The Secret Names of Children

It begins in the shadows while he sleeps. It is now 6:30 a.m., a school day. Late May. His window is partially open, and birds cajole and sing on an overgrown bush. He has been dreaming and doesn’t hear the birds. Shadows of the birds emerge and disappear upon the curtains. Each flick of the boy’s eyes brings with it a new set of images. He likes birds, especially the raptors. There is a copse of mostly maple trees behind the house he lives in with his mother. One night, not long ago, he heard some screeching just as he was falling asleep. The sound frightened him, and he got out of bed and went to his mother who was watching television with the sound down low.

 

“Mommy, what’s that sound?” he asked.

 

“What are you doing up?” she asked.

 

He could tell by the sound of her voice that she wasn’t upset.  

 

“There’s a sound outside my window.”

 

His mother turned off the TV and listened briefly before getting up. She walked him back to his bedroom. His mother walked up to the window and was about to close it when the screeching started up again.  

 

“That’s an owl,” she said.  

 

She picked him up and kissed his cheek and put him back to bed.  

 

“It sounds like something wild,” he said.

 

She smiled. “Yes, it does,” she said. “Now go back to sleep.”

​

 

Last night, just before going to bed, he didn’t want to pick up his toys, especially the trucks, which he had left in the middle of the floor. He wanted them together so that in the morning, even though it would be a school day, he could play with them a bit before his mother called him to breakfast. His mother tried to get him to compromise by putting one truck away, a small metal pickup that she had stepped on multiple times, once stubbing her toe to the point of breaking the skin, and he agreed, securing the small truck in a white plastic container. He doesn’t know how to explain the love he has for his mother. He is five years old. One night he woke from a dream, and he got out of bed and entered her bedroom. She wasn’t there. He found her in the living room, asleep on the couch, the light from a table lamp shining on her face. She had a blanket draped over her, below her exposed arms. He didn’t wake his mother. He had already forgotten his bad dream. There was a bit of spittle in the corner of his mother’s mouth. Carefully he took his finger and wiped away the spittle and kissed his mother on the cheek. He pulled the blanket the best he could, so it covered her upper body. Then he went back to bed.

 

​

He doesn’t know his father. He only knows his mother. Some days he watches tall men come to school and pick up one of his classmates. He is in the first grade, and these men with their husky voices, some in ties and jackets, others in scruffy-toed work boots, bend down and pick up their child like they could carry them forever. Once he saw a man pick up a little girl and toss her in the air like she was a doll.  The girl—he didn’t know her name—giggled and threw her arms around his neck. The man wore glasses and had a black beard.

​

His teacher is a woman. He likes his teacher. Sometimes when she laughs, she covers her mouth, and giggles through her spread fingers. One day his teacher brought in her new puppy to class. The puppy was in a box, and his teacher took it out and laid it on a blanket. The puppy was all black except for a bit of white on the tip of one ear. The puppy whined. That day he got to hold the puppy, and it licked his cheek, covering his face with its sweet puppy breath.

 

​​

In the house next door is a young man that is often shouting. He always seems angry about something. Sometimes the shouting wakes him, like it does this morning. He listens for words, but he can’t make them out. He looks on the floor and sees his trucks lined up in a circle and he thinks about getting up and playing with them. They have work to do. Unfinished work from last night. But he is still sleepy, so he falls back to sleep despite the man’s shouting.  

 

When he wakes, he hears his mother in the bathroom. She is taking a shower. The sun is shining through his window. He remembers something about a man shouting, and he wonders if he had dreamed it. He gets out of bed and looks for his favorite truck, a little one that has a digger in front, and he stuffs it in his backpack in a place where he thinks his mother won’t find it. He’s really not supposed to take toys to school. He likes school but there are days when he feels unsettled, when he’d rather be at home unbothered with having to learn. Today is one of those days and having the truck secretly inside the backpack, which will be lying in his cubby, makes him feel better knowing a part of his home is with him.

​

As they start to walk out the door, his mother waiting for him to put on his shoes, he hears shouting outside, and he hesitates. He hates shouting. As they walk to the car, the angry man next door exits a car nearby. He is smoking, the smell acrid like burning tires. There are others in the car, and the sound of arguing. The angry young man gestures at the other men in the car in a threatening manner. They yell at each other, and one starts to exit the car but when he sees him and his mother, he smiles and doesn’t come all the way out. All the way to their car, his mother holds his hand so tightly that he almost tells his mother that she is hurting him.

