I'll See You Again

by Jackie Hance

  We finally steadied ourselves, put the roof back up, and drove home. That night, I tried to tell the story to Warren, but except for my giggling in the retelling, it didn’t sound very funny anymore.

  “I guess you had to have been there,” I finally said lamely, almost to myself.

  Falling asleep that night, I realized that a car, great jewelry, new furniture—they’re all just things at the end of the day, and they offer no lasting feelings. Children—and the memories of children—are what endure. A home, Warren, family, friendship. I needed to find what mattered again, to understand what had happened to my life and how to rebuild it when all that had truly sustained it was gone.

  Eleven

  Some of my friends say that Warren and I make an unlikely pair. We are simply wired differently. He’s always evinced an easy contentedness, while I get restless. I don’t need much sleep, and I never relax, even on vacation. The summer we joined a beach club, friends joked that I could never sit for very long.

  “Anyone need anything?” the cabana boy asked one day, coming over to where my friends and I were lounging.

  “We’re good,” I said. Then a minute later, I jumped up and dashed off to get some water or suntan lotion.

  “Why didn’t you ask him to get that?” Melissa asked when I came back.

  “I needed to get up, anyway,” I explained. I have a lot of energy—and a lot of anxiety—that I need to release, whether in useful activities like running or planning, or fruitless ones like worrying.

  Warren and I grew up with different backgrounds, which partly explains our contrasting styles. My Italian family was emotional, voluble, and dramatic—so it’s natural that I want to talk about everything. Sometimes too much. Warren has the more steadfast approach of his Germanic father. Mr. Hance, a retired postal worker, seemed resolute and resigned in the face of tragedy. He tried to keep his life orderly and unemotional, getting done what he needed to without a lot of fuss or fervor. He lost his only daughter and four of his grandchildren in one inexplicable accident, but he didn’t talk about it much. Instead, he trudged to the cemetery every week to water the plants and tend the plots.

  I sometimes wonder if men who maintain a pragmatic approach have emotions roiling underneath that they cover up with a solid facade. Or is the facade really the truth? Mr. Hance never talked about the breakup of his marriage decades earlier, but the pain must have reverberated. When Warren was fifteen, and Diane, the youngest, only eight, their mother had an affair and left. After Eileen moved out, Mr. Hance stayed behind to raise the four children on his own. Warren and his siblings had very little contact with their mother.

  Warren became a pillar for his family, the one his siblings—his twin brother, John, their brother David, and the youngest, Diane—could rely on. The parents made a plan that when Diane reached twenty-one, they’d sell the house and split the proceeds. But as that birthday approached, Diane and Mr. Hance still lived there and Warren, ever the good guy, didn’t want their lives to be disrupted. He bought half the house and let them stay. He eventually moved in with them while we were dating. When we got married, they left and Warren and I made it our home.

  It’s not surprising that Warren felt deeply connected to the house, but I just considered it the place we currently lived. He had strong roots, while I floated around, always imagining the brick-and-mortar that might make us happier. Once the girls hit preschool, I talked about house-hunting in the nearby town where Jeannine and Rob and Melissa and Brad ultimately moved.

  “Garden City has a middle school the girls would attend, rather than going from elementary school to high school,” I said.

  “The local schools were just fine for me,” Warren insisted.

  “I don’t like that the girls have to share a room,” I said, trying another angle. “The house is too cramped for three children.”

  “When I grew up, we had four children here,” he said.

  Try to argue that one.

  Emma, Alyson, and Katie loved the house and our big backyard, too. I was the only one who had a problem with it, who wanted to move on.

  I knew he was right about the town, though. Friends and neighbors cloaked us in love and support. I don’t know if every community is like ours, but people gathered around us with extraordinary warmth and caring. Warren and I joked that we had an open-door policy, and we meant it quite literally. We never locked the door, happy to have anybody stop by, and fortunately, people popped in regularly.

