Four words in my sons handwriting, taped to the back of the last drawing. He says he is my grandpa.
My father lived next door until the spring before my son went silent. Every single night, at bedtime, he would stand in his lit upstairs window across the yard and wave to my boy through the glass, slow and steady, until my son waved back and lay down and slept. It was their whole world, those two. The wave was how the day ended.
Then my father passed, in April, quietly, and the window next door went dark, and three weeks later my seven year old stopped speaking.
The man in the window in all those drawings was not a stranger over our house. It was my father, exactly where my son had seen him every night of his life, waving from the glass.
The security camera had frightened me half to death. A figure, 3am, every night, at the upstairs window. Until I looked closer at the last clip, really looked, and saw that the figure was small. It was not a man at all.
It was my son. Sleepwalking, the doctor told us later, which grieving children sometimes do. Every night at 3am he got up, still asleep, and walked to his window, and waved across the dark yard at the black window where his grandfather used to be, and waited, and waved again, and finally went back to bed.
He was not waving at the camera. He was not waving at me. He was waving at the window next door, keeping their ritual going, because in his sleep he had not yet learned the thing his waking heart could not say. That the light was not coming back on.
He drew the man in the window over and over because he could not tell us. He had lost his words along with his grandfather, and the drawings were the only way he had left to say, he is still there, I still see him, he still waves.
He says he is my grandpa. In a dream, in the only place a grieving child can still visit the ones they lost, my father had told my son the one thing a boy that age needs to hear. That he was still his grandpa. That dying does not undo the word.
When I understood, I did not treat my sons window like something haunted. I took it to a good childrens counselor, and I treated it like what it was. A little boy saying goodbye in the only language grief had left him.
We started talking about grandpa out loud, all of us, every day, at the dinner table where we had been too sad to say his name. We looked at pictures. We told the stories. We let my son hear that it was allowed to miss him, that the missing was love and not a thing to be silent about.
And one evening, at bedtime, I did something. I went next door, where the house sat empty waiting to sell, and I turned on the light in that upstairs window. Just once. And I stood in it, and I waved to my son across the yard, slow and steady, the way my father had a thousand times.
My son stood at his own window. And he waved back. And then, for the first time in a year, he spoke. Three words, through the glass, that I felt more than heard. Goodnight, I love you.
He talks now, all the time, the way seven year olds do, about everything and nothing. The sleepwalking stopped the week we started saying grandpas name at the table. The counselor said it would, once the boy had somewhere awake to put the goodbye.
We kept the last drawing. The man in the window. I know now it was never a warning and never a stranger. It was a grandfather and a grandson refusing to let a wave be the last thing between them. Some things you find taped behind a dresser stop your heart. This one started my sons voice again.