Hearts Left Behind (13 page)

“Tam, I talked to Grandpa and Grandma and they’re fine
with it.”

“Fine with what?” she asked.

I switched the phone receiver to my other ear.  A
sharp pain shot up my side as I stood and it felt a lot like Edie’s knuckles
were still grinding against my ribs. 
“Fine with you and
Tory coming here to stay, too.
 
With them.
With me.”
 

I inhaled deeply and silently exhaled all the pain
from Edie and everything else. 
I
pulled up my shirt to check for bruising, or perhaps a splintered bone sticking
out of my skin.

“I don’t know
,
I just feel
different here. 
In my old house, my old town.”

“Away, you mean.”

“Yes, away. 
But not from you
and not from Tory.”

“Okay.”

“Okay?  You’ll come?  You’ll stay?”

“For a while.
  I don’t
know, a week or two maybe.  We’ll come tomorrow.”

“I love you, Tam.”

I first met Tammy Emerson during my junior year at
college.  It was the Sunday night before the
Fall
semester started and the streets, fraternities, sororities, and dormitories
were bustling with new students and saddened parents, as well as returning
students and joyous parents.  An aerial view of the town that day would
have looked very much like an ant farm.

My roommate
Chris
and his sister Maggie had both returned that day and I offered to help Maggie
move into her new dorm while Chris stayed back to unpack his things at our
apartment.

Outside Stanley Hall, the streets were jam-packed and
there was nowhere to park, so Maggie asked me to stay in the car while she
sought out her new room.  I was blocking traffic behind me so I drove
off.  I went around the block four times before Maggie came back
down.  With her was a very pretty girl with long dark hair.

Maggie opened the passenger side door and leaned
in.  “Okay, we’ll carry everything up to the room – you stay here with the
rest of my things, all right?  It won’t take long.”

They each grabbed armfuls of whatever and left. 
I was again blocking traffic and had to go around the block again.  Maggie
was waiting for me when I got back.

“Did you lose your help?” I asked.

“She’ll be back down.  She got a phone call.”

Maggie grabbed a suitcase and a duffle bag and took
off again.  I started to pull away when the passenger door opened again.

“Whoa, just a second there,
driver,” said a smiling Tammy.

As she leaned in to grab a milk crate full of books
from the backseat, I was able to get a good look at her
under the car’s interior dome light.  She was
more than pretty.  She was stunning.  And she had the cutest damn
crinkly-nose smile I had ever seen.

“Ah, come on, you dopey thing,” she said to the milk
crate lodged between a laundry basket and a backpack.

“I better go,” I said, “I don’t want to block
traffic.  Why don’t you get in and go around the block with me one time.”

Tammy said, “
No,
its fine.  There’s nobody behind you.”  Then she pulled out the milk
crate and book bag and left.

G
o around the
block with me one time – did I seriously say that?

Later that night I would tell
Chris that I had met the woman I was going to marry.

When Tammy was three, her mother Bonnie was killed in
an automobile accident.  Of this woman who bore her life, Tammy has but
one photograph and but one memory.

This is the photo.

The aesthetic quality of the picture would suggest
that it came from one of those shopping mall photo booths. An off-centered,
grainy, black and white shot of her face.  She is not smiling and her eyes
are looking at something above the camera lens that captured her attention for
a moment that ended up lasting forever.  Her eyes are focused on something
concrete, but there is an ethereal quality to her look. 

When Tory was a baby, sometimes as I was changing
her diaper she would stare at the corner of her
bedroom, but there was nothing there.  No toys, no stuffed animals,
nothing on the wall.  But she was focused on something.  It was that
kind of look on
Bonnie’s
face. 
A long, hard, concentration on nothing at all.

As a gift for her daughter someday, I am going to
write a life around that picture of Bonnie Jean Emerson.  I will tell who
snapped the photo and how Bonnie knew that person.  It will tell of
everything that happened in her life that led her to that moment and everything
that happened afterward.  The story will explain why Tammy’s family never
talked to her about her mother and why there is only one photograph.  And
why it is this photograph.  I will tell my wife everything she ever wanted
to know about her mother.  Everything she has been deprived of by death
and family.

That is the one photo.  This is the one memory.

It was a blueberry smell that woke
Tammny
on that one-memory
morning.  She rode it to the kitchen where her mom stood in front of the
stove.  The image is still vivid to Tammy. 
A
spatula in her right hand, left hand on hip.
 
Cigarette
burning in an ashtray on the counter.
  Her mom’s hair is long,
brown, straight.  It flows over the shoulder straps on her white cotton
nightgown stamped with bouquets of blue flowers.  From the corner of her
eye she sees her little girl and – in slow motion – she turns and smiles down
at her.

Stop. 
Rewind.
 
Turn and smile.

When the rest of us are remembering what we remember
about our mothers, all things good and bad, this is what Tammy does.

Stop.
Rewind.
  Turn and
smile.

So wonderfully normal.
 
So magically ordinary.
  Making blueberry pancakes on a
Saturday morning.  Not like a twenty year old mixed-up single mom. 
Not like someone who was capable of dying young.  Not like the tragedy she
would become.  Not like anything but a mom.

That is the memory.

In a dream one night, Tammy’s mother gave me her own
memory of that moment and the images are every bit as vivid as those that Tammy
describes. 

