Writers & Lovers(62)

‘And bacon,’ John says. ‘And cheese.’

‘We’re young. We don’t have to worry about that yet.’ Do parents these days really make kids worry about their arteries?

‘Papa is so old!’ John says.

‘Well, he’s not old, but he’s not the perfect machines that we are.’ I pop another cholesterol bomb in my mouth.

‘He’s not going to die though,’ Jasper says. ‘He promised.’

‘He can’t promise. No one knows when they’re going to die,’ John says.

‘He promised. And a promise is a promise.’

‘But—’

‘How about I teach you a game called Spit?’ I say.

Oscar said that they had to take a bath each night. I’m not sure what to do. I can’t leave a five-year-old and a seven-year-old in a bathtub alone, but I doubt they’ll be comfortable with me in the room. I dread it and extend dinner and cards and a game of Sorry! out as far as I can to avoid bedtime. But John looks at the clock and says it’s bath time. And Jasper says, ‘I call the surfboard!’ and runs toward the stairs and Jasper chases him and by the time I get up there the water is running and both boys are naked at the toilet, sword fighting with their streams of pee. I duck out, but John calls me back and asks me to get the bath toys down, pointing to a high shelf with his free hand.

I sit on the floor next to the tub and man the submarine. Jasper has the spy on the surfboard and John has the Special Op parachuter. We play till the pads of our fingers are blue and shriveled.

When I say it’s time to get out, Jasper says he needs a shampoo.

‘Papa just washed it last night.’

‘It got dirty again.’

John shakes his head. ‘He always wants a shampoo.’

Jasper hands me the baby shampoo. Nothing about it has changed. The golden color. The red teardrop that says ‘no more tears.’ The smell. Unlike so much, it is exactly the same as when my mother used it on me. They dunk their heads wet, and I lather them up. I shape Jasper’s foamy hair into dog ears, flat and flopped over, and John’s longer hair into straight-up antennae. They giggle at each other, and I allow them to stand up carefully, one at a time, to look at themselves in the mirror above the sink. I hold on to their waists as my mother held on to mine. They come slowly back down, and I make new shapes. I breathe in the smell.

After I get them out and dry them off, they put on their pj’s. John’s are plain navy with white cuffs that don’t reach his wrists or ankles, and Jasper’s are faded red-and-green plaid, hand-me-downs from John. They show me their rooms.

‘John’s is bigger, but mine is cozier,’ Jasper says, leading the way.

‘That’s what we tell him when he complains.’

‘Mine is big in con set. See?’

‘Concept,’ John says.

‘It’s the whole universe.’ He spreads his arms out. It’s definitely a space-themed room, with the planets from our solar system hanging in one corner and the sun in another, a poster of Apollo 17, and a glow-in-the-dark night sky on the ceiling. There’s a twin bed in the corner, and the rest of the floor is covered with an enormous Lego space station.

‘How do you get from the door into bed?’

‘I tiptoe, like this.’ And he picks his way, nearly en pointe, across without disturbing one thing.

John’s room is neat and spare.

‘I don’t like things on the wall. They can catch fire.’

Anything can catch fire. Being around kids means thinking a whole lot of things you can’t say.

He sees my eye land on a shelf of framed photographs. We move toward them together.

There she is. Sonya. Pixie cut, round brown eyes, Jasper’s mischievous smile. I realize I had an image of her as willowy and bohemian and dreamy looking, but she is compact and purposeful. No nonsense my mother would say. Beside her—at the top of a mountain, on their leather sofa, at the alter—Oscar looks tall. She seems active and zestful, the way people who die young always do, as if they were given an extra dose of energy and passion for life, as if they knew they had less time to spend it. Or maybe it’s just the way we see their photos afterward, when any life we still find in them feels exaggerated.

‘That’s our mom.’

‘She looks really kind.’

‘She was.’

I don’t know how these small bodies have sustained the loss of her, how they make it through to the end of each day.

‘I lost my mom, too. Last winter.’

‘Was she old?’

‘No. She was fifty-eight. But she wasn’t as young as yours.’

‘She was thirty-seven.’

‘We saw her. When she was dead,’ Jasper says. ‘She looked like a piece of driftwood.’

‘Papa told you to stop saying that.’

‘Well she did,’ Jasper says. ‘John has a journal!’ He bolts across the room, claws around under the bed, and brings back a fat notebook.

‘No.’ John grabs it from him.

‘Just the funny page.’ Jasper finds a page close to the beginning with big words in black magic marker: I HAIT POPA over and over. And at the bottom: JASPR IS A POOPSY POO.

We all laugh.

‘What did you mean?’