“Well, that’s different,” he said. “I don’t know that I was an addict, but I sure as shit went through withdrawals. It was tough. And—well, that’s been forty years ago, and I still occasionally feel it. Like a nagging sort of itch in the back of my mind. Might be different for you. It’s been longer, and different circumstances.”
That was true. I lit a cigarette. I could feel and hear my pulse in my ears. “Everybody looks at me like I’m broken. Like I’m one of these flowers, and if you just breathe near me I might fall apart. The thing is … Grandpa … there were times when I could have called. When I-I could have gotten to a phone. But by then, I believed his lies.”
He nodded and stripped off his gloves. “You’ll grow back. Just like these flowers. You’ll have to trim some dead stuff—especially the lies that son of a bitch told you. But you’ll grow back. And I’ll be right here with your mom and dad and Sam.”
He didn’t mention Grandma. That’s because she thought I was a whore. And deep down in my heart, where I was like one of these crushed flowers that lay curled on the ground, cut off from the main branch, I believed it too. But I knew those were lies. Lies he told me. Lies I told myself.
I didn’t have to live those lies anymore.
Forty-Two
Erin
The day after Cole got back from Alabama and the meeting with his parole officer, I started looking for work. We had talked a lot about it during the drive back from Oregon. Waffle House had insurance, but it didn’t cover mental health, and we needed mental health coverage. And with a felony conviction, Cole was lucky to have the job he had—he wouldn’t be going back into the corporate world, not for a long time—if ever.
For the first time in a long time, I’d stopped resenting him for that. I understood what had driven him to hurt Chase the way he had—I’d always understood that. More importantly, during that long, slow drive back from Oregon, we’d gotten to know each other again. For the first time in years—hell, for the first time ever—Cole actually talked with me about how he was feeling. We spent long periods of time on that drive in silence. But we also talked—about his job, about our fears, even about a possible future.
Sometimes, during the drive home, I would ride in back, holding Brenna or sometimes Sam. Brenna slept much of the time, when she wasn’t puking. One the second day, Cole stopped the van at an overlook somewhere in the mountains. The sky was clear and we could see for miles, the land laid out below us in sweeping hills of green and blue. The air was cold, just enough to hurt when I inhaled, and I thought we were only going to stop for a few minutes.
But Brenna got out and looked around. “I can’t remember the last time I saw something so beautiful,” she said. And then she started to cry.
We all cried a lot in those days. And that was another change for Cole. Before Oregon, I couldn’t remember ever seeing him weep. But something had broken the dam. Something.
It wasn’t something, it was Sam.
When faced with the realization that he was at risk of losing her too, everything had broken through. Now sometimes it seemed like he couldn’t stop crying. At the mention of Brenna’s return, or Sam’s struggle, or how badly he wanted us back together, his eyes would water and he’d get an embarrassed look on his face as he wiped tears away.
“You don’t have to hide that,” I said.
“I couldn’t if I tried.”
Cole went back to work a few days after we arrived in Atlanta. At first they set him up as a relief manager—working a few days in one restaurant, then a few at a different one. He worked a lot of different hours and through weekends, but somehow it was different. In the meantime, I began poring through the job websites and circulating my resume.
I’d been through this in Alabama, of course. Day after day of filling out job applications, and even two interviews. But looking back now, it was hard to get my mind around how serious a depression I’d been stuck in. Cole too. All of us. I’d barely been functional, and it wasn’t surprising at all that I hadn’t been able to find a job. But now? Now I was determined. And in a city the size of Atlanta, there were a lot more opportunities.
I started with signing up with several different temp agencies. I went through two weeks of interviews followed by mostly electronic based tests—typing speed and Word and Excel and other office products. It had been a while since I’d used any of them, but they came back quickly.
At the same time, for the first time since years before Brenna’s disappearance, I began to reach out to my own network. I graduated from Georgetown, after all, and had friends all over the country in different industries. I dug through my alumni directory and looked people up online.
Every time I picked up the phone I felt a pit of anxiety. Would my old friends and acquaintances blow me off? Was I wasting my time? I listened for tones of contempt or pity; after all, most of my acquaintances from college had moved forward with careers instead of taking a decade and a half off for child rearing.
I used to be defensive about that. And resentful. But after Brenna disappeared, I was grateful for every second I’d had with her. So what if I was starting from scratch now? I had my daughter home. Nothing else mattered anymore, except putting my family back together.
Cole was gone from five until four, but usually I would have lunch with Jim, Brenna, and Sam in the kitchen. Jim would crack jokes and tell dirty stories about the Marine Corps, a regular running patter of words that helped smooth out the gaps and silence.
Because that silence existed. The silence was not knowing how to ask Brenna all the questions I needed to ask. How had she survived? What kind of trauma had she endured? How could I help her when I didn’t even understand really what she’d been through? Some days she seemed fine—playing games with Sam, laughing and joking. Other days she would retreat to a remote place I couldn’t touch. She would sit on the back porch, smoking cigarette after cigarette, staring into space. Those days I was terrified for her. And I knew I made her nervous, hovering and asking her ten times a day how she was doing, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
One afternoon in late October I was looking for Brenna and found her on the porch smoking again, sitting in a rocking chair. Jim sat in the other rocker. They were quiet.
