Just One Thing

by Holly Jacobs

  But nothing came.

  With or without inspiration, it was time to go back. It really was cold.

  It took me more than a minute to realize that it was October.

  The summer had well and truly left.

  “Gus.”

  There were leaves that had already surrendered to the inevitable and fallen. My Wellingtons crunched against them as I walked. Hickory nuts littered the path too. My boots crushed them into the soft earth. Some might sprout into seedlings next spring.

  And now that I was noticing things, I noticed that the leaves that remained in the trees were red, gold, and orange. The few remaining evergreens provided a touch of green that would accent the dark brown limbs throughout the winter.

  And then I knew. I absolutely knew with certainty what I needed to add next.

  I was anxious to get back to the workshop.

  I worked hard that week, but not with the same manic need as last. Telling Sam about Gracie had been some sort of hurdle, I realized, as I added a swatch of water and sand next to the horse and orange blanket that week. Then, I ringed the tableaux with fall flowers. I was starting to say good-bye to Gracie, my peacemaker. My heart. Finally. Years later I could say good-bye.

  I had hoped and prayed for that miracle, but it never came. Gracie had died. It was a Sunday morning, still dark and quiet. The newspaper boy who tossed our daily paper onto the porch—I’d learned the distinct sound of that thud—still hadn’t come by.

  I was bone weary. I’d had Lee help me move one of the family room recliners into Gracie’s room. My asking, “Could you help me move a recliner?” was the longest conversation we’d had in days. Ever since our miracle disagreement, we’d stopped talking altogether.

  I spent most of my nights in Gracie’s room in order to hear her whenever she needed me.

  But that night, she’d asked me to hold her as she slept. I’d snuggled next to her in her bed for a very long time, until I was certain she was sleeping. Then I moved over to the recliner. She hadn’t called. I’d woken up and realized that she’d finally had a peaceful night’s sleep. Maybe she was better. Maybe I had my miracle.

  I’d given her the morphine about midnight. It supplemented her pain patch. She’d slept quietly after that.

  I remember thinking that maybe Gracie had turned some corner and would be better. I’d watched her from my recliner vantage point. Her expression was peaceful and I’d wondered what she’d dreamed about. Then I realized, her chest wasn’t rising or falling anymore.

  Horror sank in. Sometime after midnight, as I slept, she’d quietly left.

  Even all these years later, I felt the stab of pain again. I’d lost Gracie.

  I think that’s when I started losing myself as well.

  Maybe I’d started when my father died.

  But now, sitting in my studio, working on the tapestry, I finally started letting go of Gracie.

  No, that was wrong. I could never let go of her. But I could let go of the pain of her loss and remember the joy and the grace of my youngest daughter.

  That week I felt as if my baggage was lighter.

  I bundled up before I walked to The Corner Bar on Monday. I walked slower than I normally did because I knew what part of my story I had to tell next. I didn’t want to, but I knew it had to be the next one.

  The bar seemed warm and inviting as I entered.

  “Colder than a witch’s tit,” Jerry called jovially as I entered. “’Course, I have no idea how cold that would be, but this is colder.”

  He laughed and took another sip of his beer.

  Jerry was a sipper.

  Over the last few weeks, as I started coming back to life and began paying attention, I’d learned that he came to the bar for company more than to drink. It was as if I was suddenly noticing that the bar had more occupants than just Sam and me. It came as a surprise. I realized that I’d become a bit myopic, focusing on just a few things, not the world in its entirety. I was going to try to change that.

  I waved at Joanie, the waitress, and as I passed Jerry, I asked, “Did you have a good weekend?”

  “Sure did. Got every leaf on my lawn raked up. Of course, I came out this morning, and there was a whole new batch waiting for me to rake ’em.”

  “Leaves and laundry. You never entirely finish either,” was my sage response.

  Jerry laughed as Sam came toward me, my Killian’s in its iced glass in his hand, and said the words that had become my permission to seek release. “One thing.”

