“No.”

His wife’s “no” was so short and flat, so sure of itself, so isolated that Eric looked away, afraid of that “no.”

No. No. No.

Eric and his wife had sat in the car in the quiet for a long time before either thought to shape their tongues into words that shaped pain that shared it that let it out. After that long time, Eric finally felt words scratching at the inside of his mouth, desperate to crawl out from blankness, to bravely defy a powerlessness that whispered “words cannot speak.” Then he had said, “We’ll come back in the morning.” He had said it because it was logical, practical – a plan. He had said it because he did not know what to say.

He turned to his wife again.

“Becky.” He said her name. He could not say more than that. He wondered if Becky’s mouth ached to be of use, like his mouth did. If it also ached to articulate any kind of hope or comfort or love or maybe some sort of explanation for his mouth.

He held onto the steering wheel with both hands, clinging to it. He tried to think of words for things. He couldn’t find them.

“Becky, neither of us is ready for this. Let’s go home and sleep and we’ll come back tomorrow for the kids. They’re probably asleep anyways. It’s after eleven,” he said finally.

“No,” she said. There it was again. No. She sounded like a child. Sounded defiant and far away like children sometimes get when you think they must be imagining something and you just disturbed it. Eric wanted to be far away, wherever Becky was then.

It scared him that she was not speaking for Becky talked. She talked to him all the time about everything. To her, speaking was breathing. It was not suffocating beneath all the things you wanted to say (was she suffocating now?). So she spoke what she wanted to say, whatever it might be.

When they had first slept together, years and years ago now, Eric had thought it the highest expression of what he felt for Becky.  To him, it said everything. Words could never hope to say more than what they did. The physical possessed a confident determination for Eric that words lacked. He spoke by holding her hand through the night and tracing the arch of her brow with his finger and touching her thigh under the table and smoothing her hair.  But Becky needed words. She had said “I love you” first and she said it often, even now after seventeen years of marriage. Becky saw vigor in words, what hands could never express, the primacy in language.

She did not speak now though – it was the inevitable weakness of words, their smallness and quietness and elusiveness.

“Okay,” Eric said. He didn’t know what to say, but perhaps the buoyant sound of words would call her to speak.

She was silent.

If they went home, if they got in bed, and maybe if they pulled the sheets over their heads like Becky sometimes did when worried or afraid, and Becky could contort her body into that small little circle she slept in and he could hold her like that under the covers – maybe then he could start to fix this. By holding on to her. By hiding under the sheets with her and his warm breath would warm her more than the sheets ever could. More than words ever could. He’d stretch his body to hold hers, around hers, over hers so she’d feel a part of him like she sometimes said she did.

He turned to his wife again, and he watched her as she began to bite her lip. She was staring straight ahead. He wished she’d cry, at least. He knew what to do if she cried. People cry and you hand them a tissue or wipe tears away with your bare hands and you hug them and hold their hand or even just sitting there as they cry, letting them cry in front of you – sometimes that is enough. But Becky never cried. In his eighteen years of knowing her, Eric had never seen Becky cry. Not even now, after this, did Becky cry. And he, knowing her as he did, did not blame her. Could not blame her even as he had fallen apart in the waiting room and she had sat silently beside him in her own falling apart. Still, he resented the distance he felt from the absence of tears. Resented that he could not hand her a tissue or wipe her tears away with his bare hands or have reason – find a prompting prodding plea of a tear – to hug her right then in the car and hold her hand or sit there as she cried, as she sobbed into his shoulder and he would stroke her hair.

Damn it, Becky. Talk. Or just cry. If you won’t talk, cry for God’s sake, he thought over and over again.

She refused.

“Becky, we’ll pick them up in the morning. They’re fine here,” Eric said.

Becky said nothing. Biting her lip had become picking at her lip with her fingers, pulling off bits of skin slowly and methodically until, he knew, she tasted the salt of blood. He couldn’t see her face very well. It was a black smudge stain of a face, its eyes and nose and lips lost in darkness.

“Becky –”

“Eric, stop. I don’t want them waking up tomorrow not knowing.”

“Why not? Let them. They’re babies.”

“I want them to know. Now. Tonight.”

“What are we going to say?”

“Whatever comes out.”

“Nothing is coming out.”

“They’ll hear that too,” she said.

“No, we’re going home.”

“My children are not staying at your parents’ house for even one night. We’re picking them up. They’re coming home.” She turned towards him then, and the streetlight illuminated her face. She frightened him. He didn’t know that face, those eyes, the crease on her forehead.

