Chapter Five
When all this is over, Diana will reflect upon her hasty and ill-considered decision to stick Tom’s letter in her bedside table.
What if she’d taken it with her to the library instead?
Or locked it up, as she later did, in the fireproof box in the office, with their passports and birth certificates?
Would Duncan have given up on his need to know what his father had written?
Would he have accepted that Tom’s message wasn’t for him and moved on?
She doesn’t think any of this when she finds him on her bedroom floor, curled up on the braided area rug, his long legs squashed into his chest. Instead, terror rockets through her nervous system, down her spine, and all the way to her toes.
“Duncan?” She falls to her knees. “What’s happened?”
Diana leans over him, her hair falling out of her ponytail and across her face.
She pushes the strands behind her ears and slowly turns Duncan over, not wanting to worsen his pain.
Her brain hasn’t fully calculated that Duncan + letter = a problem she can’t easily parent her way through.
In a fruitless attempt to believe something other than the letter is causing his distress, she searches his body; there’s no blood, no broken bone poking through the skin.
His eyelids are scrunched together, his face red and twisted.
She settles next to him on the floor, cross-legged, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his knee. “Duncan?”
He opens his eyes. They are bloodshot, the lashes clumped together in unhappy spikes. He thrusts the letter at her and sits up, his legs sprawled in front of him. “What’s this, Mom? What does it mean?”
She has no idea what to say. How does she explain this to Duncan when she can’t explain it to herself?
“He says people died because of him.” Duncan jabs at the letter. “Who died? Who?” He’s yelling at her, his voice filled with fear.
Before Diana can respond, Phoebe is in the doorway, holding Bear Bear.
“Mama? Why is Duncan upset?” Weeping, she runs to her mother’s lap as Diana takes the letter from Duncan and pushes it under the bed.
Phoebe’s sobs are sympathetic, unconnected to Duncan’s discovery, or maybe she’s been holding them in for some time.
They’re relentless, too, soaking the front of Diana’s sweater.
She starts to hyperventilate, her chest heaving and her body twitching.
Duncan’s emotions abate the more upset Phoebe becomes, and soon he’s wrapped himself around his sister, trying to soothe her.
They’ve been here before. After Tom died, they each fell into grief in unsettling, yet different, ways.
Phoebe cried unceasingly, exhausting herself until she passed out every evening.
Duncan withdrew, nearly failing out of school.
Diana fell into a stupor, sleeping for days at a time.
The thought of returning to that period fills her with dread.
“Phoebe, honey, you’re all right,” Diana whispers, holding her children tight to her body, one arm around each of them.
When Phoebe calms down, she’s limp in Diana’s arms, eyes puffy and hair matted against her face.
“Duncan, let me put your sister to bed, and then we can talk.” Diana lurches up onto her left leg and then her right, Phoebe’s weight making her off balance and awkward. “Okay?” She looks at Duncan as she leaves the room, and he nods with one curt tilt of his head.
She expects he’ll listen to her, that he’ll wait, but after she’s escorted Phoebe to the bathroom, changed her into pajamas, and tucked her into bed, Diana hears the front door slam.
Through Phoebe’s bedroom window, in the darkening twilight, Diana watches as Duncan runs onto the basketball court of Phoebe’s elementary school.
Up he goes, tossing the ball into the net; he sprints to save it from rolling into the snow.
He runs to the other side, dribbling all the while, only changing which hand bumps the ball up and down.
Back to the net and up, stretching to direct the basketball through.
Over and over, Duncan barrels across the court.
As if compelled to keep his body in motion.
Diana knew nothing about basketball before Duncan picked up the sport.
Tom, a freshman starter on his high school’s varsity basketball team, hoped Duncan would be similarly inclined, so he registered him for Alcott’s recreational basketball league before the boy could tie his sneakers.
From the second the orange ball was placed in Duncan’s hands, he was captivated.
Whenever Tom could get away from work, he and Duncan would be on this court, sometimes joined by other kids from the neighborhood.
More often than not, it was the two of them alone, strategizing plays, improving Duncan’s jump shot, and practicing rebounds.
When the winter weather forced them inside, they watched Celtics games on television together, wearing matching Larry Bird jerseys, perched on the edge of the sofa.
