A long time ago, when Theo was still a child, his mother often confided in him.
He remembers painting golden stars on the navy blue ceiling of his childhood room. His hands were too small back then to grasp the rough handle of a paintbrush, his discernment too unformed—and so his mother clutched his fingers in hers and guided him through fluid motions. She carried him up a metal ladder and lifted him high on her shoulder, and he recalls lighting up with joy at this precariousness. She would murmur into his ear as they together cast shining droplets of light across the false night sky with yellow paint, and he would listen with rapt attention.
There were words Theo did not understand during these quiet moments of confession and so he would fit his mouth around the unfamiliar vocabulary, phrases he could not pry into the meaning of, and repeat them until he forgot. But he would always grasp the vague shape of his mother’s disquiet.
He can’t form this image in his mind with the clarity he wishes. He can’t recall with certainty whether the ladder shone or rusted, whether his mother ever smiled between her melancholy intonations. Before a certain point in adolescence, all the years just seem to blur together, memory snapshotting into one big reel of subdued images and feelings.
The point is, he can hardly recall a time when his mother was not in mourning.
—
Mother and Father had always wanted many children.
Their marriage was a happy one—this is the only certainty Theo can cling to of life before. Every time he strains his mind to recall tangible detail, he falls short. If he’s lucky, he’ll get fragments. The glow of candles, a happy melody. The bite of a birthday hat’s string at his neck, a grandfather’s trembling hand clutching his shoulder proudly. And then—gritty sand, the lull of waves. The beach accompanied every happy occasion in his childhood. It was nothing special—a muddy stretch of weathered rock graced with perhaps half a mile of shoreline. Theo didn’t ever return there, in the aftermath of the end. To do so had seemed akin to a desecration of holy ground.
He can recall with more vivid clarity the first time his parents announced Mother’s new pregnancy. How their home was alight with sheer bliss for months, how Father’s eyes lit with joy and his mother’s laughter rang throughout the rooms. They had wanted this for so very long.
And then disaster bared its teeth, sunk its talons into his family’s soft flesh with a hunger Theo has realized is insatiable. The pregnancy was going so well—six months along, with fingers and toes and eyes and ears clearly visible in the black-and-white image the doctors presented. She often made his mother laugh with her kicking, extra-powerful when Father played Michael Jackson in the speaker beside Mother’s swollen belly. And then, in what seemed like a blink of an eye—she was nothing at all.
With the curse of hindsight, Theo understands that she marked the beginning of the end.
He remembers silence, for a long time. He remembers how grief permeated the air; he remembers Father’s constantly bowed head and his sighs of disappointment when he thought Mother wasn’t looking, brief windows into a deeper sadness. Theo would clamber up to the couch beside his mother with clumsy limbs, take her hand in his, and startle at how cold she felt. Like she was radiating ice, or perhaps simply capturing all the warmth in the air within her heart, in a tiny cage alongside all her passion. She would notice his discomfort, forehead creasing in mild concern, and attempt a weak smile. But Theo never doubted, even in these terrible moments, that his mother was strong.
And then a dream sprang anew from the ashes of their loss in the form of another child. His parents were reluctant to dare allow in traitorous optimism this time, but months passed, and Mother let her guard down enough to paint the upstairs bedroom pink. Theo found a list of baby girl names scrawled on the back of a shopping list in Father’s handwriting. It was different this time—no fanfare, only quiet expectation. It didn’t matter. The ending of the story remained the same.
It happened again, and again. Every baby lasted just long enough for a seed of hope to take root in his parents’ hearts, clearly unbarren no matter what they pretended. It became a sick sort of routine.
Mother and son had long since stopped using the paintbrushes to draw golden stars by then, and so Theo watched night by sleepless night as the constellations on his ceiling slowly faded. Instead, Mother seized the brushes in trembling hands after tearful visits to the hospital. She collapsed on the couch for just a moment upon returning, barely sparing him a glance before collecting her paint cans and brushes and dragging herself up the stairs to the chillingly empty room in which lay a bassinet that would never be used. She shrieked as she took in the pink or blue walls she had so lovingly adorned, and flung herself forward to re-cover the plaster surfaces in cold white paint. Theo thinks this somber cycle comforted Mother, in some odd way—provided something for her to tangibly control, when the universe allowed her so little autonomy over the one thing she wanted. But the sight of soft pink and powder blue still drew bile to his throat.
