Just One Thing (22 page)

After everything, I could still trust. I trusted my kids enough to share tonight with them. I trusted my mom—she’d have come if I’d called.

And I trusted Sam. I trusted in the healing power of our Monday nights, and our one-things.

I drove the snow-covered road home. The snow had stopped and the clouds had momentarily cleared. A half-moon illuminated the fields, then disappeared as I entered the wood-lined section of road that led to the cottage.

I felt centered. Eased. Letting go of the Erie house was another step in my healing.

And after talking to Sam, I felt braver than I’d felt in a very long time.

Connie left the next morning to drive back to Cleveland. I was thankful it had stopped snowing. She planned on renting a U-Haul when she came back in a couple weeks for Christmas.

After she left, I stared at the pile of things I’d brought from the house. Lee’s ugly red sweater was on the top of the heap. Rather than put the things away, Angus and I trudged through the snow to the barn. I brought the sweater with me.

I tossed it on the back of the couch, then I lit the fire in the cast-iron stove. It didn’t take long for the room to warm up enough for me to take off my coat.

I stared at the loom.

I needed to finish the piece, but in order to do it, I’d have to face my last big thing and I wasn’t sure I was ready, but I knew I had to. Maybe Sam was right; being brave wasn’t so much feeling brave as it was doing what needed to be done.

I walked back over to the couch and picked up the sweater, fingering the wool.

I remembered Lee laughing as I complained about how ratty it looked. He’d put it on and grin as he waited for my anticipated complaints. It became a joke between us.

But I also remembered other times he wore the sweater. Times that brought no jokes or smiles.

I smelled the sweater, burying my face deep in its rough warmth. I could have sworn it still smelled of Lee’s cologne.

I went to my workbench and took out scissors and before I could second-guess myself, I clipped a seam and started to unravel the yarn. Slowly, I pulled a long piece of the red wool out. Then I sat at the loom. I knew what I needed to weave next, just as I knew what my next one-thing had to be. I called Sam. “I know Saturdays are busy and that we meet Monday nights, but I need to tell you this one-thing alone.” An urgency to finish pressed on me, and I was on the verge of asking him to get someone to cover at the bar, but in the end, I didn’t ask.

I didn’t have to.

“I’ll get Chris to cover.” There was no hesitation, no complaint, just Sam saying, “Should we meet at your place?”

No. I didn’t want to bring this particular one-thing here and I couldn’t take it to the bar. This one needed privacy. “Could we meet somewhere else—somewhere that we won’t be overheard?”

“Do you care what time?”

“No.”

“I’ll pick you up around three.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

I kept glancing at the loom, but I didn’t work on the tapestry. I didn’t work on glazing my bowl. I simply sat next to Angus on the couch and unraveled Lee’s sweater. I purposefully tried not to think, not to remember. I’d do that later with Sam.

About one, Angus and I trudged through the snow, back to the cottage. I made sure he had food and water, then forced myself to eat some soup, not because I was hungry, but because I knew I should be hungry.

I showered, dressed, and was waiting for Sam when he pulled up.

“Thank you, again,” I said by way of greeting.

He nodded. We didn’t say much on the drive. I wasn’t sure where we were going, but I didn’t ask.

Sam drove down I-79, then into Erie and to the peninsula. He parked at one of the lookout points on the bay side. The water hadn’t frozen over yet, but it looked thicker to me. Like a greyish snow cone. As if with just one or two more freezing nights the bay’s water might turn to ice.

I could see the city across from us. The tall tower at the end of the pier.

“I thought this would be private,” he said. “Neutral ground.”

Sitting in Sam’s truck there was no chance we’d be overheard. To be honest, in the winter, the peninsula was quiet enough that we didn’t even see another car.

“Thanks, Sam.” I was quiet a few minutes, trying to formulate this one-thing. Most of the time, the stories just spilled out. This one was premeditated. “Before we do this, I need you to understand that Lee was a good dad.”

Sam nodded, not saying anything.

I kept going, needing to be sure he believed it, not just believed me. “There are so many examples. The kids were maybe fourteen and thirteen when we had that huge snowstorm. It knocked out power to our house for two days. Rather than fret about things melting in the freezer, or missed appointments, Lee lit candles and announced we were going to have an eat-the-food-before-it-spoils picnic while we played the world’s longest game of Scrabble. We had two games, an old one with missing tiles, and a new one we’d just bought. He duct-taped the boards together, combined the tiles, and we played all night. It sounds like such a little thing, but the kids still talk about the Scrabble storm. That was the thing about Lee—he could make anything an adventure.”

Sam sat on his side of the truck, nodding, not saying anything because he knew I needed to do this–this one-thing, one big thing, was the elephant in the room. I’d danced around it, circumventing it. It was the one-thing that was the straw . . . my straw.

