“My dad told me that you guys grew up here together.”
“Yep, we did.”
“Were you two friends?”
“Me and your dad?” I smile down at her. What a special little girl Son Settles had.
“Yeah, sure, of course we were friends. Used to play a lot of baseball and basketball together.”
“Yeah, he still likes to play those games.”
“Can I ask you something? What’s your name?”
“Well, I guess I can tell you since you saved me from choking and everything.”
She laughs at herself and then looks up at me with those flowery eyes of hers.
“My name is Mel, short for Melanie. Don’t call me Melanie. And I already know that your name is Tucker, so you don’t have to tell me.”
She reaches down and picks up a handful of pebbles and starts throwing them at the metal slide across from us. Each one makes a loud pinging sound as it hits.
I have love for this little girl. It was love that I hadn’t been able to give to Ethan. Mixed with a little leftover love I had for Katie perhaps. The beauty of all youth had grown even more precious to me as the world around grew more ugly.
She purses her lips determinedly with every toss of a pebble. Then she tucks that long brown hair back behind her ears and looks up at me with her slightly freckled face. Like a little porcelain doll whose maker has dotted each freckle with the tip of a fine brush delicately and with great care.
I open my mouth to speak, stop, release the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. Bending down, I pick up a handful of my own pebbles to ping the slide with. We sit there in silence until I have pinged my last pebble against the slide.
“Mel, have you ever had to do something that you really didn’t want to do?”
“Uh, hello, I’m a kid. My whole life is about doing things I don’t want to do.”
“Yeah, I suppose. So, how do you deal with it? I mean, do you ever try getting out of it?”
“Used to. Then I figured out that when there’s something that someone is making me do, one way or the other I always end up having to do it. Usually it’s best to do it quick.”
“Huh. You’re a pretty wise little girl, Mel. You know that?”
“Yep.”
All the colors. I can see them as I approach the cemetery. They were not there before. From a distance it almost looked like confetti. But they are envelopes. Envelopes of different colors and sizes—dozens of them.
I walk above the dead, weaving a path between the headstones and taking it all in. The letters are propped against headstones and sticking out of flower arrangements. Some seem to be growing right up out of the ground, tiny little paper headstones sprouting up from little slots plowed into this sacred soil.
And there are people here, too. Living people, I mean. More than I’ve ever seen at a cemetery when there isn’t a burial service going on.
I see an older couple walking hand in hand as if strolling through a Japanese garden.
A former Sunday School teacher of mine has a basketful of letters and is sneaking around like the Easter Bunny—placing a yellow envelope here and an orange one there.
I watch Lyle Weber leave with a handful of letters and I see Abigail Simpson standing and holding just one, a quivering hand covering her mouth as she reads it. Whoever wrote that letter has love for Abigail Simpson. And Abigail Simpson has love for whomever that letter was about. I never believed in the possibility of either of those things until this moment.
Beatrice Hart sits cross-legged in front of Laura Jane’s headstone with several open letters stacked neatly at her side. At least that many more in front of her waiting to be opened and read.
There are five letters at Ethan’s gravesite and two at Katie’s. There are about to be three.
From my back pocket I pull out the letter I had written for Howard and Betty Cooper before coming out here. The envelope also contains the poem that I had written for Katie those many years ago and a letter to the Coopers explaining the story behind it. I had not set out to write the Coopers a Grave Letter, but after leaving Swinging Girl at the park I had gone back to confront Grandpa only to find the house empty.
I had stood in the living room staring at the picture of Grandpa and Grandma at the altar on the day of their wedding. I stared into the face of my grandfather and he stared right back at me through time. My eyes bounced across the frozen faces of the children and grandchildren and great grandchildren that surrounded them on that wall. The clocks ticked at me. It was when I looked back at Grandpa that the idea came to me. Almost as if it came from that man in that wedding photo. That man on that day. That man that Grandpa had intended on being forever.
I went upstairs to the attic and pulled the poem out from beneath the floor plank where I had hidden it the day of Katie’s funeral. There was a part of me that was going to be embarrassed for the Coopers to read that poem that little boy me had written for their daughter. But I knew it would bring them some joy and I could not deprive them of that.
I added my letter to the pile at Katie’s grave and left the cemetery.
Silent Killers
Finally, a blip.
And then another.
And another.
But the nurse kept adjusting the fetal heart monitor around my wife’s belly.
Tammy saw that I was confused. “That’s mine, Tucker,” she said. “That’s my heartbeat.”
The nurse asked us if this was our first child—no, we have a four year-old girl.
If we knew what we were having—yes, a boy.
If we had a name picked out—yes, Ethan.
She loosened the strap, repositioned Tammy in the bed, tightened the strap.
“He’s hiding from me, the little stinker. I’m going to get Nurse Graham and ask her to try. I’m always having trouble with these things. I’ll be right back.”
Tammy turned to me and with her eyes alone she told me something was wrong. Those eyes pleaded for help and they asked for forgiveness. She tried a smile, but the tears came. One hand went over her eyes as if protecting them from some horrid sight. The other hand reached up and then back down again looking for something to hurt or something to hold.
