Where the Broken Lie (14 page)

They are sweet and it seems to me that something big is happening that neither of them can fully understand. They do not know what lies ahead of them, these two panda bears. They are about to find love in each other. And in the way an alarm clock reminds you not to sleep, they have reminded me of my own slumbering love. I head back to Grandpa and Grandma’s to call my wife.

“Tam, I talked to Grandpa and Grandma and they’re fine with it.”

“Fine with what?”

I switch the phone receiver to my other ear. A sharp pain shoots up my side and it feels like Edie’s knuckles are still grinding against my ribs.

“Fine with you and Tory coming here to stay, too. With them. With me.”

I inhale deeply and silently exhale all the pain from Edie and everything else. I pull up my shirt to check for bruising, or perhaps a splintered bone sticking out of my skin.

“I feel different here, Tam. In my old home, my old town.”

“Away, you mean. You feel better being away.”

“Yes, away. But not from you and not from Tory.”

A few seconds tick away before she finally responds.

“Okay.”

“Okay? You’ll come? You’ll stay?”

“For a while. I don’t know, a week or two maybe. We’ll come tomorrow.”

“I love you, Tam.”

In the maples in front of Grandpa and Grandma Gaines’ house a brown bushy-tailed squirrel scampers across the telephone wires. I can hear the sound of kids playing baseball off in some distance—or at least what passed for distance in Willow Grove. In some further distance than that, a dog barks.

I rock on the porch swing and wait for Tammy and Tory to arrive. My eyes keep watch of the railroad tracks that my two ladies will soon be rumbling over. Three trains come and go. Each of them blare their horns faintly, then loudly, then faintly again.

Swinging back and forth, I think back to the day we brought baby Tory home from the hospital. We were living in a two-bedroom mobile home that I refused to call a trailer. We were young and happier than I realized—recognizing when I’m happy is something I’ve never been good at. Then all of a sudden, into our lives comes this tiny little something that I instantly realize has my entire world stashed inside of it. I remember thinking that very thought the day we brought her home from the hospital. We walked inside and I set Tory atop the breakfast bar in her car seat. I looked at her and I thought to myself,
Everything—the whole damn world—right there
.

Tam and I laughed as our baby girl looked back and forth between the two of us from that counter top. Eyes wide-open, she looked wise somehow.

“Well, now what?” I had asked Tammy that day …

“Daddy!” Tory screeches from inside the van.

My eyes had been following them since they crossed the tracks, but my mind was disconnected from the moment and didn’t receive the message. Memory-blindness.

“Daddy!” she yells again, running toward me now.

I step down off the porch and bend down to wrap my arms around my little girl. She throws her arms around me and I lift her up for a kiss. She keeps her legs running in mid- air and kicks me below the belt three times. I yelp and fall to my knees in the middle of the yard. Still holding Tory against me, I fall backward and then release her to lie on the ground next to me.

“I missed you SO much, Daddy!”

“I missed you, too, Sweetie,” I say in a fake falsetto that makes Tammy and I both laugh.

I close my eyes and breathe deeply. When I open them again, Tammy’s upside down face is staring down at me and smiling.

“Well, now what?” she asks.

With Grandpa and Grandma more than happy to play babysitter to their great-granddaughter, Tammy and I are able to spend a lot of time together over the next few days. We go out to dinner, to the movies, to coffee shops. We talk. We are beginning to find each other again. Learning each other all over again—some of it old and familiar, some of it new and different.

I find those Betty Cooper-like upturns at the corners of her mouth and those gorgeous gray-green eyes that somehow always seem full of hope. Her sweetness and optimism, which I had feared might die.

Over dinner one night, I told her about the letters I had written to Beatrice Hart and Phyllis Ross and she encouraged me to write more.

“I don’t know, Tam. It seems kind of weird, doesn’t it?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she assures me. “Besides, if it makes you feel better, that’s all that matters, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“It helps them and it helps you. I think it’s wonderful.”

“Maybe,” I say. “We’ll see.”

I reposition my fork and knife next to my empty dinner plate several times and then drink the rest of my margarita. Her eyes hang on me as I do. Usually I am pretty good with silence, but if there is something being unspoken in that quiet space, I sometimes have trouble holding my tongue.