 

​

It is a short drive to school, a few minutes at most. During the drive, he fingers his little truck through his backpack. His stomach growls loudly, and he knows his mother has heard it. He didn’t eat much this morning, a few bites of cereal, some orange juice. He didn’t give himself enough time to eat. He was too busy playing and wouldn’t come to the table even after his mother had called him several times.  

 

Now, as his mother pulls into the drop off line, she sips from her cup of coffee.  

 

“Have a good day, Cody,” she says. “I’ll see you after school.”

 

She reaches over and kisses him on the top of his head.

 

“Bye, Mom,” he says.

 

“Eat your lunch today,” his mother says.

 

In front of the school he dodges his way around scurrying students. His mother has pulled the car to the side to watch him for a few

seconds. He doesn’t turn around, so he doesn’t know that she is watching, or why. One strap of his backpack has fallen off his shoulder, and it droops almost to the concrete. She watches as a boy runs up to him, a small boy like him, and tugs at the backpack in a playful manner. The boy helps arrange her son’s backpack on his shoulders, and witnessing this small act of kindness causes her to suck in her breath for a moment. She wishes she could see her son’s face. But it is enough to watch the two of them—her small son and his small friend—walk into the school together.

​

​​

After dropping her son off at school, she drives around town for a while. She isn’t due to start work for another thirty minutes. She is usually the first to arrive at the office. A small insurance agency. She likes to drive around and look at houses, daydream about moving out of the house she and her son rent on Edwards Street. On occasion she likes to get out and walk around a neighborhood and get a feel for the area. Yesterday she did this, during lunch. She got in her car, drove a block or two away, parked and began walking, eating her peanut butter and jelly sandwich as she walked. It was warm. There were some preschool kids playing in a park, and she stopped to watch them. A little girl was playing in the sandbox. She was playing alone. She looked to be no more than three. Sometimes the girl would look up and say something to a young woman who was sitting on a bench near the sandbox. The young woman was on her cell phone and mostly ignored the little girl.  

 

She sat there and watched the little girl who was scooping sand into a small plastic bucket with a little green shovel. She could see that the little girl was used to being ignored. She got up from her bench and walked over to the sandbox.  

 

“That’s a nice sandcastle,” she said.

 

The little girl had tried to make the sand in her bucket stand up, but the sand was dry, and it mostly fell apart.

 

“Thank you,” the girl said. “Would you like to play?”

 

“I would,” she said. She looked over at the woman sitting on the bench. The woman was looking up from her phone now, but she hadn’t said anything. “But I have to get back to work.”

 

“Leave the woman alone,” the woman on the bench said. She had stood up, but didn’t make a step toward the sandbox.

 

 

At recess, the sky has the color of his curtains, translucent. He stares at it for a moment even as one of his friends calls for him to come and play. Over in a corner of the school building, where the light unusually shines, as if the sun were a small lamp, he can see dust motes floating in the air. He reaches and touches them, and he wonders why he can’t feel them.  

 

On the ground, near his feet, a worm is wriggling. Some ants have surrounded it, small red ones. He watches the worm for a while. It wriggles, then stops, but it doesn’t try to crawl away. He bends down and tries brushing away the ants. They scurry about but don’t try to leave. He finds a twig, even as he hears his name being called again, which he ignores, and attempts to wipe the ants off the worm, but he only manages to remove a few, so he picks up the worm with the twig and starts toward the playground area. He gets about halfway to the grass before the worm falls off.  

 

“What are you doing?”  

 

A girl is in front of him, just as he tries to pick up the worm again. It’s not a girl in his class, and he doesn’t know her name. She is wearing green shorts.

 

“I’m trying to get this worm to the grass,” he says. “Ants have been biting it.”

 

“There’s one crawling up your arm,” the girl says.  

 

He drops the worm. He swipes his arm clean of the ant. For a moment he thinks he has been bitten, and he thinks about screaming, but he doesn’t. The girl finds a small stick of her own and begins to try and pick up the worm. He wants to tell her to stop because he wants to do this alone, but she asks him to help, so he quickly picks up his twig. Together they manage to pick up the worm and make it to an area that is devoid of grass. There they let the worm go. It uncoils and starts crawling away.

 

“Do you want to swing?” the girl asks.

 

“Okay,” he says, and he follows her to the swing set.

​

​

It is 3:00, and she is running late. By the time she arrives to pick up her son, the pickup line for cars has snaked all the way onto the road, snarling traffic on both sides. It takes her fifteen minutes to reach him. He is standing, waiting patiently, his backpack lying beside his feet. There is a teacher near him, directing cars and children. She has her arms in the air, her head swiveling from side to side.  

