The Boy Who Remembered His Own Death

A Faith Again by Christy Crutchfield

For a week, the boy had nightmares. His parents woke to him bursting, crying so hard, his hair was soaked through. He was so young, the father thought, that his sweat didn’t smell.

When the mother asked what the nightmares were about, their son said, “I died. I remember how I died.” He stared at the painting of pears on the wall. The mother poured too much milk in his cereal.

At first, they thought nothing of the word remember, just a boy searching for the proper way to express a new and terrible feeling. But instead of eating his cereal, he held the spoon in his mouth like a teething toy, and the mother asked how.

“My plane got shot.”

“Your plane?”

“I went in the water.”

The mother pushed for more, and the father pushed away from the table. He’d be late for work if he listened to any more of this. It was simple: dreams amounted to diet. The mother should decrease his cheese intake before bed. He was sure there was science to support this. He drank his coffee too fast, and the inside of his mouth pulsed the entire drive to work. 

---

But a dairy free month did nothing, and the mother eventually took the boy to see their pediatrician, who recommended a specialist in Atlanta. Now they sat in a psychologist’s office where the tables and chairs were child-sized. Winnie the Pooh and his friends paraded across the wall. The father had no idea what this was going to cost, this on top of the gas crisis.

The child psychologist said, “I’m going to show you some pictures, and you tell me the name of what you see, okay?” He did not have the kind, stooping manner of their pediatrician. He had the coiffed gray hair and sideburns of a successful man who’d never had children. His suit was tailored, the belled trousers pressed with sharp creases. His wrinkles sloped downward.

The cards were mostly simple things any three-year-old would know. Dog, train, tree, cup. The boy didn’t know bison. He didn’t know blender. But he knew wrench. He knew propeller. He knew aircraft carrier, which made the mother suck her teeth.

The child psychologist put his cards away. “And what kind of plane was it?”

“A Warhawk,” the boy said.

“And where was it?”

“The Pacific.”

“The Pacific Ocean?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, sir,” the father said, and his wife squeezed his arm. They were supposed to quietly observe from the adult-sized chairs in the corner.

“Yes, sir,” the boy said. “The Saratoga.”

The child psychologist looked over the boy’s shoulder at the mother.

“We didn’t know that,” the father said, also looking at the mother, searching her blinking for signs she’d kept something from him while he was at work. “We didn’t know that.”

The child psychologist wrote something in his notebook and asked the boy, “Who’s America’s greatest enemy?”

“The Japs.”

The child psychologist looked not at the boy’s parents, but at the mirror, and the father wondered who was watching them from the other side.

Afterward, boy raced wooden blocks along a wire track, while his parents sat at the child psychologist’s mahogany desk. “Could anyone have told your son this story?” he asked. Could this be a memory the boy claimed as his own?

The mother said their family didn’t talk about the War. Besides, they’d been stationed in Europe or had stayed home.

“And do you or members of your family believe in reincarnation?”

The father wondered why his wife didn’t answer with an immediate no, but she was probably just as surprised by the question.

“You’re not implying—”

“I only ask because these types of cases are more prevalent in communities that do. In India, for example.”

“Do you think that’s what this is?” the mother asked. “A past life?”

“We don’t,” the father said. “We’re Christian.” For some reason, he didn’t say Catholic.

The child psychologist sent them home with paperwork to enroll their son in a study. There were other children like their boy. When the mother asked if he could help ease the nightmares, he referred them back to their pediatrician, and the father wondered what kind of doctor offered no remedies.

---

That night, the mother pushed the comforter to the end of the bed and slid under their lightest sheet. She wanted to pursue the study.

“We could get some answers,” she said. But the father didn’t think these were answers they wanted, their son crazy at age three. And if not crazy, then what?

“Well, at least consider it,” she said, turning off the bedside lamp. She used to wear a lotion that smelled like flowers, but lately she’d been using one that smelled like medicine. He couldn’t get it out of his nose. 

The father didn’t sleep well that night, his own father in his head. The boy’s grandfather, a man who’d immigrated from Ireland as a child, often spoke about his second-class citizenship in the South. “We were basically Jews,” he’d say.

