Saving Graces (19 page)

And New Year’s Eve was no better. As it approached, I started worrying.
This morning’s paper brought the year-end stories. It was a hard year here. Good riddance, they say, to 1996. And I try to find my own feelings in this. Do I want the last year he spoke and ran, the last year he touched me to be gone, to be history? The march begins; it will be one year ago, then two, a decade, then two, and more, since I last saw my boy. It does not matter, of course, what I want. This year will end, and the next.

1997. I had once thought this year would make me sad for he would leave and go to college, and I would write him letters he would not care to read. In anticipation, I had been buying him silly cards whenever I saw them. They sit in a slot above the telephone. Several dozen cards—wordplay and foolishness—all to remind him his mother loved him. I should have buried them with him, for now I cannot throw them out or send them to someone else or look at them.
No one warns the grieving that New Year’s will be hard. You expect Christmas. You expect birthdays and the anniversary of their death, but, as I wrote on New Year’s Eve,
I did not expect this. I did not expect the evening’s celebration to press against me so. But it has. Why do I keep being surprised? I ought to learn but somehow I do not. There is this constant tugging. I want to get up, walk away from here, leave this life and all the sorrow it has brought, find somewhere else where maybe I can be someone who has not lost her son. I know it is useless, that the loss is not here around me. It is in me, in my every thought, in my empty arms, in my weary, beaten heart. And there is part of me that does not want to leave, does not want to go a place he has not been, see faces he did not see, wear clothes I had not owned when he died. He is, I sometimes think, only in those things that he touched, upon which he gazed, or that he simply knew. I do not want to see Montana; he is not there. I will not travel to Stockholm; he cannot see it, too. And I do not want this new year to come. It has, I know, but I do not want it. I do not want it. Everything was the same as last year. We did not go downtown together to First Night as we had in some years. We stayed home. Last year was home and football and finally Dick Clark. Wade came and went throughout the night, as was his way; between parties or for no reason whatever, he would come home for a bit. The headlights in the drive. His door slamming, maybe he would finish listening to a song before coming in. And then up the steps, two at a time. And he would come in the family room and try to sit just where his Dad was sitting. They’d pretend to fight, and I would make room next to me. Come sit with me, son, I have room here. And he would sit with me, press himself against me. And then as soon be off, returning in an hour or two to repeat the whole routine. That was last year. The year that is gone, is history, like he is. By midnight last year his father and I were in bed, watching the festivities unfold on television. Wade came in a few minutes after, crawled over me, and lay between us. Happy new year, son. That little kiss, the most one could hope for from a young man. Are you in for the night? Yeah, I’m home. Love you guys. And he crawled over me again. I could hear him bound up the back stairs. If I had known it was the last new year’s eve, would I have done anything differently? The edges of the night are a blur, where had he been? I would get that back. I would write that down, write everything, what he wore, what he ate. (Well, that was likely a cola and string cheese. But I would write it down nonetheless.) Write so many details that I could walk into it whenever I wanted, be there again. Once since he died, I have felt that same presence beside me, not the weight of him, but the warmth. In the stillness of night, have you felt something there? I think it was my memory on which he is sufficiently impressed that I can feel his warmth but I cannot quite get my mind around the rest. I want my mind to stop protecting my heart. I want to feel him all. If only I could feel his arms. Maybe if it were last year, I could feel him, feel the weight of him, his breath close against me, and his own smell. Maybe if the year would not change this time. But it changes. And he seems, by the simple changing of a single digit, so very far away from me. And I feel so very alone
. I typed and pressed send and went back to bed. The hard edge of it would not turn away from me.
The time, the celebration of birth, the comfort of families, the changing of the year, are like measurements. What has changed, what has stayed the same? And there will, each year, be changes, new years to be crossed, births and marriages, graduations, graying hair. One thing will not change: Wade is dead.

Anna Virginia Johnson is buried not far from Wade. An English boxwood planted by her grave decades ago when she died, as Wade did, at sixteen. I think about Anna Virginia, though I only know her name. There is no sign she is otherwise remembered. If there is no life eternal, then Anna Virginia is gone, faded, only a name on a stone, a stone being slowly covered by that boxwood. We can cry out, I do cry out—but I cannot change it.