 

Her passenger-side window is open when she pulls up to the curb, and she stares at him for a second. He is looking down, and he hasn’t seen her pull up. The teacher hasn’t noticed, either. He looks tired, she thinks.

 

“Cody, Cody,” she says.

 

“Mom,” he says.  

 

He gets in the backseat, and she comes around the car to help him with his seat belt. Past the school, out on the road, he starts talking

while she simultaneously drives and looks in the rearview mirror at her son. His cheeks are red, and she asks him if he feels all right, and he ignores the question, and starts telling her about his day. His voice is hard to hear clearly. He’s talking about a worm, and ants, and how the worm was wriggling, and a girl who helped him save it. She mostly catches the girl part.

 

“Who was the girl?” she asks.

 

“I don’t know,” he says.

 

And he starts in again, from the beginning. He was outside, during recess, the sky had this interesting color.  

 

“What color was it?” she asked.

 

She thinks about running through a yellow light but stops the car.

 

“It was a shade of periwinkle, I think,” he says. 

 

She smiles. “Periwinkle,” she says.  

 

“Yes.”

 

She goes over it, over the years, over and over, thousands of times, millions, tens of millions. What could have made a difference? What could she have done differently? She was his mother, after all. It was her job to keep him safe. If she didn’t do it, who would? She could have run the yellow light. She could have been on time to school. She could have stopped at an ice cream shop and sat outside while they slurped vanilla-chocolate-swirl ice cream cones. They could have stopped at a playground. A museum. She could have driven slower. Faster. She could have gone back to the office and filed that document she had left on her desk. Both of them could have stayed home and played hooky, gone on some kind of adventure together. Driven around the block again. Gone to visit her parents who live three hours away. Or stayed inside and used their imaginations, played with trucks and plastic bugs, read books, found a sandbox somewhere, anywhere. Done most anything except arrive home when they did.

 

He looks like he is waiting, the young man from next door. He stands outside, looking up the road, swiveling his head from side to side, muttering to himself.

 

“He’s outside, Mom,” the boy says.

 

“What?”

 

“That man. The one who is always angry.”

 

She sees him through the windshield as she pulls up to the house. There is no driveway, so she parks on the street. He is standing in the front yard of his house, not far from the street. He has the look of someone who is lost. He is talking to himself, not loudly, and while sitting in the car, its motor still running, she can’t make out what he’s saying.  

 

“Let’s drive around the block,” the boy says.  

 

She’s tired and wants to go inside and lay down for a few minutes before making dinner. She doesn’t say anything, just turns off the car and goes around to help her son out. While he stands in their yard, carefully watching the man who doesn’t seem to notice them, she goes back to the car because she has forgotten something and that’s when the car comes around the corner, its engine roaring as if it’s a jet engine. Shots are fired. She instinctively ducks, sticking her head inside the back door of the car. After the car passes, she looks

over and sees her son lying on the ground.

 

 

Months later she still calls out to him. She hears his feet pitter-pattering on the floor, waits for him to run up to her, holding his latest Lego creation. She had many names for him. Secret names. In the apartment she has moved into, a couple of miles from the house a drive-

by shooter ended her life along with his, she sits alone. Like a ghost. Sometimes she dreams that he is still alive. Even awake her mind wanders, daydreams. He is only in another room, playing quietly. What a good boy. He can hardly be heard.

 

​

He had these boots. They were pink. Bright pink. After a rain, they used to go out and find puddles together. She would hold his hand.  He would stomp through the puddle, sometimes splashing water onto her leg all the way up to her knees. She would tell him to stop, but he would only laugh, and stomp harder.  

 

 

One day, a year after, she thinks she sees him. There is a little boy wearing a raincoat that covers his knees. It is sprinkling spits of rain that she doesn’t really feel. The boy is wearing rain boots. They’re pink but not bright pink. He is jumping in a rain puddle with both feet.

 

“Cody,” she calls out to him.  

 

His back is turned to her. There is a young woman sitting on a bench because they’re at a playground, but she doesn’t notice the woman. Cody. He keeps splashing. Cody. When she gets up to him the boy turns around, and she sees that it isn’t him. But she stares at him for a while. Then she looks over at the young woman. She is smiling, and she starts to rise from the bench. The boy has taken off his hat, and as she starts to move away from him, she almost reaches out to touch his hair.

​​

​

She feels like a bug aimlessly floating in the middle of an enormous lake. Her parents look at her during a holiday visit, over a year after

the incident. She sees the looks on their faces, especially her father. She knows they worry about her, but she can’t do anything about it.  

