Writers & Lovers(63)

‘I don’t know. I don’t remember.’ He is still laughing hard. He takes the book from Jasper and starts flipping through the pages.

‘Have you been keeping that a long time?’

‘Since I was four.’

He’s probably written a hundred pages. The writing starts off big and wild, mostly in thick pens, and then gets smaller and thinner. The most recent entries are meticulous and tiny.

‘You’re a writer like your dad.’

He shakes his head. ‘I just like to record things. So I don’t forget.’

I feel the photographs beside us, a family frozen in motion.

Below the photos are books. We look through them, and Jasper pulls out his favorites, which we narrow down from a huge stack to a smaller stack. John just wants Robinson Crusoe, which they are nearly halfway through.

‘Can we read in Papa’s bed? There’s more room.’

But when we get settled there, they press up so close on either side of me that we didn’t need the extra space. The smell of the baby shampoo comes up from their hair and my fingers as I turn the pages.

After the books, they are tired and go to their own beds. I ask if anyone would like me to sing a song, and they say no, but as I’m leaving Jasper’s room he says he’s changed his mind. I sing ‘Edelweiss’ and ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ and then John calls across the hallway saying he changed his mind, too. I tell him about the Kroks and sing him ‘Blue Angel’ and ‘Loch Lomond.’

I go back to Oscar’s bed. He hasn’t changed the sheets and the pillows smell like him, his skin and his shaving cream. I think about his wife and her bright face. If my lump turns out to be deadly cancer, I don’t think anyone will look at photos of me later and think I had an extra dose of anything. I fall asleep around four and Jasper comes in before five. He knocks his body against the bed until I wake up, and he stands there until I pull back the covers for him to crawl in. He’s wide awake. He tells me about a boy named Edwin in his class.

‘He’s a hitting and punching guy,’ he says.

‘And what do you do?’

‘I karate chop him. In my magination. In true life I go to the other side of the room.’

‘That seems like a good strategy.’

We talk about popsicles and our favorite flavors and all the places he’s swum in his life and a rock John jumped off of somewhere in a place that began with an m where there were kittens under a porch. He’s taken my hand and holds it like a map, with two hands in front of his face, spreading out the fingers then pushing them together.

‘I don’t remember my mama,’ he says.

‘You were only two, right?’ I can’t bear to say when she died.

‘Uh-huh. I don’t know if she was like you or completely different. If she was like Aunt Sue or completely different. Who was she like?’

‘She was probably like you.’

‘Me?’

‘She was probably curious and smart and silly in the best way.’

He brings my fingers up to his mouth and bounces them absently against his lips.

‘When my mother died, I sort of felt her inside me sometimes,’ I say. ‘Like I’d swallowed her.’

He laughs. ‘Swallowed her.’

‘I still have moments when I feel that, when it feels like she’s inside me, and there’s no difference between us or that the difference doesn’t matter.’

He’s listening, bouncing my fingers still. He doesn’t say anything.

‘I think it is all that love. All that love has to go somewhere.’

He gnaws a little on my pinky. He nods slowly. ‘I think she loved me,’ he whispers to my knuckles.

‘She did,’ I say. ‘And still does. Very, very much. And that love will always, always be inside you.’

Time is mercurial when you’re with children. A whole morning making pancakes and playing freeze tag goes by in a minute, whereas waiting for Jasper to tie his shoes or catch up on his bike is endless. They bring me to their favorite playgrounds: the one with the tunnel slide, the one with high swings, the one with the rock-climbing wall. We eat quesadillas at the taqueria on Bow Street and banana cupcakes at the café next door. On the way home we pick up Mrs. Doubtfire at Blockbuster, and I make mac and cheese without a vegetable side and we eat it on the couch, which Oscar doesn’t allow. Jasper crawls into my bed at three that morning and falls asleep quickly this time and I don’t think I will but his breathing and his small hot feet against my shins lull me back. On Sunday it’s the aquarium, the grocery store, baking cookies, and playing cards. For dinner they help me make a lasagna for Oscar’s return. His flight lands at 6:14. We pull the lasagna out at quarter past and stare at it, the cheese still bubbling at the sides. We’re hungry. We play ping-pong in the garage to distract ourselves, but the boys fight about who will play on my side so I cut that short and suggest I read them another chapter of Robinson Crusoe. They settle in on either side of me again. Maybe it’s not too soon. Maybe this is where I belong. I think this might be where I belong.

We’re right at the part where Crusoe finds a human footprint on his island when Oscar opens the door. I’m relieved. I didn’t want to have to explain the cannibals to them. The boys spring from the couch and run to him.