by Webb, Peggy
Slowly she made her way to the sofa. It was closer than the bed. She didn't even bother with her shoes, but simply stretched out and pulled the afghan over her all the way up to her chin.
She thought of the way Sonny had looked in his tiny coffin.
"Oh, God," she cried, squeezing her eyes shut. Tears oozed out the corners of her lids.
In that fuzzy state prior to deep sleep, she began to dream. The dream was always the same . . .
She was in the kitchen, humming while she arranged roses in a crystal vase. The caterers buzzed around her, putting canapes on silver trays, selecting the finest strawberries for the compote, chilling the wine. Outside she could hear the sounds of Sonny's laughter.
She went to the door, smiling.
"What are you doing, sweetheart?"
"I'm a famous quarterback. See?" He tossed his football into the air, then went into gales of laughter as it landed in a red-gold carpet of October leaves and his golden retriever scooped it up with his mouth. "Run for the touchdown, Max. Run for the touchdown."
Jean was totally forgotten as her son and his dog chased each other around the yard. Satisfied, she went back inside to prepare for the party. She had invited over fifty guests. She loved entertaining, and fortunately, so did Paul.
"Mrs. Tyler, telephone." Her housekeeper Matildy appeared in the doorway.
It was the pianist she'd hired for the evening, and she was on the phone only five minutes. But that was all it took.
She heard the tires squealing on the pavement, the frantic barking of the dog. Jean was screaming even before she was out the door.
Sonny lay in a heap on the street, his football three feet away. The driver of the car stood by, saying over and over, "I didn't see him. I didn't see him."
"Sonny!" She screamed as she ran. Gathering the small body to her chest, she sat in the middle of the street, crying and calling his name. His blood soaked her shirt, and he was as still and limp as a rag doll.
"Oh, God! Sonny!"
In the distance she heard the wail of sirens. Men in white coats tried to take him out of her arms, but she would have none of it. She screamed at them and even clawed one's face.
"It's all right, Mrs. Tyler. We're taking him to the hospital."
He knew her. He was saying her name.
"I want Paul," she said. "Paul will know what to do."
"Yes, ma'am. Dr. Tyler's the best."
The young man was gentle with her. He helped her into the ambulance, then placed Sonny's tiny hand in hers. She held it tight on the long ride to the hospital. One thought sustained her. Paul was a doctor. He would know what to do.
God took pity on her. Paul was on ER duty.
"Paul," she screamed, running to him. "Don't let Sonny die."
She couldn't stop saying his name.
"Paul . . . Paul. . . ."
Her dream was always the same, and she always woke up calling for Paul. In her dream she never got beyond the front hallway of the emergency room, never got back to the tiny cubicle where Paul worked so frantically on their son.
Jean pushed the afghan off and sat up. Her hair was damp with sweat and her mouth felt dry. Moving like a very old woman, she made her way back to the kitchen for a glass of water.
The calendar on the wall said June. Was it summer already?
Each day was a test of survival.
o0o
Hope Methodist Church sat among a grove of live oak trees facing the gulf. In the evenings when the tides came in and the wind stirred the Spanish moss hanging from the live oaks, music of the carillon rang out clear as the voice of angels.
Evenings were Susan's favorite time of day, especially Wednesday evenings when she drove down the long lane to church for choir practice. Spring through fell she drove with her windows open so she could hear the symphony of wind and waves and music.
The sounds were soothing, peaceful. With the setting sun painting the waters gold and purple, even the gulf seemed peaceful, friendlier somehow, and not the monster that had swallowed up her husband.
She wouldn't think about that right now, about the way Brett drove off into the ocean one day without even telling her good-bye.
Mingled sounds of the carillon and the waves drifted through her window. She parked by the side entrance to the church, absorbing the music into her soul as she sat in the car waiting for the engine to stop knocking. Someday it was going to wheeze itself to death.
"Susan!" Reverend Silas Cartwright stood in the open doorway, beaming at her. "I was passing by and heard your car." He always said that but she suspected he watched out the window for her. "Come in, my dear. Come in. You look like a breath of spring."
