Where the Broken Lie (15 page)

I think about how I used to go on long walks like this with my own dad. Everything seemed so simple back then, when I was the one looking up and it was someone else looking down. I guess things always seem simpler when you’re the one looking up.

Tory loves the fact that we have put her name on the back of Ethan’s headstone.

“That’s my name there—right, Daddy?”

“That’s right.”

“What does the part above my name say? I forgot.”

“It says ‘To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die.’”

“Ethan lives in our hearts—right, Daddy?”

“That’s right, Sweetie.”

“So it’s kind of like he’s alive—right, Daddy? Because he’s alive in our hearts.”

“Yes, Sweetie. He sure is.”

“But, Daddy? What if we die and our hearts die? Then Ethan won’t be alive anymore either—right, Daddy?”

“No, he’ll still be alive and so will we. We’ll find different hearts to live in.”

“Whose hearts?”

“Our family and friends.”

Before leaving the Willow Grove cemetery that morning, I walk Tory past Katie’s gravesite. We don’t stop, though, and I don’t say anything to Tory about Katie. But it still feels like an introduction of sorts.

The last thing I do before leaving is to check and see if the letter I had left by Slim Jim’s grave was still there. It isn’t.

The Willow Grove United Methodist Church has always praised God with a stoic reverence and I think that’s what had me wanting to go to church again. To silence the noise in my head.

This Sunday is special. It is Mother’s Day and my wife and daughter and mother are all here with me. Tory sits between Mom and Larry the same way I used to sit between Grandma and Grandpa Mueller. Mom has one arm draped across Tory’s shoulder, gently rubbing her granddaughter’s arm. Every few seconds Tory looks up at her and shows her the picture she is drawing on the back of the Sunday bulletin. Mom smiles proudly and squeezes her in close.

“Do you like it, Victoria?” Tory says to her namesake.

“It’s beautiful, Victoria,” her namesake says back to her.

Naming Tory after her did not make Mom love her granddaughter anymore than she would have otherwise, but I’m pretty sure it helped her love herself more. And the relationship between them was more special because of it.

Mom and Larry live in Glidden now, but still come to Willow Grove for church. Even though Glidden is only ten minutes away I hadn’t gone to visit them yet, and I know that Mom is probably hurt by this. She wants me to need her more. She had hugged me when we arrived that morning, but then turned her attention away from me and toward Tory. Swooping her up in her arms and giving her all the love and comfort that had been building up inside.

Tory returns to our pew after the children’s message and I get up to take her down to the nursery. Tammy gently pushes me back in my seat and whispers, “I have to use the lady’s room.”

She is teary-eyed and I know that she is remembering Ethan’s funeral and can probably see his little casket as clearly as I can.

Tammy and Tory leave and I lean forward to focus to the sermon, elbows on knees, head in hands. As Pastor Judy begins, I look at Mom seated next to me and I think how she must be missing her own mother this day.

I close my eyes and fade back to Sundays passed when Grandma Mueller would give me a piece of gum or candy from her purse once the sermon started. I called it her “Let’s Make a Deal” purse because it contained anything that Monty Hall could ever think to ask for. Monty could ask for a hairpin, tweezers, a hard-boiled egg, whatever, Grandma would surely have it in her “Let’s Make a Deal” purse.

Back then I would lean forward just like this Grandma would walk my back with her fingers. She’d rub gently or scratch little messages onto me.

Love you.

My boy.

Hi T 
(she always called me T.)

And then … I felt it.

Hi T.

I actually
felt it
scratched into my back.

I let out a gasp and jerk upright like you do when stirred from those pre-sleep dreams. I swing my arms wide for balance, accidentally hitting my mom with one arm and the back of the pew with the other. The eyes of the congregation turn to me. Pastor Judy stumbles momentarily, but presses on and things continue as normal.

“Are you okay,” Mom whispers.

An instant sweat pours from me. I turn and see that the pew behind me is empty.

“I’m fine. Did you … did you scratch my back?” I ask.

“No, I didn’t touch you.”

Hi, T—
that was the message scratched onto my back.
Hi, T 
like Grandma Mueller used to scratch-write onto my back. I try to determine whether I had actually felt it or if it had merely been a powerful daydream.

From behind me comes a muffled giggle. Tory had snuck back upstairs and is hiding on the floor in the pew behind mine.

“Tory, did you do that?”

“Yes,” she giggles.

But she couldn’t even read yet, so she couldn’t possibly have done this.

“How? Why did you write ‘Hi, T’?”

“I didn’t, Daddy. I was drawing a picture.”

Some people get a burning bush, I get pillow feathers and back-scratched messages. That I believe these things were signs—did it make me a man of greater or lesser faith? If there is a God, He certainly has a sense of humor.

“Daddy, I don’t want to be downstairs. I want to stay here with you.”

Just then Tammy returns looking for Tory, giving her that hands-on-the-hip mom-frown when she sees her with me. I pull Tory close to me and kiss the top of her head. And when I do, I smell that odor of laundry detergent and cigarettes that I’ve always associated with Grandma Mueller. It comes and goes like a pin-prick, but I have no doubt. It was definitely her smell.

I want to believe there is life beyond this one and that maybe it exists within some other world interwoven with our own. That the inhabitants of this ‘Other World’ have simply passed through a one-way door that takes them out of the world we know, but they were are somehow still around, wanting to reach out to us. To scratch their way through the dimensional doors between us. And that sometimes with enough struggle on their end and enough need on our end they were able to break through—even if just to drop a feather at our feet or scratch a message on our back. Anything that might stir us and get us to move from where we are to where we are supposed to be.