I was leaning against the window, legs getting more and more unsteady with every second I couldn’t hear our baby’s heartbeat. I moved to her side.
“Tucker, I’m so scared.”
“No, Tam. No. Everything’s going to be fine. Right? Everything’s going to be fine.”
The room was full of white things, silver things, fluorescent things. The door opened and Dr. Connelly stepped in slowly. She had trouble lifting her eyes against the gravity of the situation. She inhaled deep and then spoke.
“Mr. and Mrs. Gaines, you … know what’s happened, don’t you?”
And here’s what you think about in the moments after you find out that your baby has died …
You think about that Saturday morning that your wife sent you into the bathroom to read the results of the home pregnancy test that she had purchased and taken without your knowledge. How long ago that day seemed, and longer still the next one like it.
You think about how losing a child feels both the same and different as you had imagined. Like the difference between being alone in a room and alone in the world.
You think about those who will explain that this was God punishing for sin and you hate them for it. And you hate yourself equally for having the same thought.
You think about all the people that should have died before this child and how capable you are of killing them yourself in this moment. Your father. Your mother. You could kill them by your own hand if it would save your baby. If it would set the world right.
You think about the Hendricks, friends of your family who lost their grown son in a farm accident the year before and you are jealous of their memories because you already realize that this one memory, this day of your child’s death and birth, was the only one you’re ever going to have of h
im before he was tucked into a coffin, dropped into the earth, and forgotten by a world that cycled without relent. How invaluable memories suddenly seemed to you. And how utterly unattainable.
You think about how much people will care and how much they won’t. How much they will understand and how much they won’t. How they will try to put this tragedy in a smaller box by comparing it to what they deem to be bigger tragedies.
Stillbirth was not birth. Stillbirth was stillbirth.
And you think about Katie Cooper. How this was how her parents must have felt when she had died.
Was this how you felt, Howard Cooper? Were you some new kind of lost? Were you some new word for sad? Were you something far greater than angry? Far, far greater than the worst, most bitter, vile tasting, spit-spit-spit, hate-hate-hate, don’t-look-at-me, curse-the-world, angry you had ever known? Was that what it was for you when your daughter turned up dead, Howard Cooper? Did you have to stand and look on stupidly at a broken wife you couldn’t take care of? Did you have to helplessly watch her endure a pain and horror that made your own feel small? Made you ashamed of your own pain until you hated it? Did your hands never feel so empty? Did your hugs never feel so cold? Did you never feel more a failure?
You were sad when Katie Cooper died, very sad. Not as sad as Howard Cooper had been then. Not as sad as you are now.
I knew that Mom and Larry would be anxious for news. Not to mention Tory. I didn’t want to make that phone call. I didn’t want to say the words out loud. I didn’t want them to hurt like I knew they would. And for reasons I did not understand, I was humiliated. Like I had been the butt of some cruel joke and would now have to face a laughing world.
I picked up the phone and dialed.
I searched for the right words to use. My head raced in wispy little thought-circles. Falling from a building and grabbing for something that had never been there.
What does stillbirth mean? Was he ever alive? Did he exist? Was it better to not have known him at all? Would memories make it hurt more? Am I supposed to hurt this much? Did he ever exist?
“Hello?” Mom said anxiously.
It took me a second to gather myself.
“Mom … we lost the baby.”
“I’ll be right there,” she said.
Dr. Connelly advised us that the safest way forward was to let Tammy have the baby naturally. Mom and I sat in chairs on either side of Tammy in the bed between us. The three of us sat and waited for contractions, the unrelenting portent of birth and death, alpha and omega. We prayed for a miracle and why not? Why shouldn’t there be one? If not for me, for Tammy. At least for my beautiful wife who lay there in that cold dark room feeling like the most horrible of failures. The child who had lost her mother was now a mother who had lost her child.
We prayed and cried through the long night that was not long enough. I was shamefully weak and had neither the strength nor the will to so much as stand upright. I watched my mom spoon-feed Tammy ice chips and dampen her brow with a cold wet rag. She stroked her hair like a mother strokes her sleeping child, pulling the loose strands away from Tammy’s face.
Tammy and I would look into each other’s eyes and turn away when we could not stand what we saw there. Her eyes searched mine for forgiveness or protection or answers or something else that I could not provide. She knew what lay ahead of her. Knew it could not be avoided. Birth and death.
I was tired with the weariness that comes from seeking and not finding. There was nothing I could do to help either mother or son. I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror several times during that eternal night, looking for something that hadn’t been there before, but I didn’t look any different. I needed a wound, wanted a scar. Some sort of permanent disfigurement to mark the moment. But there was nothing, I still looked the same. How in God’s name could I look the same? I forced a smile just to see if my face was still capable of making one. Just to see if I could see anything behind it or in front of it, but my smile still looked like my smile.
"Your son is dead," I kept saying to myself. "Your son is dead."
