Saving Graces (20 page)

White Sand

My friend, the white sand on the beaches,

that gives us heaven on earth

And the sun that shines brightly over,

tripping on the clouds and winds,

of obstacles, but never hurt.

A martyr in my mind and others, forever my brother.

Sunny days are when you smiled,

and life awakens in your pretty blue eyes.

My brother, white sand on the beaches and the sun,

pure as diamonds and precious as gold,

the bestest friend I’ve ever known,

When I’m sad, I hope your there to hold my hand.

When I’m happy, I hope your there to hug my neck.

Because if it wasn’t for you my life would be a total wreck.

And for you my companion, I love you for that.

Your in my heart, forever!

The spring came. We restarted a conversation we had had before Wade died about whether John should run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Lauch Faircloth. David and Jim and John sat at our kitchen table, readying for the fight. John went by the state Democratic party headquarters and was greeted quizzically when he said he thought he would challenge Faircloth. He went to Washington to talk to Bob Kerrey, who was the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and who didn’t greet him quizzically at all. Bob knew as well as anyone that some fights are brewing inside and you are ready before anyone else knows. While John was away, I thought I would straighten the study. It sounded simple enough, I know, but it was covered in papers. What it meant, of course, was going through a lot of paper that had to do with Wade: cards on which he had written his bibliography for a paper, the notebook of his papers that his English teacher gave me, his list of companions for his Outward Bound trek, a hundred little things he’d left behind. The night before he’d died, he worked late in the study on his junior term paper. When I got home, the computer screen still had his scanned photograph of striking workers during the 1930s. His books from that paper were on the coffee table still open beneath newspapers with stories of his death.

Putting his things in folders, taking the steps to put them away, was much harder than I had anticipated. Well, in truth, I had not thought at all. Stupid me. It was no consolation that he would have had it all filed by now, in his desk or his closet. He would have thrown out most of the mail, although I could not. I finally stopped, unable to do anything. But John was due back the next day, and he would be tired, so I had to steel myself to finish it. There was no easy way around any of this. After I finished, I drove to the cemetery. The rains were headed toward us, but it was bright and breezy when I first got there. At Wade’s grave, the stone basket of flowers, a large metal angel, four smaller angels, and one of the potted plants were missing. Someone had tried to move the large angel that replaced the one my sister had brought (which had been stolen earlier), but it was too heavy. The mud from their hands had left marks on the angel’s face.

I cannot express the way this violation made me feel. I had failed to protect this boy when he lived. I loved him, yes, and he had known that, yes. But my first responsibility had been to keep him free from harm, and I did not do that. I do not feel guilty. I did all I knew to do. It simply was not enough. And now I could not even protect his place. I stood and cried and screamed. A couple walking came to console me, and Chuck, the cemetery director, came and sat with me. At first I was glad that at least they had left a mark—that large angel would have their fingerprints.

I called the police and then told Chuck to go home. The rain started to move in. It would wash away the fingerprints, I thought. So I took two umbrellas from the trunk and arranged them to cover the statue. To hold them down, I covered the umbrellas with a sheet and then a quilt. (Fortunately I clean my trunk about as often as I straighten my study.) Then I sat on the bench and finished my prayers. The police did not come. I called again. It was nearing five, and the gate would be locked soon. The rain was steady now; there had been accidents; no one was available. I persisted, and they sent someone.

It turns out you cannot get fingerprints from that surface. The wait had been fruitless. I put the umbrellas and linens back in my car. More had been taken from us, of course, than simply the trinkets that comfort us at the grave. I was so tired of being impotent, of being reminded I was impotent. And I was just plain tired.

