Where the Broken Lie (18 page)

Everything Dad does these days is either done slowly or not done at all. Dad has not treated his body well in his fifty-four years and it caught up to him in recent years. A collapsed lung, a heart attack, another collapsed lung. Still, he claims no regrets. If you ask Dad, he’ll tell you that his health issues aren’t the result of smoking, drinking, and the other accoutrements of an undisciplined lifestyle, they are partly genetic and partly environmental.

“Sure, I know the smoking probably made things than they wouldn’t have been. I’m not a fool. But that’s not why I’ve had the problems I’ve had, Tuck. It’s whatcha call Farmer’s Lung. Plus my Grandpa John always had heart problems.”

Like the autumn and its changing personality, Dad is sometimes refreshingly brisk, sometimes too cold, sometimes surprising in his warmth. Autumn used to be my favorite season, the cool relief from oppressive summer. But then I realized that autumn lacks something that I desperately need in my life—hope. Autumn offers no hope. Of yesterday it teases, of tomorrow it taunts. Leaving you to sweat in recollection and shiver in foreboding. All of its promises are cold, the autumn.

With the aid of a cane I had never seen him use before, he walks to Ethan’s grave and stands in front of the headstone.

I wonder at the man’s thoughts.

And then he begins to cry. The tears come and go like a spring shower. After years of seeing the lightning and hearing the thunder, I had finally felt the rain.

He walks back around to the front of the headstone and clears away some leaves and twigs with his cane. Then he reaches inside his jacket pocket and — to my utter astonishment — pulls out an envelope. Dad lived in a small town a few miles from Willow Grove and apparently they, too, had gotten word of the Grave Letters phenomenon. He bends down and places it under the statue of the weeping angel that looks over Ethan’s grave.

Head bowed, he stands still in front of the headstone for a moment, then coughs hard a couple times and returns to his car.

When he is gone, I walk over and open the letter.

The short letter drains me of all energy and I head back for town. I consider taking the Mr. Innocent letter with me, but decide against it. I will gamble that it will either still be there tomorrow or Mr. Innocent will pick it up and write me back.

Sometimes I feel like I didn’t know my own dad any better than Ethan got to know his. As a young boy, it was my dream to grow up to be like my dad. As a man, I fear that I have done just that. But having children of our own makes it both easier and tougher to love ourselves. Easier when we see the beauty within them, harder when we see our own flaws mirrored back.

Dad’s love for me is Old Testament. It’s the way he knows and I eventually learned to respect it. And maybe now I can learn to actually accept it.

I have spent too much of my life being ashamed of my dad. He smoked, he drank, and he always laughed too loud for me. He cheated on Mom and caught my shame because of it. But in this one short letter I learned more about my father than I had learned in all the conversations we ever had. I knew my dad was a good man. And I knew that he loved me. Because fathers love their sons.

Then Grandma got sick.

She had been having abdominal pain for a few days before Aunt Paula and Grandpa were finally able to convince her to go to the hospital. When she finally did go, the doctor decided to keep her overnight for observation. When he was unable to diagnose her symptoms, he had her stay another night. And then another. They performed exploratory surgery and still they found nothing.

It was this nothing that would soon kill her.

After surgery, they checked her into what they called a rehabilitation center for one week of rest and recovery. I had never actually been inside a rehabilitation center, but in my mind I had images of stroke victims learning to talk again or amputees getting used to their new prosthetics.

That was not what this place was.

This was a place they put old people they didn’t know what else to do with. This was purgatory. A place for those who were closer to death than to life.

With Grandma away, Grandpa had assumed the breakfast duties. “You know you don’t have to do this, Grandpa,” I say between bites of bacon one morning.

“What’s that?”

“Making these big breakfasts every morning. I usually don’t eat breakfast at all.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. Kind of makes me feel, oh, I don’t know—normal, I guess. Having breakfast is normal.”

I nod. “The bacon’s good.”

“Yep. And everything else is either undercooked or overcooked. I ain’t had much practice at this in the past, oh, say fifty-five years or so.”

I bet fifty-five years looked smaller from his end of it. The frying pan sizzles as Grandpa lays more bacon in it. He keeps his back to me. “Hey, Grandma was telling us the other day how the two of you met.”

“Oh, was she now?” he says as he scrapes runny eggs into the garbage. Then he puts more bacon into the frying pan and turns back around to face me. “And what did she say—that I was an old grouch?” He smiles his grandfather smile and I wonder when that had come to him. It’s not the kind of look a man is born with.

“No, not at all. She said it was a double-date with John and Marge. It was Marge that thought you were an old grouch. Grandma said she thought you were handsome.”

“Well, I suppose they’re both right,” he says with a wink. Grandpa has his back to me again, paying too much attention to the bacon.

