The Summer Son (18 page)

“Don’t hold out on me now. Mom and I, we picked him up at the base. We rode with him to the cemetery. We watched him go into the ground. We did all of that. We found the strength. Why couldn’t you? Forget about Mom and me. You owed Jerry that.”

Dad hung his head. The words, when they came, had nothing behind them, and they dissipated into the space between us.

“I know.”

“You know what?”

“I know it’s my fault. I know he left because of me, and I know that he died because of me.”

Dad looked up. His eyes floated in tears.

“I’ve lived with it every day since. If I hadn’t done what I did, he might be still with us. I couldn’t face it. I couldn’t face Leila. Why she even wanted me there, I don’t know.”

“Dad, she didn’t know.”

“What?”

“I never told Mom about that night.”

“God, Mitch. Why not?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe some things are best not revealed.”

We sat quietly for a few minutes.

“It was a terrible day,” I said, finally.

“What?”

“The day we found out about Jerry.”

On that October day in 1983, I watched through the living room window as the car pulled slowly through our cul-de-sac and stopped in front of the house, and I knew. When two grim-faced men stepped out, I had the most preposterous thought, that if I just dashed out the door and met them, ushered them back into the car and sent them away, we wouldn’t have to hear it, and it wouldn’t be real.

Instead, I croaked out “Mom,” and my mother, who was cutting vegetables in the kitchen in a desperate effort to draw her attention away from two days of deep dread, knew it too.

Then came the two crisp raps against our oaken door, and Mom and I walked wordlessly to the entryway and let the Marines in out of the rain.

We had feared the worst on that Sunday, when the bombing of the Marines barracks in Beirut had been all over the news. We knew Jerry was there, and we hoped against hope that he had been among the survivors or hadn’t even been in the area at the time. But I could tell from the way Mom talked that she had a sense that our news would be crushing. I guess I had the same sense, given the knot that kept growing in my gut. Still, we wouldn’t know anything for sure until the government was good and ready to tell us. With men still being accounted for and rescues still being attempted under sniper fire, who knew when that would be?

Mom made phone calls but no headway. Whom do you call, anyway? There’s not a dead-Marine hotline. You wait. You worry. You wonder if life is ever again going to be what it was before the uncertainty set in. And then, if you have a soul, you wonder how even the news you want to hear could be considered good when the families of two hundred and forty-one men were about to find out that their son, their brother, their husband, their father would be coming home in a box.

I stayed home from school on Monday and Tuesday. It’s not as if I could have concentrated on my studies, and I wanted to be home in case our worst fears came knocking. I didn’t want Mom to absorb that news by herself. Mom had the same idea, calling in sick. We spent two days sequestered in our small house, not speaking beyond the perfunctory, daring not to give words to our worry.

“You think it only happens in the movies,” I told Dad. “But it was real. We let the Marines in, and they hung up their raincoats and followed us into the living room. Then they told us that Jerry was gone.”

Dad looked at me.

“How did Leila take it?”

“It was…weird,” I said. “Mom never took her eyes off the Marines. She looked almost serene. I know that sounds weird, but that’s what I saw. I listened, and I heard the part about the nation’s indebtedness to Jerry, and I almost laughed.”

“Laughed?”

“Yeah. I mean, we were the ones with the debt. Jerry wasn’t ever going to get married, have children, or grow old. Who could pay us back for that? Nobody has pockets that deep.”

Dad looked hollow.

Ten days after the Marines visited, we met the plane. We stood in the rain, watching the flag-draped coffin as it was off-loaded. We rode beside Jerry those seemingly endless miles down Interstate 5 to Woodlawn Cemetery.

I sat beside Mom for the service, flanked by Jerry’s high school friends, his coaches and teachers, people from the neighborhood, and a contingent of Marines. When the rifle volley echoed against the leaden Washington sky, Mom flinched beside me. The scent of the guns’ discharge found my nose, and nausea bubbled in my gut.

I watched as my brother was consigned to the earth. The flag was presented to my mother, yet another gesture that could not begin to account for our loss.