But the grandfather was young enough to lose his accent. Their last name was not recognizably Irish. He only had to hide his family and his faith. Still, he insisted his children go to Mass every week. He prayed over their meals and kept a Bible hidden in the drawer of his bedside table. None of this made sense to the father then, though now he supposed this assimilation was what earned them the house in the suburbs, the Plymouth, and the pension. 

After he retired, the grandfather went to Mass every day to atone for denying Christ in public. He’d made it into one club. The next was heaven. He must have known he was sick. 

At that point, the father was in college, taking philosophy and physics classes, sleeping in on Sundays. He’d started to think of religion as man’s answer to death’s question. He felt like a child outgrowing Santa Claus. He pitied his simple parents who now hung a framed print of a guardian angel above their couch, her arms outstretched to protect two little children as they crossed a rickety bridge. 

But even though logic said God couldn’t exist, the father could feel Him in his dorm room, in lecture halls, in his head listening to his doubts. And during the grandfather’s last rites, the father felt His presence thick as humidity. He watched the priest place the Eucharist on the grandfather’s dry tongue, wondering how the body of Christ could possibly dissolve. He was afraid the grandfather would choke, that Christ would be his death and salvation. But he also saw a peace smoothing the grandfather’s face, a certainty in the new life that awaited him. What awaited men who believed in nothing?

This death brought the father back to the Church, where he met his wife, who had an unshakable faith he found naive and comforting. He attended Bible study and became a Eucharistic minister. He volunteered to help with the Church’s bookkeeping. He held his wife’s hand on Sundays as she sang along to the processional unembarrassed. It was a relief to have a faith again.

In bed, the father propped his head on his forearm and tried not to think about his doubting Thomas phase in college. He listened to his wife’s wet breaths. How could she fall right to sleep? He wanted to ask her the question that had been on his mind since the child psychologist said reincarnation. Was this some kind of test? Could a study like this bulldoze everything the father had rebuilt? Because while he’d been faithful for years, he still doubted. Because he wasn’t sure he could call what he had faith. These days, he prayed that he could time it like his own father had, hold out long enough for his last rites. One last chance for Confession. One last chance to feel the presence. To get it right.

---

When the second letter arrived, the mother brought it to the dinner table. “We have to tell him something.”

“I said I would call.” The father noticed there wasn’t so much as a personal note from the child psychologist, this man who was not a therapist like they thought, but a researcher. If the father had known that from the beginning, he never would have made the appointment. He would have asked their pediatrician for some sleeping pills, and they could have gone on with their lives.

And anyway, the boy recovered easily from his dreams. He cried them out and went back to singing little songs to himself. And though the mother said he’d been arranging his planes in pyramids and Vs, though he told her about some friend named Jack who said, “Pilot’s wings are just the beginning,” though he’d added details about fumes filling his eyes before the water extinguished everything, he didn’t crash his toy planes in waking life.

When the father came home from work, the boy was watching television, cross-legged on the floor with his mouth open. And he was now sitting at the table while his mother cut up his roast and they prepared for him to push the meat around. The negotiations. At least three bites. She’d indulged him as usual, allowing a cowboy to stand guard over his plate, as long as he promised he wouldn’t play with it until he finished his dinner.

More proof there was nothing to study. This was just a boy with an overactive imagination. This game of make believe would dissipate, just like Gherkin had. One day, his new imaginary friend had to have a seat at the table, and the next, the boy was begging for little tin planes.

“But this feels different,” the mother said. He knew the names of each toy plane, names she’d never heard before like Corsair and F-23, names the father also had to admit he didn’t know. But the boy was highly verbal for his age. The mother would take him to the grocery store to discover he knew Ajax, Nescafe, rutabaga.

“You brag about it all the time,” the father said, pushing the letter aside and spooning mashed potatoes onto his plate. 

“But this is different.”

“Different how?”

She said sometimes the boy told stories as if he were the pilot. He’d never confused himself with Gherkin. He seemed, even when lost in his stories, to understand that there were two worlds you lived in at his age, and only one was yours. But this pilot’s world was blending.

“I can’t explain it,” she said.

The boy smiled at his plate like he saw something new there. The father mixed butter into his potatoes.

