No Harm Can Come to a Good Man. James Smythe
again.
Once Sean is finally put into the ground, Deanna and Laurence take the girls to his grave, to do something that’s small and private and just for them. They stand around the stone – the dates make Deanna feel sick to look at, so she avoids that – and they all tell stories about Sean and why they loved him. They have decided to bring some of his toys, to put them in the soil with their hands. Alyx buries one of her own toy ponies, the one that Sean always used to steal when he was younger; Lane chooses a dinosaur that he claimed he didn’t like any more, but that he had absolute trouble letting go of as he grew older. They don’t say why they’re doing it, but they think that it might help. As they bury them, scooting the soil on top of them, pushing them under, Deanna feels a rip in herself: so much of her beloved son now relegated to the ground. She will miss the toys, because they would have reminded her of him. She thinks about coming back at night, when the rest of them are asleep, and pulling them from the soil; but she wonders where she would stop, or if she would just keep on digging.
They sit Alyx down and ask if she would like to talk to anybody about her brother, because they’ve heard too many stories about what happens if children are left to bottle up their emotions, how dangerous it can be. They hire a therapist, a specialist in childhood bereavement, and Lane is allowed to do whatever she wants for a while. Three weeks after her brother’s death, Lane shaves her head almost down to nothing and she doesn’t bat an eyelid when Laurence shouts – screams – at her about it.
‘We had a deal!’ he yells, and she doesn’t respond or even acknowledge it. Deanna’s listening and that evening they have a conversation about his career.
‘What was that about?’ she asks, when he gets off the phone then, because they haven’t yet spoken politics yet. She had assumed. They’re in bed and he’s propped up like always, tablet on his lap. The ClearVista survey deadline has long expired; all of that stuff was forgotten in an attempt to find relative peace in the wake of Sean’s death.
‘The delegates called,’ he says. ‘They still want me to run.’
‘This year?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know.’ She knows that this works in the party’s favor; that their loss will be used, Sean an inadvertent sacrifice to the voting gods.
They have The Daily Show on as they lie in bed and they both laugh at the same joke and immediately feel guilty, as if they’ve forgotten too quickly about Sean. Then Jon Stewart starts talking about Homme’s laughable efforts at beginning a campaign. He mentions Laurence dropping out and then he looks to the camera, full of actual sincerity, and sends out his best wishes to the Walker family. No jokes: just an appreciation of their tragedy. When they switch the set off, Deanna tries to sleep, but she imagines that she’s drowning: she can see the sky above her, but the water is between her and it, a fluid mass of tropical blue that’s destined to do nothing but end.
Amit, the man who would be Laurence’s Chief of Staff, comes to the house with a plan. It’s a year-long breakdown of their lives: of the things that they have to do and how they might set about moving everything forward. He doesn’t mention Sean either, but the boy is there, floating in the air above them. Everything that Amit says is tinged with the knowledge of how this might have been before and how it will be now. He has an argument that makes Deanna feel sick to hear: that this is a chance for Laurence to do something truly good, a chance to use his awful situation to his advantage. The words aren’t Amit’s: they come from the delegates, Deanna knows. They’re desperate to harness this. The tragedy can mark every facet of the campaign, should Laurence choose to step up again: the charities that he will vouch for; the events that he will attend; every single time that he mentions the word family in a speech. Nobody will be able to forget what has happened. Deanna is about to start arguing: that Laurence shouldn’t be running, that the family needs him, when Lane comes home. She walks into the kitchen in front of them and doesn’t say a word. A month after her brother has died and she’s tattooed herself again: this time across her right shoulder blade, a single word. It isn’t announced, but it’s flaunted, red and angry, on her thin skin, so much bigger than her past tattoos. Her parents freak out, shouting at her, and they get close to read it. She lets them, because this will happen sooner or later. It’s her brother’s name, clear as anything, in a slick, italicized script, framed on a bed of flowers and leaves, a vine stretching out and away from them. It leaves them breathless. Lane leaves the house again without saying a word.
In bed that night, Deanna asks Laurence how they can be angry with her for it. She wishes it was something else: a swear word, or the name of one of the stupid bands again. That would make it easy to have something to rally against. This, though? It’s grief, manifested as words and made indelible.
Alyx seems fine, but they know that she is not; not quite. She talks to the therapist and sometime Deanna goes along and watches through the false mirror in the room that they use. Alyx talks about anything but Sean: even when pushed, it’s as if there’s a gap there, where she doesn’t know what’s wrong and why she should be talking about him. The therapist sometimes leads her into those conversations, but it’s always stilted, and Alyx is always unwilling to give anything up. One day they leave her alone in the office and Alyx doesn’t know that she’s being watched. The therapist and Deanna talk in the little room, Alyx playing behind them, past the mirror, and she talks to him. She says his name and she holds something out, a toy pony, and then she shakes her head. She agrees with the nothingness: it’s not the right pony. In the little hidden room both women know what’s happening.
‘This is relatively common,’ the therapist says, ‘especially with twins. This isn’t something to worry about.’ She squeezes Deanna’s arm, and Deanna thinks of the hospital receptionist leading her through to the pale room where they were told what had happened. The same squeeze that tells her that everything will be all right in the end, even if it isn’t right now. She’s not sure. They don’t tell Alyx that they know and Deanna doesn’t tell Laurence about it either. Instead she stands outside the twins’ room – No, she reminds herself, it’s only her daughter’s room now, because Sean is under all of that soil, face up, maybe even trying to get out, somehow – and she listens for what might be happening behind the closed door. She imagines a conversation, or a play and she wonders if Alyx sees her brother as he was, or if he’s something else, a vague and loose version of himself. She tries to fantasize Sean into being there herself while she listens, imagining him in front of her as she attempts to re-form him. Crouched on the floor, her eyes shut, she wonders if she can hear his voice herself if she tries. It would be so easy to go in and join Alyx in her fantasy.
Laurence is asked to do an interview on one of the bigger current affairs chat shows, as a pundit and nothing more. He’s still a good talker, charismatic and personable, and he’s more willing to say what needs to be said, to give sound-bites, than many others. He is, the TV producers think, good value for money. He has to buy a new suit as the others don’t fit him any more. It’s the same color as the one that he wore when he made his announcement. He gets the size smaller around the chest and waist, because he’s lost weight. He hasn’t been trying to, but it’s happened. His middle-age puppy fat is almost completely gone. If he sucks in his belly when he’s dressing he can see his ribs.
They talk about schools and healthcare, the topics that he’s there for, to actually try and pass judgment on some of the things going on across the country. And then the host rolls that into a conversation about Sean, blindsiding him. Laurence has no choice but to go with it. They talk about how the hospital tried to save him, and how hard they worked. They talk about universal healthcare and what it needs to work properly for the people. They talk about how it felt for him to lose his son, and Laurence cries, partly from the shock of being asked and partly because he simply cannot keep it in. There’s something honest about this; everybody watching can see that.
He says, ‘We have to move on. We have to go out and brave the rain. There is no other choice.’
Deanna doesn’t watch the interview, but writes instead, her own form of catharsis, abandoning the book that she was working on (which suddenly feels like frippery), taking only fragments – themes, emotions, some