“He grew up. When she admits to anything being wrong, Lily thinks it might be partly due to Greer.”
“No way! I don’t believe that. Why would a little sister turn him into the Creature from the Black Lagoon? Knowing you two, you probably bent over backward to give each kid their share of love. Plus the fact Greer adores him. He likes her, doesn’t he?”
“Yes, I think so. He’s nice and gentle to her. They actually have whole conversations and once in a while he’ll even help with her homework. He seemed to be happy when Lily got pregnant. And you’re right—we spent a lot of time making sure each got their share, which wasn’t easy in the beginning because Greer was such a handful. You remember.”
“I sure do! If you’d asked me then, I’d have picked Greer to grow up and look like that. She was a large pain in the ass.”
“Yes, but look at her now. It’s like the house is partitioned between Us and Them. Aliens and earthlings. Lily, Greer, and I on one side”—I jerked a thumb toward Lincoln’s room—“the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse on the other.”
“What do you think they do in there? I mean, besides not screwing and listening to Car Crash.”
“Carcass. They listen to music and watch horror movies. Every once in a while you hear a scream and other goofy sounds from those films.”
“Yeah, but what else? Didn’t you ever look through the keyhole or… you know?”
“I went in there once when Lincoln forgot to lock the door. That’s another thing. He put a lock on the door that could keep an elephant out. The only one of us he lets in is Greer.”
“What did you see?”
“That’s what’s strange; the place was spotless. He has no pictures on the walls, the bed was made without one wrinkle, carpets swept… It reminded me of a Marine barracks. It was too cleeean. Creepy clean.”
“That doesn’t fit, does it?”
I was about to answer when I saw Greer’s school van stop in front of the house. She got out, immediately dropped her school bag, bent over, and patted her fanny with both hands for the benefit of someone inside the van. Then she wiggled it, picked up her bag, and walked toward the house without once turning around to see if her performance had had the desired effect.
She wore red jeans, a white polo shirt, and black sneakers. Her hair went up off her head in two pigtails. The face was more mine than Lily’s but there was a lightness that brought it all together, an aura of combined humor and naughtiness that came only from her mother.
Greer was five. Our miracle child. The child born when we thought there was no hope in the world of Lily conceiving. From the day she came into the world, she was trouble. Born premature, she gave the impression she was angry at having been brought in on our schedule rather than hers. She needed blood transfusions, experimental medicines. For a shaky ten days they thought one of her kidneys was bad and might have to come out. In her first weeks we thought and talked of little else. One night I had to tell Lincoln his new little sister might not survive. Perhaps that is when it started with him. He asked repeatedly if she was going to die. As calmly as I could, I told him I didn’t know, three different ways.
“Well, why don’t you do something about it? You’re not just going to let her die, are you?”
“We’re doing everything we can. The best doctors in the hospital are working to help her.”
“So what? Why don’t you get the best doctors in the world, Max?” He began to cry, but when I went to hold him, he pushed me away. “What if that happens to me? What if I get sick? Are you guys going to let me die?”
“We’re not going to let anyone die. We’re doing everything we can.” I was tired and frightened, but that was no excuse for what I said next. “I think it’d be better if you thought about Greer now and not yourself. It doesn’t look like you’re going to die anytime soon.”
He was a little boy. Life had grabbed him by the back of the neck and shoved his face into its most vicious truth. He didn’t understand. He didn’t know how to handle it. Who does? All he wanted was reassurance that we would always love and take care of him, but stupidly I heard it as selfishness and slapped him down with a mean line.
Then again, there is only so much you can do and there are final, unsolvable mysteries. With a clear conscience I can say that for the years we lived together, Lincoln had been my great obsession. Our children should be our obsession, but there is a critical distinction. Knowing they are a product of our love, combined genes, and the environment we create from resources, hopes, and effort is one thing. Knowing they are literally us, only in another skin, is the difference between coincidence and fate. No matter how much trouble Greer was, all we could do for her was to give everything we had and then pray to God for the rest.
My parents began staying with us for a month every summer. When he could, Saul would join us. Much of that time was spent reminiscing about our lives and I pumped all three of them for forgotten details, trivial aspects, and explanations about past days and experiences that would give me better insight into who I’d been. What ingredients was I wholly unaware of then that had gone into making me the man I was now? Can we ever really know ourselves without hearing what others think of us?
Sometimes they wanted to know why I was so interested in our past. Saul got angry one night when I overdid the questions. What the hell did twenty years ago matter? Why did I persist in trying to dissect or put those days under a microscope? Why not just leave them alone, enjoy the memories of a family that had held together and continued loving one another right up to today? Luckily I had a ready answer which soothed all of them and permitted more questions. I had read about an artist in Europe who’d had a show of paintings she’d done of her own childhood. Pretending it was my idea, I said drawing my history had been a secret dream project for years but I’d only recently gotten up the courage to begin taking notes and do some preliminary sketches. It was something that would take years to complete but, if done successfully, might turn out to be my greatest work. The Fischers were proud of my success as a cartoonist, and once they knew what was going on, they were charmed by the idea. Afterward, they talked and wrote letters or called me long-distance to say they’d just remembered something that might be useful…
I listened, read, worried. I worked so hard to learn the exact contents of, then clean up and order, the room that was my life. Not so I could one day draw it as it really was, but to use to help my boy make his life into something magnificent.
Mary Poe was correct in saying we had tried to do everything right for our son. But beyond the bedtime talks about God or how thunder wasn’t dangerous, the carefully wrapped sandwiches and only two cookies in his lunchbox, the circus, the ball games, vacations, going over multiplication tables together, popcorn, mowing the lawn, talking about the death of the dog so that it became an acceptable part of life…
Despite knowing what I did, what constantly surprised me was realizing the only appropriate way to raise this child was essentially no different from any other good and concerned parent’s method. My history, the secret knowledge, the huge number of books I read and thought about for years all said basically the same thing—love them, teach them humility, balance, and restraint, applaud them, tell them no when it is necessary, admit your mistakes.
Yes, you know these things already and I needn’t go on. Maybe I’m only talking to myself now. Like the man who has gone over his checkbook ten times but still cannot find out why he is in debt. I had a hundred dollars. I spent this for this, that for that. I can account for all of it, but why, then, is there less than nothing left? Why had our son turned into a dishonest, sullen, secretive knot of a human being? There should have been something good left over from the years of support, careful guidance, and love. But there wasn’t. There was nothing in this “account.”