Hannah's Gift (13 page)

I PUT THE KETTLE ON THE STOVE AND TOOK TWO MUGS
from the cupboard as soon as I heard Laurajane’s jeep pull into the driveway. I had become accustomed to her frequent, unannounced visits and looked forward to them. Today I was especially glad to see her. Last Sunday, she had reminded the congregation that Easter, the season of miracles, was coming. I wanted to know, if this was the season of miracles, when I was going to get mine.

Although I was beginning to have more moments where I inhaled the ripeness of melons in the market, laughed out loud at a joke, or bent down to wipe a scuff mark from the toe of my shoe, they felt fleeting and painful, as if a cardboard match from a cheap matchbook had lit up my solitude just long enough to burn my fingertips before I blew it out. These days, I had no desire to let go of my grief, convinced that if I did, I would also have to let go of Hannah.

The front door opened and closed, and then Laurajane’s footsteps came two at a time up the steps into the living room.

“There you are,” she said, giving me a kiss. “Where’s my girl?”

“Taking a nap, and don’t you dare wake her,” I said.

“I won’t,” she answered, tiptoeing up the steps to Margaret’s room.

While I waited for her to come back, I poured hot water into the mugs and dropped a tea bag into each one. When Laurajane returned, we sat down next to each other at the kitchen table. Laurajane took a sip of her tea and grinned at me.

“You’re pregnant,” she said. “I had a dream about it last night. I’ve had pregnancy dreams before. I’ve never been wrong.”

I hesitated. She seemed so certain. I hated to disappoint her.

“It’s not possible,” I told her. “I just had my period about two weeks ago. There’s no way.”

Laurajane stopped smiling and studied me.

“Are you sure? I don’t believe it,” she said defiantly. “I’ve
never
been wrong.”

“I’m sure,” I told her.

It was true that, despite our problems and perhaps even because of them, Claude and I had crawled back into each other’s arms and decided that we wanted to have one more baby. We had also agreed that it was now or never. We had just in the last month stopped using birth control; I would have been shocked to be pregnant so soon.

Two weeks later, I watched the white pad on the pregnancy test stick split in two by a thin line that deepened from china to robin’s-egg to deep-sea blue.

I PEEKED INTO WILL’S ROOM TO SEE IF HE HAD FALLEN
asleep.

“Hi, Mom,” he said, his voice muffled behind the comforter he had pulled up to his chin.

“How are you, Muffin?” I asked.

“Pretty good,” he said. “Do you think you could lie with me for a while?”

“Of course,” I said.

Will rearranged his blue bunny and Hannah’s blanket to make room for me. He was now sleeping in the room that used to be Hannah’s. It had been his idea to make the change. As I climbed in next to him, I noticed that he had moved a small framed photo of Hannah from my dresser and placed it on the table next to his bed.

The two of us lay quietly in the dark. I had almost fallen asleep when I heard Will speak.

“Mom, how can we be sure Hannah was really dead?” His voice was quivering. “I’m afraid she woke up in her coffin and there’s no way for her to get out!”

He started to cry. I was surprised by his concern, because he had spent so much time with Hannah’s body after her death. But I also knew, from the books I had managed to read about children and grief, that a child’s understanding of death changes over time as he matures.

“Oh, Muffin,” I said, encircling him in my arms, “remember the policeman who came to our house afterward to officially declare Hannah dead? Remember how cold and hard her body was three days after? I’m positive she was dead.”

“Are you sure it was three days after?” Will asked.

“Yes, Will, I’m sure,” I said. “Hannah died on Wednesday, and her body was buried on Saturday.”

“Oh,” he said, wiping his tears with the sleeve of his pajamas.

“There’s something else, too,” he said.

“Remember how, when you told me Hannah was going to die, I said, ‘From now on, whenever she asks, I’m going to let her sleep in my other bed’? Well, one time I was so mad at her for taking some of my superhero figures from my room, that when she asked to sleep with me, I told her no. I can’t believe I was so mean.”