Little girl Tammy is standing there in the kitchen
doorway, teddy bear tucked under her right arm.  Her hair is getting long
and
Bonnie imagines how cute it would
look in a bob, although Grandma Joyce would not approve.  She is wearing a
white cotton nightgown sprinkled with bouquets of blue flowers, just like
Bonnie.  Just like her mom. 

Tammy chews on her left thumbnail, anxious and happy
in this secret watching moment.  Her nose is freckled, her eyes are bright
and
she is ready for the world.  She
is ready for life.  She looks up, drops her hands and lifts her face with
a broad smile.

My how I do love this little girl
, Bonnie thinks to herself.

Stop.
Rewind.
Turn and smile.

In the maples in front of Grandpa and Grandma
Gaines’ house a brown bushy-tailed squirrel scampered
across the telephone wires.  The sound of boys playing baseball could be
heard off in some distance – or at least what passed for distance in Willow
Grove.  In some further distance than that, a dog barked.

I rocked on the porch swing and waited for Tammy and
Tory to arrive.  My eyes kept watch of the railroad tracks that my two
ladies would soon be rumbling over.  Three trains came and went. 
Each of them blaring their horns faintly, then loudly,
then faintly again.  Swinging back and forth, I thought back to the day we
brought baby Tory home from the hospital.  We were living in a two-bedroom
mobile home that I refused to call a trailer.  We were young and happier
than I realized - recognizing when I’m happy is something I’ve never been very
good at.  Then all of a sudden, into our lives comes this tiny little
something that I immediately realize has my entire world stashed inside of
it.  I remember thinking that very thought the day we brought her home
from the hospital.  We walked inside and I set Tory atop the breakfast bar
in her car seat.  I looked at her and I thought to myself, “
Everything - the whole damn world - right there
.

Tam and I laughed as our baby girl looked back and
forth between the two of us.  Eyes wide-open, she looked wise somehow.

“Well, now what?” I had asked Tammy that day…

“Daddy!”
Tory screamed at me
from inside the van.

My eyes had been following them since they crossed the
tracks, but my mind was disconnected from the moment and didn’t receive the
message. 
Memory-blindness.

“Daddy!” she screamed again, running toward me now.

I stepped down off the porch and bent down to envelope
my little girl in my arms.  She wrapped her arms around me and I lifted
her up for a kiss.  She kept her legs running in air and kicked me below
the belt three times in rapid succession.  I yelped and fell to my knees
in the yard.  Still holding Tory against me, I fell backward and then
released her to
lay
on the ground next to me. 

“I missed you SO much,
Daddy!”

“I missed you, too,
Sweetie,” I said in a fake falsetto that made Tammy and I both laugh.

I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.  When I
opened them again, Tammy’s upside down face was staring down at me and smiling.

“Well, now what?” she asked.

With Grandpa and Grandma more than happy to play
babysitter to their Great granddaughter, Tammy and I were able to spend a lot
of time together over the next few days.  We went out to dinner, to the
movies, to coffee shops.  We talked.  We were beginning to find each
other again. 
Learning each other all over again – some
of it old and familiar, some of it new and different.

I found those Betty-Cooper-like upturns at the corners
of her mouth and her optimistic gray-green eyes. 
Her
sweetness and
optimism, which I feared
had died.
  She laughed at my bad jokes.

Over dinner one night, I told her about the letters I
had written to Beatrice Hart and Phyllis Ross and she encouraged me to write
more.  “I don’t know, Tam.  It seems kind of weird, doesn’t it?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said.  “Besides, if
it makes you feel better, that’s all that matters, right?”

“Yeah, I suppose.”

“It helps them and it helps you.  I think it’s
wonderful.”

“Maybe,” I said.  “We’ll see.”

I repositioned my fork and knife next to my empty
dinner plate several times and then drank the rest of my margarita.  Her
eyes hung on me as I did.  Usually I’m pretty good with silence, but if
there’s something that is being unsaid in that quiet space, I sometimes have
trouble holding my tongue. 

“You probably think I’m drinking too much
still.”  I caressed the empty glass, stared down at it.  “It makes me
feel better.  And like you said, that’s all that matters, right?”

“Don’t do that, Tucker,” she warned.  “It’s not
the same thing and you know it.”

“Well, it sort of is the same thing.”

“It’s not healthy.  It’s destructive.”

“I’m not an alcoholic, Tam.  I promise.  And
I’m pretty sure I don’t have what it takes to become one.”

“You’ve got alcoholics on both sides of your
family.  I’m pretty sure you do have what it takes.  It’s in your
blood.”

“Well, the genes may be
in me, but I’m telling you they’re recessive. 

I redirected the conversation.  “What about you?”
I asked.  “What have you been doing to feel better?”

Relenting, she leaned back in her chair and let out a
deep sigh.  “Well, actually, I’ve been going to this support group for
parents who have lost children.  I met a woman from
Werton
who lost her daughter to SIDS.  We’ve had lunch a few times, talked on the
phone.”

“Good,” I said.  “That’s good.  I’m happy
you’ve found someone who can help.”

“Oh, and I ordered these,” she said, reaching inside
her purse.  She pulled out what looked like a business card and handed it
across the table to me.  It said
This
random act of kindness is done in loving
memory of our child ______. 
After
the word ‘child’, Tammy had written Ethan Merrill.

“Wow, this is great.”

“Isn’t it?  I ordered them from this website the
support group recommended.”

“So then what - you just give a gift or something to
someone and put this card in with it?”

“Exactly.
  You want to
use one tonight?  We could pay for someone’s dinner.”