Eight Minutes (3 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

THE WAY WE WERE

W
hile Toby is at preschool, I let Thud out the back door, retrieve my gloves, and head toward what I call my garden, nothing more than a couple of four-by-four-foot boxes I maintain with the hard-earned rewards of our compost pile. When I need to think, I come out here. It cleanses my soul to get my hands dirty.

Thud joins me, tail wagging, ears up, as I settle in the soil. He pushes his nose under my garden-gloved hand. I pull the gloves off to oblige him.

“Yeah, buddy, that’s good stuff, isn’t it?” I give him three good pats, our signal that the petting session is over. Good ole Thud. He wasn’t my idea, but he’s grown on me. For Eric, Thud is nothing but a source of joy, his running buddy. For me, Thud is a reminder of how much Eric has changed, which always makes me think about how he used to be.

We met at work, where I knew how to get through to guys like him. And he was a rock star there, spending his time on a very high-profile project. Our project team used to go out for beers, any of us who were still at the office at ten o’clock. We all worked eighty-hour weeks back then. One of us would get to a stopping point, walk through the cubes making the universal beer-drinking sign (tipped imaginary bottle and a stupid grin), and we’d go to the sports bar next door and decompress. I was the only female most of the time, but I could hold my own.

Our first date, if you can call it that, started when Eric came around making the sign and I was the only one there. I told him he was stuck with me. He looked pretty happy about that. Halfway through the first beer, I declared a moratorium on work talk, and we stayed up until four o’clock telling stories and laughing. Well, I’d tell a story and he’d ask questions. That’s how it worked.

I felt listened to for the first time in my life. Like when I complained about my leaky kitchen faucet and he asked so many questions that I drew a map of my apartment on a napkin. I didn’t think much of it until the next morning, when he presented me with a toolbox for my apartment. Inside, there were tools and a set of instructions for every imaginable home repair he’d anticipated I might need. He must’ve stayed up all night.

It was better than a dozen roses.

Everybody knew he was Spock smart and honey-badger tenacious. Everybody didn’t know Eric and I had that last part in common. Somewhere between that imaginary-beer-tipping signal and an unexpectedly intense good-night kiss, we turned that tenacity toward each other.

On our first weekend together, we hardly left my apartment. Monday morning, I opened my desk drawer to find a ratchet wrench. And a Ziploc bag with three sizes of nuts and bolts most commonly used in bed frames. And the mathematical formula to predict how many repetitive horizontal shifts would create adequate friction for the nut to separate from the bolt. And a small can of WD-40 with a long red straw and a diagram indicating the precise location to apply it in order to combat any accompanying squeak. Color coded to show where new ones could occur in the future.

It still makes me smile.

He told me he thought I was out of his league. I don’t think I was, of course. I think he was just handicapped by his parents’ lifestyle. His dad was a turnaround consultant for dying companies, so they moved to a new city almost every year, which meant Eric was always the new kid. The nerdy new kid who was good at science. It’s not like the girls were lining up to be his prom date. But Eric hit his stride in college; he found his people in the engineering department. Of course, they were mostly guys.

Eric’s not a roses-and-chocolates kind of guy, but once I understood him, I saw the romance in his ways. When he requested a transfer so we could date openly without compromising our work, it was as good as a proposal.

We’re a good team. We make a plan. Working so well together and being friends, well, that was just the upper crust. We were drilling down to the magma with each other. Establishing the core. The crust could crack, and we’d still have the core.

Or so we thought until the accident.

Eric was in the rehab facility for almost two months after I brought Toby home. I barely knew Lakshmi then. When we brought Eric home, he was in a lot of pain and sedated most of the time. Entire days passed when I’m not sure he knew Toby and I were in the same house.

He qualified for home health care, which sounded like a good idea at first. I didn’t realize that I would end up barely lifting a finger to help Eric’s recovery. I’d see him wince with pain, and I’d feel guilty that I wasn’t the one making it better for him. I also didn’t anticipate how much it would bother me that someone else was in our house all day. I found fault with every aide they sent us and complained more than I should’ve. I knew he was getting frustrated with me, but when I fired the third one, Eric’s response made me realize how much our marriage had changed.

