I'll See You Again

by Jackie Hance

  “All finished,” Denine said as she closed the last garbage bag.

  “Thanks,” I said. “But can we keep this between us? I don’t want to make Warren feel any worse.”

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s nice of you.”

  But how could I keep from discussing it with Warren when the overflowing garbage bags on the driveway would be indisputable evidence? I didn’t want to rub his face in actions that had been undertaken by some alternate pod-Warren.

  “I can take the garbage bags to my house,” Denine offered. “The garbagemen can pick them up there.”

  “Ooh, would you? Thanks.”

  I helped her load the garbage into her trunk. It’s funny how much I wanted to protect Warren this time. I felt my heart soften toward my husband as I thought about all that he was struggling with, too. He must already have been suffering a psychic hangover from his rampage the night before, and he didn’t need to suffer more.

  • • •

  After the debacle of moving Katie’s bed, I decided to take control of the situation a few weeks later, when we were ready to move Emma’s bed out to make room for the crib. Another set of neighbors, Gina and Sal, wanted the bed for their guest room and I quickly agreed.

  “I’d be happy to know you have it,” I said.

  Their then-preteen daughter Erica used to babysit the girls. I’d call her during the day if I had an errand to do, and she’d always run over on short notice. She had a sweet relationship with the girls, but she’d been away at summer camp when the accident happened. Coming home to find the girls gone and the funeral done and over, she was very upset. For a long time, she couldn’t even look me in the eye. I liked the idea of having Emma’s bed in her house. Erica could watch over it with the same gentle kindness she had shown the girls.

  Moving the bed wouldn’t be easy. Emma had a captain’s bed with drawers underneath for storage, and it was oversize, so it wouldn’t go around the corner of the staircase in our house. To get it into her room, we’d had to arrange a rope-and-pulley system outside the house, hoist it to the second floor, then squeeze it in through her window. Now we planned the reverse. I made arrangements with our neighbors Sal and Jonathan to come over to help Warren. They’d take the bed out the window and onto the roof, then shimmy it down the side of the house.

  I took off the sheets. I folded up the covers. I lay on the bed for the last time. I wouldn’t let this move be as awful as the last. The guys were coming over on Sunday to undertake the project, and I’d just quietly leave the house until they were finished.

  “I’m prepared,” I told Warren.

  But I wasn’t prepared for what happened on Tuesday night, five days before the bed was to be moved.

  At about 2 a.m., I woke up from a sound sleep, hearing strange noises above me. I lay very still, trying to imagine what could be happening. I didn’t think burglars were trying to get in, and if they were, I didn’t care. (Take anything you want. Everything I care about is gone.) But the sounds were too rhythmic and persistent for a burglary. Finally realizing where the racket was coming from, I got up and went into the girls’ room.

  In the moonlight, I saw Warren, his back to me, panting and moaning as he shoved Emma’s bed out the window and onto the roof.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, flicking on the light. “You can’t move the bed alone.”

  “Why not?” He looked at me, his eyes wild, as he continued ramming the bed through the open window with superhuman effort.

  “Stop, Warren. You can’t get the bed off the roof in the middle of the night.”

  “I’ll do it in the morning.”

  “So you’re going to leave Emma’s bed outside all night?” I asked, feeling my own panic rising.

  “I checked the weather. It will be fine,” he said.

  “Oh my God.” I covered my face with my hands. “You can’t be doing this.”

  “What’s wrong? Why are you upset?” he asked, as if not aware that his bizarre behavior was answer enough to the question.

  “You’re supposed to be doing this on Sunday with the guys,” I said.

  “I couldn’t wait until Sunday,” Warren said, talking too fast, his voice on the edge of frantic. “I’m feeling too anxious. I might as well take care of it myself.”

  I went back into bed and lay there, my eyes wide open. Warren had sounded crazy, but it had to be his medication talking. Why else would he be wound up, overwrought, and bursting with energy at 2 a.m.? Given his other post–sleeping pill rampage, I guess hoisting a bed out a window wasn’t that strange.