Is this where I’m supposed to be?

Did I really believe what Mr. Innocent was telling me?

Charlie seemed pretty damn sure that Slim Jim had been innocent of Katie’s murder and that notion stirred a hibernating-bear of a thought from deep within me. Poked at it with a stick until it woke up and growled at me.

Maybe I was contriving a mystery so I could have something different to think about other than Ethan? And even if there was some truth to it, what good could come of it now? Who could be helped by my trudging around in the past like this? Not the Coopers. Their daughter was dead and they had made whatever peace they could make with that fact years ago. They knew who had killed Katie. There was no unsolved mystery here, so why create one?

I had come back to Willow Grove to find peace with my own child’s death. To learn how to let go. But instead I was reaching back to grab hold of something that everyone had let go of years ago. And it felt good to think I could help someone—even if it was a dead someone. I needed something to fix, but the question remained … was anything even broken?

Later on that Mother’s Day morning, Tory and Grandma Gaines sit together on the front porch swing. Tammy cautions Tory to slow down and to stop leaning so hard on her great-grandma.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Grandma says. “I’m old, but I’m tough.”

“When I asked Daddy how old Great-Grandpa was, he said that Great-Grandpa is so old that when he was a little boy he ate whole loaves of bread and rode a bike with square tires. Did you have a bike with square tires when you were a little girl, Grandma?”

“Hey, you weren’t supposed to tell anybody I said that!”

Grandma laughs and tells Tory a few tall-tales of her own before taking my two ladies into the house to finish preparing lunch. Old family ghosts keep that empty swing moving and the chains clanking and I sit down next to them for a couple minutes before going inside to visit with Aunt Paula and my dad.

Dad was already in the easy chair watching a baseball game—the remote in his right hand and aimed at the TV, poised to raise the volume at a moment’s notice. Paula was sitting at the dining room table in the adjacent room, staring down at the Sunday paper through bifocals.

“Who’s winning?” I ask, sitting down on the chair next to Dad.

“Hi, Tuck,” he says. “Not the Cubs.”

There is a tension to our relationship that had not been there when we were both younger. When, perhaps, the role of father and son is more clearly defined. I think it started when Tory was born and he became a grandpa. The week after her birth, Dad bought—for the second time in his life—a 1967 Oldsmobile 442. The first 1967 Olds 442 he had bought, appropriately enough, in 1967. But I came along in ‘68 and he ended up trading in his muscle car for something more family appropriate. If 
this
 442 doesn’t help him recapture some youth and glory, I’m going to recommend a 1980 DeLorean, some plutonium, and a flux capacitor.

When lunch is over, Tammy tells me, Dad, and Grandpa that the least we could do was to do the dishes considering the mothers had spent all morning making their own Mother’s Day meal. I start to argue, pointing out that I had offered to make hot dogs or mac and cheese, but Grandpa interrupts.

“The least we can do, huh? Well, never let it be said that Hollis Gaines won’t do the least he can do.”

Then he winks at Dad and me.

“Tucker, Ronald, to the kitchen.”

While we cleaned the kitchen, Tammy had gone to the florist to buy flowers for Ethan’s gravesite. When she returns, her eyes are red and she has mascara streaks down her face. She motions for me to come outside and I join her on the porch.

She starts speaking the second I close the door behind me and it’s as if I have joined her in the middle of a story she has already begun.

“So as I was leaving the flower shop, the lady behind the counter calls out to me. She held up a single rose and said ‘Here, this is for you. Happy Mother’s Day.’ And as soon as she said it, I knew it was from Ethan. I mean, I
knew it
. I
felt it
and the thought of him popped into my head on its own, you know? Like out of nowhere I had this intuitive certainty that it was from Ethan before I even had a conscious thought. Does that make any sense at all?”

“Yeah.”

She sniffs and dabs at her nose with a rolled up sweater sleeve. I reach in my back pocket for a handkerchief that isn’t there.

She continues, “Anyway, the florist said ‘It matches your outfit so perfectly, I just I had to give it to you.”

Then Tammy shows me the flower.

She is wearing a spring sweater that is sort of purplish-red. Like a vibrant mauve, I guess. Whatever the color, the rose she held up was exactly the same. So much so that the rose seems to sink inside of her as she holds it in front of her.

“I have never seen a flower that color before,” is all I can manage. I pull her into me and wrap my arms around her, careful not to crush the rose between us.

We had dinner that night with Mom and Larry. Since losing Ethan, things had become uncomfortable between my mom, and me and I was not looking forward to seeing her on Mother’s Day. Especially since my brother Gavin and sister Heather were both out of town at their respective in-laws. I didn’t much feel like telling her I loved her or thanking her for being “The World’s Best Grandmamom!” like it read on the card Tory had picked out.

While Tammy and Tory helped Larry in the kitchen, Mom and I chatted about Oprah, the latest movies and books, so on and so on. I knew she’d eventually feel the need to ask me how I was doing, and I knew I would feel the need to keep it inside and grind my teeth to dust.

But she resists the instinct. Instead, she busily knits away on her latest project, looking down through the glasses that rest on the tip of her nose. At times I do not even recognize this grandmother of Tory’s, this imposter who looks like my mom, but with smile wrinkles and touches of gray and other burdens of age. She has been a grandmother for four years now, but is still growing into the part. Soon she would be more grandmother than mother, in the same way that I was already more father than son.