But then there were all the things we don’t know, and may never know: Why didn’t they—Frances, Hiram, Ezra—call anyone? Why hadn’t their teachers seen the disarray in the kitchen on their video lessons and asked if they needed help? Did they not have family they could call? Did they not have friends? How could the housekeeper just leave such vulnerable people there alone? Why had Frances not ordered more food? Why hadn’t the boys? Had they been infected by Frances’s unknown virus? They wouldn’t have starved to death in a week, or even two. Was it the shock of being outdoors? Was it the fragility of their immune systems? Or was it something for which there is no clinical name: Was it despair? Was it hopelessness? Was it fear? Or was it a kind of surrender, a giving up of life—for surely they could have found help, couldn’t they? They had a way to communicate with the outside world: Why had they not tried harder to do so, unless, perhaps, they had had enough of life itself, of being alive?
And most of all: Where was their fucking father? The Health Ministry team tracked him down, just a mile or so away, in Brooklyn Heights, where apparently he had been living for the past five years with his new family—his new wife, with whom he had begun an affair seven years ago, and his two new children, five and six, both healthy. He told the investigators that he had always made sure Hiram and Ezra were taken care of, that he sent Frances money monthly. But when they asked which funeral home he wanted his sons sent to after the autopsy, he shook his head. “The city crematorium is fine,” he said. “They died a long time ago.” And then he shut the door.
I didn’t tell Nathaniel any of this. It would have upset him too much. It upset me. How could someone disavow their children so completely, so neatly, as if they had never existed at all? How could any parent be so dispassionate?
Last night, I lay awake thinking of the Holsons. As bad as I felt for the boys, I felt worse for Frances: to have raised them, and protected them so carefully, so vigilantly, only to have them die from desperation. And as I was about to fall asleep, I wondered if the boys hadn’t called anyone for help for one simple reason—because they wanted to see the world. I imagined them joining hands and walking out the door, down the steps, and into their backyard. There they’d stand, holding each other’s hands, smelling the air, and looking up at the treetops all around them, their mouths opening in wonder, their lives becoming glorious—for once—even as they ended.
Love—Me
My dear Peter, April 19, 2065
Sorry for the lack of communication. I know it’s been weeks. But I think you’ll understand when I tell you what happened.
Eden left. And by “left,” I don’t mean that she vanished one night, leaving only a note behind. We know exactly where she is—in her apartment in Windsor Terrace, presumably packing her things. By “left,” I mean she just doesn’t want to be a parent anymore. That was how she phrased it, in fact: “I just don’t think I have it in me to be a parent.”
There’s really not a lot else to say, and really not much reason to be surprised. Since Charlie was born, I’ve seen Eden maybe six times. Now, granted, I don’t live in the house, so it’s possible that she was coming more frequently than just Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s, and so on, but given how careful and anxious Nathaniel always seemed around her, I somehow doubt it. He would never speak badly about her to me—not, I think, because he thought well of her but more because he felt that if he said aloud, “Eden is a bad mother,” then she really would be a bad mother. Though she already was a bad mother. I know it doesn’t make sense, but this is how Nathaniel thinks. You and I know what bad mothers are like, but Nathaniel doesn’t—he always loved his mother, and still finds it difficult to comprehend that not all mothers will remain mothers out of a sake of duty, much less affection.
I wasn’t present for the conversation she had with Nathaniel. Neither was David, whose own whereabouts are less and less known to either of us. But she apparently texted him one day, and said that she needed to talk, and that she would meet him in the park. “I’ll bring Charlie,” Nathaniel said, and Eden quickly said he shouldn’t, because she had a flu “or something” and didn’t want to pass it on. （What did she think, that she would say she wasn’t interested in Charlie anymore, and Nathaniel would shove her into her arms and run away?） So they met in the park. Nathaniel said that Eden was thirty minutes late （she blamed the fact that the subways were closed, although the subways have been closed for six months now）， and that she came with some guy, who waited for her on a different bench a few yards away while she told Nathaniel she was moving out of the country.
“To where?” asked Nathaniel, after he overcame his initial shock.
“Washington,” she said. “My family used to vacation on Orcas Island back when I was a kid, and I always wanted to try living out there.”
“But what about Charlie?” he asked.
And here, he said, something—guilt, maybe; shame, I hope—flashed across her face. “I just think she’s better here with you,” she said, and then, when Nathaniel didn’t say anything, “You’re good at this, man. I just don’t think I have it in me to be a parent.”
In my new efforts at brevity, I’m going to spare you all the back and forth, the pleading, the many attempts to get David involved, the attempts at negotiation, and just say that Eden is no longer a part of Charlie’s life. She signed papers terminating her rights, which leaves David as Charlie’s sole parent. But as I’ve said, David is rarely around, which means that in fact, if not in law, Nathaniel is now her sole parent.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Nathaniel said. This was last night, after dinner. We were sitting on the sofa in the parlor. Charlie was asleep in his arms. “I’m going to put her to bed.”
“No,” I said, “let me hold her,” and he looked at me, that particular Nathaniel look—half annoyance, half fondness—before transferring her to my arms.
For a while, we sat there, me looking down at Charlie, Nathaniel stroking her head. I had the funny sensation that time had fallen away beneath us, and that we had been given another chance—as parents, as a couple. We were both younger and older than we were right now, and we knew everything that we might do wrong and yet nothing about what might happen, and this was our baby, and nothing in the past two decades that had occurred—my job, the pandemics, the camps, our divorce—had actually transpired. But then I realized that, by erasing all that, I was also erasing David and, therefore, Charlie.
I reached over and began stroking Nathaniel’s hair, and he raised his eyebrow at me, but then he leaned his head back, and for a while, we remained there, me stroking his hair, he stroking Charlie’s.
“I think maybe I should move in,” I said, and he looked at me, and raised his other eyebrow.
“Do you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I could help you, and spend more time with Charlie.” I hadn’t been planning on making this offer, but now that I had, it seemed right. My apartment—formerly our apartment—had become less a place to live and more a repository for inanimate objects. I slept at the lab. I ate at Nathaniel’s. And then I went back to the apartment to change. It didn’t really make sense.