“So, what did you think of her?”

“Oh, she was about the prettiest thing I’d ever laid eyes on.” Left hand in his pocket, tongs in his right, he turns the bacon, looking at things I couldn’t see. “Never expected a second date, but I asked her anyway. She said yes and we went for a picnic. This time without that chatterbox Marge.”

A picnic. I could see the red and white checkered blanket, the woven basket, the sandwiches wrapped in white linen.

“We were in a play together, too. She didn’t tell you that, though, did she?”

“No,” she didn’t. “A play? Like a play play?”

“No, of course she didn’t. That was before we ever went out.”

“Wow, a play. I never really pictured you as a thespian, Grandpa.”

“Well, hell, I wasn’t always bald and fat, you know.”

“What play was it?”

“You know, I don’t remember what the play was. I worked backstage anyway—props and stuff, you know—and your Grandma had a small part. The only thing I really remember about any of that is your grandmother. I was two years older but still couldn’t muster the courage to ask her out. But imagine my surprise a year later when my buddy John talks me into going on a double date with him and his gal Marge and that little gal from the community theater shows up.”

“Did she remember you?”

“Oh, heck no. And I didn’t tell her about it either.”

“You didn’t tell her that you remembered her from the play?”

“No, siree Bob. Not that night. Not ever.”

“You never told her?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I guess maybe after a while of hearing her tell the story of how we met, I didn’t want to make it something other than what it was to her. Seemed like destiny the way she told it.” He puts two more pieces of bacon on my plate. “I never wanted to be anything other than the man she thought she met for the first that night with John and Marge. Now, how’s that bacon?”

I was not the man Tammy had married. I stopped being that man when that man lost his son.

The new me took a leave of absence from work so I could stay home and drink because being drunk helped. When sober, my thoughts were scattered, like a thousand numbered index cards spilled on the floor. And me picking them up one by one, trying to find some sense in the million combinations. I’d replay the night at the hospital with Ethan and feel the tears build. What were Tammy and I doing while our little boy was dying inside of her? What kind of mundane bullshit were we discussing as his heart stopped?

Is that what you’re wearing?

What should we have for supper?

Wait till I tell you what Dave in accounting did today.

Whatever it was, I hope we weren’t laughing. I hope he died in our sleep.

One thought always lead to another and to another and there was no end, but the drinking helped. I drank to suppress it all and then—once numb—drank more to let it ease back out of me. Not all at once as it came when I was sober, but little by little and under my control. A turn of the valve. Drink a little, hurt a little, slow down, drink less, feel it coming, drink more, knock it down, drink more, keep it down, drink more, can’t see straight, drink more, vomit, cry, pass out.

I’d get drunk and write poetry. Some of the poetry was ok, a lot of it sucked, all of it helped. The alcohol dulled the pain and allowed me to express it all at the same time. I let the tears flow freely: onto the paper, smearing with the ink and mixing with the words I had written; or into my drink where I could swallow them back into me.

The first poem came after a phone call one night with my old college roommate Chris. He and his wife had a son two weeks prior to our losing Ethan and it was his talking about their baby not sleeping through the night that sparked me. When I hung up the phone, I doused my freshest pain with vodka and let the words flow like water over jagged rock.

The night before I left for Willow Grove, Tammy found me in Ethan’s room.

“Hey,” she said softly, arms crossed and leaning against the door frame.

Normally, I checked on her, usually finding her on the phone or crying alone in Ethan’s room. Sitting in the rocking chair in the corner and staring at the empty crib. Her arms wrapped around an ungifted Teddy Bear and that giant empty sorrow that I couldn’t chase away from her. She embraced it, favored it and would not let me take it away from her, however desperately I tried. However badly I needed to be able to. After a while I stopped trying. It’s harder to feel helpless that way.

“Hey.”

“How ya doing?”

“I’m fine, Tam.”

She looked down at the empty glass next to me.

“How many of those have you had?”

“One fewer than I need,” I said. And then added, “So far.”

She moved away from me and sat down on the loveseat by the fireplace. I thought about how we had sat there together the night before losing Ethan and I recalled everything from that one night in my previous life. How she was wearing the black turtleneck sweater I had given her for Christmas. How the flicker of the flames were reflected in her eyes. How the light from the fire seemed to settle over her in a soft orange glow. How our four hands caressed her belly.

“Your mom called earlier. She said to tell you she loves you.”

I nodded. “You two have a nice talk?”

I grabbed my glass and went to the kitchen before she could answer. She followed. She leaned against the fridge with her arms crossed in front of her and watched me make another vodka tonic.

I turned around and took a long sip. “You want one?”

She shook her head. “Your mom would like to be able to talk to you, too, you know.”

“I’ve got nothing to say to her.”