Coda Kensey Stedman Tell me about your mother, she says. He tells her that I am a swan. I know one fairytale about a swan, she says, my mother told me. She tells him. A girl who peddled matchsticks found herself one evening in an alley that was so dark she could not see where she was walking. She took a match from one of the boxes and lit it. She lit another and another and another. The lights turned into stars and she turned into a swan and she flew amongst them. In the morning her body was found in the snow. She was dead, smiling, surrounded by burnt matchsticks. All of the villagers thought she had been trying to stay warm. My mother is a swan, he says. I am no swan. But hearing him say it, I close my eyes and wish it so. I wish it in the soft light of my bedroom, in the shower, in my car on the middle of the highway, in the laundromat. I am always wishing. I wish silently for enormous white wings to sprout from my shoulders, for down feathers to appear, for my mouth to become an orange beak. If she were I, she would wish for this as well. I am no swan. But my son is no liar. He knows no fairytales. I did not tell him any. I did not believe in things like castles or fairies or coats made of feathers or talking wolves. If you live in worlds of make-believe, you miss your own world, the world that is real. I used to believe this. I used to tell him this. I live in a fairytale now. I live in a fairytale because in the world that is real, my son is gone. In the world that is real he is gone and I made her up, or maybe I did not make her up but took the face of a little girl he used to know and aged her. I do not often go to the world that is real. I only wish and remember and imagine. I imagine that knowing no fairytales, no stories of spells or enchantments, he tells his own children true things. And things that he believes to be true. I believe things that I need to be true: he has his own children, he can tell them no fairytales. I was a good mother. This is what is true: He was a good son. I loved him. Say he and some little girl grew up, got married, had children. Say he got to grow up. This is also true: he got lost in a cave. I cannot tell you how dark it was, he tells her. You would not believe me. They are falling asleep in their sleigh bed. Say the night is a cold one. Say they like to fall asleep talking. He was separated from the other boys. His flashlight went out. He yelled and yelled but the only answer was his own echo. Daniel, Daniel, Daniel! every stone wall and dripping stalactite repeated back to him. Daniel was the name of his troop leader; it is the name he shouted. Daniel! cried the wet stalagmites. Daniel! cried the limestone pillars, the granite sinkholes. Every troglobite and stygophile, every blind white cricket chirped Daniel, Daniel! But Daniel never came. It was unfathomably dark, he says. I imagine it must have been the kind of darkness that sight cannot fully grasp. Senses are not incapable of being shocked, of disbelief. When I was a girl my grandmother accidentally scalded me with water so hot that I thought it was cold. By the time the skin began to burn nothing was real anymore, everything I had ever known or felt or understood was suddenly wrong. I imagine it must have been a darkness like that. She asks him, What did you think about down there? Scout Law, he says, and she does not believe him. He recites to her: A Scout is brave. A Scout can face danger even if he is afraid. A Scout has the courage to stand for what he thinks is right even if others laugh at or threaten him. What did you think about? she asks him again. My mother, he finally answers. I thought about my mother. When I close my eyes at night swans wing their way across my lids. Trumpet swans, whooper swans, Bewick's swans, black swans and tundra swans. Whistler swans whistling songs. Huge swans that dwarf the constellations, wingspans stretching from Venus to Neptune. I see the swan that laid the cosmic egg, the egg with every galaxy in it. This swan is bigger than infinity, bigger than the figure eight that lies on its side and waits and waits and waits like someone keeping vigil for a missing lover. This is true: Swans pair for life. Forever. Forever, never, ever-there are no stranger things than superlatives of time. He is never coming back. Ever. Human beings are made of stars. We are celestial car crashes, astral train wrecks. Bodies warm and nubile, even made of flesh and hair and calcium bone are no more than stardust, the debris of exploding supernovae. We are hydrogen, helium, lithium; we are the first three elements combusting and bursting inside the cores of ancient asteroids. We are bombs, balloons, and batteries. This is one theory. This is what he believes. This is what I taught him to believe. Big Bang Theory, I said. I said "Big Bang Theory" because when I was his age I would lie awake at night and wonder