We Own the Sky(77)

In the quietness of the room, my breathing suddenly seemed very loud. Anna was still lying on the bed with Jack, her arms cradling his head and neck. He had come from her body, and she would stay with him for as long as she could.

I looked at Jack. Sometimes people spoke of the body after death looking

empty, as if it was neutered by the absence of a soul, like the discarded skin of a snake. But it was still him; it was still Jack. He didn’t look to be at peace—that was just the delusion of the living—but his face was mostly without expression.

The only thing I could categorically say about his expression was that it was his.

It was him; it was still him.

I rang the emergency bell after that. For Anna, not Jack. Because after she pried herself away from Jack’s body and fell to her knees, and after I put my arms around her, to encase her like we had done Jack, she broke away and slammed her head against the wall, again and again, so hard that her nose started to drip blood onto the yellow tiles.

  *

The balloons had been Lola’s suggestion. After the reception, just before dusk, we would all gather in the garden and let off helium balloons into the sky. Each person would write their own tribute to Jack, in colored marker, and then on the count of three, we would all send them up to the heavens.

The idea had not appealed to me. There was something ostentatious about it, cloying even. The idea that every dying child had to have something, something that defined them—as if his love for balloons was the final way that Jack would be remembered, as if that was it, that was the sum of his existence: a balloon.

Jack would definitely not approve. He would have thought that was messy,

somehow improper—why would you write on a balloon like that? Balloons were not meant to be scribbled on.

“Perhaps we should do it without the messages, the writing,” I said to Anna.

“Or just get some from Carphone Warehouse, he always loved those.”

“It’s just balloons,” Anna said. “It doesn’t matter where they’re from. And I think the writing is a nice idea.”

I was sullen, silent.

Jack’s funeral. I don’t remember much about that day. The banal sea of

people, the way they clasped my hand. Anna’s mother, a specter in a wheelchair, and how I resented her presence, her very living, that she was given a second chance.

The day passed in a haze of Xanax and whiskey. A church on a hill—“lovely setting, so Jack, so very Jack”—a service where everyone, except the elderly, were expected to wear color, “because that’s what Jack would have wanted.”

Laughs when the  Spider-Man theme came on. Laughs at a little boy’s funeral.

“He would have loved that, Oh, Jack would have loved that.”

“He loved to smile, your Jack, didn’t he?” They were wrong. They knew

nothing about Jack. He was frugal with his smiles, as if he thought they were being rationed. He didn’t dish them out for anyone.

Jack was buried because we could not bear to have him cremated. It was a

ritual fitting for the old but not for the young. And he was always terrified of fire. When he was little, we had taught him to be scared of the pot bubbling away on the stove and, dutifully, he was. He took comfort in the blinking red light on the smoke alarm in his room.

I watched as he was lowered into the ground, the earth tipped over him. All I could think was that there was Jack in that wooden box, dressed in his Spider-Man pajamas with Little Teddy, his flashlight, all of his Pokémon cards by his side. Coffins should never, ever be made in that size.

We got some lovely cards, Anna said, in the car on the way back to the house.

I flicked through them, in pastels, light blues, mauves, the colors of an old woman’s cardigan. In the messages, they all called Jack a fighter, a warrior. An angel in heaven. A living saint. They said he touched people’s hearts. Bits of folded paper bought for 1 pound 20 from Smiths.

Oh, they loved to make it about them, didn’t they? Did they think we didn’t see their Facebook posts? Hug your children tonight, they wrote, spend a few extra minutes before bed. And then they posted pictures of Jack. Our Jack.

It makes you realize, they said, just how precious life is, how we have to cherish what we have. Did they not think about the implications of what they were saying? That their children were still very much alive, and they would hug them tonight and breathe them in and listen to them sing as they woke. Poor little Jack, they said. He was in a better place now. He wasn’t, though. A better place was here with us. Jack was just gone. There were no playdates in heaven. He was no warrior, no angel, watching over us all. Jack did what he could and never once complained. He bore his illness quietly with a type of stoicism I had never associated with a child.

Back at the house, there were perhaps twenty or thirty people in all, family, friends, a few older children. Anna made some of Jack’s favorite things and there was cake. A few others brought nibbles. Photos of Jack cycled through on the big TV screen.

When it came to balloon time, it was raining and the wind had picked up.

After the adults had written their messages and the children had drawn their pictures, we counted down and then released the balloons into the sky. With black marker, I wrote: Jack, we will never forget you, Love, Daddy.

The coldness, the brusqueness of my message was an act of defiance, so angry was I about the idea that I was being told how I should remember my son. I didn’t know what Anna wrote, and I didn’t want to look.