I was in the midst of the interview when my cell phone vibrated an emergency code in my pocket. By the time I got off camera and checked it, the emergency was over. Molly had taken Adam to a friend’s condo about fifty yards up the street from ours. She and Taryn Waller had started drinking wine and commiserating over their husbands’ unreasonable work hours, while Adam—comatose after an ice cream cone—slept in the TV room down the hall. Taryn was pouring their fourth glass of wine when Molly realized she hadn’t checked on Adam in a while. When she went to the TV room, she didn’t see him.
They found him behind the condo, at the bottom of the Wallers’ swimming pool. While Molly and Taryn were talking, our son had awakened and somehow crawled through a homemade pet entrance set in the Wallers’ back door. He wandered onto the patio, where there was no pool fence or motion alarm. The police report said it appeared that Adam had simply walked off the edge of the swimming pool into six feet of water. He never made a sound. None that Molly heard, anyway.
Our marriage did not survive his loss.
You hear all the time how the death of a child always leads to divorce. In truth, most times it doesn’t. Sometimes that kind of tragedy strengthens a marriage. I can see how it would happen, if you were married to the right person. I wasn’t. For four years I had tried to convince myself that I was, but the fissure that opened in our relationship after Adam died proved me wrong. I tried not to blame Molly. Whether I was successful in that effort or not, she believed that I blamed her, and that—combined with her own sense of guilt—had a corrosive effect on both our marriage and her mental state.
For me, the irony was nearly fatal. Twenty-one years after my brother drowned in the Mississippi River, I had to endure my son drowning in six feet of water. Worse, I—who had been blamed by my father for my brother’s death—was now in the position of persecutor. How could she have left him unattended for more than an hour? I wondered. A two-year-old! How could she not have heard him when he woke up? Surely Adam had made some sound, called out for me or his mother, as was his habit. Especially after waking in an unfamiliar room. Or finding himself alone on a dark patio. I asked myself these questions thousands of times. And then, when I could stand it no more, I asked her. Molly hit back with the obvious: if I hadn’t forced her to cancel her plans so that I could race over and appear on CNN, Adam would still be alive.
This was unquestionably true. But accepting it did nothing to alleviate our suffering. I’ll omit the awful, protracted descent into hell that followed this exchange. Suffice to say that by the time we divorced eleven months later, we were both emotionally scarred, and Molly had lost her job. I was nearly fired myself, and were it not for the benevolence of a sympathetic friend in management, I would have been out. Instead, they kept me on, and I slowly worked my way back to some semblance of normalcy, often taking risky assignments as a way of penetrating the emotional damper that grief wraps around us.
But it was the advent of the Trump circus in 2015 that not only resurrected my career, but lifted it to new heights. I became a regular on MSNBC and an occasional guest on CNN. This spurred me into a kind of mental overdrive. Using my most closely held sources in Washington and New York, I began researching Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russian oligarchs. At the same time, I started writing a book about how the Trump phenomenon had exposed the grim truth that the sins for which the South had always been excoriated—racism, tribalism, and xenophobia—were deeply embedded in the white body politic across the United States. I was halfway through my first draft when I discovered how ill my father truly was and decided to come home. The Trump-Russia story I had to leave to others. And I was less than fours hours south of Washington when I realized that all that work I had been doing—maintaining a pace that had shocked even my most intense colleagues—had but one purpose: to shield me from the pain of losing my little boy.
Nadine knows about Adam’s death. The facts, anyway, and what it did to my marriage. She understands that I’ve never fully dealt with his loss, any more than I’ve dealt with my brother’s. As regards healthy grieving, I’ve been stuck in a state of arrested anger for decades. The death of my son piled onto the death of my brother gave me a psychological burden—or perhaps a soul burden—that requires much of my fortitude to carry through each day. “My two Adams,” I sometimes call them. I’ve had countless nightmares about both tragedies, my brother’s more than my son’s, which may seem odd. But recently, it’s my little boy I see in the long watches of my restless nights.
I see him awakening confused, even scared, calling out for me or his mother, then getting to his feet and searching the darkened condo for us, his arms stretched out before him. Drawn by the light of the little plastic trapdoor, he somehow uses his ingenuity to get it open and then crawl through, after which he scrambles to his feet and wanders out to the undulating bright blue surface of the swimming pool. Perhaps Adam sees himself reflected in the water. Perhaps he leans over to see better, looks into his own eyes . . . and then tips over.
That dream is worse than the one in which I’m pursued by savage soldiers with guns and knives who want to hurt me so badly that I consider suicide rather than capture. I have lived through that situation in the real world. It pales next to the image of my son sinking through cerulean water with no comprehension of what’s happening to him. Did he surface? I’ve wondered a million times. Did he flail his little arms? Did he scream for help, sucking in chlorine? Or did he die in silence at the cold, airless bottom?
I’ve never asked an expert that question. I didn’t even google it. In the last analysis, I probably don’t really want to know. But maybe I’ll meet an expert someday. Maybe I’ll find the courage to ask. Because however hesitant I might be to face reality, I’m a human being, and that’s something we have to know sooner or later. Did our loved one suffer? And if so . . . how badly?
It took a long time for me to start seeing women after that. Eventually I did. The first couple of tries didn’t go very well. I found it difficult to be at ease with a woman once other people were removed from the equation. Then I met Eleanor Attie, a producer at one of the cable networks. Eleanor sensed that I carried some deep pain, but she never pushed me about it, and that made intimacy possible. We’d been dating for about four months when I realized I needed to return to Bienville. We kept in close touch at first, but after three weeks or so, our calls started getting further apart and our emails less frequent—weekly, almost perfunctory things. When you leave the small, hyperconnected family that is the Washington media circus, it’s like falling off the earth—at least to the people still working under the big top.
After all, it wasn’t like I was sending in weekly reports from Zabul Province in Afghanistan. I was in Mississippi, which from Washington looks like a fourth-world country. The newspaper I’d taken over focused mostly on local matters, except for the occasional blistering screed against the depredations of Trump and his cronies, authored by my father. But it’s been two months since Dad printed one of those. Mortality is having its way with him. His diminished editorial output has cut into the profits of our local glazier, who was making good money replacing the plate-glass windows on the ground floor of our downtown office. Before Dad slowed his pace, not even security cameras stopped the angry Trump supporter who simply wore a mask as he marched up to the windows with brick in hand to make his feelings known.