Andrew climbed onto his bed and lay on his back looking at the ceiling with the easy bonelessness of a child who is, for the first time in a long time, genuinely tired rather than exhausted. The new shoes sat at the foot of the bed in the lamplight, Jacob’s name on the heel in careful stitching. The taped ones sat beside them, holding their shape, still exactly what they had always been.
I turned off the light and stood in the doorway for a moment before I went.
“Mom?” Andrew said, from the dark.
“Yeah.”
“I think Dad would be okay with me wearing the new ones.”
“I think so too,” I said.
A pause. Then: “He’d probably say something dorky about how the old ones held up pretty good.”
I laughed. It came out before I could shape it into anything, just a real laugh, the kind that arrives without warning.
“He absolutely would,” I said.
Andrew made a small sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh and then he was quiet, and a few minutes later his breathing told me he was asleep. I stood there a moment longer, in the doorway of my son’s room with the light off and his shoes at the foot of the bed and the whole impossible year of loss and grief and duct tape and three hundred children sitting on a gym floor somewhere behind us, somewhere we had passed through and were still passing through and would continue to pass through, because that is what grief is, a country you carry with you rather than one you leave.
But you can carry it differently, depending on what else you are carrying alongside it.
We were going to be okay. I had known it earlier in the afternoon and I knew it again now, and it felt more solid the second time, the way things do when you have tested them against a moment of doubt and they have held. Not because the hard things were over. Not because Jacob was coming back or the money was suddenly easy or the job had been there all along or any of the things that had been true today would remain permanently true.
But because people had shown up. Because a child named Danny had gone to the art room and come back out wearing something different. Because a girl named Laura had asked about a pair of shoes and listened to the answer. Because my son had stood in front of his whole school wearing his father’s name on his feet and let his shoulders go back and understood, at eight years old, what it meant to belong to someone who had mattered.
Because of all of that, and also because of a roll of duct tape offered to me by a small boy who had decided that the things connecting you to the people you love were worth fixing rather than replacing, we were going to be okay.
We were, in fact, already something close to it.