“You probably think I’m drinking too much.”

I caress the empty glass, stare down into it.

“It makes me feel better. And like you said, that’s all that matters, right?”

“Don’t do that, Tucker,” she warns. “It’s not the same thing and you know it.”

“Well, it sort of is the same thing.”

“It’s not healthy. It’s destructive.”

“I’m not an alcoholic, Tam. I promise. And I’m pretty sure I don’t have what it takes to become one.”

“You’ve got alcoholics on both sides of your family. I’m pretty sure you
do
have what it takes. It’s in your blood.”

“Fine, the genes may be in me, but I’m telling you they’re recessive.

I redirect the conversation.

“What about you?” I ask. “What have you been doing to feel better?”

Relenting, she leans back in her chair and lets out a deep sigh.

“Actually, I’ve been going to this support group for parents who have lost children. I met a woman from Werton who lost her daughter to SIDS. We’ve had lunch a few times, talked on the phone.”

“Good, that’s good. I’m happy you’ve found someone who can help.”

“Oh, and I ordered these,” she says, reaching inside her purse.

She pulls out what looks like a business card and hands it to me. Printed on the front of the card, it says, 
This random act of kindness is done in loving memory of our child _____
.
After the word ‘child’, Tammy has written Ethan Merrill.

“Wow, this is great.”

“Isn’t it? I ordered them from this website the support group recommended.”

“So then what—you give a gift or something to someone and put this card in with it?”

“Exactly. You want to use one tonight? We could pay for someone’s dinner.”

We survey the restaurant. I point out a young mother and her two children who are sitting in the far corner of the restaurant. Her toddler son is crawling around the table while her daughter is waving a picture she has drawn in front of her face.

“I think we have our winner,” I say.

When we get home that night, everyone is in bed and the house is dark. I sneak into Tory’s room to give her a kiss goodnight, but she is awake.

“Why aren’t you sleeping, little girl?”

She shrugs her shoulders. I sit down on the edge of the bed.

“What’s the matter, Sweetie? Is something bothering you?”

Again she shrugs.

“Okay, it’s late. You need to get some sleep.”

I lean forward and kiss her forehead, pulling the covers up to her chin. As I start to get up, she says, “Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think Ethan is doing now?”

Moonlight seeps into the room between a gap in the curtains, shining a silvery stripe down Tory’s face. She looks back up at the moon, not at me, and I remember that favorite storybook of hers and how we would copy from it as part of her bedtime routine.

“I love you all the way to the moon, Daddy.”

“And I love you all the way to the moon and back, Little Nut Brown Hare.”

“I don’t know, probably playing with some angel friends. Maybe watching us, looking out for his big sister.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

Her gaze shifts away from the moon and locks on me.

“Can we go to the cemetery tomorrow and see Ethan?”

“Sure, Sweetie,” I say, kissing her again. “You bet we can. Get some sleep now, okay?”

I rise from the bed and walk to the door.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I wish I could have seen him.”

There are lots of things you have to think about when your baby has died. One of the hardest is whether you want his four-year-old sister to see her dead brother. Tammy and I chose to spare Tory that pain. To spare her the image that would be burned into her memory. The kind of image that nightmares were built around. What we didn’t realize is that in sparing her the pain, we cost her the only chance she had for a memory.

“Me, too, Sweetie. I’m sorry.”

The next morning, I take Tory up to the playground to meet my new friend and to swing for a while. But again Swinging Girl is not here. It has been several days since I’ve seen her and this concerns me a little. It’s an irrational fear and I know where it’s coming from, of course. Having lost both Katie and Ethan, I realize that I’m destined for a future of irrational fears and over-protectiveness.

Tory and I walk through Bruner’s cornfield to the cemetery. She is enthralled when I tell her how Mikey Bruner and I used to hunt arrowheads in this very field. How this land had been full of those ancient relics from a lost time and a displaced peoples. How Mikey and I would roll them around in our hands and make up stories about each jagged little stone. The buffalo brought down by one, the cavalryman pierced by another. The broken points that had undoubtedly been chipped on the bones of its victim—arrows sticking out of chests like tombstones sticking out of the ground.