“Eat up, honey,” she said, and the boy pulled the napkin from his lap and tucked it into his collar. If it were up to the father, he’d make his son eat it cold for breakfast, like he’d been made to do.

The boy rubbed his hands together and grabbed his fork. “It sure feels nice to have a home cooked meal,” he said and ate his entire side of meat.

---

The father came home to a car in the driveway, to a man with gray sideburns and pressed gray slacks on their couch, one of their good cups and saucers in front of him on the coffee table. Their boy was playing on the floor, luckily with his horse figurines. The toy planes were on the table, and the father wondered who had placed them there.

Their son’s case had promise because there was an identifiable incident, names to trace, death certificates to track.

He shook the child psychologist’s hand, while his wife avoided his eyes. The child psychologist was headed to some institute in Virginia. He said their son’s case had promise because there was an identifiable incident, names to trace, death certificates to track. He said they were lucky. Most children didn’t have enough identifying details to pursue their case.

“Lucky,” the father said.

The mother smoothed her skirt and left the room.

“Yes, well.” The child psychologist gestured toward the boy and sat back down on the couch. The mother returned with another cup and the coffee pot. She poured the father a cup then hovered over the child psychologist’s, stopping because it was almost full. He took a polite sip.

The mother settled into a chair and opened her leather-bound journal, pen poised like a secretary. They all watched the boy prance his horse across the carpet in a very un-cowboy way. 

“Do you want to play with your planes?” the mother asked.

The boy shook his head.

“You like those ponies, don’t you?” the child psychologist said.

The boy turned away from him.

Their son was some sideshow freak. They were all waiting for him to perform. He wouldn’t play with his planes. He wouldn’t talk about Jack. Their son turned shy, the way he sometimes did around men. He kept his back to the child psychologist and whispered a neigh to his horse.

The father took a sip and tried to identify what the child psychologist found so distasteful in their coffee. It’s not like it was instant. But he also hoped his wife felt some shame about it because she certainly felt shameless inviting him into their home behind her husband’s back. Did she think she wouldn’t get caught? Or was she hoping to get caught? Because she and the child psychologist nodded at each other as the boy began to draw, like there was some conspiracy between them.

“I’m going to draw too, okay?” the child psychologist said, picking up a brown crayon. His suit jacket pulled taut as he leaned over the coffee table. “What should I draw? A dog? A car? A plane?”

The boy traced blue over and over until it pilled on the page.

“A car then.”

The boy’s eyes moved to the man’s paper. He sketched long lines and curves. The bumpers, the wheels. And after a while, the boy picked up a red crayon and continued.

The father’s stomach growled. What kind of trick would their son have to perform before they could eat dinner? He was sure his wife hadn’t even begun preparations. The boy was making a mockery of his parents, acting like a B movie lunatic one minute and a dumb kid the next. The child psychologist would think they made it all up to get their names in the paper. 

And what if they had? What if the conspiracy was between mother and child, cooking up this story not out of fantasy but vanity? Their faces on the covers of biographies, bestsellers he couldn’t hide from the Church. He shook the thought away, reminding himself the boy was only three.

“So, what exactly do you expect of us?” he asked the child psychologist. “To go all the way to Virginia? For our son to be brain scanned and hypnotized?”

“Hardly.” The father could imagine the child psychologist at parties, condescension over canapes. “Before you arrived, I was telling your wife that you simply need to document your son’s account of the pilot.” Not to push. Not to fish for revelations. Simply document. The Institute would do the rest. The mother scribbled in her journal so fast the father couldn’t imagine her neat cursive was legible. 

“And don’t worry. We don’t believe in hypnosis.” He said the word like he didn’t like the taste of it. “We’re a legitimate organization. Not one of those LSD quack jobs.”

When the boy finished, his mother and the child psychologist swore he had drawn his death. In the center, a Warhawk was circled in red. A spray of black bullets like gnats came from another plane, complete with crosses on the wings and tail. Red fire, they said, blue ocean.