She didn't. Her dress was still damp from the splashing at the dolphin pool and she smelled faintly of fish. There had been no time to change. She'd barely had time to deliver Jeffy to her mother and get to the church for choir practice.
"Thank you." She hugged the minister, loving his unfailing kindness and the scent of yellowing parchment and candle wax that clung to him like a well-worn coat.
Sounds of laughter drifted down the hall as the early arrivals began to fill the choir practice room.
She leaned back and smiled at the minister. "You look good too."
"No, I don't. I look like the dried-up old toad I am, but I thank you for fibbing so sweetly."
They laughed together while the sound of music lifted toward the vast mahogany rafters as the choir warmed up, waiting for its director. Dust motes rose from the polished floor and spun slowly in the last rays of a dying sun. Turtle doves cooed in the eaves outside the stained glass windows, their gentle murmuring voices blending with the distant cadence of breakers and the faraway cry of the brown pelican as it lifted over the water.
She loved this church. It was where she had met Brett. She'd been a member of the choir back then, she and her sister.
She remembered the duet they had sung that Sunday, "He Touched Me." She had had the solo part.
Brett had been sitting in the back of the church, gorgeous and golden, looking as if he should be on the beach worshiping the sun instead of in church worshiping the Lord.
Susan couldn't keep her eyes off him.
"Check out the hunk," her sister had said, right in the middle of the sermon. "Wouldn't you like to get your hands on that?"
"Shh. The preacher will hear you."
"Good. Maybe he'll get excited and have to dismiss church."
Brett caught her eye and winked. Afterward, he pushed his way through the crowd and cut her off before she could get to the choir room and take off her robe.
"You sound like an angel."
"Thank you."
"Look like one too." He leaned close, propping his hands on either side of the wall, trapping her.
It was terrible and wonderful.
"Name's Brett Riley. Don't know a soul in town except you. How about if you take me around this afternoon and show me the ropes?"
Her throat felt as dry. She envied Jo Lisa, who always knew what to say to men. "Oh, my . . . my, uh . . . sister is waiting for me."
"Let her wait, little angel."
Susan had gone with him and never looked back, never even bothered to tell her sister.
That had been Brett's pet name for her, little angel. He'd even called her that the day he'd died. "Brought you a present, little angel." It was a yellow plastic clock, shaped like a cat. The ugliest thing she'd ever seen. Tacky. But she would never have told him so.
Brett didn't like to hear the truth. "Got it at a flea market and thought it might brighten up your kitchen."
He helped her hang it on the wall, then kissed her on the cheek and walked out the door.
"Wait," she wanted to call. "Where are you going?" But she didn't. Whenever she'd asked that question he'd always accused her of checking up on him.
Such a thing never occurred to her, though it did seem that he spent less and less time at home, less and less time with Jeffy. Of course, that could be
her fault. She didn't have much time for him anymore, not the way she had in the early days of their marriage.
She studied the ugly clock on the wall and listened to him in their bedroom, changing clothes. In the middle of the day. She didn't dare ask why.
Would things have been different if she'd asked why? Would he have said, I'm going off to kill myself, and could she have said something to keep him from it?
Brett had walked out the door without saying goodbye. It was the last she ever saw of him.
She pressed her hands to her temples, remembering. Sometimes she hated Brett for dying, and then she felt guilty for hating the dead.
Susan stood quietly in the church, letting the hushed, peaceful sounds of evening wash over her. In that sacred setting, she would find relief. At least for a few hours.
She thought of the yellow cat clock on her kitchen wall, ticking off the hours without Brett. She guessed it was his going-away gift. It didn't even keep good time.
Susan smoothed her skirt, tipped up her chin, and walked toward her choir practice room. The setting sun had fallen through the windows onto the floor. She followed the red gold stain down the hall.
