Osler's Razor

Good Night, Rory

By Mark Osler

         By the third kid, you pretty much have bedtime down. It's all about routine, each act imbued with symbolism and importance, a Kabuki theater between generations. It was just me and Rory at home-- my wife Ellen had gone to be with her parents along with Lara and Jay-- and that meant the performance was all on me.

         First came the bargaining. He was lounging at the other end of the couch in his jammies with the feet in them, reading a book that was making him laugh. I loved the sound of it, this bit of unbridled joy, and let him go for a while before I made the opening offer.

         "Five minutes?"

         He looked up and lowered his eyes in a show of seriousness. "Twenty minutes," he said deliberatively. He knew the game.

         "Ten?" I countered.

         Like a car salesman getting close, he thought for it a bit. "Fifteen!"

         We settled on twelve (there was a pattern to this), and I set my watch. I pretended to read, but I just watched him, really. He was like his mother and brother: when he read he was totally engaged, nodding occasionally and issuing that laugh every other page. 

         When the alarm went off we headed up the stairs. I would be slightly behind him, acting like I was going to trip him, and he backed his way up warily while issuing threats. When we got to the top, he ran to the bed, jumped in, located his rabbit, Pierre, and pulled the covers up before looking up expectantly. 

         It was my turn to perform. "I would like to tell you a story with your characters included!" I announced in a formal voice, as tradition required. In response, he named his characters (Pierre the rabbit and Spiderman), and I began the tale, in which Pierre got tangled up in one of Spiderman's webs, sued him for damages, and won a carrot.  It seemed to work. The contracts' goals were achieved, and I closed the door to Rory's room softly as I left. 

         Talking to Rory always settled my mind, even when things were hard. Ellen and I had decided before our first, Lara, was born that we were never going to use baby-talk; we were going to talk to our children the way we talked to each other. Rory's patter showed it, too-- other than calling Ellen "Mommy," and the high little-pitched voice, he spoke like an adult.

         But now I was alone. I thought about turning on the TV for a bit, but I was worn out from a long day of work. Lately, I've been working from home, but that somehow makes me more tired than when I commuted in to school. And the world is more wearying than it used to be, of course.

         Sleep comes fast, but not for long. I hear Rory's whispers close to my ear, urgent and scared. "Dad, there's someone in the house."

         It's one of those things that a kid can say that makes your heart speed up. I pulled him into the bedroom and closed the door. There are two big French doors with a flimsy slide lock between then, painted white. I motioned to him to sit down with me next to the bed and to be quiet, my finger against my lips. He nodded, shaking a little.

         We live in an old house, and old houses make noises-- especially at night, for some reason.  We sat there for a bit, and my heart calmed, at least until I heard the noise. It was a creak from the first floor. It might have been the house, but it was hard not to imagine a footstep. Since I started working from home, I've wasted way too much time on nextdoor.com, a website where people report various local indignities and scandals. And there was a break-in a few blocks away, on Halifax. The homeowner, a cranky-looking woman identified as Betsy1958, had heard a noise, come downstairs, and found a man running out her front door with three bags of rice, toilet paper, and a computer. These days, the toilet paper was probably worth more than the computer.

         Was this the same noise? I sat and wondered, and then I heard it again, the creak.  Rory urgently whispered "See?" I nodded.

         There was nothing to reach for in the bedroom-- no gun, no bat or mace. My phone was on a charger downstairs by the back door. I was in my pajama bottoms and a t-shirt from one of Ellen's races that featured a heart; it wasn't an intimidating look. But something in me wanted to go downstairs and confront whoever it might be.

         I leaned over and whispered in Rory's ear: "Stay here! Don't move." Then I slowly slipped the door open. Slowly, but not quietly; the door was hung too low for the high carpet, and it made a "Shhhh" noise whenever it was opened. I grimaced at the noise and moved through the door on the balls of my feet. Glancing down the stairs, I didn't see a light on. 

         Slowly, my feet feeling their way, I crept down the stairs when I heard the noise again and stopped, frozen. Where was this guy? The kitchen? The mud room? What would he want to take from the mud room?  That's when I realized that Rory was behind me, at the top of the stairs. "I'm scared!" he whispered. I turned and motioned with both hands for him to go back to my bedroom, panic setting in. I should have stayed with him. 

         Creeping to the bottom of the stairs, I turned each way, looking. That's when I saw what was gone: the painting over the fireplace. 

         It was an abstract by my father, with deep smoky lines at the bottom and dark shades of brown and red at the top, and about 7/8ths of the way up there is a slash of white and blue that was like glimpsing God-rays and hope through a glass, darkly.  It was my favorite painting because it was the closest I had ever come across where a work of art truly represented an emotion.

         The space where it had been emboldened me. I stopped creeping and walked around the corner, through the dining room, into the kitchen. There was no one. I turned on the light in the living room. Nothing. 

         He was gone, probably. I went to the stairs and looked up. Rory had taken my advice and was gone from them.  I checked to make sure the front door was locked and walked back up the stairs. Halfway up, I realized that I had not looked in the mud room, behind the door by the fish tank. But now I wanted to see Rory. 

         I reached the top of the stairs. The bedroom door was closed again. Pushing on it, I could feel that the slide lock had been closed.

         Something about that terrified me. I knocked on the door. "Rory? Unlock the door, ok?"

         I heard the bar slide over, and the door opened. There was Rory, crying. He had a way of crying where he started silently and slowly built up to wracking sobs. It broke my heart every time. I knew the trick was to distract him, so I began to head-butt him while making a cow noise. It worked, for a moment. He pushed back at my head with both little hands and said "Stop it!"

         I did, and we both sat there in the dark, quietly. After a minute he asked "Did they take anything?"

         I shrugged. "That painting over the fireplace is gone."

         He didn't say anything right away. When he did his voice was trembling. "Dad, you took that down."

         I was thunderstruck. Maybe I had; things had become a little fuzzy in my memory since things started getting weird, so many people getting sick, the hospitals overwhelmed. 

         "You took it down when Mommy and Lara and Jay went to be with Grammy and Grand-dad in Heaven."

         I had. He was right. I had been mad when I did it, mad at God and the world, and I had taken the painting down and put it behind a door. It was too hard to see. If there had been someplace deeper to hide it, a hole bored into the earth, I would have put it there.

         I began to shake a little.

         Rory moved next to me and put his arm around me. Kids do that; they can tell. As his body moved next to mine, it felt a little... off. Something was wrong. 

         I pushed the sleeve of my pajamas up, and pressed the front of my wrist to his forehead.

          He was warm.