Photograph by Amy Hart
I stand barefoot on the cool tile floor in the familiar kitchen at 3146, sautéing spinach in garlic and olive oil, imported, according to the label, but the fine print says it’s produced in New Jersey. I turn the greasy knob for the left front burner to high and watch the metal rings flush red, as if they’re suddenly embarrassed. On the right front burner, steam rises and clatters the inside lid of my lightweight aluminum pasta pot, then escapes around its edges, declaring victory: the water is boiling.
The pot’s cover abruptly lifts off, morphs into a UFO, and drifts high up into the night sky. I gaze at it, and am pondering the purpose of life, when, without warning, it reverts back to a lid and lands safely on the pot. I’m impressed that a cheap pot and lid, with such humble beginnings—hurriedly pulled off a gray metal shelf in the bargain basement section of Woolworth’s on Eighty-Sixth Street in Manhattan—could accomplish such a feat.
I lift the lid, too quickly, and the hot dampness wet-slaps my face. When I add the pasta into the water, it’s briefly reduced to a gentle boil, but quickly regathers its steam, splashing me again with such force that I fear I’ll drown in the starchy pasta water. Then, I discover that the blue plastic colander, also purchased from the basement level of Woolworth’s, the one that Jason uses to clean the gravel for his turtle Sammy’s tank, is missing. Jason, I yell, where are you?
I wake up in a panic and realize this is no longer my kitchen.
I bought the pasta pot, colander, and other household basics from Woolworth’s after Jason’s dad and I separated; Jason had just turned three. In our fifth-floor walk-up apartment on East Ninety-Second Street, overlooking Patty’s, an Irish bar, Jason adapted the gleaming pot as a drum, banging it with two wooden spatulas. When he tired of that game, he fashioned the pot’s lid as a shield, clutching its black handle and holding it in front of his chest, Viking-style, the spatula-turned-drumstick doubling as a sword. The blue colander served as his helmet.
While we lived there, Jason’s pretend rival warrior was a Patty’s regular who stood on the street below his bedroom window, shouting, “Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it.” Jason called him “The Fuck-It Man,” a feeble rival warrior. A year later, on July 17, 1999, Jason’s fourth birthday, we left New York for Florida.
“I’ll sort of miss The Fuck-It Man,” Jason said.
“Me, too,” I said.
For me, leaving New York was like having a kidney removed; you could live without it, but you would regret its loss. We were moving to Florida for my new job and to be closer to family, a type of dialysis, an artificial replacement after the dissolution of my marriage to Jason’s dad.
While I finished packing up the last odds and ends, I turned on the radio and heard the news that John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s plane had crashed the night before. What a tragedy, I thought. But I was focused on other things.
At first, Jason and I lived in a series of apartments, before finally moving to 3146, the street number of the house where we lived for nine years. We began referring to the house by its number, minus the street name, Shady Oaks Lane, after Jason asked me why it was called that.
“It’s called Shady Oaks Lane because there are so many oak trees lining the street,” I said.
Never one to take things at face value, Jason began counting the trees; he was six at the time.
“There are only five,” he said.
“Well, I’m sure there used to be more when they named the street Shady Oaks.”
“What happened to them?” he asked.
“They probably died of a fungus,” I replied.
“I don’t like things that die,” Jason said.
After that, if only subconsciously, using the street name seemed hypocritical. Numbers were factual; they didn’t make promises they couldn’t keep.
My dreams of 3146 were becoming more frequent.
I’m playing Scrabble with Jason; it’s his turn, and while he’s deciding on a word, he drops an N. He knows it’s an N, he says, because it’s a consonant he needs for the word he’s planning to use. We both hear it hit the hardwood floor with a light wood on hardwood clickety-clack, but when he looks for it, he can’t find it. We search everywhere—under the couch, behind the cushion on the chair he’s sitting on, even on the other side of the room, because he says that those tiny letters can travel farther than you think.
