Are You Sitting Down? (24 page)

“It’s not what I am, Mother, it’s
who
I am,” he kept tel
l
ing me.

And I wouldn’t listen.

I d
id
n’t know who I
was
anymore, or who I was when Justin was living.
I
was
a stranger on the sidewalk who I
avoid
eye contact with every time I look
at them, everytime I look at myself
in the mirror.
When I turn
ed
away, the face
wa
s forgo
t
ten.
I might turn back for a second look, thinking I kn
e
w that person from somewhere.
But it’s too late.
They
’
re already gone.

That’s probably why I resented Travis so much.
He too was a stranger to me, until he came into Justin’s life.
I’d known Justin much longer than Travis, but already it was as if he knew my son better than me.
At last, someone just like him had reached out to my Justin.
The missing piece in his puzzle of life was complete.
He knew love, and the touch of someone I only dreamt about when I was a school girl.

Maybe I resented Justin too, or was jealous, because he had someone to love and who loved him back.
And it’s not out of convenience or because we can’t imagine doing anything di
f
ferent with ourselves.
Too much time had passed for Manny or me to know a different life.
How dare I think I could drag Justin down with us?
There was no time to learn anything
outside my
indifference;
no matter how many times Justin tried to get us to be more open to
such
things.
In a flash, the cancer took him.
I don’t know who
wa
s to blame for that either.
But when your only child is gone it’s then that you realize the time you wasted.
I kn
e
w I c
ould
n’t change that, but I c
ould
n’t stop beating myself up over it either.

“Do you want me to take those boxes upstairs?”
Manny asked.

He’d finished sweeping up the lights and picking up the paper.
He thumbed through the sheets of news on the coffee table with a look as if he thought they were today’s paper.

“If you don’t mind, and bring down a few more of the empty boxes from the hall,” I said.

When he was done, he sat down on the sofa and turned on the television.
I w
a
ndered aimlessly between the stairs and the poor Christmas tree, as if waiting for someone to knock on the door.
Manny had mentioned that Travis might stop by, so maybe it was him I was waiting for.
I doubted he came, but a part of me secretly wished he would.
Something inside felt
that
if Travis came over, our house would be alive with Justin again.
I knew it wouldn’t bring Justin back, but being the last person to have seen Justin alive, I felt Travis was somehow magical.

I w
a
ndered into the basement and pulled the chain to turn on the overhead light.
The concrete room was cold, but not damp.
I approached Manny’s
train
miniature
of the entire town
of
Ruby Dregs
which was built atop four large ping pong tables pushed t
o
gether.
It was an elaborate replica of every building and house
in Dogwood
, even the cemetery where Justin was buried looked almost identical to the real thing.
With all the lights and trains turned off, the town was eerily still and seemed deserted except for the miniature people frozen and faceless.

The miniature of our own house seemed much cleaner.
The aluminum siding was not dirty; the yard was neatly cut.
The tree in the front yard, the one lightning had hit
this year
, was alive and vibrant instead of half dead and clinging to its last living branches.
Lorraine White’s house was the same, except that is how her real house looked in
real life
.
It was lively and bright, nestled in its grove of countryside and between rows of fruit trees.
I had never been inside, but I had driven by it many times.

I leaned down to look into the windows like some giant.
With my thumb and forefinger, I grasped the sides of the roof and pulled.
With a quick snap, the gum paste holding the house onto the
Styrofoam
land gave way.
Holding the small house in the palm of my hand, I admired it for a few seconds before dropping it onto the floor
to step on it
.
It shattered beneath my shoe like a crunchy cockroach.
Satisfied with its demise, I lifted my shoe and pushed the remains under the table with my toe.

Travis

I put on my coat and slipped out the back door.
I had been here less than two hours with my mother,
three
of my si
b
lings, and my niece and
two of my
nephew
s
; and already I needed a break.
They’re much easier to handle in smaller doses.
During previous visits,
I’ve had Mom all to myself or visited with only one or two of them.
I doubt if any of them felt the same way I do.
They all still live here within minutes of each other.
They’re accustomed to seeing each other once or twice a week.

Mom has always done a good job of keeping me caught up on things via the telephone when I couldn’t be here.
A conversation with Ellen or Sebastian on the phone rarely lasts longer than five minutes.
Martin and Clare never call.
But hearing about the lives of your loved ones from a voice on the other end of the receiver just isn’t the same.
Email is a little more personable to me.
Someone has to actually sit down and type it, but no one has time for that either.
Instead, I usually have a mailbox full of jokes and forwards from Mom.
Ellen sends the same ones to me because she doesn’t notice that Mom already copied me on them too.
Of all things, family should feel the closest, but when we are
actually
close we don’t have much to say to each other.

Mom’s cat, Marcus, circled my feet.
He meowed a few times and purred loudly, the most anyone had said to me since being here.
I knelt to scratch him under the chin before walking out into the yard.
Looking beyond the snow covered trees, memories of all of us picking apples in the fall or having snowball fights in the winter played out before me.
I found Martin and Marline’s initials carved in a heart on one of the trees from back when they first started dating.
Sebastian’s
old tire swing hung motionless.
The orchard looked like some wi
n
try canvas where a painter had captured the foundation of all of our lives here.
Only we had changed.
I envied Mom for getting to wake up to it everyday.