if God could hear my thoughts. I taught him to be full of sense because I was full of fear. I taught him rhyme and I taught him reason because knowing is always better than not knowing. I always wanted to be telling him something true. I told him that his thumbs were Delta Cephei, his eyes were Polaris, his elbows and knees were Eta Aquilae. You are made from the same as the stars and the sun, I told him. I might have been holding him. I do not remember. I remember he loved to be picked up, cradled. He loved lullabies much longer than most children do. She did not know him then. She wishes she had. She wishes she had known him when they were small, when they could fit into tight places, when everywhere was somewhere to hide. She imagines that he was then as he is now. She imagines that even as a boy he was made of the same as Mars. More than anything else, more than blood or flesh or bone, he was made of fire and stardust. Mars the Red Planet, the god of war. It has the same astrological representation as the one used to signify the male sex: the circle, the arrow sticking out of it. The symbol looks angry, volatile, poised to do something rash. I had behavioral issues, he tells her, I hit somebody. You were Behavioral Issues Boy? she shouts at him. She laughs. He is made from the same matter as the stars, the same matter as Mars. He was one of those boys who would make you want to believe that human beings really are made from stars. He would make you want to believe in the bang. Tell me everything, she says. Tell me yesterday, and the day before that. Tell me about the winter you punched that boy. She thinks, When you lied on the floor with your head under the Christmas tree and gazed up through the twinkling branches did you see his face? Did you? You must have. You were not the kind of boy who punches people except you were. He tells her he kept hitting him and hitting him. The sound was not a smack or a thud or a thwack. The sound was terrible, something unnamable. Why did you do it? she asks. But he cannot remember. She says, Tell me everything you remember. Nothing is his anymore. She is going to take it and remember it with him. She can never forget it. Did that winter turn colder and bleaker than any winter before it? she asks. She thinks, Tell me that after the holidays you would see that boy in the hallways and he would look at you with confusion, fear. When I realized what I was doing, he tells her, I stopped and I said to this kid, I said, 'You have got to hit me back! Just hit me back!' But he would not do it. I begged him but he would not do it. My son tells her this but he did not tell me this. I never knew. I think of how strange and lonely it is to be a child. I cannot remember myself as a child, but my child as a child-that is all I can remember. My clothes are dirty. Sometimes this occurs to me later than it should. Sometimes this occurs to me after I have been turning underwear inside-out for more than a few days. The laundromat is a place I do not like to go. I spend the hour before I leave collecting all of the quarters around the house. I find them on the floors of the closet and in the bottom of my purse, along with the lone red and white peppermint. This must be some kind of rule, that mothers must have a single, forgotten starburst peppermint at all times. Which president is that? I asked him. George Washington, he answered. The Coin Collection badge is made to look like a giant quarter. He had the badge for Coin Collecting but he was not proud over this one like he was proud over his Canoeing badge. He was the youngest one to get the Canoeing badge. The laundromat is on the corner. Today, I am washer number 23. Snuggles, Tide, Downy, socks and towels and sweaters-clean, sweet smells, domestic smells, smells that smell like home. All of these soft things going around and around and around make me dizzy. I want to grip something steady. In the laundromat, there are lots of mothers and their sons, lots of mother-son laundry-doing teams. They smell of April Fresh or Clean Breeze or some kind of Blossom. Each mother-son laundry-doing team smells different than the next because every family in the world has a singular smell and no other family smells this way. I like this about families. It is the smell of the detergent they use and something else. I like the way you recognize it immediately when you walk into a home. I always used to wonder what we smelled like. Mothers and fathers and sons and daughters smell like White Lilac, Mountain Spring, Soft Ocean Mist and that something else. I imagine that now that he is gone, the something else is gone with him and I smell only of detergent and that is it. I watch a Mountain Spring girl sit on a dryer and kiss her Mountain Spring boyfriend. How lovely, I think, to be young and in love and doing laundry. You, I think, watching the girl, should be kissing