He thought, then, about that morning and his wife washing blue glass dishes as she danced to Tom Waits in the kitchen, and how when he came in, she had looked at him and just kept dancing. He thought about last night and listening to his wife read James and the Giant Peach to their two youngest girls and how her animated voice tugged the words from the page to life like it did. He thought about yesterday when he was angry about some work thing and she had let him rant and when he was done she had smiled at him that odd smile with her tongue curled on her top lip, fixing everything. These things felt as if they had happened years ago. They felt far away, foreign, like moments from movies.

He longed then for a woman he feared he would never see again. Where were the words she had taught him? Where was his wife? Had she entwined her life so completely with Sean’s that his death was her death? Entire. Final. Irrevocable.  The thought horrified him.

She continued to pick at her lip. It seemed so violent now and her lip was visibly bleeding.

“Your lip is bleeding.”

“I want to cremate him.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to bury Sean. I want to cremate him.”

“We can talk about this later.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I am going to cremate him.”

“You want to burn your son’s body.”

“My dead son.”

“I’m sorry. Let’s decide later. Later, okay?”

“I already decided. I don’t want there to be a grave.”

“Jesus Christ, Becky.”

And then they sat quietly for a few moments. Eric quiet in the realization that Becky had not been struggling with love words that scratched achingly at the inside of her mouth – aching to touch Eric as his words had ached to touch her. All this time in the car and she had been thinking about how a grave was unbearable, the burning of a small body somehow endurable.

Language flailed hopelessly in that car. A feeling of hollowness prevailed – a hollowness that felt somehow nightmarishly puffed up like one of those pool toys the children were always popping in their rough jumping sharp-nailed playing. The popping would mean deflating and then the buying of a new, oversized, but doomed pool toy. The hollowness was overwhelming but release would not come to people who were not pieces of blown-up plastic. The fate of the pool toy was not their fate. Its blessed doom was not to be their doom. The God that deflated the pool toy with his pity would not deflate them. They’d remain hollow with the scars of stabbing, popping, the death of a son but they would not be deflated. Was that love? Could that be called love?

“Let’s just do one thing at a time, here. Step by step. I’m going to take us home because we both look like shit. We’ll terrify our children. We can get them tomorrow.” He spoke slowly. It felt like his tongue was cutting the inside of his cheeks.

Becky pulled the car lock up and opened her door and got out.

Get back in the car honey, he wanted to say. I’m going to make this better but I can’t if you’re going to close your eyes and do this like a zombie. This has to be the same as any other problem. Like we’ve always done. We’re going to get in bed and we’ll talk until we fall asleep. We’ll break it up into bits and pieces and examine each and I’ll say this and then you’ll say this until I see the same thing as you see. We can’t tell the kids like this. Not yet, he wanted so badly to say. Not yet, he so badly wanted for it to be true.

But he didn’t say any of this. Not then. And Eric got out of the car and followed Becky up the narrow path to this parents’ house.

It was strange to Eric that this Los Angeles house should look the same that night as it did when he was a child, that it shouldn’t look smaller and its whitewash face shouldn’t speak about a long time ago things that everyone in the family tried to forget as it usually did to him now. Instead, it was large and silent in the face of the death of a sixteen-year-old grandson that had spent Christmases here and Thanksgiving and sometimes the Fourth of July.

Eric did not think of when he was seven and he’d thrown a glass cup at the head of his youngest brother. Or how when he was sixteen he’d beat that same brother up until he was bruised and crying, and he did not think of the frequency of these kinds of events. He did not think of the endless guilt these actions delivered, how the guilt had weaved itself around him, tying his hands to it, making it so he could not look at his younger brother without resentment and a soft, blurred hatred he could not face. He did not think of the bitter way his skinny, alcoholic mother smelled when she put him to bed as a child or how she wouldn’t let them walk in the house with their shoes on or eat anywhere but the kitchen or play anywhere but the playroom and the backyard and how they couldn’t have a dog because dogs were dirty and little boys were too dirty too but the three had been born as babies who might just make the house less lonely for her. He did not think of the father who had abandoned him in this house, who moved to San Diego, remarried, and started a new family that had no room for Eric. He did not think of how his stepfather was never there because of work, but when he sometimes was home he was silent and intimidating and unapproachable. He did not think of how alone he had felt when he was fifteen, how he had stolen his mother’s painkillers, how resolved he had been, how he had lost his courage and flushed them down the toilet. He did not think of five years ago when he had stood in this front yard and listened to his mother as she calmly told him that his youngest brother had died in a car accident.

The house usually screamed these things to him as he walked up its pathway. In this way, Eric knew that Time did not fix things. Time didn’t care. Didn’t give a shit. If anything, Time made the bad things burn more boldly, more painfully with a clearness that sometimes woke you up at night – even when you weren’t walking up the pathway of that godforsaken house. Eric knew that when something really hurt real badly you couldn’t speak about it to your wife, your friends, or even to yourself. It was so large and dark and looming that you couldn’t really find it, just feel it. You carried that kind of pain with you for forever.

