friends, our neighbors, even a reporter from The Sacramento Bee who wanted a “human element” to accompany her article. Daniel had been no stranger to the local news outlets, which had all printed pictures or run footage of him from one concert or another, receiving one award or another. Local hero...musical prodigy...
When I stepped onto the front porch that afternoon to get the mail, I found half a dozen cards tucked up underneath our doormat. Mom and I opened them together, read them silently and started a stack on the sofa table. Later that evening, she went outside and returned with a basket of corn bread and honey butter. Our house was under the surveillance of a small army of sympathizers and well-wishers, people who loved us but couldn’t bear to actually encounter us. And I didn’t blame them one bit.
That night Kendra, my best friend since fourth grade, called. I took the cordless extension into my bedroom and closed the door and sat cross-legged on the floor, feeling small and strange.
“I heard about your brother,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Thanks,” I said. We let the quiet between us stretch for minutes, and then I said, “I think I have to go.”
“I’m sorry,” she blurted again.
“I know.”
“Are you still going to go to the dance?”
It took me a long moment to figure out what she was talking about. And then I remembered: the Halloween dance, our matching costumes. Mom had made us our dresses, and Kendra’s mom had bought our matching wigs. We were going as the dead twins from The Shining.
“Um, no,” I said.
“Do you think that maybe I could borrow your costume for someone else? I was thinking maybe Jenna, from our homeroom? I mean if you’re sure you’re not going....”
“Whatever,” I said, my throat tight, and hung up.
It was the loneliest I’d ever felt in my life.
In the hallway, I paused outside my parents’ bedroom, listening to their voices. They weren’t arguing, exactly. Dad was packing—he’d be in Oberlin for two nights and back again on Sunday. Meanwhile, Mom was in charge of the arrangements for Daniel’s memorial service, which would be on Monday.
“I just can’t imagine that we won’t have a headstone for Daniel,” Mom was saying.
“We can have a headstone. Of course we can. We can have whatever you want.”
“But his body won’t be there!”
“No, it won’t.”
I braced myself with an arm against the door frame.
“I just never pictured...” Mom said, her voice trailing off.
“It’s the right thing to do, Kath. There’s an incredible expense associated with shipping a body—and besides, it’s not Daniel anymore. He’s gone.”
“It just doesn’t feel right. And how will we know? How will we absolutely know?”
“How will we know what?”
“When we get the—Daniel’s—remains, how will we know those are his remains? I mean, you read those things about funeral homes....”
“Kath,” Dad was trying to calm her.
“I mean it!” Mom’s voice had risen to a hysterical pitch, which I probably would have heard without eavesdropping. “I’ve been thinking all day, maybe they mixed something up. Maybe it wasn’t Daniel who died, after all. Do you know, I kept calling his phone and leaving messages? I was thinking maybe he would pick up and say it was some kind of stupid mistake—”
I remembered the times I’d seen Mom on the phone, dialing, listening and hanging up. I began to feel sick.
“They found his wallet in his pocket,” Dad pointed out.
“Right! And I could just imagine Daniel saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I lent my wallet to this guy from my dorm....’”
“Kathleen,” Dad said, “you’re being—”
“What? What am I being?”
They were quiet for a long moment, and then Mom said, “I know. I know exactly what I’m being. I don’t think I know how else to be right now.” She flung open their door and stepped into the hallway.
Startled, I stepped back, whispering, “I’m sorry.”
What else was there to be but sorry?
The trip to Oberlin was endless—the drive to the airport, the hassles of TSA screening, the agony of being wedged into a middle seat with nothing to do but think. Even when I closed my eyes, I saw Daniel—at six, at ten, at sixteen, at nineteen...at twenty-five, an age he would never be.
When I’d successfully forced Daniel from my thoughts for a few moments, I remembered again the name I’d written on my notepad: Robert Saenz. It was like swallowing a mouthful of dirt; thinking of him brought a lingering grit, a foul taste. He’d driven home while Daniel lay dying. “Careless, so careless,” Kathleen had bawled into my shoulder. But it seemed now that careless was the absolute wrong word. Careless was forgetting to throw the sheets in the dryer, or not picking up the promised gallon of milk on the way home from work. It wasn’t driving away with my son dying on the side of the road. I must have fallen asleep grinding my teeth, because I woke in Chicago with a sore jaw. My first thought was: Robert Saenz, you bastard.
The scheduled two-hour layover in Chicago grew to four hours, thanks to a weather delay. I watched as a cargo train wobbled by in the gray slanting rain, and uniformed personnel hoisted luggage indiscriminately into the hold. I strained, trying to spot my bag, which was black and therefore indistinguishable from dozens of other black bags. I hadn’t been to Chicago in close to thirty years, but the airport version of the city wasn’t one I would have recognized, anyway— steel-beamed ceilings, black-and-white checked floor tiles, deep-dish pizza, a preponderance of Cubs and Bears paraphernalia. The Chicago of my childhood had been my father, the cramped house with the nicotine-stained walls, the accordion closet door that had been thin protection against his rages.
Daniel’s death had brought my father back to me as a real person, rather than an abstract part of my past, buried alive in a time I rarely revisited. I hadn’t called him twenty years ago, when Kathleen was pregnant, and I hadn’t called nineteen years ago when Daniel was born, or seven years later when Olivia came along. Why ruin our happiness with his condescension? Later, when Daniel performed at Carnegie Hall, when Oberlin called with a full-ride scholarship offer, I’d wanted to rub his face in it: Look what my son has done. Look how well I’ve done, away from you all these years. But there had been the promise to Kathleen, and I’d never picked up the phone.
I was tempted to call him now, to hurt him with Daniel’s loss. Impossible idea—my father couldn’t begin to feel the loss of the grandson he’d never known. It was yet another defeat for me—even my effort to deprive him of his grandchildren would spare my father pain, in the end. Escaping to the bathroom,
