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Sometimes, Gabe wonders what he would be like if he was alive. He wants to know if he would play football and live for Friday nights and his coach would clap him on the shoulder and say, “You’ve got quite the young man here,” to Dad. Or maybe he would be in theater, and Natalie would be embarrassed and proud to come see him perform. He could be in marching band. He’d like to learn to play an instrument, like Natalie.
But he’s not alive, and he doesn’t play football or an instrument. He doesn’t act or sing on stage. Dad has never patted him on the back after a job well-done and said, “That’s my boy.” Natalie hasn’t rolled her eyes and yelled at him for embarrassing her in front of her friends.
It’s okay, though. He has Mom. Mom, who loves him and sings on his birthday and says his name. Gabe doesn’t think he could ever love anyone as much as he loves Mom, but maybe he’d know how to if he was alive.
There are a lot of pictures of Natalie around the house. When he was younger, Gabe would spend hours staring at them while Mom thought he was at school. He knew each of them better than he knew himself. He could tell you off the top of his head that in the picture from her first day of kindergarten, Natalie wore a pink shirt and flowered leggings with a Dora the Explorer backpack. There’s one of her and Dad after a piano recital, and Gabe can point out the stranger sneezing in the background. He can show you the pictures Mom took pre- and post- braces. The walls and shelves of their house are adorned with Natalie’s Halloween costumes and recitals and first days of school and Christmas mornings.
There are no pictures of Gabe in the house.
He knows there have to be some pictures of him somewhere. He’s scrolled through Mom’s Facebook often enough to know that first time parents are crazy about taking pictures of their kid. If nothing else, hospitals always take pictures of newborns. But the walls of the house and the scrapbooks and frames on the shelves look like Gabe never existed.
It aches in his chest when he thinks about the fact that Mom and Dad had Natalie to replace him. It’s something no one talks about, but they all know. Logically, he knows it has to be hard on Natalie to know that she was born to fill a whole left by someone she’s never met, but it’s hard not to get caught up in his own anger and pain. He was their son, their baby boy, and Dad was content to just have another kid and forget about Gabe.
Once upon a time, Gabe knew that Dad loved him. When it was just the three of them, Dad would come home from work and kiss Mom and eat dinner with Gabe on his lap. For the most part, he was a good baby, but he never wanted to be put down. Gabe knows that most people don’t have memories from when they were babies, but he does. It’s probably got a lot to do with dying at 18 months.
Gabe remembers dying.
He doesn’t like to think about it.
When he was little, Mom would hold him on her hip and dance around the living room, humming and singing. Gabe would babble along with her and clap his tiny hands, and Mom would laugh her beautiful laugh. He’s bigger now, but they still dance together sometimes. He’s a good at it, but they can only dance together when Gabe is real enough.
When he’s the most real, when he’s almost enough, is when Dad starts saying Mom has to go back to the doctor. They always put her on a new medication (or a few), and then Gabe is… less. When Mom is “doing poorly” and missing Natalie’s recitals and Dad sleeps on the couch, Mom and Gabe dance together. They talk in the mornings and evenings, and Gabe’s thoughts are clear enough to tease an oblivious Natalie. Once the doctor figures out her medication, Gabe is just a flicker of a boy Mom occasionally smiles at over the dinner table.
He doesn’t want to be less. He wants to be alive, and this is the closest he can get.
The ECT works differently than most of the medications Mom has been put on. When she stops seeing Gabe, he usually stops being. It isn’t an instantaneous thing. He can feel it in the way his thoughts slow down and the world seems hazy, and the next thing he knows he’s missing time. If he’s lucky, it’s just a few weeks. Usually, it’s a matter of months, but there are entire years he missed.
With the ECT, it’s like they just chopped off her hand and hid it somewhere in the house. He’s still there and still aware, but now he doesn’t even have Mom. She’s just trying to go about life with Dad and Natalie telling her everything’s fine, but she’s missing a hand. Gabe just has to hope that phantom pains and the smell of decay will lead her back to him.
Maybe he’s put a little too much thought into this analogy. He’s had a lot of alone time. Now that none of them can see him, he’s taken to screaming at all of them. Sometimes they’re shouted lectures. Other times he screams like a baby left in the crib too long.
He screams at Natalie while she gets high with Henry. Gabe knows she’s ashamed of him, but he’s always thought she was so smart. Sure, she’s a dork, but she’s Gabe’s dork. Between the piano and her grades, it’d always been clear to him that Natalie was going to make something of herself. He would have loved to be there, really be there, for it. Gabe knows he could have been a great big brother.
(“Whose birthday is it?”
“My brother’s.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“I don’t.”)
He screams while Dad lies to Mom. He hates this image Dad paints for her of a perfect wedding and a perfect family with one perfect child. It’s not the truth. Mom got pregnant. They got married. Gabe died, but he didn’t leave. That’s the ugly, painful, gut-wrenching truth, and Mom needs to know it. Gabe wants Dad to stop trying to make things perfect, and start working with what he has. He wants the version of Dad who was content to feed Gabe on his lap until they could afford a high chair.
(“Do you feel he’s still real? Love, it’s just not so.”)
He screams for Mom to say his name. He’s so fucking lonely, and he just wants her back. Even if he doesn’t get to be alive, it was enough to have Mom. Natalie gets upset about Mom not being there for her, but Natalie has the whole world. Gabe’s world is just Mom.
(“Everything is perfect. Nothing’s real.”)
One day while Mom is at the doctor and Dad is working and Natalie is out, Gabe finds the keepsake box. It’s full of the things Dad used to lie to Mom, but the music box is there too. Gabe opens it idly and hums along with the familiar music. It’s no photograph, but the music box is his, and he loves it. An idea comes to him suddenly, and he leaves it where Mom will find it when he hears her come home. The plan works.
Phantom pains and decay have finally brought her back to him, and Gabe is laughing and dancing and running across the house. The house is his kingdom, and he’s finally back in control. Dad actually talks about him for a few seconds, but he still won’t say his name. Natalie is yelling at Henry, but Gabe has Mom back and that’s all he needs.
She’s paying more attention to Natalie than him, but Gabe’s okay with that. He can share Mom. He’s a good big brother.
But then Mom is leaving, and Gabe doesn’t understand what he did wrong. She hasn’t even spoken to him. He helped her remember, and now she’s leaving. Gabe is screaming like a baby in a crib again.
There are lots of things a dead son cannot do. He can’t talk to most of his family. He can’t go to school. He can’t understand everything that goes on with Natalie or Dad or even Mom. One thing he can do, however, is sob for his mom like a little boy, but she doesn’t turn back. She walks right out the door, and now it’s just Gabe and Dad.
Gabe’s bawling reaches a particularly gut-wrenching tone, and he sees Dad flinch. “Can you hear me?” he demands. “Can you see me?”
Dad flinches again. It’s clear that he’d hoped the problems would go with his wife, but Gabe is his son too. He’s the family ghost, and they’re finally talking about him.
Gabe just wishes he could have been a real part of the family. He doesn’t know what kind of son he’d be—a football player or a theater geek or a band kid—but he would have been something more than what he is now. Mom would have been able to love him without destroying herself, and Natalie would have been such a dorky, awesome little sister. Dad would love him and be proud of him. He’d look at Gabe, all grown up and making his way in the world, and see his little boy who couldn’t sleep without a music box.
(“Gabe. Gabriel.”
“Hi, Dad.”)