Making Toast (12 page)

This is how children’s birthday parties are done these days, though not all occur in warlike surroundings. Last year, Jessie had her party at Dave and Buster’s, a sort of junior casino, where kids play interactive games, and Sammy had his birthday at Little Gym, where the kids jump and tumble on mats. The advantage of such places is that there is no cleanup for parents, and the staff runs the show. I find them weird but harmless, though Laser Nation may be pushing it.

I play with Bubbies, then leave him with Harris as I move to the video game area where Caitlin collars me and pushes me around a while, before I carefully deliver her to her mother’s care. The video games include “Extreme Hunting” and “Virtual Cop.” Never having tried one, I play “Virtual Cop.” I draw the blue plastic automatic from its holder, and knock off every bad guy who pops up on the screen. I take to this. My score is “Excellent.” A sign appears: “When all life is lost, the game is over.”

Having shot as many people as they could, Jessie, Sammy, the birthday boy, and fifteen other children lay down their arms and eat birthday cake. Bubbies joins the bigger kids, and though his head is barely visible above the top of the long table, he looks and listens and shows no sign that he feels out of place in the company of elders. Jessie meets Ella, the daughter of the Australian, Graeme. Ella is not quite six. “I hear an accent,” says Jessie. “Are you from France?” Ella says, “If I were from France, I would be speaking French.”

Jessie’s to-do list, pinned to the music stand on the keyboard. There are boxes to be checked:

• GET DRESSED
  
• BRUSH TEETH
  
• BRUSH HAIR
  
• MAKE BED
  
• CLEAR DISHES AFTER MEALS
  

While I am away one day, Harris calls to report that James has scribbled all over the sectional with a Magic Marker, and that he has been banished to his room.

“Does he have an attorney?” I ask. Like most doctors, Harris hates lawyers.

“He’s already been convicted and sentenced,” he says.

“Without due process?” I ask. “I think I’ll take it upon myself to represent him in the appeal. This case will be a cinch. You can prepare yourself for a nasty civil suit as well.”

“Don’t bother. We have witnesses,” he says.

“Minors?” I ask. “Are there any fingerprints on the Magic Marker? Has he confessed?”

“In a way,” says Harris. “But he does not yet acknowledge the magnitude of his crime.”

“Then why,” I ask, “was he tried as an adult? Which reminds me: Has he been given his one telephone call?”

“Yes,” says Harris. “He’s going to call
you.
”

Long ago, I abandoned all hope that I would ever learn anything new again—too few remaining brain cells. Now, thanks to the reading I do with Sammy before bedtime, I teem with information about trucks, boats, planes, cranes, and drilling equipment. Last night, after Sammy and I had discussed the comparative strengths of stabilizers and forklifts, I lay down for a while with Jessie. Ginny had finished two chapters of
James and the Giant Peach
with her, and Harris was in with James. Jessie was ready to pick up another book—
Harold and the Purple Crayon
—which she read to me.

“Harold creates his own world,” said Jessie. “Like writers,” I said. Jessie has variously wanted to be a writer, a doctor, a fashion model, and an orchestra conductor. “If you decide to become a writer, Jess, you can create anything you like—friends, princesses, monsters…” “New worlds, too,” she said. “New planets.” I said, “Harold not only creates his own world, he lives in it. That’s like writers, too. Another way of saying it is that writers
inhabit
their own worlds.” Jessie said, “Inhabit. Let’s make that tomorrow’s Word for the Morning.” I said, “Let’s
do
that.”

We continued talking about all that a writer can create, like Harold. I said that sometimes, when one creates, one does not find what one is looking for right away, and so must keep creating until it appears. He may even have created it before, but lost it, and now must imagine it again. “Like Harold’s window,” said Jessie. With his crayon, Harold draws first one window, then two, and then an entire city of windows in an effort to discover the window he lost. “Exactly like Harold’s window,” I said.

