Running Barefoot

by Amy Harmon

  After his funeral, Kasey was buried in Levan Cemetery next to his Grandpa Judd, who had passed away when Kasey was ten. Kasey had loved his Grandpa and would have liked that, but I secretly wished he could be buried next to my mom, that in his death I could claim him. That he could be numbered with my family, as I would now never be numbered among his. The anger I felt towards God kept me distracted from my grief for a while. I had suffered my quota already- it wasn’t fair that He should take two people from me. It was someone else’s turn. I fumed at Him. Even when I tried to pray for strength and understanding, I found myself too angry to finish, and would leave my knees in fury.

  Underneath the anger there was also a question. In sorrow, I found myself asking Him, “Why was Kasey given to me, God, if You were only going to take him away?” It seemed so cruel, and the God I knew was not that God. It was the first time in my life I questioned His love for me.

  The date I was supposed to marry Kasey came, and Tara came and got me, keeping me busy for the day. But when night descended, I found myself in my room fingering my mother’s wedding dress, the dress that would have become mine that very day had Kasey lived. It was simple in style, high-waisted and long sleeved. It looked very Jane Austen to me, and I had loved it all my life. My mother had stored it carefully, and it was almost as white as the day she wore it.

  I had a picture of her in this dress, looking up at my dad with the most serene smile on her face. She held yellow roses in her bouquet and wore a flowered wreath in her hair. Her hair was a rich, heavy brown, and it hung down almost to her waist. I didn’t have her coloring, but my wide eyes and my heart shaped face were hers, as well as my slightly fuller top lip, which gave my mouth a Betty Boop effect. Dad had affectionately called us Boop and Boop Two when Mom was alive. She and my dad looked so young and happy. The picture had caught my dad with his eyes closed, but somehow that just made me love the picture more, like he was counting his blessings at that moment, eyes closed in profound gratitude.

  I wondered…if they had known that time would pass quickly and my mom’s life cut short, would their eyes have lingered longer? Would their hands have gripped each other tighter? I was suddenly envious of my parents, of the time they did get. They had twenty years together. They would always belong to each other now. My mother would always be Janelle Wilson Jensen. I would never be Josie Judd.

  When the house was quiet and Johnny and my dad asleep, I put her wedding dress on, arranged my hair, and carefully applied my makeup. I played Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata very softly on my CD player. When I finished the comforting feminine rituals of many a bride, I stood in front of my full length mirror and stared at myself for a very long time. The words of Jane Eyre came to my mind, and I understood my literary friend as I never had before.

  “Where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday? Where was her life? Where were her prospects? Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman - almost a bride - was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects desolate.”

  My dad found me asleep on the front porch swing the next morning, still fully dressed in my stiff white dress, wrapped in the long lace of my veil. I had come outside to sit in the pale light of the moon, unwilling to remove the dress and relinquish what remained of my wedding day. I had fallen asleep to the creak of the wooden swing. My dad had spoken my name, waking me up to the dawn of the day after. He had sat down beside me and pulled me into his lap, rubbing my back in slow circles, rocking gently, letting the sun rise and the horses wait while he sat with me and held me in his arms. My anger eventually unraveled as it was sucked into the black hole of my profound disappointment. The life I had envisioned would never be, and I mourned for it almost as desperately as I mourned for Kasey.

  The months after Kasey’s death were like a strange play where I became the leading lady with a helpless supporting cast, and where the props of daily life kept me functioning in a stilted parody of existence. No one knew what to do or say. My outrage at my loss would return randomly, causing me to keep my own company in order to not lash out at loved ones who only wanted to help. I played my music constantly, even as I slept. It wound its way around me and through me, and helped me retreat from my reality.

  I would run through the hills around my house, down the long country roads that meandered around the familiar farms and homes of my neighbors. The distances became longer and longer, endless nocturnes, concertos and sonatas saving me from thought, the tempo of my breath whooshing in tandem with the percussion of my pounding feet. I’d decided to wait until January to start school, but I was actually looking forward to leaving for the University after Christmas. My life-long dream of musical renown now felt very empty, the loss of someone to share it with had made it seem as hollow as an abandoned shell, but I still wanted it. I needed it. I needed to reclaim it, to reshape it. And I craved the anonymity of a town where nobody knew about my pain. Hiding it would be so much easier.

  My dad was relieved that I seemed to be moving forward, and I’m sure a cloud lifted whenever I left the house, though he never would have admitted it. How painful it must have been for him! How intimate his knowledge of my pain! Ten years before, his anguish had mirrored my own. But his empathy provided him a seemingly endless patience, and he cared for me now as I had tried to care for him then.

  And poor Johnny. I had been so irrationally angry with him. He’d tiptoed around me for the first month, trying to communicate his love for me in little ways…making my bed, stocking the fridge with cold Diet Coke though he and my dad drank nothing but Pepsi. One day he’d even washed a load of my whites, folding each sock and lacy under thing neatly and placing them on my bed. I’d eventually started doing some of the same things for him ... asking his forgiveness, returning his love by gathering the clothes from his bedroom floor, putting Twinkies in the freezer so he could eat them frozen the way he liked them, cleaning the mud from his work boots and shining them up, leaving them sitting neatly on the back porch - such little acts of kindness that were easier to perform than words were to speak. And we never did speak of that horrible day.