  But understanding what had happened didn’t make it any better. I lay under my own covers, staring at the ceiling, feeling the emotional weight of Emma’s bed pressing down on me from the roof. Emma’s bed, perched precariously outside, defenseless against the night air. An innocent object—like an innocent child—left exposed and vulnerable. The image of the solid wood frame teetering on the roof seemed a metaphor for my deepest, darkest sense of shame. I hadn’t protected the girls. Hadn’t kept them safe.

  Perhaps the connection seemed remote, but as the hours ticked away—3 a.m., 4 a.m.—I could think of nothing else. In his agitated state, Warren thought the night air wouldn’t harm Emma’s bed. But in my mind, the least we could do now was protect everything connected to the girls—to their memory, to their lives.

  I didn’t sleep for one moment. At about 4:30, I texted my running friends:

  “Can’t go this morning. Warren had a bad night.”

  I got up anyway, done with lying there sleeplessly. Too tired to run, I could at least take our dog Jake for a walk. An hour later, I was outside strolling in front of our house with Jake when Una came by—a one-woman running group this morning.

  “Hey, you’re up,” she said, slowing down. “What’s going on?”

  “Look,” I said, pointing up. “There’s a bed on my roof.”

  Una cocked her head upward and came to a dead stop. “Oh, wow. Do you need Doug to come over?”

  “No. It was so stupid of Warren. But he’s going to have to figure out how to get it down today himself.”

  Luck, in the form of our extended circle of family and friends, bailed him out. Warren stayed home from work, not feeling well after the long night, and by coincidence, my brother Mark came over that day just to hang out. Our neighbor Jonathan was working from home, and he came over, too.

  “Good news, Warren, come here,” I called out as soon as they arrived. “You’re getting that bed off the roof now!”

  The three men got a rope around the heavy wooden form and shimmied it down the side of the house. By two in the afternoon, twelve hours after Warren had started the project, Emma’s oversize captain’s bed was on the ground.

  But even that wasn’t the end.

  After all the huffing and puffing going down, the guys realized that the bed wouldn’t fit up the staircase at Gina and Sal’s house. Nobody was in the mood to suggest additional adventures that involved more roofs, ropes, and windows.

  “What should we do?” Warren asked.

  Everyone who had been involved in the bed-moving escapade was now standing on the sidewalk, staring at Emma’s bed. I made it clear that I didn’t want it back. I looked at Jonathan and had an immediate idea. When something is right, I know it.

  “Could you use it?” I asked him. “It matches the other bed. And you have two children.”

  He looked at me anxiously, remembering the hysteria that resulted the last time he agreed to take a bed. But I was smiling, so he nodded.

  “Well, sure,” Jonathan said. Then mentioning his son, he added, “Colton is getting old enough for a bed. He’d love it.”

  Was it a twist of fate? Coincidence? Destiny? A sweet joke from my angels in heaven? One way or another, Emma’s bed and Katie’s bed ended up in the same house again, in children’s rooms right next door to each other.

  As with so much else, it wasn’t easy, but we had gotten there.

  Twenty-three
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  Everybody I knew seemed thrilled about my having a new baby, and why shouldn’t they be? I’d gone through a lot to make it happen. I kept reminding myself that I’d made a decision. But had I made the right decision? With Emma, Alyson, and Katie, I had been so proud to have a happy house and happy family. Children deserved no less. But if happiness wasn’t in my repertoire anymore, maybe I couldn’t give this baby the good life she deserved.

  I kept flashing back to a day shortly before the accident, when Warren and I had a disagreement, and since we had a pact never to argue in front of the girls, we sent Katie and Alyson outside to play. Our quarrel didn’t amount to much, but when it ended, I raced down to the basement with hurt feelings and burst into tears.

  Alyson must have spotted me from where she was playing in the yard because she stopped what she was doing and came over, pressing her face against the basement window.