Sammy says he wants to be a scuba diver when he grows up, but he also has a bent for inventing. He would like to make a device that sits on top of a helmet and allows people to see invisible things. “Like ultraviolet rays,” he says. “And Mommy.” I get him some books about Thomas Edison, in whom he expressed interest when I mentioned some of Edison’s inventions. One night we huddle over a book about Edison’s early years. Sammy is most impressed by the fact that Edison’s hair turned white when he was only twenty-three. Reading to him about the telegraph and the phonograph, I try to make the ancient instruments intelligible to him. I read ahead on a page and learn that Edison’s wife died when he was thirty-seven, leaving him with three small children. I hesitate, then read the passage to Sammy. He listens thoughtfully but says nothing.

On the morning of New Year’s Eve, Jessie is the first of the children to come down to breakfast. “I had the most wonderful dream,” she says. “I dreamed that Mommy was alive and that she was having a baby girl.” I tell her that after my father died, I used to dream that he was alive, too.

“No,” she says. “It wasn’t like that. I dreamed they took Mommy out of the ground and found that she was alive. There was just a small tear in her heart, and they could fix it.”

“Did you speak with her in the dream?” I ask.

“She was talking very lightly. I couldn’t understand what she was saying.” There is no sadness in Jessie’s voice, more like a report of something wondrous. We speak of other things. She looks at the Word for the Morning, which happens to be “rejuvenate.”

Catherine Andrews, the children’s psychotherapist, has her office in her house, one of the seemingly infinite number of handsome houses on serene, tree-filled streets in Northwest Washington. It is the house in which she grew up, she tells Ginny and me, and to which she returned as an adult to care for her ailing father. Her office is furnished for children, with cupboards for stuffed toys and drawing materials and a little table in the center. On a wall near the door hangs a chart of sketched children’s faces in a variety of moods. On the way out, children are asked to pick the mood they are in.

We sit around the little table. Catherine is a small, tidy woman in her fifties, the sort of person you can tell secrets to. She has a lovely, comfortable expression and a calming voice not so soft or without authority as to be lulling. She says we are doing everything just about right, but Ginny and I have come to her specifically to learn if there are things we should be doing in response to episodes such as Sammy lying spread-eagle on the floor. “One thing you might do,” she says, “when they are recalling how Amy looked in her final moments, is to show them pictures of their mother when she was active and happy.” She speaks of three elements of death difficult for children, or anyone, to come to terms with: its universality, its inevitability, and the fact that the dead are unable to function. She says, “Some children cannot understand why a dead parent does not do something to come back to them.” They find it incomprehensible, she says, that death cannot be fixed.

To my surprise, she says she believes in the spiritual presence of the dead. She cites instances of evidence, tactile and otherwise. It is clear, too, that she believes in God and that her God does not intercede in tragedies. “But he weeps for them,” she says. I listen respectfully. Ginny and I tell her of our admiration for Harris. We speak of the delicate balances of our family arrangement, and of our attempt to create a role for ourselves between grandparents and parents. She acknowledges the unusual nature of our circumstance but as yet detects no problems we can’t manage.

I mention my concern that Harris appears under a strain these days, and that I feel under a strain as well. The month of December has passed heavily. I tell her I keep saying “Amy” when I mean Jessie or Ginny, and that I often feel removed from friends in social situations. She says that one of the delusions of people in grief is that once a year passes, things will start to look up. She reminds us of what she told Harris at the outset, that grief is a lifelong process for every one of us, not just the children. As for the demarcation of a year, “Things actually get worse. You, Ginny, and Harris are now realizing the hard truth that this is how life will be from now on. One year is no time at all.”

Near the end of our hour, she speaks of Jessie. She says boys, like Sammy, tend to demonstrate their feelings and leave them behind—what she had said regarding Sammy’s school drawing of Amy lying on the floor. But girls, she says, are more likely to keep feelings under wraps, and to wait till they feel safe to express them. Jessie had been holding back for a while, she says, but at their last session she made a drawing that Catherine calls “a very good sign.” It is a tenet of art therapy, she says, that when children draw themselves standing on firm ground with a sky above them, they are feeling secure. Jessie drew herself standing on a hill, with the sky above her and a rainbow around her.