Each member of the Huntley family tried to deal with the fact of death privately, individually.
Suze spent much of her time at home in the far corner of her room, the farthest from the boys’ bedroom, moving her dolls in complex, repeated patterns on the carpet and speaking to them in a voice so faint and fragile that, standing in the doorway and watching her daughter, Catherine could never understand any of the imagined conversations. Suze would retreat to her room as soon as she arrived home from school on weekdays, and frequently not leave it for longer periods than to eat and go to the bathroom on the weekends. Catherine and Willard might try to entice her out-even demand that she join the rest in some activity in the family room, a game or a particular television program-but as soon as their attention strayed from her, she quietly disappeared.
Burt didn’t seem quite so badly troubled. He was willing enough to spent time in the front of the house- perhaps too willing. He would clear a space on the family room floor and play for hours with his army figures, the same ones that Sams had so enjoyed watching in the make-shift tent on Burt’s bunk. He would send army against army, silently destroying formations with a single swipe of his arm or leg, and knocking individual soldiers over by striking them with the base of whichever one he held in his hand.
Will, Jr., preferred the armchair next to the couch in the family room, where he would sit with his dog, Crud, for hours on end, ruffling the dog’s fur or scratching its ears. Sometimes he would simply hold onto the animal, cradling it tightly in his arms. Often, he would almost cry.
Willard became more an automaton rather than a person. He woke at 5:00 am on work days, got ready to leave and let himself out of the house without saying a word, without making any extraneous sounds that might disturb the others. He never called home from work. He never spoke about his work while at home. He began arriving home later and later, sometimes an hour later than usual, sometimes two hours or more, always explaining curtly that “Traffic was bad.” Those words, exactly, never an alteration. “Traffic was bad.”
On week ends he puttered around the house, futilely spattering plaster on the ubiquitous cracks that kept extending themselves in corners, on new ones that spread like narrow cancers in window corners. He never repainted any of the repairs. Occasionally he would work outside, doing what was required to keep the place presentable-mowing the front yard but rarely the back; sweeping the front sidewalk and drive when blowing leaves accumulated along the foundations of the house; trimming the hedges separating his house from those on both sides, but ignoring the overgrown shrubs along the back fence.
Catherine responded worst of all to Sams’ death. She barely registered what the coroner’s representative meant when he said, in abstracted, formal officialese that nearly left her breathless: “If the child hadn’t been so old, I would call it SIDS-as it is, all we can say is that he suffered an ALTE that ultimately proved fatal.”
“ALTE,” Willard had asked humbly.
“An apparently life-threatening event. We found no other definable cause of death.”
And, as far as the authorities were concerned, that was it. Dead child. So sorry. Nothing more to say.
She wouldn’t let Willard remove the little box bed from the back room. He had wanted to carry it out to the back yard and take a sledge hammer to it, pound it until nothing remained but infinitesimal fragments that would blow away with the faintest breeze…but he never told Catherine. About a week after she had found Sams’ body, he made one effort to pick the bed up, then noticed that she had changed the bedding that morning, left the room, and rarely entered it again.
Catherine did, though. She would perch on the edge of the box, its pine frame cutting painfully into the back of her legs, and stare blankly at the floor…and the place where he had been laying that morning, where the faint line of the shattered slab created a ripple in the other-wise smooth carpet.
She also carried Sams’ blanket with her almost everywhere. It was still filthy-she had actually intended to wash it later that Saturday with the rest of the sheets and pillowcases from the children’s rooms but obviously hadn’t. The satin edging was ragged, stained, stiff where normally it would have been damp. It stank. But she either held it in her hand or tucked it under her arm or squeezed it between the waistband of her pants and her skin, where the touch of it made her flesh chill and shiver.
There was no family anymore. Merely five people of varying ages quietly inhabiting the same space…the same house.
Certain times of the day proved more difficult than others.
Suze seemed to have no trouble falling asleep in her own bed, although the number of stuffed animals keeping Flat Cat company on top of her coverlet increased dramatically, until there was almost no room for the girls’ body. Still, once she burrowed her way under the layers of plush and politically correct, non-flammable, hypoallergenic filling, she slept deeply, rarely waking until well past dawn.
But the boys…
The boys’ categorically refused to sleep in the back room.
It didn’t matter how much Willard blustered or wheedled, how often he led them by the hand back to their bunks and warned them to stay there or else…no matter how resolutely he carried out the motions of preserving the sense of a normal bedtime, the boys always woke the next morning twined together on the family room couch, sometimes covered by one of Burt’s blankets, sometimes completely uncovered.
On week days, Willard never looked into the family room to see if they were there. He ignored them, moving through the darkened kitchen and living room and entry and out the door like a phantom. On weekends, if it was a good day, the boys were up and dressed before either Willard or Catherine roused, and things went…well, placidly. If it was a bad day, Willard would find them asleep, and stomp out of the house without eating and spend most of the rest of the morning in mindless, useless chores.
Beyond that, the boys spent as little time as possible during the day in their room. If they needed to change, they whipped in, grabbed whatever clothes they needed, and locked themselves in the back bathroom until they were fully dressed. If Burt wanted a particular set of army figures, he would halt outside the door, take a deep breath as if he were about to dive into shark-infested waters, and race in and out as fast as possible. If Will left his homework or his school books in the room, he was more than willing to take whatever punishment his teacher might mete out for his lapse, rather than walk down the hall and retrieve them before heading out to school.
In all, one could fairly say that the Huntleys were at a stalemate, neither openly-and perhaps healthily- grieving for loss nor taking any steps to move beyond it.
Until late in the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-ninth of August.
2
Willard was, as usual, immersed in the television-some football game or another, essentially identical to any other he had stared at over the past month except for the colors of each team’s uniforms, and even those were almost indistinguishable beneath their crusts of mud and swampy-green grass stains. There was a score, the teams were something to something, of course, but he couldn’t have told anyone what it was. The game was busyness, something to do, something to keep from thinking.
Catherine was sitting at the other end of the family room couch, pretending to watch the game as well, but in reality paying more attention to her hands as they slid aimlessly up and down the nap of the bit of blanket on her lap.
Neither looked toward the kitchen door as Will, Jr., entered, carrying something.
He didn’t speak. He simply stood there, motionless, deathly pale and breathing so shallowly the rise and fall of his chest barely fluttered his shirt.
Finally, Willard glanced up.
Then stood up, urgently, in one swift motion. Catherine caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, then rose to her feet as well.
In a breath, both were at Will’s side.
“What’s wrong?” They spoke at the same instant.
Will didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his eyes-hollow, bruised, red-rimmed-to meet theirs. Then he dropped them to the object he held in his hands.
When they saw what it was, their faces abruptly drained of color until they were as pale, as ashen-white as their son.
It was just a dog-food bowl, Crud’s dented aluminum bowl that usually held crusted remnants of the
