She thought often about the many evenings when, overworked, exhausted, alone, she couldn’t wait for her much-loved son to finally go to bed, and then within an hour she would miss his company and stand over his bed, watching him sleep. She knew in her heart that boys grow up too soon, and she would stand there, grieving for the lost time. On these nights, she would marvel at the perfect, clear skin of his round cheeks, flushed from burning off the events of the day or from the physical effort from growing before her eyes. Some mornings she swore he was taller than when she put him to bed. Nightly she would cover him with a blanket; he always kicked it off. He was never cold, but she couldn’t stand to see him sleep uncovered. So much of what she tried to do for him failed. Many nights she was certain that this was why her son was now dead.
He never asked about his father, never complained, didn’t seem to miss having a father at all. When he was very small, she believed that she could make up for the absence with extra attention and effort and carefully planned activities. But she came to understand that she couldn’t throw a ball or a punch, and for reasons almost beyond her comprehension these skills were vitally important. She certainly didn’t know how much they mattered to him.
And then his actual father died somewhere. To her great surprise, she and her son were beneficiaries of a modest life insurance policy, enough to buy a small house in a suburb just outside of the city, a longer commute from her job but with better schools and better neighbors, where the children weren’t so rough and the environment wasn’t so jagged and hard. She also put some money away for his college, but most of it went unused in the end.
The house was small and neat, with a trim yard and small front porch. At first she thought her new neighbors might stop by and welcome them with introductions and handshakes. Then she thought that something was expected of her, but she wasn’t sure what. Weeks went by, and then months, but friendships never materialized. Some nights she would stand outside of her front door, in the dim, fragrant evening air, and watch the houses up and down the street, each still and silent except for a picture window flickering erratically with blue television light. Sometimes half the televisions visible from the street would project the same program, the windows glowing in syncopated time.
She signed him up for boy scouts with disastrous results. He came home from one meeting with a small box full of pieces of unfinished wood and hardware and instructions on how to assemble a “pinewood derby car.” She was greatly relieved to see an entire paragraph in the instructions explaining that the project should be done by the scout, with only advice and minimal assistance from the parent. He was hesitant about his ability to complete the project, but she prodded and encouraged him until he was almost proud of his little wooden car, even with its wobbly wheels.
She had a meeting the following week, the night the scouts would race their cars. She watched as he ran down the walk to the church basement, his little car in a bag held carefully out to the side. For a frightening moment he disappeared in the dark at the end of the sidewalk, but then the door opened and he was perfectly silhouetted in the yellow light of the doorframe.
When she picked him up two hours later, he sat alone on the curb in the dark, hunched over and sullen. The car was gone. The other boys had presented elaborate little models, with detailed paint jobs and bearings in the wheels that made them race smooth and swift down the track. One car even had tiny headlights. Her son blamed her, of course, for making him do the project himself. She blamed herself too, but what angered her the most was that no one told her to ignore the instructions, no one let them in on the real rules. Her son began coming home with bruises.
She ordered a tall white fence built around the yard, to keep out stray animals and marauding children, to have something to look at other than the radiance of someone else’s TV, to make a perfect, beautiful space for them both. She landscaped the yard, doing much of the work herself, and put in a small pond in the back, with giant rocks she thought would be perfect for a boy to climb on. As he grew, he spent less and less time on the rocks, and eventually less and less time in the yard at all, but she wasn’t sorry that she put so much work into it. She loved the feeling of pure calm that she felt every time she snapped the gate shut behind her.
Her nightmare came back when he was a teenager, the nightmare she had weekly when he learned to walk. She used to dream that he fell into water, a lake or an ocean, a vast, dark body of water, and she was searching for him, trying to pull him out of the water before he drowned. She could never reach him. In the dream, she would see him fall and go to that exact spot, and sometimes she would even glimpse the pale skin on the inside of his little arm, or her fingers would brush the tips of his, but she could never get to him. The dream would go on and on, she would keep looking for him under the water long after it was possible to find him.
When she first began having this terrible dream, she enrolled him in swimming lessons, thinking it would give her some peace of mind. He became an excellent swimmer, strong, swift, confident, but the dream never really went away. When it came back on a weekly basis, he was tall and lean and on the cusp of manhood, but still she would dream he was a little, chubby boy, drowning in the dark water just beyond her grasp. Even after he died she would dream about the water, but no longer about him falling in, only about him being in, his grown self, somewhere in the water where she couldn’t find him.
By the time he was a young man, she knew why swimming lessons hadn’t helped her to sleep better, but by then he was so far away she didn’t know how to bring him back. He knew he was loved, he accepted her home cooking and her thoughtful gestures with kindness. He would kiss her goodnight and pat her cheek with his hand, just like he did when he was little. He rarely talked back, hardly gave her any trouble. But he talked about leaving all the time, going far away to college, never coming back to this stupid neighborhood, the neighborhood she had chosen because she thought it would make his life better.
She had wanted him to know that it wouldn’t matter if he was gay, but she didn’t know how to bring it up. She thought she might insult him. If she was wrong, he would be offended, and even if she was right he might think she was intruding. One awful night he came home from “hanging out with a friend” and as soon as he stepped inside to find her waiting up for him he burst into sobbing, incoherent tears. She rushed to him and he let her wrap her arms around him while he cried so hard she thought he might suffocate. She thought she might have heard him say, “No one will ever love me” but she couldn’t tell. She was so shocked to see him like that, and she hadn’t held him in so many years. She loved him to the ends of the earth, but she knew that didn’t matter. She knew her love was irrelevant, a mother’s love, infinite, unconditional, selfless, was not what he needed. When a child is small, his mother is as beautiful as a princess and as powerful as a wicked queen. By the time a child is grown, his mother’s love is a footnote, sometimes even a punchline, returned with a weekly phone call in the best of circumstances.
She never had a moment’s peace after he was born. At first she worried about the cost of diapers and whether daycare was bad for him, but later she worried about vicious dogs and sexual predators and drunk drivers and handguns stored unsafely by a playmate’s parents. After his funeral, she went home and packed her clothes and a few personal things into boxes that she threw in her car. She drove to the city and rented a hotel room. Within a week she had an apartment, and she paid movers to bring only her bed and television and a single armchair. Who was there to sit at a kitchen table? Who was left to need the familiarity of the living room, where the same pictures hung on the same walls year after year? Everything was packed into cartons and stuffed into a storage space. None of it was important to her. She supposed that it was strange for her to move on so completely, to shut the door on the house where she raised him and never go back, but none of it was for her. The house, the yard, the rocks, the bicycles, the blankets, the coffee mugs and the crayons, the food in the pantry, all of it, was for him. None of it had served the purpose she intended, not even the fence. He was dead, and she had been grieving for him all of his life.