Mate For Life

I tell Emily we’re going to run because I don’t know what else to do. Her dark eyes grow wide, because she thinks we’re going for a jog, which usually means a visit to the park. I know she doesn’t really understand half of what I say to her, but she’s the only one left to talk to.

Living in this house has become like living in a mausoleum. Or worse—a silent house of horrors. He barely talks to anyone, and never about Johnny. He rants and raves, but no talking. I would like to. I would like to sit in my living room in the morning, when the sun’s rays are pale and slowly begin to paint stripes on the wooden floor. I would like to sit with my coffee and Emily and talk to her about Johnny without worrying that he will hear and snap at me. They should have grown up together and I wonder if she’s going to forget him—after all, she’s young. I can’t bear the thought of him fading in our memories. Talking, I think, will keep him alive.

But I can’t even do this, because of him. He has taken grief and made it his alone, made it something violent and unquenchable, something I can’t touch and he can’t stop touching. If his grief were fire, he’d be raging with open wounds, burns that would never heal because he cannot walk away from the blaze. And I would be just outside, feeling the heat and choking on the smoke but never allowed to complain because it could never be as torturous as what he's going through.

Emily is still a baby in my eyes, just over a year. She obviously cannot talk back to me. But I feel that it’s important that she knows who Johnny is—was—and I want her to remember him. After all, I sometimes think that Emily wouldn’t even be here if Johnny hadn’t come first. They were supposed to grow up together. This was our plan, him and me. It was everything we were supposed to be doing—getting married in a beautiful lakeside ceremony. Being newlyweds for a while, traveling. Then, buying a starter house, where we still live. (Emily and Johnny should be romping together in the backyard, instead of Emily leaning against my lap in a darkened living room and Johnny sitting on the mantle in an urn, a prison for a child if there ever was one.)

I didn’t want the urn, that was him. I wanted to scatter Johnny to the wind, to return him to the earth and keep him in the fresh air and the snow and the springtime smell of grass blades. He wanted him in the urn, a reminder every day of what we didn’t have anymore. I understood that his grief was different than mine—how could it not be? —but I was Johnny’s mother! In the same token that I did not have a say in the final destination of Johnny’s ashes, I was also considered by him to be cold and unfeeling.

How can you be so calm? And you barely cry! You want to throw him away? You have to give me something! This he raged at me, in the beginning when I was still numb and feeling nothing, only coming alive for Emily. She was still so small then, and I held her a lot, even though my grandmother, who knows everything, told me not to spoil her by holding her so much. But the heat of Emily’s body against mine was something that tethered me to the land of the living, that kept me just outside his fire. I use the world “living” loosely. I wasn’t living, not really. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to be tortured quite the way he did. My son was dead—wasn’t that torture enough?

To be completely clear—I didn’t blame him. How could I? Before all this happened, when we were still in our rosy haze of dream life, he was a good man. A good father. He was earnest and a little dorky, if I’m going to be one hundred percent honest, and sometimes he got really excited about topics that felt like watching paint dry to me—the mating habits of Oldfield mice, for example. I don’t know why this one stands out in my memory; I can only conclude that it was the last boring documentary he made me watch before Johnny’s accident.

I still remember the narrator’s deep voice, talking about how Oldfield mice are unique among rodents because they mate for life, the mother and the father taking care of the babies together in the nest. Emily was asleep in my arms, and Johnny’s long-lashed eyelids were heavy in his lap, and while I was half-listening and scrolling my phone with my free hand, he was raptly engrossed with the television, wearing a tiny half-grin of wonder. Over mice.

But I remember it so clearly because there we were: in love, mating for life, our little family in our little house. It was one of those sweet little moments, where you feel flooded with warmth and full of gratitude. I can picture his lips as he made a psst sound, nodding down to Johnny, who’d finally succumbed to slumber (probably due to the boredom of the mouse documentary.) I remember his dinosaur pajamas and how his body flopped when he picked up and carried him to bed. Emily was limp in my lap, and I was content to leave her there for a while.