  “Mommy, don’t cry,” she had said.

  She looked unbearably sad, and her sorrowful expression cut to my heart. Seeing me weepy had drained away all her normal cheer. I couldn’t do that to her. I immediately wiped away my tears and gave her a big smile.

  Now that I was halfway through my pregnancy, I kept remembering how I felt seeing Alyson’s sad face and knowing that I had caused her sorrow.

  I’d been able to change my mood very quickly for Alyson, and she easily returned to her usual good spirits. But what would life be like for the new baby, coming into a house imbued with pain? Would gloominess be her standard mode?

  “I’m thinking about putting the baby up for adoption,” I told Melissa one day in my second trimester.

  “You’re not putting the baby up for adoption,” Melissa said. “We’re all going to be here to help you. That baby will be as loved as anyone on earth.”

  Her words resonated. Even in the darkest times, I felt loved and sustained by my friends, and their generous spirits would be equally nurturing to the baby. In fact, taking care of her would be a piece of cake in comparison to putting up with me. I immediately decided that the baby would have three godmothers—Melissa, Isabelle, and Jeannine.

  If my crazy thoughts now focused on adoption, at least I no longer thought about suicide. I couldn’t. I had a responsibility to this pregnancy and something to worry about more important than myself.

  “You were such a good mom with the girls,” Isabelle said sweetly, “and you’re going to be a good mom again.” She looked at me with her big doe eyes, and I couldn’t help smiling. Even when she was being sincere, Isabelle brought out my sillier side.

  “How about the time I couldn’t stand the noise in the house? Remember? I sent Katie over to you, then locked myself in the bathroom,” I said.

  “Which of us hasn’t done that?” Isabelle asked with a laugh.

  I had yearned every day since the accident to hear the girls giggling and laughing, or even squabbling and whining. How could I have ever wanted to escape happy pandemonium? I would give anything to have the sounds of normal family commotion again. To me a new baby crying wouldn’t be noise, it would be a return to the music of our lives, an end to the eerie quiet.

  Isabelle was right. Even in my pregnant, insecure state, I knew in my heart that I’d been a devoted mom to Emma, Alyson, and Katie. They reveled in the comfort of my affection and were growing up confident and strong. Each day before school, I gave them a hug and a kiss and nobody ever walked out of the house without a smile.

  Except one morning, when Emma was in third grade. She had gotten the day off to a bad start by refusing to let Aly borrow her coat. After I insisted she share, she went into theatrics about how unfair I was and began to cry. I tried to get her to stop, but she began ranting because she didn’t like the way her hair looked.

  “You’re behaving like a brat,” I had told her, which made her cry even harder.

  Why was my nice girl behaving this way? As she left for school, she looked back at me, but I looked straight ahead and didn’t do a thing—no hug, no kiss, no “Have a nice day.”

  As soon as the door closed, the whole surly scene began eating me up. I felt awful. How could I let Emma go to school unhappy? Maybe she hadn’t behaved well, but she was an eight-year-old girl who needed reassurance, not reprimands. As the adult, I should remedy the situation and make her feel better. I pulled out a pad of paper and quickly wrote a note apologizing for the bad morning and telling Emma I loved her. I sealed it in an envelope and drove to her school.

  “Could you get this note to Emma as soon as possible?” I asked the secretary in the front office.

  “Sure, Mrs. Hance,” she said. “Is anything wrong?”

  “Not after she gets the note,” I said, relieved.

  Making sure children are happy and loved and secure. My job. I’d done it well once and maybe—with the love and support of my friends—I could do it again.

  • • •

  The cliché when you’re pregnant is to say you don’t care if it’s a boy or girl as long as you have a healthy baby. I wanted a healthy baby. I also wanted a girl. Some fertility clinics will check the DNA of an embryo before implanting, but Dr. Rosenwaks liked to interfere as little as possible, so he didn’t screen for sex. Meanwhile, I told everyone I was sure it was a boy—and I meant it.

