The Kids

By Jules Barrueco
 
       “Are you crying about the Kids again?” my husband asked from the passenger seat, with the same look that he’d had for the last nine days. Heartbreak for the Kids, concern for me, relief for himself that I’m not as heartless as I sometimes seem - it was all there on his perfect thirty-year-old face.
        Moments earlier we had been in his parents’ driveway preparing to head toward our next Christmas destination. We packed up our rented SUV, ostensibly filled with holiday cheer, and waved goodbye as I slipped on his mother’s sunglasses. The sun was inappropriately bright, its rays out of place considering how dark the world seemed.
        As we merged onto Route 84 in Connecticut, I wasn’t prepared for what was coming.
        Newtown/Sandy Hook, the sign overhead read.
        It nearly stopped my heart.
        We were twenty minutes from the town where my husband had been a kid, and nine days from the morning that the Kids had all died. That’s what we called them in our home – “the Kids.”
        “Are you crying about the Kids again?” my husband asked each day, brow furrowed, that same panicked look on his face. I am generally not a crier, and am ambivalent, at best, toward children. This was new and confusing territory for both of us.
        Yes, I’m crying about the Kids again, I often tried to say. But usually I just nodded. I couldn’t get the words out through the choking sobs. I had learned to be robotic in those nine days; I rinsed the dishes and sobbed, hung up our clothes and took deep, grotesque sniffles. At work I closed my door and read legal briefs through wet eyes. Their faces were everywhere I looked – Noah Pozner in his Spiderman t-shirt and brown winter coat, Jesse Lewis with his underbite. I couldn’t stop seeing them, and I couldn’t stop crying. And since I was too busy to just cry, I cried while I did other things.
        And suddenly there we were, passing by the place where the Kids had been kids, the town that will be forever broken. Yes, I was crying about the Kids again. The sunglasses had given me only a moment of cover.
        As I drove past their exit, silent tears streaking my cheeks, I felt like an intruder. That little stretch of highway now belonged to them, it seemed, and the rest of us should keep out. In fact, my location wasn’t the only reason I felt like an interloper. I didn’t know anyone from Newtown, certainly not anyone who had died or lost someone. I had no connection to Sandy Hook besides its close proximity to my husband’s childhood home. Why then, did I feel utterly broken too? 
        Maybe I felt broken because, even at age thirty-four, I remembered how it felt to be six. At that age I had a big personality, a yellow banana seat bike, and an unfortunate pixie haircut that took twenty-five years to completely grow back. I also had a warped understanding of mortality.
        I did understand that people died, sort of. Having not yet questioned my belief in God, I still said bedtime prayers and requested, each night, that we all live forever. I asked for this in the same way I asked for “gravity boots” each Christmas, which I believed would enable me to walk on the ceiling. I knew they were unlikely to appear under the tree, but I tacked them on the list, just in case. 
         At six years old I believed death was a choice, something we could will not to happen. As I watched the news each night on my parents’ small kitchen TV I was always confused by the death tolls. If a plane crashed I thought, of the people falling through the sky, why didn’t they just land on their feet? If a car drove off a bridge into icy water I wondered, why didn’t they just open the door and swim out? I thought our lives were in our own hands, and I didn’t understand why I was the only one smart enough to realize it. I thought we could just choose to live. Maybe I felt so broken now because every six year old should get to believe in that way, without ever having to test that theory.
        Maybe I was broken because these last nine days had been the saddest since my mom had died five years earlier. My grief switch flipped. She was too young to die, I used to think, over and over. That was before the Kids, before I saw how young too young could be. By the time she died I knew we could not, in fact, just choose to live. I did not yet realize, however, we could choose to die. After learning that she had only six months left, and would never return to her home, my mom, quite efficiently, did just that. She made a choice, and died. At least that’s my theory.
        Perhaps I was broken on that dark sunny day because, en route to see my sister’s children, I knew what should have been in store for little kids at this time of year. “Don’t forget to pick up dog treats for Tuck Noodle’s stocking,” my sister had said, referring to our new puppy, who was riding along in the back seat. Santa brings treats for her family’s cat. Her children would notice if Tuck Noodle was excluded. I’ll bet the Kids still believed in Santa Claus, or other magical things, not yet old enough to know the real from the imaginary. I’ll bet they, too, had stockings for their kitties and doggies. They probably loved their pets in that amazing, unconditional way that I love my puppy. I wondered if their own Tuck Noodles noticed the Kids are missing.
        Was I broken because I discovered I want my own kids after all? As a career-focused New Yorker, content with the life I am living, children have never been a priority. A child could mess up my perfectly balanced world. But helpless to fix all that was broken in Newtown, I started thinking, all the time, that I should have one. It seemed like the only way I could contribute something meaningful; I could supply the world with a new beautiful child, since so many had been lost. “Can we name our baby after one of the Kids?” I asked my husband, one day, as I cried. 
         I felt broken when I thought of the tremendous terror and pain that the Kids likely experienced at the end of their lives. At an age when bad guys are only supposed to exist opposite superheroes, they encountered a living, breathing villain. Too young to watch the violence of today’s movies, they became a part of unthinkable carnage. At a time when the scariest thing imaginable should have been the shadows in their basement or a really bad dream, they experienced a metaphorical nightmare. Now they’ll never experience anything ever again. At a stage when most anything can be scary, did they even know how scared they should be? 
         Maybe I was broken, quite simply, because the Kids barely got to live, and life is wonderful. They never got to come home from school and build that gingerbread house. They will never grow up, get to know who they were meant to be, or feel how amazing it is to accomplish a grown-up dream. They will never fall in love with that one perfect person – and so many wrong ones – or get proposed to atop the Eiffel Tower, or have a little green-eyed girl of their own to worry for. They will never again get to run down the stairs on Christmas morning and look for those gravity boots.
        I don’t know exactly why I felt so much love, and loss, over strangers. Whatever the reason, the twenty kids I never knew had left me paralyzed. But like the little stretch of highway on Route 84, that level of grief really belonged to Newtown. I, an outsider, had to stop being so broken. Because they weren’t my kids. They weren’t my friends. They were just twenty small people who found a chink in my icy exterior, crawled inside, and commandeered my heart.
        Although nearly a year has passed, I still think about those Kids, just in smaller, less debilitating doses. I think of them when I imagine having my own child someday and, for the first time, believe I might not be as cold and unfeeling toward him or her as I always feared. I like to imagine that the Kids and my mom are all together, taking care of each other, in some better place that I hope for but don’t always believe in. Mostly though, I like to imagine that the beautiful Kids from Newtown believed as I once did when I was six. Maybe they too thought they had a choice, that they could just choose to live. Maybe they died quickly, holding on to that sweet naive six-year-old hope, before they realized we were wrong.


Fall 2013                                                                             ALR                                                                         Pages 46-48

(As published in The Avalon Literary Review, Fall 2013)