Family Matters

by Deborah Bedford

  He reminded himself, It wouldn’t ever be the same.

  The phone call he’d received this morning had taken him by surprise. He had been away from the field for so long now that he thought most people had probably forgotten he ever played.

  “Buddy,” Harv Siskell had boomed at him over the line. “I’m sending a courier over with tapes. I want you to have a look at them and tell me why we didn’t win last night.” Harv had been coaching Buddy since he’d been a sophomore at Southern Methodist.

  “Why does it matter what I think?” Buddy asked him brusquely.

  “Because I need a new assistant coach!” Harv bellowed at him. “I want to know what’s wrong with my game. Then I’ll tell you what’s right about your input.”

  “Suppose I’m not interested in viewing your tapes?”

  “Too late, Buddy. They’re already on their way. And, Bud…”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t worry about tipping the courier. He’s my nephew. He was drooling buckets just to ring your front doorbell and have a look at you.”

  “Thanks, Harv.” His tone said, Thanks for nothing.

  “Call me as soon as you’ve got comments for me.”

  Even with the advance notice, Buddy jumped at the knocking on his door a few minutes later.

  “Gee, Mr. Draper…Buddy…” the boy said, stumbling in his excitement. “It’s great to meet me…I mean, meet you!” He held the package out to Buddy. “My uncle sent these over. He told me I could bring them.”

  Buddy took the package and handed the little boy a dollar bill. “Thanks, son.”

  The kid never even noticed the tip. He just kept staring at Buddy. “I’m in the fourth grade at Prairie Creek Elementary School in Richardson. We play soccer every Saturday. I’ve been playing since I was five years old and I practice all the time.”

  “That’s what it takes,” Buddy said, standing there holding the door open and waiting for the boy to leave, for no good reason deciding he was in a hurry now to tear open the packet and watch the game. “It takes hard work and practice…for all your life…”

  “That’s what my uncle says, too. He got us all tickets to the last three Burn games. He can get them for us anytime we want.”

  The boy just stared up at him, his brown eyes huge and glowing.

  “That’s really nice,” Buddy said, touched.

  “Oh, gee, Mr. Draper…Buddy…would you mind…? I mean, if you’ve got time…I really wanted…”

  “Yes, son?”

  “I really wanted…your autograph?”

  Buddy grinned. It had been months since anybody had asked him to sign anything. “Sure thing, kid.”

  “I thought about you signing my soccer ball but it gets kicked around so much that I knew it would rub off. You don’t mind writing on paper, do you?”

  Buddy invited the boy in. His eager guest followed him as he pulled a Sharpie out of his drawer and fished around in the closet for a team sweatshirt. “Here,” he said when he found it. “Now. What’s your name, son?”

  “Billy,” he said. “Billy Siskell.”

  Buddy hated to admit it but he felt better than he’d felt in a long time. He looked at the little boy again. “B-I-L-L-Y? I want to be sure I spell it right.”

  “That’s right,” Billy told him.

  “To Billy Siskell,” he wrote, “an excellent courier and soccer player. Keep on kickin’. Buddy Draper. The Dallas Burn.”

  It wasn’t until he’d scribbled the last part of it that he realized he couldn’t officially write “The Dallas Burn” beneath his name anymore.

  He handed Billy Siskell the sweatshirt and Billy clutched it to his chest. “Thank you, Mr. Draper. Thank you for the shirt!” The boy reached over and pumped his hand, trying very hard to be a man. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, Billy.”

  Then Buddy stood, smiling now, genuinely smiling, watching the kid pick his bike up out of the grass and ride away.

  Exactly ten days had gone by since Cody had gotten sick. When Jennie Stratton arrived at her office at the Dallas Times-Sentinel this morning, she felt oddly out of place. It startled her that everything could go on as usual, day in and day out, despite what had happened to her son. Reporters clacked away on the computer keyboards and the phones were ringing off the hook in the newsroom. She felt as if she’d stepped outside herself and were watching everything from some vast distance.

  Someone spoke to her. “We’re so sorry about your little boy.” She wished people didn’t think they had to say things. It would be much easier if she didn’t have to respond.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s been very hard.”

  She made her way up the stairs to Art Sanderson’s office. In one hand, she clutched the portfolio containing cartoon sketches she hadn’t worked on in days.

  Her editor met her at the top of the stairway. “Our sympathies, Jen. We’re sorry about Cody.”

  “The flowers were lovely, Art.” The staff had sent a huge bouquet to Cody’s room at Children’s, big purple carnations and yellow mums, topped off with a half dozen balloons. Cody had loved the balloons, of course.

  “You up for a staff meeting?” Art asked her. “I’d like to bring you up to speed on what everyone’s doing. We had to go ahead and make decisions about the gubernatorial series.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “We made the decisions in a pinch. We hated doing it without you.”

  “You’d better call everyone together and fill me in.”

  She could tell by the guarded pleasure in Art’s eyes that he was impressed she’d returned to work so soon after Cody had taken ill. Which was fine. He ought to be. She was going beyond the call of duty. But she was doing it for herself, not for anyone else.