—
Do people die all at once?
If you asked Father, he would say with a detached bemusement only years of loss can instill, yes. A cylinder of lead fired neatly between the eyes and life snuffs, candle flame blown out by errant breeze. Life is defined by the heart rate monitor that, no matter the extent of its crescendos or valleys, will inevitably flatten into a barren plain of death, the two worlds delineated by science and necessary acceptance and the widower’s common sense.
If you asked Theo, he would tell you that the first time you lose a bit of life, you never get it back. You lose slivers of life like whispered secrets, or years, or unborn children—these things do not grow back; you cannot sleep or eat or force the living back into you.
And in the end, there is only so much of a person that can be stripped away until they cannot hold on in the face of such weakening foundation and crumbling mortar. You can spend a lifetime living on with an unyielding will to survive, to preserve this citadel that has lasted far too long—weathered too many storms and earthquakes and would-be-conquerors—to admit defeat now, could hold the bricks together through resolve alone. You could spend decades doing that. But people—good, selfish, cowardly, honest people—they all reach a point where their strength isn’t enough anymore.
He wonders what would happen if you stripped away the cold tiles of the hospital in which countless doctors have excised and delivered future daughters and fathers and brothers and sisters from thousands of joyful mothers—and failed to do so for the only one that mattered—if you drilled down and down until you met rough soil, and asked it: do people die all at once? It would, perhaps, tell you: “yes; the living are not the dead, and the dead are always dead.” But Theo knows that it could just as easily evade the question like the mass of the living always do, and simply tell you: “I am the soil of the land of the dead, and of the dead who do not yet know they are dead. The dead who have crumbled into ash, and the dead who walk me with strong limbs and coursing blood, but what does it matter? They are meant for me regardless.”
Theo is inclined towards this latter statement. He knows that when Mother slipped away under clinical sheets to join all the iterations of stillborn children in death, it didn’t matter how much life she clung to with quivering hands. When sickness slipped between the cracks in her defenses and stole her away, there was no doubt which land she pledged her allegiance to.
—
Theo grew tired of reeling from the change Father went through after Mother’s passing. Absurdity is the business of men with some measure of sanity. It is an impossible task to judge the sense of a man whose anchor amidst a hurricane of tragedy has been ripped from the seabed and hurled straight through the ship’s hull with a cascade of splintering wood. A captain goes down with his ship, and if the frigid waters and monsters lurking in their depths don’t kill him, he must resurface irrevocably changed.
The next few years crawled along with an extreme slowness—the kind of slowness that bordered on cruelty. How else could one describe this state of living—of repeating the same cursed day again and again, bare-footed Sisyphus on the mountain, a slow-thrashing bee drowning in the honey that once gave it life and home? When Theo returned from school, Father would look up from his newspaper and survey him with confusion in his eyes, as though he were expecting someone to return his misplaced wife to him and had instead received a parcel in the shape of a useless son. His father rarely talked, so Theo had to read his moods in other ways. It was only when he looked angry, really angry, that Theo would feel the tremor of it in his teeth and know to stay away.
The summer after eighth grade, he quietly approached the older man and, head bent low, requested to be sent to boarding school. The flicker of relief in his father’s eyes as he muttered his assent shouldn’t have stung as much as it did. A week later, he clutched his suitcase in hand, shouldered a light backpack, and stalked out the door without so much as a muttered goodbye. He wishes he could say he didn’t look back. Just one last time.
His eyes met a closed door. Empty windows. He wasn’t really sure what he expected.
Theo turned away, and told himself he wouldn’t miss any part of this place.
A smaller piece of himself, one that remembered gentle hands and yellow paintbrushes, quietly admitted that he would miss the stars.
—
Three years seems quite a vast period when one comes to terms with the stupidly transient nature of a lifetime.
