The Push

At Elijah’s funeral, the priest spoke about how God has a plan for each of us, that Elijah’s soul was not meant to grow old. I could not reconcile this with what I feared had really happened at the park after school the week before.

I think I saw something happen right before that poor boy fell off the top of the slide.

I was so tired—Violet was having trouble sleeping again, wanting more water, wanting the light on. It had been weeks since I’d slept through the night. I might not have been thinking straight.

Ten seconds, I would estimate. That’s how long she watched Elijah run from one side of the big play structure to the other, where Violet stood at the top of the highest slide. She kept her hands behind her back, her eyes on the boy. He bounded toward her along the wobbly bridge, openmouthed, squealing, the fresh fall air blowing back his long hair.

The thud had a sharpness to it when he hit the ground. Thuck. More like that.

She had looked down at me without any remorse in her eyes when she saw, on the gravel below her, that his crumpled body did not move in his striped shirt and drawstring jeans. She was expressionless when we heard his nanny scream for someone to help, the woman’s shrill panic enough to ring my ears. She was unflinching when the ambulance came to take him away on a tiny person’s stretcher, as a crowd of mothers and nannies stood and watched in horror, their children’s scared little faces buried safely in their necks.

I stood, staring at the top of the slide, replaying what had just happened.

In the moments before he ran toward her, Violet had looked over the steep slide platform, as though she were a professional diver, visualizing her splashless entry into the water. Be careful, please! I’d shouted. It’s too high up there! It’s dangerous! The panic of a mother. If I’m honest, my mind went there: Danger. Death. But hers. A mother’s mind is always there. She stepped back and leaned against a wooden post of the play structure. I hadn’t known why she stood there waiting.

I saw her leg lift. At just the right moment.

I think his head hit the ground first.

In the echo of sirens, Violet asked in a quiet voice if we could go for a treat. Her eyebrows lifted in anticipation of my reaction. Was this a test? What had I seen? What would I do to her? The fact that she might have tripped him was so absurd, so unthinkable, that it almost instantly disappeared. No, no, it didn’t happen. I looked up at the gray sky and said aloud, “That did not happen.” Blythe, that was not what you saw.

“Mom? Can we go for a treat?”

I shook my head and put my trembling hands into my coat pockets and told her to walk.

Follow me. Now. NOW.

We walked the seven blocks to our apartment in silence.

I left her in front of the television, and I sat on the toilet for the next hour, unable to move, visualizing what I might have seen. This wasn’t a fistful of someone’s hair or taunting in the schoolyard. That platform must have been twelve feet high. I took off the V necklace you gave me. My neck felt red. Hot.

Strange things flooded my mind, things like tiny pink handcuffs, and child social workers, and reporters in trench coats knocking at our door, and the paperwork involved in transferring schools, and the outrageous cost of divorce, and that poor child’s electronic wheelchair. I stared at the mold in the grout of our shower tiles and I replayed her reaction over and over. And then I decided: No. She didn’t trip that child. She wasn’t close enough to him. No, I was not the mother of someone who could do something like that.

I was so very tired.

I made her a peanut butter sandwich. She touched my arm when I put the plate on the coffee table and her fingers on my skin made me flinch. I stared at her hands and they looked so small, so innocent, the knuckles still dimpled with baby fat.

No. No, she had not done anything wrong.

I told you that night about the horrible accident that had happened to Elijah.

The accident, I called it.

Violet did a puzzle at the other end of the kitchen. She looked up at me when my phone buzzed on the counter. I stared at her while I answered. It was one of the other mothers from the playground telling me Elijah had died at the hospital.

“Dead. My God. He’s dead.” I felt winded. You glared at me for such candor, such poor maternal judgment for having said that out loud, and you went to Violet’s side to comfort her. But she was fine. She shrugged. She asked if you could find the corner piece she was looking for.

She just needs some time to process.

Of course.

Maybe you should have thought that through, Blythe. Did she need to hear he was dead? Bad enough she was there when he fell.

And then not until much later that night when we got into bed, You doing okay? Come here. That must have been terrible to see. I’m so sorry, Blythe. You pulled me close and fell asleep with your leg wrapped around mine. I stared at the ceiling in the dark, waiting for Violet to wake up again.

The next day I left a frozen quiche and expensive protein smoothies in a cooler outside the family’s apartment door, with a note that said we were thinking of them. I sent flowers to the funeral home, big white lilies.

All our love, The Connors.

The police looked into the incident briefly, a matter of routine. They questioned me. I told them what I told you: we did not see anything. Violet had already come down the slide when I heard the sound of his body hitting the ground when he fell. That the wood planks are too worn and slippery. That I’d always thought it was a dangerous playground. That I was thinking of his poor mother.