“This is tragic,” he says. “Can anything be done?”
“So much can be done,” I say. “But everything would have to be different.”
“Well,” he sighs, “now Grandma and Poppa know. She wanted to watch it.”
“Have you heard anything about a flu,” I ask. “Does anyone you know have the flu?”
“Grandma died of the flu.”
“No. They died in a car accident. You know that.”
“Sometimes they get mixed up,” he says.
Colson’s the age I was when I was told about the country. Ten years later I’d be married. I married too young and unwisely, for sure.
“Do they sometimes tell you stories you don’t believe?”
“Daddy,” he says with no inflection, so I don’t know what he means.
We finish the popcorn. He did a good job. Every kernel was popped. I take the bowl to the sink and rinse it out carefully, then take a clean dish towel from a drawer and dry it. It really is an extraordinarily lovely bowl. I don’t know where to put it because I don’t know where it came from.
A few days later my father is back. He was a handsome man with handsome thick gray hair.
“Son,” he says, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“It’s all right,” I say.
“No, it’s not all right. I wish I knew what to tell you.”
“Colson, honey,” I say. “Stop.”
“That’s no way to have an understanding,” he says. “Your mother and I just wish it were otherwise.”
“Me too,” I say.
“We wish we could help but there’s so much they haven’t figured out. You’d think by now, but they haven’t.”
“Who’s they,” I ask reluctantly.
But Colson doesn’t seem to have heard me. He runs his fingers through his shaggy hair, which looks damp and hot. My boy has always run hot. I wonder if he’s bathing and brushing his teeth. My poor boy, I think, my poor dear boy. Someone should remind him.
The following afternoon when Colson is with his tutor, who, I think, is deceiving both of us, though to all appearances he is a forthright and sincere young man, I drive almost one hundred miles to see Lucy, the other elephant. She is being sponsored by two brothers who maintain the county’s graveyards, some sort of perpetual care operation, though to be responsible for an elephant is quite another matter, I would think. The brothers are extremely private and shun publicity. It was only after great effort that I learned anything about them at all or the actual whereabouts of Lucy. Someone — though neither of the brothers, a friend of the brothers is how I imagine him — agreed to show me around the grounds that she now occupies, but I find that once I reach the gate I cannot continue.
I turn back, ashamed, and more estranged from my situation than ever.
When I return home the tutor has left and Colson is putting his drawings in order, cataloging them by some method unknown to me. When my mother and father were taken from us so abruptly I knew that Colson was terribly bereaved. Still, he did not want my father’s safari hat or his water-bottle holster. He did not want his watch or his magnetic travel backgammon. Nor did he want my mother’s collection of ink pens, which I suggested would be ideal for his drawings. He wanted no mementos. Instead he went directly to communication channels that are impossible to establish.
“Where were you, Daddy,” Colson asks.
“Why, at work,” I say quickly.
Surely I am back at my usual time. I seldom lie, indeed I cannot even remember the circumstances of my last falsehood. Why would he ask such a question? I kiss him and go into the kitchen to make myself a drink but then remember that I have stopped drinking.
“A lady came by today but I told her I didn’t know where you were.”
“What did she look like,” I ask, and of course he describes Jeanette to a T.
I am so weary I can hardly lift my hand to my head. I must make dinner for us but I think the simplest omelet is beyond my capabilities now. I suggest that we go out but he says he has already eaten with the tutor. They had tacos made and sold from a truck painted with flowers and sat at a picnic table chained to a linden tree. I have no idea what he’s talking about. My rage at Jeanette is almost blinding and I gaze at him without seeing as he orders and then reorders his papers, some of which seem to be marked with only a single line. I feel staggeringly innocent. That is the unlikely word that comes to me. Colson puts away his papers and smiles, a smile so radiant that I close my eyes without at all wanting to, and then rather gently somehow it is day again and I am striding through the bustling wasteland to Come and See! The reflection concerns Gregory of Nyssa. He is a popular subject but I am forever having difficulty in recalling what I already know about him. Something about the Really Real and its ultimate importance to us, though the Really Real is inaccessible to our understanding. Food for thought indeed, and over and over again.
When the meeting concludes and we are dismissed I practically hurl myself on Jeanette, who has uncharacteristically contributed nothing to the conversation this night.
“Don’t ever come to my house again,” I say.
“Was I really there, then? I thought I had the wrong place. Was that your son? A fine little boy. He can certainly keep a secret, can’t he.”
“I’ll call the police,” I say.
“Goodness,” she laughs. “The police.”
It sounded absurd, I have to agree.
“I was concerned about you,” she says. “You haven’t been here for a while. You’ve been avoiding us.”
“Don’t ever again…” I say.
“A delightful little boy,” she continues. “But you mustn’t burden him with secrets.”
“…come to my house.” I couldn’t be more insistent.
“Actually,” she says, “no one would fault you if you stopped attending. How many times must we endure someone making a hash of Gregory of Nyssa? People are so tenacious when they should be free. Free!”
I begin to speak but find I have no need to speak. The room is more familiar to me than I would care to admit. Who was it whose last breath didn’t bring him home?
Or am I the first?
The Mother Cell
She had been living there for a few months when an acquaintance said, “I think you should meet this person. She’s new. She lives over by the conservation easement, the one with the moths.” She, too, was the mother of a murderer, that was the connection, but Emily and this Leslie didn’t hit it off particularly well, though they were both fiercely nonjudgmental, of course. But then another mother, well into her twilight years but unaccompanied by caregivers, moved down less than three months later, around the Fourth of July, the time of pie and fireworks and bunting-draped baby carriages. It was as though some mysterious word had gotten out. These things happen, like when highly allergic people, practically allergic to life itself, all gravitate to some mountain in Arizona, or when a bayside town in Maine becomes the locus for lipstick lesbians overnight. Penny arrived next, followed by a few more mothers in quick succession until the influx stopped.
Nobody had to tell them outright that they had better be model citizens. When a bear mauled a young couple out at the state park, the mothers worried that the incident might be perceived as their inadvertent doing for weren’t black bears shy as a rule? And this was an extremely aggressive bear and small, hardly more than a cub, but determined and deliberate.
One mother, Francine, thought a hunter had shot the bear with a hallucinogen prior to the attack, just for fun, to see what would happen. “It must get boring for them to just shoot something and have it die,” Francine said. “Someone shot it with a mind-altering drug.”