The sport bonded the two of them, with Tom passing on his love of the game to his son as a kind of legacy.
During those first few months without Tom, when Duncan clammed up and wouldn’t talk to anyone, Diana, barely able to function herself, sat silently next to her son on the sofa while he watched countless basketball games, including old playoff series broadcasting on cable channels she didn’t even know they had.
After a while, she started to talk to him during the commercial breaks.
At first, Duncan ignored her. Then, slowly and begrudgingly, he started to answer her inquiries about zone defense, the three-second rule, and traveling.
Sometimes, he even mocked her ignorance (“Mom, how do you not know this?”), rolling his eyes when he thought her question was particularly ill informed.
Those were her initial glimmers he would be okay.
Diana hurries out of her house, pausing at the edge of the yard to wait for a car traveling down the street to pass by.
The driver, a slight figure hunched over the steering wheel, steps on the gas as the car approaches Diana, tires squealing.
Before Diana can yell at the driver to slow down, the car is gone, and the lights around the basketball court click on, making her blink.
Intent on his game, Duncan doesn’t waver as she runs across the road to him.
She made a mistake asking him to wait. While she may have needed a few minutes to take care of Phoebe, the delay was too much to ask of him.
So, of course, he came here. He always comes to the basketball court when he’s upset.
Diana stops at the edge of the court, clearly visible to her son, and watches him.
Lately, she’s been distracted, not ignoring her children, but not giving them her full attention either.
Her grief is to blame, as is her job. She’s given both of those areas of her life more energy and space than she should have. No parenting awards for me, she thinks.
“Duncan? Why didn’t you wait for me?”
He bounces the ball harder against the blacktop, scowling.
That’s the wrong question. Why did I ask that? “Do you want to talk about what you found?”
Duncan stops, gripping the ball. He starts to speak but abruptly turns to the net instead. Up he jumps, and the ball goes through. Swish. Swoosh.
“Are you worried I’m mad at you for lying to Uncle Evan about being sick? Or finding the letter?” Diana asks, trying again. “Don’t be. I wish you hadn’t, of course, because it wasn’t for you. I’m not mad at you, though.”
Duncan captures the ball as it exits the hoop and bounces once near her feet. Diana asks herself whether it’s possible to mess up this conversation more. “What I mean is that I don’t understand the letter myself. Not yet. Since you’ve read it—” Diana is interrupted by her son’s anguish.
“Why, Mom? Why did he have to die? Why did he leave us?” Duncan drops the ball, clenching his fists and looking down at his feet. “Why?” he asks, the tears coming fast, falling to the ground and disappearing into the blacktop.
Diana is at his side, wrapping her arms around him. “Shhh, honey. I’m here.” They rock together, their weight shifting from one foot to the other, not unlike how Diana soothed him late at night when, as an infant, he emerged from a satisfying slumber to the shock of being awake. “Shh, shh.”
“Why, Mom?”
“He was sick, honey, and the doctors didn’t have the medicine to help him.”
“He had cancer.” Duncan’s voice is so low Diana strains to hear him.
“Yes, cancer.” Only months between diagnosis and death; not enough time to get better. But enough time to write that letter.
“He gets fuzzier in my mind.” Duncan gulps as he grabs for air to fill his constricted lungs. “Sometimes, I can’t remember him on my own. Like he’s only a story someone told me, not a real person. Why, Mommy? Why?”
Duncan hasn’t called her Mommy in years. She pulls him closer, his shoulder blades taut under her hands. She inhales his twelve-year-old-boy scent, drenched with sweat and sadness.
This is the truth of their lives: An enormous loss has reshaped all of them, forcing the kids to grow up in ways they shouldn’t have, at least not so soon.
While she would give anything to be able to take away Duncan’s grief, to lessen his pain would be, in some ways, dishonest. What Diana can do—what she has to do—is validate his emotions.
He needs to believe the parent he has left is there for him.
“Why did your dad die? I don’t know. He should be with us, helping you and your sister with your impossible math homework, teaching Phoebe to ride a bike, and, of course, playing basketball with you.”
As Duncan’s breathing calms, Diana slides her thumb along his cheek. “There’s nothing we can do to change the fact he’s not here. What we can do is keep going and look out for one another. Remember your dad loved us, and loves us still, wherever he is.”