In Broken Places (26 page)

“Uh-huh.” Her chin puckered a little bit and her eyes welled with tears.

“Maybe we should draw a picture and leave it under the tree for him. Would you like that?”

She turned her watery blue gaze on me and nodded eagerly—gratefully.

“It can be your Christmas present for him, okay?”

She was already heading for the dining room table, where she liked to draw.

“What do you want to draw for him?” I asked, going to the box next to the couch where we kept her paper and crayons.

“A volcano,” she said without hesitation. And she did just that in the minutes that followed, giving special care to the lava that flowed from the mountain’s red peak. When she’d finished the drawing, she recruited my help to write
For Daddy
at the top. My hand shook as I spelled out the words in green block letters.
D-a-d-d-y.

We hung the drawing from the lowest branch of the tree and propped Shayla’s blue rabbit next to it. It was her way of thanking him, I guessed. For the rabbit. For the Wonder Bread. For the love.

Christmas afternoon at the Johnsons’ was a down-home family affair, complete with a perfectly prepared meal, an exquisitely decorated tree, and the kind of general cheer that radiated a warm glow. Scott, who had been invited to the celebration long before our falling-out, arrived shortly after we did. We’d met a couple of times in the intervening days, always with polite reserve. The first time had been at church on the day following our Christmas tree purchase, and Scott had deliberately approached me, concern on his face.

“Are you okay, Shelby?”

“I’m okay, Scott. Thank you.”

He’d turned to leave but changed his mind. “If you need anything—you know, like your tree falls over or something—just give me a call.”

I’d thanked him again and watched him go. Shayla, on her way back from her Sunday school class, had launched herself at him, showing him her Noah’s ark drawing with pride. He’d smiled and complimented her, then kissed the top of her head and walked into the sunlight, headed home.

And now, we both sat in the Johnsons’ living room nursing glasses of Christmas punch as Shayla played with her new German-speaking doll and Bev and Gus scurried around the kitchen putting the final touches on our meal.

Scott was trying his hardest to diffuse the tension by making conversation, but I could tell it was putting a strain on him. I’d hurt him, and I wasn’t sure he understood why. But I wanted him to know that I hadn’t dismissed him—erased him from our lives. I glanced at Shayla, who was so engrossed with her doll that she was oblivious to anything else, and gathered some courage.

“We’ve missed you around.” As conversation starters went, it was pretty lame. I rolled my eyes and saw his smile deepen. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry we’ve seen less of you.”

“Yeah? I am too.”

I felt a sigh shoving its way to the surface and held it down. “I don’t know how to do this,” I said earnestly, searching for the right words. “What I said the other night—it’s true. And I can’t change any of it. But . . . but I don’t know how to do this anymore.”

“How to do what?”

“How to go back to being friends after . . . after what you said—and what I said.”

His eyes connected more intently with mine. “You still want to be friends?”

“I . . .” I hesitated. There would be safety in cutting off all contact, and yet . . . “Yes—of course I do.”

He looked at me consideringly, weighing his response. “After
what happened the other night,” he finally said, “it might be hard to go back to the way things were.”

“Scott, if I could . . . If I could, I’d—”

I saw traces of frustration in his expression when he interrupted. “Why can’t you?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

I tried to say with my eyes what I couldn’t articulate, but he was looking away, lost in his own thoughts.

A silence stretched thin before he spoke again. “I should have waited—been more sure we were both on the same page before I—”

“Wait. Scott, you can’t take the blame for this—”

“I should have given it more thought before just blurting it out.”

“It’s my fault too. I should have been . . . I should have been clearer—sooner.”

He didn’t contradict my statement. “Well . . .” He paused. “At least we know what we’re dealing with now.”

“Yes.”

“And I guess that’s a good thing,” he said, expelling a breath.

“I hope so.”

He rubbed his hands over his face and shifted in his chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “And since we’re the same people we were a week ago—and those people were friends . . .”

“Maybe we can still be?” I offered hopefully.

He stretched his neck, side to side, and I heard two pops. “We can try,” he said. “I mean, we’re both grown-ups, right?”

I hesitated on that one. “Sure. We’re both grown-ups.”

“So we just . . . try to make it happen, I guess. I put the lid back on what I talked about, and—”

“Can you?”

The look he gave me teemed with emotions I didn’t dare identify. He sighed and shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I’ll give it a shot.”

I bit my lip and looked at Shayla, grateful for this man who saw beyond his own pain and embarrassment enough to stay our friend. “Okay,” I said with a smile, and there was relief in the word—more than I’d expected.

The smile he returned was kind and sincere and slightly strained. It tore a little at my resolve. “So, here we are,” he said. “How do we start this thing?”

I shook my head in amazement at his kindness. “First, we thank God that people like you don’t hold grudges.”

“He’ll be happy to hear about it. It’s a new skill I’m working on.”

I realized at that moment how difficult this was for him. For a man as confident and driven as he was to admit defeat and allow ongoing contact was a testament to the goodness of his heart.

“And then what?” he asked, sitting up straighter as if preparing for a challenge.

“Well . . .” I racked my brain. “I tell you about my David Hasselhoff fantasies and you tell me about . . . I don’t know. What kind of skeletons do you have in your closet?”

He thought hard and I could see a lightness coming back into his expression. “Well, there’s the high school prom where I stage-dived into a crowd of adoring fans without warning and they all moved out of my way. I broke a tooth.”

“What were you doing diving off a stage?”

“I was in the band.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Guitarist. For—” he made a gesture like he was reading a marquee—“the Raging Atoms.”

