Look Again - Lisa Scottoline [113]
Will is gone.
Ellen imagined him in a hotel. He’d be wondering where she was, what had happened, why he wasn’t home, why he wasn’t with his cat, why he wasn’t going to school. Bill would be calling him Timothy and smiling in his face, and there would be lawyers and pediatricians and shrinks, but there would be no mother. His world had been turned upside down and stood on its head. He’d gone from life with a single mother and no father, to a life with a single father and no mother, like the negative to his positive, his existence in obverse.
He’s just a little boy.
Ellen knew what she had to do next, or tears would flow and engulf her. She plucked Marcelo’s hand from her hip, edged toward the side of the bed, and rolled out as quietly as she could. She padded downstairs in the dark, running her fingertips along the rough brick wall to guide her way. Her feet hit the floor, and she crossed the room to the glass coffee table, where a black laptop sat with its lid open. She hit a key, and the screensaver appeared, a color photograph of an old wood fishing boat at ebb tide, its orange paint weathered and peeling, with a tangle of worn netting mounded from its bow, in a twilight sun.
She opened Microsoft Word and pressed a key, so that a bright white page popped onto the screen, then slid the laptop around and sat down on the couch, pausing a second before she began. The title came easily.
Losing Will
She stopped a minute, looking at it in black and white, the faux newsprint making it real. She swallowed hard, then set her feelings aside. She had to do this for her job. And for Marcelo. And mostly, for herself. Writing had always helped her, before. It always clarified her feelings and her thoughts, and she never felt like she could understand something fully until the very minute that she’d written about it, as if each story was one she told herself and her readers, at the same time. In fact, it was writing that began her relationship to Will, and she found herself coming full circle again, so she began:
Last week, I was asked to write a story about what it feels like to lose a child. We were concerned that, among all of the statistics and bar graphs attending an article about the city’s escalating homicide rate, the value of a child’s life would be lost. So I set out to interview women who had lost children.
I spoke with Laticia Williams, whose eight-year-old son Lateef was killed by stray bullets, a victim of violence between two gangs. I also spoke with Susan Sulaman, a Bryn Mawr mother whose two children were abducted by their father several years ago.
And now, to their examples, I can add my own.
As you may know, I lost my son this week when I learned that, unbeknownst to me, my adoption of him was illegal. My son is, in fact, a child by the name of Timothy Braverman, who was kidnapped from a Florida couple two years ago.
I hope you don’t think I’m being presumptuous in inserting my own experience into this account. I know that my child is alive, unlike Laticia Williams. But forgive me if I suggest that how you lose a child doesn’t alter the fact that, in the end, he is lost to you. Whether you lose him by murder, abduction, or a simple twist of fate, you end up in the same place.
Your child is gone.
What does it feel like?
To Laticia Williams, it feels like anger. A rage like a fire that consumes everything in its path. She feels angry every minute she spends without her child. Angry every night she doesn’t put him to bed. Angry every morning that she doesn’t pack him his favorite peanut-butter-and-banana sandwich and walk him to school. In her neighborhood, all the mothers walk their kids to school, to make sure they get there alive.
Of course, that the children remain alive after they get home is not guaranteed.
Her son “Teef” was shot in his own living room, while he was watching TV, by bullets that flew in through a window to find their lethal marks in his young cheek. The funeral director who prepared Lateef’s body for burial took all night to restore the child’s face. His teacher