Excerpt
One Sun Only
One Sun OnlyThis is not a rewrite of that story in which plants and animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife.
“I hope there’s no afterlife,” he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. “I hope he’s not watching over me.”
I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn’t think it could be the dog.
“I just don’t want there to be an afterlife, is all,” Ernest said, after thinking about it for a few seconds. “For anybody. I think when you’re dead you should stay dead.”
I had him and his sister for the weekend. Sally, who was now eleven and exploring Catholicism (to her mother’s alarm), kept talking about her hope that my father was watching over us. My father had been very fond of her. He’d taken her to the Art Institute every Wednesday, taught her painting techniques and a lot about art history. They’d been obnoxious together, playing games like who could most quickly recite the titles of all the artworks in Gallery 397 (Sally’s favorite), or all of Pablo Picasso’s middle names in order. (The full name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso, a succession of sounds I came to know as well as the alphabet.) A few weeks before my father died, he had asked me if he could take Sally to the Venice Biennale, where one of his paintings was being shown. We both knew that this would likely be his last trip abroad. I’d told him he could take Sally to Venice if he took Ernest, too. “Ernest doesn’t care about art,” my father had said. “He’s eight years old,” I’d said. “He cares about his grandpa.” They’d all spent two weeks touring Italy—Venice, Florence, and Rome—a trip Sally still mentioned at least once a day. A trip that I, alone with my father as a child, had also taken a version of.
“Can you look up Bill Murray’s net worth?” Ernest asked me, turning away from the window.
He’d watched Groundhog Day again at his mother’s the day before. He could’ve asked her to search for Bill Murray’s financial situation, but for some reason he kept these kinds of requests for me. I looked up Bill Murray’s fortune online.
“And how rich are we?” Ernest asked.
“A lot less than that,” I said.
I don’t know why I wasn’t ready to tell him the actual number, why it felt wrong. My father had left behind a significant amount of money, and I was still getting used to it. I hadn’t known him to have so much.
My phone rang. Nikki couldn’t help checking on the kids whenever they were with me for the weekend.
“I got a call from Ernest’s teacher,” she said.
“How are you doing?”
“Sorry. Yes. How are you doing? She says Ernie’s drawings worry her. She says he keeps drawing dead people.”
I left the living room.
“We know this already,” I said, once I reached my office. “It’s just a phase. Little boys are drawn to violent scenes.”
Nikki asked me to look through our son’s backpack for what he’d drawn at school that day.
“Describe what you see,” she said, once the drawing was in my hand.
What I saw was a single page with the instruction “Draw yourself many years in the future!” and my son’s response: a drawing of his own gravestone, with mine, his mother’s, and Sally’s surrounding it.
“Are there dates on the gravestones?” Nikki asked.
“Only on mine,” I said. “According to our son, I’ll die in . . . almost exactly two years.”
My ex-wife audibly shivered at the other end of the line.
“It’s just a drawing, Nik.”
I was pissed that Ernest’s teacher had called her instead of me.
“He shouldn’t be thinking about death so much,” Nikki said. “I think he might be traumatized.”
“Let’s not bring trauma into this. He’s had a rough year.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t draw your father’s grave,” Nikki said. “He misses him.”
“Does he?”
“We all do.”
I heard some glasses clink in the background.
“Do you have company?”
“Just Franny,” she said. “Just having drinks with Franny.”
“Hi, Franny,” I said.
Nikki echoed my hello, and I heard Franny say, “Is he offering you more money again?” (I kept suggesting that I increase Nikki’s alimony, but she kept refusing, on the grounds that she’d married—and divorced—a struggling novelist, not an art-world heir.) “Take the f***ing money,” I heard Franny say.
“I’ve been using this wine-delivery service,” Nikki said, at random, hoping, I could tell, that I hadn’t heard Franny. “They’re so responsive. Every time I have the smallest question, the slightest issue, they answer right away. I wonder if I’m their only customer.”
Sally came into my office then.
“Is that Mom on the phone?” she asked.
“Yes, honey. Do you want to talk to her?”
“I just saw her this morning,” my daughter said, and left the room.
“They really make you feel special,” Nikki said.
“At least she didn’t draw me dead in two years,” I said.
Sally wanted to hang some art. She thought that my new apartment lacked life, and since I’d inherited (on top of all his money and books) my father’s last series of paintings, a series Sally had seen take shape in the old man’s studio for months, she thought that what we should hang was a no-brainer.
“There’s no room for all four,” I told her. “You’ll have to pick one.”
“I like the walls white like that,” Ernest said.
“It’s depressing,” Sally said. “It feels like a hospital in here.”
“You’ve never been in a hospital,” I said, deciding, apparently, to side with my son.
“There’s stuff everywhere at Mom’s,” Ernest went on. “It’s suffocating.”
“ ‘Suffocating’?” Sally said. “That’s a big word for you.”
“Shut the f*** up,” Ernest said.
I should have said something, and maybe I would have, had I been given more time, but Sally lost a tooth then, her last cuspid, on the breadstick she’d been snacking on. She spit the tooth onto the coffee table, and the sound it made hitting the glass was the last thing Ernest and I heard for a while, as Sally quickly left the room, leaving us to stare at the piece of bone she’d just expelled, sitting amid a little blood and half-chewed dough. Was it a piece of bone, by the way? You always hear that your smile is the visible part of your skeleton, but are teeth made of actual bone? Ernest started blinking rapidly, every blink drawing the left corner of his mouth up with it.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He dipped a finger in the blood next to Sally’s tooth. This seemed to calm him down, so I let him do it. He drew a red circle on the glass.
The reason my father had liked Sally more than Ernest was that Ernest wasn’t very good at drawing. Or, rather, he wasn’t curious about how to get better at drawing. He’d gone with his grandfather to the Art Institute once a week, too, for a time, but soon he asked to be excused, and my father never forgave him. One thing he’d recognized in Ernest, however, was a talent for drawing near-perfect circles freehand. I think that’s why he was so pissed at him, in the end. An assured freehand circle was a sign that you could be great at drawing, according to my father, if only you put your mind to it.
“It’s a nice circle,” I said to my son.
He clenched his fist and, with the meaty side, erased what he’d drawn.
The rain had now acquired the consistency of mucus, each drop sticking to and sliding down the window.
How could it only be six p.m.? Time moved so slowly when the kids were around. I couldn’t wait to experience what everyone said: They grow up so fast. Even seeing them every other weekend, I noticed no changes.