  “My miracle never came. Gracie’s miracle. It wasn’t long after I lost her that I lost everyone else.”

  “Hey, Mom,” Connie said over the phone.

  “Hi, honey. How’s school?” Connie always swore she couldn’t wait to get out of Erie. Lexie had never understood that. She loved Erie. She loved the entire northwestern Pennsylvania region. But true to her word, Connie had decided on OSU in neighboring Ohio. Conner had stayed closer. He was at Pitt, just a couple hours away in Pittsburgh.

  Early morning calls had become Lexie’s mainstay.

  She sipped her coffee and listened as Connie talked about her classes and friends. Connie asked about school and Lexie tried to come up with happy anecdotes, but for the first time in her teaching career, her students didn’t excite her. Teaching had become a chore. She dreaded getting up and going to school each morning.

  “It’s great, honey,” she said with horribly false enthusiasm. “We’re getting ready for an art show.”

  “You know, Mom, you should show some of your stuff. That dish you made me for my keys is right by the door. Everyone comments on it.”

  Lexie hadn’t been working on her pottery in a long time. Not since—

  She shut off the thought, but couldn’t shut off the flash of pain. “Well, I’ve got to run, sweetie.”

  “I talked to Dork-Boy yesterday.” She didn’t need to ask who Connie meant—the entire family was well aware of her nickname for her twin. “He’ll call tonight.”

  “Great. But you don’t have to make him call.”

  “I didn’t make him, Mom. I just prodded a little.” She laughed and Lexie forced herself to try to echo it. She hoped that Connie didn’t notice that it didn’t ring true.

  Lee walked into the room and mouthed the words, Tell her I said hi.

  “Your dad says hi.”

  “Hi back at him. Gotta run.”

  Connie clicked off. “She said hi as well.”

  Lee poured himself some coffee and picked up the paper.

  This was their new routine. He came downstairs each day just as Lexie was ready to leave for school. He came home as she was going up to bed. After Gracie died, something in their marriage had died as well. Lexie wasn’t sure what it was, but she felt its absence.

  On the off chance tonight would be different, she asked, “Will you be home for dinner?”

  “No.”

  She wasn’t sure why, but suddenly his response pissed her off. She hadn’t cared enough about anything to be pissed off in a long time. The rush of anger felt good.

  “Maybe it’s time we admit this marriage is over,” she said, without thinking. She hadn’t realized that’s what she’d been thinking.

  Lee took a sip of his coffee and met her gaze.

  She waited for him to express some emotion. Anger. Pain. Or maybe he’d laugh and tell her don’t be silly. They’d gone through bad periods before—times when they lost each other for a moment. But then the moment passed and they always came back to themselves.

  There was no anger, no pain, no laughing at the idea of them not being together—not being Lexie and Lee.

  Since that first day on the quad when he’d joked that if they married they’d have the same initials, they’d been Lexie-and-Lee. Their names fitting together as well as they did.

  Good times and bad. They’d stuck.

  She remembered his wedding vows. Talking about chemical reactions in reference to that first day on the quad.

  When
it came to her vows, she’d told him, “I didn’t want them to use the words ‘until death do us part,’ because it won’t. I promise that I will love you forever.”

  She looked at him now and their wedding day felt too far away to count, and that promise felt burdensome.

  “Lee?” she prodded, needing him to say something. “Say something.”

  She needed him to be strong this once. She needed him to pull her into his arms and tell her everything would be okay . . . even if it was a lie.

  But he didn’t move. He nodded. “Maybe it is time to admit our marriage has been over since—” He cut himself off.

  Neither of them was ready to voice when their marriage had died. But Lexie knew the exact moment. The moment that she woke up to discover her daughter would never wake up again.

  She should be crying. She should be mourning the end of her marriage, but she didn’t have room to mourn for anything other than Gracie. She thought about her mom’s practicality when her father died.