my son. My son is ten forever. He is toes and early mornings and rain puddles forever. He is napping forever, he is on a snow day forever, he is staring out of the back window of a school bus forever. I imagine he and the girl grew up, got married. A sleigh bed, health insurance. This is what I wanted for him. Instead, he is staying a little boy forever. Some little boys have that soaring quality. He had that. I would look at him and think: bird, sparrow. I would look at him and think: flight. Would he have outgrown this? I do not think he would have. Maybe this is why. Grown men are supposed to stay on the ground, and he would have kept on soaring. Perhaps this is was in his stars; perhaps this is why he could never grow up, never be a grown-up. This is what people say, "Grown-up," and I always wondered where? Up to where? She pesters him about the cave. She says, Tell me, tell me. She wants to hear every echo he heard in the tunnels, every drip of water on rock. She wants him to tell her how he felt the swooping of bats over his head, the slitherings and skitterings of black things under his feet. She wants the names of the camp songs they sang on that trip, on the bus and in the woods and around the cracking, crackling fire. She wants him to sing them back to her. She wants him to tell her the names of the other boys in his troop. Were they named David and Peter and Joshua? she guesses. There was a Peter, he says. But she wants more than "Peter." She wants to be there in the cave with him. She wants to see him sell popcorn, see me sewing another badge onto the dark blue of his scout shirt. She wants to see the gaps in his teeth. Did he spit water through them? She thinks that he must have; he would have been that kind of boy. What is this scar from? she asks his knees and elbows. What about this one? And this one? She wants to see every tree he fell out of. She wants to see the boy he hit. We would have been friends, she tells him. I know, he says. Leave No Trace. This is what they teach the boys, Leave No Trace. It is taught in Cub Scouts and again in Boy Scouts because it is so important. A single mistake at a campsite could result in a devastating forest fire. His face was very earnest when he told me this. He did not yet reach my hip but he could recite the Outdoor Code. He said: As an American, I will do my best to be clean in my outdoor manners, be careful with fire, be considerate in the out of doors, and be conservation- minded. Good, I said. Maybe I said, Good, Sweetheart-I cannot remember. I have to know that whole thing, he said. He was nodding, nodding. I thought, This is why the Boy Scouts of America are makers of good men. Good, good, good. I said that word a lot, then. "Good." I thought it a lot. Things were good then. You might not guess that now. Looking at me in the laundromat or waiting at a street crossing, you might never believe this, that things used to be good. They taught the boys to Dispose of Waste Properly, Pack it In, Pack it Out, Leave What You Find, Minimize Impact. They taught the boys to Leave No Trace. He left no trace. You cannot tell that things were once good and we were once happy. Good left no trace. Joy left no trace. He left no trace on me. He was my only friend. There were women I talked to, sat with on weekends in white lace-scalloped living rooms. I was always waiting to leave them I have to go pick my son up, I would say. Cub scout meeting, I would say. Scouts, they would say, good for you! Scouting is so helpful behavioral issues. And then they would smile, smile. I smiled back, turned and fled. I would speed the whole way there. He sat in the passenger seat when he asked to please sit in the passenger seat. He liked to choose the music, turn the black dial, search the radio waves for a song that he knew. He did not ask often. It is so much safer in the back, I said. I like to sit by you, he said. Sometimes when I drive at night my eye catches him in the passenger seat but only for a second. Sometimes I hear him singing with the radio. John got the Aviation badge, he said. John was older, victorious. He played baseball. He might still play it, I do not know. I would like to get that badge, he said. I imagined a sky full of little boys in planes, of little boys piloting huge silver steel birds. Alright, I said. We spent a lot of time that spring learning how airfoil generates lift and how an aeronautical chart works. We made a poster of an aircraft instrument panel with thick markers that had an oily smell. We went to the county air show and watched tiny bright blue planes and tiny bright red planes swoop and dip and leave white looping trails of cursive behind them. I did not do these things for him. I did these things with him, in his company. We did these things together. Believe me or do not believe me but it is the truth. He was the only one I cared to talk to. He