Grief

Tiffany Scandal

“Sometimes when I close my eyes, I can still see his body.”

Marcy stared at her coffee. A bleak nothing. Decaf. She had switched over because she drank more when she was anxious and the caffeine was making it worse. Her head was already fogged enough with grief. She looked up at the lights. She hated crying in public.

“My boy, he was so young…”

The warmth of a hand covered hers. Across the table from her sat an elderly man, smiling, warm, sympathetic. A grief counselor who met people in public and helped them process feelings over the loss of loved ones. Marcy sniffled, lips quivering. She couldn’t make eye contact; it’d make the crying worse. So she looked down or at his mouth as it spoke or into her lap as she pretended to listen. “I failed him. What does this say of me, as a mother?”

The counselor’s smile didn’t waver. He tapped on her hand and shook his head. “Marcy, you have to understand that you did what you could for your little boy. You did everything right.”

Everything. Right…

“The rest we have no power over.”

After her boy Hunter fell ill, everything happened too quickly to sink in. One day he was playing in the front yard, the next he was in a hospital bed with a doctor speculating it could be a growth in his pancreas causing him to throw up so much. There hadn’t been any signs. No visible journey. Overnight he went from a hungry boy eating his dinner to not even being able to keep down water. He’d needed a transfusion just to stabilize. He’d looked so weak in the bed.

Money had been tight, but she hadn’t hesitated to opt for any chance offered. Even if it only meant just a little more time. There was no backup plan, no regard for piling debt. But none of that mattered: she would do anything to make her baby boy healthy again.

And a few weeks after the surgery, he died.

After his release from the hospital, Marcy had taken leave from work to watch over Hunter. She cooked and cleaned and budgeted, and did whatever she could to keep him comfortable. They were glad to have him home. They wanted to see him smile, to see him happy. Marcy and her partner David joked and played with him. Watched movies. Let him eat whatever he wanted. But Marcy and David would fight after Hunter went to sleep. The fighting started within the first week of his illness. At times she’d get so angry with David she’d want to just leave and take Hunter with her. But she couldn’t leave; not now. Not while Hunter was sick. So she started smoking and in the night calm of outside air she’d imagine cancer cells replicating in her lungs.

Then one night, while David was at work, Marcy had tucked in Hunter. He had seemed less energetic that day, but the doctor had told them to expect that after the procedures he’d been through. Sitting on the side of his bed, she brushed his dark brown hair off of his forehead and kissed him goodnight.

“Gross,” Hunter fussed.

“Turd.” Marcy messed up his hair and secured the stuffed pterodactyl under his arm.

Then she told him to get some sleep and turned off the lights.

The house was quiet, calm. She went outside to smoke and collect her thoughts.

How’s Hunter? David texted.

Fine. I just tucked him in for the night.

Okay. If you need me to leave work early, just let me know.

Even though David wasn’t the best partner, he was at least a really good father, and Hunter needed that right now. People who loved him.

In the distance, Marcy noticed a shooting star. A glow tearing through the night sky. Something felt heavy inside of her body. She looked back toward the house and whispered Hunter’s name. She quickly snubbed out her cigarette and ran back inside to check on her boy.

“Hunter! Hunter!”

He didn’t respond at first, but his body was still warm. Marcy took him in her arms and shook him.

“Hunter!”

When he groggily opened his eyes, Marcy felt a huge wave of relief.

“Whaaattt?”

“Nothing, honey. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Hunter nodded his head and laid back down.

Marcy chuckled. She tucked him back in and left the room.

The dread never left her. But rather than check on her son every five minutes, she opted to just keep busy around the house. Knowing David would be home soon, she cracked open a bottle of wine and waited for him on the couch amidst the freshly clean home.

Keys in the lock, Mercy stood up and smiled, ready to hand him a glass of wine. He looked tired.

“You’re drinking?”

Not even a hello.

“I just opened this. Figured it’d be nice to unwind.”

“Unwind? You’re not even working. What is there to unwind?”

“David, you don’t have to be so mean. I just thought we could enjoy a glass together. Something nice, you know?”

David walked past her and didn’t take the glass she offered.

Marcy could already feel like she was about to start crying again, so she just went toward Hunter’s room. If anything, she’d sleep there and keep watch over her boy.

In the doorway, she dropped the glass of wine.

Hunter was facedown on the floor. Like he had crawled out of bed and was making his way to the door before he fell. His green footie pajamas made him look like a little tyrannosaurus rex. The material looked so soft in the light.

“Hunter?”

“What’s going on?”

David ran up to Hunter’s room and pushed past Marcy. He picked up Hunter and checked him.

“He’s not breathing.”

Marcy couldn’t move. Her breath caught in her throat.

“Call 9-1-1!”

“Wha-wha…”

David got up and ran past Marcy again, bumping her into the doorframe this time.

“For christ’s sake, Marcy. Do something,” he scolded as he ran past. “Yes, we need an ambulance…my son. He’s not responsive. Hurry!”

He pushed past her again and shoved his phone into her hands. “Was that so difficult?” He turned Hunter over and started administering CPR.

Hunter, her six-year-old boy. He looked so small next to his father.