  We’ve always been lucky with our friends, and now several couples in our closest circle seemed to put everything else aside to be with us. They never made a fuss about it—they just showed up. The five women in my running group bolstered me daily. Friends I had grown up with—many of them still in New Jersey—checked in regularly, and those from Warren’s early years—many of them still in Floral Park—recharged their bonds. My cell phone rang constantly with women from the bowling league or prayer group that I had joined. Neighbors and fellow parents from town came by on unexpected evenings with food or funny stories.

  “Hello, Hances!” our ever-merry friend Bob GaNun would call out when he sauntered in, a couple of nights a week. “It’s Uncle Bob.” He would sing a song or do an Elvis impersonation so good that he could be onstage in Las Vegas. For a few minutes, Warren and I would smile and feel safe from our endless arguments.

  Warren’s brother David got a leave from his air force posting in Korea for the funeral and then, not wanting to abandon Warren, asked to be transferred to New Jersey. We converted our basement into his weekend bedroom, and having him nearby was good therapy for Warren. The two of them bonded over drill bits and chain saws. Warren had many home-improvement ideas, and David, a great hands-on guy, actually knew how to do them. Typical guys, they didn’t have to talk to get comfort. Pounding nails and climbing ladders seemed to do the trick.

  David became the weekend cushion between Warren and me, keeping us from turning volatile on those long Saturdays and Sundays when other people were busy with their families. I loved David and appreciated what he did for Warren. But he was a Hance, a brother of Diane, yet another reminder of what had happened.

  “I can never get away from your family!” I yelled at Warren one afternoon. “Diane is dead, but she won’t leave us alone!” When I went to visit the girls at the cemetery, I saw her tombstone. When I talked to Warren, Mr. Hance, or David, I glimpsed her face. No matter what I did, I could never get away from her.

  Feeling ambivalent about family was new for me. Warren and I had always kept blood relatives close. Emma, Alyson, and Katie had adored my mom, who babysat for them often. Mr. Hance—Poppy—was a daily presence in their lives, and many aunts and uncles and cousins came by frequently. When the girls had questions about other relatives, we answered them simply.

  “Mommy’s daddy is in heaven,” I told the girls, and we visited him in the cemetery often.

  “What about Daddy’s mommy?” Emma asked.

  Eileen might have wanted to reconnect with her children and grandchildren now, but before the accident, Warren couldn’t see the point.

  “Daddy’s mommy didn’t want to be a mommy anymore,” I explained.

  They accepted the statement with the innocence of children. The explanation made sense to them, even if it didn’t to me.

  Now when I was feeling sympathetic, I could admit that Warren hadn’t had an easy time with the women in his life.

  His mother left him.

  His girls were gone.

  I never wanted to be another woman in his life who left him. That’s at least one of the reasons I stayed after the accident, when it might have been better for both of us to be apart.

  • • •

  My childhood wasn’t nearly as complicated as Warren’s. I grew up in a moderately affluent neighborhood in New Jersey where my dad owned the Town Pub, where I eventually met Warren. It was a popular hangout, and my dad loved being the center of the social scene. He hired many of my school friends to work there
nights and weekends, and my first real job was at the restaurant, too. My mom didn’t have a job until I reached high school, but my dad took good care of her even after their divorce, and we always had what we needed.

  About the time I went off to college, the restaurant took a downward slide and finances got tight. My dad didn’t mention the problems, but his checks started bouncing. I got called to the registrar’s office at Boston University and was told that I needed to provide a cashier’s check if I wanted to stay enrolled. My grandmother paid the tuition, and I got a job to pay rent.

  When the debts became too much to handle, my dad lost the restaurant and took a job at another one. I needed to earn a salary in the summers, and while many of my friends continued to work at the Town Pub, I loyally went to the restaurant where my dad now worked. The only problem was that I couldn’t make enough money there.

  My dad must have had the same problem, because eventually he gave up on restaurants and started driving a cab. At first I felt embarrassed for him. He knew everybody in town. What if he ended up with someone in the backseat of his cab who had been a friend? But he didn’t worry. He liked driving and talking to people, and he had no ego invested.