He finally takes another N from the Scrabble pouch and uses it for “Nantucket.” Throughout the rest of the game, we comment on how strange it is that it could disappear like that into thin air.
“Oh, let me look in my shoe,” he says. “Maybe it fell in there.”
“Are you sure it was an N?” I ask.
I count the Ns in the pouch to make sure he isn’t mistaken. But there are only five, not six.
I’m sitting on an unfamiliar couch in the living room at 3146 with Danny, my dead ex-boyfriend. We’re talking about why he contacted me after his diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, three years after we’d broken up.
“Did you want to tell me I was the love of your life, or did you want to clear your conscience?” I ask.
“Why didn’t you ask me then?”
“You were dying; now I wish I had.”
“No, you don’t,” he says. “You’re dreaming.”
“What about Jason?” I ask. “Why did you treat him with such contempt? He was only nine when we met.”
“How old is he, now?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
From the beginning, Danny had made it clear that he wasn’t interested in raising more kids; his were grown. Still, he vacillated between thinking Jason was a deal breaker, his words, and something that he could learn to live with. I went along, thinking things would change. And they did change, just not in the way I thought.
One day, we were sitting in the living room at 3146 on the couch. Danny was pontificating about how Hemingway was the greatest writer who ever lived, when Jason walked in.
“Hey, man,” Jason said.
Danny didn’t look up. He continued his lecture about The Old Man and the Sea, a first edition copy of which he was waving through the air for emphasis.
“I’ll bet Jason has already read it,” I said.
I was always trying to make it right between them, always trying to prove to Danny that Jason was a good kid, worthy of his caring.
Jason casually walked over to Danny and asked if he could look at the book.
“Be careful with it,” Danny said, as he hesitantly handed it over. “It’s worth a lot of money.”
Jason grabbed the book and began ripping out pages and hurling them into the air.
“Sure, I’ve read it,” Jason said.
His eyes filled with tears as the pages floated to the floor.
“How much is your book worth now?” Jason asked.
Danny sat still and watched, unable or unwilling to move or speak, no tears in his eyes, only a flicker of anger and chilling resignation.
On hands and knees, I gathered up all one hundred and forty pages, while silently counting each hurtful thing that our alliance had brought to Jason, and to me. Danny’s temporary inaction quickly passed, and he was out the door before he saw me shed a tear.
I visited Danny in Baltimore after his diagnosis. One night, when everyone else had left, including his girlfriend, I asked if there was anything I could do for him. He said that having his feet massaged helped alleviate the pain, so I sat down on the floor in front of his recliner and massaged his feet, first one, then the other. It struck me as an immensely intimate experience, but not even close to giving birth to Jason.
“I’m sorry about how I treated Jason,” he said. “He was only a kid.”
My dreams of 3146 were becoming more sporadic, and sometimes Jason was no longer in them. I missed his presence but told myself it was for the best.
I’m finally removing the flowery blue wallpaper in the dining room that I’ve hated from the day we moved in; Laura Ashley on steroids, I called it. I paint the walls a deep green and swim through them effortlessly; the water has a calming effect. After I emerge from my wall swim, I tackle the clutter on the kitchen counter and throw out stacks of personalized 3146 address labels I’ve received, many of which I dishonestly used. I meant to send a donation to the Juvenile Diabetes Fund but forgot.
The guilt of my dreams is more forgiving than the guilt I experience in consciousness. I reflexively shake off the dream guilt, like a swimmer who emerges from the pool and shakes the water from her body. When I’m awake, my guilt tempts me to thrust my head under the water and hold it there until I can no longer breathe.
There’s a hard knock at the door. I haven’t bothered to get the doorbell fixed. When I open it, kids dressed in Halloween costumes say, “Trick or Treat,” but their voices are not those of children. They speak in deep, gruff tones and ask me why I kept my porch light off last year. That was the year my dog died, I tell them. I wasn’t feeling well.
“You think dogs are more important than kids,” they say. “Can Jason come out and play?”
I stay up all night trying to rewire the doorbell.
