December sunlight sliced through the French doors and fell in a swath on my kitchen island. Home from taking the kids to school, I dropped my keys next to the sink and inhaled the silence of the empty house. Another day of rushing Rowan through his morning routine had me on edge. I regretted yelling at him to hurry up and get out of the car. I turned on the stove and a small flame erupted under the tea kettle. My phone rang, and I glanced at the screen. It was Summer, my friend and realtor who was working with Randy to help sell his house before it went into foreclosure.
“Kendall,” she said, breathless. “I’m calling with the worst news.”
My mind invented a handful of scenarios in which the house sale fell through. The inspector had discovered some catastrophic structural damage. The whole place had burned down.
“The worst news,” her voice faltered. “Randy. Killed himself.”
I clutched the countertop. Two glasses of raspberry smoothie sat where the kids had left them, a purple puddle at the base of one.
“I’m so sorry,” Summer was saying. She was crying. I envisioned her blonde hair, long and straight, rimmed with sunlight. She was the embodiment of her name, Summer. Bright and beautiful with an open smile of white teeth and red lipstick.
“My kids,” I said, my ribs splintering like a wishbone.
“I know,” she replied.
The tea kettle whistled from miles away. I stared at the stove, confused, then slowly switched it off.
“How did he do it?” I asked.
“He hung himself.”
My peripheral vision closed in.
“The inspector had an appointment at the house this morning,” she said, rushing now. “He found Randy in the living room, saw him through the window in the front door.”
A slideshow reeled past my eyes, pictures like permanent tattoos. Randy hanging. Where? In the living room. By the window? By the couch? I remembered when he painted our front door red. Nothing was real. I had been practicing his suicide in my mind for years. This shouldn’t be surprising. And yet. The shock left me stunned. Unable to feel.
“I should go up to the house,” I was pacing now, searching for my keys.
“No, don’t go up there. There’s nothing to do except stop and breathe. You have to take these moments of quiet before everything starts happening.”
I draped myself over the kitchen island, my arms on the cold wood. The air was shallow in my lungs.
“That poor inspector,” I said.
“He’s traumatized.”
“Jesus. I wonder if Randy planned it that way. To spare his girlfriend from finding him.”
“He was such a gentle soul,” Summer said. Her words were sandpaper against the grain. Was he gentle? Soft spoken, perhaps. But quietly hostile, and he had just ruined our children’s lives. Still I was grateful that she thought it and said it. Let that be the story of Randy, if his people needed to believe it. It felt like a salve against my rage, and I would need it while I figured out which memories to preserve for my kids.
“It was brave of you to call, Summer. Better to hear it from you than the police.”
We hung up and my mind searched for a place to land, as if scrolling through static for a radio station. He had actually done it and succeeded. I hovered like a balloon above my body. Whatever emotions it contained, were out of reach.
There was no way I could protect my kids from the news that would destroy their childhood. I looked at the clock on the stove. I had five hours to learn how to usher them through this catastrophe. I opened my laptop and Googled, how do you tell your kids their father has died.
“Be concise and straightforward,” the computer said. “Avoid euphemisms. Use the word, dead.” Another wave of denial swept through me. Tidal water. None of this was real.
I detached from gravity and tumbled while some efficient version of me left a message for Greg, “It’s important, call me back as soon as possible.”
Then I called Rowan’s therapist, Geoff. Pen and notebook on the table in front of me. “Should I tell them it was suicide?”
“I think it’s best to be truthful,” he said. I pictured him at the desk in his office. Young and handsome. A father of two boys. “If you don’t tell them now, you’ll have to do it later and that would be worse.”
I nodded and wrote down the word, truthful, in blue.
“What if they ask me for details, like how he did it?” I kept the pen moving. Retracing the word, truthful.
“You can answer their questions,” he said. “You know what to do. Just be real.”
“Knowing me, I’ll default to too much honesty. I just need to know if that’s OK.”
“Kendall, I’ve always known you to be a wise and loving mom. I have faith in you now.” I drew straight lines, fanciful lines, a flower, an eye.
“I’m scared this will destroy them,” I said.
“Listen, there’s research that says, having one solid parent is enough. This is an unimaginable blow but you will all get through it.”
“God, I hope so.”
“Kids process trauma in small bits. You’ll see, they can only hold it for so long. And as they move through developmental stages they’ll have to revisit and reprocess it all.”
“Like for years?” I asked.
“I’m afraid so.”
“What about today and tomorrow? What do we do?”
“Let them decide. If they want to go to school, that’s really good. Maintaining continuity is key and the sooner they can resume their normal routine the better.”
After talking to Geoff, I felt my feet on solid ground.
While rehearsing what to say, I was startled by a hollow knock on the door. A team of uniformed officers stood in a half circle. Their formality carried an unbearable weight.
“Are you here about Randy Laird?” I let them off the hook. They nodded. They introduced themselves. Officer Somebody, police, coroner, two victims’ advocates.
“May we come in?”
We sat on my gray sectional couch. I held onto the cushion with two hands the way you might hold the edges of a fast moving sled. It was crushed velvet. In the kitchen my phone rang, unanswered.
“Your name came up in the database,” one of the cops said. “You were married to Randall?”
“We were divorced,” I corrected him.
They handed me pamphlets. They mentioned an autopsy, support groups, funeral homes, told me to contact social security.
The Christmas tree stood naked by the window, strings of lights strewn on the floor.
