Hearts Left Behind (22 page)

There were five letters at Ethan’s gravesite and two
at Katie’s.  There were about to be three.

From my back pocket I pulled out the letter I had
written for Howard and Betty Cooper before coming out here.  The envelope
also contained the poem that I had written for Katie those many years ago and a
letter to the Coopers explaining the story behind it.  I had not set out
to write the Coopers a Grave Letter, but after leaving Swinging Girl at the
park I had gone back to confront Grandpa only to find the house empty.

I had stood in the living room staring at the picture
of Grandpa and Grandma at the altar on the day of their wedding.  I stared
into the face of my grandfather and he stared right back at me through
time.  My eyes bounced across the frozen faces of the children and
grandchildren and great grandchildren that surrounded them on that wall. 
The clocks ticked at me.

It was when I looked back at Grandpa that the idea of
the letter came to me. 
Almost as if it came from that man
in that wedding photo.
  That man on that day. 
That man that Grandpa had intended on being forever.
  I
went up to the attic and pulled the poem out from beneath the floor plank where
I had hidden it the day of Katie’s funeral.  There was a part of me that
was going to be embarrassed for the Coopers to read that poem that little-boy
me had written for their daughter.  But I knew it would bring them some
joy and I could not deprive them of that.

I added my letter to the pile at Katie’s grave and
left the cemetery.

Finally, a blip.
  And
then another. 
And another.
  But the nurse
kept adjusting the fetal heart monitor around my wife’s belly.  Tammy saw
the confusion on my face.

“That’s mine, Tucker,” she said.  “That’s my
heart.”

The nurse asked us if this was our first child –
no, we have a four year-old girl
. 

If we knew what we were having –
yes, a boy
.
 

If we had a name picked out –
yes, Ethan
. 

She loosened the strap, repositioned Tammy in the bed,
tightened
the strap.  “He’s hiding from me, the
little stinker.
  I’m going to get
Nurse Graham and ask her to try. I’m always having trouble with these
things.  I’ll be right back.”

Tammy turned to me and w
ith her eyes alone she told me something was wrong.  Those eyes
pleaded for help and they asked for forgiveness.  She tried a smile, but
the tears came.  One hand went over her eyes as if protecting them from
some horrid sight.  The other hand reached up and then back down again
looking for something to hurt or something to hold.  I was leaning against
the window, legs getting more and more unsteady with every second I couldn’t
hear our baby’s heartbeat.  I moved to her side.

“Tucker, I’m so scared.”

“No, Tam.  No.  Everything’s going to be
fine. 
Right?
  Everything’s going to be
fine.”

When Nurse Graham couldn’t find the heartbeat either
they called for a
sonographer
to do an
ultrasound.  He arrived within five minutes and left within four. 
After introducing himself, he volunteered no other information.

“What’s going on?” I asked.  “Is everything
okay?  Is our baby okay?”

“I can’t answer that.  Dr. Connelly will be here
in a few minutes.”

He left the room.

“How can this be?  Tucker, how can this happen?”

“We don’t know anything yet, Tam.  Let’s just
wait for the doctor and think positive.  We don’t know anything.”

The room was full of white things, silver things,
fluorescent
things.  The door opened and Dr. Connelly
stepped in slowly.  She had trouble lifting her eyes against the gravity
of the situation.  She inhaled deep and then spoke.

“Mr. and Mrs. Gaines, you…know what’s happened, don’t
you?”

And here’s what you think about in the moments after
you find out that your baby has died…

You think about that Saturday morning that your wife
sent you into the bathroom to read the results of the home pregnancy test that
she had purchased and taken without your knowledge.  How long ago
that day seemed and longer still
the next one like it.

You think about how losing a child feels both the same
and different as you had imagined.  Like the difference between being
alone in a room and alone in the world.

You think about those who will explain that this is
God punishing for sin and you hate them for it.  And you hate yourself
equally for having the same thought.

You think about all the people that should have died
before this child and how capable you are of killing them yourself in this
moment. 
Your father.
 
Your
mother.
  You could kill them by your own hand if it would save your
baby. 
If it would set the world right.

