So you’re not worried about him,” I said. “Not really . . . The only thing that does bother me is his missing an exam. Eric always took care of business, academically speaking. . . . Maybe he just decided to hike.
Hike?”
“Back when he was living at home and stayed out all night, he’d sometimes come home with mud on his shoes, looking pretty dusty. At least one time I’m sure he was out camping. This was maybe a year ago, when he was home taking care of Mom. Our rooms are next to each other, and when he came in I woke up, went to see what was going on. He was folding up this nylon tent, had this backpack, bag of potato chips and candy, pep-peroni sticks, whatever. I said, ‘What’s all this, some kind of loner-loser picnic?’ He got angry and kicked me out of his room. So maybe that’s what he did last night—went out hiking. There are lots of nice places around Palo Alto. Maybe he just wanted to get away from the city lights so he could look up at the stars. He used to love astronomy, had his own telescope, all these expensive filters, the works.”
I heard her breath catch.
“What is it, Stacy?”
“I was just thinking… We had a dog, this yellow mutt named Helen that we got from the pound. Eric would take her with him on long walks, then she got old and lost the use of her legs and he built her a little wagon thingie and pulled her around—pretty funny-looking, but he took it seriously. She died—a year before Mom. Eric stayed out all night with her. That’s got to be what happened. When I asked him about it, he said he did his best thinking late at night, up in the mountains. So that’s probably it, he’s a little stressed, decided to try that. As far as the test, he probably figured he could talk his professor into a makeup—Eric can talk his way into anything.”
“Why’s he stressed?”
“I don’t know.” Long silence. “Okay, to be honest, Eric’s having a real hard time. With Mom. He had a terrible time with it right from the beginning. Took it much worse than I did. Bet that’s not what my father told you, though. Right?”
My son deals with his anger by organizing…. I think it’s a great way of handling stress. . . . Get in touch with how you feel, then move on.
“We didn’t discuss Eric in detail,” I said.
“But I know,” she said. “Dad thinks I’m the screwed-up one. Because I get low, while Eric does a great job of looking okay on the surface—keeping up his grades, staying achievement-oriented, saying the right things to my father. But I can see through that. He’s the one who took it really hard. By the time my mother died, I’d already done my years of crying, but Eric kept trying to pretend nothing was wrong. Saying she’d get better. Sitting with Mom, playing cards with her. Acting happy, like nothing was any big deal. Like she just had a cold. I don’t think he ever dealt with it. Maybe hearing about Dr. Mate brought the memories back.”
“Did Eric talk about Mate?”
“No. We haven’t talked at all, not for weeks. Sometimes he e-mails me, but I haven’t heard from him in a while…. One time—toward the end of my mother’s … a few days before she died, Eric came into my room and found me crying, asked what was the matter. I said I was sad about Mom and he just lost it, started screaming that I was stupid, a wimp and a loser, that falling apart would accomplish nothing, I shouldn’t be so selfish, thinking about my own feelings—wallowing in my feelings was the phrase he used. It was Mom’s feelings I should be concentrating on. We all needed to be positive. To never give up.”
“He was tough on you,” I said.
“No big deal. He yells at me all the time, that’s his
style. Basically, he’s this big huge brain machine with the emotions of a little kid. So maybe he’s having some sort of delayed reaction, doing what he used to do when he got uptight. Do you think I should be worried about him?”