“How did he die?” Leo said.
“Heart problems,” I said. “People with Down syndrome have a higher risk for certain heart conditions. He was thirty-two.”
Leo was quiet.
“What was his name again?” Leo said.
“Daniel,” I said. “Danny.”
He looked at the photograph from the movie theater.
“Did he know?” Leo said. “When people made fun of him?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “Not always. He was better at some social cues than others. When he didn’t know, I was grateful he didn’t know. When he did know, I watched him handle it in a way I could never fully explain, just absorb it and keep going, keep being himself, and I was in awe of him for that even when I was too young to say so.”
“How come you never told me about him?” Leo said.
I sat with this question.
“I’ve been asking myself that for about forty minutes,” I said.
“And?”
“Because grief is complicated,” I said. “Because I kept thinking I would find the right moment and the right moment kept not being now. And because I think I was also protecting myself a little bit from the conversation this would require.”
“This conversation,” Leo said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Because you knew it would require talking about tonight,” he said.
“I didn’t know tonight was going to happen,” I said. “But I knew that bringing Danny into your life fully would eventually require talking about the way people respond to people like him, and I knew that conversation would be uncomfortable for both of us.”
He looked at the photographs.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “About Danny.”
“I know,” I said.
“That doesn’t make what I did okay,” he said.
I looked at my son.
He had gotten there himself, which was the thing I had been hoping for and had not known whether to expect.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t. But it matters that you said it.”
“Would it have been different?” he said. “If I’d known. Would I not have done it?”
This was a better question than I had expected from a fourteen-year-old in the middle of a difficult conversation, the question underneath the surface question, which was whether knowing changes behavior or whether behavior has to change for different reasons.