The father didn’t think it was so clear. A red circle with a green X in the middle, like he’d tried to scratch out a mistake. A child’s abstraction, like when he drew pictures of the family, circles with sprouting legs and arms, indistinguishable from the sun above them. They were seeing what they were seeking. Like people who claimed to see the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. He could forgive his wife this impulse, or at least try. He expected better from the child psychologist, who said he’d be taking these “findings” to Virginia. He said they might have enough information to “identify the life.”

When he left, the mother gathered the half full cup, the untouched sugar and creamer.

“He just showed up,” she said before the father could say anything. “What was I supposed to do?”

“Well, you seemed awfully enthusiastic to host him.” And now, he’d have to eat a cold sandwich for dinner like a bachelor.

“I don’t like that man,” their son said, now flying a toy plane. The father wondered if three-year-olds were capable of spite. Maybe the boy would end up with some sense after all.

The mother pushed the kitchen door open with her hip, the china jangling on the tray. “Well, he never heard back from us.” The door swung open and closed several times in her wake, and the smell of casserole wafted into the living room.

---

At Mass, Father Mandracina sermonized that heaven and hell were the same place. After you died, there was only you and God for all eternity. And if you truly loved God, what ecstasy that would be. If you didn’t, well.

 The father thought, what about my parents? And if heaven and hell were the same place, what did that mean about purgatory? Their pastor was making up rules—he knew this was nowhere in the Bible.

His wife just nodded along. She lived easily in contradiction, God-works-in-mysterious-ways as a coverall. In her mind, God and some many-armed deity could exist side by side, spitting back souls and planting them in little children’s bodies. His wife was less interested in the rules and more in the feeling. She chose the patron saint of alcoholics as her Confirmation name because Monica sounded pretty. She said she knew for certain that God existed when a hummingbird hovered in front of her face on a camping trip. It made eye contact, and she felt like it knew her name. She didn’t think this hummingbird was God but a sign, a messenger. The father had never received a sign. There was only that presence, that feeling of being watched from a corner of the ceiling. He tried not to think about how he would feel alone with this presence. It would be different, he told himself, when it was actually God and not his imagination.

Lately, it wasn’t the boy but his wife who was testing him. The house was quiet. She wasn’t ironing or sweeping with her old Beach Boys records playing. She was studying, chin in hand at the kitchen table as their boy ate breakfast. Just like when he was a baby, and she’d stare at him for hours proclaiming he was a perfect replica of a human, his tiny toes the dollhouse version.

Just yesterday, when he came downstairs, he found her holding a book open like a grade school teacher, pointing to the pictures. But instead of a story of little lost puppy, she was pointing to fighter jets. “Like this?” she said. “Or this?” And the boy twisted his mouth side to side. The plastic cover crinkled along the open spine. 

The house was suddenly filled with history books. His wife was now an expert in the library loan system and the two-front war. She’d been in Junior College when they met, hoping to be a librarian or history teacher. But the draft was looming, and they married early in the relationship. It turned out the father had flat feet, but by then he was working, making enough for both of them. And she’d dreamed of being a mother longer than she’d dreamed of librarianship. 

At the kitchen table, the boy finally pointed to one of the photos, and his mother wrote it down in her journal. 

But things were getting better. The boy’s dreams had ebbed. The father couldn’t recall the last time he’d woken screaming. His vocabulary was changing too, both growing and shrinking depending on the subject. He didn’t know Iwo Jima, but he did know ponderosa. He was more interested in his fourth birthday party than in mastering the defensive split. The mother had purchased the invitations, bordered by a lasso with a sheriff’s star on top, but they were still sitting unaddressed on the coffee table.

They decided they would broach the delicate topic of God after the party. Then he would understand why he went to the nursery and ate small donuts while his parents went to Mass. The boy would be four in a month, and before they knew it, he would be seven and then eight. Still, his First Communion seemed unimaginable. And the father worried the dreams would mushroom into a fatal skepticism later in life, worse than his own. Would he run away to a commune? Would long-haired hippies come banging down their door looking for proof of reincarnation? The father was afraid it was already too late to set the boy on the right path.

He tried to return to the liturgy, the congregation singing “They Will Know We Are Christians,” as the offertory basket made its way down the aisles. He reminded himself that the hippie movement was waning, just like the boy’s dreams.

