Where the Broken Lie

Copyright © 2012 Author Name
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-938750-14-4

The book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without the permission of the publisher. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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To all of you I love.

For all of you I miss.

Sometimes lost is just a word. Other times it’s life changing. It’s the sharp edge of forever.

“KA-TIE! KA-TIE! KA-TIE COOO-PERRR!”

“What about the park—has anybody checked at the park?”

“Yes, they checked the park. She’s not there.”

“What about Ike’s? Anybody look up there?”

“Ike’s closed two hours ago.”

“Well maybe she got locked inside somehow. Somebody should go check.”

At some point, I fell asleep on the living room couch, which was where I was when Mom nudged me awake in the early darkness of the next morning. She didn’t speak. She didn’t have to. A mother can tell her child a lot of things with just a look.

And my mother’s look told me that Katie Cooper was dead.

There were things inside me once that are gone forever now, replaced by something harder. It started that day. Katie Cooper’s death was the day I started to die, and Ethan’s death is what finished me off.

I walk into the room where my only son lies in an open casket. It is the second hardest thing I will ever have to do.

Tammy couldn’t bring herself to see him like this, so I come here on my own, which I actually prefer. I can be selfish with my pain. Wrap myself up in it without having to be strong for anyone else. It will be our final moment as father and son.

I have never hyperventilated before, but this must be what it feels like. My chest heaves, my stomach swells, and I can’t catch my breath. Swallowed screams cut my throat.

I edge toward him.

Ethan’s face is as bruised and battered as it had been at the hospital two nights earlier. He will never heal. There is nothing for me to do but say goodbye. I stand over him and cry. My tears fall onto his face and I rub them into his skin so that a part of me is buried within him.

I kiss him one last time and stroke his hair. I tell him I love him. And then I turn and walk out of that room where my only son lies in an open casket. It’s the hardest thing I will ever have to do.

I will never heal—old Tucker is every bit as dead as his son.

Who the hell am I now?

The answer to that question, perhaps, can be found in Willow Grove.

There’s an old couple that lives in an old house in a little town in the Midwest. The old couple are my grandparents and the house is my childhood home, which Grandpa and Grandma bought back into the Gaines family when my mom remarried. The town—Willow Grove, Illinois—is where I attended my first day of kindergarten, my last day of high school, and all school days in between. I have walked its sidewalks as a son and as a father. On its streets, I have pulled my Radio Flyer and driven my Dodge Caravan. In its open fields, I have lain. The town remembers me and, like a lonely old man, it reminds me of my forgotten stories whenever I visit. I have gone back to this place more times than I have left it, and it will probably always be this way, for my childhood still lives and breathes in the green grasses and the tall trees of this—my hometown.

It’s the first Saturday of May, and the mid-spring air warms my skin. The citizens of Willow Grove are planting flowers, painting shutters, riding bikes. As I drive through town, I recognize faces, but I don’t wave. Try to not even look, but can’t help myself. The Abbot’s house, once pea green, is now sweet-corn yellow. The Huber’s driveway is freshly blacktopped. A few other changes here and there, but mainly everything is the same as ever.

Old Man Keller rolls down the middle of Fourth Street on his Cub Cadet as if he owns the road, and I suppose an argument can be made that he does. That old lawn tractor has probably logged more hours on these streets than any other vehicle in town history. He has been mowing lawns in this town since he was a kid, back when lawn mowing was a much quieter whirring and snippy activity, and when the Old Man doesn’t have a lawn to mow, he rides around town on that old tractor.

He stops his Cub Cadet in its tracks and waves for me to slow down.

“How you doin’, Tuck?” he yells over a sputtering engine.

“All right, I guess. How about you, Alvin?”

“Good, good, doin’ good. Well, I heard you might be coming back for a stay. It’ll be nice seeing you around.”

I’ve spent too many years in Willow Grove to be surprised by Old Man Keller knowing about my visit.

“Yep. See you around,” I say, pulling away.

Nice enough old guy, Keller, but I sure can’t imagine living his grass-mowing life. His wife is a nurse at the county hospital so cutting grass in the summer and plowing snow in the winter probably paid enough for the Old Man and the Old Woman. I often wonder what kind of thoughts the Old Man has riding atop that tractor. Plenty of time for thinking, that’s for sure. At some point, you’ve got to figure he asked the good Lord what his life’s purpose was and the answer he got back was 
Cut the grass, Alvin
.

Rather than cross the railroad tracks that divide the town, I slow to a stop when I reach them and take long looks each way, wondering where those trains ever come from and where they ever go. The trains never stop in Willow Grove, they just roar through. It was along these tracks that Katie Cooper’s body had been found so many years ago.

As my eyes linger on the empty landscape of rock and weed, gruesome images of blood and flesh play in my mind, fabricated long ago to fit with the stories I had heard. Katie’s half-naked body lying in the tall grass, a cluster of interested crows cawing from the telephone wires above. Her eyes open wide in a dead stare and her mouth agape, framed by blood-crusted lips. Those green eyes had looked into mine countless times. Those pretty lips had kissed my cheek just once.

Off in the distance, a single light flickers like a solitary star. Perhaps it’s Katie or Ethan. Who knows? The light grows larger, moves toward me. Loud bells ding-ding-ding, and the crossing gates lower. I let my foot off the brake and roll off the tracks, just under one of the gate’s falling arms.

I slow my car to a stop on the blacktop driveway that had just been a mess of grass and gravel when I had lived here. And even from here I can see that the stairs leading up to the second-story sun porch thirst for paint and would easily soak up two or three coats.

It’s such a warm secret of a room, that sun porch. Grandma once told me that this house had served as the home and office of the town doctor many years ago. The story goes that the doctor had a daughter who had contracted tuberculosis and was unable to leave her bed, much less the house. The doctor had the sun porch built so his little girl could spend her waking (and dying) hours nearer to the outdoors she so loved and missed. I didn’t hear that story until many years after I’d moved out of the house, and I’m glad because it would have made the room something other than it was for me.

The little girl supposedly died in that room, but you couldn’t feel it. You didn’t feel the hopelessness of the little girl who died in that room. You felt the love of the father who built it. Surely it was a desperate and helpless love at the time, but not anymore. Now it’s simply love in its purest form. Still, I can see the mourning father defiantly pouring his heart, his soul, and all things earthly into providing his dying child a warm room closer to the heavens but still within his reach. Like some sort of desperate compromise offered to God with knee bent and fist raised.