A Visit From Cody

CW: Themes of family trauma, grief, and sexual abuse.

You, Cody, are ready to stop farting around, mooning around the band room watching Tom practice the clarinet. You are needed, and though you vowed never to go back, if you don’t, things will suck forever.

The usual tableaux, sans you: Pop at his place, narrow shouldered, hair parted and combed. Mom, head bowed, frizzed and frowsy from cooking, Small James containing quivering kid energy inappropriate at the dinner table. Anne - and this is why you are required - pink cheeked and weeping. 

Your father doesn’t raise his voice. He has spoken. The matter is settled and concluded: Anne will go to St Katherine’s in May and return for the beginning of the semester in September. Your mother keeps her usual silence but you can hear her quickening breath, the scrape of her knife on the plate, her chewing tight and hurried like a caged rodent. Small James isn’t sure what’s going on but his stomach churns. He knows it isn’t good whatever it is, and he knows better than to ask. Anne stares at her plate through her tears. She wants to sweep her arm violently across the table so the meat and peas, the china, the silverware crash to the floor with wicked glee. Of course she says nothing.

Yours has always been a quiet family. 

You knew about Cousin Hal’s visits. You knew and Pop knew and your mother too, but each privately, maybe hoping Anne would (impossibly) say it out loud. Small James makes himself scarce when Hal comes to stay.

It takes them a moment to notice you, there at your usual place, where your chair, stored in the garage now, has surprisingly reappeared. No time was wasted rearranging the chairs around the table after your funeral, it's like you had never been there. Pop sees you first, goes suitably pale.

-Hi Pop

Hearing your voice Mom turns. Here you are in your Redhawks shirt, shoulders newly broad, hair longer than was approved of. She gasps.

-Yeah, I know. Unexpected.

Anne looks startled (of course) but you are touched to see, joyous. She says

-You knew too, didn’t you Cody? And Pop. And Mom. But no one says a thing. No one ever says a thing.

Your mother won’t lift her eyes from her plate. Small James says

-What? What did Cody know?

Anne tilts her head. She chooses her words with care, and, aware of your father’s discomfort, an almost triumphant precision.

-There’s a seed of a baby could grow in me Jimmy. Just a seed. Like a weed nobody meant to plant. 

Small James nods like he suspected it was something like that. Says

-But you don’t want it, right?

At the table, and all through the house, our magnificent, terrible symphony of silence.

You say

-Pop, you’re going to rethink this.

He begins to interrupt but a piece of underchewed ham catches in his throat and he struggles to breathe. You lean toward your little sister, who once saw you and Tom in each other’s arms in the field behind the gym and smiled at you merrily, conspiratorially.

You say

-Anne, is that what you want? Saint Katherine’s?

She shakes her head no. Her cheeks are damp and blotchy and you can feel the teenage heat off her skin, so familiar it hurts.

-What do you want, Annie? Say.

-I want it… I want it …

-Go on.

She’s frozen.

—Anne I’m here. We have to say things now.

My sister inhales, then, husky, determined, 

-I want it gone.

-Yes

You say

-Anyone can see that. Mom can see. 

Your mother is staring at you and where there might be horror you see wonder. And - can it be? Can you bear to see? - love. The unbearable idea comes that you might have talked to her about Tom and you and found understanding. You can’t think about this.

-Pop, Ann’s just a kid. Like I was.

(Well, like you are and guess you will be for the foreseeable, until you get a heads-up about what’s next)

-Pop, you knew about Uncle Hal, and you let him. You have to live with that. But not in the way Anne will. She deserves at least to go on and be a kid and have a life. Let her finally have a choice Pop. You’ve got to. At least one of us should have a choice.

Your father has a voice now but no, he listens. Your father, for once, listens. Is a dead son what it takes to make some men listen? His face for a moment colors with habitual rage but suddenly turns so sad it’s like the face of a man you’ve never met. He looks at his daughter.

-Is Cody right? You want to stop it?’

Anne is thinking of Hal’s fat arms and how she never tried to push them away, about how she wishes him dead but feels other things too. But she nods. Yes. Please. Stop it.

Pop says

-Well. I can talk to Pastor Raymond. I heard his wife knows a woman.

You think, why would your father know this?

But Anne’s face is softer, and her eyes clear, and her voice quivers less than you expect,

-Thank you Pop

Your mother’s eyes haven’t dropped from you all this time. She leans to you hesitantly and touches the blue red bruise round your neck and you feel it like a feather. She says, and you realise it has been stored up since that day,

-Cody, are you okay? Cody we’re sorry. We’re so so sorry.

-I’m better now Mom.

Small James says

-Are you gonna stay here now Cody? I got a new ant farm. I’m naming them.

-Nah. But I could be back. You’ve only got one brother and I’m him. Name a bunch of them after me.

Mom is not used to speaking. But -

-We’ll see to Harold. We’ll… 

This is new, beautiful, odd - every voice at the table being heard. You feel yourself vanishing like a fog’s descending, but just around you while the rest of the world stays vivid. This is what it’s like now.

You say,

-There’s an idea. I’ll pay Harold a visit.

And you will. And he will be so fat and pitious and full of shame that it will be a mercy when he joins you, never knowing there was ever a possibility of Small Harold in the world.

But mostly what will call you is the sweet reedy prayer of Tom’s clarinet as he practices in the music room, and the warmth of the earth in the field where you lay with him, and your picture together in the yearbook that year, arm in arm, grinning.