was the best friend I had. I want to be a pilot, he said that day at the air show. I barely heard him. His eyes were locked on the sky. Say he is a pilot now, a commercial pilot. Say his son and daughter are not afraid to hover at forty-thousand feet, high over an ocean. Say this son and daughter give all of the children in their class tiny plastic gold pins that look like wings and say Fly Delta. Could a pilot defy time? he asked. We were cooking something. I cannot remember what. It was something that required sugar peas, he was sitting at the kitchen table snapping them for me, putting them into a big blue bowl. It might have been a white bowl. Defy time? I said. It was something that required a bell pepper. I was standing at the sink rinsing a yellow one. He said, Could a pilot keep flying from time zone to time zone and never get older? Oh, I said, no. No, it does not work like that. But if you get in a plane on Sunday on one side of the world and fly to the other side of the world it takes hours and hours and hours and by the time you get to where you wanted to go it should be Monday but it will still be Sunday! You get the day back! He blurted all of this in a rush. No, I said. Spheroids, I said. Lunes, I said. He looked disappointed and I talked about meridians and longitudes and sundials and science. He looked deflated and I explained and explained. I brought the pepper to the cutting board and sliced it open. In one of the halves was a brown moth, perched on the core of seed clusters. Come here, I said, Look. There were no holes in the pepper that we could see. We examined each half carefully. Magic! he said. It was jarring to see the moth there, dark against the bright yellow flesh of the pepper. Its wings fluttered slightly. No, I said, It is not magic. I remember this now and wait for the memory to change. I wait for the flock to dive, for the birds to swoop higher or lower and for their color to change in the light. I wait to remember that I just let him believe a jet was a time machine and a moth a magician. There is a Space Exploration badge! he yelled. He was yelling all of the time. He was in that place that little boys pass through in which they must always be shouting. A Space Exploration badge? I said. Yes! he said. John has it! I am going to get it! He sat down. I think he was eating an apple. I think it was red. What do you have to do to earn it? I asked him. He shook his head. He needed a haircut, I thought. A lot, he said. A lot. I imagined a sky full of little boys in rockets, blasting through white-hot stars and past purple planets. Alright, I said. We went to the library and took out armfuls of books. We went to the observatory. We drove two hours to the natural history museum. We stood in the cold out in the lawn with our heads tilted back and stared up at the sky. Does it make you feel small? I asked him. No, he said. It makes me feel big. We made collector cards of famous space pioneers and a scrapbook documenting successful planetary missions. We identified and explained launch lugs and engine mounts, igniters and recovery systems. We made a mobile. We designed a plan for an unmanned mission to another moon. We drew a lot of pictures. The night we launched the model rocket you could see our breath in the air, curling and white. I want to be an astronaut, he said, I changed my mind. He was always wanting to get up there, get higher, get higher still. He was always up, up, and away. He wanted to soar-he wanted to soar with the birds and then above the birds, above the cumulonimbus clouds and weather patterns, above everything. Up, up, and away. The word for "yesterday" on the planet Mars is "yestersol." As in, Today I fly. Tomorrow I will fly. Yestersol I flew. I will have flown. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration decided this. They decided this because timekeeping on Mars is different than timekeeping on Earth. A solar day on Mars is almost twenty-five hours long. I told him this. This is how I taught him to think about Mars, in terms of numbers and graphs and satellite pictures, in terms of things that are true. But she thinks about Mars differently. She thinks about it as unbelievable fire, as a red ball you could play with or live on. I suppose Mars could be behind the unstoppable, hot kinetic energy that forces two separate bodies to break into motion, to run fast and frenzied through narrow asphalt streets, up crooked stairs, to fall star-like and carelessly onto a bed of white linens. But that is as much as I can imagine, that is as far as my imagination can reach. But her mother told her stories about little green men and amorphous shifters of shape and other Martian life forms. Her mother held her daughter rapt, suspended in tales of oddity. I told my son the sky on Mars was yellow but her mother told her it was the color of butterscotch. I told my son Mars