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Ollie. Ollie. My little Ollie Trolley.
She smiles at him. All the time she smiles at him.
Broadly and with what, even with round dark eyes that can still be classified as new, he can see is pure love. Joy at his joy as he laughs and smacks at the hard plastic of his favorite chair. He does not have words for colors, but the chair is his favorite color.
It is the color of his favorite plate—the sort that has the little smiling face looking back up at him through cuts in the plastic. It is the color of his mother’s sweater, the one she wears in the mornings when she first lifts him out of his crib; smelling of milk and something sweeter that sticks to her skin. It is the color of the sky that he likes to look up at, eyes wide and reaching for the puffy clouds that hang like candy floss as summer comes around.
She smiles at him. And he, just as warm, just as radial, smiles back.
Broadly. With the tiny stubs of his cutting teeth that work well to gum at the bits of soft food she spoons in his mouth. Sweet or lined with cinnamon that makes him wrinkle his nose when it catches on his lip. He likes cinnamon—the same way he likes sugar and salt and the sour slices of bright oranges that she lets him suck on even though the juice sticks his tiny fingers together.
She frowns sometimes, too.
Not at him, never at him. At the bright screen that sits on the table in the room where all of his toys are sitting scattered on the floor. She frowns sometimes at the person who sits and talks for hours. She frowns where there are loud noises or strange signs or a hundreds other things. He watches her face in those moments—when the crinkles by her eyes dip down and flat. When her mouth tugs into a shape that he tries to copy and instead hurts his mouth.
He stumbles to her instead, toys forgotten. Latches onto her legs and picks at the bright flowers on her dress with tiny fingers until she turns her head away and down at him. Until she looks and blinks and for a moment he feels a harrowing sort of worry that something is wrong.
And then she smiles at him. And he smiles back, happy to be lifted into her safe, warm arms.
Little ollie. Ollie, Ollie oxen free.
He realizes that he and the man have the same name when he perks his head up when he hears it but it is the man who answers instead. The man who sweeps his mother into his arms in a laughing circle and presses his face to hers. The man who steps over and scoops him up—lifting him well over his head in a wide spin.
The man smiles too. A big, broad smile that turns the man into an warm, earthbound sun as they spin and spin and he laughs and laughs and laughs at the feeling.
The man loves to laugh. The man laughs when his mother says something in a tone that he doesn’t understand. The man laughs when the cat makes that bumbling noise when the cat gets upset that he crawls so close to its food bowl. The man laughs when he sticks his head up at the sound of his name.
Oliver.
He cannot say Oliver. He does not know what Oliver means. Oliver is him—he is Oliver. The man is Oliver too. His father, he learns, even if he calls him da da da da da over and over and over again as pulls himself up on stumbling legs.
The man does not always call him Oliver. Sometimes, when he is swung over his shoulders and feels all that much closer to the sky, he calls him Junior. Junior. He cannot say Junior. He does not know what Junior means. Junior is him—the man is not Junior. But he is Oliver.
And Oliver is happy, grabbing onto the man’s ears to keep himself steady, that it is something they share.
Oliver? Like Oliver Twist?
He sees the name in a movie first. One with children that do not look like him wearing clothes that are too large as they duck and run and tumble all over all the places that London no longer looks like.
His mother tells him that is not where his name came from as she smiles over at him, braiding his growing hair between her fingers. His father laughs and teases her over Oliver’s head—what if it was where his name came from?
It was a joke, Oliver knows, and his name came from his father who got it from his grandfather. It’s a borrowed thing, cycled down through people like the color of his eyes that match his aunts and the dimple by his mouth that he sees push in the same place next to his mother’s. The blanket on his bed that had once been on his father’s, made by soft, dark, wrinkled fingers that had loved him very much and, even if Oliver had never touched them, loved him just the same with the mess of thread and fabric.
His mother smiles—the same as she always does, and his father laughs.
And Oliver...Oliver contemplates.
It was a joke, he knows. It does not bother him to think that his name is borrowed, but for the first time he wonders what it means for it eventually.
Will it go to someone else?
Will his hands—smooth and dark and warm—make something for someone they never touch?
He looks up at the frosted blue stars clinging to his ceiling and wonders about it. When he asks his father, he laughs and tells him not to think so much about morbid things. When he asks his mother, she pauses in her smile before it comes back and she says it’s a worry for a long time away.
The fact that it is a worry at all makes him frown later, when they cannot see him.
Oliver. Oliver and Company, that one movie with the cat…
It is not a worry for a long time away.
He does not like blue as much when it is in flowers, laid out on top of a casket as he walks with his head level at his father’s elbow to look at the woman who was his grandmother. She does not look like she is sleeping, she does not look peaceful or anything else anyone is saying behind him.
She looks dead.
He has learned the word by accident. Listening by the door when he shouldn’t have. Pretending to understand when his mother had done her best to explain it as his father nodded along. She had smiled—a smile that made her look sad—and had talked until he had simply agreed that he knew what it was. His father had laughed—a small chuckle as he had gotten him out an ice cream and later he had heard them both talking in quiet, hushed voices. Leaving quiet, hushed tears against the dark blue of his father’s shirt.
He had not understood. He had not lied, but he had not known there was anything to lie about. It had seemed so…incorrect. To think that a person might be gone.
He understands now, watching her face.
