If it weren’t for Angie as my fellow survivor, insanity would’ve seemed the likeliest of available bad options. To be in a nice white room of rest, a chamber decently padded, to be strapped in safe with a certain Mr. Whitman as a baritone male nurse read to me. The real Santa, and Santa’s small would-be helper, fastened down here, me, safe.

It was good to expect something alive coming down out of that same sky that had brought Robert home.

Beside me, at the low gate, with two haphazard boy-guards to keep us off the field, Robert’s mother said, in a girlish voice that made me recall my own mom’s recent unruly youngish laugh, “I just feel I look so discomposed, Hartley. We ladies have our days when we appear acceptable and these other days. Of course, as I told Bob, how should I look? I’ve kept feeling ugly since he died. I am clean at least, right? Ask Bob.”

“You’re far from ugly, Mrs. Gustafson. You look just like him and we all know what he looks … like.” Her husband gave me a glance that meant, She is upset, don’t mind, most natural thing in the world, really. And man to man, my eyes responded.

“Yes, but it’s strange, you know, that if I had just bought some new clothes, ones I believe Robert would’ve adored and called ‘fabulous’ whether he truly felt that or not, it would’ve helped me. Not to boast, but I was the one who taught him that word, you know, but in the original sense, as in a fable. So, to say fabulous means that something is really worthy of a fable, or a fairy tale. He was, of course. By the time we got back home from New York, sixty greetings and messages from around the world were waiting. People seemed to know without being told. Surprising, the scale of it … There’re days I believe that Robert’s great gift was to make us love him and, through that, to find each other. I did sometimes wonder if he received half of what we all sent him daily. He seemed to inspire more love than anyone, ever, but to need it less. Is this awful, I’m saying? Do I shock you, shock myself? I think not. When he was about two, I remember going in to check on him. Afternoon nap. It’d sure been quiet in there. My baby was sitting in his crib, just waiting for me, and then he smiled. I saw he’d planned to. Hard explaining. At times, the beauty of him then was almost spooky, even for me. You’d catch him with his thoughts. When I was pregnant, of course we didn’t know whether to paint his nursery pink or blue, so I chose a pretty yolk yellow, and what it did to the color of his hair and skin all the time! That day, his eyes were bigger than they’d ever look again but I felt he was testing me.