My Happy Boy

The last time I saw my son… Well, that was back in 2008– right after his 12th birthday.”

She looks out to the sea and beyond the horizon.

“He’s 29 now. I miss him so much.”

Her smile seems to wilt.

The camera zooms in on her face, her eyebrows are curved down, almost like a frown. Her eyes don’t quite match her lips and cheeks.

The director makes a note, to splice in a shot of the water and sky, on a gray day, just before the rain.

But would that be the right vibe?

Her eyes are almost sad. But not quite.

There’s a strange happiness there, but the happiness there seems forced, desperate.

Yes, desperate…

“We went to the Montauk Lighthouse. Josh was so excited, he’d always loved lighthouses. I think that came from his fear of the dark and specifically the dark of the sea. To him, lighthouses were the ultimate contradiction of his thalassophobia, a symbol of…”

She trails off, lowers her eyes.

The director, the cameraman, the whole crew, they just wait.

She says, “… of safety. Or comfort. I guess. The same way his dad was.”

A tear rolls down her cheek, it glistens like a shard of glass.

The camera man catches it in frame, gives the director a thumbs up.

Nobody offers her any tissues.

She sniffs, wipes her face with a bare hand.

“I can still hear his excited little voice. The way he cheered when we drove down the 27 the moment the lighthouse came into view.”

She looks at the light house and sighs. “I don’t like coming back here. It’s too painful. I want to leave.”

She looks at the director, he does not flinch away from her gaze, he holds eye contact. And simply nods.

Not agreement.

Not even acknowledgment.

Just direction. He might as well have yelled at her to KEEP GOING!

She closes her eyes, but doesn’t seem to like what she sees there, her frown quivers.

“We were coming down the 27. The Montauk Point State Parkway—” she shudders, wrings her hands. “Right when we passed the sign for Camp Hero, that’s when he saw it, he cheered. It was just about the happiest he'd ever been... I think he knew what was coming, on some level maybe he sensed it. Some people say kids are in touch with a spiritual knowledge we tend to forget in adulthood. I didn't used to believe that. I used to think kids were simply too fresh and too new to be wise, they were too foolish to see plain truths. So kids still believed in hope."

She gestures towards the sea. "Anyway, it was one of the first times Josh had smiled, since we’d received the news about his father.”

Tears pulse out of her clenched-shut eyes.

Still, nobody hands her any help.

The camera is catching all the glory, and the director can already hear the accolades, though he suppresses the smile he feels.

Her voice is a ruin: “I had told him, at the start of our drive down from Albany, that Daddy was the one sending us on this trip.”

"It was stupid of me, to say it that way. Shoulda known better. Especially after I saw how damaged he was by what that damn casualty officer said.”

She grins, and laughs, but there is no mirth in her voice, only a vague tinge of cruel self-deprecation: “But he perked up when I said Daddy was the one sending us on vacation. After a year of frowning, he seemed alive again. And he asked me if that meant we’d see daddy there….”

She opens her eyes then, and nobody on the crew can meet her gaze. Except the director.

He nods, as before: mercilessly.

“I had to explain the whole thing to him, all over again. That daddy was gone. Lost at sea, lost forever. The Navy calls it Eternal Patrol. Fucking bastards. I’ll never forgive that casualty officer for even talking to my Josh without asking me first. After he rang our bell, I answered the door, he told me what happened. When Josh heard me screaming, he came running. And that bastard of an officer knelt down and told him “Josh, you know your daddy is a hero, right? Well that’s the truth. And he loves you but he can’t come home because he’s on Eternal Patrol. He’s still out at sea, he and his crew. And they’re using their submarine to watch over you and keep you safe, even now.”

"That's when he started asking me to take him to the ocean. Picture that! A kid who's terrified of deep bodies of water, begging me to take him to see the ocean."

She wrinkles her nose.