Now we were both crying. It was ten months since Hannah’s death, and grief was beginning to feel like an onion whose layers get thicker and more pungent the deeper you go. These days, I couldn’t stop replaying the last months of Hannah’s life in my head. I couldn’t believe I had ever thought it would be okay to let her go. I felt guilty for everything, from the moments I had left her
alone to go to the bathroom to the times when, frustrated and exhausted, I had lost my temper. I knew that Claude was filled with regrets, too. Weeks before, I had woken in the middle of the night to the sound of him weeping, our whole bed shaking as he sobbed.

I lifted Will’s chin until his eyes were looking into mine.

“I’m glad you shared this with me,” I said, kissing the tip of his nose. “I feel sad a lot these days. I miss Hannah, too, and I feel sorry about some of the things I said and did. But I also know I did the best I could, and I think you did, too.”

“Yeah, Mom, I know that,” Will said, sniffling and wiping his nose on the blanket.

“Hannah told me that human beings aren’t supposed to be perfect.”

“She did?” I said, surprised. “When did she say that?”

“Just the other day,” he said. “Hannah and I talk about stuff. She helps me a lot and makes me not feel so sad. She says heaven is really cool, and she’s not scared. They have baseball there, you know, and Hannah’s on the green team. Guess what else, Mom.”

“I couldn’t,” I said.

“Hannah is so excited ’cause now that she’s in heaven she’s going to grow her hair long, and she doesn’t have to wait until she’s sixteen to get pierced ears.”

SITTING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FLOOR, I SORTED THROUGH
the small pile of things that were all that was left of Hannah’s life. I lifted her Easter dress to my nose, wanting to believe that her clothes still smelled like her, feeling sick that I was no longer sure. I was finally beginning to understand how gone she was.

A month and a half ago, in a haze of disbelief, I had slogged through the first anniversary of her death. Laurajane and fifty others gathered with us on the front lawn of our church to dedicate a small magnolia tree that had been planted there in Hannah’s name. It felt like a beautiful but inadequate consolation.

I couldn’t help thinking that since we had managed to survive a full year without her, Hannah should be allowed to come back. When she didn’t, I spent three days in the deepest depression I had known since her death, emerging from it like a spider rescued from drowning whose legs have to be untangled before he can move on.

Two weeks later, faced with Hannah’s fifth birthday, I’d
had enough of depression. Claude, Will, and I decided to celebrate by doing something we knew Hannah would love. We rented a convertible, a red one, since the guy at the counter told us they didn’t have anything in pink. The four of us, Claude and I in the front seat, Will and Margaret in the back, spent Hannah’s day driving around, feeling the wind in our hair.

Now, I wrapped the Easter dress, robe j’s, and Hannah’s first pair of red shoes in tissue paper and placed them in a box. Then I carefully laid her Band-Aid collection, sea shells, and preschool art projects on top. Closing the lid, resting the box on my swollen belly, I carried it upstairs and slid it under our bed.

These things, I decided, were too special for anyone else to use.

I stored the rest of her clothes in the crawl space above the hall, and moved her dress-up box, dollhouse, Barbies, and tea set into Margaret’s room. When I finished, I lay in the middle of the floor and cried my heart dry.

STANDING IN FRONT OF THE BATHROOM MIRROR, I STARED
at my reflection. I barely recognized myself. My face looked more angular and worn than I remembered, my eyes focused on something I could not see. I looked tired, determined, wise. Whose form was this? I wondered. What life was it wanting to live?

A month before, in late November, Madelaine Grace had been born. Holding her for the first time, I felt complete as a mother, and knew she was the last baby I needed to bring into the world. Besides feeling a numbing gratitude, I had also felt deeply afraid. While Madelaine’s birth had given me one more reason to live, it also meant I had much more to lose. I didn’t want to be disappointed by life again.

I also knew that I had to start living my life. The hungry bear of my determination, which had sniffed cautiously at the light months ago, was now standing upright, pawing restlessly at the air. She could no longer wait for me to feel better, stronger, or less sad. In the sixteen months since
Hannah’s death, Will had learned to read, Margaret had walked, Claude had raised money for cancer research, and Madelaine had swallowed her first gulp of the world. I no longer felt willing for life to continue on without me.