He defended the home health aide and did not even flinch as he suggested that I go back to work. Right away. Put Toby in day care and get out of the house. Like it was that easy. Like the accident had erased his memory of what we’d decided together while I was pregnant. Like it had slipped his mind that the only reason we’d waited to have a baby was to make sure we could make it on one income. His. Like it didn’t matter that I knew exactly what I wanted to teach Toby at every developmental milestone that first year. He didn’t even acknowledge that we’d ever had a Plan A—much less that this was about Plan Z for me.

It was as if he had spouse-specific amnesia. He knew who I was, but it was as if he’d forgotten . . . well, who I was. I’m not proud of this, but I think I even said “Plan Z” to him.

He shot back, “You think this is my Plan A?”

The old Eric would’ve said “Shel,” in that softer voice, and then I would’ve hugged him and then he would’ve said something like, “We’re in Plan Z. But we’re in it together.”

Something like that.

That’s not how it went. And as much as I hated it, he was right. Pragmatic and right. One of us had to work and it couldn’t be him, and it wouldn’t do any good to sit around and pout about it. I couldn’t undo this any more than I could bring my mom back to help me.

While I accepted the reality, from that point on, I felt we were out of sync. I kept wanting a do-over, but Eric never looked back. With some money coming in, he would worry less, he said. Having the house to himself during the day would free him up to do what he had to do: focus on making progress he could measure.

After that, I couldn’t help focusing on what I couldn’t measure: the effect of those eight minutes. Memory loss. Personality shifts. Like he was tone-deaf emotionally. Out of nowhere, he developed an obsession with getting a dog—and a Dalmatian, to boot! I’d figured we’d have a family dog at some point, but why now? He was convinced it would speed his recovery. But a Dalmatian? They seemed too boisterous. Maybe a lap dog? Please. He wouldn’t even discuss it. Only a Dalmatian would do.

It made no sense to me. It worried me, in fact. I tried to talk to him, but he didn’t want to hear it. I started a mental tally of any previously unnoticed idiosyncrasies, which I reported on the sly to Eric’s doctor.

We got the dog. Eric named him Thud because the darn thing had no idea how big he was and kept thudding his head into the sofa, trying to retrieve a ball that had rolled underneath.

I smile, remembering how goofy and cute he was as a puppy. Looking up from my work in the dirt, it takes a minute before I find Thud’s latest hiding place, under the feather grasses near the fence line. He’s chewing the cover off a tennis ball with characteristic determination. I guess it runs in the family.

I took a freelance assignment and cried every day when I dropped Toby off at the Oasis Verde day care. It was hard, but we paid our bills and Eric made good progress on his mobility. His doctor was satisfied, yet for months I continued the covert reports of discrepancies in my husband the way he was before the eight minutes and after. One day, the doctor finally stopped me mid-sentence and gave me a referral to a therapist.

I’ve never been so embarrassed.

I made myself go. Anna let me say what I needed to say without worrying about how ungrateful it all sounded. I really believed I had no right to feel the way I felt. Yet I felt it anyway.

She asked me what he was like when I was pregnant. He was so Eric—in the best way. He went with me to every prenatal visit. We met a doula, or labor coach. She insisted we develop a birth plan and emphasized the benefits of making rational decisions in advance. Eric loved the idea of a birth plan, but he was insulted that I’d even consider a doula. He thought her job existed on the assumption that men weren’t capable of assisting with labor. His final contribution to the birth plan? No doula.

Ha.

I told Anna about the night Toby was born. It’s not often that you can pinpoint the exact time—within eight minutes—when your marriage fundamentally changed. I was convinced that if Eric and I could unpack those eight minutes, if we could understand what had happened to him, agree on the problem, then maybe we could flowchart a way to get back to ourselves.

Fingers on the linked roots of a nut grass, I chase them to the source and reach for my spade. At least, I hope it’s the source. I keep digging.

Eric accompanied me to therapy only once, but the minute he sat on that couch, I knew it wasn’t going to work. I realized I must’ve made him sound like a jerk, because Anna was clearly surprised by what she saw in Eric. He came across as attentive, honest, and admirably determined to recover, still walking with a cane at that point. You see, I have one of
those
husbands. Everybody understands what I see in him. Everyone tells me how lucky I am.

Mid-session, I started to cry. What could I say? He wasn’t a jerk. He just wasn’t himself. I wadded up the tissue in my fist, and we spent the rest of the hour talking about managing my expectations.