For John’s next trip to Washington, I went with him. But this time it wasn’t for the Senate. This time it was to give out a college scholarship to the national winner of the contest in which Wade had been a winner the previous year. We sat in the Old Post Office while bright high school students ate their lunches, and we talked with the two women who had managed the children the year before. Carolyn Naifeh, who had been Geoff Cowan’s assistant at Voice of America, and Ann Orr, who worked with Sheldon Hackney at the National Endowment for the Humanities, did not know then what great friends of ours they would become. All they knew was these were the sad parents of that sweet boy from North Carolina they had met a year before. So their faces were something to remember when John told them that he was running for the United States Senate. John had told me about the faces at the state Democratic Party headquarters when he had made a similar statement, but now I saw what he meant. The little side glances to one another might as well have been accompanied by shrugs. We laugh about it now.

Soon there would be the graduation of Wade’s high school class. It wasn’t just me, of course; bereaved mothers across the country were facing spring concerts and banquets and graduations. Graduation was hard. We didn’t want to sit too close—there were so many families who had living children graduating who should be close, but from where we sat at Wade’s graduation, I could hardly see the candles that were lit for Wade and for Jackson. I felt, as I often had, outside myself: the grieving mother, the solicitous friend, the dutiful parent of my surviving daughter, but all as if I were a puppeteer, stripped of the ability to evoke anything other than rudimentary motion in my puppet body. Real life was something other people had, something I’d once had and could not imagine having again. The people we once were are like characters in stories from a book; we were drawn to them, to their fullness and hope and happy naiveté, and yet we could not get to them. It was nearly impossible to believe that once we were them.

It was more than a year since Wade died, and still it seemed there would be no light. On ASG someone wrote of the perils of holding on to grief as a means of holding on to our dead children.
His death knocked me down once, and it knocks me over each day, again and again, and I see no end to that
, I responded.
I can sit and let the pain grow within me. I can feel the tears wall up against the backs of my eyelids, and my face flush, my cheekbones fill with the pressure of the coming torrent. I can rest my mind on his car, rising up in the air, of his terror, of the weight of that car pressing the life from him. I can feel just the way the air felt on the porch as the patrolmen pulled into our driveway. I rub my skirt between my fingers and beg them to tell me he is alive. I hear my No, a wail that they finally stopped outside me but which has continued inside me every day. And the intensity of that pain is greater than any emotion I ever had. Not love, not fear, not wonder. The greatest of all is pain. And I am inclined, on rainy days, or on days we might have celebrated had he lived, or on days when I cannot account for my unsteadiness, on those days I am inclined to wrap myself in my mourning, a comforter, a hairshirt, my son. There is no question that as I pull it closer about me, I feel his presence run through me. It is pain and memory, and I cannot release its hold on me. And he cannot, I remember, release my hold on him, him as a dead boy, when I do this. For when I do this, the fullness of him is gone; all he is the object of my grief. I deny him when holding on to him in pain. He becomes but a dead boy. Gone is the tender boy, the selfless boy, the tired runner, the easy laughter, all that was important to him, all that he loved, it is withered and replaced by that mesmerizing pain. I know I must let the dead boy go.

I could, sometimes, and John and Cate helped. Life was Cate’s softball and Cate and John’s soccer—he was still coaching—and the WELL. I might have had to make some Latin flashcards, but Wade had saved his in a labeled folder—so typical—and Cate didn’t need many new ones. And we turned our faces northward, to Washington. It was politics now. In our kitchen or in John’s office, looking at videotapes of commercials sent by political consultants who wanted John to hire them. Meeting with these strangers who were checking him out like he was a thoroughbred they were thinking of buying. I was sometimes surprised they didn’t open his mouth and check his bite. And I was still trying to get pregnant again. It felt like endless appointments and hundreds of shots. Cycles and failures, but I didn’t have the same anxiety I saw in the doctor’s waiting room and read about online. I had had children; I knew I could handle a pregnancy. I was just old. I say, “just old” like it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. It was a real hurdle. But it wasn’t hopeless, either. I knew what hopelessness felt like, and this was not it.

Part of the process of using pharmaceutical help to get pregnant is getting the drugs in you. The clinic nurse handed John an orange and a syringe so he could practice giving me shots, and he promptly handed them to me.

