who knows what’s best, the one who says I better step up or obviously I’ll be a major disappointment. A subtle shift, but it was there, loud and clear. “It would be a good idea to get started on your essay this summer.”
“I know, Dad. Look, can we talk about something else?” I started to feel sick, dinner churning in my stomach.
“But, Danny, you need to get serious about—” Dad began.
“Yes, I know, Dad. ‘Danny, it’s time get serious about your future, your education, your career, blah blah blah.’ But it’s not like you can squeeze all your wise fatherly advice into one week and then disappear on another business trip.”
I felt bad as soon as I said it, but it was the truth. He was always out on the road even, I suspected, when he didn’t need to be.
Dad stared into the fire. He didn’t even try to deny it. “I’m sorry, son.”
Neither of us said a thing for a long time, just watched the wood burn down into glowing red coals as the sky grew darker. Crickets and cicadas started their night sounds and fireflies flashed signals in the tall grass by the pond. When I finally spoke, what I had to say came out so low I wasn’t sure he could hear me. Or if I even wanted him to.
“Dad, how come we never talk about Cole?”
He drew in a quick breath. For both of us, hearing the name out loud felt like a blow to the heart. “You know why, Danny.”
“No, Dad, I don’t.”
He took his hat off and raked fingers through his hair. “It’s your mother,” he said. “She feels responsible for what happened. I thought you knew that.”
“How could I know when we don’t talk about it? It’s like Cole never existed.”
Tears prickled behind my eyes then, as they do now, as I sit by the edge of Walden Pond and remember.
When I close my eyes, I can still see Cole that last morning when I glanced back at the house on my way to school. He was standing at the living room window like he did every day, wearing his Batman pajamas and waving good-bye. Everybody said he looked exactly like I did when I was two, with his gray eyes and hair all black and thick like mine.
That afternoon, when the guidance counselor came to get me, we were working on the isosceles triangle theorem in eighth grade geometry class. He whispered something in my teacher Mrs. Pearson’s ear, and then they both looked over at me. Somehow I knew something bad had happened, like a premonition.
At the funeral, everybody talked about what a terrible tragedy it was. An accident. Mom had been working on the garden like she did every May, planting flowers around the pool fence. Cole was doing what he called “helping,” using a beach shovel and a Tonka dump truck to push dirt around.
When the phone rang that day, Mom picked Cole up and carried him into the house with her. But when she went looking for a pen and paper to write something down, he ran back outside, probably to get his truck. He loved that truck, partly because it was my favorite truck when I was little, and I gave it to him. By the time Mom finished the call and realized he wasn’t playing at her feet like she’d thought, Cole had opened the closed gate around the pool—we still don’t know how he did that—got too close to the edge, and slipped silently into the deep end, still holding on to that truck.
Cole would’ve turned seven years old this year and been a second-grader, but his life ended the year I turned thirteen and Rosie was four. He drowned in the pool at our house in Evanston, and Mom was so devastated that we had to move. In fact, we moved three times in five years, each time to another house in a different suburb. On the outside, every one of those houses was really pretty. But inside those houses, nothing changed. Mom was drinking, Dad was leaving, and Rosie and I were trying to be perfect. No matter how many times we moved, we were still us. And to be honest, it wasn’t working out so well.
“Are you and Mom getting a divorce?” I whispered to my dad by the campfire that night in Wisconsin, unable to be silent on that too.
Dad looked down at his hands, rubbing dirt off his knuckles. “I’m…not