I don’t know what that feels like anymore. I remember it, but it’s as if I’m looking at someone else’s memory through a plate glass window, thick and warped. I think I know what it felt like, but I’m never going to feel it again. He is nothing like that kind, intellectual, gentle man that I married. I’m sure I’m not the funny, sassy, always-up-for-adventure girl he married, either. And what about Emily? Will she grow up to be what I thought she’d be: placid, cheerful, her personality so easy and gung-ho, the way she looked up at Johnny with love almost from day one?

Or, are we going to ruin her life? Living in this house, where pain is stretched out, mine like barbed wire you have step over and carefully avoid. Sometimes, you fall and cut yourself, but you just get up and keep going. His pain is more like a landmine in a field of silence. You never know for sure if you’re going to trip one up. Emily, I’ve noticed, seems subdued around him. He rarely even touches her, looks at her, and it makes me wild inside. He withholds himself from me as well, but I am an adult woman who can sort of understand that this behavior has nothing to do with me, only him and his personal torment. Still, I would give anything for him to come back to me, to take me in his arms and curl up in our bed with me and Emily, like the Oldfield mice. Instead, he sleeps in a different room now, and Emily sleeps with me.

I feel like they have no bond. And for some reason, this breaks my heart a second time. I don’t want to leave him, or Johnny (even if he is encased in white marble on top of our mantle, like some ancient relative who adored finer things.) But I cannot breathe in this house, not with the fire and the landmines. I’m not sure Emily and I can escape my barbed wire, but if we don’t leave, we’ll never know. She is my sole reason for surviving, and I know it should be him too, but its not. I don’t blame him, but I cannot tell him that any more. I’ve told him a hundred times, a thousand. He doesn’t care about my lack of blame; he crucifies himself enough for both of us.

We split up that day, because I wanted to take Emily to the park with me for a jog, because she was bigger now and I was excited to see her reaction. He wanted to go to his brother’s house, because they have a pool and Johnny adores his cousins. So, we decided to split up, and Emily and I would join him after the park, after I came home and grabbed a shower. I got Emily ready while he packed the pool bag and Johnny bounced off the walls with excitement. I didn’t have to remind him to slather on the sunscreen or take his floaties. He wasn’t the kind of dad who didn’t know his way around a diaper bag or how to handle a playdate. Without much thought, I kissed him goodbye, ruffled Johnny’s hair (why didn’t I pick him up, squeeze him, say I love you?) and off they went and off I went and we were so blissfully naïve that our entire life as we knew it was about to end.

I don’t blame him.

I can’t really talk about it, not even in my own head. I wasn’t there, and I haven’t ever heard his version, not once, just his brother’s, and I know from the way his brother’s voice shakes, the way they don’t even speak anymore, that it was no one’s fault. That everyone is just as traumatized by the loss of my son as I am. It was the thing they tell you, the bullet point list on parent websites about water safety—never take your eyes off them. But they did. No one can ascertain as to why Johnny’s floaties were off—did an adult remove them so he could run to the bathroom? The older kids hadn’t yet returned from their Saturday morning sports, and it was just him and his brother, but they don’t remember. Maybe Johnny took them off himself? He was four, certainly dexterous enough to do so. And we’d been practicing without the floaties—had we not been diligent enough at reiterating that he was never to go in the water without them unless we were right there? Did he slip and fall or try to jump or was he just tired? They didn’t hear a splash. They just turned and he was gone and there was a smear of red on the bottom, his little swimming trunks with firetrucks and one of them jumped in and I was never clear on who either but it doesn’t matter because it was too late. It was too late then, too late while his brother did CPR, too late when the paramedics arrived, too late when his brother’s family walked in through the back gate, too late when someone finally called me. I missed the call, because Emily was snoozing and I was in the shower, googly eyed over her first park visit and the pleasant afternoon that was supposed to come.

How could I blame him? Mistakes happen. Grave ones that can change who you are. The man I once knew, the one I married and picked to be a father to all the children I imagined we’d have, wasn’t negligent. His brother, who I haven’t seen since this all happened, wasn’t negligent. All of us were destroyed by this event, but I’m trying to pick myself up. I have a therapist. His brother, I’ve heard, has a therapist, and took a sabbatical from work and bought an RV and is driving across the country this summer, probably thanking his lucky stars that all his children are still alive.