Becky, though, had not known this like Eric knew this. Becky’s childhood had been simple, clean, normal. She had grown up in Wichita, Kansas and knew no tragedy other than the small tragedies that fell on all families. Becky was a normal person. Becky was a healthy person. Becky was a happy person. In many ways, Eric had fallen in love with Becky because she was so normal and healthy and happy. He thought her foreign to sadness, carried her above it in a kind of reverence, thinking that so long as Becky was normal, healthy, happy, he might become so. Catch it like it was some sort of magnificent blessing virus. But now she was quiet. Quiet like the house was quiet.

No, at this moment coming up to the house, he did not think of the things that made coming to his childhood home awful to him – the things that stained Christmas, Thanksgiving, and sometimes the Fourth of July.  These things paled that night.

He thought, instead, of how last Christmas (was it really almost a year ago?) at this same house he had given Sean a model car kit and how they’d spent all day and most of the night making it perfect, making into something they would have forever, that would not ever change or wake up one morning, go surfing, and drown – cease to be. After that first model car, they’d made at least fifty of them in the course of a year. They’d spent hours in that garage, sometimes in quiet seriousness, painting white lines across red cars or black stripes on blue cars. It didn’t matter; only the precision mattered. As long as when done, the car glinted and said something for slowness, for sitting hours in a garage with the door open and the girls peeking their blonde heads in once in a while, but this was just theirs, girls. This was Dad’s. This was Sean’s.  Other times, their work was interrupted by talking and laughing and moments that Eric felt he had something to teach his fifteen-year-old son, something brutally truthful and wise he could give him like fathers should give their sons.

Last week, Sean had come in to the garage in the “Fuck Oakland” t-shirt Eric had bought him at the 1988 World Series. “Jesus that thing still fits you.” “It used to be really big on me, okay dad.” Sean was a skinny kid. Pale. Small-boned. Fragile. And then Sean had sat down and began working on a new car. “This one’s going places,” he’d said. “Yeah? You feeling lucky?” Eric asked. “Well do ya, punk?” Sean finished the line from Dirty Harry absent-mindedly. He’d memorized the scene when he was eleven, proudly reciting it to Eric with some accent that was part Southern and part God knows what. A few years later Sean had told him it was just to impress him – told him like it was silly, like it was nothing. It was everything now.

Then Sean had told him how his friend had pulled a fire alarm at school last week. How Sean had gotten into trouble with him. Eric had taken the opportunity to repeat to Sean something he had been telling him for years. Eric had told Sean that people don’t change, that they’re usually bad news, that he shouldn’t waste his time with some people. He’d told him that the thing to do was to be critical of people. “You have to cut through people to see them clearly, sharply. People, for the most part, are morons. Absolute morons. People are just afraid and selfish and stupid mostly. The one person who cares about you is you. Nobody else. Remember that,” he’d said something like that. Lectured, maybe.

He’d thought this preparation. This way Sean wouldn’t be so let down, finding out for himself. He’d know. Just got to cut through people and see them for who they are. Can’t change them. It wasn’t cynicism or elitism. It was being realistic.

Remembering it now, Eric grimaced. Preparation for what? Now it seemed pointless and cruel to inflict bullshit life philosophies on the poor boy. He’d be a boy for forever now, but not a hopeful boy but a boy whose father had told him about what life was really like. This is how life is, son. Ugly. Self-sufficiency. Defense. What a moron. Becky’d kill him if she knew half the things he’d told Sean, half the things Sean had listened to and probably believed and followed because he admired him. Because he wanted to be like him, and Eric had felt poetic influencing his son like that.

Becky had taken a different route in the raising of their oldest child, their only son. She’d protected him, held him closely, worried about him always. She was proud of his friendliness and his childish optimism – the same friendliness and childish optimism Eric had began to artfully break apart with words that communicated suspicion and a masculine wisdom. Becky wouldn’t let Sean take the bus to school or stay at a friend’s house if she didn’t know the parents. If he scraped his arm skateboarding, Becky fawned over him as if a scrape required the nursing back to health of a whole body. “Becky, he’s fine. He’s fine. Leave him alone. You’ve got to let the kid go. He isn’t four anymore.”

