Lift - Kelly Corrigan [13]
I think about Kathy all the time.
I wonder if she lives for the mention of Aaron’s name, hearing some story she’d forgotten or never knew, seeing his handwriting in a high school notebook under the sofa, an old photograph, a few frames of video. Here he is at his christening, or holding out a handful of roly-poly bugs, or playing stickball in that field across from the Wawners’ house. Remember how he brought a one-pound bag of M&M’s to that girl he had a crush on—Carmen?—or how many times he snuck off to the lake to go fishing and then confessed—he could never lie—before going to sleep? Remember how he’d be lying back on his bed with his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling, and when you’d ask him what he was doing, he’d say, talkin’ to God, or how, when we lived on the farm, he was always climbing that tree and then jumping out, over and over, like he was practicing for a jumping-out-of-trees contest?
I wonder if Kathy ever forgets entirely, then hates herself when it comes rushing back at her. I wonder whether she tells strangers that she has two kids or three. I wonder if she sometimes goes to sleep on a bed of Aaron’s clothes, breathing them in like so many scent squares.
I asked her recently if she ever wanted to kill herself. I don’t remember exactly how I put it, but she knew what I was getting at. She said no. She was still Maggie’s Momma and Lena’s Ma. She was still Tony’s wife. Someone still needed to fill Satchel’s dog bowl and take him for walks twice a day. There were still rivers to float on and yellow moons that stopped her short in the night and diner food. There were still days when she had the urge to wear her leopard-print loafers, something a seething person could not possibly do. There were still close lacrosse games that got her up on her feet and Camp Wahoo, a place Aaron loved, where you could wear nothing but a bathing suit and flip-flops for days, play flashlight tag and paint rocks and build fires that lasted past midnight. There were still terrible arguments and painful conversations, confessions, makeup sex and speechless moments, and there were still sobbing children to be held and righted and sent back out into the world. All that wicked, wrenching aching could not nullify the fact that there was still a role for her—work to be done and happiness to be had.
She was sad, not bitter. “There’s a difference,” she said.
I remember having an awful conversation once, long before I became a mother, about whether it would be worse to lose a baby or a ten-year-old or a twenty-year-old, and so on. Why people think about these things, I don’t know, but we do. We hover around the edges of catastrophe—trading headlines, reading memoirs about addiction and disease and abuse, watching seventeen seasons of ER. I said it would hurt the most to lose a twenty-year-old, because you’d have loved them so much longer and your attachment would be so much more specific. Babies love everyone and everyone loves them. But twenty-year-olds? They won’t lean into just anyone. You have to earn any sliver of intimacy you share with them. Some pale memory of trust and connection has to hold against the callous disregard that is adolescence. And at twenty, they are just on their way back to you.
Now, though, for me, the most unthinkable loss would be never to have had a child in the first place. That’s what I ended up saying to Meg (your “Aunt” Meg, who became family when we asked her to be Claire’s