Sarah Van Arsdale
173
Robert in the bed beside her. “What do you mean?” Indeed. What did I mean? “There was an accident, I guess,” I said, and before I could even take in what I’d said, “I’m on my way over,” I heard her say and then there was just the hollow dead phone sound in my ear, and I thought about how the ear is shaped like a little shell, and I saw my finger tracing Damian’s perfectly formed seashell ear when he was a baby. The cops must have been horrified, that I would keep saying “Damian’s dead,” no euphemism, no dodging, no introduction for poor Tessa. “She’ll be here soon,” I told them, and they nodded, and then we all sat there in the still living room, the rain nibbling down the windows in long icy streams. I thought that I should probably call Herb, but I wasn’t even sure where he was. They must have told me the story then, my son’s death already sliding into a narrative that would trail after me, and that, in the end, would change so many times over in its particulars that I wouldn’t ever know what had really happened. But as I remember it now, it’s as if we were silent, as if now there was nothing to say, and still I was waiting for Damian’s step on the porch outside, heavy with his new weight, the weight of his becoming a man, and light, too, still light with his boyish grace. y