Work Text:
Where is the boy
Who looks after the sheep?
He's under a haystack,
He's fast asleep!
/\/\/\
Heidi remembered the day her son was born like it were yesterday, but the day that she lost him was even clearer in her mind. It didn’t matter how much more recent it was. The once chunky baby boy she held after a quick labor and delivery of six hours was gone. She would never hold him again.
It was mid-July in 2017. That morning she had dropped Evan off at work, all dressed up in a beige shirt and green pants. He fiddled with his nametag all morning, adjusting it by mere millimeters every ten seconds. She didn’t think anything of it, he was always a fidgety kid. Evan had a particular way of how things should be organized and presented. Heidi had caught him on several occasions refolding his clothes right after she had dropped the pile off in his room.
Heidi was well aware Evan was different. He was quiet and nervous. From a young age, he didn’t have too many friends, and that number dwindled the older her got. She worried, of course. That was a mother’s job: to worry. But he was friendly and kind. He did well in school and had interests. Even when things got really bad and they started therapy, he was still the little boy she knew so well.
She thought she knew so well.
So, she dropped him off at Ellison Park, then went to her own job. She didn’t love nursing as much as she thought she would, but it paid the bills and she loved helping people. She could survive giving an elder a sponge bath every now and then if she could just keep the electricity on and the rent paid. That July day was slow and simple. She was stationed in the urgent care unit, despite it being anything but urgent. She drew blood, took temperatures, measured body weights—she just ran the same routine tests she did nearly every day without a second thought.
Then around 2 o’clock her name was paged over the intercom, requesting her in the hospital mortuary. She had only been down there a handful of times, running little deliveries back and forth. She just assumed it would be the same old manual labor.
She didn’t expect she’d be identifying the body of her son.
Plenty of cries and screams had graced the hospital’s halls, but nothing quite tore through them like Heidi’s wails did. She knew before they pulled back the sheet that it was him. Her little boy laid on that white table, his body contorted and broken. His face, a sickly grey-blue, was still warm in her hands.
It was a cruel trick.
She echoed his name for what felt like hours, knowing she wouldn’t get any response.
The hospital gave her the rest of the week off. Heidi didn’t know what to do with herself. She couldn’t stay in the house. If she did, she found herself in Evan’s room, holding onto the blue striped polo he loved so much. He never liked tee shirts, even as a kid. Heidi always joked that he dressed like he had a school presentation every day. So important. So proper.
Two days passed before she called Mark. She felt dirty keeping it to herself. It was her son that died, the boy she had raised after he left for Colorado with a cocktail waitress. He had replacement children, anyway. Evan was just an obligatory birthday and Christmas call each year. Nothing more.
But it was his son, too. He needed to know.
She didn’t expect him to hang up on her.
She called his cell phone, sitting for several long rings before he finally answered.
“I’m at work,” he said. Of course, because Heidi knew her ex-husband’s schedule. “Did something happen to Evan?”
She only ever called when something happened to Evan.
“Mark,” she breathed, trying to hold back a sob. “Oh, Mark…”
“What? Heidi, what is it? Is he okay?”
“He’s gone…”
“Like, missing? Is he at a friend’s house?”
“No, Mark, he’s not. He’s gone.”
A quick inhale and then the line clicked, the call was dropped. He called back later that night, asking how (he fell out of a tree), why (it was an accident), when (the funeral is in two weeks). He booked a flight and texted her the details. She would pick him up from the airport.
Those two weeks were the longest in her life.
Heidi went back to work, keeping her head as high as she could. Other nurses and supervisors went easy on her, giving her simple tasks, paperwork. She didn’t get to work with the patients. She didn’t think she’d be able to. Patients talk, you never know what they’re going to say. They come in for a strep throat swab and then, next thing you know, they’re sharing the horrific death of their grandmother after pancreatic cancer. There was never an easy day.
Maybe it would’ve been easier if Evan died from cancer or some underlying disease. At least she would have had time to say goodbye, to make peace. You don’t get a goodbye with a freak accident.
She stayed out of the house as much as possible. It’s too painful to be home, but she can’t help it. She still had to sleep, shower, change her clothes. She slept in his room, on top of the covers. Almost everything remained untouched. He wouldn’t have hidden anything from her. She was sure of it.
Mark arrived a day before the funeral. He was alone, his replacement family back in Colorado. Heidi picked him up from the airport and drove him to his hotel. The thought of him staying over hadn’t crossed her mind, but this was for the better. Staying together would only make things worse. He doesn’t ask any questions. The drive is mostly silent. At one point he checked his phone and Heidi saw two young children, both barely over the age of seven. They were smiling wide grins with bubbles in their hands. They both had Mark’s eyes.
Those were Evan’s eyes.
She could barely keep her eyes on the road.
There was no wake, just a short visitation at the funeral before his burial. It was intimate, to put it nicely. Evan didn’t have many people in his life. The Kleinmans were there, after years of silence. They used to all have summer picnics and barbecues, Evan and Jared having water balloon fights and climbing trees. Heidi couldn’t think about them climbing trees anymore.
She said goodbye to her son one final time before the casket was closed. He was cleaned up and all put together again, wearing a brand new navy suit. It looked as though he was sleeping. Looks are deceiving.
She asked Mark to dinner afterwards. Maybe they could try to have something normal, even so soon. She just needed to forget about it for one night before she had to go back home to that empty, lonely house. She didn’t have anyone else.
He didn’t respond well.
