Five(34)

Their happy little family does happy family things: They go for pizza, to the movies, to the swings, and on their walk home Sonny sits on his dad’s shoulders and tries to reach the sky. At bedtime, his giant of a father and his fierce little mother hold him tight, and he falls asleep dreaming about running in the sunshine.

One spring morning her husband has to be in the office early. He slips out of bed. It is a bright morning, unusual for London. He decides to cycle. He needs the exercise. He sneaks into Sonny’s room and kisses him lightly on the head. He kisses his wife and says, “Bonnie lass.” She is sitting bleary-eyed at the kitchen table, already on her second cup of coffee.

He puts on his helmet. He pushes away from the curb. The streets are mostly empty still. It is the last five minutes of his life, although, of course, he doesn’t know it. He thinks about the day ahead, his first meeting, his presentation after lunch. A call at 10 a.m. He notices a beautiful magnolia in bloom in someone’s front garden. He hears the van but does not see it. Just before the impact, he thinks that he should bring some flowers home tonight for his wife. She is such a good mother to their lad, their Sonny.



* * *





If it were not for her son, she would get into her bed and not leave it for three to four years.

She would pull down the blinds and stop the clocks so that she could forget the difference between day and night and she could just sleep and sleep and when she woke she would watch terrible reality television until she fell asleep again. No, not reality television. They watched reality television together, The Bachelor, Britain’s Got Talent, reruns of Come Dine with Me, American Idol. Maybe she would just watch her DVDs of The Golden Girls, the complete set her husband bought her one Christmas.

If it were not for Sonny, she would start drinking at 10 a.m. and not stop until she blacked out on the floor, in the hope that she might choke on her vomit while unconscious or die of alcohol poisoning and then she could be done with it, all of it. She could die, tragically, from grief, and everyone would be sad, and then in a few years her sister, and her parents, and her friends—the ones who attended their wedding and the ones they went to everyone else’s weddings with for that decade when they were young and carefree—they would all think of her and her husband and smile and tear up and say, “Remember when” and raise a glass. They would be missed, but people would say they were together in heaven, and sigh, and then everyone would go to work the next day. Now and then they might think of them randomly, maybe while in the supermarket, maybe while on the train going to work, but everyone would survive those thoughts and continue living.

She remembers that time, that decade before everyone had babies, when they were youthful and full of expectation and had a wedding to go to every weekend. They were grown up enough to know where they were headed but still young enough to hold the promise of their future in the pocket of his suit jacket where he was carrying her lipstick for her because it wouldn’t fit in the tiny clutch that matched her bridesmaid’s dress. And they’d steal away for a moment during the cocktail hour, and they’d look at that future and they’d know that it was just for them and that it would be wonderful.

This, what is happening to her now, was not part of that. And she cannot survive the thoughts and does not know how to continue living. She does not want to wait five years until it will sting her just a tiny bit less, just a fractional tiny bit less, but everyone else will already be at the “remember when” stage, so that when they toast him they’ll think they’ll be doing something nice for her, remembering him, but actually they will be boiling her alive, they will be blindfolding her in front of a firing squad and pulling all of the triggers.

But still, there is Sonny.

Children are the strongest antidote to grief, not because of their unconditional love or their joy or because they take pain away, nothing like that, nothing like an inspirational quote embroidered on a pillow for your sofa. Children are the antidote because of their unrelenting needs, their continuous, voracious, narcissistic, selfish insistence on living, their unceasing demands that those needs, no matter how trivial, be met immediately and urgently.

For example, on the morning of his father’s funeral, Sonny wets the bed. It’s the morning of his father’s funeral, but he still needs breakfast. And clean socks. He tries very bravely to put on his shoes himself because he understands from the change in his mother’s face when she strips his sheets and puts on new ones that he needs to be good, he needs to be grown up. Except he does not know how to do the laces.

When his Auntie Gabriela speaks to him gently and bends down and tries to help him, he will not let her.

“Can I help you, Sonny?” she says, starting to tie his left shoe.

“No!” he shouts and pulls his foot away.

“Mummy! Mummy!” he calls, in the standard, ear-piercing way he always calls for her.

“Sonny, your mum is trying to get dressed, just let me—”

“No!” he shouts at Gabriela, and runs around the house, frantically, from room to room, searching for his mum.

He finds her in his parents’ bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, still in her pajamas, staring into space.

“Mummy, my shoes,” he says, going right up to her, his face so close she can feel his breath on her cheek.

“Mummy, my shoes,” he repeats, trying to break her stare by holding her face and looking straight into her eyes.