  I admired him for losing everything yet still finding a way to go on.

  Dad also didn’t mind when I went back to working at the former Town Pub. Whatever the new owners had done, I still got good tips there, and as Dad saw it, money was money. One day, I got off work at the restaurant early and was heading out with my longtime friend Cortney, when her car broke down in the parking lot. We went back inside to wait for help. A guy we knew called out “Hi!” and invited us to come join the crowd of pals around him. I went over reluctantly, grumpy about the delay and the broken-down car. I didn’t pay too much attention when one of the guys introduced himself as Warren Hance from Long Island.

  “Long Island?” I asked, snarkily. “How do you get all the way to Long Island?”

  “It’s not so hard,” he said, missing—or ignoring—my sarcasm and instead spouting off driving directions specific enough to get me directly to his house.

  “Okay, but why did you come all the way to New Jersey tonight?” I asked, as if he’d just circumnavigated the Atlantic in a rowboat rather than driven across the George Washington Bridge.

  “I came to see the restaurant,” he said. “My friend’s brother bought it.”

  “Really? My dad used to own it.”

  Somewhere in that tangled web was a connection. And it wasn’t long before we both felt a deeper connection, too.

  In the next few months, Warren came to New Jersey so often that he probably could have circumnavigated the globe. I guess you could say our relationship started with my waiting on him, because he returned to the Town Pub for dinner the night after we met—and sat at a table where I was the waitress. It took a few dates before I realized he’d become my boyfriend. Two years later, we were inseparable.

  “I want you to move somewhere closer to me,” Warren said at that point.

  “Where would I go?”

  “I’ll find you a place,” he promised.

  I still lived at home, and though I’d been on my own in college, I’d always relied on my dad. Now, classically, the role subtly shifted to Warren. He located an apartment in Queens, and when I worried about how I could afford it, he had the apartment furnished for me. He made it easy to move from my past in New Jersey to my future in New York.

  After I met Warren and moved to New York, I began working in the catering department of Barnard College. I’d often arrive at 5:30 a.m. and work until late evening—long hours of running around, nonstop, but I loved it. Food and menus had always been my passion and an idea started to nudge into my mind that maybe someday I’d have my own catering company.

  When I wasn’t working, Warren and I spent all our time together. We were friends and lovers and shared everything, but he never asked me to marry him. I was young when we met, and maybe he wanted me to grow up a little bit. We were clearly going to be together forever, but I couldn’t understand his reluctance and threatened to leave on a regular basis.

  “I probably won’t be here next year if we’re not engaged,” I told his family one year at a Christmas party.

  “This is the last Easter party I come to without a ring,” I said at another family gathering.

  But the years went by and I kept showing up, wearing only the rings I’d bought for myself. I talked about marriage regularly, but Warren never responded. Maybe he didn’t have much faith in the whole concept because he’d never really seen it work. Why risk the hurt he’d watched his father go through?

  I finally stopped thinking about a proposal.

  Which is exactly when I got one.

  “What makes you want to get married now?” I asked him one day, after I’d said yes and he’d slipped a beautiful diamond on my finger.

  “Because you stopped asking,” he admitted. “And I love you.”

  It had taken us six years from that night at the bar to the evening at the altar.

  Once we got married, in April 1999, I quit my job and went off the pill. I wanted a baby—babies—immediately. Children gave life meaning.

  Back then it never occurred to me that they could be taken away, devastating all the meaning in life, too.

  Twelve

  Tragedy turns everything upside-down. Occasions that once made my life good now made it bad. Events I once looked forward to I now faced with dread.

  Like Halloween. Isabelle and I had made a tradition of getting dressed up in costumes and going to school to watch our children in the Halloween parade. I loved the year Emma had decided to be a pirate with a bandanna around her head, a fake sword at her side, and black tights with skulls on them. Alyson had looked incredibly cute as a fairy and Katie pranced proudly as a mermaid. Our stoop always had three pumpkins that we’d carved with the girls and lots of lights and decorations to welcome the trick-or-treaters.

