Epilogue: What Remained
People have asked me, in the months since, whether I regret it.
The question is never quite direct. It comes sideways — do you miss your family, is it hard not having them around, do you think you’ll ever reconcile — but the underlying question is the same: was what you did worth what it cost?
I have sat with this question.
I have sat with it in the therapist’s office in the building on Fifth where I began going in February. I have sat with it late at night when Leo was asleep and the house was quiet in the way that quiet houses were sometimes an invitation to the difficult thoughts. I have sat with it in the ordinary moments of ordinary days, when a holiday came around that would previously have meant a drive to Clearwater Drive and sage-and-butter smell and a father asleep in front of football.
Here is what I have come to:
I did not destroy my family.
A family where a child could be kicked hard enough to fracture his rib and the adults in the room could stand there and call it playing, where a grandmother could take a phone from a mother’s hand while the child was on the floor, where the word scene was considered more important than the word ambulance — that family had already done something to itself. I didn’t do it. I only stopped participating in the pretense that it hadn’t been done.
Leo, at eight and a half, had recovered so completely that sometimes I watched him running in the backyard — just running, for no reason, the running of a child who was full of energy and unencumbered by anything — and I had to sit with the feeling of it, because it was too large for a smaller container.
He asked me once, in February, whether we were going to see Grandma.
I told him we weren’t going for a while.
He was quiet for a moment. Then he said: “Because of what happened at Thanksgiving.”
“Yes.”
“Because of Ryan and what Grandma did with the phone.”
“Yes, Leo.”
He thought about it the way he thought about things — seriously, and then arriving somewhere.
“That’s okay,” he said. “We have Dad’s parents.”
He went back to what he was doing, which was building something elaborate out of blocks on the living room floor, a structure of ambitious and improbable engineering that was going to fall down eventually but hadn’t yet.
Mark’s parents drove up from Charlottesville most months. They were good people who had always been kind to Leo with the direct, uncomplicated kindness of people who found that easy. His mother made a different kind of pie — no lattice, a crumble top — and Leo had determined, after careful deliberation, that both kinds had merit and that the world was large enough for both.
He was not wrong.
He was, as he had always been, exactly right about the things that mattered.
And I was learning, slowly, to be the mother who was also exactly right about the things that mattered — who knew when to argue and when to stop arguing and just walk out the door, who knew the difference between a scene and an emergency, who knew that some things you protected by removing yourself from the thing that threatened them, and that this was not destruction.
It was the opposite of destruction.
It was the most careful thing I had ever done.