Oliver thinks of what he knows about life. Music that fills the walls of their small flat, dancing in the kitchen as his father sweeps his mother nearly off her feet when she doesn’t expect it. Rummaging through the basket of books they keep out for him. Working the clicking pieces of puzzles on the floor with his toys splayed out. Learning to make tea properly in his tiny, fake kettle.
To be alive is one thing.
This is another.
His father squeezes his hand and Oliver realizes that perhaps he is supposed to be sad. Supposed to be worried or concerned and so he frowns. Swallows the sadness that he can feel radiating off of his mother as they take their seats and listen to the wave of hymns that follow.
He cannot look away from his grandmother’s face. He wonders if it is really her at all. And if not, where exactly she has gone.
Oliver. Like Oliver Cromwell?
His father does not laugh so much anymore. At first Oliver thinks it is simply the heavy set under his eyes, weighing him in place as he gets home later and later to make up for the time he’s spending at the doctor in the meantime. At second, he thinks that that perhaps it’s a small illness like when Oliver had gotten pneumonia and nearly missed his exams.
Now, there is something about the way he moves that says differently. The way he seems to almost fold as he stands, his body tensing and untensing in a rhythm that makes him think he can see the outline of the bones underneath.
Something about the way he is quiet. Like there is a rattle in his chest that Oliver can hear if he listens well enough. Like there is a cloud that sits over his head, the barest bits of grey starting to show in his curling black hair.
His mother does not notice. She smiles and even if it is strained, it does not waver as she looks at Oliver. Senior or Junior, legs crossed on the couch as his father brigs her tea and presses a soft kiss to her cheek at every chance he gets. Oliver taps his pencil on his notebook, pretending to be bothered.
He isn’t. It isn’t the kiss that bothers him but the way it seems difficult for him to move again after that him think. As if that is all that anchors his father still.
Like Oliver Wicks? I had a suit from there once.
The man who was also Oliver looks good in blue, even if he is not him anymore.
Oliver has never been more certain that he has understood death less than he does right now.
It is not a tangible thing. He cannot hold it in his hands as he looks at his father’s face. He cannot look at it directly as he sees his mother do her best to wipe her tears before they drip too far down her cheeks. He cannot name it in the way that he is Oliver. That his father was Oliver. That the flowers on his casket are called Bachelor buttons and Calla lilies; spreads of white and blue that speak of the spring that is happening outside.
A period of new life, he knows. How many books has he read that in?
It has been a lie every time.
Death is not a tangible thing. Even as it fills his lungs with grief and empty thoughts of all the laughs that he had not realized had been so bright, so color filled, so lovely, it is not a tangible thing.
There is no weight to it, sitting on his shoulders.
It is the heaviest thing in the world.
And still, as he moves to sit and let the choir stand, he carries it just as easily with him.
He wonders, watching the preacher after, how many Olivers are left in the world now.
Oliver? Like the actor? No, wait, that’s Lawrence Olivier.
He does not like that they turned up the lips of the woman who used to be his mother into a smile. She did not smile like that. Her eyes would turn up, it would fill every space with every bit of brightness that it could.
This smile, tugged into the corners of what was once her face, does not.
Oliver has never been more certain that he has understood death more than he does right now.
Death is not a tangible thing. In the way that loss is not a tangible thing. In the way that love is not a tangible thing. In the way that grief, with its terrible, sinking claws, is not a tangible thing.
Death is a starting place.
Death is inevitability.
Death is…open ended.
Perhaps, he reasons, it is a beautiful thing. That whatever it is, it means his father is not sick. That his mother is not in pain. That the cut flowers will not suffer forever without water and the warmth of the sun.
It is not peace, but perhaps it can be filled with it.
He knows he should be sadder. Properly sad, he is supposed to be crying. To let the numbness sink out of him like running water as he sits now alone in his pew.
And so he frowns—only for a moment as he thinks of his mother. Once alive, now dead, but not gone.
Death is not going.
Death is not gone.
Death is not quiet.
Death, perhaps, is purpose. It is, he thinks, a borrowed thing.
Ollie. Ollie, my little Ollie Trolley.
Oliver does not know the woman in his dream. When he wakes, he is certain he does not know her. He does not know her thin face or her blonde hair or the way she talks to the man who she wants to ask her to marry him. He does not know the school she goes to and he does not know why she only likes sandwiches if they are cut into triangles.
He does not know why he’s still thinking of her when the flat is quiet and he has work in the morning. He does not know why, ten days later, he wakes with her on his mind again.
He does not know why he gets on the bus that he does. It is not his usual bus. Not to his usual place. Not towards Graham’s or Barclay’s. It rides towards Farringdon Station where he walks through with his Oyster Card and no idea of why he has come.
He sees her only after the crowd dies back a bit. When the trains are boarded and he is still sitting on the singular bench beneath the announcements that hand behind him.
He sees her rummaging through her bags—looking exactly as she did in his dream only…
Only here, it is only her. No thick tendrils that had grown and pulsed and covered her head. No mass of black and purple that had swirled over her head and one of her sides and around her bag and legs and body. Nothing but her in long coat, standing on the edge of the line in shoes still lined with snow from her walk.
He watches her, wondering if he is meant to follow. What he is meant to see. What he is meant to do.
When she slips—catching the torches off the train with a shout of surprise that does not reach far enough or fast enough or make enough of a difference—he knows.
Oliver has never been more certain that he understands death—the color, the motivations, the hunger of it-- more than he does in that moment.