“I see how that Eternal Patrol shit helps widows and siblings and parents cope with the loss. But to kids, little kids, it’s brutal. Kids can’t conceptualize the loss if it’s not delivered honestly. This isn’t telling a toddler that Fido is in a better place, on some farm in the sky. This is telling a thalassophobe, that the deep endless dark has fundamentally changed. It can't be scary anymore, because daddy is there forever, and since daddy was good, and a hero, he can't be stuck somewhere bad.”

She glared at the crew. “Do any of you really understand what that’s like? To have to explain to a broken child, the difference between literal truth and that goddamn honor lingo. To explain that Eternal Patrol doesn’t mean daddy’s still patrolling. It doesn’t mean daddy is still out there. It means he’s fucking dead. And the deep isn't full of light or love, it's crushing darkness. And it's still scary. Daddy's not watching from the deep, he's rotting down there. Do you have any clue?”

She shakes her head. “Of course you don’t know. Nobody does. Except for me, and the people like me: the people who want to forget. Adults, we know what it means, when an old man in Navy dress knocks on your door, we can read that expression clear as print-- bold and underlined. We know to cry, we know to hurt. But kids, fresh, new kids-- well they cling to hope. That blind, stupid hope, that their daddy is only lost at sea, not dead at sea. That he’ll come sailing home one happy day."

She lets her tears fall.

"The thing about that blind stupid hope-- maybe it's not so stupid. Maybe it's not blind at all. Maybe some people are right, kids can sense deeper realities that we adults are too wise to see. What is wisdom but pessimism? What is wisdom but jadedness?"

Her eyes suddenly flash. Wide open now, they catch more light and they very nearly seem to change color, to take on a stormier grayness as she stares wistfully now into the sea. Some of the crew follow her gaze-- she's not looking out onto the broad horizon. She's staring hard into the water, as though she could ever pierce its roiling surface and penetrate into its depths, by will alone.

"Josh was so happy. And his happiness only seemed to grow, as we drew closer to the point. He grew almost giddy-- and that should have been a warning to me. But how could I stop? How could I turn back? Would I have?"

She slumps to the ground, sits right there in the scrub grass, and rakes her slender fingers through some sand.

"I've heard what people say about me. I've heard it all. I know why you wanted me to speak, to film me. You said you wanted to give me a chance to tell my side of the story-- that the public deserved to know. But it's that same damned public, with their morbid curiosity, that you're trying to entertain. You want to give them a show-- an exclusive with the kid-killer who escaped justice. Right? The kind ones say I was simply negligent. That I let him play too close to the water. That I was drinking. That he started splashing around. Got caught in the undertow. That he was swept so far out the search team had no hope of locating his... remains. Some of those kind ones, they say I noticed and tried to swim after him, but failed to bring him back. Some of those kind ones, they say I was dozing. Never even knew what happened. That he was screaming my name, begging me to save him, while I fucking slept on the beach. But the cruel ones, the ones who love the scent of blood, they say I murdered him. They say I waded out into the waters, and held him beneath the surface-- a boy who was terrified of deep waters-- that I held him down and drowned him away forever. They say a grieving widow, and a single mother, suffered a psychotic break. That I cracked under the pressure and just fucking snapped. And some of them say I never cracked. That I murdered my boy, with malice in my heart. For the rush, or for the fun, or just because. Or... to be free of him."

She looks at the director. "Which sort are you? The kind or the cruel? I can tell. You're the sort who likes the scent of blood in the water. You are a shark. You like to see red in the waves, you wish to taste it. You're not just putting me on film as a spectacle for the people who want to see gore on the shore. You're the kind of man who wants to poke the gore yourself, to see how it feels. To see, maybe if it might still squirm. And if not, then at least you want to smell the fester."

The camera man's mouth falls open, he looks at the director. The director signals him to keep rolling. His eyes sparkle.

She sighs. "I don't care. I don't care about you, or what you think. Nobody believes my side. Not even my own family. They were the kind ones. They said it was an accident, a tragedy. They said I made up the story, to cope with my own grief-- to cope with not only my husband but also my son being lost at sea."