Thud bursts out of the feather grass, shaking the tennis ball cover like he’s got a snake in his mouth. When I startle, the root of the nut grass breaks off in my hand. I shake the dirt off the cluster. Maybe I got it all.

Of course Eric’s different; he had a life-threatening accident. Of course he’s different; he’s a father now. I can’t expect him to be the same. That’s what Anna would say. It’s what my friends tell me. It’s what I tell myself. I’m managing my expectations.

But those eight minutes changed him. I know what I know.

CHAPTER SIX

THE AIRPLANE GAME

E
aster is a bust. For the entire week prior, I try to get Toby interested, painting eggs and talking about the Easter Bunny. If a three-year-old could say “meh,” he would. In fact, he’s been “meh” about everything except John Robberson and that airplane game. He’s got Sanjay hooked on it, too.

Today, I actually forced him to bring a toy dump truck to the park. It didn’t work.

“Does the airplane game bother you?” I ask Lakshmi, not taking my eyes off the boys.

“Look at them. Sanjay is following along like an obedient puppy. That bothers me a bit,” Lakshmi says. “This is clearly Toby’s game.”

She’s right. It’s the same every day. Toby always crashes; it’s never Sanjay.

“They should take turns,” I say. “I’ll talk to him.”

“I don’t think it will work,” she says.

We watch the familiar crash, but this time the boys make such a fuss, we go check on them. Toby is lying on the ground, pretending he has a broken leg. Sanjay can’t rescue him, Toby explains, until he gets a cast like John Robberson.

“You have to lay down,” Sanjay insists, as he applies the pretend cast on Toby’s left leg.

“I am waying down,” Toby says, sitting up.

I ask, “Now, Toby, which one is John Robberson? The pilot or the rescuer?”

“Me!” he says, hobbling away. “With a bwoken weg!” Sanjay scrambles after him, and before they reach the slide, both boys have their arms outstretched like airplanes once again.

“See what I mean?” Lakshmi smiles. “He’s always John Robberson. It’s okay. He can’t help it.”

“Can’t help it?”

“Be honest, Shelly,” she says. “You know John Robberson is not his imaginary friend.”

She’s right again. I do know this much, at least. I raise my eyebrows at her.

“You may not want to hear it,” she says, “but I suspect this is like the New Delhi boy. I think Toby is responding to what his old soul is revealing to him.”

“I knew you were going to say that.” I smile and try not to let on that I’ve been thinking the same thing. “Okay. Let’s say that’s true. I just don’t get what’s being revealed. It’s not like Toby has gained this mind-blowing wisdom or anything. All he does is play the same game all the time. What’s the point?”

“You need to know more in order to put the pieces together. I’d ask Toby,” she says. “The best way to find out about John Robberson is to go to the source.”

She must see the reluctance in my face, because she says, “Look, it’s all fine and harmless right now, but I wouldn’t ignore it. If John Robberson wants something from Toby, don’t you want to know?”

We turn toward the boys and watch Toby crash his plane and Sanjay rescue him yet again. From the outside, it looks like nothing just happened, but I feel the sudden shift inside me, as if Lakshmi has swiped back a heavy curtain and I’m squinting against the sun. John Robberson has somehow morphed into more than a remote possibility.

Don’t I want to know what John Robberson wants? The longer we sit there, not saying anything else, just watching those boys fly and crash and fly and crash, the more I know I couldn’t ignore that question if I tried. My ears are ringing like an alarm that went off way too late. My mind rattles with all the horrible possibilities.

“What could he want?” I blurt, breaking the silence between us. “He can’t hurt Toby, can he?”

“Oh, I doubt it.” Lakshmi is not only unperturbed, she seems completely unaware of the impact of her words. “He’s probably just got some kind of karma that needs to be worked out.”

With the urgency I used to feel right before a project kickoff meeting, and maybe a tinge of anxiety, I embark on a fact-finding mission. After Toby’s nap, I retrieve my old leather portfolio and sit down with him at the kitchen table. I interview him like a new client, taking care to write down his answers. I read the list back to him, to make sure he agrees.

1. John Robberson is a grown man with a smooth belly who may or may not look like Eric, who may be Eric’s age and maybe even as old as Pa.
   
