by Pamela Morsi
But by the second week she was pale and nauseated. She carried a plastic trash can with her everywhere. She didn’t know from one minute to the next if she was going to throw up.
She was exhausted, but claimed that she couldn’t sleep. She refused to stay in bed.
“It’s only going to get worse,” she told us. “If I start lying around now, I might as well give up.”
The pump—which hung from her shoulders on a blue nylon strap for forty-eight hours at a time—beeped whenever her arm was crooked or she was lying the wrong direction. Just about any time she drifted off, it would beep her awake.
It was the drug in the pump that put the lie to the whole “it’s just medicine” story. Sierra was the one who helped her with it. Changing the dressing, swabbing the sutures and flushing the line with heparin.
Mom warned her. “Don’t get any of this stuff on you,” she said. “If it spills, I don’t want you cleaning it up. It’s very toxic, a deadly poison, and it could soak into your skin.”
“You’re worried that it might soak into Sierra’s skin, but you’re having it pumped directly into your heart,” I pointed out.
Mom gave me that look that I got sometimes that was meant to say, Don’t upset your sister. Just because you know things, you don’t have to share them.
I was no longer sure that Sierra didn’t understand perfectly. She was the one who was there for Mom. She was the one who seemed to know the right things to say, the right things to do. She was the one who was really a help. Maybe nursing was the cheering profession.
Sierra insisted that not only must Mom get up and get dressed, she had to put on her makeup, as well.
“Nothing can perk up the day like a cute pair of shorts and some candy-colored lipstick,” my sister told her.
Mom smiled at Sierra and cupped one side of my sister’s face with her hand. It was a tender gesture. Along way from Mom’s usual quick-witted sarcasm.
Sierra helped her dress and invited her to watch soaps. But when Vern suggested it was a great morning to sit outside, Mom took him up on it.
At first Mom tried the front porch glider, but the motion made her queasy. Eventually she ended up lying on a patio chaise. Sierra gave her a magazine, but she didn’t even pretend to look at it. She just lay in the sunshine like a lazy cat, Rocky curled up on the cushion beside her feet.
Sierra and I took turns sitting out there with her. We were a good tag team. Sierra liked to talk and she could entertain Mom for a while. Then we’d trade off. I didn’t have much to say, so Mom could drift off in the silence as I kept my thoughts to myself.
At midday Mrs. Leland fixed her some food on a tray. It was very fancy with the soup and the little half sandwich on matching luncheon dishes and a strawberry sliced to look like a flower.
“I think she’s still sick to her stomach,” I told her. “So she’s probably not hungry.”
“Why don’t you take it out to her anyway,” she told me. “It’s important that she continue to eat.”
I didn’t quite believe that Mrs. Leland cared. But then I figured it was important to her to keep Mom alive so she wouldn’t end up stuck with us. I wanted to tell her not to bother. Sierra and I would take care of Mom. And if something terrible happened, we would never stay here.
Of course, nothing was going to happen to Mom. I reminded myself. It just couldn’t. We needed Mom to take care of us. And we would always take care of her.
I carried the food out there and set it beside her.
“Oh, this is so sweet,” Mom said.
I shrugged. “Mrs. Leland did it.”
“That was really nice of her,” Mom said. “She’s really trying to be nice to us. We need to be nice back.”
“Of course,” Sierra said, as if there were no reasons not to.
I nodded to Mom, but my heart wasn’t in it.
I sat there with them. Mom was picking at the food as Sierra got her up to date on the romance of Ben and J. Lo and the latest supermodel to wed into European royalty.
My mind had already begun to wander when Vern called out to me from the kitchen door.
“Dakota, you’ve got a telephone call.”
Sierra looked up, puzzled. “Who would call you?”
I shrugged and then decided to tease. “Maybe one of those skateboarders I gave my number to.”
“You didn’t!” Sierra looked genuinely horrified.
Mom chuckled. It was the first laugh we’d heard from her all day and it was very much worth it.
“Of course she didn’t,” Mom told Sierra.
I went into the house and picked up the phone that was in the little hallway cubby.
“Hello.”
“Dakota, it’s me, Spence.”
“Oh, hi.”
“I found out how your dad died,” he said.
“What?”
“I found out how your dad died. I’m printing it now.”
“Printing what?”
“The facts about the accident, how he died.”
For a minute it was like my brain couldn’t function right. Then I realized what he was saying and my heart began pounding like a drum.
“I’ll be right there.”
I raced through the house and out to the patio.
“I’m going next door.”
If Mom and Sierra were surprised, if they said “okay” or “no way” or anything at all, I didn’t take time to notice. I ran out the back gate and across the driveway. Spence was waiting for me on his porch.
As I hurried inside the door, he called out toward the back of the house.
“It’s Dakota, Dad, we’re going upstairs.”
“Hi, Dakota.”
“Hi, Mr. Tegge,” I called out as we rushed up to the second floor and down the hallway to Spence’s room.
It looked very much like it had the last time I was there, except now the laptop was attached to the printer and there were stacks of papers all over.