But even before the pilot, the boy felt like a test. There was a nettling dreaminess about him that said he would grow up to be difficult, lazy and weak. It wasn’t so much the boy now, as much as the threat of what he would become. When the boy started school, he would need more discipline. If he was ever going to make it in this world, the father would have to help him develop a callous to protect and hide the soft body that, hopefully, God could forgive. He put an extra $5 in the offertory basket, wondering if this pilot was what he’d been sensing all along.

His wife sang without looking at the hymnal, glossing over the words she didn’t know with open vowels. She gave his hand a squeeze, which told him he needed to release his shoulders. She was a good wife, a good mother. He told himself to remember this tonight when her easy breathing kept him awake.

---

Even though it was winter and Tuesday, the mother filled their glasses with Chablis. She said it paired with the chicken and dumplings, his own mother’s recipe. The boy tried to make his cowboy ride his disproportionate pony, the cowboy’s stiff legs touching the table. The mother lit candles.

“Well?” the father said.

 “I found it.”

“Found what?”

“The Saratoga.”

She was so excited, she couldn’t hide her teeth.

“It was a real World War II aircraft carrier. And Maggie at the library said it might be hard to find personnel rosters, but they could be in the National Archives. And there’s an entire book about The Saratoga and all its battles. It should be in on Monday.”

The father chewed slowly. The last time his wife made this meal, she’d told him she was pregnant.

“Isn’t that incredible?” she said.

“If you think so.”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Honey, I don’t know what you think this will accomplish.”

The child psychologist wouldn’t disclose whether he believed in reincarnation. It seemed a strange impulse for a man of science. Shouldn’t scientists believe in nothing? That was more logical than some cycle of lives. Just gases and chance. Just you and then the worms and what the father imagined as a never-ending darkness. Though, even darkness was a kind of existence.

His stomach burned, making it hard to drink the wine, to drink the morning coffee he needed more of lately. How long would this test last? He was getting tired of trying. 

“Well, I do,” his wife said cutting her chicken smaller and smaller. “I think it’s incredible.”

Then the clang. The boy had dropped his horse into the roux, a beige splatter on his shirt. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said covering his eyes. 

The father was already standing. He took the figurines off the table and put them on the high shelf next to his wife’s cookbooks.

“At least wipe them off,” she said before his eyes quieted her.

“This is dinner time,” he said. “Not play time.”

“Why are you always mad at me?” the boy said.

“Listen and I won’t be.”

The father placed his napkin back in his lap and prepared to send the boy to bed without dinner. But the boy blinked at him, cocking his head like a puppy learning the world. He squinted before saying, “You know, you remind me of him.”

When the boy spoke as the pilot, he lowered his voice. Still a child’s voice, but older. An actor embodying a role.

“Who?” the mother said.

“My old man.” He sat with his legs wider apart, a bravado in the way he leaned back against the arm of the chair. An adult in a booster seat, challenging the other man in the room. “Hope you’re not as wicked with the belt.”

Both parents let it sit with them at the table. They did not use the belt. They agreed the hand made a point, no need to leave a mark. Though, as a child, the father had learned quickly from the belt.

His wife said, “Do I remind you of your mother?” Their son looked her up and down with a smile that said, “not at all.” 

But then, his blinking sped. He softened, his face and body his own. He jumped off his booster and hugged his mother so hard, her chair tipped back. 

He didn’t burst like he did after the nightmares. It was like he was trying to speak but kept running out of breath, a wet growl then gasp. He inhaled his cries and choked on them. His mother stroked his hair, her cheek on his forehead. “Shh,” she said, and he only cried harder.

The father was reminded of that head-spinning girl in The Exorcist, the film they dared to release that dark Christmas during the energy crisis when good citizens across America left their string lights in the attic. A year ago, he would have dismissed exorcisms as superstition.

His wife took the boy by his shoulders. “You’re here now,” she said. “You’re here.”

What was that supposed to mean? But it worked. The boy eased, his little chest rising, his breath catching in hiccups. 

“See?” She smiled, a string of saliva connecting her lips. Both she and the boy were shaking. “You’re here.”

