I’d fallen so behind in my teaching that I was in danger of having my tenure revoked. But after dinner I took him by the shoulders and said, “How do you want to spend the evening? Name your galaxy.”
He knew his answer. With one admonitory finger, he commanded me to sit on the couch. He poured me a glass of pomegranate juice—the closest thing to wine available—and went to the bookshelf to retrieve a beaten-up anthology. He put it in my hands.
Read me Chester’s favorite poem. I laughed. He kicked my shins. Serious.
“I’m not sure which one was his favorite. Should I read you your mom’s?”
He didn’t even bother to shrug—just a flick of his small hands. I read him Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Maybe it wasn’t Aly’s favorite. Maybe it was just the one I remember her reading to me. It’s a long poem. It was long for me back then, in my thirties. For Robin, it must have felt geological. But he sat still for it. He still had some concentration left. I was tempted to skip to the end, but I didn’t want him to discover, twenty years later, that I’d cheated him.
I was fine until stanza nine. That one had some long pauses in it, as I read.
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting, Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will; She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
Robin sat still for the whole long trip. He didn’t even twitch until I finished. Even then, he stayed curled against my flank. In that clear soprano voice, he said, I didn’t get it, Dad. Chester probably got more of it than I did.
I had promised him months ago that we’d talk about getting another dog. Nothing had kept me from following through but selfish cowardice. I nudged him with my flank. “We still need to get you a birthday present, Robbie. Should we look for a new Chester?”
I thought the words would galvanize him. He didn’t even lift his head. Maybe, Dad. It might help.
THE FIRST MELTDOWN CAME as we were driving back from the shoe store at the mall. We were six blocks from home, on the edge of our quiet neighborhood, when I hit a squirrel. The thing about squirrels is that they think the car is a predator. Natural selection has shaped them to evade pursuers by cutting back and running right into you, as you carry straight on down the street.
The thing threw itself under my wheels with a fur-muffled thump. Robin swung around to stare at the sentient being in the road behind us. I saw it, too, in the rearview mirror, a lump on the asphalt. My son screamed. In the closed car, the sound turned wild, long and bloodcurdling, and it converged on the word Dad.
He undid his seat belt and opened the passenger door. I screamed, too, and grabbed his left arm to keep him from stepping out of the moving car. I rolled to a stop on the side of the residential street. He was still howling, tearing against my grip and trying to jump out. I held him until he stopped struggling. But the end of the struggle was not the end of his howls. He calmed down enough to light into me again.
You killed it! You freaking killed it!
I told him it was an accident, that everything had happened too fast for me to make any choice at all. I apologized. Nothing made any difference.
You didn’t even slow down! You didn’t even . . . Mom died instead of killing an opossum, and you didn’t even take your foot off the gas!
I tried to stroke his hair, but he shoved me away. He turned to look out the back window. “Robbie,” I said. But he wouldn’t look away from the lump in the street. I asked him to say something, to tell me what he was feeling. But he held his face into his hands. There was nothing to do but start the car and head home.
There, he headed straight to his room. At dinner, I knocked. He opened the door a crack and asked if he could skip the meal. I said he could eat in his room if he wanted. I loaded up a bowl with fried apples, which he loved. But when I went in at seven-thirty, the bowl was untouched. He was lying in bed in his plaid pajamas, with the lights out and his hands behind his head.
“Would you like a planet?”
No, thanks. I have one.
I sat in my study and pretended to work. A reasonable hour for sleep took forever to arrive. I woke from a nightmare with a tiny hand clamped around my wrist. Robin was standing by my bed. In the dark, I couldn’t read him. Dad. I’m going backwards. I can feel it.
I lay there, dumb with sleep. He had to spell it out.
Like the mouse, Dad. Like Algernon.