He didn’t yell or raise his voice. He didn’t move to physically hurt her. He just looked at her with bloodshot eyes, snot threatening to spill from his nostrils.
“Our son is dead, and you want to get Olive Garden?” he asked, his voice so low it was barely audible.
“I’m just trying to make things easier,” she said, trying to defend herself. Nothing she said was ever justified by Mark. “I thought we could order out and just be there for each other, together.”
“Just pretend it didn’t happen,” he sighed, “like you always did.”
“That isn’t true! I’m handling it the best that I can!”
“Well you didn’t try hard enough!”
Didn’t. Pass tense. She didn’t try hard enough.
Her shocked silence told him all he needed to know.
“Heidi, that’s not what I meant.”
“Go to hell, Mark,” she said before driving away. He could walk to his hotel. He knew where he was.
Two more weeks passed, and she was feeling better. Better every day. She was never going to be whole again, not with the Evan sized abyss in her heart. But she could at least try. She could at least fake it. She even went to see Dr. Sherman for herself. (He usually only worked with adolescent patients, but he made an exception for several appointments.)
One day, she decided to clean up his room. Nothing drastic, just straightening up discarded items, dusting his shelves full of all his little trinket and books, vacuuming the carpet. She didn’t wash any of his dirty clothes. She dumped the hamper on the bed, going through every polo and button down, checking the pockets of khakis and jeans. They still smelled like him. She couldn’t bare to get rid of that smell.
She went through his backpack, several assignments from junior year crumpled in the bottom. She found his laptop. It was practically his best friend. She would get so tired of him staying home every weekend just typing away. She never knew what he did on there. He could be playing games or writing the next great American novel. He could’ve been watching porn in the middle of the day. She didn’t care what she would find on the laptop, she just wanted to know if there was anything left of him there.
She guessed the password on the first try, chuckling to herself. (onetwothreefour.)
Several windows were open. The desktop appeared first with folders and icons. The wallpaper was a google image of Glacier National Park with a mountain goat right in the center. She clicked on Spotify, noticing that the last artist he had listened to was The Mountain Goats. Of course, the band had nothing to do with the animal, but she remembered how he talked about wishing to see a goat or sheep or ram someday in the wild.
He was shattered when his dad moved away, but he looked forward to Colorado. There were promises of camping trips and hikes. One year for Christmas he received a whole plethora of gear for backpacking. The backpacking trip his dad promised never came. Neither did any of the trips or hike. Evan went to Colorado once, and that was for his dad’s second wedding.
Heidi closed the window, shifting to the next one: Minecraft. She knew nothing about video games, but she knew that him and Jared were once obsessed. So much so that Jared had punched a tree at recess one day, receiving a splinter so deep and painful that he nearly had surgical intervention. Evan teased him for a whole year.
She closed that window.
The last window open is a word document.
He was always writing, but she never read any of it. He stopped letting her read his writing in sixth grade. She kept every short story he wrote in a fancy shoe box hidden under her bed.
The word document was a letter.
Dear Evan Hansen,
Today was not a good day. This week wasn’t a good week. This won’t be a good year. Junior year just ended, and I have no friends, which isn’t a surprise. No one understands me. No one gets me. No one wants to try to know me.
If I could just talk to people, then maybe things would be different. Maybe Jared and I would still be friends and I could have a job without panicking at the idea of answering a phone and working a cash register. Maybe I could have other friends.
I can’t tell Mom anything. I can’t let her know how I feel and what I want to do. She has too much on her plate. She’s too busy for me.
And Dad didn’t even want me.
I just wish everything was different.
I wish I were part of something. I wish that anything I said mattered to anyone. I mean face it, would anyone notice if I just disappeared tomorrow?
Sincerely, Your Best and Most Dearest Friend,
Me
Heidi threw the laptop off the bed, rubbing at the tears on her cheeks, trying to compose herself.
“It was just a freak accident,” she whispered to herself, pacing around his room. “He fell on accident.”
She tried to convince herself that it was just a letter, that it didn’t mean anything. There was no plan, no goodbye. The letter was written in May. (But why was it still open in August?) It wasn’t like all the celebrity suicides she read about in gossip magazines. She kept trying to tell herself it was an accident. What happened at Ellison Park wasn’t meant to happen.
She grabbed the little wooden box from his nightstand. His medication was in there, half empty. He had been taking it. She watched him take it. They had a routine: he had to take it in front of her. He was doing just fine.
But she just couldn’t believe it.
Her son wanted to disappear and now he was dead. He had been dead for just over a month.
She took the week off from everything. She holed herself up in her room, barely eating, not showering. She stayed curled up on his bed, holding his clothes as if it were him. She didn’t know if she could handle staying in that house forever. She didn’t know if she could even stay in Rochester anymore. She wished she could disappear, too.
She took that week to rot at the core.
But that week ended, and she had to return to real life. She didn’t tell anyone what she had found, not even Mark. This one part of her son, as painful as it was, was solely hers. She wasn’t going to share it with anyone else. She needed to be selfish to survive.
Heidi remembered the day her son was born like it were yesterday. He was a big baby, nine pounds and ten ounces. He screamed with the strongest lungs any nurse had ever heard. Mark wasn’t in the room during the delivery. He couldn’t handle it. Hospitals made him nervous and he was easily nauseated. When Evan was born, she cut the cord herself. From the moment he took his first breath, he was wholly and completely hers. She held him all through the night with no intentions of ever letting him go.
She held on the best she could.
/\/\/\
Will you wake him?
No, not I,
For if I do,
He's sure to cry!