“Okay, I’m here. Tell me what this is all about,” I said as soon as the door closed behind us.
“Well, you did say you wanted to know what happened to your dad.”
“Yeah, right.”
“So I went on the Internet.”
“The Internet? My father is on the Internet?”
“Well, not him exactly,” Spence said. “But I got to thinking that there might be some newspaper articles about the accident or an obituary or something.”
“Was there?”
“I couldn’t find anything about the accident, but there was an obituary.”
“An obituary? About my dad?”
“It didn’t say much,” Spence told me, shrugging it off. “But it did give me the death date and tell me what company he’d been working for. So I looked up the company. They got conglomerated into another company a long time ago. But I was able to track down the fact that they had a fatality investigation by OSHA in the early nineties.”
Spence was grinning from ear to ear.
“Once I knew who it was and when it was, it was a piece of cake to pull up the report on it,” he said. “Look it’s all here. It’s got to be him. The death date matches the obit.”
He held out the paper to me. My hands were shaking as I took it from him. The page was divided in little blocks. At the top it read “Region IV” and at the sides “TN.” The title of the block was “Description of Fatal Incident and Standards-Citations Related to the Event.”
It was as if my eyes couldn’t focus. These words printed on this ordinary piece of paper had changed my life so completely, so irrevocably. I couldn’t just see them, I had to hear them. I read the short paragraph aloud.
“‘At approximately 10:30 a.m. on October 15, 1991, a twenty-one-year-old male employee of the Hetta Cove Logging Company was fatally injured when struck by a tree limb. A nearby crew was topping a forty-eight-foot pine that kicked back, falling into a standing tree adjacent to a bucking area. A break-off limb from the standing tree impaled the victim causing multipl
e abdominal and chest injuries.’”
I paused trying to understand the words, trying to picture the scene. Neither was clear.
“‘Total number of citations issued: One. Number of citations issued related to the event: One: Work areas not separated by safe distance.’”
“That’s a real low number,” Spence told me. “Most of these reports have lots of them.” He was shuffling through other papers. “One of these has twenty-six citations. Man, if they give twenty-six citations, you know that it was really somebody’s fault. If there’s just one, then, I guess it was just bad luck.”
“Bad luck,” I repeated. “Bad luck.” I’d thought I would feel better knowing something. That all the uncertainty and speculation was what made it feel bad. I didn’t know Sonny Leland. I never met him. I never heard the sound of his voice. How could his death mean anything to me? But the sadness that welled up in me was huge. And it was worse, far worse, to know that something that could mean so much could happen so stupidly and with no one to blame.
I wanted to scream, to hit, to throw something. I saw the blue geode that Spence was using as a paperweight. I grabbed it up and slung it across the room. It hit the TV with a horrible crash of breaking glass. It felt as if it had broken right through my heart.
I dropped to my knees, sobbing. My insides had been ripped out. There was this huge part of me that was just empty, wholly, painfully empty.
I heard Spencer’s dad come storming in.
“What the devil is going on?”
I tried to get a hold on myself. I tried to stop crying. I covered my mouth with both hands but I couldn’t prevent the sound from coming out.
“Just a little accident,” Spence said loudly over my noisy grieving.
“Why is she crying?”
“She broke the TV.”
“Delbert Spencer Tegge!” His voice was commanding, demanding. “Tell it to me straight and immediately!”
“She wanted to know how her dad died,” I heard Spence explaining. “Nobody talks about it and she wanted to know. I found the accident report on the Internet. I didn’t know she’d get upset like this.”
The man knelt down beside me.
I’m sorry, I tried to say, but I was still muffling my sobs and the words couldn’t come out. I’m sorry.
He was reading the paper I’d dropped beside me on the floor, then he let it slip through his fingers and he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against his chest. I don’t think a man had ever held me in his arms. It felt safe. It felt good. Mr. Tegge pried my hands away from my mouth.
“Let it out, honey,” he said. “It’s okay. You’re among friends. Just let it out.”
I did.
He held me and rocked me and I cried and cried. Spence was there, on the other side of me. He had an arm around me, too.
I should have felt embarrassed, humiliated, stupid. But I didn’t. I was sad and scared and mourning the loss of my dad. And these people, these neighbors that I hardly knew, they were mourning him with me.
REAL LIFE
16
I put the papers that Spence had found for me, the Logging Fatalities Report and the obituary from the Knoxville Sentinel, under my bed with the soccer picture. I worried a lot about paying for Spence’s broken TV. But I didn’t dwell on my minibreakdown. When I’d finally got myself together, Mr. Tegge and Spence and I talked it over. I’d never really had an opportunity to grieve for my father. And now, when I was in a new place, living with people I hardly knew and worried about my mom, it was expected that the specifics of the tragedy might hit me hard.
Del Tegge made it all sound so logical, acceptable. I’m pretty sure that Sierra would have called my behavior freaky. And more than likely all of the Sonnys in Mom’s recent past would have suggested the psych ward.
Spence was really lucky to have such a great dad.