“What do you guys want for dinner tonight?” I asked.
“Whatever,” Brenna said. She shrugged and looked away.
“You okay, baby?”
She barely grunted a response, and then that was followed by a coughing fit.
I sighed. “Brenna, I know you don’t want to think about it, but maybe it’s time to think about quitting smoking—”
“Just leave me alone!” Her shout was unexpected and loud. “I don’t want to quit smoking, and I wish you’d just stop nagging me about it!”
I didn’t physically stagger back, but it felt like it. It was unjust. I hadn’t said anything to her about the smoking in weeks. But she was obviously feeling something. She stood up and stamped out her cigarette.
“There. Are you happy?” She stomped off, slamming the door behind her.
I sighed, eyes falling on Jim, who hadn’t moved during the exchange. He gave me a sympathetic look and said, “She’ll be all right. Just having a rough day.”
“Withdrawals?” I asked. I sank into the rocker Brenna had just vacated.
“She had nightmares last night and couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“Oh, I didn’t realize. Did she tell you—?” I trailed off.
“I don’t sleep so well these days, Erin, so I heard her crying out. No way you could have known.”
“Did she say what it was about?”
He closed his eyes. “Yes. She talks to me sometimes. But you don’t really want to know.”
“Of course I want to know. She’s my daughter.”
He leaned close and touched my hand. “Listen, Erin. She went through some stuff that I can barely comprehend, and I’ve seen people chewed up by artillery in war. You don’t want to know. And more important,
she doesn’t want you to know. She already feels like you think she’s broken forever, like you are ashamed of her.”
“Of course I’m not ashamed of her!”
“It isn’t about you. For Christ’s sake, did you know she found a cop and asked for help at one point? And was raped by him! She was locked in a closet for days. She was tortured. She may never heal from that. You don’t have a right to demand that she tell you anything.”
I sagged back into my seat, involuntary tears running down my face. What kind of secrets did she have? My poor girl. “She told you that? I just want to help,” I whispered.
“Yeah, she told me. A little. The biggest thing you can do to help her right now is just give her the space she needs. Love her. Be there for her. But don’t demand anything. She’s going to therapy and her meetings and right now that’s going to have to be enough.”
I looked out at the garden that Jim had so meticulously cultivated over the years, with Brenna increasingly helping him. “I don’t know how to help her.”
“You help her every day by letting her know that she’s loved. By letting her know that … that she’s going to be okay. That she’s not dirty, that it didn’t change the way you love her. Deep inside she feels like she’s … like she’s ruined. She doesn’t feel like it happened to her, she feels like it … like it soiled her. And that may never get better.”
I looked over at him. Cole’s father was in his late sixties now, and after five years of retirement he looked happier than I’d ever seen him. At peace. I found it perplexing that the man who had so confounded me when we met twenty years ago had somehow become the pillar of our healing family.
“You know, I don’t understand you. When we met I thought you were—please don’t be upset—well, I thought you were kind of a small-minded bigot. But you’ve been the first to reach out and be open to Sam and … I just don’t get it. What changed? Or was I just wrong?”
He shook his head. “You weren’t wrong. You weren’t wrong at all. I was a bigot. But look—I spent most of my life driven by rage. My daddy died early from a heart attack. My brother-in-law murdered my sister. In some ways you were instrumental in some change in perspective for me. I liked that you challenged me. But the biggest difference happened not too long after you and I met. I got a call that one of my old sergeants was dying. Lymphoma. Might have been Agent Orange. Might have been something else entirely. Who knows? But he was a good man, and he lost his leg beneath the knee saving my life. So I had to go, you know? I spent a week in Mississippi, in this piss-poor town in the middle of nowhere. He’d stopped doing chemo and radiation because it was too late, there was nothing to be done. But, the thing was, I’d known plenty of black men in the Corps. Good ones and bad ones. But I’d only known them in the military. I didn’t know their families or their lives. And here—I got to know him. I got to know his family and the things they’d been through. Sergeant Groves—he told me about when his father got home from World War II. Nothing those Mississippi white boys hated more than seeing a black man in a uniform. They grabbed his daddy off the train the day he came home from war, and beat him, and took his uniform. And here Sergeant Groves came home from Vietnam in 1969, missing part of one leg, and the first word someone says to him as he’s getting off the bus is nigger.”
Jim paused, then said, “I promised him I’d never use that word again.”
I felt my forehead wrinkle between my eyes as he told the story. He was getting worked up, his face red, by the time he talked about Groves coming home from Vietnam.
“I ended up staying out there three weeks. Virginia was fit to be tied, I’ll tell you what. But I’d come to realize that—I’d been lied to, and I’d done my own share of lying. So I decided it was time to branch out, learn some more. Jeremiah pointed me to some books to read—”
“Wait, what?” The idea of James calling up Jeremiah seemed preposterous.
