Hearts Left Behind (14 page)

We surveyed the restaurant and settled upon a young
mother and her two children who were sitting in the far corner of the
restaurant.  Her toddler son was crawling around the table while her
daughter was waving a picture she had drawn in front of her face.  We paid
for the woman’s bill and gave the waitress the card
.

“When she asks for her bill, give her this instead.”

When we got home that night, everyone was in bed and
the house was dark.  I snuck into Tory’s room to give her a kiss goodnight
and found her awake.

“Why aren’t you sleeping, little girl?”

She shrugged her shoulders.  I sat down on the
edge of the bed.

“What’s the matter,
Sweetie?  Is something bothering you?”

Shrug.

“Okay, it’s late.  You need to get some sleep,
okay?”

I leaned forward and kissed her forehead, pulling the
covers up to her chin.  As I started to get up, she spoke.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think Ethan is doing now?”

Moonlight seeped into the room between a
gap
in the curtains, shining a silvery stripe down Tory’s
face.  She looked back up at the moon, not at me, and I remembered that
favorite storybook of hers and how we would copy from it as part of her bedtime
routine.

“I love you all the way to the moon, Daddy.”

“And I love you all the way to the moon and back,
Little Nut Brown
Hare
.”

“I don’t know, probably playing with some angel
friends.  Maybe watching us, looking out for his big sister.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

Her gaze shifted away from the moon and locked on me.

“Can we go to the cemetery tomorrow and see Ethan?”

“Sure,
Sweetie,”
I said, kissing her again.  “You bet we can.  Get some sleep now,
okay?”

I rose from the bed and walked to the door.

“Daddy?”

“Yes?”

“I wish I could have seen him.”

There are lots of things you have to think about when
your baby has died.  One of the hardest is
whether you want his four-year-old sister to see her dead brother.  Tammy
and I chose to spare Tory that pain.  To spare her the image that would be
burned into her memory. 
The kind of image that
nightmares are built around.
  What we hadn’t
realize
,
was that in sparing her the pain, we cost her the only chance she had for a
memory.

“Me, too,
Sweetie.
  I’m sorry.”

The next morning, Tory and I walked through Bruner’s
field to the cemetery.  She was enthralled when I told her how
Mikey
Bruner and I used to hunt arrowheads in this very
field.  How this land had been full of those ancient relics from a lost
time and a displaced peoples.  How
Mikey
and I
would roll them around in our hands and make up stories about each jagged
little stone.  The buffalo brought down by one, the cavalryman pierced by
another. 
The rough, calloused hands that had carefully
sculpted and shaped them.
  The rib bones that had chipped off the
points - arrows sticking out of chests like tombstones sticking out of the
ground. 

I thought about how I used to walk like this with my
own dad - down the railroad tracks looking for wild flowers and
asparagus.  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 always wanted to look at Ethan’s tombstone
because it had her name on the back of it and that’s where she led me when we
arrived at the cemetery.

“That’s my name there - right, Daddy?”

“That’s right.”

“What does this part say again?  I forgot.”

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

“Ethan lives in our hearts – right, Dad?”

“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
just find different hearts to live in.”

“Whose hearts?”

“Our family and friends.”

The worry left her face and I saw her sifting through
her thoughts for another question.  Lazy sounds
from a
plane miles
high drifted down to our ears.

“Daddy?”

“What,
Sweetie?”

“Will you and Mommy have another baby some day?”

“I don’t know - maybe someday, Tory. 
Probably.”

“Good.  Cause then we could live in that baby’s
heart – right, Daddy?”

“Yes we could.”

“That’s good.  I like that, Daddy.
  We should have another baby.”

She walked around to the front of the headstone. 
I followed.

“What does it say, Daddy?  Can you read it to me?”

“Well, it has my name and Mommy’s name and Ethan’s
name and it has all of our birthdays.”

“Daddy, that angel looks just like your tattoo and
Mommy’s tattoo.”

“Yep.
  We told them to
do it that way.”

She pondered that for a moment and then said, “Daddy,
can I get a real tattoo like that, too?”

“No,
Sweetie. 
Little kids can’t get real tattoos.”

“Why not?”

“They just can’t, Sweetie. 
Maybe
when you’re older.”

“Okay, when I’m older I’m going to get a real angel
tattoo like that, Daddy.  That way I can be just like you and Mommy. 
The whole family will be the same.”

Before leaving the Willow Grove cemetery that morning,
I walked Tory past Katie’s gravesite.  We didn’t stop, though, and I
didn’t tell Tory any of the stories there were to tell.  But it still felt
like an introduction of sorts.