  I have to do something to keep from hurting. Only it never stops.

  Jen went to her own desk and sifted through the papers. She flipped through several rough sketches to remind herself what she’d been working on. She jotted down several notes to herself and was in the middle of organizing them when a thin young man with unruly hair stuck his head in the door. “Jen! Hello! I’ve been trying to call you for days.”

  “I haven’t been home much, Kirby. I’ve been at the hospital with Cody.”

  “I haven’t seen you looking this exhausted since you were going through the divorce.”

  She flipped a pen at him. Kirby had been the entertainment editor at the Times-Sentinel for years, an aging dancer who had long since retired from the Dallas Metropolitan Ballet and turned to reviewing performances instead. He had proven a loyal friend over the past years. “It’s good to see you, too.”

  “I’ve been worried about you.”

  “Everybody’s been worried about me.” She smiled; she appreciated his concern. Just talking to Kirby helped her get a little of her spunk back.

  “Has it been tough spending time with Michael?” he asked.

  She sighed. “I haven’t had time to think about it,” she answered honestly. “This has been a lot more traumatic than anything I’ve gone through before.”

  Kirby sat on her desk. “You’ve forgotten, I think. Your divorce from Michael was pretty traumatic. All those days you could hardly work because you were so upset. And what about the night you waited up for him until three in the morning to come home from the hospital?”

  “Kirby…”

  “He didn’t deny that, did he?”

  “There is nothing,” Jen said quietly, “more traumatic then thinking you might lose a child.”

  “What about the day he came storming in here waving your latest cartoon at you and accusing you of ruining Buzz Stephens’s career? That man ruined his career all by himself, Jen. You just drew a cartoon about it.”

  “Kirby, Michael and I made a career of accusing each other of things. We’re still doing it. I don’t want to talk about this right now.” For some reason, she felt as if she were betraying a close friend by rehashing all of this today. Michael had just helpe
d her too much during the past days. They had to stand strong together because of Cody. He didn’t deserve this from her now.

  She gathered up her things and walked down the hallway with Kirby to the meeting. She perched on the stool at the drawing table, her usual spot, and called them all to order. “Okay,” she said, and it struck her as bizarre just then, that this was just where she’d been sitting, these were just the people she’d been talking to, when her world had turned upside down. “Tell me what we’re doing. Art says he doesn’t know if I’ll like it.”

  “We had to trash the idea about the poodles at the picnic,” one of the artists told her. “Art thought that, by the time you could get it drawn, it wouldn’t be relevant anymore. He wants us to go with an entire series about—” he hesitated almost imperceptibly, but it made Jen steel herself for what was coming. Something was up “—the Texas politicians who are having affairs. Art thinks it’ll be a nice satire, something they might even pick up for Texas Monthly.” The other heads around the table nodded in agreement.

  “No.” She shook her head. “No…no…no.” It was all so incredibly stupid and trivial. She tried to remember when political satire had meant something to her. Certainly it had. But no more. “I’ll talk to Art about it. Don’t do anything yet.”

  They went on to other things. At the end of the meeting, Jen sat feeling incapable and out of touch while her entire staff filed by her, chattering. Her meeting with Art later wasn’t much better. “We’ve done too much of that,” she told him, referring to the “Adulterous politician series,” as she’d started to think of it. “I wanted something creative. I wanted something that would make people laugh instead of saying, ‘Oh, no, not again.’”

  “You’ve got to go with me on this one. We don’t have time for anything else.”

  “I hate it,” she said matter-of-factly, jumping up off the chair and prowling around like a cat, her hair hanging in a gold sheath down her back.

  “I did the best I could without you.” Art leaned back in his chair. “I’m not going to change it now.”

  So that’s where it ended. Jen returned to the artists that afternoon and told them to start working where they’d left off. Everyone knew she’d been overruled.

  Michael and Jennie had just come from a visit with Cody, and had left him fast asleep.

  “It was a mistake, going to work today,” she told Michael. “I thought it would help me forget for a few hours. But nothing helped.”

  “I’m still not seeing patients. I couldn’t have diagnosed a child this week if the President of the United States had brought one in. Russell’s covering for me until further notice.”

  She looked up at him, surprised he was referring all his patients to someone else. When they had been married, he’d never done that.

  Her gray eyes were huge. And her questions were telling, filling him with questions of his own. “We’re good parents, aren’t we?” she asked.

  They looked at each other wordlessly.

  When they reached the lobby of the hospital, Jennie didn’t want to say goodbye to Michael just yet. She needed to be near him, just as she had needed him for the past few days. She needed not to be alone now.

  “You want to go get something to eat?” she asked. He didn’t even hesitate before he nodded. He must have felt the same way. Together they walked to the cafeteria. They both bought sodas and hamburgers wrapped in greasy paper. Then they sat down at a table and sipped their drinks. For an eternity, neither of them spoke.

  Then, as if he wanted to break the silence he said, “I’ve got an answer to your question.”

  “What question?”