You think about how much people will care and how much
they won’t.  How much they will understand and how much they won’
t.  How they will try to put this tragedy in a
smaller box by comparing it to what they deem to be bigger tragedies.

Stillbirth is not birth. 
Stillbirth is still birth.

You think about the Hendricks, friends of your family
who lost their grown son in a farm accident the year before and you are jealous
of their memories because you already realize that this one memory, this day of
your child’s death and birth, is the only one you’re ever going to have of him
before he is tucked into a box, dropped into the earth, and forgotten by a
world that ticks and tocks without relent.
 
How invaluable memories suddenly seem to you. 
And how
utterly unattainable.

And you think about Katie Cooper.  How this is
how her parents must have felt when she had died. 
Is this how you felt, Howard Cooper?  Were you
some new kind of lost?  Were you some new word for sad?  Were you
something far greater than angry?  Far, far greater than the worst, most
bitter, vile tasting, spit-spit-spit, hate-hate-hate, don’t look at me,
fuck-you-world, angry you had ever known?  Is that what it was for you
when your daughter turned up dead, Howard Cooper?  Did you have to stand
and look on stupidly at a broken wife you couldn’t take care of?  Did you
have to helplessly watch her endure a pain and horror that made your own feel
small?  Made you ashamed of your own pain until you hated it?  Did
your hands never feel so empty?  Did your hugs never feel so cold? 
Did you never feel more a failure?

You were sad when Katie Cooper died, very sad. 
Not as sad as Howard Cooper had been then.  Not as sad as you are now.

I knew that Mom and Larry would be anxious for
news.  Not to mention Tory.  I didn’t want to make that phone
call.  I didn’t want to say the words out loud.  I didn’t want them
to hurt like I knew they would.  And for reasons I did not understand, I
was humiliated.  Like I had been the butt of some cruel joke and would now
have to face a laughing world. 

I picked up the phone and dialed.

I searched for the right words to use.  My head
raced in wispy little thought-circles.  Falling from a building and
grabbing for something that had never been there.

What does stillbirth mean?  Was he ever
alive?  Did he exist?  Was it better to not have known him at
all?  Would memories make it hurt more?  Am I supposed to hurt this
much?  Did he ever exist?

“Hello?”
Mom
said anxiously.

It took me a second to gather myself.

“Mom…we lost the baby.”

“I’ll be right there,” she said.

Dr. Connelly advised us that the safest way forward
was to let Tammy have the baby naturally.
 
Mom and I sat in chairs on either side of Tammy in the bed between us. 
The three of us sat and waited for contractions, the unrelenting portent of
birth and death, alpha and omega.  We prayed for a miracle and why
not?  Why shouldn’t there be one? 
If not for me,
for Tammy.
  At least for my beautiful wife who lay there in that
cold dark room feeling like the most horrible of
failures.
 
The child who had lost her mother was now a mother who had lost her child.

We prayed and cried through the long night that was
not long enough.  I was shamefully weak and had neither the strength nor
the will to
so
much as stand upright.  I watched
my mom spoon-feed Tammy ice chips and dampen her brow with a cold wet
rag.  She stroked her hair like a mother strokes her sleeping child,
pulling the loose strands away from Tammy’s face.

Tammy and I would look into each other’s eyes and turn
away when we could not stand what we saw there.  Her eyes searched mine
for forgiveness or protection or answers or something else that I could not
provide.  She knew what lay ahead of her.  Knew it could not be
avoided. 
Birth and death.

I was tired with the weariness that comes from seeking
and not finding.  There was nothing I could do to help either mother or
son.  I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror several times during that
eternal night, looking for something that hadn’t been there before, but I didn’t
look any different.  I needed a wound, wanted a scar. 
Some sort of permanent disfigurement to mark the moment.
 
But there was nothing, I still looked the same.  How in God’s name could I
look the same?  I forced a smile just to see if my face was still capable
of making one.  Just to see if I could see anything behind it or in front
of it, but my smile still looked like my smile.

"Your son is dead," I kept saying to
myself.  "Your son is dead."