2. John Robberson might wear a uniform made of a shirt and pants.
   
3. John Robberson talked or whispered to Toby at the flight museum and asked if Toby liked his plane.
   
4. Toby likes John Robberson’s plane.
   
5. John Robberson thinks you should wink at girls.
   
6. John Robberson likes coffee and oatmeal cream pies.
   
7. John Robberson wants Toby to meet someone named Kay.
   

“Why does he want you to meet Kay?” I ask him, to clarify this last point.

“I don’t want to!” he says, using his outside voice.

I return to my paper and add an item:

1. Toby doesn’t want to meet Kay.
   

“There. I wrote it down. But why not?”

He starts kicking his feet against the chair legs. “I just don’t!”

“Okay, okay.” I rest my hand against his shins. “Anything else you can think of?”

He leaves the table and finds his bucket. He pulls out a toy plane. “This one isn’t the same as John Wahbuhson.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is the F-14. Tomcat.” He holds it up to me. “John Wahbuhson flew the F-105 fighter pwane. Thud.” He fishes around in his bucket again.

“Like our Thud?”

Toby goes to pet the dog while I amend one of the items on the list.

1. Toby likes John Robberson’s plane and identifies it as a F-105 fighter plane.
   

Toby knows his airplanes. Ever since the Boneyard, we’ve read the same mind-numbing book every night. It’s closer to an aviation encyclopedia than a bedtime story.

“Daddy will be home soon,” I say. “You go play now.” On the way to the laundry, I take a tiny detour into his bedroom. My heart thumps like Thud’s tail on the hardwood floor when I realize there is no F-105 mentioned anywhere in that book.

Eric, home from work, surprises me in the hallway. “What are you doing with his bedtime book?”

“There’s no F-105 in here,” I say, flipping the pages toward him.

“Okaaaay.” He takes the book from me and closes it. “And why do you find this omission upsetting?”

“Toby says it’s John Robberson’s plane. Our son has a toy F-105, but do you even know what an F-105 looks like?”

“No. Should I?”

“No. And neither should Toby. How can a three-year-old know something like the name of that plane?”

“He probably saw one at the museum. I don’t know.” He walks toward our bedroom.

But I know. Toby knows something, and there’s no way he could know it. I follow Eric into the bedroom. He pulls a T-shirt from his top drawer and turns toward me, bare chested. I can see the scar under his ribcage.

He says, “Why do you have to read so much into it?”

“Listen to this.” I read him my entire list. “What about the oatmeal cream pies?”

He sits down on the bed and pulls off his socks. “What about them? They’re a snack. Unhealthy, okay, but it’s not like his imaginary friend is telling him to drop a bomb on unsuspecting villagers.”

“Why does he keep talking about what John Robberson likes? Why would he do that?” I pick up the socks he dropped.

“For you. The more you ask him about John Robberson, the more he tells you about it. He’s humoring you. He knows you want to know.”

“What about Kay?” I ask, pointing to the list. “Every time I ask him about Kay, he freaks out. He’s not humoring me on that one, now is he?”

Eric rolls his eyes just as my cell phone rings in my pocket. I go to the study to take the call. It’s international, which means it’s Carla, which means it’s the middle of the night there, which means I should take this.

I’m now two life phases ahead of Carla, my college roommate. She’s single and took a consulting sales job right out of school, so she travels all the time and makes tons of money, and we have almost nothing in common anymore. Except that on bad days, we call each other and express how much we wish we could change places. She’s in London, sitting alone in her five-star hotel room in the middle of the night, her sleep pattern still stubbornly adhering to the wrong time zone. I’m relieved for the lack of crisis this time. Jet lag. I can deal with jet lag, especially if it’s not mine.

I tell her, “Someone told me that jet lag is the time it takes for your soul to catch up to your body.”

“How woo-woo of you.”

“Eric thinks I’m majoring in woo-woo right now.”

“What do you mean?”

I tell her about John Robberson. I hear Carla tapping keys as soon as I say “F-105.”

“There’s this book I read awhile back . . . here it is. It’s written by the parents of a little boy who was the reincarnation of a World War Two fighter pilot.”

“Why are they all fighter pilots?”