had a chaotic axial tilt but she was told that it spun like a dancer. I said words like "transit," and "phases," and "orbit," and she was told that Mars was never lonely with two moons to play with. Tell me about your mother, she says. She was full of science, he answers. His voice is always everywhere. I hear him as a boy, I hear him as a man. I always hear him. His words are loud and echoing in the back of my mind. They are winged words that flap violently, desperately. They are butterflies as big as birds, moths the size of a grown man's fist. Was I too full of science? Do his own children ask for fairytales and stare at him in disbelief when he tells them he cannot give them any? Do they begrudge him his lack of magic? Did he begrudge me mine? Sometimes I think that if we had lived on Mars, he would have been alive for that extra hour. For that extra hour, he would have been mine. From time to time I remember too much too quickly and it feels like falling down a flight of stairs. Except worse that that. A barraging of years, afternoons, seconds, sandals, sand dollars, streaks of sunlight, books of matches from sports bars, silly things. I am pulled in and pulled under. I imagine it is a lot like what going down Niagara Falls in a barrel would feel like. It is fascinating what we remember and do not remember. I remember a rocking horse, soft cloth animals and jackets with stitches. Stitches are something that I remember there being a lot of. He was always falling from heights he ought not to have been at. I remember stitches along seams and on knees. And this one here? she asks in the hesitant light of a winter morning. Maybe it is after Christmas, the time in December that is sweet and dark and hushed and sad. I fell, he says. The scar is small and barely brown. I was trying to put seed in my mother's birdfeeder, he says, the chair fell out from under me. My mother was a bird person too, she says. Say they stop speaking then, each floating away down their own trail of thought. Say they are slipping back into sleep. Say outside it begins to flurry. I see them as a flock of birds. I see him holding her hand and they are running or dancing, moving quickly. The moments I remember get smaller, bigger, quicker, slower. Everything that I can remember shifts, flutters, wavers, warps-like a drove of birds in flight swoops and dives this way and that. First they look silver and then they look white. So quickly do they dive and then soar up again, wings beating madly, that they look like one body or two bodies holding hands. Like my memories, they are never the same from one half-second to another. A shimmer changes, a glimmer changes, a different feather catches the light, one bird flies a little higher, a little lower. It is like this when I try to recollect anything; details flicker dimmer or brighter, a sigh is louder, a laugh is softer, something he said is a bit different. He could fly before he could speak. When he could speak, he said, Make me fly! He was three or four or five. I want to fly! he said. I would lie on my back and hold him, balancing him on the soles of my feet. I lifted him up towards the ceiling and he laughed. We did this a lot. He wanted to always be soaring. I remember when he was a Tiger Cub. I remember when he was a Bobcat, a Wolf, a Bear, and a Webelos. Webelos is the last Cub rank before Boy Scout. He needed the Arrow of Light Award to advance rank. I liked to say it, "Webelos." "We Be Loyal Scouts"-I could hear each word in it. I heard some of the other mothers leave off the "S" sometimes and for some reason that bothered me. He would have been a loyal Boy Scout. He was a loyal boy. It was his nature to be loyal. And Trustworthy. And Helpful. And Kind. And Reverent. All of the qualities that Scout Law promises will make a good man, he had. He would have been a good man. And he was Brave. I know he was brave. I could feel it in him, see it on his face. I know he was brave down in that cave. I know that when his flashlight went out, he quelled the sharp panic rising up in him faster than any other little boy could have, faster than I could have. He needed an Arrow of Light in that cave, that was what he needed. He needed a real Arrow of Light when he was down in the black wet deep, in the clammy cold, in the drip drip dripping, the echoing infinite dark. This is when he needed that straight and narrow arrow with that sun coming up behind it, saying, This way, This way. Go this way and you will get out, Go this way and everything will be all right. Just follow. This I remember perfectly. This memory does not change: Daniel's wife came to tell me about the cave. Daniel was the troop leader. His wife was beautiful. This is all I recall about either of them. She parked in the gravel driveway, walked slowly to the house. I was sitting on the porch, sewing. She said, Grace? And I said, Yes? And I knew