Hearts Left Behind (15 page)

When we finished lunch that Mother’s Day, Tammy told
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 started to argue, pointing
out that I had offered to make hot dogs or
mac
and
cheese, but Grandpa interrupted.

“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 winked at
me and Dad.  “Tucker, Ronald, to the kitchen.”

The three of us spent the next half hour clearing the
table, putting food away in old containers of Cool Whip and Country Crock
butter, carefully hand-washing and towel-drying Grandma’s china, and wiping off
the stove and counter tops.  Grandpa and Dad argued about
everything:  whether the leftover potatoes and gravy should be stored in
the same container; whether the inside of the glasses should be allowed to drip-dry;
what cupboard certain dishes belonged in.  Dad knew more about Grandpa’s
own kitchen than he did, which was obviously irritating Grandpa.  So Dad
would do something right, Grandpa would tell him it was wrong, and I would
quietly laugh.  I watched my fifty-something dad
be
the son for a while and I realized that no matter the age, father is father and
son is son.

While we were cleaning the kitchen, Tammy had gone to
the florist to buy an arrangement for Ethan’s gravesite. When she returned,
her eyes were red and she had mascara streaks down her
face.  She motioned for me to come outside and I joined her on the
porch.  She started speaking the second I closed the door behind me and it
was as if I had joined her in the middle of a story she had already begun.

“So as I was leaving the flower shop, the lady behind
the counter called me back.  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 just
felt it
. 
I felt it and the thought of him popped into my head on its own, you
know?  Like out of nowhere I just 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 sniffed and dabbed at her nose with a pulled up
sleeve.  I reached in my back pocket for a handkerchief that wasn’t
there.  She continued.  “Anyway, the florist said ‘I don’t know, it
matches your outfit so perfectly, I just I had to give it to you.”

Then Tammy held up the flower.  She was wearing a
spring sweater that was sort of a purplish-red.  Like a vibrant mauve, I
guess. 
Whatever the color, the rose she held up was
exactly the same.
  It matched so perfectly
that the rose seemed to sink inside of her as she
held it in front of her.

“I have never seen a flower that color before,” was
all I could manage.  I pulled her into me and wrapped my arms around her,
careful not to crush the rose between us.

We had dinner that night with my mom and
step-dad.  Since losing Ethan, things had become
uncomfortable between me and Mom 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
Mom!” like it read on the Mother’s Day card Tory had picked out for her
grandmother.  I had had enough of celebrating the blessings of parenthood
for one day.

While Tammy and Tory helped Larry with dinner preparations,
Mom and I chatted about Oprah, movies we
had seen, books we were reading, 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.

“How are you doing?”
she would ask.

“Good,”
I
would say from behind the newspaper.

“Is everything okay?”
she would press.

“Yes,”
I
would say, drawing out the word slowly like a heavy door swinging closed.

I made Mom feel as hurt and helpless in her efforts to
comfort me as I felt when trying to comfort Tammy.  I knew it, but I
couldn’t help it.  Or maybe I just really didn’t care.  Let it be my
pain to cast the shadow this time.  She knew how her questions pained me,
of course, but asked them anyway because we both knew that there was more pain
in the not-asking than in th
e
asking.  Still, I wasn’t angry with Mom.  I was angry at myself –
hated myself – and being rude to her did more than feed that self-hatred, it
justified it.

I peeked over the top of the newspaper and watched her
knitting away busily, looking down through the glasses that rested on the tip
of her nose.  She had been a grandmother for four years now, but was still
growing into the part.  Eventually she would be more grandmother than
mother, in the same way that I was already more father than son.  Watching
her there in that quiet mo
ment, my mind
drifted back to
a
afternoon long ago when Mom and her
friend Kathy took me, Gavin, and Heather to Brenda’s Hometown Café for ice
cream.  It struck me as suspicious for some reason and I had an instinct
that the ice cream was the softening of some blow to come.  Still, by the
time we were walking home I had lost any concerns I had had somewhere between the
top of the sky and the bottom of my ice cream cone.  They quickly came
back to me, though, when I found myself walking alone with Mom, Kathy hanging
back with Gavin and Heather.

“Tucker, you know that your dad and I have been fight
ing a lot lately,” Mom had said.  We walked
side-by-side and I looked up to that sky that had just a moment ago been
beautiful and boundless with hope, but now just seemed bigger than it needed to
be.  I stopped walking and looked up at my mother’s face.  When she
looked back, I knew for certain what was happening.  A mother can tell her
child a lot with just a look.

Divorcing Dad, telling me about
Katie Cooper, being there for us when we lost Ethan.
  The problem
for Mom was that not only was she
there
for me
in all those situations, she
was
there
.  Fair or not, I couldn’t help but associate all
of my great pains with her.  She had seen me at my weakest and distance
has always been my remedy for vulnerability.

Mom let out a big sigh
and dug around in her knitting bag for a new ball of yarn.  At
times I do not even recognize this grandmother of Tory’s, this imposter who
looks like my mom, but with gray and wrinkles and other burdens of age.  I
suppose she experiences the same bewilderment when looking at me.  Perhaps
it’s even worse for her, having been able to witness all of my metamorphoses –
  from
a baby within her to a man without her.  I
only picked up the book that is my mom’s life in the middle, never really
knowing how the story started.