Six months have passed since Jason last visited me in a dream. In some ways, I’m relieved, but I also feel alone and abandoned. One day, as I’m pulling into my new neighborhood, I spot a huge turtle in the street, but I drive around him, and don’t stop to help. Several years ago, Jason noticed one in our driveway; we put him in a box in the backseat of the car, drove to a nearby wooded area, and turned him loose. Jason asked me if the turtle would be safe now, and I lied and told him, of course. It wasn’t really a lie because I hoped he would be safe, but I also knew that the odds weren’t very good.
Jason used to ask me if he would be safe when I put him on a plane to fly up north to visit his dad.
“Will the plane crash, Mommy?” he asked.
“Of course not,” I said.
“Is there a monster under my bed?”
“Of course not.”
“Will the turtle be safe?”
“Of course.”
Just when I think he may never return to my dreams, Jason comes home.
An older lady with characteristics of both my dead crazy aunt and my former mother-in-law moves into 3146. She sits on the couch in a faded flannel nightgown and works New York Times crossword puzzles upside down. She arranges items in the refrigerator alphabetically—apples, broccoli, carrots—the zucchini is stuffed precariously on the bottom shelf, next to the yucca.
Jason walks into the kitchen and opens the refrigerator door, swinging it back and forth, looking for something that he’ll know when he finds it.
“Yuck, Mom!”
“Stop swinging on the door,” I say.
He gives it two more swings for good measure, then grabs a jar of peanut butter, another of jelly, slams the door shut, and shoots me that mischievous twinkle-in-his-eyes look.
I smile.
The weekend that it happened, I was looking forward to some alone time while Jason visited his dad in New York.
Jason’s dad had his private pilot’s license to fly a small plane; he flew shorter trips, mainly from Long Island to New Jersey or upstate New York, sometimes to Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. Jason had flown with him before. We joked about his dad flying a plane; he didn’t drive a car that well. He was one of those drivers who would nonchalantly drift into another lane, and if you pointed it out, which of course you would if there was a car next to you, he’d tell you that he hadn’t done it, that he was a good driver. But the fact of his flying had become more or less like pouring milk on cereal. He’d flown many times, without incident.
I tried to call Jason before they took off but he didn’t answer. Then I got busy making my pasta, and by the time I thought about it again, I realized they would already be in the air.
The small plane crashed in Nantucket Sound on a warm and humid July evening, three years ago. Thunderstorms were reported popping up in the area. The investigation concluded that the crash was most likely caused by a combination of bad weather and pilot error.
Jason’s and his dad’s bodies were found two days later on July seventeenth, the day Jason would have turned fourteen. I know this from reading about it in the newspapers and from what people told me afterwards. I have no memory of that day, after sitting down to eat my pasta. All I have are memories before that day, and now my dreams.
John F. Kennedy, Jr., as a young boy, is standing at the top of the stairs at 3146 in his double-breasted pea coat, saluting; it’s the same salute he gave at his daddy’s, President John F. Kennedy’s, funeral.
“Jason didn’t suffer when the plane went down,” John-John tells me in his little boy voice.
“How do you know?”
“Since my own crash, I ride on all of the planes.”
“Every one of them?”
A tear rolled down his right cheek. “I ride in the cars, too.”
“With your daddy, President Kennedy?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Thank you, John-John,” I say. “It helps to know that.”
Susan Long: My story is about a mother’s grief and guilt. After my divorce, my young son and I moved from NYC to Orlando, and I was required to put him on a plane every couple of months to fly up and visit his dad. Each time, before boarding the flight, he asked the same question: “Mommy, is the plane going to crash?” Each time, I gave the same answer: “No, of course not.” Thankfully, it never did, but I worried greatly about sending him off on an airplane all alone. My son is now a grown man living in NYC, and we fly back and forth frequently to visit. And although he no longer asks if his plane is going to crash, it’s true that I still worry. I guess mothers always do. To read more of my work, visit www.author-susanlong.com; substack.com/@susanlongtakemehome.