“The Raging Atoms.”

“We were science geeks. And my parents threatened to ground me if we went with our first choice for a name.”

“The Raging Test Tubes?”

“The Raging Hormones.”

“That would probably have been more accurate.”

“Probably.”

I smiled at him and felt new buoyancy attenuating the bleakness in my mind. “So—now that we’ve emptied out our closets, wanna go see if Bev and Gus need help?”

“You haven’t told me about David Hasselhoff yet,” he said as we headed out of the living room.

“That’s a conversation best had after a couple mugs of well-spiked eggnog.”

“Cheater.”

“Raging Atom.” I halted him with a hand to his arm. “Thank you, Scott,” I said, my voice soft, sincere. “I . . .” Would it muddy the waters to tell him I needed him? Probably. So I shook my head and kept it to myself as I led the way into the dining room, feeling happy-sad in a mustard-yellow kind of way.

Gus had just placed the largest, most beautiful turkey in the middle of the table when we entered the room, and Bev was busy pouring the drinks.

“Don’t mind the draft,” she said, nodding toward the open window. “We’re getting rid of the burned-Tupperware smell.”

“Been helping around the kitchen again, haven’t you, Gus?” Scott said.

“She loves me for my slicing skills, but she could do without the rest.”

“No one feels sorry for you, Gus,” I said without a trace of sympathy.

“Better get Shayla in here,” Bev said. “The turkey’s getting goose bumps.”

“Shayla! We’re eating!”

“Not yet,” came a stubborn voice from the other room.

“Shayla—now.”

“Wait a minute, Mom!”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure what had happened. I’d been about to use hollow threats to get Shay into the dining room when it dawned on me that no one else was moving anymore. Bev was frozen in midpour. Gus was staring at me with his trademark Santa Claus grin, and Scott had something that looked suspiciously like deep emotion in his eyes.

“Did I miss something?”

Bev put down her pitcher and looked at me with a smile that was warmth and victory and relief and love all rolled into one. “She called you Mom,” she whispered.

My heart did a jig. “What?”

“She called you Mom.”

I looked at Scott for confirmation, and he just beamed his dimpled joy at me.

“I missed it!” I wailed.

“Call her again!” This from Gus, his twinkling eyes alight.

I cleared my throat and tried to sound convincing. “Shayla, come here now!”

And from the other room, right on cue, my sweet, strong-willed child answered, with frustration in her voice, “But Mom . . . !”

I covered my gaping mouth with my hand and looked wide-eyed at Scott. He crossed the room and whispered, “She called you Mom, Shell,” and wrapped me in a hug.

In more ways than one, I felt like I’d finally, perfectly come home.

The canopy hung too low, weighed down by time and dust. The pillows were moth-eaten and smelled of abandonment. Fibers were coming out of the rug we lay on in little tufts of red and black and gray. Our Huddle Hut was decomposing before our eyes.

“You think maybe we’ve outgrown it?” Trey lay on his side picking at a bag of peanuts, his head too close to the sagging sheet above us. Even the quality of our snacks had deteriorated. And when snacks deteriorated in my life, I knew an ending was beginning.

Trey’s legs extended well past the edges of the sheet and he looked scrunched up, somehow—a giraffe trying to fit into an African hut.

“Yeah. I think maybe we’ve outgrown it.”

I was lying on my side facing Trey, head propped on hand, trying to absorb all the fragments and nuances of this ritual that had grown out of our fear and need. There was nothing salutary in the dusty sheet above us, nor in the Christmas lights, nor in the filtered sun petering in from the single attic window. And yet . . . this place had nursed our wounds and buffered our resilience and bolstered our resistance. It had mothered our survival in ways I couldn’t fathom.

This was our last visit to the Huddle Hut. Mom had now had a series of ministrokes, and she needed to live in a smaller place, with emergency care nearby—just in case. So Trey and I had come over this afternoon to pack up the last of her things before the movers came tomorrow. The past weeks had been a slogging journey through mountains of accumulated life-fragments—shelf-fulls of LPs, and closet-fulls of outdated clothes, both hers and his, and drawer-fulls of everyday junk, and cabinet-fulls of china and silver and crystal and pewter. We’d finally had to send Mom to her new apartment, ostensibly to clean it, in order for us to box up and dispose of the inordinate amount of irrelevance—physical and metaphysical—she so desperately wanted to keep.

We’d even cleared out the attic, tossing a dumpster-load of garbage from which we’d rescued only a few old toys and a pair of fifty-year-old roller skates. Trey thought he might be able to get something for them on eBay.

And here we lay in an attic empty save for the Huddle Hut, contemplating the shrunkenness and fragility of the structure that once had felt so grand and safe. Trey rolled onto his back and dropped a fistful of peanuts, one by one, into his mouth. I hadn’t seen him grow up, but in this intimate refuge from our childhood trauma, he suddenly seemed old and strong and calm. My sensitive, fragile brother had deepened into a prevailer who excelled as an “apprenti-chef” in a French restaurant in St. Charles, led his own support group, helped in a homeless shelter, spent time with a handful of good friends who shared his priorities and views about life, and still, somehow, found time to be with me. I was glad to see him developing relationships with so many others, mostly because he’d devoted his entire childhood to just us. And it was good to hear him talk about seeing places and living adventures and investing in people when he’d spent so many years hiding from the outside world because of the stigmas of Davishood. But on this final afternoon on Summer Lane, it was just the two of us lying uncomfortably in our deteriorating hut and contemplating life. That much hadn’t changed.