Love & Darts (9781937316075) (20 page)

Solutions come
easily when you cradle your dead son on your lap. More strict less
strict understanding tolerant easygoing lots of hugs. There aren't
any gray areas anymore. I know what I should have done for Jason,
what I could have done for him. But it wasn't so easy when he came
home drunk, so self-righteous, and so full of hard-edged life. I’d
never admit it. Not even to my husband, Dan, but in my mind I
called my son Genghis Khan. Because to have this massively
disrespectful adult-sized child in my kitchen, with my collections
of Longaberger baskets and antique swan figurines, was just beyond
comprehension. I got so sick of his back talk. I wanted to beat the
insolent belligerence out of him. Don't get me wrong; I never hit
my child, but I did as much with words. Well not me, exactly. My
husband was the enforcer.

I never questioned it. Because other people's
children tiptoe in and try to sleep off their beers. Not my son.
Seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, curfews didn’t matter. He’d come
into the house with an armload of empty beer bottles and dump them
in my kitchen trash can. He never got sick; just wanted to eat.
Invariably he’d cook something. Two in the morning and he’d have
half the kitchen torn apart trying to make scrambled eggs or
grilled cheese and bacon. Never anything simple like a bowl of
cereal.

Upstairs I’d roll over and fret. My mind was in a
constant tizzy about whether we should have done more of this or
that. Everything that seemed like it might have been a mistake
replayed to haunt me. Regret is not a strong enough word. I was
dismantled. Night after night the world I tried to build came down.
And it was never meant to be a dungeon for him, never a cell he was
sentenced to as punishment. I wanted a fortress just to protect
him, to keep him safe, to give him a chance. Because I knew no one
would understand. People wouldn’t love him like I did if they knew
the truth. Maybe we’d been keeping secrets from him about some part
of life he should have understood. But how could he know anything
about what I did? He wasn’t even born.

But that kid picked up on something. When he’d come
home all clattering beer bottles like that, it’s not that Dan and I
weren't already awake waiting for him every time. We were usually
in bed each pretending the other might be sound asleep. After
twenty minutes of listening to dishes break and cans of corned beef
hash fall on the tile, to the faucet running to overflowing and him
banging around into everything, it was like a pattern. I’d say,
“Maybe I should just go down and make him a real meal.” Only after
my suggestion did the man I married ever say, “No. No. You get some
sleep, dear.”

No one knew. Jason didn’t look much different than
his brother. But. Oh God. What I wouldn’t do to have those three
weeks of my life back. Dan forgave me, let me come home, and that
was it. We moved on with our lives. Did everything we could for
both our sons.

But Dan operated from this frightening sense of
honor about the whole thing. So those nights when Jason came home
drunk, when I was about to get up and go down to him, maybe even
sit with him long enough to tell the whole story, my husband always
did what he thought was the right thing. Dealt with it for me, you
know? So he’d pat me and go downstairs. Exactly the same way every
time. “No. No. You get some sleep, dear.” And then two taps like I
might have been a Labrador.

And that was it. Dan kicked off the covers,
muttered, swore a bit to me, and went downstairs. He always started
in on him the same way. “Damn it, Jason. Your mother is trying to
sleep. What the hell do you think you're doing actin’ a fool in my
house? Are you drunk?”

Now even if me and my husband had
a routine upstairs Jason had two different responses. He’d either
laugh hysterically and go right on bumpin’ into things, or he’d fly
into an uncontrollable rage. Personally, I liked the rage better.
They got everything out in the open. Sure they fought like hell. I
half-thought they’d like to kill each other some of those nights.
But they got exhausted quick and usually stormed off to bed within
the hour.

If Jason laughed right in his father’s face, though,
those nights took a lot longer. Instead of screaming fits I heard
taunting, jeering, and lectures. I never went down, but I could
just see my Dan standing in the middle of our kitchen with his
hands on his hips and his spindly little-old-man legs running down
into those disreputable slippers, seething mad at the insolence,
professing his infinite knowledge to the drunk cook. All the while
I could hear Jason disrespecting his father, darting all around in
the cabinets and the pantry looking for different things to throw
into his late-night snack. Once they went on that way for more than
three hours.

In the morning I’d clean up an incredible mess.
There'd be the skillet with eggs, tomatoes, cheese, even chocolate
chips cooked up and stuck to my Teflon.

Sometimes, instead of saying anything to my husband
in our bedroom, I’d try to get to my son first. I’d get up and make
a motion to go down before Dan so I could talk to Jason alone, make
a little peace, maybe sedate him some. But I never made it farther
than the landing. I guess it was a father-son time. Really those
nights were about the only time those two were ever in the same
room together. Jason avoided his father. Dan just seemed oblivious
to his older son a lot of the time. He gets along better with
Daniel. I try not to notice. Dan tries not to have it be true.

I wish I wouldn’t have been so apprehensive those
nights. I could have marched down the stairs like Cleopatra and
told them both to go straight to hell or at least suggest they see
some kind of psychologist. I knew there was something wrong, but I
didn't know how to help. Guess it was the guilt, the shame. And
just not believing that three weeks in a life matters much at all.
If it would have been anyone else’s kid, I would have had all the
answers. You can see it better. Know what might help. But I acted
like an idiot with my own son. I flashed him sappy smiles or
reached out to touch him as he jerked away. I don't know. I used to
think he favored me. But I don’t know now. Maybe in some ways he
didn't respect me as much as he did his father. That’s probably why
I never told him. He would have hated me, judged me, judged
himself.