People say closure comes with time, but these years have gifted Theo nothing of the sort. Then again, he’s not entirely sure what closure is meant to feel like. Does it creep into you slowly, a conquering soldier claiming more territory day by day, wielding acceptance like a double-edged sword until your shields crack and walls crumble and a new city is constructed atop the ruins of your old perceptions?
Or is closure sudden? One unpredictable, all-consuming moment of realization in which you attain some deeper understanding akin to the sorts of enlightened experiences that poets and philosophers have marveled at for centuries? If so, Theo thinks he’ll be waiting for a long time.
He heaves himself down at his desk and turns on his computer, raising his eyebrows at an email from Father. He knew it would be the same as it always was. His father wrote three times a year for one purpose only, a message of one sentence with perfect copies stretching all the way up Theo’s inbox—an unfortunately necessary, detached confirmation of—
Tuition paid for semester.
Theo snorts. There it is.
He doesn’t bother to respond.
Some people, it occurs to him, will never give you what you need. They destroy themselves far away somewhere, in a fortress that they’ve built and sealed from the world. They call it protection, or sacrifice, or they don’t care enough to call it anything at all.
Are these people to be pitied? Hated?
Grieved?
He’s tired of grieving.
In an effort to give him the distance he so clearly desires, Theo spends his summers at his wealthy roommate’s house, requesting that the headmaster inform his father. Eli is the sort of kid who lives in a perpetual attempt to take as many charity cases as possible, and Theo’s living situation is no exception. He spent his first summer at the mansion in constant tension, awaiting the moment Eli inevitably grew bored and took his money and attention to a more novel cause.
That moment never came. Eli was persistent in treating Theo’s presence as never unwanted, nor even desired, but simply acceptable. Theo realized the awkward tension he cringed at in every interaction never existed for the older boy, and his misgivings slowly faded. If Eli wasn’t quite family, he was at least a constant—someone Theo didn’t have to brace himself against. By the end of that summer, and the ones that followed, his place in Eli’s home became the sort of reliable comfort he had grown used to living without.
In the heart of his third summer at this new home, Eli’s butler delivers Theo a letter on a silver tray—an envelope forwarded by the school. He stares at the paper with wide eyes before tearing it open and unfolding the contents. It isn’t Father’s handwriting, though his name is scrawled on the return address.
This is a woman’s handwriting—neat, letters slotted into perfectly straight rows. Theo’s eyes dart past a short message, frowning at the unfamiliar signature—Sadie—before scanning the contents.
Theo,
I know things have been strained between you and your father in the past years. I don’t know the full situation and don’t pretend to, but I felt this was important for you to know regardless of the circumstances.
I’m truly sorry if this is unwelcome, but your father and I are getting married, and I would like for you to be there. I know he would, too.
Please let me know if you can make it. The dates and location are listed below.
Best,
Sadie Miller
…Married?
For several moments, Theo simply stands in place, incredulity and anger mixing into a poisonous concoction within him, a phantom pain burning his stomach, creeping through his intestines. It lights up his entire body, but still brings with it a lesser sting than the sheer indignation coursing through his mind. His father is getting married.
So it was never that Father didn’t want a family—he just didn’t want him. Theo’s fingers curl into fists, paper ripping at the edges under the tension.
And yet—and yet, he is furious to find that he understands his father, in some way. Because this—this really marks the end of whatever fragments of before still remain. Silence alone isn’t enough to rid someone of the forces of nostalgia and memory that bind a father and son together—you need something more, for that. Something tangible and life-changing.
Something like a new wife. A new family.
This will break him free.
This will break Father free of the chain built from the delicate material of baby clothes and framed photos of a family at the beach and a blue, or pink, or eternally white room, and a hospital bed where his mother lies sick with a pain that digs through her side like a shovel, and a man signing enrollment papers without a second thought, and a baby boy listening to his father’s voice lull him to sleep, and—it will never end. The metal forged of these flashes of shared lifetimes will never stop twisting in loops and linking together until someone makes it stop, this cursed chain.
And maybe Theo wishes his father had the face of a stranger, one that he has never gazed up at with complete trust, and maybe Father wishes Theo were not someone he has cradled in his arms and sang lullabies to. Maybe the two of them don’t know what to do but keep moving apart, because these paths crawled apart in different directions long ago and may never be reconnected—the convergence as possible as Theo ever seeing his mother’s smile again.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe they still love each other. Maybe any such love has been thoroughly ground to dust under the ever-polished boot of Mother’s pain.
