| Something to Bury |
Jamie Sampson, age eight, was hit by a car at dusk on a Thursday. His bicycle, the angular frame bent and splashed with blood, ended up in the shrubbery that edged my mailbox. He did not wear a helmet, and his brains and bits of hair and scalp spread across the pavement casually, almost as though they had always been there or belonged there or had finally come home.
They did, in fact, create a stain that no amount of water seemed to wash away. After the accident, my husband and our neighbor spent hours with the garden hose pointed at the street, drinking beer, shooing our son away as the sun set and the moon rose. They still wore the funereal suits they had left the house in that morning. They stood like gatekeepers over the spot and glared at drivers who passed the house and dared to linger a bit too long.
I should tell you that my son saw everything. He and Jamie were playing some game, a game invented by boys, and if you asked him the rules he would shrug and glance at the ground. “Bikes,” he said, when I questioned him. “We were playing bikes.”
Later, I held him in my lap when he told the cops and Lisa and Alex Sampson, “I don’t remember.” He did not cry, and tried to slip out of my arms. He kicked me in the leg and I pinched his side, harder than I should have. “One minute he was riding and then he wasn’t. There was a car. It was white. I don’t remember.”
He would repeat this, as would I, for neighbors and teachers and aunts and uncles until it became the truth and took its place in the mountain of facts about a dead boy. It became something else for us to bury.
I tell no one, but every night I dream that Jamie is resurrected from the pavement. He walks up the driveway solemnly, with purpose, and I know he means to take my son back with him.
It has been years now, but time means nothing, you realize. Time is just a vehicle, really. It propels us forward and sometimes all we can do is watch helplessly as the world builds and collapses and builds itself back up again.
Each night, I rush and lock the doors, each one of them, just in time. I then lock the windows while Jamie stares at me with what used to be eyes. “Let me in,” he says. “Just for a minute. I promise.” I tell him no and to go back, but sometimes, I open the window just a crack. Sometimes, I let him slip his hand or his arm or half his body across the windowsill before I change my mind, push him away, and slam the window shut.
His fingers curl into sharp claws and he scratches deep gouges into the wood and the glass. “Please,” he says. “Please.”
My dream self smiles and says, “Maybe next time, Jamie. Come back tomorrow.”
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