Someday she was going to get up enough courage to smash that tacky clock into a million pieces.
o0o
Bessie Markham's house was in a run-down neighborhood, and she knew it. As she waited for Susan to come back from choir practice, she pushed the curtain aside and peered through the window. Across the street Jilly Swan's oversized Victorian house looked like a rotting toadstool. Susan called it faded elegance but Bessie was a realist. She called a spade a spade.
Jilly's house was a plain eyesore, and if Jilly didn't soon get up enough gumption to buy a few buckets of cheap paint and get out there and at least paint the porch railings, Bessie herself was going to march over there and do it for her.
Bessie knew the last time Jilly had put on a coat of paint. Ten years ago. She remembered because that was the year Jo Lisa announced she was through being her mother's version of a Southern belle and had set her mind on other things.
Bessie knew exactly what those other things were, but she tried not to think about them. Turning away from the window, she sighed. The Lord only knew how she bore up under all her tribulations.
She checked on Jeffy, then went into the bathroom to answer the call of nature. When she'd first moved there after her dear Henry died, the bathroom had been a little dungeon of a place with exposed pipes and no windows. She'd added pink gingham skirts to the lavatory and tacked pink gingham curtains on the wall. Although she never fancied herself an artist, she'd painted a blue background under the curtains to look like sky, then added a half-moon of yellow to look like the sun shining through, and topped it all off with white lines to resemble windowpanes.
Susan called her bathroom artistry a touch of glamour, Jo Lisa called it stupid, but Bessie herself merely called it making do with what you've got. Neither one of her daughters was a speck like her. Practical, that's what she was. Susan and Jo Lisa took after Henry's side of the family.
She checked her hair for gray roots, found a good half-inch border of them poking out of her scalp, and made a mental note to get some more Number 10 red hair coloring when she went to the drugstore.
She heard Susan's old car drive up even before she flushed the toilet.
"I'm coming. . . . I'm coming." She washed her hands, soaping them twice, then reapplied her lipstick and checked her mascara before she went to greet her daughter. Some women her age looked like leftover prunes, but she didn't believe in letting herself go.
"Hi, Mother. How's Jeffy?"
"He's the same as he was when you left him, bless his dear little heart." Bessie straightened a stack of movie magazines on her way to the flowered sofa, then sat down, keeping her back as arrow straight as she had when she'd been sixteen.
She was proud of her posture.
"You don't think I'd let anything happen to that child, do you? Why, I take as good care of him as I did of you and Jo Lisa. He's like my own."
"I know, and I do appreciate it." Susan kissed her cheek before sinking into an old wicker rocking chair.
"You look tired, Susan."
"I'm fine."
"You'd say that if your britches were on fire. You've never been a complainer, unlike Jo Lisa, who does nothing but.”
"Please, Mother . . ."
"I know, I know. You don't want to hear me talk about my oldest daughter who hasn't even bothered to send her mother a Christmas card in three years, let alone remember a birthday."
"She loves all of us. But her ways of showing love are different."
Bessie pursed her lips. She wasn't about to get into that conversation.
"Tell me how it went today at that fish place."
"The Oceanfront Research Center."
"Whatever. Do you think it's going to help Jeffy?"
"It's hard to tell after only one time, but I think I saw some progress."
"Don't get your hopes up too high, Susan. It can be a mighty long way to the ground."
"Paul Tyler would agree with you."
"Dr. Tyler? What's he got to do with this?"
"He's the marine biologist who's working with Jeffy and me. While he was feeding the dolphins, Jeffy smiled, but Dr. Tyler absolutely refused to acknowledge it."
Bessie Markham figured somebody could have knocked her off the couch with a feather.
"Dr. Paul Tyler is feeding dolphins?"
"That seems to be a part of his job." Susan smiled. "Dolphins have to eat, too, you know."
"Could you excuse me a minute?"
"Mother, what's wrong?"
"Nothing. I just have to check something."
Bessie got her reading glasses off the top of the mantel, then scrambled around in the wicker basket until she found a telephone book.
"T . . . t . . ." she muttered, running her finger down the pages. "Aha, just as I thought." She slammed the book down and marched back to the sofa.
