Five(35)

He is too young to understand that the smooth untouched pillows on his father’s side of the bed are killing her. That before he came into the room, she saw them and had to turn her back because the sight of them—plumped, fresh, ready to be slept on—is like a needle in her eye, is like her fingernails being pulled out one by one while she listens to fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard at the same time.

“My shoes, Mummy,” he says again when she doesn’t respond.

Gabriela, who has run after Sonny, stumbles, panting, into the bedroom, saying, “Sorry, Sis, I tried to—” but stops when Luna raises her hand. Gabriela feels redundant and ineffectual, she feels bad that she couldn’t do this one little thing at least for her grieving sister, help her nephew get dressed.

But Luna just stands silently from the bed, hoists Sonny onto it so his feet dangle above the floor, and kneels in front of her son. She ties his left shoe, then his right.

Gabriela, who is thirty-two and does not want children, and is in a polyamorous relationship, and thinks traditional heterosexual marriage perpetuates sexism and inequality, does not like this image. She does not want her grieving sister to be kneeling at her nephew’s feet, like some Jesus and Mary live-action re-creation. Gabriela goes to her and tries to lift her to standing so that Sonny doesn’t get some weird patriarchal images mixed up with the grief and what is bound to be post-traumatic stress disorder, but Luna stops her.

Luna says, hugging Sonny’s legs, “There you go, baby, you look very handsome, Daddy is very proud of you. Go play now, okay? I’ll come get you when it’s time to go.”

“Okay, Mama,” Sonny says, as he hops off the bed, straight down into Luna’s lap, hugging her with every part of his small being. “Tackle,” he says in his deepest voice with a Scottish accent, as he tackles Luna to the ground. He has always been good at mimicking his dad.

“All right, okay, boy, off you go,” she says, her limbs tangled with his, as he pushes off her shoulder with all his weight to get himself up and steps on her hand with his newly laced-up shoe.

Luna stays on the floor for a minute and says to Gabriela, who she knows is disapproving of some or all of what she has witnessed, “Don’t be so appalled, I’m forty-one, it’s easier to be closer to the floor.”

“What?” Gabriela asks.

“So I’m ready when he tackles me twelve times a day. It’s just easier if I’m already close to the floor.”

Luna then pulls herself up on the side of the bed. Her husband’s smooth pillows that he will never sleep on again are in her field of vision, and they devastate her again and make her say, “Why,” but it is not a question.

“I don’t know,” Gabriela says, holding her sister’s hand. “Would it help if I put them away?” understanding intuitively that it is the sight of the pillows hurting Luna in this moment.

“No, it’s okay, just do my hair, will you?” she says, and before she reaches the mirror, Sonny is back in the room, shooting them with pretend lasers, commando-crawling under the bed, getting dust all over his clothes, jumping on top of the rumpled duvet in his shoes, and finally collapsing, dislodging his father’s pillows and sending them to the floor.

That is where they remain for a few months after the funeral, although every time Luna crosses the room she sees them, until she stops sleeping in the room so that she does not have to cross it and does not have to see them.

One rainy day, Sonny finds the pillows in the path of the tornado that is the only way to describe his movement around the house and strips the cases off to make a cape and something he calls a Bone Catcher. He uses the pillows to build a fort. Then he gets hold of the scissors and rips the pillows open and throws the hypoallergenic, antimicrobial synthetic white stuffing that was meant to ease her husband’s allergies into the air to make snow all over the room.

“Look, Mama!” he shouts, with a joy she cannot imagine but is grateful that he still possesses. “A blizzard!”

He does all of this while Luna watches, with white polyester clumps sticking to her hair, and she wonders how much of her husband’s DNA is still in the fibers of the pillows, and she does not scold Sonny for turning it into snow.

She also does not stay on top of the bills, and takes leave from work, and does not wash her hair because it hurts, and does not buy milk when it runs out, and does not make Sonny eat vegetables or limit his TV watching, and tries to remember what she’s supposed to do next and has absolutely no idea.

But at least the pillows are gone.



* * *





Two years pass. Luna is grateful for the mundane mandatory tasks that distract her from the monumentally horrific, unimaginably terrifying, gaping chasm of her grief. She stands on the edge of it every morning, amazed that once again she has awoken, surprised to find that she is still alive, and she wonders what she must have done in a previous life to have caused the karmic disaster that is her current reality.

But, always, there is Sonny.

She has to wash his clothes, and buy him pajamas, and read to him, and take him to other children’s birthday parties. She has to give him antibiotics for ear infections and has to cut his hair, which is the same copper brown as his dead father’s. She has to take him to school, she has to work.

If she knew that her husband’s last thoughts were of her and their son, of bringing her flowers on the evening that he did not survive to see, it might make it easier, it might help. But there is no way of her knowing that truth and so she cannot take comfort in it.