On Talk of the Nation, Science Friday on NPR they talked of the origins of man. How recent, a caller asked, are the differences in man we attribute now to race? Very recent was the answer. Race has emerged in the last 100,000 years. There was so much in this: if 100,000 years is recent, what then is sixteen years? A blink, less than that. And even something as seemingly basic as race is mutable. It exists briefly, maybe to be washed away again as gradually we intermarry and live in common climates.
It confounded me, but the words that cut me were the truths I confronted every day:
Parts of death—at least parts—are cruelly permanent. I will not brush his hair from his eyes, I will not feel his arms wrap around me as I work, I will not watch him as he shoots a basketball in the backyard, I will not sit beside him at the table now or in ten years or twenty. This is the life I must now live and in this life he is forever dead.

New Year’s Day was followed by the nine-month anniversary of his death, on January 4th. In the nine months since he died, I had been to the movies only once. It was
Emma
. I could do that. I went once to a light opera,
Amahl and the Night Visitors
. I could not do that. As Amahl’s mother held him and loved and watched him, I could not stop the tears, grateful for the curtain calls to come and the darkness that allowed me to cry. And finally for the first time we watched something besides sports or a convention or the news on television. I walked into the family room and sat down with John. He was watching
The American President
. Michael Douglas walked down the portico from the Oval Office, the boxwood gardens to his right. Three weeks before Wade died, I had walked that portico with him, the gardens to our left, when he had gone to Washington for the speech contest. And I knew, as I watched the movie that night, that all my strength and all my smiles were doomed. It would always come down to this. That sweet boy, my precious son, lay in the ground, his hands, his long squared fingers, crossed on his chest, wearing that same jacket he wore on the portico. Everything was hard.

I thought endlessly of odd moments, not necessarily happy times but intense times, times when having Wade as my son took everything from me. When he was in Colorado for the eighteen-day journey with Outward Bound, it was unlike other camps he had attended: I could not speak to him or write him, and he could not write to me. On the day he was to fly home, I had calculated when he would be at the Denver airport, and I arranged to be home if he might call, as I hoped he would. He did, but he called earlier than I had thought, and when I came home, there was only the tail end of his collect call recorded on the answering machine minutes before. It sounds foolish now, but I was inconsolable. I had saved up all my expectations, for days I had been anticipating his voice, and now I had been frustrated. Hours passed while he walked the Denver airport and talked to other boys who were leaving on earlier flights, shopped for shampoo and washed his hair. Hours that I sat there, staring at the phone. John tried to distract me, but it was no use. I wanted my boy.

He did finally call, exhausted and less than interested in telling me right then everything that had happened to him in the preceding eighteen days. So I waited the interminable hours until he would be home, got to the airport early, and watched each plane land, searching the windows of those that taxied by for his face. Finally he was in my arms. I would only have him for hours before he left with John for Africa, to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. He bathed and ate and slept, and I watched him sleep, sitting beside his bed, my elbows on my knees and my chin in my hands. I rose to move his laundry or, when he woke, to get the newspaper articles I had saved for him. But I needed that contact, his smell, the soft brush of his hair. I ran my hands over his fingertips and across his newly shaved face. I drew my finger softly against his eyelids and brows, and I traced his lips. I could not leave his side. I could not get enough of him, particularly since I knew he would go away again. I just never knew there would come a time when he would go away forever. I wished for one more touch. But it would not be enough, I knew. I would only ask for another, or for the warmth of his breath. Things I could not have and for which I should not have even dreamed.