Maybe it doesn’t matter. Because this chain—it has to break.
Theo viciously crumples up the letter and tosses it into the trash.
—
The phone in their dorm room will not stop ringing.
Theo and Eli eye the thing warily. It’s been twenty minutes now. Theo is starting to consider ripping the cord out of the wall—or better yet, he imagines with satisfaction, grabbing the whole thing and throwing it out the window, watching it shatter into a hundred pieces on concrete sidewalk—
“Not until we know who it is!” Eli insists, rolling his eyes at Theo’s groan. “Just pick up and be done with it.”
But Theo can’t, because he’s already discarded another three letters from Sadie Miller and he knows it must be her on the other end of that phone. She’s more persistent than he thought she would be. He wonders how she’s hiding these constant attempts at contact from his father.
“We know who it is, and I don’t want to talk to her!” Theo starts toward the plug, but Eli pulls him back with a hand on his shoulder.
“Theo, come on.” Theo crosses his arms stubbornly. “Fine, then I’ll do it.”
His friend rushes forward, and has pulled the device to his ear before Theo can stop him.
“Hello?” A pause. Eli’s eyes widen and dart towards Theo before he slams the phone down. “…Theo. It’s a man.”
The boys stare at each other silently. Theo picks at his fingernails, fighting the urge to tear himself out of the room.
The phone rings again.
—
He’d had a plan, Theo explains to Eli in a rare moment of vulnerability, the two boys sitting beside a circular table of cold marble in his roommate’s kitchen. Eli had dragged him away from school, insisting he needed the break, and the two planned days at the house grew to five, then ten. Theo can’t stand the thought of returning to campus—this building is the one place he has where his father’s tearful voice cannot reach him.
“I don’t understand him.” He grinds his teeth, acutely aware of every buzz of noise in the room, the dripping of the sink, the rolling of thunder outside. “I was going to graduate, get a scholarship, work my way to not needing his money anymore. It would be better for both of us, then. I could stop being a burden, and he could—he could…” he could ruin his own life living in memories instead of dragging Theo down with him.
Lightning sporadically slices through the dark sky, illuminating Eli’s face oddly. His friend wears a strange expression; something like pity. Theo hates it.
Memories flock to his mind, unbidden, of the last time he saw this expression on his best friend’s face. He can see it so clearly—Eli’s face, the ringing of the dorm phone, the trembling of his own fingers as he forced himself to reach out and grab it—
“Theo?” His father’s voice echoes through the phone. Theo flinches, hand shaking to the point he struggles to hold the thing to his ear properly. “Theo, is that you?” The voice is distorted— hoarse, like the man has been crying. That’s not possible.
Theo says nothing in response, only breathing harshly, wishing he had the strength to throw away the phone. But he hasn’t heard this voice in three years. He despises this longing for his father to keep speaking, tell Theo about his day, ask if he has a girlfriend, if he needs anything for school. And maybe they could pretend for just a second that this was a regular call, one checkup of many in a year. Father would ask when he would next come to visit, and he would reassure him soon, and they would both hang up smiling.
But that’s not their life. They lost that a long time ago.
“You—you haven’t responded to any of the letters.” So they were from him. “We thought it’d be better coming from Sadie. I’m so sorry I didn’t reach out myself sooner.”
Theo’s fingers are starting to turn white as they grip the phone. “We—I really want you there. I want you to be at the wedding.”
A pregnant pause. Theo senses his father is done talking, now. He’s waiting.
“No.” Theo doesn’t bother with anything more. He sets the phone down firmly, and pretends he didn’t hear the other man let out a choking sob at his cold response.
Eli looks at him, clearly about to say something but unsure if he will regret the words as soon as they leave his tongue. Mother’s voice rings in Theo’s ears, one of her sayings—she must have whispered it to him a hundred times in those days when he could never have understood—Never let life know you’re making plans, my love. Death might hear and decide to make a joke.
