Fire Engine Red

 
Hush, little baby, don't say a word,
Mama's going to buy you a mockingbird.
And if that mockingbird don't sing,
Mama's going to buy you a diamond ring.

 
We took Zell to Deling City for his tenth birthday. There was a large model of a fire engine displayed prominently in one of the windows on the long, glittering shopping arcade – blazing metal-red, beautifully painted, complete with miniature firemen sitting in the cab. Zell was a feisty ten-year-old with an active imagination and a burning love for anything on wheels, and it was love at first sight. I watched him with his button nose pressed up to the window, his breath fogging up the glass as he stared and stared, and then peeked around at us and declared, "Mom, I want it!"

It was a bitter goodbye that the two of them head – Zell and the toy fire engine. His father had saved for months for that train ticket to Deling City, and just being able to walk along those magnificent cobblestoned streets under the big arcade was experience enough. The fire engine was out of the question, Dad said. Too expensive. Not worth it. Didn't Zell appreciate the vacation that he'd already been given as a present?

Zell didn't throw a tantrum, but he was quiet for the rest of the day, turning accusing eyes on us as if we'd ruined some kind of grand dream. The day after we arrived back in Balamb, Dad came home from work with a hastily wrapped package.

"Open it, Zell," he said with suppressed excitement. "It's yours."

Under the shoddy wrapping paper was a box with a picture of a fire engine, nowhere near as flashy as the one we'd left behind in Deling City. But Zell picked up the box with wide eyes as Dad knelt beside him with one hand on his shoulder.

"It's a model," he said. "I'll help you put it together. You'll love it."

They'd gotten halfway through the complicated project, with hundreds of tiny metal pieces and slats that apparently needed to be glued and painted one by one, when there was an accident at work one day, and Dad didn't come home. The model sat unfinished on our kitchen table for the next half year, during which Zell took his entrance examinations for Balamb Garden, was accepted, and moved away to the dorms. The house was quiet now. I took the parts of the model and carried them upstairs to his old room, where he'd come back to stay sometimes on weekends if he had extra saved leave.

He never mentioned it, but one day I went upstairs to clean and found that the model had been finished, painted and sitting grandly on one corner of his desk, as if it had always been there.

"You finally got around to finishing that model?" I asked him casually the next time he was home.

"Aw, Mom," Zell said, gangly and awkward at fourteen, with his blond hair grown out long in the front to hide forehead pimples. "I wish you wouldn't go barging around in my room when I'm not there."

The next time he came home, I did not mention that I had been upstairs to clean again and found the model gone. Perhaps he'd taken it to school with him, or perhaps he'd deemed it too childish and thrown it away, or maybe he'd given it to somebody. I would think about it sometimes when I took down the pictures from the walls to dust – family pictures in large, wooden frames that seemed to embarrass Zell when he came by and brought friends to visit. On some occasions, I'd bring out the family scrapbooks and watch him fidget.

"Mom," he wondered at sixteen, after the friends had gone back to Garden and he was staying the night, "how come you don't have any baby pictures of me?"

A thousand answers flashed through my mind, and a memory of the lady at Zell's entrance exams who had given me a brief overview of what to expect physically and mentally should my son become a SeeD. I said calmly, "I don't know. We must have lost that album at some point when we moved."

A brief look of confusion passed over his face, and he said, "But we've always lived in this house, haven't we? You, and me, and...and Dad."

"The three of us," I said softly, as he nodded uncertainly, and then I said, "I miss Dad."

The confusion flitted across his face and then was gone, replaced by the son I knew, and he said, "Yeah. I miss him too."

After he'd gone back to school, I went into my bedroom and dug under the piles of winter clothing packed away in neat stacks, mementoes of past trips and my husband's work clothes, which were still folded in the bottom dresser drawer. When I found the slim book, I went to the kitchen and sat for a while with it in my lap, as if my fingers were afraid to open it, and then turned the cover.

It was only two pages. One, a makeshift certificate of adoption, somewhat faded but uncreased and smooth. The other, child Zell holding a stuffed bear, smiling crookedly for the camera.

The phone rang. I picked it up. "Mom!" Zell's voice crackled excitedly over the line. "I'm up for my graduation exam soon. You think you'll wanna come to the party after I pass?"

There was no hesitation in his confidence, no if I pass, in the event that I pass. I looked down at the photograph of the earliest memory I had of my son, trying to meld that child's smiling face to the sound of the deep voice over the telephone line, and wondering if time passed so quickly for all mothers, realizing that my son had slipped away from me without me knowing.

"Sure thing," I told him. "I'll be there."

I could hear the infectious grin in his voice. "Thanks Mom. You're the best."

"Your birthday's coming up," I reminded him. "It'll be before the exam. Do you have some leave carrying over from last month?"

He sounded curious. "Yeah. What's up?"

"We haven't done anything in a while for your birthday," I said. "How about taking a trip to the city?"

21 April 2007