The front door swung open. Greg rushed into the foyer. He had left work without even knowing why. This irritated me. The melodrama of it. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but Greg was born to play the rescuer and I couldn’t bear to need rescuing.
He stopped cold and scanned the ominous crowd. I took him by both hands and told him the news.
He wrapped me in an abrupt and crushing embrace. His biceps too hard against my cheek. “I could tell by your voicemail that something was really wrong,” he said into my hair. The intensity was suffocating. Rather than comforted, I felt imprisoned.
We returned to the couch. I couldn’t retain one fact the somber team was telling me. Greg took notes. He gathered up the pamphlets. I let myself drift on the surreal tide. The victim’s advocate, a gawky gray-haired man patted my back as if a complete stranger’s affection would bring me any solace. It didn’t.
A sudden thought jarred me. The mysterious despair that had overtaken me yesterday after buying our Christmas tree.
“When did he die?” I asked the coroner, hoping to find a correlation.
“A little more than twenty four hours ago. Most likely it was yesterday morning. It appears as though he woke up and had a final cup of coffee on the deck.”
“I knew it,” I said. They all looked at me quizzically. “I felt it.”
Perhaps I was inventing a self-indulgent fantasy. One that would bring me some illusion of control. But if I was connected enough to be in the know, then didn’t that also make me culpable? I could have invited him to come tree shopping with us. I could have shown him more compassion. It had probably been six months since I had actually looked him in the eye. Did I even answer his final voicemail?
That afternoon I had to tell my kids that their father was dead. The entourage left and Greg made me a sandwich I couldn’t eat.
“Do you want me to be here when you tell them?” he asked.
“No. I have to do it alone.” I felt it strongly. The need to hold the three of us in our own private bubble.
I went to the kids’ rooms and brought their favorite stuffed animals to the couch. Then I decided that would be weird. They’d wonder why the animals had traveled downstairs, so I stashed them under the throw pillows. I called a friend and asked her to drive the kids home from school. It seemed important not to explain why. She shouldn’t know before my kids. They shouldn’t hear it from her.
I watched through the living room window as the carpool arrived. The grass was winter brown. The tree branches were brittle. Long shadows snaked over the yard. Chloe skipped toward the front door. Rowan dropped his backpack and raced to the trampoline for a quick backflip, and I thought, this is the last moment they will ever be happy.
They had just turned eleven years old.
I heard the front door unlatch and the dog’s toenails tapping in the hallway.
“Can you guys come to the living room?” I hollered. I wished I could apologize to Rowan for yelling at him that morning. What a terrible thing to do on the worst day of his life. Chloe plopped onto the couch with a smile. Rowan looked suspicious, as if he already sensed my dread. He turned to make his escape.
“Row, come back, we need to talk,” I said.
He moved reluctantly back to the couch.
“I have some very difficult news,” I said.
Before I even began to unleash the rehearsed words, he covered his ears.
“No,” he said.
“Daddy has died,” I told them.
“No,” he yelled, his hands still pressed to his ears.
He came off the couch until he was kneeling on the rug and screamed with pure agony. I have never heard anything so painful. Rowan sank to the floor in anguish and then tried to run from the living room. I caught him and gave him his teddy bear with the frayed nose. He embraced it and fell back onto the couch sobbing. In that moment, I hated Randy .
“We’re a team,” I told them. “We’re getting through this together.”
Chloe sat still, her eyes wide.
“Did he kill himself?” she asked in the smallest voice.
I nodded. She whimpered without tears. I moved to the couch and held out my arms. They leaned against me.
“Mommy, can we decorate the Christmas tree?” Rowan asked.
“Yeah,” I replied, surprised by the new mood.
The kids bolted from the couch and rummaged through a box of ornaments.
“This is my favorite one,” Chloe said. She held a guitar-playing rabbit.
Rowan picked up a black lab dressed as a firefighter.
Greg came home then and stood beside me without talking. I reached for his hand which was winter cold. When the tree was filled, it almost looked like a normal December day. Rowan hung his stocking on the mantle. Chloe slumped in a blue armchair.
“Mom, how did he do it?” she asked.
Something leapt in my abdomen, like a kick in utero. Rowan spun to face me. The Christmas tree had only been a short respite from the hazardous journey ahead.
Chloe was pacing the hallways of her mind, trying to make sense of the inconceivable. I was afraid of giving her information that could haunt her.
“Are you sure you want to know?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said with adult composure.
“No,” Rowan said.
How could I tell one, but not the other? If Chloe had to grapple with not knowing, her imagination would fill the gaps. Silence didn’t make an awful thing disappear, it just closed off any avenue to process it. I decided to trust her.
“Let’s talk,” I said to Chloe. She followed me into my office. My desk was piled with papers that seemed important yesterday.
I didn’t know if she was old enough to understand what it meant to hang oneself, so I sidestepped the details and said, “He did it with a rope.”
She nodded, looking at me steadily.
“Do you know what that means?” I asked.
She nodded again and asked, “Where?”
“In the living room.”
She breathed in and out.
“This sounds like a game of Clue,” I said, picturing the revolver, the lead pipe, the little plastic coiled rope.
“I’ll never think of that game the same way again,” she answered. And we laughed. Everything was shattered, but we laughed.
When she got quiet, I asked, “Are you OK?”
“Yes,” she assured me.
I thought to myself, there is no way she can actually be OK.