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I stood at the rail above the flagstone patio and the swimming pool with my tee-shirt and boxers flapping around me. I could tell myself it was the thunder that had awakened me, or the freshening wind, but of course it was the dream. The two of us on the couch, holding hands, unable to talk about what was between us. The loss was too big, too permanent, too there.
It wasn’t rattlesnakes that killed our son. He died of dehydration in a hot car. I never blamed my wife for it; she almost died with him. I never even blamed the dog, a St. Bernard named Cujo, who circled and circled our dead Ford Pinto for three days under the hammering summer sun.
There’s a book by Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and that perfectly described what happened to my wife and son. The house where our car died—because of a plugged needle valve that would have taken a mechanic five minutes to fix—was far out in the country and deserted. The dog was rabid. If Tad had a guardian angel, he was on vacation that July.
All that happened a long time ago. Decades.
I went back inside, closed the slider, and latched it for good measure. I lay back down and was almost asleep when I heard a faint squeaking sound. I sat bolt upright, listening.
You get crazy ideas sometimes, ones that would seem ridiculous in broad daylight but seem quite plausible in the small hours of the morning. I couldn’t remember if I’d locked the house, and it was all too easy to imagine that Allie, a lot crazier than Greg believed, was downstairs. That she was pushing the double stroller with the squeaky wheel across the great room to the kitchen, where she would leave a Tupperware container of oatmeal raisin cookies. Pushing the stroller and believing that her twin sons, forty years dead, were sitting in the seats.
Squeak. Pause. Squeak. Pause.
Yes, I could see her. I could even see Jake and Joe… because she could see them. Only because I wasn’t her I could see they were dead. Pale skin. Glazed eyes. Swollen legs and ankles because that was where the snakes had bitten.
It was ridiculous, idiotic. Even then, sitting upright in bed with the sheet puddled in my lap, I knew it. And yet:
Squeak. Pause. Squeak.
I turned on the bedside lamp and crossed the room, telling myself I wasn’t scared. I turned on the room’s overhead light, then reached through the doorway and turned on the upstairs gallery’s track lighting, also telling myself no one was going to clutch my groping hand and I wasn’t going to scream if someone did.
I went halfway across the gallery and looked over the waist-high rail. No one was in the great room, of course, but I could hear the first spatters of rain hitting the downstairs windows. And I could hear something else, as well.
Squeak. Pause. Squeak. Pause.
I had neglected to turn off the overhead paddle fan. That was what was squeaking. In the daytime I hadn’t even heard it. The switch was at the head of the stairs. I flipped it. The fan coasted to a stop, giving one more squeak as it did so. I went back to bed but left the table lamp on, turned to its lowest setting. If I had another dream, I didn’t remember it in the morning.
I slept in, probably because of my late-night scare, and skipped my walk, but I was up early on the next three mornings, when the air was fresh and even the birds were silent. I took my walk to the swing gate and back, seeing plenty of rabbits but no humans. I passed the Bell mailbox at the head of a driveway enclosed by rhododendrons but could barely glimpse the house, which was on the bay side and screened by trees and more rhododendrons.
During weekday working hours I heard leaf blowers and saw a couple of landscaping trucks parked in Allie’s driveway when I went to the grocery store, but I think she was otherwise alone. As was I. Plus, we were both singles who had outlived their mates. It might make a decent romcom (if anyone made romcoms about old people, that is—The Golden Girls being the exception that proves the rule), but the thought of putting a move on her held zero appeal. Less than zero, actually. What would we do? Push the invisible twins together, one on each side of the stroller? Pretend to feed them SpaghettiOs?
Greg had a caretaker, but he had asked me to water the flowers in the big pots flanking the doors on the driveway side and poolside. I was doing that one twilit evening ten or twelve days after I moved in. I heard the squeaky wheel and turned off the hose. Allie was pushing the pram down the driveway. She was wearing a kind of shoulder sling. In it was a stainless steel pole with a U-shaped hook at the end. She asked me if I was still feeling all right. I said I was.
“I am, too. I come bearing cookies.”
“That’s very nice of you,” I said, although I wouldn’t have minded if she had forgotten. Tonight there were red shorts spread on one stroller seat and white ones on the other. Shirts were again draped over the backs. One said SEE YA LATER ALLIGATOR, the other AFTER AWHILE CROCODILE. If there had been actual kids in those tees, they would have looked cute. As it was… no.
Still, she was my neighbor and harmless enough. So I said, “Hello, Jake” and “Hello, Joe, what do you know?”
Allie trilled her laugh. “You are very sweet.” Then, looking straight at me, she said, “I know they aren’t there.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Allie didn’t seem to mind.
“And yet sometimes they are.”
I remembered Donna once saying something similar. This was months after Tad died and not long before we divorced. Sometimes I see him, she said, and when I told her that was stupid—by then we had recovered enough to say unkind things to each other—she said, No. It’s necessary.
Allie’s sling had a pouch on one side. She reached into it and brought out a Ziploc bag of cookies. I took them and thanked her. “Come in and have one with me.” I paused, then added, “And bring the boys, of course.”
“Of course,” she said, as if to ask, What else?
There was a set of inside stairs going from the garage to the first floor. She halted the pram at the foot of them and said, “Get out, boys, hustle on up, it’s all right, we’re invited.” Her eyes actually followed their progress. Then she put her sling on one of the seats.
She saw me looking at the snake pole and smiled. “Try it, if you like. You’ll be surprised at how light it is.”
I pulled it out and hefted it. It couldn’t have been more than three pounds.
“Steel, but hollow. The sharp point on the end of the hook is to stick them with, but they’re too fast for me.” She held out her hand and I gave her the pole. “Usually you can push them, but if they still won’t go…” She lowered the prod, then gave it a quick lift. “You can flip them into the brush. But you have to do it fast.”
