John looks away, like he’s trying not to cry now.
“So we’re talking about what he’s going to do after the test—he says he’s going out with some friends—and I’m telling him to make sure never to get in the car if he’s been drinking or if his friends have. And he says, ‘I know, Dad. I’m not an idiot.’ The way teenagers do, you know? And then I go on to tell him never to text and drive.”
John laughs, a dark laugh. “How on the nose is this dream, Sherlock?”
I don’t smile. I bring him back by waiting.
“Anyway,” he continues, “the examiner walks over, and Gabe and I give each other a thumbs-up—like the day I dropped him off at kindergarten right before he walked into his classroom. A quick You’ll do great. But something about the examiner makes me nervous.”
“How so?” I ask.
“I just have a bad feeling about her. Unsettling. I don’t trust her. Like she’s got it in for Gabe and he won’t pass the test. Anyway, I watch them pull away. I see Gabe make his first right turn out of the driveway and it goes well. So I start to relax, but then Margo calls. She says that my mom keeps calling and Margo wants to know if she should pick up the phone. In the dream my mom is still alive, and I don’t know why Margo’s asking me this, why she doesn’t just answer the goddamned phone. Why the hell wouldn’t she pick up? So she says, ‘Remember, we agreed, don’t pick up the phone unless somebody’s dying?’ And all of a sudden I think that if Margo picks up the phone, it means my mom is dying. That she’ll die. But if Margo doesn’t pick up, nobody’s dying—my mom’s not dying.
“So I say, ‘You’re right. Whatever you do, don’t pick up the phone. Let it ring.’
“So we hang up and I’m still waiting for Gabe at the DMV. I look at my watch. Where are they? They said they’d be back in twenty minutes. Thirty minutes go by. Forty. Then the examiner returns but Gabe isn’t there. She walks toward me, and I know.
“‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘There’s been an accident. A man on his cell phone.’ And that’s when I see that the examiner is my mom. She’s the one telling me that Gabe is dead. And that’s why she was calling Margo over and over, because somebody was dying—it was Gabe. Some idiot on a cell phone killed him while he was taking his driving test!
“So I say, ‘Who is this man? Have you called the police? I’ll murder him!’ And my mom just looks at me. And I realize that the man is me. I killed Gabe.”
John takes a breath, then continues his story. After Gabe died, he says, he and Margo bitterly blamed each other. In the emergency room, Margo growled at John, “A gift? You said the phone was a gift? Gabe was the gift, you fucking moron.” Later, after the toxicology report indicated that the driver was drunk, Margo apologized to John, but he knew that deep down, Margo still blamed him. He knew because, deep down, John blamed her. Part of him felt that she was responsible, that if she hadn’t been so stubborn and had just looked at the caller ID, John would have had his hand on the wheel and reacted more quickly to the swerving drunk driver, getting them out of harm’s way.
The terrible thing, he says, is that nobody will ever know who was responsible. The driver might have hit them anyway, or they might have avoided him if they hadn’t been distracted by their argument.
It’s the not knowing that torments John.
I think about how it’s the not knowing that torments all of us. Not knowing why your boyfriend left. Not knowing what’s wrong with your body. Not knowing if you could have saved your son. At a certain point, we all have to come to terms with the unknown and the unknowable. Sometimes we’ll never know why.
“Anyway,” John says, returning to the dream, “at that point I wake up screaming. And you know what I say? I yell, ‘Daddyyyyyyy! ’ Gabe’s last word. And Margo hears this and freaks out. She runs into the bathroom and cries.”
“Did you?” I say.
“What?”
“Cry.”
John shakes his head.
“Why not?”
John sighs, as if the answer’s obvious. “Because Margo’s in the bathroom having a breakdown. What am I gonna do, have a breakdown too?”
“I don’t know. If I had that kind of dream and woke up screaming, I might be pretty shaken by it. I might feel all kinds of things—rage, guilt, sadness, despair. And I might need to let some of it out, open the pressure valve a bit. I don’t know what I’d do. Maybe I’d do what you did, which is also a reasonable reaction to an intolerable situation—numb out, try to ignore what I felt, hold it together. But I think at some point I’d just explode.”
John shakes his head. “Let me tell you something,” he says, locking his eyes on mine. There’s an intensity in his voice. “I’m a parent. I have two girls. I won’t let them down. I will not be a basket case and ruin their childhoods. I will not leave them with two parents who are haunted by the ghost of their son. They deserve better than that. What happened isn’t their fault. It’s ours. And it’s our responsibility to be there for them, to have our shit together for them.”
I think about his idea of having his shit together for his kids. How he feels that he failed Gabe and doesn’t want to fail the others. How he feels that keeping the pain locked up will protect them. And I decide to tell him about my father’s brother, Jack.
Until he was six years old, the age that John was when his mother died and the age Gabe was when he died, my father believed that he and his sister were their parents’ only kids. Then one day, my father was rummaging around in the attic and came across a box of photos of a little boy, from birth all the way to about school age.
“Who’s that?” he asked his dad. The boy was my father’s brother, Jack, who had died at age five from pneumonia. Jack had never been mentioned before. My father was born a few years after his death. His parents believed that not talking about Jack was a way of keeping their shit together for their kids. But their six-year-old was shocked and confused. He wanted to talk about Jack—Why didn’t they tell him? What happened to Jack’s clothes? His toys? Were they in the attic with the photos? Why didn’t they ever talk about Jack? If he—the little boy who would one day be my father—died, would they forget all about him too?
“You’re so focused on being a good dad,” I say to John, “but maybe part of being a good dad is allowing yourself the full range of human emotions, of really living, even if living fully can sometimes be harder than not. You can feel your feelings privately, or with Margo, or here with me—you can let them out in the adult sphere—and doing that might allow you to be more alive with your kids. It might be a different way of keeping your shit together for them. It might even be confusing for them if Gabe is never mentioned. And allowing yourself to rage or cry or sit with the despair at times might be more manageable if Gabe were given some air in your household and not tucked away in a box in the proverbial attic.”
John shakes his head. “I don’t want to be like Margo,” he says. “She cries at the slightest things. Sometimes it seems like she’ll never stop crying, and I can’t live that way. It seems like nothing has changed for her and at some point, you have to make a decision to move on. I’ve chosen to move on. Margo hasn’t.”