Life and Other Inconveniences(14)

The day Sheppard went away, he’d had a loose tooth—his first, the bottom right. Central incisor (I’d looked it up later, to help the police identify him). I’d never see that tooth gone, never see the sweet gap in his smile, or the bigger tooth that would grow in its place. Sheppard would never need orthodontic work. He would never have acne, never become a sullen teen who sat in front of the television and grunted out replies.

Or maybe he had. I hope he had, God yes. What was the term again? Forced adoption, yes. Of all the scenarios, that was the only one that was even remotely acceptable. These days, when I’m feeling weakest and most afraid, I’m tempted to do what I swore I never would . . . picture our reunion.

I can’t do that now. Therein lies despair, as the saying goes.

At any rate, some thought I betrayed my older son by not doing the romantic thing and dying of a broken heart. My husband took the easy route and simply died—just stopped—while sitting in the Adirondack chair by the stone wall, our favorite place. He left me just three years after Sheppard went away. I’d found my husband there at the edge of the yard, his feet propped up on the stone wall that divided Sheerwater from the stone-hewn beach. He’d been smiling.

That had been our spot, before, where we used to sit together, the boys tucked in bed, sleeping. Garrison and I would sip our drinks, holding hands, knowing how lucky we were, feeling rather smug, really. We were successful and happy. Wealthy and grateful. Blessed by two fine sons, one better than the other, but perhaps Clark would change and become more like his brother. Garrison would kiss my hand, and we’d watch the sunset, our voices rich with love and satisfaction.

So the fact that my husband would die in our special place, abandoning me, leaving me alone with this mountain of grief and giving me another that would be impossible to climb . . . it was so brutally unfair. Even as the pain ripped me in half, the anger surged harder. How dare you, Garrison? How can you do this to me?

But he had, and Clark and I were left alone.

I knew I wasn’t a good mother to my other son, but I was all he had. And he was all I had, too; my parents were long gone, and my sister and brother were unable to understand my grief. I hated them, anyway, with their living children whom they gathered closer to them, because thank God it hadn’t been them. Thank God tragedy struck me instead.

A year after I buried my husband, I started my company, and people were stunned. How does she DO it? How can she even get out of bed in the morning? First her son, then her husband . . . Or worse—She must have ice in her veins, leaving that poor little boy with a nanny all day.

Frankly, it made me want to kill them. Violently. I’d smile and murmur graciously while they exclaimed their surprise that I was working, that I could manage to go on, that they thought of me and dear Sheppard so often, and I was in their thoughts, their prayers. Yes, I imagined myself stabbing them repeatedly. Driving a stick through their eyes and into their brains as they clucked and cooed at my iron lady resolve. Die, I imagined saying as I twisted the stick in their eye socket, their blood spattering my Chanel suit.

Because what was I supposed to do? I’d tried to curl up and die the day the police told me they could no longer allocate resources to search for my son. I wanted to die the day my husband’s heart stopped beating as he listened to the waves lapping at the shore, thinking, no doubt, of our firstborn. I’d tried to die the day the most promising lead—a small boy matching Sheppard’s description found in Boston—had turned out to be someone else’s child. The day I got that news, I left the police station without a word, went back to my car and clutched the steering wheel and screamed like an animal. Oh, yes, I would have loved to die that day, when the Missing gnawed at my heart and lungs, taking all the breath from me, laughing as it did.

But I lived. It came almost as a shock, living. Should I have committed suicide? I might not have loved my second son as much, but I wasn’t about to saddle him with that legacy. Should I have become a drug addict, swallowing pills to numb the pain? An alcoholic? Should I have moved away from the town my family had helped found, the home where Sheppard had lived? Really, tell me, I wanted to say to the well-meaning, wonderstruck idiots. What else should I have done?

“Thank you,” I’d say. “Clark and I must keep going, after all.” A reminder to them that I had another son . . . and to pinch my own soul, because at times I forgot about Clark, frankly. I just didn’t care as much. Let him get Cs. Let him skip practice. Let him stay out late. It didn’t matter. The Missing and I would wait for him, me dry-eyed and irritable, the Missing waiting for that chink in my armor so it could devour me.

To make up for it, I gave Clark a car on his seventeenth birthday. College was a given; Dartmouth had a building with his grandfather’s name on it. I was not concerned about his future. I wanted to be, but Sheppard had taken my mother’s heart with him that day.

So . . . I lived. As one does when one is not given a choice, when one’s heart refuses to stop beating, when God doesn’t listen as you beg him to bring back your son who is probably dead, to bring back your husband who definitely is, to end all the pain of your barren, useless heart. Very few people understood. Miller Finlay, whose family owned a construction business and who’d overseen the repairs and renovations on Sheerwater, did. He’d lost his wife. He knew the Missing, though we never spoke of it, except at his wife’s wake. The first time he’d come to Sheerwater after her death, our eyes locked, and the bond formed. His cousin was Jason, who had ruined Emma’s future, but Miller was a different sort. Decent. Ruined, like me.