I was constantly trying to sneak in on you and dad’s dinner parties. Even when I was a little boy, even then, I found the witty dialogue of adults so much more fascinating than all the pointless drivel the kids my age would talk about. There was something so completely entrancing about it, the way the adults would talk about politics, and the truth, the way they would so casually toss around curse words without a second thought.
However, the point of the dinner parties was always, and will forever be, to get away from the kids. So everytime I’d try to sit down and listen, you would politely scoot me off to bed. But I would sneak back out. I would sit right there at the crook right next to the refrigerator, lean my head forward so that I could hear all the cool, sexy banter between the grown-ups. Oh, the things I could tell you.
So, one night I was doing that, and you and dad were talking about how “difficult” it was.
“We weren’t sure we’d ever be able to have one again,” one of you said.
And someone asked you something, and you said, “I just woke up one day and there was blood everywhere.”
And it slowly dawned on me that I used to have a brother, and that he had died. Later in life, I would put it all together and realize that you had had a miscarriage.
I’ve thought about this a lot since that night. A lot. I’ve thought about the fact that I was supposed to be the younger child, and I wonder what that would be like. I wonder what my brother would have grown up to be like. I’ve thought about the fact that Colin would most likely not exist if my other brother had lived, and I wonder what that would be like. As I’ve turned into an adult, I’ve thought about what a horrible, horrible experience that would be, to be a twenty-five-year-old boomer in the middle of the Camelot years, newly married, just moved to the suburbs, your first home, life completely on track, when one morning you wake up to a pool of blood between your legs and a dead child. I think about how similar experiences have driven many, many young couples apart, made them divorce, about the long-lasting terror it produces in some women, to the point that they would never get pregnant again. I wonder if I was twenty-five and had a miscarriage, if I would have the courage to try again. I don’t know.
There was a couple of hushed lines in the living room, and then you said, “It was the most difficult thing I’ve ever been through.” And then there was silence. And then I went back to bed.
