“No shooting, no shooting!” Eli cries out. But his chest is already sopping wet where the older boy holding the huge water gun has doused him. Only moments before, Eli was shrieking with delight, running in circles around the jungle gym while two bigger kids wielding water guns and pistols chased him. I watch helplessly as his face shifts from excitement to tears of hurt and confusion. “I don’t like that boy,” Eli shouts. “I didn’t want him to shoot.” His disappointment is unbearable.
Even though it’s May, there’s a chill in the air. I take Eli upstairs to change into dry clothes and leave Roy in Riverside Park pushing Eva on the baby swings. The phone’s ringing when we enter the apartment, and I think about just leaving it. But I pick up just in time to hear Ted’s voice, just before the answering machine clicks in. Cradling the phone under my chin, removing Eli’s wet shirt at the same time, I tell Ted I’ll call him back later. But he keeps on talking and he won’t stop.
“He’s already six,” Ted’s saying about his son David. “It’s time he knows how Danny died. It’s a mistake not to have told him sooner.” I’m confused about why he’s talking about Danny right now, but then he abruptly switches to my mother. “They should know that she died in the water,” he pronounces. “Secrets are not a good idea.” He’s planning to tell David and Karl, too, this afternoon.
“Can we talk about this later?” But there is no later. I try to get a word in edgewise, and to stifle my anger until after I hang up.
“I’m telling them this afternoon,” he repeats. “About Danny, and about Mom. It’s not a good idea to let any more time pass.”
He has called to notify me, not to ask me. I’m furious. “I have to go,” I say, and hang up the phone.
Eli’s already busy playing in his room. I take a fresh towel from the bathroom and wrap him up and hug him, and try to forget about Ted and his righteousness.
“Why did those boys shoot?” Eli’s asking again. It was just last week when Eli and I passed a man with a real gun. We were on the way to a birthday party and we were late, so we were walking fast when we saw a man pointing a pistol into the face of another man who was chained to a fence. I jumped. And then I saw there was a third man holding a camera.
“They’re making a movie,” I quickly explained to Eli. Eli’s mouth was wide open.
“Was that a real gun?” he asked.
“They’re just making a movie,” I repeated. “They’re pretending.”
“Do people have real guns?” Eli asked.
“Some do.”
“What do they do with them?”
I paused, trying to figure out how to answer. But Eli was already figuring it out. “They only shoot bad people, right?”
I nodded, relieved. Eli’s view of the world was still intact.
It’s such a delicate balance getting death in the right place. I don’t want it always hovering beneath the surface of my children’s lives like it was in my childhood. I want them to know about death, but not be consumed by it. Honesty is essential, that’s always been my position. But not over-honesty. Not like what Ted’s advocating.
I’m not ready to tell my kids that my mother died in the water. Eli’s finally just begun swimming lessons, and Eva, who’s still too young to swim, loves to splash around at the water’s edge. Besides, we don’t even know for sure how my mother actually died.
But it’s the part about Ted talking to his kids about Danny that really has me enraged. There’s no way I’d ever hold Danny’s death as a secret. Ted knows that. I couldn’t possibly allow the shadow of suicide to loom behind the scenes of my children’s lives, like it did in our growing up. In that way, I know for certain I’m nothing like my mother.
Even before Eli was born, I’d thought about how I’d someday deliver the story of Danny’s death to my children. I knew it would be a pivotal moment in our lives. Plunging ahead right now doesn’t have to do with being honest. I’m sure this isn’t the right time for it. And what if Eli now gets the news from his cousin? David’s not much of a talker, so it’s unlikely. But Ted’s lack of sensitivity is infuriating. At four, Eli is definitely too young to learn about drowning, let alone suicide.
Ted can be like this sometimes. He can be unbelievably inconsiderate and think it’s logical. He can make a unilateral decision that suits him and self-righteously storm ahead like it’s good for the whole world. Like the time when he got angry at me for saying I wanted my own car back, the one I’d lent to him. I’d just moved back to New York, and could never find a parking space on the street for the little white Honda I’d bought (true enough, with my father’s help on the down payment) during my days in Washington. So I told Ted he could use the car until I figured out what to do next. About a year later, when I managed to locate a parking garage I could afford way downtown, I told him I was ready to have the car back. And he actually said no, I couldn’t have it. He couldn’t possibly give it back to me now, not just when he was planning to sell it! Janet was pregnant and it hurt her back too much to have to lean over the seat when she was getting in, so they were planning to trade it in for a four-door car, he explained as though this was rational.
