“Mom, my cape!” Andrew shrieks as we return to the apartment, his Superman Halloween costume caught in the door.
Michael rushes back, holds Andrew’s chest so he doesn’t move, and carefully opens the door. “OK Andrew? Superman can still fly.”
I pour myself a glass of wine as the boys unload their bags of trick-or-treat candy on the kitchen table.
“Mom, I want to eat everything!” Andrew lays his face down on the pile of candy, as if to hug it.
“How much can we have?” Michael’s fingers have already clutched a couple of candy bars.
“You can eat as much as you want, but remember,” I point to a yellowed piece of paper on the refrigerator, a set of rules I wrote out shortly after bin Laden’s killing.
“Which one?” Andrew pushes his candies around.
“Capen Code number four,” I touch the paper, “you must ‘Understand that your choices will have consequences.’ So eat as much as you want, but if you eat too many, you’ll probably feel sick.”
“Awesome! As much as we want!” Andrew tears open candy after candy, stuffing his mouth.
Michael—ever the older and wiser—reminds his brother, “Andrew, you’re a lot smaller than me, you’re only five, so don’t try to eat as much as me.”
I strike a match and light several candles on an altar, the flames illuminating photographs of a handful of people. I have set out flowers, chocolates, good coffee, even a tin of caviar I keep only for this purpose.
“Mom, why do you put out food for photographs every Halloween?” Michael asks between bites.
“Dia de los muertos, the day of the dead,” I blow out the match, adjust a picture frame with a photo of my grandparents on their wedding day, stoic expressions and starched clothes. “This is how Oscar taught us to honor people that’ve come and gone.”
The first Halloween I had worked at the Sentinel, Oscar had told me he populated his altar not only with his loved ones who had died, but with newspaper photographs of people in Juarez who had been killed by the drug cartels; people who might have been schoolmates, people who could have been his neighbors, even people with whom he had no connection. Maybe it’s pointless, he had told me, but I believe the souls of dead victims want to be remembered, want to have a little of the life that someone stole from them. Thank God my girls don’t have to live in the danger, but I still live with the death of that place.
I dust off three pictures of people I never met, pictures I photocopied from the Sentinel’s archives more than a year after the paper had included them in coverage of the bombing; a 36-year old man on his way to the office, a 52-year old man on his way to a Santa Monica garden he maintained, and a 19-year old girl on her way to morning classes at UCLA.
“So who are all the people?” Michael stands next to me and points to each photo in turn.
I tell him the names of my grandparents and his great aunts, a childhood friend who died in a boating accident.
“And what about these people?” Michael points to the newspaper portraits.
“Those are people I want to respect.”
“What people?” Andrew joins us, flapping his cape up and down.
“These people,” Michael points again. “Why do you want to respect them?”
“Just because.” I step back to the kitchen. Each year I avoid this question. I am willing to acknowledge I have some connection to them, to ask forgiveness of their souls, but not to speak of it with the children.
“‘Just because’ why?”
Michael has never asked why there is no picture of his father on the altar. Maybe I should start adding other victims, other people I don’t know so these three pictures aren’t so obvious.
“Because I said so. Now stop asking questions.”
Andrew flaps his cape again. “Can I eat the chocolate for the dead people?”
“No!”
“They can’t eat it,” he says indignantly.
“No more questions. Eat your own chocolate.”