“Well, I told him. That I wanted to know more. He asked me to read some people. James Baldwin and Malcolm X and some others. Let me tell you, there’s a real eye-opener. Now, with Sam—when Cole told me about this transgender business—I just knew y’all needed help, the kids needed help, and I told him to come and told him Virginia would keep her mouth shut about it, which isn’t a promise I’ve been able to keep, unfortunately. But I got online and did some reading. Because I thought it was all—I don’t know what I thought. Crossdressers and perverts or something. I didn’t know. I just didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. But—ahhh, crap…”
He wiped his eyes, which had gone red with tears. “Sam’s world is going to be so hard. And the only thing we can do is try to protect him. Her. As much as she’ll let us.”
I shook my head in wonder. “What about Virginia?”
He shrugged. “I had to threaten her. I know it’s not how you’re supposed to do things in a marriage. But I couldn’t get her to listen no other way. She kept saying … well, you don’t want to know the actual words she used, they were terrible—wailing and crying—and I finally told her that if she used that kind of language around the girls I’d pack her up and move her out. Because otherwise, she’ll push and push and twist and turn and I won’t have it. I won’t have her digging her claws into Sam and Brenna.”
We sat silently for a long time, watching a lone robin as it poked in the recently disturbed soil, searching for worms. It was brilliantly colored, its red breast contrasting with nearly black back and wings. It chirped, and Jim’s face jerked a little.
He swallowed, then said in a faraway voice, “You know, when Sam was little and you sent the girls to visit—one time he was out back here playing with some of Virginia’s old dolls. She, I mean. I think she found the dolls in the attic. She was—she was having a tea party, just all by herself out here. And I come out, and she said, ‘Grandpa, come have tea with me and the girls?’”
He blinked his eyes quickly as he told the story, not looking at me, or at anything but the past. He cleared his throat and continued.
“Anyway, she said … she said, ‘Will you come have tea with us?’ And I told Sam … I said, ‘Boys don’t have tea parties. Boys don’t play with dolls.’”
The old man’s chin shook as he spoke the next words. “Sam said to me, ‘I’m not a boy.’ And she looked at me and meant it. So I … I took the dolls away. I told her to go play ball, and leave them for her sister. And I could see it, Erin. I could see it hurt her, that it damaged her spirit. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forgive myself for that. It didn’t really surprise me, when Cole called and told me.”
He shook his head and swallowed. “I wish I knew how to tell her … how sorry I am.”
I took his hand. “You already did, Jim.”
The next morning I dropped Brenna off at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting in Sandy Springs—some days she went to as many as two or three meetings a day. Watching my daughter walk away from me always gave me a twinge of fear. But as she approached the door, she saw a woman she recognized from her meetings. They embraced, and Brenna’s face lit up with a smile. I started the car but didn’t move for a few agonizing seconds. Brenna lit up a cigarette and the two women sat on a bench at the entrance to the building. The other woman began to tell a story, her hands waving around, her smile infectious, and I knew Brenna was in good hands.
Unexpectedly, I felt my eyes water. I put the car in gear and headed out.
That afternoon I finally locked down a full-time job.
Cole
The cards were stacked between us in sets—we were playing gin—but neither Erin nor I were paying close attention to the game. We’d made a point since getting back from Atlanta to do two things without fail. At least one night a week, we sat down, just the two of us, and played a game. And another night, we went out on a date, regardless of whether we had the money.
We’d barely touched the cash that Jeremiah and Ayanna had given us since our return, considering that to be emergency funds. That meant spending less than my meager paycheck of
twelve bucks an hour.
But things were looking up. Erin was flushed as she talked about the new position. “I know it’s not a lot of money,” she said, “but the health benefits are great.”
“The money’s not bad either,” I said. “More than I’m making.” Her salary as deputy communications director at the art museum would pay forty thousand dollars.
“Well, once you get your own restaurant again, you’ll be making more.”
“We’ll be able to afford to get an apartment somewhere,” I said.
She tilted her head. “I wonder…” she trailed off.
I raised an eyebrow. When she didn’t continue, I said, “What is it?”
She smiled. “I wonder if we should stay here for a while longer. If it’s okay with your parents, of course. But Brenna’s spending so much time with Jim, I feel like it’s really good for her.”
I nodded. “It’s true. She hardly talks with us, but when I got home from work this afternoon and I looked out back, the two of them were talking away. Brenna was going a mile a minute. I couldn’t tell what about, but … I wouldn’t want her to lose that.”
“What do you think they talk about?” she asked.
I shrugged. “God only knows. I know he’s been encouraging her to wait before getting a job. She’s talked about it a little, but Daddy told her to wait a year, and just go to her meetings and focus on her recovery.”
“And she listens to him,” Erin said.
“Wonders never cease.” I smiled slightly as I said the words.
She set her cards down—I’d lost track of whose turn it was—and reached across the table. I took her hand in mine. Then I said, “I’m proud of you, you know. And excited for you, with this job. You’ll be great at it.”
She squeezed my hand. “I love you, Cole.”
The words sent a warm wave through me. For I don’t know how many years, we’d stopped saying it. We’d stopped believing it. I looked in her eyes. “I love you too.”
Winter Flower Page 49