  About a week before I planned to leave for school, my dad left work early because of a terrible headache. I was upstairs boxing up some of my things, when I heard the kitchen door bang open, and I called down to him in question. I heard the cupboards slam and then a glass break and I sighed, wondering what he was up to.

  “Dad?” I plodded down the stairs and into the kitchen to find him swaying at the sink with a bottle of aspirin in his hand and broken glass around his feet.

  He turned to look at me and teetered, grabbing for the edge of the countertop. He lost hold of the opened aspirin, sending little white pills scattering all over the floor.

  He started to speak, but his words were slurred, kind of the way he sounded when he’d had too much to drink.

  “Dad! It’s 2:00 in the afternoon! Are you drunk?” I accused angrily, arms akimbo.

  “No booze,” my dad mumbled out, and he fell to the floor as if his legs would no longer support him.

  Fear for him slammed through me like a freight train, and I rushed to him, seeing the shadow of death’s long sickle pulling him from me as he tried to right himself, his eyes squeezed shut in a terrible grimace.

  “No!” I shouted, momentarily crazed at death’s all-too familiar and terrible visage. I put my arms around him and threw his left arm around my shoulders

  “Dad, we’ve got to get you to the hospital!” I helped him to his feet and we staggered like a pair in a three legged race out the kitchen door and down the back steps. Somehow we made it out to his truck, and I toppled him onto the passenger seat and wrapped the seat belt around him, trying to hold him upright. Calling 911 would mean waiting for an ambulance to come from Nephi, and we didn’t have time for that. I didn’t know what was happening, but something was very wrong.

  My dad had had what his doctors called an ischemic stroke, caused by a blood clot in his brain. When we got to the hospital, his speech was
unintelligible and there was no way he could walk. I had run into the emergency room calling for help and within minutes he’d been wheeled in while I had shouted out exactly what had transpired in the kitchen. After a scan to make sure that the stroke wasn’t caused by a brain hemorrhage, he was put on blood thinners to loosen and break up the clot. But a great deal of damage had already been done.

  After a week in the hospital, my dad came home unable to walk and unable to speak clearly. The part of his brain that controls movement and speech had been damaged. His left side was particularly weak, and he was unable even to feed himself.

  I drove him back and forth to the rehabilitation clinic in Provo every day, where he spent three to five hours relearning everything from tying his shoes to writing his name.

  I learned how to care for him by watching the team of doctors and therapists that worked with him each day. My brothers and their wives assisted where they could. Jacob took most of the farm work on, and I gratefully left that in his capable hands. Often, one of my sister-in-laws would drive Dad to rehabilitation or bring him home, spelling me on one stretch or another, but for the most part I was the caregiver, and I took on his care with a ferocious determination that he would be whole again. I had lost too many, and my dad would not be numbered with them.

  Within a couple months he was walking with a walker and making considerable strides in other areas. His words were not nearly as slurred, although he’d lost some of his cognitive ability and would sometimes forget what we’d talked about only moments before. I’d asked him once, what does ‘two plus two equal?’ and, after thinking for a moment he’d responded - “What’s a two?”

  Even his sense of touch was affected. He couldn’t tell hot from cold - it was as if the signal triggering sensation was off somewhere in his brain. One day he washed his hands under scalding water, not knowing he was burning them.

  During the week he spent in the hospital right after his stroke, I called the Dean of Admissions at Brigham Young University, as well as the director of the music department whom I’d met with upon accepting my scholarship. After briefing them on my situation, both had been truly kind and told me that the scholarship would be deferred until the following school year. As I hung up the phone I knew I wouldn’t be using it.

  I stopped playing the piano after my dad’s stroke. The first weeks after he was able to come home I was too tired to do anything but see to his needs. I fed him, bathed him, and took him through the exercises I’d been shown that would help him to regain the strength and mobility he had lost. And of course, the long hours in rehabilitation took up the months that followed. Every once in a while I would finger the keys, waiting for that familiar pull in my veins, but the music that had once been forever dancing in my thoughts was strangely silent. I didn’t let myself dwell on it. I don’t know if it was exhaustion or just an unwillingness to face what was happening to me.

  Then I stopped listening to classical music when I ran. Instead, I borrowed Tara’s ipod and listened to Tim McGraw and Kenny Chesney – according to Tara they were ‘real men in cowboy hats’. My dad had always loved George Straight and Johnny Cash. I found it occupied my thoughts while I ran and left my heart untouched - which was just what I wanted.

  When my dad was well enough for me to leave him for any length of time I started teaching piano lessons. Financially we were in trouble, and I needed to work. But the lessons were noisy and our house was small and not conducive to a recovering stroke patient who needed a great deal of rest, so the bishop of our church gave me permission to use one of the rooms in the church to teach my students. By that time, it was summer and school was out, and I could schedule my students around my dad’s rehab schedule. But when school started, my students would not be able to accommodate me as easily, and I needed an additional source of income that still had some flexibility. I had to do something else.