One day, not too long before I told Emily we were going to run, we had a terrible fight. Mostly, it is silent rage that steams off him, and he’s even taken to drinking scotch now, which is absurd since he used to be a man that had perhaps two light beers on a rare occasion. I screamed at him that I could not keep living this way and he screamed back that he didn’t understand how I was moving on, that it had only been a year, and I screamed again and begged him to look at me, to see me and Emily, who was not in my line of vision but I could imagine she was behind me, terrified at the volume and cruelty in our voices.

Emily is not my son! That’s what he bellowed at me when he threw his glass at the wall, where it shattered and fell to the floor as if in slow motion, the brown liquid running down the wall. He screamed this as if I were an idiot, as if I truly believe anything could replace the child that used to live inside me, the one who made me a mother, the one who was supposed to live long past the age of four, the one who is probably watching us from the mantle and quivering just like Emily is.

And I know you blame me, he says, finishing his angry monologue, the same diatribe he has been whipping at me for a year, as if this is all my fault, and my supposed hatred of him for not keeping our son alive is the reason we are living like this, tiptoeing around the barbed wire and the land mines until one explodes. I cannot keep telling him otherwise. I hang my head in defeat.

He walks out of the room, and I go to Emily, who is sitting in the corner of the living room where all her toys are, shaking. She looks at me with worried eyes and I sit down beside her, running my fingers through her hair. It’s okay, I tell her. I think about how far this is from the day that was not so very long ago, the night when we all snuggled together on the couch, when she was still brand new. Now, there are tributaries of scotch on the wall and broken glass that I know I have to clean up so she doesn’t cut her little feet. But I can’t stop thinking about that moment, that one I'll never reach, when we were safe and warm and all together.

As I tell her about it, making my voice as soothing as possible, I realize then that we have to leave. And this will be hard because he is half of my son, but he no longer feels like half of me. And I’m taking Johnny with me, and I’ll release him into the air. I deserve that—everything has been about him, and his grief. But what about mine? His plight has been so much more crushing than mine, I get it. But he’s wrong about me. I’m not cold, and I do cry.

So, I tell Emily about the life we should’ve had, how we sat on the couch and watched a documentary about Oldfield mice, and how they mated for life and how I once looking at Daddy like that, and how Johnny was supposed to be here, and nothing was supposed to be like it is now. She relaxes, lays her head on my lap, and grows sleepy, and I am suddenly full of a need to leave, to take her out of this house, to run.

When I say run to her a few days later, I know she assumes we’re going to the park for a jog, which is something we’ve done regularly since Johnny died. But I also think she gets it that something more is happening, because she can see me putting clothes into a suitcase, and loading things into my car, and even making a special bag stuffed with her favorite toys.

I should tell him that I’m leaving. I should properly do it—file for separation, or divorce. For some reason though, I think this will break him completely. I leave him a note instead and tell him I’ll text him soon. I leave the urn for the same reason—he never looks inside, and he’ll never know what’s left of Johnny is gone too.

I look at Emily and wonder if he’ll even care that she’s gone. I decide that he won’t, and I don’t feel any guilt at all about taking her. He hasn’t taken care of her since before Johnny, hasn’t bonded with her, hasn’t even tried. I doubt he knows her schedule or what she eats now. I look at her innocent brown eyes, her complete trust in me that this running away is the right thing to do.

I tuck the plastic bag full of Johnny carefully into my purse, grab my keys, and snap Emily’s leash on. Her whole body wags in anticipation as she pulls me out the door so quickly I cannot possibly feel regret or take one final glance. This dog is the thing that saved me, and maybe she will save him too. Maybe our absence will remind him that he hasn’t lost his entire family, not yet.

I shift the car into drive and lower my sunglasses as tears fall. Obviously, I don’t need to hide my sorrow from Emily, but I do anyhow. On the seat beside me, she pants contentedly, only looking forward, never back.

Then again, maybe he will miss her. I realize, as I reach over and stroke Emily’s fur, that this is what I truly want. The sorrow of this life is only going to be bearable with him at my side. Maybe us running will snap him out of it, and he’ll realize that we are still like the Oldfield mice after all, and we’ll come back together in our nest and continue to be a family. To mate for life.