“I hated you,” I told Dad. “I thought about how you were sitting back here in Billings, in that Holiday Rambler where it all was set in motion. You beat him up over a girl, and he was gone. And you couldn’t even be there.”

“I’m sorry.” Dad’s voice was a whisper. “I wish I had been.”

Tears ran down my face. I hadn’t cried for my brother in a long time. Then I realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the man across from me.

The good-byes you refuse to say must be the hardest of all.

Time had stopped for Dad and me, but the world continued spinning on its axis. I watched the march of commerce proceeding on the TV, faintly illuminating a living room otherwise gone black.

“I’m going to see him again,” Dad said.

“You’re going out to Olympia?” I hadn’t been back in years, not since I lost Mom. “I’ll go with you.”

Dad looked up. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. A shiver went through me.

“No, Mitch. I’m dying.”

I listened as Dad at last put the puzzle pieces into place, filling in the picture of what had compelled me to come to Billings.

A routine checkup. A marker in Dad’s blood that attracted the doctor’s attention. Then came the unraveling of a life.

An exam found swelling in Dad’s lymph nodes. That’s when he started calling me. He needed to talk, but he couldn’t find the words.

A couple of days after I arrived, he had gone not to Helen’s grave but to a hospital for a CT scan. The verdict: pancreatic cancer marching throughout his abdomen. The diagnosis was as grim as it could be. The doctors saw no chance at cutting it out or blasting it with chemotherapy. Dad was advised to get his affairs in order and to prepare for what was to come. He had spent two days figuring out how to tell me, and I had spent those days ripping his life apart.

I had finally reached my father. Soon, he would leave. How much could one family be expected to give, I wondered? Jerry, gone. Mom, gone. Dad, going.

“I won’t have anyone left,” I said softly.

“Bullshit,” he said, and I half laughed and half cried to see my gruff father return. “You have a wife. You have two kids. You love them, don’t you?”

“I do.”

“You hang on, then. You hang on, and don’t let go.”

Silences weaved among our short bursts of conversation. It was as if only a few words could knock the breath out of us again. When the decades unspool into the dusk of a single day, it’s hard to know what to grab hold of.

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“Can we talk about Milford?”

“We just did, didn’t we?”

“We did. But I’m wondering.”

“What?”

“You sent me away. Why did you do that?”

“Mitch, it was a long time ago.”

“I know.”

“It was a bad time.”

“I know. But, Dad, I’ve never gotten past it.”

“It was just a mistake, Mitch. Just a mistake.”

He yawned.

I let him off the hook.

As darkness settled into Dad’s house, he headed for bed.

“How long?” I asked.

“Three months. Six months. Hard to say. Not long.”

I walked over and hugged him. I held on until he hugged me back.

A few minutes later, I heard snores slipping under the closed door of his bedroom. Exhausted as I was, I had no desire for sleep. I had too much to reconcile, and not nearly enough time to do it.

I also knew I couldn’t manage it alone.

I slipped outside. I walked to the end of Dad’s driveway, and I placed the call.

“Get here as soon as you can.”

I
LAY IN BED
because there was nothing else to do. Sleep wouldn’t come. My emotions were tapped, but still the thoughts ping-ponged in my cranium.

I had carried Jerry with me every day since the news came to our door in 1983. I proudly shared his name; it was his legacy that weighed on me. I lost him when I was fifteen, and I labored under his shadow. By being buried a hero, he became a better athlete, a better student, and a better human being in death than he had ever been in life. It’s not that I didn’t love Jerry and miss him desperately. It’s that I longed for someone to speak of him as I knew him—hardheaded, mischievous, arrogant, and yes, good-hearted—instead of presenting him as some sort of ideal I couldn’t match for no other reason than, one, I was alive and, two, I wasn’t him.

I flipped over and pounded my pillow. I chafed at the memory and at my stale grievances. I had to learn to let go of some of these things.

And
, as I reminded myself,
it’s not as if Mom and I weren’t guilty of the same reverence to the dead.

We suffocated in our house on the upper eastside of Olympia after he was gone. It had been our home since the early seventies, and his absence tore a hole in it that we couldn’t fill with memories or regrets. Mom found us a townhouse nearer the bay, and we moved. I stayed until my high school graduation and my departure for California and college at Berkeley. She stayed until she died. Another loss.

