I loved my home, and who I’d been able to be there…though I still felt as if I were in disguise, a hot mess impersonating a well-bred, evenclassy,mother.
When I allowed my mind room to roam, I realized I was scared. Of course, I knew bad things happened on the greenbelt—murders, overdoses, idiots who jumped from cliffs and broke their necks. We heard sirens and saw Life Flight helicopters over Barton Hills regularly.
“Frog Island?” suggested Annette. This was a place along the greenbelt reached only via an unmarked trail near my home. The boys had named the place Frog Island after catching tadpoles there. I had a photo of the three boys, nakedtoddlers, standing on a giant rock and beaming. Annette, Whitney, and I had sipped wine from our water bottles and gazed at them.
That was the same summer that Xavier had led the boys on an escape. I’d been in charge of taking the boys on a hike when all three boys started running, too fast for me to catch up. I’d yelled at them to slow down, but they disappeared and when I hit a fork in the trail, I’d freaked out, terrified. The boys were toddlers, and none of them knew how to swim. I’d heard the urban legend about a group of eight-year-olds who had gone looking for a place called Secret Cave and had never been seen again. I’m ashamed that I hesitated, wondering if calling the cops would make my friends mistrust me.
Finally, Ididcall the cops, and they found the children at a greenbelt exit, lost and scared. Xavier was apparently inconsolable, and fought the cop trying to bring him home.
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IN RETROSPECT, MAYBE Ishould have asked Xavier what he was running from.
—
CHARLIE, HIS FACE TEAR-STREAKED,told me later that “Xavier said keep running,” and the boys had listened to their headstrong leader. I wanted to tell Charlie to ignore Xavier, to stand up to him and do what he knew was right, but I’d swallowed the words. I didn’t want Charlie to become alienated, and it had all turned out OK in the end. We’d laughed about it; started calling the boys “the Three Musketeers.”
I wanted my son to be a musketeer.
I wanted to be the mom of a musketeer.
I had spent my childhood being anxious, and with good reason. My father was in prison (good riddance,said my mom)and my mother didn’t always come home. The front lawns at our Cape Cod trailer park were filled with broken kids’ toys, and the endless nights were punctuated by screaming arguments and women smoking and crying on front steps. We didn’t have a phone. I remember being scared, holding my little brother close, knowing I couldn’t protect him, though I would try.
One night, when I was twelve years old and Mack was eight, he got very sick. It came on suddenly while my mom was out. (Darla hadn’t been born yet.) I made Mack a microwave pizza, carefully placing the frozen disk on the cardboard apparatus that was meant to “brown” the bottom in the microwave. I made us a pitcher of Crystal Light (my mom’s favorite mixer with cheap vodka on a summer day—she drank it all afternoon from a Big Gulp cup). We had a small TV and I settled Mack on the couch with food and drink, angling the rabbit ears until I found cartoons.
“My head hurts,” said Mack. “My neck hurts and my head hurts so much.”
I found a bottle of Tylenol behind a bag of maxi pads under the bathroom sink. I crushed a pill with the back of my mom’s hairbrush and mixed the powder in Mack’s Crystal Light. He drank a few sips. “Does that help?” I asked. Mack shook his head, not crying, but pressing his lips so hard together they were white. He, like I, had been trained not to complain. I knew his pain was bad.
Mack didn’t eat his dinner. He gazed dopily at the TV, his expression like a blasé summer girl’s. His breathing was shallow and seemed to take a lot of work. When he exhaled, he made a groaning sound. Once in a while, he started crying and clutching his head or neck.
We didn’t have a thermometer, but I could tell Mack was too hot. When he fell asleep, I ran through the trailer park inthe dark to Mrs. Deacon’s house. Mrs. Deacon was an elderly woman who seemed nice. She opened the door after I had knocked for a while. She wore a nightgown, smelled of beer, and seemed annoyed. I apologized and told her Mack was very sick. She let me in, and from her wall phone I dialed my mom’s prepaid cellphone. She couldn’t always afford minutes, but I closed my eyes and prayed it was on.
I guess I had believed in God, because I did pray that night. I remember putting my palm on the wall beside Mrs. Deacon’s phone, the rough wallpaper. I asked God for help. I asked God to save my brother.
By morning, I knew God was a lie.
There was no answer on my mom’s phone. The Clam Shack had been closed for hours but I called there anyway. The phone rang and rang. I tried my mom again. Hatred for her shot through me—what kind of a mother forgot about her children?
Finally, I asked Mrs. Deacon if she had a thermometer. “Honestly, honey,” said Mrs. Deacon, “I have no idea where it is. Can we talk about this in the morning?”
I went home. Mack was breathing, but in a scary way. He was absolutely burning up, his eyes like hooks catching mine. “Help,” he managed. “It hurts so much, Weezie. It hurts so much.”
“It’s going to be OK,” I said. “I promise, Mackie. You’re going to be OK. Sip the Crystal Light.” I held the drink up, but when I tried to angle his head to the glass, he cried out in pain. “My neck!” he said.
After a while, I went back to Mrs. Deacon’s. I don’t remember all the details. I had been toldnever, neverto call 911, as it was asking for trouble. Our next-door neighbor had called an ambulance once and the cost of the ride had ruined her. She’d eventually lost her trailer, because of calling 911.My father had gone to jail after a bar fight during which a stranger called 911. “You hear me?” my mom had said, after one of these stories. There were so many of these stories, brought out on lazy nights for my mom and her friends to rehash, to reexamine, almost as if they could find another ending if they told the stories often enough. “Don’t ever, ever, call the police. We handle things on our own in Bluebird Acres.”
My mom was a bad mother—I allowed myself to acknowledge this. From Mrs. Deacon’s, I called 911.
By the time the ambulance arrived, Mack was already dead of bacterial meningitis.
It was a tragedy, everyone said.
Mack would be thirty years old if he had lived. He loved microwave pizza, and dogs, and his bike. He would have been the best uncle, Uncle Mack, stopping by my Barton Hills house with a bike helmet on, and even those ridiculous biker shorts, saying, “Charles, my man, you up for a ride?”
When Mack had been dead a week, I stopped at a crosswalk on my way to work at the Woods Hole Beach Club. I watched a small white van pull into one of the mansions along Woods Hole Drive. On the side of the van was a red cross, but the vehicle was not an ambulance. Under the cross, I read the wordsCAPE COD CONCIERGE MEDICINE—KEEPING YOU SAFE.I watched the van park, and a young woman in a white doctor coat climbed out. She went to the front door of the mansion and rang the bell.
The door opened, and I heard a voice ring out. “Dr. Wilson! Thank goodness you’re here.”