 

“I had so many nicknames for him,” she says.  

 

They nod.

 

“Dozens.”

 

“Tell us one,” her mother says.

 

“They’re secret,” she says, but she sees the disappointment in their faces.  

 

“We only need one,” her father says.

 

“Little Mouse,” she says.

 

They smile, and she can see that they like the nickname. She starts to tell them why, but she decides not to.  

​

​

Her grief cuts to her soul. She feels she could take a knife and try to cut it out, but she would never reach it. It is unreachable.

​

​

One morning, as she is driving to work, she drives past the turn for the parking lot and keeps on driving. She drives all the way to Mackinaw City, two hundred miles away, at the very tip of the lower peninsula. She takes Highway 31, keeping the lake on her left the entire way. She doesn’t stop. Not once. Past Manistee, Traverse City, Petoskey. At Mackinaw City, she crosses the five-mile-long bridge over the Straits of Mackinac. Lake Michigan lies below, like an inland sea. The bridge arches like a giant serpent; its stable girders and cables soaring toward the sun. DO NOT STOP ON THE BRIDGE, a sign says, but that is what she feels like doing. She wants to lean over the immovable concrete railing and look at the water below, watch the whitecaps.

 

She finally stops at St. Ignace, at the southern tip of the Upper Peninsula. She boards a ferry that takes her to Mackinac Island, leaving her car as motorized vehicles are not allowed on the island. She sits next to a man who has brown, curly hair. He asks her name, and she thinks about telling him a made-up one. She thinks about creating a whole new life, the thrill of escaping lingers in her chest.  

 

“Jessica,” she finally says.  

 

His name is Seely, and he touches her hand, and she looks at him and smiles, and she sees the face of her child in his face, what her son might have looked like as a young man. At a souvenir shop, while perusing a swivel stand of postcards, he looks at her with longing. Through the window, at a confection shop, they stand and watch the confectioner pour liquid chocolate from one container to another.

 

“Let’s go bike riding,” Seely says.

 

The road runs along the shore. Away from the town, the breeze feels cooler, brisk. She watches Seely’s back, the muscles bulging through his blue T-shirt. After a bit, he turns and begins riding up into the interior of the island. Years earlier, in what seems like a former life, she remembers taking Cody to the park. He was learning to ride a tricycle. She carried the bike to the park in one hand while holding his hand with the other. The bike was red with streamers sticking out of the rubber handlebar grips. She told him to push the pedals with his feet. At first he couldn’t coordinate his movements, pushing the pedals forward and backward, but he kept at it without getting frustrated. It wasn’t long before he was riding all over the park, making noises with his mouth like he was speeding. She ran along with him, cheering him on. “Look at me, Mommy,” he kept saying. “Look how fast I’m going.”

 

Now, because she is tired, she pedals slowly. She doesn’t see Seely. She stops, sits at the side of the road.

 

His voice feels like it comes from the sky. “Up here,” he says.

 

She looks up but doesn’t see anything. She walks her bike around the next turn, spots his green bike leaning against a tree, near a trail.

 

“Up here,” the voice comes again.  

 

And then she locates him, standing above the trees on a large boulder. He looks like he is standing on the roof of the world. He waves for her to come up.  

 

“Hi,” he says, once she reaches the top.

 

“You left me,” she says.  

 

He smiles. “You’re so pretty,” he says.

 

He says it in a nice way, like he just meant it as a compliment, nothing more, as if he expected nothing in return. The sun is just above them. She sits down on the boulder, her arms folded over her knees. A hawk, high above the trees, circles and circles, and she watches it until her neck hurts. Everything, she thinks, reminds her of him. In beautiful, silly, and stupid ways. Every insect, every bird song, every roar of a truck engine, is a window into some memory, as it rises out of the ether, like a link in a fence. Her own body, as she stretches out on her stomach, feels the hardness of the stone, is something he never got tired of touching. He used to rub his tiny fingers along the length of her arm. Sometimes he would playfully pull the tiny hairs near her wrist. As a toddler, he liked to kiss her eyes, and he would ask her to close them. It is not hard for her to conjure up his soft, moist lips upon her closed eyelids. She holds onto these memories because she is afraid she will forget them. A year ago, at the suggestion of her family doctor, she attended a support group for parents who had lost children from drive-by shootings. It had seemed such a random group to her, but she was surprised to find six adults there, all but one a woman. The social worker was an older woman who kept her hands clasped in her lap and spoke in a soft voice. She had asked each group member to list three things about their child: their favorite toy, favorite food, favorite activity. As they went around the room, she thought hard about Cody’s favorites, but before it was her turn, a woman stood up and instead of listing her child’s favorites, she went into the day of her daughter’s death, talking about how it happened, where she was, what it was like seeing her on the ground, and Jessica could feel her body tense, becoming hotter, and the social worker tried to get the woman to stop, but the woman couldn’t, wouldn’t. She understood the woman’s need, to let someone know. Yet, she couldn’t take it. That’s not what she came for. “I can’t get the vision out of my mind,” the woman said. And Jessica jumped out of her chair and rushed to the door, her hand over her face, stifling a scream.

