I still dream of Kevin nearly every night. The motif changes through the years. At some point, fairly recently, he began to play his guitar again. We are in a downstairs coffeehouse, late; exposed brick walls, dim light, shadows. The patrons have all gone, but a few musicians linger in front of their beers at wooden tables, figures in a Caravaggio painting. Kevin is among them, yet isolated from them; he is the only one playing, and the source of light. The pick in his fingers feathers over the strings, which are somehow in the foreground, and infinite.
Or he and I are struggling along through an immense crowd in some city, near the bottom of marble steps that descend from a grand hall, where an important event has just ended, a concert maybe. The people around us are exiting the hall. Kevin is small, and people jostle and press in against us, and I hold his hand for fear of losing him.
In the most disturbing and redemptive dream of all, Kevin as a young boy has been struck and killed by a car, and I feel our dream-shock and dream-grief as intensely as I felt it in the actual event of his death; but Honoree gives birth to another baby, and the baby is Kevin.
Dean is thirty-five now, and he is doing fine. He seems in possession of himself, aware of his limitations, and ready to live on his own in the wider world. We have found a small house for him in Rutland. He will move into it soon. Honoree has been preparing him for the skills and duties necessary to live in a house. One of those skills is cooking. Dean has been an eager learner. The other day I walked to the edge of the kitchen and found the two of them huddled at the stove, Dean a head taller than his mother, absorbed in what she was showing him. I can’t be sure, but I believe that she was teaching him how to cook chicken in fancy style.