“When you were six years old we were having the downstairs re-carpeted. I was in the kitchen and you had wandered away from me.” Her face felt suddenly wet, but she didn’t try to wipe away her tears. “We had a conversation pit, they called them that back then. They were somewhat popular in the seventies. They had put the huge roll of carpet down on the edge of it and gone back to the truck for something or other. We never found out exactly what happened, but when we found you, you were at the bottom of the pit, the end of the carpet roll on top of you.”
All through his mother’s explanation Charlie felt around his head, his fingers finally settling into a particular spot three inches above his left ear. “I have this place here.”
“Yes, Charlie. That was one of the results of…”
“Couldn’t you have gotten it fixed? I don’t like it at all. My cap never fits right, and my hair grows funny.”
“Charlie, you were dead. There seemed no reason.”
“It’s not your head, Mom. You don’t have to comb your hair over and over again until it looks right.” His mouth suddenly seemed like this uncontrollable thing. He turned his head to the mirror just inside the apartment, and she watched as a sneer spread across his face in the glass. He turned back and frowned at her. “You should have watched me better. When Ellie and I have kids you better bet we’re going to watch them better than you did me.”
His mother trembled. “I made a mistake!” she cried. “And I have paid for it every day since then. You have been a constant reminder and a knife in my heart! But I never complained—I never even told you. I have only loved you.”
He backed up a few steps. It pained her to see. “You let me die,” he said, his hands held up between them.
“I’m your mother, Charlie, and I’ve always loved you. And I know it’s sad, it’s terribly terribly sad, but you just can’t have children. Just think of what they would be like. Something like that was never meant to be. My own grandchildren.”
“They’d be like me, Mom. Maybe they would look like me. What’s so bad about that?”
She gazed up at him, drying her eyes on the edge of her sleeve. “Oh, nothing, nothing, sweetheart. I’m sorry I got so upset.”
“Do you want some tea? Ellie likes it, so I have a lot of it. You can see my place. That’s what Ellie calls it—‘Charlie’s place.’”
“That would be very nice, Charlie. Thank you for inviting me.”
He held the door open for her as if he were a doorman at attention. She stepped inside carefully, watching her feet. Once inside, she sniffed. It was a bad habit. Her son had no smell, virtually none. He never had. But the mind plays tricks, and after he’d died she’d found herself attributing almost every unknown smell to him.
There were also no cooking smells, or smells of garbage, or unwashed clothing or unwashed body smells, the smells she generally associated with young men. There was a strong aromatic mix of soaps and disinfectants. Her son was no corpse. He was something else. He was his mother’s son, and no son of hers could be referred to as a corpse.
Charlie’s apartment was profoundly neat. The area appeared completely without clutter, the rug well-vacuumed, spoiled by not even a thread of lint, her son’s few personal items (if an empty vase, a stapler, and a battered dictionary could be termed “personal”) equally spaced on a single white plastic shelf mounted on the wall. There were a few toys—some cars, a plastic soldier, a yo-yo, scattered by the bed. While she was looking, he walked over and nudged them under the bed with his foot. “I don’t play with those,” he said. She gazed at the neatly made bed. “I have some cookies here, Mom. I used to like cookies. Ellie likes to have a cookie with her tea when she stays over. Would you like a cookie with your tea, Mom?”
“That would be nice.” She noticed his politeness, and noticed how his politeness pleased her. She went over to the bed, trying not to look at it too directly. On a small table beside the bed was a young woman’s photograph. She picked it up gingerly, as if it might go off. In her experience the most innocuous things sometimes had a tendency to go off, ruining everything. She stared at the image of the creature who chose to “stay over” with her dear, dead son. She didn’t like to think of these things, but how could she avoid it? The young woman in the photograph had a shy smile, and the saddest eyes she had ever seen. She put the picture down quickly.
“Here, Mom.” Charles walked awkwardly into the room with a cup of steaming tea on a small metal platter along with what appeared to be a spotless plastic ashtray with a single cookie resting inside. He went over to a large chest in front of the single window and set it down. “You can feel the wind when you sit in front of the window. I always like feeling the wind on my face. I don’t have any chairs. Do you want to sit on the floor?”
“That will be fine. Your floor is—very clean.” She sat down on the floor by one end of the chest and he sat down at the other. She started sipping her tea, which had a dry, dusty flavor, but she smiled and nodded at her dead son as she drank. The cookie was stale and hard, but at least the ashtray it sat in appeared quite sanitary.
Charles watched her as she consumed these things, occasionally peering out the open window, his eyes fixed and distant. Finally he said, “Mommy.” He stopped, closed his mouth and began again. “Mom, why aren’t I—” He closed his mouth again.
“Why aren’t you lying in some grave somewhere?” she prompted.
He nodded. “I want to know. Do you know?”
She was grateful for an excuse to put down that awful tea, even though her hand was shaking as she returned it to the platter. “I can’t tell you exactly,” she began, “because I don’t exactly know myself. We had the funeral, and it was very sad. I thought I would die, too, or that at least was what I deserved.” She paused then, looking for some reaction from him. As there was none, she continued. “For the next few days I stayed in bed while your father went to work. I knew he was suffering greatly, but I was in no condition to help him.
“At the end of a week, perhaps two—I really have no idea—I got up and made breakfast. Your father joined me at the table. No words were said. Then, after a few minutes, you walked in, much slower than normal, as if you had awakened from a hard sleep, and sat in your usual chair.” She stopped and looked at him. “Do you remember any of this?”
Without pause he replied, “I don’t remember. Was Dad surprised?”
“I thought he would have a heart attack.”
“Were you surprised, Mom?”
“No. No, I was not.”
“I think I knew you weren’t surprised.” She nodded. “Were you happy to see me?”
His mother did not know how to answer that question, and so she said other things she knew to be true. “For the first half hour or so your father cried and hugged you to him and told me how wonderful this was and what a joyful, joyful, thing it was that had happened to us that day, a true miracle. You, however, acted as if there was nothing unusual going on. You looked from one of us to the other, as if you hadn’t the faintest idea what we were talking about. Your father wanted to call your grandparents and all our friends and even neighbors who we didn’t know all that well.”
“Did they all come?”
“I wouldn’t let him call anyone. And just as I knew it would happen, over the second half hour or so, your father stared at you, and stared at you, until he became terrified of the sight of his own son, and he wanted to call the police and the doctors, but most of all he wanted to call our parish priest. But again, I would not let him. And though he said he could not bear it, he agreed to do what I wanted, and he did not make those calls.”