  Practicality to mask the pain.

  She’d never given her mother enough credit. “Do you want to move out, or want me to?”

  “I will,” he said conversationally, as if they were simply discussing dinner plans. “Paul left his wife a few months ago. I can crash with him. I’ll see to it this weekend.”

  And that was that. The man Lexie had been married to since she was twenty—for half of her life—was moving out.

  They were calling it quits.

  It was as if after Gracie died and the twins had left for their respective colleges, they had nothing left to bind them. Nothing left that they shared.

  Lexie tried to think of something to cling to, some argument to mount, but she came up with nothing. She couldn’t think of any earthly reason they should stay together. The only thing they shared anymore was a bed, and it was king-size, so they didn’t even bump into each other.

  There was nothing left.

  “Well, all right then.”

  She let Bernie outside and left for school.

  She walked out of the house and turned her back on half of her life.

  “Lexie, you did the best you could.” Sam’s words were offered as my absolution, but I knew he was wrong.

  “No. No, I didn’t. I could have fought. I could have tried. But it was easier to walk away. Nothing had been right since Gracie died. We’d become strangers. Lee had changed when she died. I’m sure I did, too. We limped along the year after we lost Gracie, while the twins were home, but when they left, there was no reason to put on any pretenses. It was over.

  “And that’s how you lost your husband?” Sam, who’d listened to all my stories—all my one-things—without judgment or comment, looked disappointed.

  No, not disappointed. He looked mad.

  When I didn’t say anything, he pushed more. “You just gave up?”

  Words I could say—maybe should say—tumbled over each other in my mind. That he thought he knew me well enough from just a few months of Monday one-things, that he could judge me and make assumptions . . . Well, it pissed me off. The anger I felt now echoed the anger I’d felt that morning when Lee and I called it quits.

  I pushed back my unfinished beer, grabbed my coat, and turned and walked out of the bar without saying anything.

  I stomped down the road.

  It wasn’t long until he caught up with me. “Lex, wait.”

  “Fuck you, Sam,” I shouted without turning around.

  I had never used that word. Never.

  I’d never even thought it.

  Oh, I’d heard it. I was a teacher, so I was familiar with the sound of it. But it wasn’t part of my personal lexicon.

  Sam grabbed my arm and I tried to pull away, but he held tight and spun me. “I’m sorry.”

  “That wasn’t how I lost him. Lee and I divorced . . .”

  I hadn’t planned to say more, even before Sam pissed me off. But the story came tumbling out.

  The twins graduated from college. Thankfully their ceremonies weren’t the same weekend. Lexie was also thankful that she and Lee figured out how to coexist with the kids.

  Their divorce hadn’t just been amicable. It had been emotionless. Painless.

  They’d both simply had enough and walked away.

  It was as if they’d used up all their pain at Gracie’s funeral and didn’t have any left to mourn the death of their marriage.

  Lexie had heard that losing a child was the worst kind of pain and she didn’t doubt it. She felt as if someone had cut off a limb and she was suffering from phantom pains, thinking her arm was still there, even when it was long gone.

  Some mornings, she woke up and forgot. Forgot that Lee had moved out. Forgot that her two Cons were away at college. Forgot that Gracie was dead.

  The forgetting only lasted a few moments, but when she remembered, the pain hit her anew and she almost buckled under the weight of it.

  Last weekend, at Connie’s graduation, they’d sat as if they were a family. Lexie, Conner, then Lee. This week, the same thing, except it was Connie sitting in between them and Conner graduating.

  As they sat in the huge theater the school had rented for its graduation, Lexie realized the seat next to hers was empty. For a moment—just the smallest of moments—she closed her eyes and pretended Gracie was there, sitting next to them at Conner’s graduation. She reached over and placed her hand on the armrest that separated the seats, but instead of Gracie’s hand, she just felt wood.

