly grow out of that stage. But there was more to it with him. It was as if he wasn’t part of our human world. He was indeed more of an animal perhaps. Closer to the other species than ours. That’s one way to look at it. That what I saw, he felt. He knew, in his bones.
My daughters, though, were as faultily human as humans could be. Making terrible mistakes. Miscalculating. Trying to create their own rules. I swear, if I didn’t possess a piece of paper that said my husband had died of heart failure, I might have been tempted to find a private investigator and track down those two’s whereabouts the night he died. What those girls were capable of used to exhilarate me, but sometimes now, it also frightens me. The clarity of old age isn’t always so rosy.
When you’re near death, everyone says that two things happen: either a light appears, beckoning, or the events of your life appear in quick cuts, a slideshow of gratitude. Neither of these happened to me. I suppose that’s how I knew for certain I would live.
But Miles didn’t know this. Miles didn’t know what was inside my head any more than I knew what was inside his.
After the French doors opened and Barrett Smith stepped up behind me and raised his hand to strike with the hammer, I saw his shadow. In the gleaming brass of the stove hood, kept so shiny by my daughter, with the gleam of the Murano pendant lights washing across it just so. It was almost beautiful, this last thing I saw for a week. As if Hillary knew the perfect lighting would come in handy someday. And in that moment, so too did I see my mistake. The camera out back. Facing. What he could have seen or heard or known.
But in that split second, when I saw what I saw, I did one final intelligent thing at least. I didn’t turn around, didn’t offer my face, my forehead, my throat. I parried a bit left, knocking the chili pot, and he missed his mark, caught the side of my head. That was what saved me, the surgeon said.
I was knocked out cold, saw stars circling before it faded to black. But then no light, no slideshow of life. Blanker than night. Footsteps running, maybe a scream? I don’t really know. The sound was muted, turned low. Blood in my ears, I suppose.
And then, just those thin, awkward arms picking me up, rocking me, holding me like he had that broken fawn. I couldn’t see him, but I imagine he had the same look on his face, that eternal calm like his mother. Making sure I wasn’t alone. That in the journey between life and death, another warm body would be near me. His mother and aunt had found him there, sitting in my blood, tears in his eyes. I thought I heard their voices, murmuring as they ran in. I felt a tear slip from his cheek and land on mine. There is no other feeling like it, a warm tear landing.
I understood him then, finally. All the boy knowledge I never had, the crash of ball against backboard, the bang-bang of pots and pans, the screeching wheels, the chiming trains, all the animal wonder of bears and wolves, the adventures my girls never carried in their heads, never shared in our heart-to-hearts, all that he possessed in his small body that I had never understood, it flooded me, filled me. How I wished I could spread it around, share it. How I could explain! How I now knew what his therapist and mother and father had all struggled to know. This oddity. This compulsion. This crazy hobby that belonged only to Miles, no one else. It all made sense.
It was simple, so simple. It was the opposite of wildness. A million miles from strange. To be with someone when they are hurting. When you are so very awkward, you don’t ever know what to say or what to do, because you are too young and too unformed and too different from other people. When all you know is that you don’t have the power to help it and you don’t have the knowledge to change it or the courage to fix it. But you have to do something, because you are inherently good.
You don’t give up. You don’t walk away because you don’t know what to do.
No. You just hold them. You give them nothing and everything you have.
And you abide together.
You simply abide.