 

“I’m hungry,” Seely says.

 

Out of her reverie, she turns over and looks at him. He is shirtless, blocking the sun with his hairless chest.

 

“Let’s get some lunch,” he says.

 

“I’m not ready to leave yet,” she says. “You go ahead. I’ll meet you somewhere.”

 

“Okay,” he says. “On the porch of the Grand Hotel.”

 

The thought comes to her as she watches him retie his shoes, his head down—she could go with him, not just now, not just back to town, but out west—she could go. The tingle of taking flight thrills her. There was nothing to stop her from going. She watches as he walks away from her, disappearing down the trail like a spoiled dream. An hour later, she is standing in front of the Grand Hotel, using one of its massive pillars as a screen. Seely is sitting on a bench, reading. A breeze ruffles the book’s pages. There is a young woman sitting on another bench, wearing a short, dark-green skirt, pleated down the front. Nearby, a young boy plays on the painted plank flooring, moving toy vehicles around. He is making sounds with his mouth as the vehicles roll over the porch, the knees of his pants scuffing across the rough wood.  

 

“Cody,” she whispers.

 

She comes around the pillar, and Seely sees her. “Jessica,” he says.

 

She climbs the stairs. The boy is ignorant of her moving toward him. So is the woman. She bends down and sits on the porch with him. 

 

He looks at her, surprised. He isn’t frightened. She takes one of the vehicles—a construction vehicle with a digger in front—and begins manipulating it, making noises with her mouth. The boy looks at his mother, confused. 

 

“Mommy,” he says.  

 

“What are you doing?” Seely asks.

 

“Playing cars with Cody,” she says. The boy rises and walks over to his mother who has a gentle but concerned look on her face. “I’m sorry,” Jessica finally says. “I—” and she can’t finish her sentence.   

 

As she walks away, every memory of her son begins swirling through her brain like some kind of phantasm. She can see him in her brain like he is with her. He stays there even as she boards a ferry back to her car and drives the two hundred miles back home. She knows she is hallucinating, but she doesn’t care. These visions come and go for weeks. When she describes them to her parents, they look at her sadly and tell her she should see her doctor. After that, she doesn’t tell anyone about the visions. She keeps them to herself. She marches through a world both real and unreal. But what is memory? It’s in your head. Doesn’t that make it real?

 

​​

He was almost born in her bedroom. The labor came on so suddenly and unexpectedly. He was two weeks early. She had to call a taxi to take her to the hospital. The taxi driver—an older man with a bald head—helped her into the backseat of the car. He was gentle, calm, even as she grimaced with pain. She remembers this man, years later, in the tormented silence of her dreams, and she recalls that he stopped by her house a few days later. He had brought flowers, and she was so touched by his kindness that she asked him inside. The baby was asleep then, and she brought him to the crib to see her sleeping son. He was on his back; his breathing so quiet that it could hardly be heard.

​

“He’s beautiful,” the taxi driver said.

 

 

One night, years after he was gone, she rummages through her memories. She refuses to let them go. She has even started to write them down, so she won’t forget. And the memory of leaving Mackinac Island, driving over the bridge, and heading along the Lake Huron coast instead of returning along Lake Michigan, returns to her. Did she stop on the bridge? And look over into the water? She recalls someone pulling her back, but who would that have been? She tells this to the new support group she has joined. They’re all women who have lost children to gun violence. They go around the room, telling each other the secret names they had for their children: Cutey Pie, My Angel, My Only Sunshine, Sleepy. Silly names. When it comes her turn, she hesitates. She starts to choke up. The woman sitting next to her reaches out and grabs her hand. It calms her.  

 

“My name is Jessica,” she says. “My son’s name was Cody. Among other things, I called him Bunny.”

 

He loved toy vehicles.

 

Running through mud puddles.

 

Chocolate ice cream.

 

Snow.

 

He liked to swing.

 

He liked to watch me dance on the kitchen floor.

 

He wished for a puppy.