  Gracie should have been sitting there, watching her brother graduate and talking about her own graduation the next year.

  And even after years, the pain and anger hit her again.

  Lee looked over Connie’s shoulders and mouthed the word, “Gracie?”

  Lexie nodded and felt the tears welling in her eyes.

  Connie looked over and took her hand. “Mom, you don’t have to cry. Dork-Boy got a job. He won’t be moving in with you or dad and sponging off you. And to be honest, if the whole work thing doesn’t work for him, I told him he could come live in my basement.”

  She laughed and allowed Connie to think that’s what it was. It was easier that way.

  They sat through the graduation.

  Lexie had sat through them in the past for friends, but she’d never found much to recommend graduation ceremonies. Pompous guest speakers who went on and on about the future the graduates had in front of them, when all the graduates wanted to do was revel in the here and now—in the fact they’d accomplished this goal and had earned their diplomas.

  Two hours of listening to endless names of people she didn’t know in order to enjoy that one moment that belonged to her . . . to her friend or her child.

  They called Conner’s name and handed her son his diploma.

  Lexie looked at Lee again, and smiled. He smiled back and she knew he understood what she was saying without words. Congratulations. They might have screwed up many things, but they’d done this right. They’d parented these two children into the start of successful adulthoods.

  Then, just like that, it was done. The ceremony ended and Lexie reveled in the knowledge that somehow, despite everything, they’d managed to raise two amazing people. There would always be a hole in their lives where Gracie would live, but still, they’d managed it.

  They were connected.

  “Excuse me,” Lexie said to a passing parent. “Would you take a picture of the four of us?”

  “Sure.”

  “Camera karma?” Lee asked, laughing.

  She nodded.

  The father taking the picture motioned the four of them closer, and asked, “Camera karma?”

  They’d started the family tradition on a trip to Disney World. Every time they’d offered to take a picture for another family, someone would turn up at just the right time and do the same for them.

  Lee put his arm around Lexie and explained to the man, “You take a picture for me, and it’s good camera karma. I’ll offer to take one of your family . . . ka
rma.”

  The man laughed, which made them laugh as well.

  That moment was when their impromptu photographer snapped the picture. He held the camera out to Lexie and she looked at that moment captured in time. The four of them laughing. Happy.

  Connie’s shoulder-length blond hair fanning out, and Conner’s hair covered by the cap he still wore. The twins sandwiched her and Lee, who had his arm around her, as he’d done in countless pictures when they were still married.

  They might have lost their way and divorced, but they would always be tied by their twins.

  Just as they’d always be tied by the child they’d lost.

  As if he were thinking the same thing, Lee leaned over and peered at the picture, his hand slipping with a comforting familiarity around Lexie’s waist.

  She still felt a distant, familiar spark.

  “I hadn’t lost him then; I’d just misplaced him for a bit,” I explained to Sam.

  “And after your son’s graduation, you started seeing him again?”

  “Well, not just then. It was a start, that touch. But it—Lee and I and what we had—we didn’t find our way back fast or sudden.”

  “What—”

  “No more tonight, Sam. I . . .” I paused, wanting to explain. “This thing on Mondays—whatever it is—it means something to me. It’s cathartic. But to say it all at once . . .” I just shook my head.

  He nodded. “And about earlier, I’m sorry. It’s just that you don’t strike me as the type who gives up. You didn’t with Grace. You fought. And I admired that because I did give up. If it hadn’t been for Grid . . .” He shrugged. “If it hadn’t been for him, I might not have been able to start again.”

  “You are not my mother. You’re not my commander. Get the hell out.” Grid moved toward him. “Get the hell away from me.”

  “Tut, tut, tut. Do you kiss your mother with that mouth? Kiss any women with that mouth? Probably not, because at the rate you’re moving, you couldn’t catch a woman to save your sorry ass. And you and I both know, with a face like that, you’ve got to do the catching, because no woman’s going to come to you on her own.”