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By Root 989 0

best friend, and he was emblematic of friendship and loyalty. He was also known as a mediator who used his persuasiveness and gentleness to forge compromises. It was the perfect name for Wade. But for the next year, for fourth-year Latin, Jennifer would give them all the names of gods in a ceremony that took place on Attic Night. We watched his classmates move up and on without him—that was the first time we had to do that—and as I sat there, I could see him, I could see him standing beside his good friend Todd, his head thrown back in laughter at the foolishness of comparing themselves to gods. The tears came silently, and we left quickly, John to our room and his books, me to the computer and my friends there. The writing on ASG was raw. We were all so unprotected, skinless really. I felt I could tell them everything, and I did. Four weeks after Wade died, I wrote, Today is four weeks. This is the hour he died. The phone message light is blinking. Please be Wade, I whisper. “Hey, Mom.” If I could only hear that. “Hey, Mom.” Instead the words, “Hello, Mrs. Edwards.” My chest aches.

At three months, I joined a discussion about whether to change the room of a child who has died. I know it has only been three months, but I do not know if I ever will be able to take it apart, since he put it together. Since he was only sixteen, he put so little together, I cannot take anything apart. There is already too little of him here on earth. I need the places to grieve, but I do not need them to feel close to Wade. I go to his room only in my worst moments. I pull his comforter back and smell him in the sheets. I take his things from his backpack and put them back again. I run my hands over his books on the shelves. But I feel close to him when I am sitting here, or when I sit at his grave, where he never was while he was alive. Or when I pass his parking place at school or when his friends come by. And when I look across a long yard or read a novel with a perfect image. Wade is with me everywhere. The beach house, his room, these are places I have to deal with. But I cannot confuse them with keeping Wade close to me. Did it help Bob, who was trying to decide what to do with his daughter’s room? I don’t know. I do know it helped me. It helped me think about all the parts of this terrible uprooting, sort them out, and give them places. That was such an important part of what was happening: our helping, or trying to help, was helping us. It provoked me to think about how I had responded in the past when other children had died, and I thought of Kellam Hooper.

I dated Kellam a little when I was at Mary Washington College. He died in an automobile accident in 1969, our sophomore year, returning to the University of Virginia from a date with another girl in Fredericksburg. Ten years later, the year Wade was born, I went back to Charlottesville to interview Virginia Law School students for summer jobs at my Nashville law firm. I drove by the house Kellam had lived in, a house where he and I had once sat up all night talking, and I stopped outside, looking up at what had been his windows, and I thought a lot about him—as I had for years. When I went home, I wrote a story about him, a story I then put in a drawer. After Wade died, I realized I should have sent the story to Kellam’s parents. So I set out on a mission to find them. It was good for me. The search swallowed me up. Since Kellam had died before graduating, the UVA Alumni Association had no record of him. But they did have the address of Joey Tennant. It was Joey, wasn’t it, who had been in the car with Kellam and survived? I remembered his hair and his open face; I doubted he would remember me. When I finally reached him in Texas—he had been camping with his son’s Scout troop, I liked the adult Joey immediately—he said I was right, he had been with Kellam, and he added, “I think about Kellam all the time and wonder if other people do.” Joey gave me some hints about where to find Kellam’s family, and using them, I finally found Mrs. Hooper. Improbably, she had moved to Charlottesville.