She laughs. “The kid had ungodly nightmares—like he was trapped in a burning airplane—and he kept talking about this guy by name. The mom believed it right away but the dad refused. Then he got obsessed with it and did all this research, and by the end of the book, they took the kid to the place where the plane crashed so the old soul could have some peace. And it went away and the kid forgot about it.”

“So much for the comforting idea of children with old souls.”

Carla says, “I know. I hear moms say things like that all the time, like it’s a good thing. Like it means they’re wise beyond their years. But, jeez, I think it would be awful if your kid really had an old soul—because it means he’s a reincarnation, right? And he’d be talking to dead people and obsessed with how the last guy died. Who wants their kid to remember somebody else’s death?”

I don’t answer, but she stops talking. I hear ice clink in her glass.

She asks, “Toby’s not obsessed, is he? Having nightmares?”

“No nightmares. But he plays this weird airplane game every day where all he does is crash. Breaks his leg ten times a day.”

“But he never dies, right? So it’s different.” She laughs. “At least you don’t have to take him to revisit a crash site.”

“And one more thing. He talks about someone named Kay. Not in a good way. Just keeps saying he doesn’t want to go see her. Evidently that’s what John Robberson wants him to do.”

“It’s so weird to hear you talk like he’s an actual person.”

“Well, technically, he’s not anymore,” I say, dejected. “At best, he’s a spirit with a body he left behind.”

“And how does that work, anyway?” Carla continues. “What’s the lag time between one soul departing and it landing in another body? Minutes? Years? Nanoseconds?”

I hear the chair squeak and realize I cannot stop shaking my right foot. “I’m serious. It’s freaking me out. I don’t want some lost soul working out his karma on my kid.”

She says, in a softer voice, “It’s a lot easier to just believe in good old heaven, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t until my mom died that I appreciated how comforting the concept of heaven is. I remember standing next to Pa at the funeral home. All their old friends repeated these platitudes so confidently that for his sake and mine, I wanted them all to be true: She was no longer in pain. She was in a better place. She would be there to greet Pa when it was his turn. She was watching over me and the baby.

What if they were wrong? What if her spirit, her soul, the very essence of her being had already moved on to someone else? The idea that my mother’s soul could shuck her old connections so easily is unsettling.

I couldn’t do it, just let my soul drift away. If I died right before my first grandbaby was born, I’d find a way to haunt Toby. Not in a mean way—I’d just want to see.

“What am I going to do?” I ask Carla.

“Um. Google.” When I don’t laugh, she says, “Start with the plane and go from there.” I hear her take a sip from her drink. “Come on, you’re slipping, girl. Do your work.”

As soon as I hang up, I find it:

Affectionately called “Thud” by its crews, the Thunderchief was the first supersonic tactical fighter-bomber developed from scratch rather than from an earlier design. The “D” model was the most widely used and produced version, with 610 built. The F-105 served throughout the Vietnam War, dropping thousands of tons of bombs on North Vietnamese targets. Thuds continued in U.S. Air Force service until the early 1980s, when they were retired from the Air National Guard.

I bookmark that page and hone my search, looking once again for John Robberson. This time, I try the Air Force website, but I get lost in the jargon. It feels like a maze that could take years to figure out. Finally, I find a site by an amateur Air Force historian that I realize is unofficial, but at least it’s clear. Bookmark. There were about eight hundred F-105s built; looks like 395 were lost in battle.

There’s a list. A freaking list! “F-105 PILOTS SHOT DOWN.” It doesn’t get much clearer than that. It’s crude, sure. It looks like a Word document. I can just picture some gruff old veteran spending hours on the phone, going to a million vet reunions, tracking all this down.

“Better him than me,” I say. “I don’t know who you are, buddy, but thank you.”

My heart is in my throat as I do a search for Robberson in the document. No result. I try again. Nope. I jump to the end. Total: 443 pilots. Okay. Back to the top. I try again, thinking maybe I made a typo. I alternate spellings—Roberson, Robertson—which returns several entries, but no John. I smile, remembering Toby’s insistence on “Wahbuhson.” Fully aware that I’m relying on the power of phonetics, I try Robberson again. Nothing. I scroll down the names, which aren’t in alphabetical order. Maybe chronological. Not all of them died. It has their status: POW, Rescued, KIA. Nothing. I’m sure it’s there. Maybe I missed something. Second time through, same result. I can’t believe it. Three times. Nothing.