She fixated on the pterodactyl that was next to her little boy. Her movements felt slow, blurred. She was on her knees, hugging the dinosaur, staring at Hunter’s little hand.

“Marcy! Open the fucking door!” David yelling in front of her.

Marcy just looked at him. His words seemed foreign. She rolled to sit on the floor, still reeling from everything that’d happened. David ran out of the room again. He returned with paramedics. They surrounded Hunter and tried to revive him.

“He already…” She pointed at David but couldn’t produce the rest of the words to finish her sentence.

David was talking to the paramedics. Answering questions. But she couldn’t focus on the words they were saying.

“Call it.”

Marcy noticed the blue gloves not doing anything.

“Is-is he go-going to be okay?” That’s when she looked at Hunter’s face. He looked so peaceful. Like a little angel. She clutched the dinosaur tighter.

The paramedic looked at his partner. “Ma’am, I’m sorry to say, but your son is dead.”

“D-d-dead? No…”

“Yes, a coroner will be here for the body. It’s best not to try to move it.”

“No. No, Hunter is going to be okay. He had all the surgeries and treatments. The doctor said…”

“I’m very sorry for your loss.”

“But he’s only six.” At that point, Marcy started bawling. David got up and hugged her. She buried her face into his chest. “He’s only six.”

And just like that, their little boy was gone. Her little boy.

***

Everything hurt. Time became a foreign concept. The days bled into nights, into weeks, into months. After the funeral, the house stayed quiet, felt empty, became filthy. David started drinking vodka directly from the bottle and constantly toasted the ghost of a child that never developed into a friend. Marcy smoked regularly now. Started smoking inside of the house because her boy was dead and nothing mattered anymore. Neither cared about the effect on the other. On the couch together, with the television off, David asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Me either.” He nodded and stared at the blank screen.

“It’s not fair.”

“What?”

“Life.” She took a drag from her cigarette. “I think about him more than I think about my mother. It’s like his death being so immediate makes her death seem further away. Not gone, just more distant, less significant. I’m afraid of losing him like that. I don’t want to lose him.”

“I wish I could just talk to him.” The drag of his speech more noticeable now. He was drunker than usual, but had gotten good at masking it. “I miss him. He was a good boy.”

Marcy tapped ash into a Coke can. “I feel him sometimes, or the memory of him.”

“I wish I could hear him snore.”

“I wish I could hear him laugh.”

“I wish I could just, I don’t know, talk to him or something and tell him how much I love him.”

“We have a Ouija board.” Marcy used to use play with Ouija boards all the time when she was younger. Although it had always been with friends for fun, she did believe in the board’s power to communicate with the dead.

“Huh?”

“In the basement.”

Before David could say anything else, Marcy got up to look for the board. The bulb over the staircase was burnt out, so she blindly navigated her way down the stairs and walked face first into a cobweb. She screamed, flinched, and fell down the remaining five steps. She landed with a heavy thud and felt the silence that followed swallow her. She looked toward the door she came from, relieved she didn’t fall from the top of the stairs. She dusted herself off, fumbled for the light switch, and started digging through musty boxes full of forgotten objects. In one box, she found unframed pictures. Her and David when they were young and happy. The cat that ran away shortly after they moved into their home. Baby Hunter. Photos that should’ve been in an album, but were instead recklessly abandoned. She continued to flip through photos and stumbled across her favorite picture of Hunter. There he was, missing front teeth, holding his pterodactyl. That was when Hunter said he hoped the tooth fairy would leave him $1,000 so he could buy his very own dinosaur. The next day, the tooth fairy disappointed him by only leaving a quarter and a brand-new toothbrush. David told Hunter they should form a child’s union, and together they built placards to protest against the tooth fairy’s wage theft. Marcy wished she had taken a photo of that.

“You alive?” David shouted from the couch.

Marcy rolled her eyes. She fell a while ago, and it just occurred to him to check on her? She scanned the rest of the basement and noted the Ouija board on top of the box she was sitting next to.

“Right in front of me,” she whispered to herself.

She tucked the pictures under her arm and picked up the dusty game box to take back upstairs.

“You want to try this?”

David chuckled.

“What’s he gonna say? The kid barely learned how to read and write.” David took a deep breath. Marcy could tell he was about to cry.

She swiped everything off the coffee table and took the board out of the box. Empty takeout boxes, cans, bottles, cigarette cartons flew to the ground. She put the stack of photos on the table next to the board, with the image of Hunter’s toothless grin right on top. Planchette on the board, Marcy sat ready with her fingertips ready to channel. David just sat on the couch.

“Come on,” Marcy urged David.

He shook his head but reluctantly got up. He mimicked what Marcy was doing.

They both stared at the board and said nothing.

“What now?”

“Uh, I guess we say something. Umm.” She cleared her throat. “Uh, hey. Umm. We’d like to communicate with our son. Hunter. Hunter, are you there?”

Nothing happened.

David took his fingertips off of the planchette and dropped them at his side. “This is stupid.”

“Maybe we just need to give it more time?”

David opened a bottle of vodka and took a swig.

“No, I’m done. That…that game…it’s not…” David started crying.

