Say No More by Gemini Sasson Page A

every day and pretend there was nothing wrong.
    More than that, though, she didn’t want to leave Hunter with Estelle, who’d been responsible for watching him while Lise went off to work since he was six weeks old. In a single day, years’ worth of trust had been destroyed. Snapped like a fishing line yanked into the deep by a whale. That’s what Lise said, anyway.
    Every day she sat watching Hunter, never letting him get more than ten feet from her before she launched into a state of panic. If he wandered into the next room, she darted in after him to see what he was doing. When he went to bed at night, she checked on him half a dozen times before going off to her own bed, where she lay awake for hours.
    If Lise showed her emotions to an extreme, Hunter kept them zipped up inside him. She asked him a hundred questions every day, but all he did was shrug or shake his head. Most of the time, he just sat in front of the TV or lay on the floor with a book about animals propped open in front of him.
    “Platypus.” Lise pointed to the picture. “Can you say platypus, Hunter?”
    He traced his finger around the outline of the animal. Remained silent.
    Lise tapped on the page. “‘P’, platypus starts with a ‘p’. Do you want to practice your letters today?”
    Nothing.
    “Would you rather go to the park? We can even invite your friend Max along. If we bundle up, it’s not too bad outside. Should get even warmer if we go after lunch.” She squatted beside him and tilted his chin up with her hand, but he wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Hunter, I know you can hear me. I know you’re very sad about Daddy. I am, too. I miss him every day. And I wish there was something I could do to bring him back. But I ... I can’t.”
    Her words trailed away, overlain with that same vapor of sorrow that seemed to pervade everything about her these days. It had been two months and still not a day went by that she didn’t fall apart. Sometimes she’d lie in bed for hours after putting Hunter down and cry herself to sleep. Other times she’d be sitting there watching TV and all of a sudden a reminder of him would leap out at her from the flickering screen: Adam Levine in a crisp white T-shirt, a commercial for Ram trucks, a movie about a rancher, a Keith Urban song ...
    Cam was everywhere. And yet ... he was nowhere.
    Hunter punched up the volume button on the remote control to drown out any further interruption from his mom. It was a program about prairie dogs, but they didn’t look much like dogs to me. Then he rolled onto his side and pulled himself into a ball. Snagging the corner of the blanket next to him, he covered his head with it. I sniffed at the lump where his head was. When he was very small, he used to play ‘turtle’. I’d nudge him and he’d poke his head out and erupt in laughter. But today he just wrapped the blanket tighter around him.
    Looking up at the ceiling, Lise said, “Oh, Cam, I don’t know how to do this without you. I’m trying. I’m really trying. But I need help.”
    She tromped into the kitchen and rattled some pans as she put them away in the cupboards. Part of the routine that she’d fallen into after Cam died was finding ways to fill up her day whenever she wasn’t hovering over Hunter. She rarely let more than a few dishes pile up on the counter before scouring them clean. Crumbs on the table were banished with a vengeance. Closets were purged, filing cabinets reorganized, and shelves dusted. More than filling up the hours, I think it was a way of refusing to acknowledge the emptiness that Cam’s absence had left in her life.
    She slammed a cupboard door and collapsed onto a kitchen chair. She let out a sigh so long and heavy it sounded like all the air was rushing out of her lungs at once. Then the tears started — tiny sniffles at first, building until they were full-blown sobs, broken only by gasps for air and muffled nose blowing.
    I nudged at Hunter until he lifted a corner of the