It’s not like I thought Alex would believe in the tooth fairy forever, nor would I want him to. What bugged me about his passage to disillusionment was how clumsily it was unfolding. Not just earlier yesterday morning, but four months ago too.
I grew up watching the A-Team, and I love it when a plan comes together. Conversely, it drives me batshit nutso when things fall apart. So after Alex went downstairs yesterday morning, having busted me as not just the tooth fairy, but the lousiest tooth fairy that ever existed, I sat in my tepid bath, immersed in my own filth, and let myself adjust to the awful feeling of having authored such a crushing end to my youngest son’s innocence. I had fucked things up, no two ways about it, and I knew I needed to accept my failure and move on. But I had no idea how, and it felt selfish and shameful to be wallowing in self-pity while I left Alex to go downstairs alone to try to make sense of the cold plainness of life by himself. I mean, come on.
Now, the obvious upside here is that, as soon as I realized I had an obligation to help Alex cope with the disillusionment, there was a role for me in life again, so I was able to get out of the bath before getting hypothermia and/or diptheria, and that really did make the whole day go better. The downside, though, is that I had to man up and figure out exactly what type of tourniquet to use to stanch the bleeding.
Fortunately, the only right thing to do made itself pretty obvious: I was going to have to dispense with the traditional, ambiguous disavowals and tell him the truth. But not just tell him and send him to school, there needed to be some ceremony. The passage needed a rite. I was going to have to welcome him into the inner sanctum of adult knowledge and power, and in so doing, I would restore his trust in me, adults, and the world. No biggie. Genius, even. I told Julie my plan.
“I don’t want you to tell him,” she said. “Because as soon as you do, he’ll start asking about the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus and God, and I know the tooth fairy is ruined, but he’s too young for there to be no more magic left in the world.”
“But he already knows,” I objected. “He’s suspected the tooth fairy for ages, and now he knows for sure. What’s he going to think we think of him, if we keep insisting on that pretense? He’d just think we were liars. At this point, it would be that simple. And he’d be right.”
“But Santa Claus,” she pleaded.
A pause, then a lightbulb. A wicked, beautiful, manipulative lightbulb.
“Okay, here’s what we do. We cop to the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny, but nothing else. That’s how we do it.”
She consented and, with our plan hatched, I took Conner and Jack to school and returned home for the big talk.
“Hey Alex,” I said, “Julie and I need to talk to you about something before you go to school.”
“Okay,” he said, forever going with the flow. We all sat.
I started. “It’s about the tooth fairy…”
“Okay,” he said again.
“…and, although I hate to say this, the Easter Bunny.”
His face registered shock.
“I think you’ve known about the tooth fairy for a long time. At least I think you’ve suspected it. Suspected that the tooth fairy is actually parents. That it’s not real. That parents do it.”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve caught you twice, and I’ve caught mom twice, so… yeah.”
“Right. I know.” I fidgeted with an invisible molar in my hands. “And I wish we could have kept it going until after you’d lost all your teeth, but we obviously couldn’t, and it doesn’t seem right to keep pretending at this point.
“And the thing is, you might as well know about the Easter Bunny too.”
He nodded, solemn and wizened. I continued.
“I don’t really know why parents ever started doing this, except they just didn’t want Santa Claus to be the only magical thing in the world. They wanted more of that magic than they could get, so they invented silly versions of it like bunnies that deliver candy and bounty hunter fairies…”
“So Santa Claus is real?” Alex looked astonished now.
“What I’m saying,” I said, choosing my words as carefully as an oaf like me can, “is that I can’t explain Santa Claus. I can tell you how the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny are actually just things that parents invent, but I can’t explain Santa Claus.”
His eyes grew wider and he nodded his head slowly, taking in the gravity and mysticism of this new information.
Finally, he came in for the hugs. First from me, then from Julie, who was surely wondering by now what kind of psychopath she’d married.
“Dad,” Alex asked, “what do you do with the teeth?”
“Oh, I keep them in a mason jar in my closet. I’ll show them to you this evening.”
He grinned wide now, and I could see symmetrical gaps where his canines used to be.
“Alex, there’s one very important thing before you go to school,” I continued, and he was attentive. “Having been let into the world of this adult secret, you have to swear not to share a word of it with other kids, ever. You have to promise.”
He had never been happier to promise anything. There was even another hug. I got up to start gathering my work things. Julie was going to have to take Alex to school any minute. This chapter was finally about to end pretty well, when Alex called my name. I turned around as he pulled his hand from his pocket and handed me a five-dollar bill.
“Put this in my college savings account,” he said, and grabbed his backpack and Julie’s hand, and went out the door and into the world of men.