In the next couple of weeks I found myself more and more in the company of the Tegges. Some of it was my own choosing. I began to hang out with Spencer. But Old North Knoxville was a small enough neighborhood that we ran into them frequently.
We saw them in church. The Lelands, I discovered, were regular Sunday morning worshipers. But they didn’t attend any of the churches in their area. The first Sunday after Mom’s chemo, the five of us crowded into the Saab and headed downtown. I was really shocked that Mom decided to go. She’d dropped us off at Sunday schools from time to time. And she never discouraged us from going with our friends. But in my memory, weddings and funerals were the only times she’d ever darken the door. But she’d come in to breakfast Sunday morning wearing her gray suit.
“This church is a part of our family heritage,” Vern explained to us as we drove up the hill on Henley Street.
Sierra was all perked up and interested. She shot a quick smile to Mrs. Leland. The woman responded with a nod. The two had gone on a shopping expedition. Probably because the old harpy didn’t approve of my sister’s clothes. But Sierra was in seventh heaven in her new designer suit. She could have easily passed for twenty-five. And she was willing to try to please anybody who had the money and willingness to buy for her.
“Tell them the story, Phrona,” Vern urged. “The place will mean more to them if they know the background.”
Mrs. Leland shot him a look across the front seat, but she didn’t argue.
“When the building of this church was proposed,” she said, “my family was among a group of very prominent and wealthy parishioners who pledged funds for its construction.”
It was curious how she could talk to us directly from the front seat and be both holding her nose in the air and looking down on us at the same time.
“That wouldn’t have been much of a hardship, of course, in 1928,” she said. “But after the market crash everyone was virtually penniless.”
She hesitated momentarily and then turned to glance at each of us separately, making sure everyone, including Mom, was paying attention.
“Our family honors their obligations,” she declared. “That dark time was no exception. My grandfather sold all of our furniture and the silverware from our dining table to pay what he had pledged. And he wasn’t alone. Every family managed to come up with the funds that they’d promised. This beautiful building went up during a time when no one in the city had a dime to spare. So every time you girls see that gothic spire on the skyline, you can remember it as a standing memorial to the faithful, steadfast sacrifices of Knoxville families.”
Sierra gazed at the church on the hill in awe. Mom rolled her eyes.
Inside we followed Vern up to a pew near the front. They always sat in the same place it seemed and all the people around them knew them, greeted them and were curious and eager to meet their daughter-in-law and grandchildren. The church was very cathedrallike with beamed ceilings distant overhead and lots of dark woods and stained glass.
The service was described by Vern as High Methodist, which I guess accounted for all the robes and candles. The singing was nice and the minister was interesting and brief. When the communion began, Sierra marched right up to the rail beside Mrs. Leland and Vern. Mom stayed in her place, so I stayed in mine.
In the end, it was not so bad and I was glad that we had come. Maybe some prayers would help Mom. Or help me help Mom. Or both.
As we filed out onto the walkway in front of the building, a familiar face came up behind me with a customary middle school greeting.
“Hey, girl.”
I turned to see Spence and his dad. They both had on suits and ties. Spence just looked kind of nerdy in his, but Del Tegge was very handsome.
“Hi,” I said to them both.
“How are you doing this morning, Dakota?” Del asked me.
“Fine.”
He nodded. “If you’re interested in coming to Sunday school,” he said, “you’re welcome to ride with us. We’re here early every week.”
“Every week? Spence doesn’t like to miss, huh?” I teased.
The kid made a face at
me, but we’d become close enough friends that we were able to joke with each other.
“I teach one of the high school classes,” Del said. “So I have to be here. But we both like it. It’s a good way to spend a Sunday.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I admitted.
Del’s eyes slid past me to smile at my mom and offer his hand.
“You’re looking very lovely today, Dawn,” he said.
Mom glanced down at the gray suit and then back up at Del. “Maybe you need to get out more,” she said.
He smiled at her little jab.
“How do you like our church?” he asked.
Mom shrugged. She didn’t seem that impressed by either Del’s good looks or his compliments.
“I’ve been here before,” she answered. “This is where they had my husband’s funeral. Of course, the place looks different without a casket in the middle.”
It was as if she were throwing his friendliness back in his teeth. I couldn’t imagine why she was doing that. He was only trying to be nice to her. Maybe it was the Lelands.
He greeted them, too. Mrs. Leland clasped his hand in her own and told him how much she’d missed having him around the house. Vern suggested he come over for a game of chess and he promised to do so very soon.
I, of course, didn’t have to wait for a visit. As soon as we’d gotten home and finished lunch, I hurried over to their door. It was much better lolling around their place. Though I often spent time on Spence’s balcony with the Nature Sounds Receiver finding out what was really going on in the Leland house.
That Sunday we spent almost an hour laughing our heads off as we eavesdropped on Sierra and her skateboard crush, Seth. He’d come rolling up the street and jumped up the curb, just to show that he could. She walked down to the privacy of the sidewalk steps to talk to him.
Spence and I lay flat on our bellies on the balcony, he with one earphone and me with the other.
“It must be hard to skateboard in this neighborhood,” she said. “With all the hills and everything.”