I turned again on the bed and replayed Dad’s revelation about why Mom had left him. It rocked me to my core. I closed my eyes and conjured her, and I remembered how I sometimes wondered why she never again let a man into our lives. My mother was not a cloistered woman, but at the end of the day, the men in her life were Jerry and me, and then, finally, me alone. For thirteen years after I moved away to college and then to my own life, she stuck to the routines and friendships she had in Olympia. If she ever regretted her decisions, she took that sorrow with her.

The torrent of memory carried me back to that November day in 1999 when I found out she was gone. It was only by inertia that I held it together on the flight from San Jose to Seattle, on the ride down Interstate 5 to the hospital in Olympia. I made the dutiful calls to the mortuary and to Cindy, summoning her to help me say good-bye.

The grief got the better of me only after I found the ground beef thawing on the countertop, put there by my mother on her final morning, before her final car drive, before her final breath. She had planned tacos for dinner. The soft-shell tortillas, the tomatoes, the cheese, the avocados were in the refrigerator, waiting.

I sat at the dinner table and I wept. Then I cooked the tacos, though I had no appetite. She would have hated to see it wasted.

In Mom’s closet, I found photo albums that stretched to her early days in Montana with Dad. Flipping through them was like making bygone years flicker to life, if only for a moment. As the pages rolled past, so too did the arc of our family. First, it was just Mom and Dad, fresh-faced and young, all the possibilities and promises of youth in front of them. Later, baby Jerry appeared. I saw images of trips I had heard stories about—Mom, Dad, and Jerry, perhaps four years old, at the Grand Canyon. Then I showed up, bouncing on my grandfather’s leg, riding in my father’s arms. More pages went sliding by. Dad fell away, and the landscape changed. Jerry, in his early teens, frowning into the camera while Mom and I smiled in Pioneer Square. Jerry graduating from high school. Jerry, square-jawed, in his Marine uniform. Then it was just Mom and me. I grew up. She clipped out newspaper stories about my football games at Olympia High. The honor roll. My senior prom date. And then, as I finished high school and headed to Berkeley, the pictures ended.

I found something that made me angry all over again at Marie. Written during that summer in Milford, the letter from my mother asked Dad if he had given thought to private school for me. Across the top, Marie scrawled, “Leave Jim alone. Mitch doesn’t want to go there.”

I cried myself to sleep.

I remembered Mom’s going-away day, and I wondered when it would come for Dad. In the darkness, I whispered a prayer and asked God to let me be here for Dad when it was time for him to leave. Though I could well recall every slight, I also remembered that when it was down to him and me, he had come through.

The day we buried Mom, I left her house and made my way through the early morning traffic in Olympia to the mortuary. I rapped on the door and told the man that I wanted a few minutes. He took me to her and graciously cleared out.

I went to unload thoughts I didn’t want to clutch too tightly in that morning’s service, to say the words I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear. Whether Mom was in that room with me that morning is beyond my grasp; I don’t know if it was her or just her temporal vessel, now empty of whatever it was inside that made her vivacious and funny and kind, always in the light and never in the shadows. The intervening years haven’t granted clarity on that question. I just don’t know, and I distrust those who claim to have the answers.

The face I saw looked like Mom, and that was good enough. I stroked her hair, and I started with a thank you.

After the service, Cindy and I lingered at the grave. Mom would be set to rest next to Jerry. It didn’t make much difference to me—I would be on this side of the dirt, missing both of them—but I hoped it would make a difference to them, wherever they were. If they were.

I took Cindy’s hand and we walked to the car. About halfway up the path, Dad stepped out from behind a massive fir. He wore a blue suit whose heyday was two decades earlier, and his thinning, gone-gray hair was slicked back. His tie, grappled into a haphazard Windsor knot, hung askew. He fidgeted and looked anxious.

I hadn’t seen him in twenty years. Cindy smiled and thanked him for coming, and I knew then that she had placed the call. There was much that it occurred to me to say, and I dismissed it out of hand.

He had come to my side.

The three of us walked away together.