Free Tom is Dead by Marie Darrieussecq Page A

runs between the chairs and I have to stop him. Have to stop him like Sergeant Garcia wants to stop Zorro. I told Vince off nearly all the way through that interminable time. The semblance of order that the world maintains. Vince did that for me.
    How long does it take? Other people sitting on chairs— who?—in this strange ceremony during which my son’s body burns. I concentrate, try to think about what’s happening and why I am here. Tom. He’s struggling between a wild cat and a vulture. I know what kind of scream a dying child makes. What kind of wail. I’m banished, because I have seen and I have heard. I still believe I roam among the innocents, just a little more lonely perhaps; I believe I’m still among the others (who?) sitting on my chair, stopping Vince from running, with Stella heavy and asleep in my arms. But I’m banished. And I already pretend to be unaware of it. I’m slightly bored. Stella gets increasingly heavy. My arms ache. I’m hot. I wait till I’m allowed to leave. A circle of ashes, and the world of the living is closed to me from now on. And I wait patiently, stopping Vince from running between the seats, shifting position because the baby’s heavy.
    Then, what? Oh, yes, one detail: I’d bought Tom a book. A little present, a surprise. I had something I needed to be forgiven for, I suppose, and he did like surprises. It was the story of a little Aboriginal boy, like an introduction to this new country. Forgiven for what? I don’t need to go far to find that: on top of the move, the little time that I devoted to him. This unrelenting impression that I devoted very little time to him. And it wasn’t because I admitted it to myself that it wasn’t true. But how to quantify such things? How to know? Tom seemed happy. He asked for nothing. Vince, the eldest, asked a lot. And Stella too, Stella, the baby of the family, had the needs of an eighteen-month-old human being. So I gave Tom presents.
    My father is the second of three, like Tom. A curse, he always insisted. But my father is the second of three brothers. At least the birth of Stella had made Tom the last boy, the smaller of our boys, the smallest boy forever.
    The little Aboriginal boy met a wolf. Though in this case, it was a dingo, one of those big red Australian dogs. I don’t remember anymore how he got away, but he got away. Modern fairytales are misleading. The ogre, the witch, the cruel mother and the big bad wolf, the unpunished monsters of true fairytales know what happens to children that we let out of our sight.
    The little Aborigine escaped from his family at dawn and returned at night, unscathed and victorious, taller.
    When I came across this book, still gift-wrapped, and hidden so that Tom wouldn’t find it…Vince was too big to like it, and Stella too small. It was Tom’s book. Nobody would replace Tom. I would never read it to him. Never again would I hold Tom on my knees, attentive. Silent, warm, in my arms, his shape…The only moments, reading or singing, when our bodies were close. Vince had been cuddly, Stella was still a baby, but Tom, he was happy to put a bit of distance between us. And I respected that. I admired his strength. I counted on him, I guess.
    But I left the present there, for no one. A detail. A simple detail. His absence began with details. His desertion. I won’t get to see him, all excited, opening his present. There was a monstrous gap between these details and the truth they revealed. Between the little boy and death. For a long time, a big part of me assumed it was obvious that we could catch up on the delay we’d had with our storytime, our time of joy. And then, bit by bit, the consciousness grew, the narrow pathways to awareness…My skin, my eyes, my hands, my internal organs, the folds of my brain that, bit by bit, became conscious of Tom’s absence…The knowledge was immediate. His death. Then it