Her contributions to the yard had stayed much the same as well, as if she tried hard to preserve it just the way it was back then.
Her birdfeeders were the same and in the exact same places.
The little koi pond lay motionless, frozen beneath a sheet of ice.
I brushed the snow from the ice to somehow look through it, wondering if those were the same fish she’d had for years.
Marcus had stayed on the back porch until I knelt next to the pond.
He bounded through the snow and stood on the ice watching my hands carefully as if I was going to be his acco
m
plice in getting to the fish
down below
.

“There’s only four or five koi left down there.
I’ll probably
have
los
t
another one by the time the ice thaws.”

I looked up to find Mom standing there over me with a ge
n
tle smile on her face.
The snow had silenced her footsteps, or she had snuck out the backdoor deliberately so I wouldn’t hear her approaching.
Marcus
leapt
over to her to rub against her boots.

“Are they frozen in the ice?
I can’t see them,” I asked.

“No, there’s a dip in the middle at the bottom
where they go because
it doesn’t freeze completely.
They are prob
a
bly h
i
bernating in some way, if fish do that.”

The thought of the fish in their icy grave saddened me, but I guess it wasn’t a grave at all.
Like the flowers, they rebound in the spring.
The daffodils, the leaves on the trees, the fountain in the koi pond, even the birds all spring back to life.
It seemed childish for me to wish humans didn’t have to die. What if we could just hibernate in a hole in the ground until the ice over our life melted?

“Is something bothering you, Travis?”
Mom asked.

“I just stepped out to get away from all the noise.
It’s so peaceful out here so I thought it would be nice to enjoy the back yard for a few minutes.
I was remembering all the fun times we
had
out here.”

“It’s the only reason I won’t let Martin cut down more of the trees.
Half of them are dying.
You can’t tell now because all of them are leafless, but some of them look pretty spotty come spring time.”

“Everything dies,” I said with a sigh.

“I’m afraid so, dear.”

“If you could go back and live any part of your life over again, Mom, would you?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

“Travis, there were so many bad days.
I couldn’t wait for them to be over.”

“What about the good ones?
What about Dad? You wouldn’t want to see him again.”

“Of course, I’d love to see him again, but in a way he never left.
Your dad is still here, the house, the trees; he’s still here with us.
He’s in here,” she said placing a hand over her heart.

She placed her other hand over mine.

“I’d give anything for one more day with Justin,” I said grasping her hand in mine.

“Just one more day?”

“Well, maybe two or three…months,” I said with a
smile
.

“Are you going to go see him?”

“I think I might wait till tomorrow.
I’m debating on g
o
ing to see his parents.
I ran into Mr. Black when I stopped to pick up the ham.”

“He’s such a sad pitiful looking man.
He’s really let himself go.
I see him at church, but I haven’t seen Helen in a year or so.”

“Do you ever go to the cemetery?
For Dad?”

“At first, I went all the time.
Then, I was going at least once a week.
I make an effort to go about every two weeks or once a month now.”

“Do you talk to him?”
I asked.

“Travis, I talk to him here.
I don’t have to go to the cemetery and see his name on a marker to speak to him.
The body we buried beneath the soil was your father’s, but it’s not who he was.
His soul is a lot more than that
.
I
t’s never left me.”

“Mom, you have such a calm way of dealing with things.”

“Calm?
I’m a mother, dear.
All I know is calm, at least now that all you kids have moved out of the house,” she said with a laugh.

“I don’t know how you do it.”

“Travis, it’s okay to grieve and there’s no reason to feel guilty for not going to visit him everyday in the cemetery.
I think you are doing fine.
If you weren’t, you
would have
gone to the cemetery as soon as you got into town, instead of co
m
ing here.”

“Yeah, I guess you are right.”

“Of course I am.
I’m a mother.
Now let’s go back i
n
side before the others come out here looking for us and try to start a snowball fight.”

She picked up some snow and packed it into her hands and threw it at me.
I jerked my shoulder to dodge it but it
hit m
e on the
back anyway.
I pretended to lean down to pick up some snow.
With a laugh and an apologetic plea, she hurried over to dust the snow from my back.
I put
my arm around her waist and
wrapped
hers around mine
.
W
e walked across the yard to go back inside.

* 
*
*
*

Clare and Sebastian were entertaining the kids with a board game on the floor in front of the Christmas tree.
The warm glow of the lights on their faces would
have made
a great pi
c
ture.
Thinking the same thing, Ellen grabbed her camera from her purse to snap a photo.
Mom, Ellen, and I stood there for a few minutes watching them letting the kids win.
It was good to see Clare and Sebastian smile.

Mom disappeared into the kitchen to position the foil wrapped plates and bowls of food Ellen had brought in, adding them to the buffet line of food on the counter, dividing them
according to how she thought everyone should eat them.
The ham and my turkey would go first, followed by rolls, salad, deviled eggs, yams and other vegetables.
Desserts were on a small card table across the room.

I crept away and walked upstairs like a sneaky kid with the house all to himself.
I walked room to room opening the doors and turning on the lights to look inside for a few seconds, expecting Mom to have put up new wallpaper or painted a bathroom.
Maybe she bought new furniture or bed linens for herself.
But everything was just as it had always been, like the backyard, and I found that
soothing
.
I noticed the small tabl
e
top tree on the nightstand between the twin beds in what had been mine and Sebastian’s room.
The tree
was decorated with matchbox cars and tiny gift bags intended for jewelry size items.
I walked over and peeked into one of the bags.
There was a chocolate truffle inside wrapped in shiny gold paper.
I turned around to see if anyone was watching from the doo
r
way, like a kid about to take a peek at his gifts under the tree.
With no one there, I dug my fingers into the bag to pick up the candy.