everything already. I knew everything: the tunnels and the crevices and the unbelievable blackness. Grace? She said again. This is important, I said. It was important. I was sewing his Emergency Preparedness badge onto the breast lapel of his uniform. Because he earned it. I would not look her in the eye. Listen, she said. Grace, she said. Emergency Preparedness. I am not prepared for this. Do you know all he had to do, I said to her, to get this badge? Grace. He had to pass the First Aid test, I told her. But that is all I told her. I did not tell her: He had to simulate the transport of a wounded person from a remote or rugged area while conserving the energy of the rescuers, simultaneously ensuring the well-being and protection of the injured person. I did not tell her: He had to take part in a mobilization with the rest of the den. He had to prepare a personal emergency service pack and an emergency evacuation kit. Grace, she said. Come with me, she said. Listen, she said. He had to demonstrate how to safely save a person from each of the followng: a room filled with carbon monoxide, touching a live electric wire, clothes set on fire, drowning (using non-swimming rescues (and including accidents on ice.)) He had to demonstrate three ways to effectively attract and communicate with rescue planes and other rescue aircraft. She said something else and I did not hear her. She spoke, but it was white noise, echo, a radio in someone's back yard. He only had to choose five Emergency Situations on the list to write a report on. He chose seven: Vehicle trapped in blizzard, Boating accident, Gas leak in building, Tornado/ Hurricane, Major flash flood, Home kitchen fire, Violence in a public place. He was that kind of kid. One of the options was Mountain/ Caving accident. He did not do that one. I kept pricking my finger on the needle. I lost my thimble, I told Daniel's wife. I closed my eyes and wished to be a swan and fly in a perfect V. This is the only solid thing that I remember. This is the only flock of birds that flies in the same formation every time. I remember everything exactly as it happened. I remember exactly the one thing I would like to forget. And then there are little things. I remember things he had to memorize, things he had to recite. Scout Motto: Be Prepared. How ridiculous-"be prepared!" How can you prepare for anything? How does anyone ever prepare for anything? Scout Slogan: Do a Good Turn Daily. What does this even mean? Do a "good turn?" A good deed? He was my good turn. He was the good thing I did. He was the one good thing. Scout Principle: Leave No Trace. The Boy Scouts of America taught this one too well. He did not leave a trace. Where did he go? No one could find him. He left no trace. I remember things I heard later, things people told me. Some of the older boys went back, yelled his name into a thousand inky passageways, retraced the phosphorescent chalk marks on the floor of the cave. I dream sometimes now about the phosphorescent chalk, how it must have looked like the trails left by glowworms. I see his name luminescent in dark dirt, bright white and written again and again. I see him in a chain of children and they are all holding hands. Boy, girl, boy, girl, boy, girl. Everyone hold hands in a giant row, take the hand on either side of you. This is the best way to run down a hill. I see the handholds in a cave wall. This is what he needed down there, a hand to hold. I cannot believe they are actually called "handholds" by cavers, spelunkers. Something about this seems cruel. Handholds, holding hands. Hold his hand. Hold my hand. I can feel his hand in mine sometimes. Brief warmth and then it is gone and he is gone, shooting across the sky, falling away from where I stand. He is a comet and he is ripped away from me as fast and far as physics, astronomy, velocity will permit. I imagine that he is so high that when he looks down and sees orange and blue hot air balloons floating and full of helium he thinks that they must be smaller than sparrows. I imagine him as a constellation. After all, he is made of stars. He said my mother was no swan! His eyes are suddenly open. It is early. Say it is before Easter. Say it is unseasonably warm. I remember! he says. He said my mother was no swan, but she was! That is why I hit him! I hit that boy because I knew my mother was a swan! Say she is half-awake. Say they smell of laundry detergent, fabric softener and something else. Say things are good. She says, My mother told me that some swans are mute for their entire life but just before they die they sing one song, one beautiful song. I remember, he says. I remember why I hit him. Say their hands are touching. Maybe it is unseasonably cold. It is the most beautiful song in the world, she says, that is what my mother told me. Say in that cave he turned into a swan and the song echoed and echoed forever.