Where the Broken Lie (23 page)

He sighs and says, “No, Tucker. But I know who did.”

“Who? Don’t tell me Grandpa did it out of guilt?”

“No, it wasn’t your grandfather.”

“Well then who the hell was it, Alvin? Who else would have paid for Slim Jim Johnson to be buried back here in the very town where he had killed an eleven year-old girl?”

He sighs again and says, “It was Howard and Betty Cooper paid for it. They heard about Slim Jim’s upbringing, how sick in the head he was. They forgave the man and paid for a proper burial.”

He pauses, shakes his head.

“Some damn fine Christians, those Coopers. Just some damn fine Christians.”

Sometimes the things we discover outside ourselves make us question what is inside ourselves and the realization rumbles through our core like a runaway Union Pacific locomotive.

I am only what Victoria Mueller and Ronald Gaines could combine to produce in a specific moment in time. The same is true of them and their parents. Biologically, the men whose genes comprise me—my father, my father’s father, my mother’s father—are alcoholics and adulterers. Molesters and murderers. Their blood flows through my veins. A DNA comparison would provide scientific evidence of a similar double helix.

I do not feel those things inside me and yet I know that they are there, the little dragon monsters. Biologically, the potential is there. Maybe that wicked genetic recipe needs to stew in life’s failures and disappointments before being ready to serve. Perhaps with time and opportunity I will become the same.

What more lay ahead for me? How much more of me and mine is there to uncover? And what was I to do with what I had already learned?

The Old Man had told me everything he knew. Probably everything that there was left to know. Except, that is, for what could only be found inside my grandfather’s mind and memory. That’s all there is left to know.

A hundred miles of thoughts swirl through my head in the six-block stroll I take through town. I walk the meandering sideways walk of a child who is going somewhere he doesn’t want to go.

If Keller’s story is true—and I believed that it was—then the facts pointed to my grandfather having killed Katie. Yet there is no real proof. There is nothing for me to do with all my doubts and fears but throw them at Grandpa and watch him react. But how could I confront him? And yet how could I not?

In the end I decide that I cannot live my life with the not knowing. The not knowing about my grandfather and of the shared blood that runs through our veins.

I watch my feet move in front me—left, right, left, and imagine them overlapping the childhood steps that I have surely taken on this very pavement years before. Taking the long way home, I stroll down Adams Street past the school and toward the park, hoping to find my swinging sage.

And find her I did.

I stop for a moment and watch the little girl swing back and forth. Chained and unchained. Safe and unsafe. The destiny of sky. The fate of ground.

I felt like I was suddenly living in a world that knows shade, but not sunlight.

“Hi!” she says.

“Hi.”

I walk over to my bench and sit.

“Thank you for helping me the other day.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Settles.”

She drags her feet until the swing stops. She climbs off and makes her way toward me. She sits down right next to me on the bench and then leans forward on her knees the same way I have.

“My dad told me that you guys grew up here together.”

“Yep, we did.”

“Were you two friends?”

“Me and your dad?” I smile down at her. What a special little girl Son Settles had.

“Yeah, sure, of course we were friends. Used to play a lot of baseball and basketball together.”

“Yeah, he still likes to play those games.”

“Can I ask you something? What’s your name?”

“Well, I guess I can tell you since you saved me from choking and everything.”

She laughs at herself and then looks up at me with those flowery eyes of hers.

“My name is Mel, short for Melanie. Don’t call me Melanie. And I already know that your name is Tucker, so you don’t have to tell me.”

She reaches down and picks up a handful of pebbles and starts throwing them at the metal slide across from us. Each one makes a loud pinging sound as it hits.

I have love for this little girl. It was love that I hadn’t been able to give to Ethan. Mixed with a little leftover love I had for Katie perhaps. The beauty of all youth had grown even more precious to me as the world around grew more ugly.

She purses her lips determinedly with every toss of a pebble. Then she tucks that long brown hair back behind her ears and looks up at me with her slightly freckled face. Like a little porcelain doll whose maker has dotted each freckle with the tip of a fine brush delicately and with great care.

I open my mouth to speak, stop, release the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Bending down, I pick up a handful of my own pebbles to ping the slide with. We sit there in silence until I have pinged my last pebble against the slide.

“Mel, have you ever had to do something that you really didn’t want to do?”

“Uh, hello, I’m a kid. My whole life is about doing things I don’t want to do.”

“Yeah, I suppose. So, how do you deal with it? I mean, do you ever try getting out of it?”

“Used to. Then I figured out that when there’s something that someone is making me do, one way or the other I always end up having to do it. Usually it’s best to do it quick.”

“Huh. You’re a pretty wise little girl, Mel. You know that?”

“Yep.”

All the colors. I can see them as I approach the cemetery. They were not there before. From a distance it almost looked like confetti. But they are envelopes. Envelopes of different colors and sizes—dozens of them.

I walk above the dead, weaving a path between the headstones and taking it all in. The letters are propped against headstones and sticking out of flower arrangements. Some seem to be growing right up out of the ground, tiny little paper headstones sprouting up from little slots plowed into this sacred soil.

And there are people here, too. Living people, I mean. More than I’ve ever seen at a cemetery when there isn’t a burial service going on.

I see an older couple walking hand in hand as if strolling through a Japanese garden.

A former Sunday School teacher of mine has a basketful of letters and is sneaking around like the Easter Bunny—placing a yellow envelope here and an orange one there.

I watch Lyle Weber leave with a handful of letters and I see Abigail Simpson standing and holding just one, a quivering hand covering her mouth as she reads it. Whoever wrote that letter has love for Abigail Simpson. And Abigail Simpson has love for whomever that letter was about. I never believed in the possibility of either of those things until this moment.

Beatrice Hart sits cross-legged in front of Laura Jane’s headstone with several open letters stacked neatly at her side. At least that many more in front of her waiting to be opened and read.

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

From my back pocket I pull out the letter I had written for Howard and Betty Cooper before coming out here. The envelope also contains 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 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 upstairs 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 that I was confused. “That’s mine, Tucker,” she said. “That’s my heartbeat.”

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 with 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.”

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 was 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 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, was the only one you’re ever going to have of him before he was tucked into a coffin, dropped into the earth, and forgotten by a world that cycled without relent. How invaluable memories suddenly seemed to you. And how utterly unattainable.