  Tara had gone to beauty school and graduated the year before with big dreams and blue hair. One evening she made an off-hand suggestion that I could take classes at the Beauty College in the hours my dad was doing his rehabilitation. I decided that cutting hair would be as good a way as any for me to stay close to home and pay the bills. Jared lived in Provo, about ten minutes from the hospital, and when I wasn’t out of class in time to pick my dad up, he would pick him up and take him to his house until I was finished with classes. Somehow we stumbled through that year and, unlike Tara, I graduated with my hair color mostly intact, and no dreams to speak of.

  Tara had wanted out of Levan and had gotten grunt work in a pricey salon in Salt Lake City, hoping to learn from the best and work her way up. I’m sure Louise would have like her to come work with her at Ballow’s ‘Do – but wasn’t surprised at Tara’s need to do her own thing. Tara’s lack of interest in the family business helped me, however, because Louise let me work in her shop. I was able to cut hair in the day and teach piano students in the evenings, and dad and I limped along, financially and otherwise.

  Tara was the kind of stylist who experimented on everyone who knew her - with mixed results. My hair went through several different shades and cuts before Tara’s mom pulled Tara aside and kindly but firmly told her she was to experiment on someone else. I was a perfect guinea pig as I had absolutely no interest in how I looked. In beauty school I had practiced on her as well, with much more conservative results, and though I would never be as creative as Tara was, I was conscientious and precise. My loneliness made me a good listener, and I was able to give customers what they wanted, rather than what I thought would bring out their inner sex kitten, as Tara was prone to do.

  Every once in a while, I’d find myself contemplating how different my life was from the life I’d dreamed of. There was a time when I had dreamed of attending a Performing Arts High School. I never told my dad about that, although I’m sure he would have tried to make it a possibility. The tie that bound me to my home was much too tight, much too strong. Then, there was Kasey, and all thoughts of leaving had fled. I remembered the days when Sonja had mused that I would perform with the Utah Symphony. But Sonja never made me feel guilty about my choices. She understood what held me. However, I knew she ached for me, worried that I would bury my talent in duty and then someday try to uncover it, only to find it had rusted with time and inattention.

  Sonja had aged. The spry 70-year-old of our first days together was suddenly 80. She had started getting more forgetful, wandering off, not remembering where she was or how she got there. A year after Dad’s stroke, Sonja was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Doc called me and asked me to come see her. Sonja was devastated, and I was distraught but somehow unfazed. Life seemed to have become one tragedy after another, and I had gotten good at coping.

  Sadly, Doc’s health had deteriorated as well. His mind was sharp, but he was physically ailing. They hired a live in nurse, so they could remain in their home for as long as possible.

  It was for Sonja that I started playing the piano again. I would ride my bike up the hill around sundown every day, just like I had for my daily lessons years before, and play for her. I played music that demanded great skill, but that didn’t engage my soul. Somehow, Sonja seemed to crave the cascading scales and the pounding chords, and never complained that I spent too much time courting the ‘beast.’ The disease that was slowly robbing her of her personality and her very spirit would cower in the face of my musical onslaught. It was as if the neurological synapses and pathways in her mind that had once been forged by her intense musical study were regenerating and re-firing as the music reminded her confused brain of its intricate knowledge. My fingers would fly, and I would pour all my energy into a frenzy of furious music.

  After I played, she would be almost normal, invigorated, without a quirk or slip. This was the only kind of playing I ever did. No beautiful Beethoven or dreamy Debussy, no heartbreaking concertos of love and loss. I played only the technical, only the difficult, only the demanding. She was my sole audience. For most of the next two years, she was co
herent and healthy enough to remain at home.

  Then one day I rode my bike up the hill to the house, only to have her nurse tell me she was unwell, and sleeping. I came back every day for a week. Sonja refused to see me. When I finally insisted on seeing her, she seemed fearful, her lip quivering and her eyes filling with tears. She wailed at me to go home. I went to her piano and played desperately, trying to coax her back. For once it didn’t seem to help. She locked her door, and I could hear her sobbing behind it when I knocked. Her nurse said arrangements needed to be made to put her in a home. Doc and Sonja had made some inquiries and crafted a detailed plan. When it became necessary for Sonja to go to a convalescent home, Doc went with her. Doc passed away in his sleep two months later. Sonja was physically quite healthy, but the spiritual Sonja, her self, was gone - hidden away somewhere, leaving me to grieve as her body lingered to unintentionally mock and remind.

  I visited her often at her convalescent home, and she seemed to enjoy the CD’s I brought. But she never ‘woke up’ to the music, although she seemed to favor the mellow and the melodious now, shunning the powerful pieces of the last two years for the sweeter nocturnes and serenades. I read to her, as I had done many times before as a young girl. She also enjoyed this, but liked Nancy Drew in lieu of Pride and Prejudice. I tried reading her beloved Wuthering Heights only to have her fling it across the room as I had done in her sitting room so many years earlier. The medication she was on made her less fearful, but I could tell she was always relieved when I left. After all, I was a stranger.