Hold Tight

“Now,” she said.

Still no movement.

Tick, tick, tick—and then Betsy exploded: “NOW!”

The scream startled them. She moved over and clicked the TV off.

“I said, dinner now! How many times am I supposed to call you?”

The twins scattered silently toward the kitchen. Betsy closed her eyes and tried to take a deep breath. That was how she was. Calm followed by the blowup. Talk about mood swings. Perhaps it was hereditary. Perhaps Spencer was doomed from the womb.

They sat at the table. Betsy came over and summoned up a plastic smile. Yep, all good now. She served them and tried to engage them. One twin chatted, the other wouldn’t. That was how it had been since Spencer. One twin handled it by totally ignoring it. The other sulked.

Ron wasn’t home. Again. Some nights he would come home and park the car in the garage and just sit there and cry. Betsy sometimes feared that he’d keep the engine on, close the garage door, and do like his only son. End the pain. There was such perverse irony in this whole thing. Her son had taken his own life, and the most obvious way to end the ensuing pain was to do likewise.

Ron never talked about Spencer. Two days after Spencer’s death, Ron picked up his son’s dinner chair and put it in the basement. The three kids each had lockers with their names on it. Ron had taken Spencer’s off, started filling it with nonsense. Out of sight, she guessed.

Betsy handled it differently. There were times she tried to throw herself into her other projects, but grief made everything feel heavy, as if she were in one of those dreams where you’re running through deep snow, where every movement feels as though you’re swimming through a pool of syrup. Then there were times, like now, when she wanted to bathe in the grief. She wanted to let it all crash in and destroy her anew, with an almost masochistic glee.

She cleaned up dinner, got the twins ready for bed. Ron still wasn’t home. That was okay. They didn’t fight, she and Ron. Not once since Spencer’s death. They hadn’t made love either. Not once. They lived in the same house, still made conversation, still loved each other, but they’d separated as if any tenderness would be too much to bear.

The computer was on, Internet Explorer already up on its home page. Betsy sat down and typed in the address. She thought about her friends and neighbors, their reaction to the death of her son. Suicide truly was different. It was somehow less tragic, gave it more distance. Spencer, the thinking went, had clearly been an unhappy soul, and thus the boy was already somewhat broken. Better someone broken gets tossed away than someone whole. And the worst part of that, for Betsy at least, was that it actually made some sense, this awful rationale. You hear about a child who was already starving, dying in some African jungle, and it isn’t nearly as tragic as the pretty little girl who lives down the street getting cancer.

It all seems relative and that’s pretty damn horrible.

She typed in the MySpace address—www.myspace.com/Spencerhillmemorial. Spencer’s classmates had created this page for him a few days after his death. There were pictures and collages and comments. In the spot where one usually placed the default picture, there was a graphic of a flickering candle.

The song “Broken Radio” by Jesse Malin with some help from Bruce Springsteen, one of Spencer’s favorites, played. The quote next to the candle was from that song: “The angels love you more than you know.”

Betsy listened to it for a while.

In the days after Spencer’s death, this was where Betsy spent most nights—going through this Internet site. She read the comments from kids she never knew. She looked at the many pictures of her son throughout the years. But after a while, it turned sour. The pretty high school girls who’d set it up, who also bathed in the now-deceased Spencer, had barely given him the time of day in life. Too little too late. All claimed to miss him, but so few seemed to have known him.

The comments read less like epitaphs than some arbitrary scribbling in a dead boy’s yearbook:

“I’ll always remember gym class with Mr. Myers. . . .”

That had been seventh grade. Three years ago.

“Those touch football games, when Mr. V would want to quarterback . . .”

Fifth grade.

“We all chilled at that Green Day concert. . . .”

Eighth grade.

So little recent. So little truly heartfelt. The mourning seemed more for show than anything else—public displays of grief for those who really didn’t mourn all that much, her son’s death a speed bump on the way to college and a good job, a tragedy, sure, but closer to a résumé-enhancing life requisite like joining Key Club or running for student council treasurer.

There was so little from his real friends—Clark and Adam and Olivia. But maybe that was how it was. Those who really grieve don’t do it in public—it truly hurts, so you keep it to yourself.

She hadn’t checked the site in three weeks. There had been little activity. That was how it was, of course, especially with the young. They were on to other things. She watched the slide show. It took all of the photographs and kind of made them look like they were being tossed on a big pile. The images would rotate into view, stop, and then the next one would come circling down on top of it.

Betsy watched and felt the tears come.

There were many old photographs from Hillside Elementary School. There was Mrs. Roberts’s first-grade class. And Mrs. Rohr- back’s third grade. Mr. Hunt for fourth grade. There was a picture of his intramural homeroom basketball team—Spencer had been so excited by that victory. He’d hurt his wrist the game before—nothing serious, just a little sprain—and Betsy had wrapped it for him. She remembered buying the ACE bandage. In the photograph, Spencer was holding up that hand in victory.

Spencer hadn’t been much of an athlete but in that game, he had hit the winning basket with six seconds left. Seventh grade. She wondered if she’d ever seen him happier.

A local policeman had found Spencer’s body on the roof of the high school.

On the computer monitor the pictures continued to swirl by. Betsy’s eyes grew wet. Her vision blurred.

The school roof. Her beautiful son. Scattered amongst the debris and broken bottles.

By then everyone had gotten Spencer’s good-bye text. Text. That was how their son told them what he was about to do. The first text had gone to Ron, who’d been in Philadelphia on a sales call. Betsy’s cell phone had received the second, but she was at Chuck E. Cheese’s, the arcade-pizzeria where parental migraines are born, and didn’t hear the text come in. It wasn’t until an hour later, after Ron left six messages on her phone, each more frantic than the last, that she found the text sitting on her phone, the final message from her boy:I’m sorry, I love you all, but this is too hard. Good-bye.