  At the twenty-week sonogram, the technician said the baby would be sufficiently developed that I could find out the sex.

  “I don’t want to know,” I said firmly.

  The emotional strains of this pregnancy had practically brought me to the brink, and I figured the next months would be even harder if I knew the baby wasn’t the gender I secretly wanted. Or maybe not so secretly. Everyone understood that I desperately hoped this baby would restore some of the joy I had felt with my three girls.

  “Really?” asked the technician, whom I hadn’t met before. “Are you sure you don’t want to know?”

  I lay very still on the table for a moment. I had to accept sometime that I would be bringing up a boy. “Okay, let’s find out,” I said.

  She took another minute to verify, not wanting to make a mistake. “You’re having a girl,” she said finally.

  I started crying. Bawling. Tears rolled down my cheeks and my whole body shook. The technician had no idea what she had said wrong and nervously left the room. Outside, someone filled her in on who I was, and she came back smiling.

  “Are you sure it’s a girl? Are you sure?” I asked her.

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “It’s really a girl? And it’s alive?”

  “Look at her heartbeat.”

  Her.

  Heartbeat.

  My own heart was fluttering wildly.

  • • •

  The moment I knew the baby would be a girl, I also knew her name.

  Kasey Rose.

  I’d picked Kasey a month before the implantation even occurred, while I idly watched the Miss America Pageant on TV one night. I only half paid attention as the contestants stepped forward at the start of the show to introduce themselves. One of the contestants announced herself as Kasey—I never caught the last name—and when I looked at the chyron on the screen, I saw Kasey with a K.

  I gasped. I’d always loved the name Casey, but I’d never seen it with a K before. I literally jumped off the sofa, as excited as if I’d won the lottery. This was it! A beautiful name that included an E-A-K for Emma, Aly, and Katie. I felt as if the Miss America contestant were talking directly to me.

  After I got pregnant, I thought about how I could ever thank Dr. Rosenwaks for his extraordinary gift. I had already written him a long note of gratitude, but any present I thought of seemed inadequate. A box of fancy chocolates? A bottle of expensive champagne? A gorgeous bouquet of flowers? Wait, I could do better than that. If I named the baby Rose in his honor, the flower would never lose its bloom.

  • • •

  Warren and I weren’t fighting now so much as we were overwhelmed and uninvolved with each other. Even at this point, two years on, Warren
kept most of his dark thoughts to himself. His way of coping with grief involved physical labor—building, moving, growing. Maybe that is typical for a guy. He took comfort from building the rock garden and waterfall in our backyard where the swing set used to be, and he spent hours at the Centennial Gardens planting and pruning and cleaning for our Family Fun Day. It took me awhile to notice another physical action he took on behalf of his daughters.

  Tattoos.

  About two months after the accident, Warren had a cross tattooed on his chest over his heart. For the design, he chose the same green cross we had used on the mass cards at the girls’ wake.

  I didn’t say anything.

  A few months after that, I noticed something missing from Emma’s room. A picture she had made with a peace sign and the word peace written across it in her pretty handwriting had disappeared from her wall.

  “Do you know where Emma’s picture went?” I asked Warren the night I noticed it was gone.

  “Which picture?” he asked. But from the expression on his face, I knew that he knew exactly which picture I meant.

  And he knew that I knew.

  “The peace sign,” I said.

  “I’ll show it to you later,” he said.

  “Show it to me now.”

  Warren slowly unbuttoned his shirt and pushed away the sleeve, and I saw Emma’s handwriting. He had taken the picture to a tattoo artist and had it imposed on his arm.

  The last drawing Emma ever did would now be part of him forever.

  I was stunned. And that wasn’t the last of his body art.

  Warren spent a lot of time sitting in the rock garden he had helped build in the backyard to memorialize the girls, and he told me that he always saw a red cardinal there. He thought of the cardinal as a sign that the girls hovered near.