The Learning Lab kept me from dreaming, because it kept my mind in the present. Most of my time was spent working on the web page, which I had finally improved on since my first Geocities effort, keeping the students reasonably quiet, making sure the e-mail was running and that the printers had paper, that the candy wrappers were in the trash cans and the students’ questions answered. It was rewarding, demeaning, and exhausting all at once. And there was no place I would rather be. I was there one night when I got perhaps the best gift of all. The director of the Lab was Steven Killion, a gentle man of quiet strength, enormous intelligence, and astounding patience. When John and I finally left for Washington, we confidently left the physical care of our son’s memory to Steven and to Sarah Lowder, who matched Steven in gentle goodness, and our ability to do so says all I ever need to say about these two.

One night, Steven was at the Learning Lab late, again, and I sent him home. John was working, so I could stay on with the two students left at the computers. They were a sturdy girl and a younger boy, her brother undoubtedly, and she was helping him. After a while, the telephone rang, and the woman at the other end asked if Alyse was there. I turned and looked at the girl. Could that be Alyse? Alyse Tharpe? It was. I called her to the phone and asked her to see me when she had finished. A few minutes later she came over, and I told her who I was. Alyse had been in elementary school with Wade. They’d been in the same classes, and they had, memorably, been in the same fifth-grade production of
Julius Caesar,
which looked from the audience like an indistinguishable clutch of twenty-five ten-year-olds, who—because there were three fifth-grade classes—would periodically walk offstage and be replaced by another indistinguishable clutch. I cannot remember anyone else’s part, not even Wade’s, but I do remember Alyse’s role. Alyse was the seer, and the line she delivered is now my favorite: “Beware de Ides of de March.” Alyse and Wade had gone on to different middle schools and then to different high schools. They had lost track of each other. And now she was here at the Learning Lab.

“Alyse, I’m Wade’s mother.” Pause. “Wade Edwards.” Pause. She looked blankly back at me. “Wade, from Root Elementary.”

Her face lit up. “Wade!” She hugged me, and then she pulled back in horror and in grief. “Wade?” She looked at his picture on the wall. “I know that face. I just couldn’t remember why. Oh, Wade.” She hadn’t known he had died. She hadn’t linked the boy she knew on the playground at Root with the name on the Learning Lab she was using. Now, for the first time, she began to grieve the loss of her friend. We hugged each other in the middle of the Lab, and then we sat and I told her about Wade.

When I got to the Learning Lab the next day, Steven handed me a letter. Alyse had given it to him, and he had read it—which I loved because he only knew Wade through a mother’s description, and who could trust that? But now he had Alyse’s eloquence, Alyse’s eyes to inspire him each day. And I had it, too.

Dear Wade,

I just found out it was you that the Lab was dedicated to. I’d like to say that I’m impressed and you wouldn’t believe how much the students are grateful for it. There are some kids who do come in and cut up but I guess that’s just you given them the sillies. I hear you climb a mountain! I’m so proud that you climb it but that could never be me, I’m not that brave.

Listen, I just wanted to say something that I didn’t get to say when we attended school together. You were my only real friend and the only one since then. I want to thank you for being there and taking up for me when everyone else didn’t. For sitting with me at lunch when I thought I had to eat by myself and making sure everyday was a good one. Even though I acted up all the time I’m glad I had someone to make me be serious when I needed to. I might not have gotten out of there without you, I have so much to thank you for because you make me the person I am. In being there for others, not judging, doing my own thing, beingable to establish trust for and from other people. Thank you will never be enough neither will this letter or this poem but I hope that my heart is sufficient and my soul a light.

I don’t feel sorry for you or sad other than the fact that elementary was the last time I saw you. I am hurt because of that. But your in a very special place right now so enjoy it. Don’t send down no teardrops of rain because you’re lonely (joking, cry all you want). You know what you did that was really special? You understood me most of the time and when you didn’t you tried. When other people didn’t understand me or what I was saying, they call me name, but not you! You were that light I tried and continually try to follow, but your too bright. I wont give up though. I come to terms that it was you that pulled me to that picture in the lab everyday. I’m sorry it didn’t click. When your mom hugged me, I so badly wanted to cry, but I held it in. I didn’t want to make her upset. I still make paper hats, footballs, and boats you taught me how to make and I still remember the last score in the last football game we played. 37–17!! I never beat you, you were just too good! God bless your soul, I love You.