The other thing I did before leaving was to
check and see if the letter I had left by Slim Jim’s
grave was still there.  It wasn’t.

The Willow Grove United Methodist Church had always
praised God with a quiet reverence and I think that’s what had me wanting to go
to church more.  To silence the noise in my head and embrace that comfort
that comes with things that can be counted upon. 
The
constant and the consistent.
 
The regular and the
routine.
  Same day, same time, same place.  It might be the
sermon, it might be a particular hymn or it might be a conversation in the
fellowship hall or the parking lot after the morning service.  Whatever it
was, going there calmed me.

This Sunday was special, though.  It was Mother’s
Day and my wife and daughter and mom were all here with me.  Tory sat
between Mom and Larry the same way I used to sit between Grandma and Grandpa
Mueller.  Mom had one arm draped across Tory’s shoulder, gently rubbing
her granddaughter’s arm.  Every few seconds Tory would look up at her and
show her the picture she was drawing on the back of the morning bulletin. 
Mom would smile proudly and squeeze her in close. 

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

“It’s beautiful, Victoria,” her namesake said 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 lived in Glidden now, but still came to
Willow Grove for church.  Even though Glidden was just ten minutes away I
hadn’t gone to visit them yet, and I
knew
that Mom was probably hurt by this. She wanted me to need her more.  She
had hugged me when we arrived that morning, but too quickly 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 built up inside.

Tory returned to our pew after the children’s message
and I got up to take her down to the nursery.  Tammy gently pushed me back
down in my seat and whispered, “I have to use the lady’s room.”  She was
teary-eyed and I knew that she was remembering Ethan’s funeral and could
probably see his little casket as clearly as I could.

Tammy and Tory left and I leaned forward to listen to
the sermon, elbows on knees,
head
in hands.  As
Pastor Judy spoke, I looked at Mom seated next to me and I thought how she must
be missing her own mother this day.  With eyes closed, I faded back to
Sundays passed when Grandma Mueller would give me a piece of gum 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 would ask for a hairpin, tweezers, a hard-boiled egg, whatever
it was, Grandma would surely have it in her “Let’s Make a Deal” purse.

Back then I would lean forward on elbows and knees
just like this and pretend like I was really concentrating on the sermon. 
Really I was just waiting for Grandma to walk my back with her fingers. 
She’d rub gently and then 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.

With a gasp, I jerked upright like you do when stirred
from those pre-sleep dreams.  I swung 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 turned to me.  Pastor Judy
stumbled momentarily, but pressed on and things continued as normal.

“Are you okay,” my mom whispered.

An instant sweat pouring from me, I turned and saw
that the pew behind me was empty.  “I’m fine.  Did you…did you
scratch my back?” I asked.

“No, I didn’t touch you.”

Hi, T –
that
was the message scratched onto my back. 
Hi, T
just like Grandma
Mueller used to scratch-write onto my back.  I was trying to determine
whether I had actually felt it or if it had just been a very powerful daydream
memory.  Then
came
a muffled giggle from behind
me.  Tory had snuck back upstairs and was hiding on the floor in the pew
behind me. “Tory,” I whispered.  “Did you do that?”

“Yes,” she giggled.

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.  Did believing these
things were signs make me a man of greater faith or lesser?  If there is a
God, He certainly has a sense of humor.  What funny little games he liked
to play with me.

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

Just then Tammy came up the stairs looking for Tory,
giving her that hands-on-the-hip
mom-frown
when she saw her with me.  I pulled Tory close to me and kissed the top of
her head.  And when I did, I smelled that odor of laundry detergent and
cigarettes that I’ve always associated with Grandma Mueller.  It came and
went like a pin-prick, but I had no doubt.  It was definitely her
smell.  I wanted to believe it truly was Grandma Mueller, using the great
granddaughter she had never met to let me know she was there with us.  I
wanted to believe there was life beyond this one and that maybe it existed
within some other world interwoven with our own.  And that the inhabitants
of this some other world had simply passed through that one-way door that took
them from this world, but that they were always here with us, wanting to reach
out to us, wanting to scratch their way through whatever limits of dimension
were keeping them from us.  And that maybe sometimes with enough struggle
on their end and enough need on our end they are able to break through, even if
just to let us suffocate with us in our dreams, or to drop a feather at our
feet, or to 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.

There’s what you know and then there’s what you can
make yourself believe.  Did I really believe that was Grandma
Mueller?  Did I really believe what Mr. Innocent was telling me? 
When
Charlie told me what he told me that
night at Mustang’s, he had 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.
  But did I really believe that Slim Jim was
innocent?  Or was it just something I made myself believe. 
Something
that allowed me to think about something other than my
dead son.
  Maybe I would get some answers in my next letter from
Mr. Innocent.

