A Mother's Reckoning: Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy(28)
The boys and I would sit and watch the wildlife from our picture windows like other families watched television. Scrub jays, flickers, magpies, and chickadees patronized our bird feeders, and deer families and foxes and raccoons shared whatever seeds spilled to the ground. We hosted a family of bobcats in our backyard for a while. One night after dinner, Tom looked up from doing the dishes to see a black bear staring right back at him through the kitchen window, not eighteen inches away. One morning, he saw another bear blissfully lying on his back in the middle of our swimming pool, soaking in a depression in the pool cover that had trapped just enough water for his bath.
One of our neighbors told me the land used to be a wintering ground for a local Native American tribe, and the property had a spiritual feel to it. I had wanted my boys to grow up safely surrounded by the beauty of nature, to roam free in a place that would reward their imaginations. When we found the house in the foothills, as decrepit and neglected as it was, I believed we’d found that place.
We moved in early December of 1989, when Dylan was in third grade. A friendly neighbor gave us an old minibike from his garage, and Tom found a second one, used, in the newspaper classifieds. He and the boys rebuilt the bikes to get them running, and before long, Dylan and Byron had worn trails throughout our property. They had tremendous freedom to roam; on the other hand, the new house was so remote that their activities in town had to be scheduled so Tom or I could provide transportation. The boys couldn’t simply get on their bikes to visit friends, or ride to the corner for an ice cream. Our relative isolation in the country meant the two boys spent a great deal of time together.
As he grew, Dylan took a lot of pride in his independence. To my amusement, he asked me to show him how to do his own laundry when he was ten. That independence, combined with the determination we’d seen when he was young, made him a force to be reckoned with. I remember taking him and Byron to the roller rink. I wasn’t an accomplished skater by any stretch of the imagination, but I could stay on my feet, and I offered to help Dylan, who was struggling to stay on his. He insisted he could do it alone, and so I dutifully planted myself against the railing as he stumbled away from me. He took a few halting steps on his skates without gliding, and then fell, hard, to the floor. I rushed to help, but he waved me off impatiently. “I can skate. You wait here and watch. Don’t move! I don’t need help.”
And so I watched as he crawled on his hands and knees to the railing and pulled himself up. Then he took another few awkward steps before falling again. I held myself back and watched as the tiny figure inched around the huge rink: a few hesitant steps, the inevitable fall, and then the laborious crawl back to the railing. I have absolutely no idea how long it took him to go all the way around. It felt like an hour.
Finally, he lurched up to where I stood. Sweat poured from his face, and tendrils of blond hair stuck to his forehead. I winced to think about the bruises covering his legs under his dusty jeans. Holding the wall to steady himself, his legs shaking with the effort to keep himself upright after all that work, he stood tall and proud in front of me.
“See? I told you I could skate!”
Incidents like this convinced Tom and me that Dylan would be able to accomplish anything he set out to do, if only by sheer force of will. This was the foundation of our belief in him. He had a lot of confidence in himself, and we did too.
Dylan spent fourth, fifth, and sixth grades in a gifted classroom. It was almost a private-school setting: small classes, lots of chess and math games and individual attention. By the end of sixth grade, challenged academically and spending his days with kids who shared his interests, Dylan seemed to be on top of the world. He left a record of the confidence he felt in a drawing: a boy in a plaid shirt, standing on top of a range of yellow, green, and purple mountains, waving to the viewer with a huge smile on his face. The principal of his elementary school chose the picture for the school’s permanent collection, framed it with a gold nameplate, and hung it in the hallway.
After Columbine, afraid someone would destroy or steal it, we asked his favorite teacher to return it to us.
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One of the traits that marked Dylan throughout his life was an exaggerated reluctance to risk embarrassment, something that intensified as he entered adolescence. Both Tom and I are self-deprecating by nature, the first ones to poke fun at ourselves. But Dylan did not laugh easily at his own foibles. He could be unforgiving of himself when he failed at anything, and he hated to look foolish.
One summer afternoon, when Dylan was about eight, we went on a picnic with Judy Brown and her two boys. The kids were catching crayfish in the creek, and Dylan lost his balance on the slippery rocks and fell into the shallow water with a splash. He emerged unhurt but furious: livid about the pratfall, and even angrier that everyone else had laughed. We tried to help him to see the humor in it—Byron would likely have hammed it up further by taking an elaborate bow—but Dylan went to the car and refused to speak to anyone until he felt able to face the world again. The reaction seemed outsized, but it only cemented what we already knew: Dylan felt embarrassment more acutely than other kids did.
When he was about ten and a cousin was visiting from out of state, she and the boys and I went horseback riding together. Midway through our ride, Dylan’s horse stopped in the middle of the trail to pee. Childishly, the rest of us laughed. Dylan’s face grew red and hot with embarrassment, his humiliation growing with every passing second. Still, while Dylan might have been more self-conscious than Byron had been, his insecurities still fell well within normal parameters for a preteen.