The father said nothing. He followed them upstairs as she readied the boy for bed. He didn’t often see the boy undressed, and when he did, he was always surprised by his fragile body, visible ribs, little blue veins snaking up the arms. Even after his wife went downstairs, he watched the boy sleep, like a gazelle he’d seen on a nature program, run ragged escaping a lion. He wished they’d had a girl. His wife would know how to raise a girl properly.

He wished they’d had a girl. His wife would know how to raise a girl properly.

He found her in a living room chair, a glass of wine in one hand and her forehead in the other. Her eyes were closed, and he could hear the breath whistle in her nose.

 “We’re done with this,” he said, and she opened her eyes. “You’re making this happen.”

“Me?”

“Your shrink even said it. Don’t push. All you’ve been doing is pushing.”

“But we’re getting close.”

“We?”

She shook her head. 

He pointed to the ceiling, their son asleep above them. “Is this what you want?” 

She’d complained she was getting older, and this was the first time he saw it in the lines around her set mouth. He walked with hard footsteps he wanted her to hear, china shaking in the cabinet, as he went upstairs. She’d finished the wine by the time he came back down with the cookie tin full of toy planes. 

He made her repeat after him. She’d call the Institute and say they would not participate in the study. She’d ask the child psychologist to leave their son alone and if he didn’t, they would sue. She said this all with her thumbs hidden in her palms. She used to be a nail biter but kicked the habit for their wedding. He handed her the tin and watched as she emptied it in the kitchen trash.

---

The dreams stopped completely. The boy knew plane, but not aircraft carrier, not The Pacific. His parents didn’t ask if he knew crash. And after he’d blown out his candles in his cowboy hat, the memory of the pilot was extinguished too. And after the party, his parents sat him down and explained God.  Though his wife was better at this kind of thing, it was important that the father take the lead. He felt the presence in the back of his head as he told the boy that God created the heavens and the earth, that God created him and loved him and only wanted him to be faithful. And if he was, good things would come in the end. The boy paid more attention to the hem of his shorts, but this was a seed. The father would tend it, monitor its slow growth. 

On Palm Sunday, already too hot, they stood together in the church parking lot waiting for Father Mandracina to precess through the crowd. To keep the boy behaved, the mother taught him how to fold his palm frond into a cross. The priest passed by, dipping the aspergillum into the holy water and launching it at the parishioners, but the boy did not look up. He picked at the fibrous threads, which pulled away like loose strings on a sweater. The mother knew the father wanted to grab the boy’s wrist, to tell him that the fronds were not playthings. They were blessed and sacred. But he didn’t. He was trying. He watched the boy pull string after string, leaving them in a pile at his feet.

---

Something in the soil that summer turned the hydrangeas pink. But the white stayed at the edges of the flowers, so it looked like a mistake, petals withering instead of blushing. The father searched the closet for his yard clothes, planning to bury pennies to change the flowers back. 

In the far back of the closet, he noticed a moving box that hadn’t been there before, a scarf and two pairs of shoes stacked on top as if to hide it. He removed the clutter and opened the cardboard flaps, but he already knew. It was full of mimeographs and yellow legal pads, his wife’s usually neat handwriting slanted and smeared. She’d starred and circled paragraphs. There were three exclamation points next to the name William O’Connor. She’d found a photo, which was copied to a hazy poor quality. Still, the father could see the corn-fed smile, the big cheeks, the hat cocked just right.

And on letterhead from the Institute, a message from the child psychologist, dated only a month prior. He reported that the details didn’t add up. The Saratoga, yes. William O’Connor, potentially. His body was never recovered. A John, nicknamed Jack, was also on the roster. But no one was flying Corsairs then. But, while they were flying Warhawks, O’Connor was not declared missing at Iwo Jima. So, they could not say this was a match. 

In another letter, he wrote that, no, he didn’t believe she or her son were lying. Children were suggestible and imaginative sometimes. Still, he assured her the findings were logged at the Institute and, yes, he would honor her request to remain anonymous. Further study would not be pursued, but this was where many cases ended. She should be grateful they were able to get this far.

A violence crawled up the father’s body. This betrayal felt worse than adultery. He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. He balled the letter in his fist, stabbing a corner into his palm.

“What’s wrong?” His wife was standing behind him. He’d forgotten he called her. “You’re burning up.”