Looking into my own eyes, I saw a woman who, having been dismantled by suffering, had managed to piece herself back together. I felt a deep respect and compassion for her, for the emptiness she had known, for the strength she had found. I now knew that, just as Hannah had been able to see beyond her body’s deterioration, I was much more than a bereaved mother. My anger at the world had diffused into a determination to do something purposeful and real in my life.

The grief that once threatened to swallow me up had found a home in my bones. My suffering wasn’t something I was going to have to let go of; it had become part of what I had to offer, part of who I am.

I SAT SILENTLY BETWEEN KIM AND KATE AT A LINEN
-covered table at the Newcomers’ Ladies’ Luncheon. They had talked me into coming this afternoon, having assured me that it would do me good. Since Hannah’s death, I had resisted putting myself in social situations with people I didn’t know. I still felt like a loose cannon, as if Hannah’s death had left me without a polite bone in my body. I was never sure of how I would respond to the awkward and painful questions that strangers inevitably asked.

“How many children do you have?” was the most difficult. If I said “three,” I felt awful for having excluded Hannah. If I said “four,” the next question always was, “How old are they?”

Once people were confronted with the story of Hannah’s death, almost anything could happen. It was in some of those moments that I had frequently wanted to bite someone’s head off. The question that incensed me most—usually asked by other mothers—was some version
of, “Did you feed her hot dogs?” I resented the implication that, since I had, I had contributed to Hannah’s cancer; I also recognized the deep fear that lurked beneath the surface of their concern.

I, too, had once believed that I could protect my children from harm, control the things that happened to me and them. As a mother of three other children, part of me still wanted to believe I could. I had spent hours backtracking through every detail of Hannah’s life, trying to figure out why she had gotten sick. I still longed to know if there was something else I could have, should have, done. I hadn’t yet accepted that I might never know, and didn’t appreciate having the question stirred up in me again and again.

Now, although I couldn’t help feeling as if my real self was hiding behind a made-up, dressed-up cardboard cutout, I was beginning to think Kim and Kate might have been right to bring me here. The three of us had successfully navigated the cocktail hour, Kim and Kate sticking nervously close to my side, steering conversations toward benign subjects like the difficulty of finding a reliable gardener. I imagined they had decided beforehand that superficiality was a safer bet than subjects that could bring up words like “cancer” or “death.”

Now, although the three of us had been seated at a table with seven other women, none of whom we knew, it seemed that we might get through lunch unscathed, too. Once everyone had ordered their food, a lively
conversation sprang up about the hassle of getting a new driver’s license when one moves to a new state.

One woman told an elaborate story of having made three different visits to the department of motor vehicles in an effort to get a decent photograph. I quietly sipped my wine and studied the faces at our table. How many of them believed, as I once had, that only “other” people’s children die? I couldn’t see a trace of suffering on any of them. I wondered if they would say the same about me. Despite the carefully manicured fingernails and heads of perfectly coiffed hair, I knew I couldn’t know perfection by the way things looked. I knew I couldn’t know suffering that way, either.

One of the women, with teased, blond hair, the one who had recently moved to New Jersey from Atlanta, broke into the conversation. Pulling a Gucci wallet from her bag, she flipped through a stack of credit cards before finding what she was looking for.

“Take a look at this,” she said loudly. She handed her driver’s license to the woman next to her. “I almost died when I saw it. I look like a
chemotherapy patient
, for God’s sake.”

Kim and Kate froze. I looked at the woman. I wanted to tell her that the most beautiful face I knew had belonged to a chemotherapy patient, but I said nothing.

I knew there had been a time in my life when I had been oblivious to suffering—my own and everyone else’s. I had believed that people brought suffering onto themselves. I had felt superior to them and thought that compassion was
about feeling sorry for the fact that their lives weren’t perfect like mine. I now knew that I, too, had always suffered; I simply hadn’t been willing or able to acknowledge it.

This big-haired woman with the chemotherapy driver’s license was not my enemy. She was myself.