Later on that Mother’s Day morning, Tory and Grandma
Gaines rocked together on the front porch swing.  Grandma’s feet were
firmly planted, while Tory’s dangled freely, running on air.

Tammy cautioned Tory to slow down and to stop leaning
so hard on her great grandma.

“Oh, that’s okay,” Grandma said, “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 tir
es when you were a little girl,
Grandma?”

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

Grandma laughed and told Tory a few tall-tales of her
own before taking my two ladies into the house to finish preparing lunch. 
Old family ghosts kept that empty swing swinging and the chains clanking and I
sat down next to them for a couple minutes before going inside to visit with
Aunt Paula and my dad who had both just arrived.  I had not seen or spoken
to my dad since Ethan’s funeral when he had shaken my hand, put his other hand on
my shoulder and said “Take care of your family, Tucker.”  I had nodded and
looked down at the floor between us.  His pants were too short and he had
on one black sock and one brown sock.

“I will,” I said.  He squeezed my shoulder once, t
hen turned and walked out of the church.

Dad was already in the easy chair watching a
basketball 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 behind the couch, staring down at the Sunday paper through
bifocals. 

I don’t know whether it’s because we’re too different
or because we’re too much alike, but Dad and I have never been what I would
consider close.  I wanted hugs.  He wanted handshakes.  I was an
unwilling student and he was a relentless teacher who viewed every conversation
as an opportunity to teach me something.

“Yeah,
Dad,
my stupid garbage man left trash
laying
in the
driveway again this week.’

“Well, Tuck, that’s too bad but I’ll tell
ya
, some of the smartest men I’ve ever known were garbage
men. 
Don’t be judging people based
on what they do for a living.  You don’t know, maybe they couldn’t afford
to go to college and get a cushy office job, but I’ll tell
ya
,
they work hard and make decent money.  Not great money, but decent and
they don’t have to put up with
all the
corporate BS.”

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

“Hi, Tuck,” he said.  “Iowa is, but the Illini
are fighting back.”

He spoke a whole sentence.  He looked at me when
he did so.  He even smiled.

While D
ad has
always been moody and short-tempered, it seemed to get even worse after Tory
was born and he became a grandfather.  I think it depressed him.  The
week after Tory was
born,
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. 

Now,
I know Dad
loves his granddaughter, but I also know that Tory is a reminder of his age the
same way an out of place chair in a dark room is a reminder you have
toes.  I wanted him to fall in timeless love with my daughter and he
didn’t because he couldn’t look at her without thinking of what she made him.

Dinner that Mother’s Day consisted of fried chicken,
mashed potatoes with white gravy, green beans
casserole, and a Jell-O salad.  Grandma also cooked a ham because
my Aunt Paula won’t eat chicken.  Paula is fifty-two years old and hopes
that Grandma would stop spoiling her ended long ago.  This has been the
source of much aggravation for my father over the years and part of the reason
for the proverbial oil and water relationship he’s always had with his little
sister.

Dad and Paula just never got along, although not
for lack of trying on her part.  Of course,
that’s probably the other thing that bugged him most about her - all of her
trying to get along. 
Because while Dad loved his
sister, it was in a real
only if you
leave me the hell alone
sort of way.

For
his part,
Dad had long ago given up on the prospects of ever having a simple discussion
about anything with Paula and I confess to having empathy for that
perspective.  A conversation with Paula was like driving the wrong way
down a one-way street.  She spoke with direction and momentum and ignored
all laws of caution and courtesy.  She was always like,
“I really don’t have any idea how to fix such and
such a problem, but if it were up to me here’s how I’d do it.  That’s the
only way it’s ever going to work, believe you me.”

Were you to disagree
with her, most often it was either unheard altogether or somehow
misinterpreted as words of support.  Such as the time Paula and I
discussed the possibility of new business coming to Willow Grove.

“They want to put up two big billboards saying that
there’s commercial property available downtown.  They want to put one sign
on the east side of 38 and one on the west.”

“Well, I suppose new business would be good for the
town,” I said.

Nodding her head, she said, “Yeah, right.  What
do we want with some big old factory or manufacturing plant or such?”

Dad’s just the opposite.  Seems like anything I
ever said to him was somehow taken as dissension in the ranks.  Like Dad
could say, “Joe Montana is the greatest QB of all time.”

And maybe I would reply, “Yeah Dad, he was awesome.”

And probably he would say something like, “Awesome,
huh?  Well, just who the hell do you think was better than Joe Montana,
smart guy?”