Chapter 1

He woke up, covered in sweat, but the dream, the nightmare, kept calling him back. His father was there before he knew it, holding him, comforting him as if he were afraid.

"And who thought about using them?" asked Ms. Jones, carefully watching the boy.

"I did, 'cause Alex didn't know where dad kept them."

"And you did?" she asked, sounding rather puzzled.

"Yes, I saw daddy put them away in his closet after I found them in the bathroom."

Those words, together with the angry look Ms. Jones shot at him as Kyle answered her question, made Paul realize just how serious a mistake it had been to hide the pills in the boy's presence.

"And what did your daddy say the first time you found them?" she prodded, keeping her eyes on Paul.

"In the bathroom? He said that I wasn't supposed to touch them because they were bad... but why would he give something bad to my mommy?" asked Kyle, sounding more than a little confused.

"I see, so you had seen him give the pills to your mommy?"

"Yes, they made her pain go away," Kyle explained.

Paul didn't know how a social worker would take those words. He realized that he had made a series of mistakes but the fact remained that, when the pain hit, neither he nor Sarah had had the presence of mind to tell the boys to leave the room while she took her medication. Paul could only hope that Ms. Jones would understand that.

"And so when you found them, your dad told you never to touch them again and then he placed them on top of his closet. Is that right, Kyle?" asked Ms. Jones, trying to recreate the scene in her mind.

"Yes."

"And earlier today, while you were playing, where was your daddy?"

"In the next room. He was working, and I was afraid he was going to get mad at me when I told him that Alex was asleep." said Kyle shyly.

"Does he get angry a lot?"

"No, but we are not supposed to go in there while he is working," explained the boy.

"So, you didn't go right away, after Alex swallowed the pills?"

"No, I told you. Alex and I were playing, but then Alex fell asleep and wouldn't play with me any more. I tried to wake him but I couldn't so I went looking for dad."

"But there is something I still don't understand, Kyle," said Ms. Jones, seemingly confused. "If the pills were on top of your dad's closet, how did you get all the way up there to reach them? Can you tell me?"

"I knew daddy kept them in his closet 'cause I had seen him put them there, so we opened the drawers to climb up," Kyle tried to explain. "We just wanted to play."

"You opened the drawers?"

"Yes, like steps, and then Alex went up to get them."

"But your daddy had told you that you were not supposed to play with those pills," Ms. Jones confronted the boy, though Paul couldn't fathom what good that would do. Kyle was only five, it wasn't the boy's fault. It had been his mistake.

"Yes, but I already told you, we were playing and we had seen them make mommy's pain go away," insisted Kyle.

"And after Alex got them down, how did you open the bottle?" asked Ms. Jones, aware that the package itself should have been child-resistant.

"I don't know. It was hard. At first Alex couldn't figure out how to do it, but after trying for a while he just opened it."

"So Alex opened the bottle and then he swallowed the pills?"

"Yes, he was very sick and the pills were going to make everything better."

"You mean he got very sick?" asked Ms. Jones, trying to make sense out of the child's words.

"No. He was sick in the game we were playing."

Kyle appeared to be perplexed, and more than a little exasperated, by the social worker's seeming inability to tell what he believed to be the obvious difference between reality and a game. In his mind, the game was still nothing more than a game. Well, Paul thought, at least that would explain how he could remain so calm. Still, it was kind of ironic... children were too often accused of confusing fantasy and reality. They were routinely dismissed because it was assumed that they believed that fantasy was fact, but now Kyle appeared to be unaware that the opposite had happened. The boy insisted on keeping fact and fiction apart long after they had merged... long after fantasy had become fact.

There was an eerie feeling in Alex's service as his friends were led by their parents past the small casket. For most of them this was their first experience dealing with death, and it came embodied in a child like themselves. Kyle stood quietly by his father's side. The boy was calm, maybe even detached, as the events unfolded in front of him. Kyle had only asked if Alex had gone away like his mommy and Paul had barely dared to nod at that, unsure of whether or not he would be able to control his emotions long enough to speak.

There were nameless faces expressing their condolences with empty words, and Paul suddenly realized that Alex had somehow been transformed into Alexander... a man's name he would never grow into. He became almost painfully aware of the fact that his son had never truly been Alexander before, only Alex. Like so many parents before him he had branded his son with a man's name before he was even born, only to change it to a child's nickname the first time he saw him. And now, in death, his son had morphed into a stranger Paul had never met.

Once the service was finally over, there was the burial itself. A small grave had been dug open next to Sarah's headstone, in the place Paul had always assumed he would one day occupy.

He felt desolate as he tried to imagine what might have been if something, anything, had been different. Paul was horrified when he caught himself wondering what his feelings would have been if Kyle, and not Alex, had been the patient in their deadly game.

If Kyle had been the patient he would still have been there, saying goodbye to one of his sons, holding Alex's hand, comforting him as he now knew he would never do again. He would have been standing in that same spot, holding Alex's hand in the same way in which he was now holding Kyle's. His own grief might have been different, as both boys had always been, but it certainly wouldn't have been less. He would still have been there, wondering what might have been had Alex been the patient. Unconsciously Paul tightened his grip on Kyle's hand, needing the reassurance of the boy's presence. He couldn't even hear the priest offer what he believed to be words of comfort.

Paul was not a religious man, for him church was a place he was expected to go to a couple of times a year, part of a ritual rather than a faith... and lately, a place to bury the dead, but in spite of that, he caught himself muttering a prayer to Sarah, begging for her forgiveness and asking her to keep Alex safe, as he vowed to keep Kyle. He would not fail twice.

The sound of dirt raining down on his son's casket was almost deafening, but no-one else seemed to hear it. Paul gathered his courage to look around. He was surrounded by his closest friends as well as some of his colleagues and a few of his students but the ones that drew his attention were the little mourners who had never mourned before, and their parents. Their parents who were too afraid to look him in the eye, their expressions a mixture of compassion and accusation.

Paul suddenly realized that those children, the ones that appeared to be strangely out of place in such a gathering, were the only ones that were there really because of Alex, the only ones that had had a chance to get to know him. The grown ups were there for him, or perhaps because they felt it was their "duty". Even his own family had failed to attend. It really wasn't their fault, seeing how most of them lived thousands of miles away, and everything had been so sudden. Sarah's parents had asked him to put off the service for one more day to make it possible for them to be there but Paul had refused. For Kyle's sake, he couldn't allow things to drag on any longer.

He was grateful when he felt a light hand touching his shoulder, distracting him from his own thoughts. Sandra, one of his closest friends, was standing by him. Paul tried to give her a reassuring smile but failed miserably. She didn't say anything, silently acknowledging that there was nothing she could say. She just remained there grounding him, lending him the strength he needed to keep himself together as the ceremony dragged on.