  “Whether we’re good parents.”

  She bit into her hamburger, wiped mustard off her lips with the napkin.

  “Remember when I was serving my internship at Parkland and Cody was teething?”

  She thought back, then grinned. “Oh, I remember that, you mean when his bottom ones were coming in?”

  He nodded, smiling for perhaps the first time in days. “The first tooth. You brought him into the hospital at three in the morning so I could get a look at it.”

  “You think that was funny?” She couldn’t resist teasing him just a bit. During their married life together, they’d jousted often. “It was better than sitting there on the sofa with him, listening to him cry all night long. Riding in the car always made him feel better. So we rode in the car and came to see you.”

  “I thought that was quite the accomplishment, him getting that tooth.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “You were so proud. I remember you showed it to every doctor doing night duty at Parkland.”

  “They were all so impressed, too.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they were,” she said, tilting her head at him and laughing. “I’m sure they’d never seen anything like it before in their lives.”

  That was back in the days when I thought I could perform miracles, Michael thought. “I thought that tooth was the coolest thing.” Then he chuckled. “You know, they always say doctors make the craziest parents. We’re even more amazed by all our kids’ feats than other people.”

  “You certainly were.”

  Silence came between them again. It lasted a long time.

  “We were good parents, Jen. Maybe crazy sometimes, but good. You were a good mother. You still are.”

  She plopped her elbows on the table, chin in palms, surveying his features, honestly surprised at his words. Honestly surprised at how comfortable she felt with him. His face was familiar to her yet it was different, too, with wrinkles at the corners of his eyes where wrinkles hadn’t been before, deep lines around his mouth that spoke of his concern for his patients and of his painstaking work.

  Their eyes met. She looked sad. “I just wasn’t a very good wife.”

  He didn’t answer. Lots of water had gone under the bridge. There are always two sides to everything. And it didn’t really matter because it hadn’t been her fault. They had both decided, a long time ago, that it would have been better if they hadn’t married one another in the first place. Each of them had been sailing in a separate direction, seeking dreams and a life, each of them unavailable when the other needed support. They’d both been very, very young.

  He fingered his paper cup. “Those days don’t matter anymore, do they?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t know what she could say. And then she looked up at him again. “Yes. I think they do matter. We had some good times together. We both got Cody out of it. They matter because they remind us that neither one of us was to blame.”

  “Or that both of us were.”

  The silence came again.

  “Come on,” he said finally, laying two quarters on the table for the busboy who was mopping tables with a rag. “Time to go home.”

  She pulled on her jacket and heaved her bag over one shoulder and walked beside him, still quiet. At last, just as they arrived in the lobby, she touched his arm to stop him.

  “What is it, Jen?”

  “I blamed you for this, Michael. I blamed you for everything that’s happened to Cody.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know that.”

  She had to say the rest of it. She knew him so well from so long ago. And she could see it in his eyes. “And you are blaming yourself, too.”

  He stared straight ahead, out the plate-glass window toward the parking lot.

  “There isn’t anything you could have done.”

  He glanced at her, acknowledging her absolution but knowing it wasn’t going to be that easy for him to accept forgiveness. He let her lead him to a row of chrome chairs lining the wall. They sat.

  “I had to blame somebody, Michael. And you were the one who was there, flesh and blood, standing in the room with me.”

  “Do you know what I would give,” he asked, “if there had been something…anything…I could have done for him?” He stared at the ceiling, at the splotchy drywall there, seeing only his son’s little body and the babysitter’s frighten
ed face when he rushed in from the hospital to them. “I would die myself if I could trade that for what’s happening to him. I ought to have been able to see it, to stop it.”

  “Some things just happen.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “I’ll always have questions about this,” she told him softly. “But they won’t be questioning your abilities. I have faith in everything you did for him, Michael.”

  He gripped her hand and looked at her for the first time in long minutes. “Will you, Jennie? Will you have faith in what I have done? In what I didn’t do?”

  He was such a strong man one moment, more vulnerable than she’d ever seen him the next. Without even thinking, she went to him, to let him hold her when he held out his arms. “Michael.” She stroked his hair the way she would have stroked it every night if only he’d been able to stay beside her, if only he hadn’t always been called to duty at the hospital. If only she hadn’t been so young when they’d married. If only she could have understood then what he had to do.

  Chapter Six

  Cody Stratton knew exactly when Andy was going to come in every day. He loved to hide from her and make her laugh. He’d groan when he saw her opening the door and then he’d do his best to burrow down into the covers so she couldn’t find him.

  “Guess where I am,” he’d say, doing his best not to giggle. But she always found him no matter what he tried. Then, after she did, it was always the same, up and down…up and down…up and down…his knees and legs folding up accordion-style against his belly while she worked with him.

  “Now. You do this at least three times a day,” Andy always told his mother. “You’ve got to work at this to keep him from getting so stiff. When you work with his hands, you want to move your fingers in a circular motion like this, relaxing his fingers apart instead of prying them. When you stretch his neck, you want to move it in a circular motion, too, like this….”