Ethan arrived very early the next morning after six
hours of labor.  The delivery was normal in so many ways.  Screams
and cries. 
Blood and tears.
  Tammy
delivering our still baby may have been the greatest act of strength I have
ever witnessed.  I sat in my chair defeated through much of the
delivery.  But this woman, this love of mine, this
mother
found the strength to push when it was against her every instinct.  I knew
her thoughts. 
Stay here. 
Stay with me, inside me.  We can pretend it all away.  We can pretend
everything better and I will never let you go.  I am your mommy and I will
never let you go.

We did not get our miracle.  Ethan Merrill Gaines
came into this world in a haunting silence.  Dr. Connelly lifted him to me
and let me cut the cord that linked him to his mother.  The cord that
wrapped around his
neck,
brought him to death. 
And in that moment, as I severed that connection, all was calm and peaceful and
far too quiet.  As if the world had
gone still with him. 

The surgical scissors clinked when I set them down on
the tray.  And I began to sob and it killed all that quiet, reawakened the
world.

The nurse helped me bathe and dress Ethan and I
presented him to his mother.  She cradled him in the nook of her arm,
looked down at him like a memory.  He was still warm and Tammy closed her
eyes, held him to her chest and pressed her cheek against his, allowing herself
just one more moment to pretend.

She then gave him to me and I began holding him
forever.  I held my son and felt his body steadily cool, despite all my
efforts of warmth.  His hair was dark and had a curl to it like my
own.  Tammy told me that he had my nose, which I desperately wanted to see
but could not.  I did think that he looked like his big sister Tory,
though.  I parted his eyelids to see eyes of blue and I counted fingers
and toes.  Blood poured from his nose and I dabbed it away with the
corners of the blanket.  His jaw was slack and his mouth kept falling
open.  I gently held it shut, closed my eyes, and held him against me
tight. 
Tried to squeeze him into me.
  I
felt him in my arms and knew that he was real. 
Knew
that he had existed.
  Ethan Merrill Gaines had lived.

I rocked in the chair, repeating over and over the
only words that came to me.

“My poor little boy.
 
My poor little boy.”

The dream was more real, but less frightening than my
choking dream.  I knew I had nothing to fear in this place.  This
place – and everything in it – had me to fear.

Bloody-knuckled hands were choking the life and breath
out of my grandfather.  He gasped and I saw Ethan suffocating inside of his
mother.  Umbilical cord around his neck, not understanding what was
happening.  Not knowing that all he needed was just a little bit of
air.  Not able to untangle himself from his lifeline.  The thought of
my dead son softened me briefly and my grip loosened.  Grandpa coughed and
choked and sucked in air greedily.

Not moving from my straddling position across his
chest, I lifted my eyes to the picture that hung on the wall in front of
me. 
Grandpa and Grandma on their wedding day.
 
Standing there together hand in hand, not knowing what life had in store for
them. 
Unable to foresee this moment some fifty-plus
years in the future when the groom would be killed by the son of his son.
 
The groom smiled at me.  What had happened to this man?  Where had he
gone?  I stared hard, looking for some semblance of the creature that was
beneath me now.  Some hint of the evil that lurked within, but
I couldn’t see the dragon monster.  There was no
evil in that man.  Life had put it there later, to be sure, because in that
man in the picture there was no evil.  I was surrounded by the evidence of
the life that followed this picture moment and I searched for clues in
them.  Every wall and table top was covered with the evidence of
normalcy. 
Delicates and figurines, gifts from over the
years.
Old pictures of things that were once new and
new pictures of things that had become old.
  Ceramic things,
knitted
  things
, embroidered things. 
Souvenir dishes from Niagara Falls, The Alamo,
Mt
.
Rushmore.  On the table by the door was a green kerosene lamp that had
gone from modern convenience to useless artifact without itself ever having
changed.  The lamp was aged and
unaged
,
it was the world around it that had changed.

There was no
explanation.  The man in the picture had been killed by the man in my
hands.  The man in my hands, like some pod creature replacement, had crept
in and stole the good man’s life.  He quietly assumed his role.  He
steadily hurt and he silently killed.  Like whatever evil was responsible
for killing Ethan, this pod creature silently killed.