“Even when they were little, the kids loved him. My story with them was Belinda Mae, because I could sing and Lee, like my grandmother before him, couldn’t hit a note if it were the broadside of a barn. But he was better at the rest of the books. He could make the stories come alive in a way I never could. When they were little, he’d do Sendak’s
Where the Wild Things Are
and have the kids gnashing along with him. When it was good, he was very good.”

Sam finally broke his silence. “And when it wasn’t good?”

I didn’t answer right away. The weight of this one-thing was hard to get out from under.

“This is it,” Sam stated. “This is what all your one-things were leading to. My shrink would say those other things were tests.”

“Tests?”

“To see if you could trust me. Sharing things that mattered, but not the big thing that had you leave your home in Erie and sent you out to the woods.”

“You have a shrink?”

Sam nodded. “Had. PTSD. There was Grid, but I needed more, especially when he left. It wasn’t the injury that immobilized me in the hospital. And it wasn’t the injuries that haunted my dreams. It was the weight of the memories. I’d wake up from a dream—they were always so real that I’d have to check to be sure I wasn’t really covered in blood. Even in my dream I’d know that my best attempts wouldn’t be good enough.” He looked down at his hand, as if expecting to see it covered in blood. “I was trained to save people. I was that kid in school who always had As. I excelled. I wasn’t prepared to fail. I especially wasn’t trained to fail on such an epic level. I was trained to be sure and decisive—I was trained to save.”

“Trained?”

“I was a doctor.”

The four words sank in. Sam hadn’t gone to fight; he’d gone to heal. His job had been to save people. He’d been trained to fix people.

“When I was younger, I thought I’d play in the NBA. My best friend, Neil, and I had it all planned out. We’d both play college ball, then move to the big leagues. But when I was a sophomore in high school, everything changed.”

“Neil,” Sam screamed as he raised his arms, calling for the ball.

Neil passed it to him and Sam shot his best friend a look. He knew that Neil was ready. They’d practiced this play for weeks. Sam set up the shot, and Neil sprinted toward the hoop. Sam threw the ball upward in front of Neil, who jumped, caught it and was ready to sink it into the basket, when number eight from the other team jumped as well, slamming into Neil midair.

Sam watched as Neil fell. It felt as if it happened in slow motion. His best friend, still clutching the ball, fell toward the floor. Number eight plucked the ball out of Neil’s arms.

The sound of Neil’s head hitting the hardwood reverberated through the auditorium. But no one but Sam seemed to notice. Everyone else was focused on number eight as he sprinted toward the other team’s hoop with the rest of Sam’s team hot on his heels.

Normally, Sam would be running after him, too, trusting that Neil would climb to his feet and follow.

But there was something that kept him stationary under the net. He looked at Neil, who hadn’t moved or opened his eyes.

Then his best friend started to convulse.

And still Sam stood there, watching Neil jerk so hard that his head hit the floor again.

Sam didn’t know what to do.

He barely registered that the ref blew his whistle. The coaches ran onto the floor and the players stood under the other team’s net, watching as Neil moved spastically.

Sam didn’t know what to do to help.

He stood frozen as the paramedics arrived and took the still unconscious Neil away on a stretcher.

“I can still see it all so clearly in my mind. From that moment on, I knew that I’d never play in the NBA. That dream gave way to another. I would be a doctor. I’d never again not know what to do. That’s what I thought, at least. I told myself that if I’d been a doctor, I could have saved Neil. In my mind, I’d save everyone. But that’s not what happened. I couldn’t save everyone. I couldn’t even save myself.”

I reached out and took his hand.

All the things he’d told me, they’d been tests as well, I realized. “I’m sorry about Neil. After Gracie died, my mom said that sometimes you can’t save everyone. Sometimes it’s okay to simply save yourself. No matter what you say, you did save me. Before you, I survived. But surviving isn’t living. I’d gone through the motions until I walked into your bar. You saved me, Sam. I’m alive again because of you. I want to save you, too.”

“So tonight we do our one big thing?” he asked.

I nodded. “One-thing with you has become my absolution. No, that’s after confession, when the priest absolves you. Our one-things are my permission to let go and move on. Somewhere along the line, I recognized that.”

“And there’s one more thing you need to move on from,” he said. Slowly, recognizing the significance, Sam said the words. “One thing?”

“I think there are tipping points in recovery. Points when things get better or sometimes worse. Sometimes there are a lot of tipping points as you heal—new levels as you try to rediscover yourself. But some moments are more than tipping points. They’re more like lines. You don’t always recognize it as you approach, but you can see it in hindsight. You cross that line; then everything’s different. You’re different. My father’s death was a line like that.”