We drive out to the conservation area along the creek in Hamilton, the one that borders the water where the herons hunt in the shallow reeds in the early morning. It was the place Diane loved most in this particular part of the world. She used to say the herons moved through the water like very old thoughts, slow and entirely certain of themselves. We would come here on Sunday mornings when Michael was small, and she would pack sandwiches in wax paper and we would sit on the bank and watch the birds and she would tell Michael their names and he would forget them immediately and ask again the following week, which she found more endearing than frustrating.
Noah calls the herons big gray birds. This is my fault. The first time he asked me what they were, the word heron had temporarily vacated my memory in the way words sometimes do when grief has been running the premises for long enough, and I said big gray birds instead, and he accepted this nomenclature with complete satisfaction. I have not corrected him since. I prefer his version. It says precisely what it means and it means precisely what it says.
We throw stones into the creek. We look for crawfish under the flat rocks near the bank. He tells me, with extraordinary attention to detail, about the ongoing geopolitical conflict between his two most important action figures, a dispute that has apparently been running for several months and involves complex territorial grievances I am not yet fully briefed on. I listen carefully. I ask clarifying questions. He appreciates the questions.
Last month he lost his first baby tooth.
He called me the moment it happened, his speech delightfully impaired by the gap in his gums, the words tumbling out faster than his mouth could properly organize them. He was so proud he could barely breathe. I drove straight over without calling ahead, without requesting approval, without parking down the street. I took a photograph of him standing in Michael’s kitchen showing me his gap-toothed grin, his face bright with the specific, full-body pride of someone who has accomplished something for the very first time and understands, in some wordless way, that this is the kind of thing worth marking.
I had the photograph framed. One copy for Michael. One for my kitchen windowsill, where it sits next to the photograph of Diane in the oncology ward, pale and glowing, holding Noah two weeks before the doctors found what was already growing inside her. She is looking at him in the photograph with the expression she wore when she had decided something was extraordinary and was not going to pretend otherwise.
She would have been completely, devastatingly excited about that lost tooth. She would have called everyone she knew. She would have baked a cake with a tooth drawn in white icing on top of it and brought it over unannounced, because she never once believed that showing up unannounced with food was anything other than a kindness. She would have made Noah feel that losing a tooth was among the most significant achievements in the history of human accomplishment, and she would have been entirely sincere about it, and he would have believed her, because she was the kind of person whose sincerity was simply not in question.
When the house is quiet on a Sunday evening and the late light comes through the kitchen window and catches the silver frame at the right angle, I sit at the battered oak table with my coffee and I think about what it cost to get here, and whether I would do it the same way again, and the answer is always the same. I would have preferred not to. I would have preferred a different set of facts. But when the facts are what they are, the engineering is not optional. You do the assessment. You document the findings. You present them clearly to the relevant parties and you let the structure make its own decisions.
Some things hold. Some things don’t. The ones that hold are worth every hour you spent in the dark, measuring.