“I only know what you’ve told me about your dad,” Eli starts hesitantly, “but it really seems like he genuinely wants to change. To start over. Don’t you want that?”
Theo doesn’t know.
—
In the end, he grits his teeth and gets on a plane.
He’s not really sure why. Maybe so that he can grab Father by the shirt and spit scathing barbs and insults into his face until the older man throws him out and never contacts him again. Maybe to ruin his wedding day, because the sheer unfairness of what is happening is enough to leave Theo speechless.
Maybe because that phone call was the first time he ever heard his father cry.
It’s a small ceremony.
Theo slips into the back row, hoping to fade into obscurity, but there are perhaps three dozen attendees, and he can feel eyes on him from all across the venue. He finds no recognizable faces. The pastor is droning on, and the wooden seat is too hard, and the sun beats down on burning sand and cooks him alive, and Theo can’t help but fidget. The collar is too tight, Eli’s borrowed suit too itchy, and his father has still not caught notice of him. He’s clutching his new wife’s hands, the pair seemingly entranced with each other, paying no mind to the audience.
His father looks good, Theo remarks bitterly. Three years ago his face was sunken, clothes slightly hanging off his frame, sporting darkened circles beneath his eyes most days. He looks healthy now—strong frame, lively eyes, an aura of being exactly where he intends. Perfectly at ease.
Happy.
And his bride is beautiful. Sadie Miller, her white dress glowing in the sun, providing a stunning contrast to the turquoise ocean behind her. Theo can’t help but notice that everything about her is startlingly opposite from his mother. Brunette, not blonde. Icy blue eyes, not the soft brown that Theo inherited. She carries none of mother’s calm; she holds the stance of a woman who is stubborn, ready to wield what tools she possesses if needed. She exudes strength; her eyes burn. Mother’s strength had always been quiet, lying beneath the surface where only those who loved her enough to dig could see.
Vows are exchanged. Theo looks away.
Memories flock to his mind, unbidden. The beach—not this white-sanded beauty, but the perpetually damp, rocky mess of his childhood. His beach.
His mother was there, like she always had been. Smiling, ankles wading in the sea as she pulled up her sundress to keep from getting wet. She always gave up in the end, letting the soft fabric fall in the waves to encourage her son, who was unwilling to enter the ocean. She told him to try; just try, my love, I’m right here. Theo doesn’t think anything ever happened to him, a palpable root of the aversion. He was perhaps afraid of the shape of it, the way it drew back only to crash forward with even greater power, uprooting and unbalancing and crashing, crashing, crashing, and still it came crashing up again, foam teeth snarling for another round. How could it be anything but furious? What if it directed that anger at him? He thought it would catch him, those white arms unforgiving and limitless in their rage, and dash him against the rocks, or swallow him. The concept of object permanence was perhaps not one he’d yet fully grasped; he did not truly understand how people vanished beneath waves and then came back up again.
But that day—and all the other days that matched it near perfectly, like different takes of the same scene—these were his best memories. The sun beat down in a warm embrace behind a blanket of clouds, and Theo and his mother—or was it his father?—lay under the shade of a swaying umbrella, in the spot they always took. Where had it been? There were not many areas of sand in this beach that were not littered with rocks or perhaps even glass, and so they must have been clever, found a spot tucked away out of sight of the dozen others who bothered visiting such a decrepit shoreline. He thinks, stupidly, that he could ask his father, before his eyes once again lock on the man and woman standing before him, and he is overwhelmed by a wave of dull emotion—the kind you can’t name; can’t even imagine ascribing a label to.
Father pulls his gaze from Sadie for just a moment as the audience applauds the new marriage, and he locks eyes with Theo. His eyes widen; a smile flits across his face. It’s seemingly genuine, but how could it be? Theo feels unbearably wrong, under his stare—like he should be cowering before this man, or begging for forgiveness for doing a thousand things, or for doing nothing. He tears his eyes away, and stands up to leave. He’s done what Father asked—one last courtesy.