  Jeannine threw an annual Halloween costume party for the grown-ups—and she took it seriously, with contests and events and over-the-top outfits. For one party, a group of us were characters from The Wizard of Oz: Isabelle was Dorothy, Mark was the Scarecrow, I was a Munchkin, and Brad dressed as the Mayor of Munchkinland. Melissa, who always dressed up as something pretty, got to be Glinda, the Good Witch.

  For my first Halloween without the girls, I stayed in bed all day crying. As evening fell, I left a spread of candy on the stoop for any children who stopped by, but didn’t turn on any house lights. Huddling alone in the dark seemed the only way to get through the night. Jeannine canceled the annual blowout Halloween party because all of us were haunted by real ghosts and didn’t need anything else to scare us.

  By the next morning, I could check another painful day off the fall holiday hit parade. But there were more to come.

  As the leaves fell off the trees and the days got colder, I shuddered at the thought of going to our traditional family Thanksgiving dinner at my brother Stephen’s house in New Jersey. Sitting at his festive table without the girls in their normal places would be more than I could bear.

  “Come to our house for Thanksgiving,” Jeannine offered, always stepping forward in the crunch. “We’ll start a new tradition.”

  “What about the extended family you usually go to?” I asked.

  “We’ll skip it. Being with you and Warren is more important.”

  In typical Jeannine fashion, she cooked up more than dinner. Her town had an annual Turkey Trot, and since one of Warren’s friends wanted to organize a running club for the Hance Family Foundation, this seemed like the place to launch it. A small gang of friends and neighbors would run five miles in honor of Emma, Alyson, and Katie—wearing T-shirts to show their support and raising money with every step. Warren insisted that he and I should run, too.

  “Ugh, no,” I groaned. “Do I have to?”

  “Yup, you do,” said Warren, an advocate of tough love.

  “I only run with my running gr
oup,” I protested, looking for any out. I wanted to stay in bed and cry on Thanksgiving morning, far away from any crowds. I didn’t want to wear a T-shirt with the girls’ picture and have people stare at me in public as I ran down a street.

  “Well, everyone’s going to be there, so you have no choice. You’re running.”

  When Warren and I arrived Thanksgiving morning, the crowd running for the foundation had grown to forty or fifty. Everyone was wearing white T-shirts with a logo commemorating the girls. The warmth and enthusiasm were overwhelming, and as we took photos in our matching outfits, I started to cry. Emma, Alyson, and Katie had brought everyone together, and the race would be infused with their spirits.

  I couldn’t get too emotional, though, because Bernadette and Tara and all the other women in my usual running group surrounded me and brought me to the starting line. As we took off along the route, I heard bystanders cheering, and though I was sad, their goodwill seeped into my heart. I didn’t think I had much to be grateful for on this holiday, but I suddenly felt very thankful for the goodness of the people running with me and the kindness of those lining the road.

  Warren and I had one place to go between the run and Jeannine’s dinner—the cemetery. I couldn’t let a holiday pass without spending time with the girls, but so far, the visits had been difficult. The grave sites remained stark and I had cried on Emma’s birthday, upset that people going there would see such a barren plot.

  “The headstones aren’t ready yet,” Warren had said shakily, trying to explain.

  “I don’t care about excuses,” I had said, sobbing. “We can’t do this to them. The girls always looked so pretty when they went to school. The cemetery has to be pretty at all times.”

  So, on Thanksgiving, I walked tentatively toward the girls’ graves—and then stopped, feeling another surge of gratitude.

  “It’s so beautiful!” I said, turning to Warren.

  He smiled, pleased and relieved. The headstones had finally been finished and laid, and our friend John Power, who is a landscape architect, had planted graceful trees and shrubs all around. The whole scene looked so peaceful and appealing that I felt a tiny bit of comfort. I fell to my knees and touched the fresh soil where John had done his wondrous transformation.