THE POWER OF THREE (11 page)

             
I had a cardboard carton half filled with church-donated sheets and pillow cases and towels when I again heard the pattering of little feet running across wooden floors.

             
I shut my eyes hard and tried to make the sounds vanish.
You’re not there
, I thought.
You’re really not there.
 

             
“Mama!”

             
I hadn’t heard his voice since the night before the fire. It had been months. I was not all right, would probably never be all right again, but I thought I had pulled myself together. I loved my husband just as much as ever. My love was a deep thing, loyal and true and real. I could live for him, if not for myself. He had lost a son, too. We grieved together and in that way made ourselves stronger. We were a couple again, not a family, but one day we would make a new family and without speaking of it, we knew that would happen.

             
“Mama!
Come!”

             
Brady hadn’t known many words. He had been almost potty trained--almost. He could walk and climb and feed himself. He could say Mama, Daddy, eat, want, water, cup,
come
. He was unable yet to say whole sentences. For him to say, “Mama, come.” sounded like him. How could it be?

             
My heart took a flip and saluted my breast bone. I caught myself with my eyes closed tightly, willing the auditory delusion away.
Can’t be.
He’s not here.
 

             
“Mama?”

             
The child’s voice was near. He was in the room, standing at my side.
Calling my name.

             
I opened my eyes, afraid what I would see. When I looked down my little boy was whole and alive and fine. His dark blonde hair shone with health. His brown eyes showed intelligence. His chubby body wrapped itself around my legs and held me tight.

             
“Brady!” I dropped to my knees and took him into my arms. He had substance and weight. I could feel his flesh and his bones beneath. I could smell the baby smell of his fine hair. Maybe I had died and now we were together in some everlasting life…

             
I pulled him away from where he was clutching my shoulders and looked into his eyes. There was a brief twinkle there that faded so fast I questioned if I’d ever seen it. “How are you here? They say you’ve gone, Brady.”

             
“No, Mama.
Here.
Here.
”
He pointed to the place he was standing to assure me he was right in my arms, right in his place in the world, near his mother.

             
“Oh, baby, my baby.” I hugged him close once more, eyes closed, surrendering to my physical senses. I could feel him, hear him, see him, and smell him. I didn’t have to taste him to know my own child. He was unburned. He was not in a grave moldering. He was here with me.

             
And then he wasn’t. Just like that. My arms closed on air, sending me off balance so that I fell forward to the floor, catching myself with my hands. He was gone, even the scent of him. The air did not move. It lay stagnant in the room, shot through with shadow.

             
I rose to my feet and tears came and went without my knowing. I was losing my mind. I had taken so much Valium I was turning into a zombie person, someone whose senses were no longer reliable. That was the only credible thing I could think since I was alone, and there was no child, no Brady to console me. I had dreamed it all up out of the dark deep pit of my guilt and grief. I had yearned to have him back so hard that I
hallucinated
him for my own frail selfish reasons.

             
Or so I thought.

             
#

             
Florida’s west coast was a veritable paradise after living a few years up north in Michigan. Fiery colors of red and orange climbing bougainvillea hung pendulous and luscious against house walls. Palm trees swayed in an easy breeze. We found a tiny house with a living room-bedroom combination and a tiny kitchenette. We took it because it was on a canal—and
because we were a couple again in no need of an extra room for a child.

             
Behind the house we used discarded crab traps, baiting them with chicken necks, throwing them off the end of the short pier, and by evening hauled up our dinner. We ate boiled crab, crab salad, crab sandwiches, and crab stew. My husband found a new job and I pulled out my old notebooks to try to write again. They had discovered my old standard Remington typewriter undamaged in the spare bedroom/office where I threw Eddie out the window, but I wouldn’t take back anything from the house, nothing. If I lost my son there, then that life was over, and I couldn’t touch anything that had been in the house.

             
I hadn’t published anything yet, but I had high hopes one day I would. I was young, married to a loving man, I still had dreams, and I had a future if only I could reach for it again.

             
I spent evenings sitting on the pier above the canal writing short stories in my notebook. Often I’d pause, pushing back my hair, staring out at the jungle of green across the canal, just thinking. I thought about Henry Miller in Paris with his women and about Truman Capote eating watermelon in a sunny Alabama field. The days in Florida were long and lazy. They brought no profound understanding of the world and why death lurks around every corner, but those calm days helped me grow stronger. I had stopped taking the tranquilizer and some nights I was even able to sleep. I didn’t hurt any less. I merely tried to embrace life more, seeing what beauty I could and ignoring anything disturbing.

             
“Mama?”

             
He was behind me where I sat on the pier. I hadn’t been thinking of him, not this time, my mind embroiled in the fictional story I was trying to write in the notebook.

             
I sucked in and held my breath. He wasn’t there. His voice was a freak occurrence produced by my creative mind. I ignored it. I chewed the eraser on my pencil, tasting the pink rubber on my tongue, frowning. I wouldn’t turn around.

             
“I’m here,” he said.

