In Derek Peck, Jr.’s, case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief — the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition — from differ-ential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting later weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.
He crouched over the body, staring in disbelief. “Mother? Mother!”
As if it was he, Derek, who’d done something bad, he the one to be punished.
He couldn’t catch his breath. Hyperventilating! His heart beating so wildly he almost fainted. Too confused to think, Maybe they’re still here, upstairs? for in his dazed state he seemed to lack even an animal’s instinct for self-preservation.
Yes, and he felt to blame, somehow. Hadn’t she instilled in him a reflex of guilt? If something was wrong in the household, it could probably be traced back to him. From the age of thirteen (when his father, Derek Senior, had divorced his mother, Lucille, same as divorcing him), he’d been expected by his mother to behave like a second adult in the household, growing tall, lank, and anxious as if to accommodate that expectation, and his sand-colored body hair sprouting, and a fevered grimness about the eyes. Fifty-three percent of Derek’s classmates, girls and boys, at the Mayhew Academy, were from “families of divorce,” and most agreed that the worst of it is you have to learn to behave like an adult yet at the same time a lesser adult, one deprived of his or her full civil rights. That wasn’t easy even for stoic streetwise Derek Peck with an IQ of, what was it? — 158, at age fifteen. (He was seventeen now.) So his precarious adolescent sense of himself was seriously askew: not just his body image (his mother had allowed him to become overweight as a small child, they say that remains with you forever, irremediably imprinted in the earliest brain cells), but more crucially his social identity. For one minute she’d be treating him like an infant, calling him her baby, her baby-boy, and the next minute she was hurt, reproachful, accusing him of failing, like his father, to uphold his moral responsibility to her.
This moral responsibility was a backpack loaded with rocks. He could feel it, first fucking thing in the morning, exerting gravity even before he swung his legs out of bed.
Crouched over her now, badly trembling, shaking as in a cold wind, whispering, “Mommy? — can’t you wake up? Mom- my, don’t be—” balking at the word dead for it would hurt and incense Lucille like the word old, not that she’d been a vain or frivolous or self-conscious woman, for Lucille Peck was anything but, a woman of dignity it was said of her admiringly by women who would not have wished to be her and by men who would not have wished to be married to her. Mommy, don’t be old! Derek would never have murmured aloud, of course. Though possibly to himself frequently this past year or so seeing her wan, big-boned, and brave face in harsh frontal sunshine when they happened to descend the front steps together in the morning, or at that eerie position in the kitchen where the overhead inset lights converged in such a way as to cruelly shadow her face downward, bruising the eye sockets and the soft fleshy tucks in her cheeks. Two summers ago when he’d been away for six weeks at Lake Placid and she’d driven to Kennedy to pick him up, so eager to see him again, and he’d stared appalled at the harsh lines bracketing her mouth like a pike’s, and her smile too happy and what he felt was pity and this, too, made him feel guilty.
You don’t pity your own mother, asshole.
If he’d come home immediately after school. By four p.m. Instead of a quick call from his friend Andy’s across the park, guilty mumbled excuse left on the answering tape, Mother? I’m sorry guess I won’t make dinner tonight okay? — Math Club — study group — calculus — don’t wait up for me, please. How relieved he’d been, midway in his message she hadn’t picked up the phone.
Had she been alive, when he’d called? Or already…dead?
Last time you saw your mother alive, Derek? they’d ask and he’d have to invent for he hadn’t seen her, exactly. No eye contact.
And what had he said? A rushed schoolday morning, a Thursday.
Nothing special about it. No premonition! Cold and windy and winter-glaring and he’d been restless to get out of the house, snatched a Diet Coke from the refrigerator so freezing his teeth ached. A blurred reproachful look of Mother in the kitchen billowing in her buttercup-yellow quilted robe as he’d backed out smiling ’ Bye, Mom!
Sure she’d been hurt, her only son avoiding her. She’d been a lone woman even in her pride. Even with her activities that meant so much to her: Women’s Art League, East Side Planned Parenthood Volunteers, HealthSty Fitness Center, tennis and golf in East Hampton in the summer, subscription tickets to Lincoln Center. And her friends: most of them divorced middle-aged women, mothers like herself with high-school or college-age kids. Lucille was lonely, how was that his fault? — as if, his senior year in prep school, he had become a fanatic about grades, obsessed with early admission to Harvard, Yale, Brown, Berkeley, just to avoid his mother at that raw, unmediated time of day that was break-fast.
But, God, how he’d loved her! He had. Planning to make it up to her for sure, SAT scores in the highest percentile he’d take her to the Stanhope for the champagne brunch then across the street to the museum for a mother-son Sunday excursion of a kind they hadn’t had in years.
How still she was lying. He didn’t dare touch her. His breathing was short, ragged. The squid-inky black beneath her twisted head had seeped and coagulated into the cracks of the floor. Her left arm was flung out in an attitude of exasperated appeal, the sleeve stained with red, her hand lying palm-up and the fingers curled like angry talons. He might have noted that her Movado watch was missing, her rings gone except Grandma’s antique opal with the fluted gold setting — the thief, or thieves, hadn’t been able to yank it off her swollen finger? He might have noted that her eyes were rolled up asymmetrically in her head, the right iris nearly vanished and the left leering like a drunken crescent-moon. He might have noted that the back of her skull was smashed soft and pulpy as a melon but there are some things about your mother out of tact and delicacy you don’t acknowledge seeing. Mother’s hair, though—it was her only remaining good feature, she’d said. A pale silvery-brown, slightly coarse, a natural colour like Wheaties. The mothers of his classmates all hoped to be youthful and glamorous with bleached or dyed hair but not Lucille Peck, she wasn’t the type. You expected her cheeks to be ruddy without makeup and on her good days they were.
By this time of night Lucille’s hair should have been dry from her shower of so many hours ago Derek vaguely recalled she’d had, the upstairs bathroom filled with steam. The mirrors. Shortness of breath!
Tickets for some concert or ballet that night at Lincoln Center? — Lucille and a woman friend. But Derek didn’t know about that. Or if he’d known he’d forgotten. Like about the golf club, the two-iron.