Growing up, Teddy and I were companions. We were only two years apart, and Danny wasn’t born until Teddy was almost four. The two of us would spend hours in the basement, underground with the rusting pipes overhead and exposed stone walls surrounding us, while my mother took care of Danny upstairs. Sometimes my mother would bring down batches of homemade play dough that she’d make out of flour, water, and food coloring. It didn’t have the same nice smell as the real stuff that came in a can, and it wasn’t as spongy. But if you let it dry out and kept sprinkling water on it, you could shape it more delicately than you could do with real Play-Doh. I was the bossy older sister, so I got Teddy to run upstairs to get more cups of water, and I’d be in charge of building the villages we made in different shades of red and green dough.
In our underground world, we’d spend all afternoon practicing “Hush Little Baby, Don’t Say a Word,” preparing for the appearance we planned to make someday on TV on Community Auditions. I was the mother and I’d wrap Teddy in a plaid wool blanket and rock him on my lap while we sang. Once we got our own record player, our performances became more elaborate. We’d stage scenes from Babes in Toyland. Teddy would keep returning the needle to the same groove of the record until we got the song just right. I’d sing in my sweetest voice, “My sheep are gone for good, their cloaks our livelihood . . .” trying to get it just right, never sure of the exact words. Teddy would wander around, acting like my lost sheep, and I’d be Bo Peep looking for him in the corners of the basement.
When it wasn’t too rainy or too bitterly cold, we’d play outside with the neighbors. In the winter, I’d break the icicles off of the low-hanging eaves of the roof and give them to Teddy, who would suck on them. There were a couple of winters when some elderly neighbors made their backyard into a skating rink for their grandchildren, and sometimes when it looked like no one was home we’d go over there and slide around in our rubber boots. In the spring we’d pick the red berries that we thought might be poisonous, and together we’d mix them with mud, saying it was chocolate, and try to feed them to the boy who lived at the far end of the street, even though we knew it was wrong. And when it got a little warmer we’d play hopscotch or kickball. When there was an argument about whether one of us had made it to the base before the ball, Teddy and I would usually stand up for each other.
United as the two of us could be, though, we were also different, and not always on the same side. He always knew how to follow rules and how to get along with my mother. My mother liked that Teddy and I were friends (maybe partly because it had the look and feel of a well-functioning family), but she also liked having Teddy for herself. She seemed to understand him more than she understood me. He was more predictable to her and safer, which was essential to my mother. I loved to walk on the edge of the curb, and there was an especially high one that went way up above the street near the doctor’s office in Salem, where the streets were busier. “Get down now!” my mother would yell. But it was too much fun keeping my balance on the narrow stone curb high above the ground to come down. Teddy once told me he was amazed that I would just keep on doing what my mother said not to do. And I couldn’t understand why he thought that was such a big deal.
Teddy may have been cooperative with my mother, but he could also make trouble. Once he tried to scare my father by creeping around the house in the middle of the night. The stairs started creaking and I heard my parents’ door open. When I peered out from the bedroom that I still shared with Teddy, I saw my father treading around in the dark in his underwear, checking to see where the noise was coming from. He was walking very carefully in case it was a burglar or a murderer. He had a flashlight in one hand, and in the other hand he was holding the blown-glass bottle from the top of my parents’ bureau. Just as he was about to start going down the stairs, Teddy jumped out and my father screamed louder than I’d ever heard and raised the glass bottle over his head. When he saw it was Teddy, he started yelling even louder and I was afraid my father might hit him instead of the burglar, but he caught himself at just the last minute. Teddy didn’t like being yelled at, but he was pleased because he had won in tricking my father. I never would have thought to do anything like that, no matter how angry I was.
Teddy was very good in school. He was always in the smart class, and the teachers always thought he was one of the best students. I thought he might have taken a special test that told my mother he was smarter than Danny and me, because she always acted like she just expected Teddy to do better in school. My mother had been an excellent student, too. Once, she told us, her French teacher accused her of plagiarism because her essay was so far superior to anyone else’s. Of course, the teacher was completely wrong because cheating was something my mother would never do. Another time, when she was in elementary school she got to go to Gracie Mansion because she won an award for her paper on why she was proud to be an American.
It was a little after Danny was born when Teddy started getting sick with a kidney disease and he had to go to the hospital. Sometimes he’d be at Children’s Hospital in Boston for two weeks or even a month at a time. They’d attach wires to his brain and to his heart in tests called EEGs and EKGs. Once, my mother told us, they thought he might die, because he might have something called “water on the brain.” That was when my mother obviously had to devote herself completely to Teddy.