             
He wasn’t there. He couldn’t be. If he was there or I thought he was then I was sick, I was mentally ill, and I was going to have to tell someone. I couldn’t go on hiding this kind of thing.
 

             
“Mama, please.”

             
I had taught him manners. I had taught him to use his spoon to eat. I had taught him to pull on his pants and put his arms through the sleeves of his shirts. I had taught him to love me.

             
I turned, dropping the pencil. It went clattering to the old boards of the pier, rolling and leaving a little splash behind when it fell into the green water.

             
He was there, I would have sworn to it in court. I twisted from the waist and took him into my arms. My notebook slid from my lap onto the pier.
“Baby.”
It’s all I could say, choking up again with those unshed tears rushing down to constrict the muscles of my throat.

             
He talked to me this time in sentences. I didn’t care why. He was older now, almost three. That was probably why he was more articulate, or at least that was my reasoning, as invalid as it turned out to be.

             
“I want to stay, but I can’t,” he said.

             
“Why can’t you stay with me, baby? I’ve missed you so much.” I talked around that tightness in my throat. I swallowed hard and mentally refused the overwhelming emotions that caused it. I forgot all about being mentally ill. This was too real. Could mad people touch that which was not there?

             
“They won’t let me stay. They say you need to come with me.”

             
I opened my mouth to question him, but he began to fade. He was but a ghost really,
that’s what I could see now, what I recognized. He was no more real than a nightmare or a daydream. “Don’t…” I meant to protest his going, but before I could, he was gone. There one second, gone the next. Nothing in his wake was left disturbed. Even the breeze had ended and warm air lay around me, snuggling me close, stealing my breath.

             
I gasped. I let the unshed tears flow. The wound of his loss was open again and bleeding. It would never heal as long as I kept seeing his ghost. This had to end. I’d tell Grant, my husband Grant. He would know what to do.

             
#

             
Grant hadn’t cried until the day of our son’s funeral. This is what they told me. He was dressing and he broke down and wept. His mother, emotionally stunted and hard as a weathered stone, admonished him to act like a man. My own mother, having flown to Michigan from New York for the funeral, got into a fight with Grant’s mother, questioning her heartless reproof.

             
I had seen Grant cry only once before, long before we had Brady, when we’d argued and I’d threated to leave him.

             
Now he cried when I told him I kept seeing Brady.

             
“I’m sorry…” I shouldn’t have told him. Unlike me, easy to weep and mope, he had been strong and resilient, holding his loss close and private. We hadn’t talked about the fire or our loss. We couldn’t bear to say the words. I think we both hoped that day would just slide down into our memories and be buried there, caked with scars, covered with cobwebs, forgotten.

             
“You aren’t really seeing him.” Grant wiped his face, cleared his throat, and straightened his shoulders. “You know that, right?”

             
“I can’t be sure. I can see him, hear him, and even touch him. Then he vanishes. Maybe I should see a doctor.”

             
Grant thought I should. The next week I went to a psychiatrist and laid out the background and the problem. He said what I thought he would. I felt guilt and that guilt was bringing the boy back to me. As long as I could conjure him, I could hold off my feelings of guilt. What I had to know—and believe--he said, was it truly wasn’t my fault. Between the time Grant left for work at seven and when the fire started a little before eight, the boys were up and playing. It was a horrible accident. It was life. It was what happened sometimes without rhyme or reason.

             
“How do I get rid of the guilt then?” I asked. “I have to do something.”

             
“You say you’re a writer. Write it out. Keep a journal about your days and note when bad thoughts intrude or when you feel sad. Write about your son.”

             
“I can’t do that.” He was surely a fine shrink, but he was not a mother. Asking me to write about these things was asking me to enter a torture chamber and submit myself to horrendous suffering.

             
I went away from his office without any of the help I thought I’d find. He could prescribe something for me, he said, and I declined. I could write about Brady, he said, but I couldn’t. And that was the limit he was able to offer. I lied to Grant, letting him think the visit had fixed everything. I lied because if it happened again, if Brady came again, I just wouldn’t tell anyone. It would be my secret. If this was insanity, I accepted it.

             
#

             
It was a couple of months after seeing Brady on the pier that he came again. There was
something subtly changed about him. He looked grayer, his flesh not as pink as before. His eyes were ringed with dark shadows. His hands hung listlessly at his sides. “Mama,” he said in a dull voice so small it came from the far end of a tunnel.

             
I was in the easy chair reading a book. I put the book aside and went to him, stooping to hold him close. It was as if these times I could have him, ghost or not, were what I lived for. I feared he might not ever show himself again and in one way I wanted him to pass on to whatever there might or might not be after death. In another way I might fall into a desperate place in my soul and never climb out again without his infrequent appearances.

             
“Baby.”
I kissed his cheeks, his neck,
his
forehead.

             
His shoulders were so small, his little body so slight. He seemed even smaller than he had been before he died.

             
“Mama, come with me, I’m alone.”

             
I shut my eyes trying to make these moments with my son last. “Where do you want me to go, Brady?”