“It is not someplace I can reach, hon,” trying to hand them back to him.

To which he responded, “Then we will have to figure something else out, because I do not want to give you shots.” Cate, always helpful, was very clear: if Dad wasn’t doing it, neither was she. But John solved the problem. A warm nurse who reviewed files in his office stopped by the house every day—it was only about two blocks from work—and gave me my shot. When John started campaigning across the state more often for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate, I was particularly glad Gail Campbell and not John was my shot giver. John would arrange his schedule around weekly appointments, but it would have been much too limiting to arrange it around daily shots. When I finally got pregnant—around Wade’s eighteenth birthday—John was there to celebrate our real but muted joy. And Gail was there to teach me how to give the next round of shots I would need, which were fortunately in a place I could reach. And when Emma Claire was born, Gail was there, as proud as if she were the mother, snapping pictures and giving hugs. It went smoothly—well, pretty smoothly; as a result of the medication I did get a uterine cyst, which had to come out, and I did get gestational diabetes, which I controlled with diet. But I kept going to softball games and the cemetery and the Learning Lab, and John kept campaigning until, ten days before the Democratic primary, Emma Claire was delivered by Watty Bowes, who treated me as if I were his granddaughter—which, given my age at the time, forty-eight, I particularly appreciated.

Emma Claire developed jaundice because her blood and mine, like Wade’s and Cate’s blood and mine, were incompatible. She required transfusions and special lights, and John stayed with me, with us, when he ought to have been campaigning. Finally Cate and I made him go, and Cate took care of me and her new sister, with the help of Nancy Speroni. And by the day of the primary, ten days later, Emma Claire was strong, and John’s three girls—Emma Claire in a tiny onesie embroidered with John’s campaign logo, made by the campaign staff—stood with him onstage as he accepted his party’s nomination and prepared for the fight to come. After the klieg lights were turned off and the television cameras were packed away, Cate and I went back to the room in the Velvet Cloak hotel where we had waited for the evening’s results. She spread out across one of the beds. Harrison Hickman, our friend and pollster, came in and asked her, “Isn’t this a great night?” Her response: “I just want to go home.” It was hard on her, I could see that. And there was more to come. When John won the Senate seat, I told him the truth: in our house, if you were not a baby or a candidate, you didn’t get much attention. Take her on a trip, I said. And that Thanksgiving he did. He and Cate went to London.

Although I had a busload of teenage girls and nearly as many empty-nest mothers who would have been glad to care for Emma Claire, allowing me to go out on the trail, I stayed out of the campaign for Senate and remained with Emma Claire. I did listen to the television and, on the way to the cemetery, to the radio, and I would call the campaign office when new commercials against John broke or with something I had heard, but I barely campaigned.

I liked the campaign—from a safe distance from the cameras—and I particularly liked the young people in the campaign. They were smart and committed and poorly dressed. They were happy and energetic, and did I mention poorly dressed? The older folks—most younger than I—were fine, but it was a job for them, yet another job in a long line of political campaign jobs. They dressed like they had taken time doing it, not like the young people, who dressed like it was a blasted necessity every morning that slowed them on the way to what they really wanted to be doing. For these young people, for David Ginsberg and Christina Reynolds, for Brad Anderson, John Dervin, Hunter Pruette, for Julianna Smoot and Jennifer Skalka and Jessica Wintringham and Laura Godwin, it was a passion. Cate worked with Jessica in the press office. Laura was Emma Claire’s first babysitter. I could almost feel the mesh winding around these young people, binding them to us, and us to them. My role was purely supportive, and with a new baby, I liked it that way. John, who had lost his first, second, and third wedding rings running, needed a replacement ring. I could do that. I went to a jewelry store. “I’d like to see what you have in size nine gold wedding bands,” I said. She brought out five bands and placed them on a little square of velvet. I looked at them for only a second, and then, to her great surprise, I said, “I’ll take all five.” He only needed three in the campaign, but Emma Claire lost the fourth, so perhaps five was a good number.