After writing about Goodnight Moon last month, the book would not let me go. I kept turning it over, kept seeing things I had walked past the first time. There are objects in that great green room I did not unpack. They have been waiting.
The telephone in the book just sits there. Nobody calls on it. Nobody picks it up. It is listed and left.
For me, the telephone is everything.
It is the coroner telling me to call. It is dialing Will, then an elder, then another elder. No one answered. (**See note below) It is asking the coroner about Caleb’s phone and being told it was not found. My son went nowhere without his phone. On a cruise with no cell service, he still had it. When the coroner said they had not found it, I grabbed onto that like a rope. Maybe this was not him. Maybe they had it wrong.
They did not have it wrong.
Years later, I stumbled into an old Hangouts conversation while helping Madi send a link. Caleb’s name sat at the top of the message list. I clicked it and the screen read:
Caleb Lloyd
Away
He is as away as it gets.
Teddy, my six-year-old nephew, saw Caleb on my phone background at Thanksgiving. He had never met my son. “Who is that? Is he an adult? I have never seen him.” I told him Caleb died. Teddy sat with it the way most adults will not. He did not flinch. He did not calculate the cost of caring. He is six and already does more than most.
Caleb once tweeted about losing his phone somewhere in his school. A throwaway joke from a kid who had no idea his phone would one day be evidence.
Now the telephone is my anxiety. I text Donna and get no reply for ten minutes and I fear she is dead. I know the doorbell is about to ring with officers on the other side. It is never that. It is always that in my head.
The telephone in the great green room is not ringing. Mine is not ringing either. It never will.
Goodnight telephone.
The book has bears sitting in chairs. Our house had a fluffy white bear I gave Donna shortly after we were married. Caleb loved that thing. When he was little, he would play with it so gently, so carefully, because he knew it was Mom’s and he did not want her to worry. He could tear through the house like a storm, but with that bear he was soft.
Goodnight bear.
The book has a brush. Caleb would dance around the house in his underwear singing the VeggieTales song “Where Is My Hairbrush.” I would jump in on the verse about having no hair for a hairbrush, and he would lose it. I still had a little hair then. He did not care. The joke was too good. He laughed every single time.
Goodnight brush.
In the book, mittens are laid out neatly on a drying rack. In our house, mittens were something Caleb came running in looking for because it was snowing and snow in Georgia is rare and you do not waste a single minute of it. He would tear through drawers trying to find a pair, any pair, and be out the door before I could tell him to zip his coat.
Goodnight mittens.
The book has a clock on the wall. In “Sandman,” I wrote about hearing the clock tick on Christmas Day. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ten seconds gone. Do that and nothing else, 360 times an hour, for a few hours. That is Christmas now. The empty chair and the clock keeping time in a room where time no longer matters.
Goodnight clock.
The book ends with the stars, and for most people, that is a gentle, sleepy image. For me, the stars were never abstract.
Caleb and I observed every major sky event together from 2002 on. Eclipses, transits, conjunctions. He told me at seven years old he was going to work for NASA. At eighteen, he did, at Armstrong Flight Research Center. Our friend Barbie got his name placed on the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, and I cannot exaggerate how happy that made him. It was the closest he thought he would get to space. At least for a while.
While at NASA, he realized the flight schedules to Mars and the Moon would not align with his life. The trips he had dreamed about since he was seven were not going to happen. He had to let that go. He said his own goodnight to the moon and the stars before I ever had to say mine.
Goodnight stars.
I keep coming back to the telephone.
Every object in that room is a thing I can hold or picture or describe. The bear is soft. The brush has bristles. The mittens have thumbs. The clock has hands. The stars have light. But the telephone is different. The telephone is not a thing. It is a connection. It is the instrument that reaches across distance to find another person.
Mine does not reach him.
I pick it up a hundred times a day and he is not on the other end. He is not texting me about a smart thing he did. He is not asking me to fix his computer. He is not telling me I have to see the Grand Canyon. His status does not say “Available.” It says “Away.” And it will say that forever.
Every object in the great green room gets a goodnight. The telephone gets one too. But the telephone is the one that hurts the most, because it is the one that was supposed to keep us connected after he left the room.
Goodnight, Caleb. I am still here. The phone is on. It is always on.
N.B – I believe no one answered, or most did not, but all returned my call
within about 15 minutes. Things just do not feel quick in such a moment.
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