She didn’t listen though. When he was a baby, she’d woken up screaming and she’d looked wild as she told him that she’d dreamt they’d been at the beach and Sean had drowned. She looked so small and afraid and baby-like as she described the water in terrific detail. Speaking quickly like she did whenever she told him a story so that he could hardly follow her thoughts but still, he’d tried to dismiss her fears one by one. What he said next, he’d regret for years. After she was calm, he’d said, “I had a dream like that a few night ago.” “You dreamt of drowning, too?” “Yeah.” After that, Becky had been terrified of not only the ocean, but of the deep-end and the shallow-end, of lakes and rain and floods and just water in all forms. She’d taken the dream, in its being shown to both of them, as a sign. Sean might die in water.

It was this protectiveness that Eric had tried to counter with his lectures and his realism and his I’m your father and you’re my son and we should do things like this.  And Sean had built those model cars and recited Dirty Harry and listened to John Mellencamp and Meat Loaf and played baseball. Is this what Sean had wanted?

But it was done and it was over, and now Eric walked up to the house that had once held all his private, Becky-less, terrible nightmares. The house would hold her now, hold her as she was that night and would be for how long? Frozen as she was. Shocked as she was. Far away as she was. Walking ahead of him, determined to tell the three little girls that their older brother was dead. Dead. Would the seven-year-old understand this? Would the five-year-old? The three-year-old? How would they say it? How could they? Words couldn’t describe this to any adult, fluent as they might be in pain in all its nuances. Let alone to a child. Dead. A child? Speak it to a child?

They had reached the door, Becky had knocked, and after a little while, his mother had come to the door in her bathrobe. She looked at them and she saw, she knew. And she did not gasp or scream or cry, but she shook her head and let them in. His mother took Becky’s hands and Eric was jealous of the touching. He so badly wanted to hold Becky. Perhaps he needed to hold her and make her feel okay and maybe one day happy again more than she needed him to hold her. Then, the children appeared at the top of the stairs. They were so small, his daughters. And they had these giant blue eyes – the blue his, the giant Becky’s. They were small, yes, and they were young and they did not know that there was a flipside to anything that they had. He hadn’t given them the same lessons he had given Sean.

They shouldn’t know now. Too small. Too young. And he felt like a monster coming to ruin this smallness, to steal it. To steal what was so rightfully theirs.

“You aren’t a woodpecker,” Grace said.

“Yeah, Mimi said you were a woodpecker and to go back to bed. But we knew you weren’t. We knew it,” Madison said.

Lily, now the oldest, said nothing. She just looked from her father to her mother and back, and Eric felt that he might crumble under her look.

Grace and Madison ran down the stairs, ran to them, and jumped up at them. Eric picked Grace up. Becky took Madison.

“Lily, come down here,” Becky said.

“Where’s Sean?”

“Come down here, Lily. Please.”

Lily walked slowly, hesitantly down the stairs. They met her at the bottom.

“Let’s sit right here,” Becky said.

She wanted to tell them right here. Right now. What was her eagerness?

And so they sat down at the bottom of those stairs in that home that had been something removed from his family, something foreign to them, something he had protected them from.

But the house welcomed their pain, asking how Eric could ever have thought to erase the things it had offered? How could he have thought that he could create a life that did not know pain or hurt or any horribleness? The house laughed at him.

Becky began to speak, and her voice sounded to him like a hum without words. He heard the words “aneurysm” and “almost like being asleep” and “drowned” come from the mouth that once talked about waking up inside him. He watched the children’s faces as they changed right there before him. Lily cried. Sobbed. She understood. Madison’s face crinkled up, she asked questions, then her eyes seemed to darken, and she, too, began to cry. “Never again?” he heard her ask. “Gone,” he heard her repeat. Grace fidgeted on his lap. When Madison cried, Grace began to cry but she did not know why she cried. But one day, she would. He hoped that in ten years, maybe she at least would be unable to remember this moment. That Time, here and for her, would be of use.  That Time would fade, blur, and then erase pain. “But, mom, why?” Madison asked.

Eric could not listen anymore. He picked Grace up and sat her down on the stair below Becky’s. He walked through the living room and the dining room, he opened the screen door, and he walked outside. He felt wetness and coldness on his cheeks.  Then he heard the screen door open but he did not turn around. Suddenly his mother stood before him. The mother that also knew the loss of a child. The mother that he had never before felt so tied to, almost as if millions of strings were connecting them right then and there.

She looked at him. She played with the ties of her robe.

Wounds, like these, bleed always. And years later, he knew he’d beg Becky to move on. “We have to,” he would say. “My son dies beside me every night, Eric,” she’d say. “He was my son, too,” he’d say. “Then you cannot let it heal. How could you?” she’d say. And she wouldn’t let it heal. She never would. Instead she’d tear off a scab if it ever did form and play with the dead skin and she’d rub at the rawness of bleeding skin, daring it to heal.