Sphere of Protection

Every American old enough to remember has a relationship to the same two moments, and two towers. 20 years it’s been. Where were you when a plane struck the first tower of the World Trade Center? And the second? I rememeber walking to my car, carrying 9-month-old Clay in my arms when I learned that the first tower had been hit, but I watched, eyes glued to the television as the second plane struck, along with millions of others no doubt.

I was actually watching myself on a television screen at the moment my own little world changed forever. It was Mother Me— buoyant, unscathed, untested— helping her last-ever-baby toddle round a playground in the sun. It was the 29th of May, 2019, around dusk or just after.

The young mother beholds her earnest and curious boy reach, grasp, stretch, balance, ponder, grab, seek and find. He’s older than one, not yet two. She whisks him into her arms, steps across the bark chips and hoists him up until his pudgy baby hands meet the shiny monkey bars. Even if they’d been strong enough, his little arms would scarcely extend from one bar to the next, but he’d pleaded heart and soul to have a go. Trusting his grip, Mother Me lets go for just the few seconds, and he hangs. This is his attempt at what his older sister mastered in the scene before. Mother Me trusts his grip because she knows it, has felt its strength grasp her finger every single day he’s been alive. So she offers him these few seconds— the naturally irresistable taste of self-reliance—and when he drops into Mummy’s arms, safe, he beams.

I watched these scenes from my cosy spot on a plump chenile sofa in the house where I grew up. The VHS video played from a “VCR,” I think that’s the term? Three days earlier, my family was together for a Stateside graduation. Now, my husband and children had flown home to England, leaving me in the quiet, easy company of my parents for a few more days, where I’d found rest.

I had never before seen this footage, and I couldn’t believe they had it. In 2002, before our phones began to perpetually record of our lives, my mother had borrowed the clunky Sony Video Recorder from the school where she taught and filmed parts of our time together in Florida. It was pure treasure to see that happy family as we were all those years ago. Seventeen. Years. Ago.

Like a clarion call from that playground in the sun to the sofa where I sat came this singular, clarifying thought. ‘You want to be there every second of his life to catch him when he falls, but Gretchen, you cannot.‘ And my inner and outer worlds were perfectly synchronised, for at precisely that moment the house phone rang.

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It wasn’t even my phone; it wasn’t my house. It should have been a nuisance call, never even answered at all. Please, please let it be a nuisance call! I will buy your windows, your insurance, your solar panels. I’ll pay top dollar, no discounts, for windows I don’t need, insurance I can’t use. Speak to me with solicitation in your voice. ‘Twill be the sweetest music. I won’t hang up. I’m yours, all yours.

But the wretched call was from England. Frank in a panic. Could barely speak. Police at the door. Tracks. Clay on the platform. Train coming in the station. No. God, please no.

Wretch, and wretch.

Then shock.

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There are five stages of grief, I’m told, but I don’t think those first hours count toward any of it. Within the first hour I would be taken to the Accident and Emergency department of the hospital where I was born, to be given a tablet that would get me home to England on my own. Powerful pill. Travel by tablet.

I imagine that’s what they think, the young. That the pills will take them somewhere else and then fly them back like a return flight, easy peasy. I really don’t know, but I know that I want to know. What in the world was he thinking? And who in the world told him so? Casually trying new pills on a whim. And how will I ever forgive him? Oh please don’t let me ever forget him. The divine coversation is full of such questions— bigger ones, even. Some of them get answered, to my astonishment.

The first stage of grief is denial and the last, acceptance. Yet those in the know say there’s no prescribed order, and sometimes I think I’m doing it backwards. The more time that passes, the less I can actually believe what has happened. As my daughter said yesterday, “I think I’m starting to realise that Clay’s not just away at camp.” But I can’t quite accept even that.

Occasionally, I secretly entertain the thought that when the smartest scientists finally solve the huge quantum mystery, when they resolve the fundamental conundrum about the nature of basic reality, everyone will realise that Clay couldn’t possibly have stepped in front of a train on the 30th of May at quarter past midnight, as the witnesses say, because already when I answered the telephone at dusk on Wednesday the 29th Frank cried and told me he’d died. By the time my heart took a single beat on Thursday, 30 May, Clay had already been gone for nearly six hours.