"For Pete's sake, Mother. What was that all about?"
"This Dr. Tyler who's down there feeding the dolphins happens to be a heart surgeon."
"You must be mistaken."
"I'm never mistaken. There's only one in the phone book. Is he a tall, good-looking man with jet black hair?"
"He's tall, and his hair is definitely black, but I don't know that you could call him good-looking. He's awfully thin."
"Drinking like a fish. That's what I heard."
"Mother, you know I don't like to listen to idle gossip."
"This is not idle. It came straight from the horse's mouth." Bessie giggled at her own joke. "Lordy mercy, don't tell Lottie Burcham I called her a horse. She'd kill me."
"If she's your source, I don't want to hear another word."
"It just so happens that this same Dr. Tyler did Lottie's nephew's surgery not two months before his own son was killed."
Susan's rocking chair came to a dead halt, and her face went white. That's all Bessie needed, two sick people in the family.
"Susan, what's the matter? You're not getting sick on me, are you? Lord knows, trouble comes in threes, and Jeffy and Jo Lisa are enough to worry about without you going off the dead end..”
"Paul's son is dead?" Speaking in a whisper with her lips barely moving, Susan was so pale and still that Bessie wondered if she was going to faint.
"Run over by a car. It like to killed Dr. Tyler and his wife both. He took to drinking. Lottie's Aunt An nabelle was plumb mortified. She and Paul's grandmother are distant cousins, you know, on the Maxwell side."
Susan didn't say a word, didn't move an inch. She hardly even blinked. Bessie might as well have been talking to the walls, but she wasn't about to let that stop her.
"They say that wife of his stays holed up in that big fancy house of hers doing Lord only knows what. Nobody ever sees hide nor hair of her down at that ritzy art gallery she owns, and talk is she never even picks up a paintbrush anymore. She was good too.
Did a portrait for Lottie's brother's fancy wife . . . you know, Earshelene Phepps from Baton Rouge . . . that cost an arm and a leg."
Susan pressed her hands to her mouth as if she were trying to hold back the hurtful words she'd said to Paul.
"I'm so sorry," she whispered.
"I'm sorry too. But I don't think overpriced art is worth crying over."
"Mother, for God's sake!" Susan ran across the room and snatched up Jeffy's little sneakers.
"Susan, what in the world's the matter with you?"
"A man's son dies and all it is to you is a piece of gossip."
Bessie would have expected such an attack from Jo Lisa, but not from her youngest daughter.
"I can't believe you said that to me. After all I've done for you."
Susan's righteous anger was no match for the quick guilt that slashed her. Already regretting and repenting, she put her arm around Bessie's shoulder.
"I'm sorry, Mother. It's not you I'm mad at. It's myself. I said some horrible things to Paul Tyler." Susan pressed her cheek against Bessie's. "Forgive me?"
"I'll have to consider the source. You've been under an awful lot of strain lately."
It was the nearest thing to acceptance of an apology that Susan was going to get.
"Thanks, Mother. Where's Jeffy?"
"Same place he is every Wednesday night when you come to pick him up. Asleep in the spare bedroom."
Susan started down the hall.
"Susan?" There was no response. "Susan?" Her daughter kept on walking.
Bessie followed her. Lord, she knew that look. Susan got it every time she set out to rescue some pathetic creature. When she was a little girl Bessie never knew what she was going to find in Susan's room. The child was always bringing in a bird with a damaged wing or an injured kitten. Sometimes she even brought stray kids off the streets, all of them needing baths and a good haircut.
Susan was bent over the bed, lifting her son out and talking softly to him.
"Now, Susan, I don't want you going off the deep end with this doctor. The test of a man is not what he suffers but how he bears up under it. Look at Brett. Just drove off into the gulf because he lost his job and his son was born sick."
"Mother . . ." Susan's tone held gentle but firm warning. "I'll not hear another word about it. I don't care what Paul Tyler did or what he is; he has tender sensibilities, the same as the rest of us."