Danny and I would stay home with a babysitter while my mother went to visit Teddy in the hospital. In the cold afternoons, I’d have to play outside without Teddy. I’d play tackle football in the backyard with a boy named Laurie, who was a year older and lived a few houses up the street. He was a lot bigger than I was, and he’d jump on me and drag me across the cold muddy ground whenever I tried to run to the goal, the forsythia bushes at the end of the yard. Sometimes my grandmother would visit from New York, and she’d be there to wipe off the mud and grass stains when I’d come inside to get warm. But most of the time, it was the babysitter who was there, an old woman with fluffy white hair and wrinkly skin named Mrs. Varrell, who would always be just sitting there, on the couch in the living room, attending to Danny in his pale yellow painted bassinet.
When I finished playing, I’d take over watching Danny. If he was asleep, I’d just look at him. I loved the way he’d hold onto his ear when he was sleeping. When he woke up, I’d very carefully hold him, or try to make him laugh. I tried to put my mother and Teddy out of my mind. I was the one at home taking care of my little baby brother.
When Danny was old enough to really form an alliance with me, sometimes we would observe Teddy, who would always fall asleep in the back seat of the station wagon when we’d go on long trips. He slept very deeply, and we’d touch his scalp and move it around with our fingers, feeling the bristles of his short whiffle haircut, testing how much pressure it took before he’d respond. Maybe if we prodded him in the right way, we’d be able to figure out what made him different from Danny and me.
Sometimes I’d test Teddy to see how long it would take to get him angry. I’d put my toe just inside the entrance to his bedroom to try to get him to respond. He could get incredibly mad, screaming and stomping around his room. He wasn’t always completely good. Once when he was in third grade, he actually ran away from home. My mother went driving around in the car to look for him. She found him walking around the parking lot of the shopping center that was almost a mile away. But my mother didn’t get on edge with Teddy the way she did with me and Danny. She just seemed to love him more, even before he got sick.
I know I’ll call Ted back eventually, or he’ll call me. No one really wants to walk away. Our reflex is still to be close, even if things are tense. For a while I thought it was when he got married to Janet that we began to go separate ways. That was when he clearly started creating a world separate from mine, maybe a place he could count on. It was around then that I realized we weren’t talking much about the details of our lives anymore. We stopped sharing our friends like we used to. And we didn’t agree as much as we used to about our views of the family. When I really try to trace it, though, the point when Ted and I started going separate ways was when Danny died.
With Danny’s death, I felt like I’d lost my child. “Losing a child like that must be the worst thing that could ever happen to a mother,” friends would say, when I’d tell them about Danny’s suicide. “How can your mother stand it?” I’d nod back with a lump in my throat because to me, really I was the one who had lost Danny. And when my mother showed only blank emotion, it reinforced my role. In my pain, I not only yearned for Danny, but I hated my mother for her lack of sensitivity about the death of her own son. It remained my job to take care of him.
I could still hear Danny pleading with my mother to understand him, making her listen to the words of the Karla Bonoff song: “There’s a rose in the garden. / It will bloom, if you’re sure. / That you pay close attention / but leave it room.” “I’m the rose,” he’d tell her, playing the album over and over. It was the kind of thing my mother would laugh off as being ridiculous. After he died, more than ever, it was my mission to be there for Danny, no matter how much my mother refused to hear.
Ted’s response to Danny’s death was different. He didn’t seem to blame my mother for not understanding Danny the way I did. Besides that, the loss must have been distinct because as brothers he and Danny separately shared certain things—the same bedroom, the same overnight camp in New Hampshire where they climbed the same mountains, and the same college, although that was a place where Ted achieved, and Danny ultimately failed. As brothers they were also competitors, and Ted had the ability to succeed in places where Danny couldn’t—in school, in getting my mother’s attention, and ultimately in being alive. I worried about how hard it must have been for Ted to live with that. After Danny’s death, Ted seemed to try hard to remind himself of how much the two of them had in common. He told me he “admired my pain,” after Danny died.
With my mother’s death, it seems we experience it differently, too. Just like in life, clearly Ted feels my mother’s love, while I still struggle to find the ways to feel her presence. Ted remains allied with my mother, and I’m left grappling with whether she loved me enough. As much as Teddy and I shared growing up in our childhood home, we could also be two siblings on different sides. In the face of death, our differences are stronger.