Tuesday dawned with the promise of an early summer. Birds rooting in the eavestrough above woke him, and swooped excitedly chattering over the driveway as he backed the car out to drive Kip and Aiden to school. The class to which he had promised to return marked test papers that day was unexpectedly pre-empted for an assembly on study skills, leaving a gratified Paul time to finish marking in solitude in his empty room.
‘Bet this is your favourite class, eh?’ Gene Hill, colleague and wit, nodded to the unoccupied desks.
‘It certainly is,’ agreed Paul. ‘I trained them well.’
On the way home, Paul felt he could face with equanimity the mass in Samantha’s memory at church. The sun shone from a cloudless sky, the lilac was in bloom (its heady smell had pervaded the hospital room where Sam had died), the marking was done, the boys would be home, the housekeeper preparing supper. He turned on to Kinburn Avenue. From nearly half a block away, he heard through his open window a loud, wailing cry. In that slumbrous street, it was an alarming sound. It was the sobbing, keening cry of a child for whom there is no solace, no consolation, no ease for heartache. It was Aiden crying, sitting on the porch steps, Kip his companion in sorrow, as in all their shared life together, playing with a stone beside him, powerless to intervene, while his younger brother’s anguish deafened the afternoon.
‘Aiden! Whatever is the matter?’ Paul rushed to his side. Kip pointed to the house across the street in mute explanation. Aiden’s sobbing continued unabated. Paul could see nothing amiss. ‘Where? What is wrong?’
Kip sighed. ‘He shot an arrow at the neighbour’s house. It made a hole in the shutter.’
Paul looked. The Latvian across the street, a pale unassuming bachelor with a receding hairline, had recently installed decorative plastic shutters on his ground-floor windows.
One of these had a small hole in it near the centre. Paul almost laughed from relief.
‘Is that really all he’s crying about?’
‘I think so.’
‘Did you retrieve the arrow?’ Kip nodded.
‘Aiden, dear, it’s only a plastic shutter. I can soon replace it for him. Is that all you’re sad about?’
The keening gave way to long, shuddering sobs. Aiden nodded, then shook his head. He was beyond speech. Paul held him to himself as a mother would, knowing it was his mother’s loss his son was grieving. His shirt was soon damp with tears. The housekeeper pulled a face, and shrugged in incomprehension. Fat lot of good you are, thought Paul, and you a mother of two boys yourself…