After six hours of labor, Ethan arrived early the next morning. The delivery was normal in so many ways. Screams and cries. Blood and tears. Tammy delivering our still baby may have been the greatest act of strength I have ever witnessed. I sat in my chair defeated through much of the delivery. But this woman, this love of mine, this mother found the strength to push when it was against her every instinct. I knew her thoughts. Stay here. Stay with me, inside me. We can pretend it all away. We can pretend everything better and I will never let you go. I am your mommy and I will never let you go.
We did not get our miracle. Ethan Merrill Gaines came into this world in a haunting silence. Dr. Connelly lifted him to me and let me cut the cord that linked him to his mother. The cord that wrapped around his neck, brought him to death. And in that moment, as I severed that connection, all was calm and peaceful and far too quiet. As if the world had gone still with him.
The surgical scissors clinked when I set them down on the tray. And I began to sob and it killed all that quiet, reawakened the world.
The nurse helped me bathe and dress Ethan and I presented him to his mother. She cradled him in the nook of her arm, looked down at him like a memory. He was still warm and Tammy closed her eyes, held him to her chest and pressed her cheek against his, allowing herself one more moment to pretend.
She then gave him to me and I began holding him forever. I held my son and felt his body steadily cool, despite all my efforts of warmth. His hair was dark and had a curl to it like my own. Tammy told me that he had my nose, which I desperately wanted to see but could not. I did think that he looked like his big sister Tory, though. I parted his eyelids to see eyes of blue and I counted fingers and toes. Blood poured from his nose and I dabbed it away with the corners of the blanket. His jaw was slack and his mouth kept falling open. I gently held it shut, closed my eyes, and held him against me tight. Tried to squeeze him into me. I felt him in my arms and knew that he was real. Knew that he had existed. Ethan Merrill Gaines had lived.
I rocked in the chair, repeating over and over the only words that came to me.
“My poor little boy. My poor little boy.”
Bloody-knuckled hands are choking the life and breath out of my grandfather. He gasps and I see Ethan suffocating inside of his mother. Umbilical cord around his neck, not understanding what was happening. Not knowing that all he needed was just a little bit of air. Not able to untangle himself from his lifeline. The thought of my dead son softens me briefly and my grip loosens. Grandpa coughs and chokes and sucks in air greedily.
Not moving from my straddling position across his chest, I lift my eyes to the picture that hangs on the wall in front of me. Grandpa and Grandma on their wedding day. Standing there together hand in hand, not knowing what life has in store for them. Unable to foresee this moment some fifty-plus years in the future when the groom would be killed by the son of his son.
The groom smiles at me. What had happened to this man? Where had he gone? I stare hard, looking for some semblance of the creature that is beneath me now. Some hint of the evil that lurks within, but I cannot see the dragon monster. There is no evil in the groom. Life put it there later, to be sure, because there is no evil inside the man in the picture.
I am surrounded by the evidence of the life that followed this picture moment and I search for clues in them. Every wall and table top is covered with the evidence of normalcy. Delicates and figurines, gifts from over the years. Old pictures of things that were once new and new pictures of things that had become old. Ceramic things, knitted things, embroidered things. Souvenir dishes from Niagara Falls, The Alamo, Mt. Rushmore.
On the table by the door is a green kerosene lamp that has gone from modern convenience to useless artifact without itself ever having changed. The lamp is aged and not aged, it is the world around it that has changed.
There is no explanation. At some point, the man in the picture had been
killed by the man in my hands. The man in my hands, like some pod creature replacement, has crept in and stole the good man’s life. He quietly assumed his role. He steadily hurt and he silently killed. Like whatever evil was responsible for killing Ethan, this pod creature silently killed.
The grandfather clock in the corner dongs. How many times I do not notice, but it feels like it is counting backwards. Suddenly all the walls are covered in clocks. I snap my head around and lock on each one. So much inconsonant ticking and tocking that there is no sound space left for quiet.
No room for stillness or the still.
The clocks grow louder. Behind the sound of their taunts I can hear the faint sound of Grandpa’s voice. His hands are clasped around my wrists, attempting to release the grip I have on his neck. The clocks grow louder still and drown him out completely. I look him in the eye and he loosens his hold on my wrists.
I think about Katie and tighten my grip.
I think about Ethan and squeezed until Grandpa’s face is purple and bruised looking. Until blood pours from his nose and onto my fingers. Until blood oozes from his ears. Until vomit shoots from mouth. Until eyes pop out of sockets and I find myself staring into empty sockets.
Until all of life has left him.
I’m the silent killer.
That was the thought that was echoing through me when I awake the next morning.
The dream had been so real. The kind of real that has you wondering when you wake up whether it really happened or whether you have been blessed with a nightmare.
I don’t get out of bed. I don’t mind-check for pain or soreness. I don’t even open my eyes.
I do wonder whether my fists are bloody, but I don’t dare check.
For a moment, I wonder if maybe it all really did happen. But even if it didn’t, I do not question whether I am capable. Because I know now that I am. It is in me. I can do it.
Where the Broken Lie Page 15