Marcy walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder.

“That’s not my son.” He grabbed the planchette off the board and flung it across the room. Face red, tears streaming down his face, he let his weight fall back into the couch. He looked completely defeated. “I miss him. So much.”

“I miss him, too.”

She hugged David. He patted her back, which made everything feel worse. Made her feel extra alone. Even though he never outright said it, she felt he believed she was responsible. And maybe she was? She was home when it happened. Maybe if she would’ve just stayed by Hunter’s side the whole time, she would’ve been able to prevent his death. Even though the coroner and the doctor both said that the cancer was just too aggressive and nothing else could’ve been done, maybe she could’ve noticed something was wrong while he was sleeping and rushed him to the hospital in time and the doctors would’ve treated him and he would’ve pulled through and he would be okay. He would be alive right now, telling Marcy and David about random facts he learned at school and things about dinosaurs and how monster trucks and astronauts are cool. He would be alive, and Marcy could scoop him up and give him kisses all over his face and he would kick and giggle and tell her that she was gross, but then he’d turn around to hug her and tell her that he loved her. Hunter. Her little boy.

It hurt to think his name.

“I’m sorry.”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. For everything.”

David looked at her. For the first time in a long time, it felt like he was finally looking at her.

“If I would’ve just stayed at his side the whole time, maybe… maybe I could’ve stopped it.”

“What?”

“His…his death.”

David stared at the floor.

“Since Hunter got sick, any time I left his side, I expected every text, every phone to tell me that he died. That day, I thought about calling out. I looked at him just before I left and it was like I knew. And because I wanted so much to be wrong, I played it cool and just said see you later, kiddo. That’s it. See you later. ”

David wiped tears from his face.

“More than anything, I wish I would’ve called out. And we could’ve spent the day with him. Watched all of his favorite movies. Ordered, like, ten pizzas and…”

“Let him eat all the candy he wanted.”

David chuckled. “Yeah. And I would’ve loved to hug him and tell him that I loved him very much. God, I wish I could’ve told him that I was proud of him.” He picked up Hunter’s photo from the coffee table. “My boy. He was my boy.”

“We thought we’d have more time with him.”

“Yeah.” He stood up.

“David?”

“Yeah?”

“You were a great father.”

He nodded and walked away.

***

Nights had been rough since Hunter’s passing. Marcy tossed and turned all night, and any dreams she remembered were usually nightmares. One night she dreamt that Hunter was still alive and when she went to hug him, he tore into her neck like a vampire. Another night, she dreamt that she took him to an amusement park but he was so excited and kept running away from her. Every time she tried to keep up, more and more people would just get in the way until she lost sight of him completely. Other times, she’d just wake up crying, not remembering the dream, but figuring it was awful anyway like her son being a monster or her constant failure to be a good mother. She had started going to support groups, seeing grief counselors, trying to talk to anyone that wasn’t David because he had grown so detached that sometimes talking to him felt like talking to a wall and any day he would present her with divorce papers but that’s a whole other issue she didn’t want to think about right now because her son was dead and she would give anything to have him be alive again, even for just one minute so she could hug him and tell him that she loves him.

Lying in bed, Marcy stared at the ceiling. Tears in her eyes, she whispered all the things she wished she could say to Hunter one more time. She heard rapid footsteps coming toward her bedroom door. She wanted to sit up and look, but her body was paralyzed. Was someone in her home? David was snoring on the other side of the bed, so who could be in her house at this time of night? She felt weight pounce on the bed and crawl along her side. Her heart was racing. A cold sweat beading at her brow. Finally feeling the ability to slightly move her head, she looked down and saw the shadow rushing toward her. Just as she was about to scream, the moonlight shone on Hunter’s sweet face. His grin with missing teeth inches from her face.

“Mommy!”

“Hunter?”

And he hugged her. His little body, squeezing her as hard as he could.

“Hunter?”

“Yes, Mommy?”

“Wha?” David, still groggy from sleep, but not moving.

“Hunter. Hunter’s here.”

David sat up but stared at the doorway.

Marcy squeezed Hunter. “I’ve missed you so much. My baby boy.”

“I know, Mommy. It’s okay.”

“You’re here. I can’t believe you’re here.” Marcy started crying.

“I heard you and Daddy earlier.”

“When?”

“Earlier. But when I tried to talk to you guys, no one was there.”

“The Ouija board? It worked?”

Hunter shrugged in her arms.

She thought about the board. David threw the planchette when he got upset. So if Hunter did try to communicate with them, he couldn’t because the planchette was not on the board. But a channel for communication had been been opened.

Marcy tensed.

The channel that was opened was never properly closed.

“Hunter, not that I’m not glad to see you, but how are you here right now?”

Hunter pointed to the dark doorway. “The scary man.”

Marcy looked at the doorway and saw something move in the shadows. She hugged Hunter closer, but her arms moved through air and landed on her own body. Hunter was gone. David jumped up and charged through the doorway with the baseball bat he kept by the bed. There was a loud crash and he screamed, then silence.

Marcy stayed in bed, hearing only her own breath, clutching the blankets close to her chest.

“David? You alive?”