Page 33 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
He laughs. “Exactly. Come on, man, I’m cold. This fleece is mostly for show.”
Tim and I used to wonder if our son was really a good artist or if we were just biased because we loved him so much. Ian would be at the kitchen table doodling on one of his art pads and Tim and I would have those wordless conversations that parents have.
You seeing this?
I know, right?
How?
No idea.
Whatever doubts we had about his talent were erased two years ago. We were walking through the kids’ school with a herd of other moms and dads at parent-teacher night when we noticed some student artwork hung on the walls. The kids had been assigned self-portraits. We spotted Ian’s right away because it actually looked like Ian. Tim pointed to a particularly disastrous effort from another kid, then another. “You believe this bullshit?” he whispered. We weren’t in the habit of art-shaming children, but the point was clear: Ian’s work was better than everyone else’s.
I’m sitting up in bed now with a few of his latest drawings beside me: a Christmas tree, Santa’s sleigh silhouetted across a bright moon, and a drawing of Harry Styles wearing a holiday sweater. (The dog,not the singer.) I told him they were all terrific, but he paced the kitchen and refused to believe me. He’s asleep now. My assignment is to sit with his work and decide which one would make the best contest entry.
Our son, the tortured artist.
Tim is next to me on what was his side of the bed. He’s here because—along with mulling our son’s art—I’m about to try logging in to his school laptop, and I need him as my emotional support ghost.
When LeRoy from IT gave me his computer, he included a few photos that Tim had on his desk. I leaf through them for maybe the hundredth time. Tim smiling with the cross-country team. Tim holding a shovel with the baseball coach when they broke ground on the new field. Tim and a few teachers I recognize, like chubby Alan Trent from science, lanky Gabe Smith from English, and a pretty history teacher named Lauren Maxwell.
Your fake smile is so obviously fake,I tell him.
He smiles, nods at his computer.You gonna do this?
I’m trying.
It’s like a Band-Aid. Deep breath, then rip.
When I finally open it, the first thing I notice is how dirty it is. He was an eat-at-his-desk kind of principal, so the crumbs make sense. I run my finger over the keyboard and put it in my mouth. It tastes like sugar-dusted sand.
The lock screen image is a generic, preloaded mountain range. At the top right corner of the keyboard, a square lights up asking for Tim’s fingerprint. I touch where he touched thousands of times but, of course, it doesn’t work. A bar appears on the screen asking for a password, and I key it in off the pink sticky note LeRoy left for me.
Who knows what I expected? But when I see myself, Tim, and such very young versions of Ian and Bella smiling back at me from his home screen, I’m so gut-punched that I slam the computer shut and say, “Nope.”
Why did you have to pick one where we look so fucking happy?
He’s gone now, though.
I don’t pretend to talk to him as much as I used to. It started a few weeks after he died. I was in bed, but I was too exhausted to sleep.GriefUnited was open on my laptop, so I scrolled. After some time clicking at random, I stumbled onto a post titled, “The Ultimate Grief Hack: Your Imagination.” A man, older, somewhere in the Midwest—he said he was a writer—wrote that a few months into being a widower he found himself chatting with his dead wife. He’d do it while weeding or slogging through housework. At first, he said it was like talking into a void. Then he began to feel like he was talking to something unresponsive, like a sleeping pet. He kept at it, though, because it made him feel better and it gave him something to do. Then, one day, as he yanked kudzu out of the ground in his garden, there she was. She told him he needed to grab lower to get the roots. He knew she wasn’t there, of course, but…shewasthere.
I thought about it the next day, and the day after that. What would I even say? What would Tim look like? Would he still be sick, like those last few weeks, or would he look like he’d looked before? These were strange questions to be asking myself because, duh, wouldn’t all that be up to me?
As a kid, I was never more than a mediocre student—a girl destined to own a bar. I killed it in English class, though. I had smart things to say about the books we read, and I could write well. My math and science teachers convinced me that I was hopeless. My English teachers, though, made me feel good about myself and what I could do. That guy from GriefUnited was a writer. Talking to his dead wife worked for him. Maybe it could work for me, too.
My first few shots were a bust—just me yammering to myself. Then, one day, everything changed.
It’s you.
It’s me.
I talked to him every night at first, like when we’d just started dating and were bingeing each other. Now it’s only when I especially miss him. Sometimes he stands with me in the bathroom when I’m brushing my teeth, like he used to. Occasionally he’ll ride along in the passenger seat when I drive, which feels weird because he always drove us. I took the kids to Fenwick Island in Delaware back in July. As Ian and Bella took turns burying each other in sand, he sat next to me on my towel.
God, they’re getting big.
I set his laptop back on my bedside table for now and look down at Harry Styles.
“All right, you little shit,” I say, smacking the mattress. “I’m making an exception for tonight.”