She placed a cool hand on his forehead, and he leaned into it. He didn’t know what he felt. This oblivious, soothing comfort. This hailstorm inside him. Who did he marry?

“Honey,” she said. He pushed into her palm, but he’d taken the coolness from it. He loved her and he wanted to hurt her and he was scared. So he just pointed. She opened her mouth to speak and closed it.

“Throw it away,” he said.

He thrust the box into her arms. He knew it was heavy for her. The letter was still balled in his fist, and he brought it outside and threw it into the burn pile.

---

That night, he turned the pillow over to find the cool spot. O’Connor wouldn’t leave him, his corn-fed smile clearer in the father’s mind. He was so young. Was he digested by fish or entombed in charred metal? How long did it take for salt to wear away bone?

He should have been relieved by the child psychologist’s cold response. Proof this was nothing, his wife trying to force a miracle. There were no other lives. Or visitations from ghosts. Just a boy who couldn’t parse fantasy from reality.

But logic couldn’t satisfy the father tonight. He’d been there. He’d witnessed the boy transform. And now that he’d seen the picture of O’Connor, he knew he’d seen him before, somewhere behind the boy’s eyes. They were finally on a stable path—didn’t his wife see what she had done?  

His wife, who was not asleep like he thought, rolled over and put her head on his chest.

“What does it all mean?” he said.

“I don’t know.” But think of how special their son was, she said. He’d drawn them to a man forgotten by history. The father pushed. What did that mean about other lives? About the afterlife? About their son?

The mother didn’t say what she actually thought, that their son was a guide. Father Mandracina often used the word mystery in his homilies, which brought a roller coaster feeling to her chest. Their son was offering them a glimpse at something beyond them, and the best thing to do was pay attention. But she knew this would only frighten her husband. And she wanted to ask for husband’s sympathy, her months of research ignored because the men at the Institute could only see her as a meddling mother. Instead, she yawned and said, “Maybe he just needed remembering,” and they both tried to sleep.

Their son will never know that he could have been a poster child for reincarnation, featured on paranormal TV alongside other small children who remembered the Holocaust and slavery and someone else’s trauma. His mother agreed, a thumbnail in her mouth, never to tell him.

---

In the decades to come, the boy will rarely have nightmares. In fact, his father will be concerned that he sleeps too much, and most of their fights in his teenage years will be about his laziness. As an adult, the boy will waste his weekends lying in bed, drinking coffee in his pajamas well into the afternoon. He will not spend Sundays at church unless he’s home for the holidays.

The boy will not remember his first Palm Sunday or the day his parents explained God, but he will remember how often his mother told him that his father was trying, that the world was heavier for his father. Whenever the boy disobeys, it won’t be the punishment that sticks, but the way his father looks into him, like he’s searching for some devil there. In high school, when he and his scouting friends are caught passing around a jug of Communion wine behind the rectory, the boy will say, “It’s not like it was consecrated,” and watch the fear take over his father’s body, his shoulders reaching toward his ears as he holds his breath.  And the boy will feel this devil too, which drove him to sabotage his scouting career, the only pursuit that had made his father proud.

When the adult son hears a story on morning radio about the revival of reincarnation cases by quantum physicists, he will not connect it to himself. The physicist will describe these cases not as proof of the soul but as proof that consciousness continues after death. The son will barely listen, still in his pajamas, flipping a pancake for his husband, who asks, “Do you think the kids forget because they start to develop their own memories?”

He will sip his coffee and shrug.

The boy and his husband will live in a Northeastern town by the river, far enough from his parents and their disappointment. And when heavy rains flood the river and a man in a canoe ferries them away from their window, the son will not think about his watery death in another life. He will think about climate change and try not to blame the whole thing on people like his father.

And the son will not understand what he finds in his parents’ attic, cleaning out the house after his mother’s death and years after his father’s: a cardboard box full of legal pads and photocopies, messy handwriting he doesn’t recognize, all about some missing pilot, maybe a distant relative. The son will feel guilty throwing it away, along with the leather-bound journal he finds in his mother’s underwear drawer, which he won’t read, too afraid it contains something she wouldn’t want him to know.