But he should have known his story. And there were
times, dark times, lonely times, boring times in my life when just
looking at my son gave me so much joy. Because he was a reminder of
those three amazing weeks. He had the same shape head as his real
father. And sometimes when I’d sit in my chair next to Dan,
watching the news or a movie in the evening with the kids, I’d just
look at the shape of Jason’s head and be transported to a place
that made me smile. I couldn’t live without Dan. But that child was
a true blessing to me his whole life.

Still. I don’t know if he respected anything. I
guess he liked that job delivering milk and ice cream. He knew
every one of the restaurant, convenience store, and gas station
owners and managers in a forty-mile radius. Liked his boss. Liked
training the new guys. Ran two routes a day when someone was out
sick or if one of the guys’ wives was having a baby.

I fell into a habit of doing things for him that I
remembered he liked when he was little. Stupid, I know. I baked
cookies and left him little notes on the kitchen table like I used
to. I hope it comforted him a bit. He was having such a rough time
in those years. With cancer patients—my mother died of cancer—at
least you can dope them up on painkillers. You know they’re
suffering and there’s something you can do for them. But there is
so little you can do for someone like my Jason. It was just as
chronic. I remember thinking that I was glad he drank because maybe
it would numb some of that pain in his little lover-shaped head. I
never said that to Dan. It's absurd to even think drinking’s the
answer. Most people would call me crazy. I think I was right,
though.

But then I was just holding him there in the street.
I knew I should have told him everything, should have defended my
son to Dan, to the world.

I never could.

I remember how I heard the screech and how the
transformer popped right before the electricity went out. Dan was
on a business trip. I ran through the garden in my robe. I remember
it felt like I was wearing a bedsheet. The cotton was too crisp and
wouldn't move fast enough.

The car was smashed in on the passenger’s side and
the pole he hit had fallen. Electric lines hung slack and one was
broken. Its two limp sinister ends swung slowly. I couldn't find
him at first. Had to be careful of those live wires. I looked in
the car, but he wasn't there. Usually Victoria’s security light
floods three acres. But Jason hit whatever pole controlled that. I
knew she’d make a call so I just kept running, looking
everywhere.

There was a moon. It was that slack moon that always
makes me uneasy, wishing for the beauty of phases that are more or
less full. But thank God for the light of that slumped thing in the
sky or I never would have found him.

He was thrown across the road. Almost into a ditch
on the other side. He was so blue-white in that light. It made him
look dead the minute I saw him. It was odd. You imagine a body just
lying nice and flat, but he was all crumpled up. His right arm
stuck straight out, falling down the slope of the new spring grass.
His left arm must have broken because it just sank where something
should have been bone. His left foot was on the road, but his right
foot was way up under his chest.

His beautiful face got crushed half-slack just like
that sorry moon. His head was twisted, his neck obviously broken,
his mouth open with the top row of teeth sunk into the gravel and
mud on the shoulder of the road. His tongue was hanging down in it.
God. I sat there with his head in my lap for maybe fifteen minutes.
Probably shorter than that, really. It was pitch black except for
the moon and the stars.

Those so-called sweet birdies chuck their young out
of the nest and if they can't fly—oh well. Can those parents
possibly know? Do they have an instinct about when their chick is
ready to fly? We didn’t. Not really. We just figured by the time he
was as old as he was he should be able to hack it.

Oh I knew everything for a moment. Everything about
teaching responsibility and self-respect and obligation and fear.
Sitting in that gravel, trying to lift his whole weight onto my
lap, unable, and then with his crushed skull in my hands, like I
could fix it, maybe, but no, as soon as he wasn’t so vividly alive,
I had answers. I gave myself pompous advice, came up with solutions
about what to do with truth and lies. Dan goes to church a lot now
I've noticed, but it doesn't help me much.

Going back
in time and forward too, they drove across the western edge of the
Eastern Time Zone and lost an hour. A carol recording played too
loudly into the landscape at a Christmas tree farm in 2006. It was
almost dark. The scent of hot spiced cider and gingerbread cookies
came down from the barn where two matronly Midwesterners sat on
folding chairs selling wreaths and centerpieces.

In the parking lot the Watsons’
dog Squally ran ahead into the rows of evergreen trees, rummaging
with her snout, discovering everything she could about the farm’s
firs and pines as the temperature continued to drop. A frozen crust
of what hadn’t melted during the warm part of the week covered
rutted rows. Dan stopped at the edge of the lane and leaned against
a post. “Damn.” One boot sole was separating from the
leather.

Marie moved on with her head bent
down into the wind, following Squally’s caprices. She had told him
not to wear the boots. She stopped again and folded her arms across
her chest. Her red turtleneck sweater and down vest weren’t quite
warm enough. She should have worn another layer. “Come on, honey.”
And she really wished she had a hat.

“But the boots. What about Dad’s
boots?” Catching up to her, whistling sharply for Squally to come
back and stay closer, Dan fished through the pockets of his canvas
coat and found an old black stocking hat. He handed it to his wife.
“They’re falling apart.”

She did not think to thank him for the hat but held
a bright-colored nylon leash, dingy from a year of use, in her hand
and decided not to use it. She watched Squally bound off into the
trees with pricked ears.

“Why aren’t you saying anything? Didn’t you hear
me?”

Dan held a handsaw at arm’s length and swung it in
wide arcs almost like the pendulum dips of an amusement park’s
Viking ship ride which swings back and forth, up and down,
hesitating at the heights before plunging down, releasing joyous
screams of terror.