Mom
once told us
how when she was a teenager, Reverend Wright used to tell her she was the “the
prettiest girl in Willow Grove.”  We laughed and teased her.

“Probably said that to all the girls, mom.”

“Sounds creepy, Mom.”

Our joking hurt
her, I suppose, this winner of a beauty pageant nobody ever knew about. 
The beauty queen who can live with not being called pretty anymore as long as
somebody believes she was pretty once.  I have seen the pictures of Mom in
those days and I am certain that she had admirers the other six days of the
week, as well.  But I’ll bet even the best pictures don’t do her justice,
because pictures never do.

One of my hopes of Heaven is that I’ll somehow be able
to re-live
Mom’s life right along side of
her.  As a friend,
a neighbor, a kid at school
-
some non-speaking part in all of the scenes of her life. 
To see her life dreams and her disappointments.
  I will
get to know Reverend Wright’s Prettiest Girl in Willow Grove.  She and I
will sit together and look back on all the right and wrong turns we each made
in our lives.  We will revisit our regrets and mistakes, our triumphs and
glories.  We will watch those parts of life that have been hidden from us
inside of history and outside of memory.  We will see each of the alternative
endings to each of our life movies.  All will be revealed in my hopes of
Heaven.  Once, in a soft moment, I told all of this to Mom and she told me
that her dream of heaven was to get there before I do so she could do some
editing of her movie before I got to see it. 

I wondered whether some kind of grown-up Ethan was
watching me now.  I imagined him sitting in some Theater of Life, munching
on popcorn and watching me.  I hoped I was not a disappointment. 

We ate a quiet dinner that Mother’s Day evening and we
had quiet conversations.  Mom told us about the neighborhood
happenings.  Larry played ‘got your nose’ with Tory.  It was exactly
what normal used to look like.  But inside, it felt a whole lot different.

A lot happened before Grandpa found Tory sitting
behind that bedroom door with her arms folded around her knees, safe and
asleep.  She had only been missing for an hour, but a lot happened in that
hour. 
In that hour and because of it.

They say that right before you
die,
your life flashes before your eyes.  And what a fright there must be in
that moment when death becomes
a
certainty.  But there is a greater fright to be found in the moments where
death is feared. 
Especially when the death of your
child is feared.
  In those unknown moments, it is not your own life
that passes before your
eyes,
it is your
child’s.  When we couldn’t find Tory, I flashed back to the moment she was
born – not just her birth, but the birth also of her mother and her
father.  I saw her in her yellow satin dress at her pre-school’s holiday
program, singing
Still, Still,
Still. 
I saw her tumbling on
the sidewalk in front of our house and scraping up her knees and hands.  I
saw her running in our backyard with her new puppy, long auburn hair swinging
and bouncing behind her.

Tammy and I had each thought the other was with Tory
that afternoon.  When we searched the house
and didn’t find her, we searched it again.  It wasn’t like Tory to
just go outside without asking us, but the house was empty so we searched the
front yard, the back yard,
the
garage.  Then we
went back inside and searched the house yet again, but still we did not find
her.  We even looked in the attic that she didn’t even know existed, but
she wasn’t there either.  She wasn’t anywhere.

The thought of my little girl roving the streets alone
scared the hell out of me, even these streets of Willow Grove.  Katie
Cooper memories had been scratching at the back of my mind.  Like some
buried-alive crime victim, they clawed their way back to the surface.  I
realized that I had never felt unsafe here before.  Not in this
town.  Not even with all that happened with Katie.  But now I
imagined having to go across the street and ask Betty Cooper if she’d seen my
daughter and the same way she had once asked me if I had seen hers.  I
pictured Tory lost and lonely, without her mommy and daddy to protect
her.  How Etha
n must have felt as
the last bit of life was being squeezed out of him.  How Katie must have
felt as she
lay
on her back in the tall grass along
the railroad tracks, staring up into an endless sky before fading to
black.  Worse than imagining her alone and frightened was the thought of
her in the arms of someone wanting to do her harm, like that baby in my evil
doctor dream.

Without consciously realizing what I was doing or why,
I headed for the railroad tracks.  Old Man Keller was coming m
y way and I waved him to a stop.  But when he
didn’t turn off the Cub Cadet right away, I reached down and did it
myself.  He looked offended, like I was the first person other than him to
ever touch the ignition key and maybe I was.

“What
the hell,
Tucker.  What’s going on?” he asked.

“We can’t find Tory,” I said.  The wave of rage
that came with being forced to say the words out loud almost lifted me off the
ground.

“What do you mean - your daughter is missing?”

“Yes.  My daughter is missing.  Have you
seen her?

Bushy gray eyebrows furrowed together and the Old Man
looked for something inside his head, and I could see that he found
something. 
A thought?
 
A
memory?
 
A something.

“No,” he said with eyes darting back and forth. 
Then looking up at me, “No, I haven’t seen her.
  Are
you sure she’s not with your wife or your grandparents?”

“I’m sure.  Now listen, if you know something,
you need to tell me, Alvin.”

It was the first time I had ever said
the Old Man’s name and it made a sharp sound coming
off my tongue.  He even flinched a little like I had stabbed him in the
ear with it.