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Our son died before the dogwood pushed out its first flower, a bloom so simple with four white petals and a burst of yellow-green in the center—a beginner’s flower. I believed that flower was my son reincarnated. One believes the stupidest things in grief. I spoke to the flower and called it my son. And then I laughed because how ridiculous—how cruel, really—it would have been if my son was reincarnated as something so ephemeral, frail, and beautiful. I killed that first bloom with one swoop of my hand. Dead again, my son could become something else: the shell of a tortoise, strong and
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“I had to hear this from Lena. I’m your mother. You didn’t even give me the chance to go see you. Be with you. With him.” At this last pronouncement, my mother’s voice cracked. I only realized then that she had lost a grandchild. Her one grandchild. How bizarre that someone so far away as my mother then seemed, in this large, sunny house in Mexico, with its terra- cotta floors, arranged flowers, and paintings in gilded frames, so far away from my son’s ashes, from the bed from which he never woke up, could feel his loss. Santiago was so mine, I could not fathom her feeling him gone.
My throat was dry, but I couldn’t manage the will to stand up and get myself water. “I have no family anymore,” I said. “Now who’s being dramatic.” “My son died!” My mother pinched my chin and swiveled my head left and right. She explored my face, my ears, my neck, my jaw, as if I were new to her. “He did, my beautiful girl. But you didn’t, did you?”
Then Santiago came, and every time he looked up at me like I was a superhero, each time he called me “Papi” to tell me something half-invented-half-true—“Papi, did you know there’s water on the moon where tiny dinosaurs live?”—each time he clung to me breathless and my touch soothed him enough to make him breathe again, pulled me deeper into a love I had no idea could exist. One I had no idea what to do with. When it all went away, I was content not to love again.
Santiago was dead. There was solace in keeping his memory unchanged. He was a place to visit, like a book reread.
“It’s Germany, Joseph,” Lena said. “Babies drink beer here.” “I don’t think that’s true,” Peter said.