The wind caresses her hair, she turns her face towards the breeze. "The thing you'll come to learn about people who are alone-- really, truly, and utterly alone-- is we stop giving a fuck what random people think. Once we've been judged and damned by the people we once cared about, we realize other people's opinions never mattered to begin with."

She looks into the camera, for the first time: "And you, you're just a stranger. You don't know the truth. No doubt, if you're watching this, you've read the headlines. You have an opinion. And like all fucking humans, you think your opinion is correct."

***

She told her story, and after the crew left, she drifted down to the shore, her skin as pale as salt and sand bleached driftwood.

The sun grew red and angry and as it sank into the sea she wondered what sort was the earth itself: The kind or the cruel?

She stripped off her shoes and felt the pebbles and shells under her naked feet.

She felt the point of a whelk with her big toe, and she pried it out of the coarse sand and kicked it down into the surf. She watched it tumble and disappear.

She wondered if it was just a shell, or if the snail was still there.

Then she realized she could not have cared less, about whelks.

She thought of her Josh.

He had known, from the first visit of that casualty officer. He had known that his daddy was still alive, on Eternal Patrol, in his submarine beneath the waves.

The kind ones and the cruel ones, they'd all got it wrong. Her husband had come to take Josh. He'd come to the shore, and met them at the point, and with promises of wonders beneath the waves, he'd lifted Josh in his strong arms, and carried him down to the water-- to take Josh with him.

And they'd both turned to her and waved goodbye, because she wouldn't follow.

They went down to look at corals and octopi and sunken ships and to hunt for treasures.

They went down to wander the deep, on Eternal Patrol, to watch the whales and the fishes, the way hikers on land watched birds.

And she hadn't followed.

She hadn't the hope of a child. She was too old and stale. Realism had jailed her on the shore, and she had watched them disappear beneath the surface.

Josh hadn't been foolish and his hope hadn't been stupid.

She watched a little crab scuttle over the bare sand between two rocks, one large and one small. And she thought of little crabs scuttling between sunken remains-- pinching off pieces and scavenging between two lifeless, gray human forms-- one large and one small.

But this terrible image was a lie, a conjuring from the so called "wisdom" of adulthood.

She thought of the hippy types who talked of grounding, walking barefoot to connect directly with the earth's energy.

Well, kind or cruel, how much more so in the water?

She began to wade, the water was cool against her soles and warm against her soul.

And she thought of her boy, happy beneath the waves-- reunited with daddy.

... But yearning to be a full family again.

And she waded and waded and waded, and the waves embraced her, and she could almost feel her husbands arms.

And she could taste her own tears, like salt water, washing into her throat and down, down into her lungs.

And she could hear her Josh laughing, so happy to see her coming down to join them.

She hoped they'd forgive her for waiting so long to lose herself with them.

***

Author's note:

I'm actually planning to take my kids to visit the Montauk Lighthouse sometime this year, simply because I think it would be cool to stand on New York's eastern-most point.

But I've always thought East Coast shorelines, despite their beauty and calm, have a haunted, almost ghostly feel. Standing by the ocean one can feel so easily overwhelmed not only by the grand physical scale of the deep, and by the mysterious, alien life that thrives under the waves but also by the unknown histories of lives spent by or lost in the waters.

Also, odd as it may be to say for an avid horror reader and a wannabe horror writer, I don't usually like "ghost stories". I think, the meat of the ghost stories tends to be loss and grief, and I find these themes compelling, but generally the ghosts themselves disappoint me-- they feel cheesy or cliche.

So I figured I wanted to write a ghost-less ghost story, a haunted sort of story on this particular place-- not only the Montauk Lighthouse, as a geographic point but also "by the sea" as a sort of timeless, liminal space in and of itself.

Here's the music I listened to while writing, Lazarus and Black Star by David Bowie. For me this is a powerful piece of music, as it's one of the last things he wrote and performed before he passed away, and he seems by the lyrics and tone to be directly grappling with his own impending death. I think the tone has a morose "under the waves", drifting, sad, quality to it.