The beach. Theo had sat on a large towel, his father next to him. Mother wasn’t in sight, but he knew she was there; they never went without her. Father often stayed home, but not this time—he had wanted to come, or maybe he hadn’t; maybe Mother convinced him. Theo does not remember that part. He’s certain they played together; he recalls how his father splashed him with water, taught him to swim, patiently, for hours, because his son was willing to brave the waters in exchange for his Father’s pride—the grandest prize he could imagine. Theo was not a good student; in the end he went back to enhancing his sand pit, with the childish confidence that he could reach deeper, could dive into the ground further and further until he came out the other end in a perfect line, a bisection straight through the center of the earth. He went in with a plastic shovel, and then his hands when the thing inevitably broke, until his mother called for him and his father yanked him out with strong arms, and they returned home.
His father is pushing through the small crowd, shouting for him. Theo ignores the calls until he can’t, walks slowly away with rigid arms until he feels hands on his shoulders, gently pushing him to turn around.
“I’m so glad you came.” Father hugs him, slowly, and it’s unfamiliar and awkward, Theo’s arms still frozen stiff at his sides and his father’s motions unsure.
“Please come stay with us for a few days.” He says, clearly straining to push as much warmth into his words as he can—and yet, Theo cannot shake the feeling that he really means it.
He opens his mouth and says “okay” in a voice that is strange to his own ears, because the tears are starting to well in his father’s eyes, and he can’t bear seeing the man so desperate, and his plane home doesn’t leave for a few days anyway, because he hadn’t decided to come until yesterday under the pressure of Eli’s quiet support and his own drowning fear that he would hate himself for missing this, and—
Theo is ready to leave this place.
—
The house of his childhood is quiet when he numbly steps over the expanse of weathered coir that forms a mat reading Welcome. It’s new—one of Sadie Miller’s many imprints on the building, Theo surmises.
He shivers at the unfamiliarity of it all. A large plant greets him beside the door as he silently slips off his shoes—a habit long-since ingrained in him by a dead woman—budding with infant flowers and presenting concrete evidence that within these walls is an environment in which life can thrive. Atop the small table beside the stairs rests a lamp, emitting a soft glow from a lightbulb clasped tightly in the outstretched arms of a ballerina. It’s the sort of odd thing that Mother would have scoffed at in favor of a more elegant piece. A scan of the home reveals dozens more mismatched trinkets littering the shelves, splashing every corner with unorganized color. He jumps as Father rests a hand on his shoulder ever so briefly before rushing back to the car, his wife following behind him. Theo realizes they’re going back to collect his small bag of belongings and curses himself for forgetting it, opening his mouth to call them back but finding that he can’t conjure up the words.
Theo had swiftly escaped the wedding reception and farewells after muttering the address of his motel to his father, who promised he would pick him up the next day. He felt the older man’s eyes burning into his back as he made his way through the scalding sand and away from the ceremony. Catching a bus back to his lodging, he had collapsed onto the paper-thin mattress and contemplated running away like every nerve inside him screamed to. He could switch motels, wait around for a couple days and return to school without regret.
But he hadn’t managed to convince himself that there wouldn’t be regret, wouldn’t be so much regret that it would eat him alive, and so he remained frozen within those four walls until his father knocked at the door.
It was a quiet ride back home.
Theo quickly turns as Sadie’s soft footsteps echo behind him, his father on her heels with the small duffel. The door snaps shut, and he suddenly feels stupidly, terrifyingly small.
A tense silence suffocates the air for several moments before Sadie’s voice interrupts it. “We’ve got your old room all ready for you!” She smiles, and despite himself, Theo’s mouth quirks up in response. He lifts up his bag with stiff fingers and makes his way up the stairs, feeling a stab in his gut at the way that third step still creaks after all these years, and steadfastly ignoring Father’s fingers curling around Sadie’s as they follow him.
Each step feels heavier than the last as he slowly makes towards his room. There is no avoiding the other rooms in the hall on his path, and so he must see how they have turned the not-nursery into a study, bookshelves lining the walls so that no one would ever consider what color they were, or what color they never would be. The gilded wooden desk and chair leave no space on the carpeted floor for even a suggestion of a bassinet. Theo tears his eyes away.
He stops at the barrier of his old fortress, slowly reaching out and grasping the familiar handle. He takes a deep breath and shoves open the door.
He gazes up at the faded canopy of stars.