We Own the Sky(85)

From my bedside table, I reach for Jack’s camera and I lie down, squinting my eyes so I can focus, scrutinizing every picture as if I am seeing them for the first time. I can feel a vein or artery in my neck starting to pulse, but it is too deep within my body and I wish I could reach it, cut it out and touch its sinewy texture, and feel the throb of my heart.

I inhale and exhale, catching my breath. What I want now is to run outside into the inky blackness and jump from the edge of the cliff and feel my face smash onto the rocks beneath. Because grief, it smells very much like shame, and I cannot tell the difference anymore. Shame that I couldn’t save him, that I didn’t do enough. That I fed human plasma and God knows what to my dying son. Shame that I am still alive, that I do not have the courage to end it all.

I am trying to remember exactly what Jack looked like on the Greece holiday, with his thick blond hair and his Spider-Man shorts. But every time I try to picture him, I cannot remember the exact contours of his skin, the constellation of his freckles, the glint and hue of his eyes. It is as if he has been pixelated out of my memory, his identity protected, like an abused child.

I can remember other things from that holiday, though: the wisp of the

waiter’s mustache; the code for the hotel-room safe; the convex curve of the aerobics instructor’s ass. How could I think like this? To betray him like this.

Every moment of every single day, I should have been scanning every line of his face, every inch of his pale skin.

You never forget, they always say. Never forget. Their touch, the smoothness of their fingers; their smile, sweet and disarming; a laugh you suddenly hear echoing around the room when you’re doing the washing up. Never forget.

But you do forget, and it comes quicker than you think and in that there is shame—shame that you never really loved, that you are nothing but a fraud.

Sometimes I cannot picture my dead son’s face, but I do remember, in graphic detail, the breasts of the last girl that I fucked.

“Jack, Jack, Jack.” I say his name out loud, over and over again, and another torrent of tears comes from deep down, beyond my ribs, my lungs, the walls of my chest. It is as if the tears are being pumped out of my heart.

“Jack, Jack, Jack.” I want to open the window, climb up to the rooftop and scream his name, to write those four letters in the sky. Jack, my beautiful Jack.

I think I can see him in front of me, at the end of the bed, crouching on his knees next to his wooden garage, quietly pushing a Matchbox car up the ramp.

Yes, it is definitely him. I can see strands of his unruly hair silhouetted against the light from the window. He puts his finger to his mouth and then bites his lip in concentration, just how he would when he was trying to write the letters of his name.

“Jack,” I whisper, but he does not stir and continues winding up the handle of the lift, moving the cars from floor to floor.

“Can you hear me, sweetheart? Can you hear my words? Please answer me,

Jack, please.”

I keep on saying his name, rocking myself against the side of the bed,

wringing my hands together. I want to tell someone about the lilt of his breathing as he slept, the bemused expression on his face as he woke, how he always placed his hands over his eyes to hide from me as he sat on the toilet.

I need to find someone, anyone. I want to tell them how Jack was learning numbers and could never get six, and I tried so many ways to get him to remember—drawing it like a snake and hissing out the  s. I want to tell them how he was convinced that Batman lived in the backyard and how he babbled himself to sleep at night. I want to tell them about Jack’s yogurts in the fridge, how neither Anna nor I could bear to throw them out, so we just left them on the top shelf, their lids bulging, their best-by dates long gone.

I open my laptop and go to a folder in my email called “Anna.” I have written many drafts to her over the last two years, but I have never sent any of them.

Some of them are particularly venomous. I call her a bitch and a whore and say she killed our son. I list my grievances against her in bullet points: how she refused Jack’s further treatment at Sladkovsky’s, how her pride was more important than our son’s well-being.

I shiver, not from the cold, but because it is jarring to suddenly discover you are frail. That what you had thought was robust can so easily disintegrate, like an old parchment crumbling into dust. Anna was right all along. About everything.

She always said Dr. Sladkovsky was a fraud, that Nev was not what he seemed.

And I have cursed her for that, treated her like dirt, because I was too arrogant to

listen to reason, so enthralled by my own hubris, my feeling that anything—even my own son’s biology—could be hacked. I have lived in disgust for so long— repulsed by everything around me—and now I know that the only person that deserves my disgust is me.

Subject:

Sent: Sat May 13, 2017 10:18 pm

From: Rob Coates

To: Anna Coates

theres  no  other  way  to  say  this  but  im  so  so  so  sorry.  I  know  I  donyt deserve your forgiveness for what I did and I treated you and Jack terribly and I am so very vry ashamed of myself I am so sory anna.





london eye

watching that sunset, i wanted to tell you more about heaven, jack, but I was too scared, didn’t want to say the wrong thing. i should have told you, though, but i just didn’t know how. did you know where you were going, jack? i hope not. i hope you imagined yourself flying through the night with the snowman. i hope you found the winter air thick with love.