Sometimes when we’re sitting on the couch, S looks up at this painting of a mountain. It couldn’t be more of a cliché-classic landscape. A single boxy mountain right in the middle, trees you can’t see the top of in the foreground on the left, and full trees in the middle-ground on the right. Water between the trees leading up to where it puddles before a forest at the foot of the mountain. It looks like light is shining in on the mountain from the side. And kind of behind it too.
Our son is very interested in this painting. Sometimes there is awe on his face, sometimes there is a frown from his effort, straining to see. We wonder what the mountain means to him. Before he was born he lived in his mother in the Appalachian Mountains and he’d been to the Rocky Mountains and the White Mountains. And when he’s looking at it we wonder out loud if there’s something he can recognize there. He looks at it with such longing. But I’ve been told he can only see so far, and in black and white, and everything’s just blobs and shapes and light splotches.
Maybe it’s better the way he sees it.
S was born this winter and he’s a joy. He has an older brother, born a year and a few months before him. He’s a joy too. It’s different, though. S’s older brother Henry was born and died three days later.
I keep thinking about the strange grace of S’s circumstances. He’s a gift from his brother, Henry. Henry’s a real good boy. If it wasn’t for him, S wouldn’t be here.
That’s it.
That’s my heady thought.
That’s me seeing strangely.
S also likes to look at a print of a painting hung up above our bed called Halloween Dogs, Salem by Yetti Frenkel. There’s few kids and a handful of dogs in costumes in the Commons. There’s an obligatory witch—Salem… there’s a basset hound angel, a flower-petalled mutt.
He likes to look at it before his mom feeds him, when he’s eating, and after he eats when he’s having what we call his night thoughts.
The real painting is hanging in the hospital where Henry and S were born. We first saw it around with Henry. We saw it every time we went to see him. He had to be in a different room, floor, building than us. A room that specialized in helping his heart function. Henry had to stay in the CICU. He passed away due to a kind of de novo gene occurrence. I don’t know the right language for this, how to use it in a sentence. He had a gene that was “de novo.” A new gene that just happens. It wasn’t inherited from either of us. It helps me to think this way.
Henry isn’t here in the normal sense. But he’s with me all the time. It helps, because I need it, for me to think and to feel this way and to know it is this way. I say he’s here and I feel him here because he will always be a part of me and a part of my little family. A son’s DNA can stay in his mother’s brain for a lifetime. And I’m lucky enough to spend every day with his mother and his brother—and him, too, still living materially, chemically, and lovingly in his mother’s brain.
We had to stay on the postpartum floor because Rae needed a different kind of care. We could visit him whenever we wanted so I visited him as much as I could and wheeled Rae over when her doctors said she could.
We saw the painting, Halloween Dogs, Salem, a lot. There’s a dog that’s distinctly hound-like—different from a basset hound, more like a pointer or birddog—and it looks like our dog. And the dog that looks like our dog is in cartoonish horizontal prison stripes. And we’d laugh at it every time we went by saying something about the outlaw qualities of our dog.
After everything, I emailed Yetti Frenkel, the painter, and asked how much a print would be, if any were available. She emailed back and I couldn’t afford it. A couple months later she asked what my address was. She had a print she could drop off. We were already back in VA so I gave her my parents address. I’m grateful for her kindness. I wonder what reminded her a couple months later of me asking for a print.
S looks at it smiling every night and every morning. He looks like he’s noticing some new-to-him detail or like he’s surprised some other detail is still there, or like he’s really got an idea about what the hound dog’s brown eyes are looking at.
A month before he was conceived, for Valentine’s Day, I surprised Rae by having the print framed nicely and we hung it up in our house in Virginia.
When S has his own room, that’s where we’ll hang it up.
He gets a look in eye before eating, like he remembers he wants to look at it for a second. Grunting, smiling, straining and craning his neck to see it. I don’t know what he really sees. It’s only a few feet away from him.
Sometimes I get to watch S smiling in his sleep. Sometimes he starts cracking up like he just heard the funniest thing he’d ever heard, he’ll ever hear. His mom told me that when newborns laugh in their sleep it’s because someone in heaven is playing with them.
When I get up at 3, 4, 5, winter mornings, because he grunts himself awake, our boy needs to be held. If I can’t get my mind to read, I bounce around with S and I watch X-Files.
When we drive to S’s doctor’s appointments now, run-of-the-mill check ups we hadn’t experienced before, we put on some quiet music. If he’s fussy, we’ve learned the gentler Sparklehorse songs help. It’s a Wonderful Life title track.
One line: “I am the only one can ride that horse up yonder.”
S looking at the one painting of the mountain in the distance out west.
Another: “I’m the dog that ate your birthday cake.”
S smiling at the painting of dogs all dressed up.
This essay is part of Strange Visions, our ongoing series on defamiliarization.
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So incredible about that painter. Congratulations to you and your family. Beautiful piece.