A Gift of Grace

by Cooper, Inglath

  He reached down and lowered the volume of the radio next to his chair. “Come on up.”

  She walked closer. “Please,” she said. “Leave it on. It’s nice.”

  He turned it back up, the soothing music drifting out over the evening. He held up a Corona bottle. “Could I get you a beer?”

  Sophie started to refuse, then found herself saying, “I’d love one.”

  He got up, disappeared into the house, came back a minute later and handed her the ice-cold bottle, a slice of lime wedged in the top.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Sit down,” he said, offering her the rocker he’d been sitting in.

  “I’m fine right here,” she said, dropping onto the porch’s top step and taking a sip of the cold beer. “I wanted to thank you again. And apologize, as well.”

  He rubbed a thumb against his bottle. “No need for either.”

  “Yes, there is,” Sophie said. “I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t admit I’m still terrified by what you could do to my life.”

  “I must seem like a monster to you,” he said quietly.

  She shook her head. “At first, maybe. Not now.”

  He set his gaze on the far end of the yard. On the other side of the white board fence, cows grazed. “I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it.”

  “Since you left Friday night, I’ve thought about everything over and over again. What happened to your wife is a tragedy, Caleb. What she left behind is a gift to be cherished. I have been blessed by the miracle of that gift. I’m human, and if I could wind back the clock to prevent you from ever seeing Grace, I probably would,” she said, her voice lowering at the admission. “But I can’t do that. And what I know is that I don’t want to make this more of a tragedy than it has already been. If you want to know Grace, then I want you to know her.”

  Caleb stared at her, his eyes narrowing as if he couldn’t quite take in what she’d just said.

  “I thought maybe for the first couple of visits, I could be with her,” Sophie added. “That it would make things easier.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. And then he said, “That’s incredibly generous of you, Sophie.”

  “Maybe more selfish than generous,” she said. “I don’t want to go through another day like Friday.”

  He let that stand.

  “And about what happened before you left—”

  “Nothing happened, Sophie.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I just want you to know—”

  “Sophie,” he said softly, stopping her. “You don’t need to justify anything with me.”

  She looked at him then, couldn’t stop herself.

  “For the first time in three years, I remembered what it felt like to want someone.”

  It wasn’t what she’d expected him to say. She circled the top of her bottle with the tip of a finger, caught in a conflicting snare of attraction and sensibility. “I think we both know this is unwise.”

  “I would guess it is,” he said.

  She got up from the steps and set the bottle down on the porch. “Thanks for the beer, Caleb. I meant what I said. When you’d like to see Grace, just call.”

  And she left then while leaving was still possible.

  CATHERINE LAY IN BED, the blinds in the room drawn so that only a slim ray of sunlight slipped through. She wasn’t sure what day it was, two days or three, since she’d left Caleb’s house. She’d started to call him a number of times, but it seemed to take so much more energy than she could summon even to reach for the phone.

  She turned her face into the pillow, ran a hand across her sleep-flattened hair.

  On the day the social worker had brought Grace to Caleb’s house, Catherine had woken to an awful feeling of hopelessness. She’d managed to get herself out of bed that day and drive over there. But as soon as she’d left, the black cloud had begun to descend on her, and by the time she’d gotten home, it was all she could do to get upstairs to her room. She hadn’t left it since.

  She needed to get up. Needed to call Caleb and see how things had gone. She regretted what she’d said to him, wanted to apologize. But her legs felt as though they had weights attached to them, and she could not force her body to respond to the request her brain was sending out.

  The doorbell rang, the noise penetrating her thoughts as though it were coming from miles away. She tried to call out, tried to force herself to move, but she couldn’t make her voice work. Fear lodged in her throat. A memory floated up from a place where it had been buried long ago. Her mother lying in bed for days on end. Catherine coming in each morning, trying to rouse her. “Please, Mama. Please, get up. I brought you breakfast. Can’t you eat a little? Mama, why can’t you get up? Mama, ge-e-et u-u-up!”

  The sound of her own scream echoed in her head. She squeezed her eyes shut, tears leaking from the corners.

  All those years when she had refused to compare herself to her mother, refused to believe that her mother’s illness might have been something she couldn’t prevent. She had just never wanted to be like her. Never wanted to be this woman lying in bed, unable to get up.

  She heard the front door open, then footsteps on the stairs.

  “Catherine?”

  Jeb’s voice. Oh, dear God. Jeb. She wanted to call out to him, and at the same time, disappear, so that he wouldn’t find her here like this. See for himself that he had been right. But then, he had been right.

  He appeared in the doorway, squinting against the dimness. “The car was in the driveway. When no one answered the door I got worried. It’s the middle of the day,” he said, frowning.

  “What day is it?”

  “Monday. Are you sick, Catherine?”

  “Oh, Jeb,” she said, her voice so weak she could barely make herself heard. “Please. Help me. Please, help me.”

  THEY WERE WORDS Jeb would have given any amount of money to hear from his wife these past three years. In reality, though, they struck terror in him. He’d never seen her like this, and waiting outside the hospital’s emergency-room door, he struggled with the very real fear that he might lose her.

  At the house, he’d carried her out to his truck and driven her to the hospital himself, unwilling to wait the twenty or thirty minutes it would have taken an ambulance to arrive. With every mile, the fear inside him had grown larger and more terrifying. And when they’d finally pulled up at the emergency-room doors, he’d been so grateful to see the faces of the doctors there, he could hardly breathe.

  “Dad?”

  Jeb turned to find Caleb walking down the corridor toward him. He’d called his son shortly after getting to the hospital.

  “What’s going on?” Caleb asked, stopping a few feet away, his expression drawn.

  “Your mother,” Jeb began, just as a young doctor came out of the emergency room and called his name.

  Jeb stepped forward and said, “I’m her husband. How is she?”

  “I’m Dr. Nelson. Could we sit for a moment, Mr. Tucker?”

  Jeb followed the young woman to a group of chairs in a nearby waiting room, conscious of Caleb following them. “Doctor, this is my son, Caleb,” he said. Caleb shook the woman’s hand and they all sat.

  “Your wife is severely dehydrated, Mr. Tucker. She says she’s been unable to get out of bed for several days.”

  Jeb felt the color leave his face. “I— We’ve been living apart,” he said, shame coursing through him.

  “Has she been depressed before, Mr. Tucker?”

  Jeb nodded, feeling Caleb’s gaze on him, but unable to look at him. “Yes. But never to this extent.”

  “Has she sought treatment?”

  “She would never agree to do so.”

  “I’m recommending that she be admitted,” the doctor said. “One of our psychiatric doctors will meet with her in the morning. Hopefully, we can get your wife started on some medication that may help her. Meanwhile, we’ll get some fluids in her and just make sure everything else seems
okay.”

  Jeb stood and thanked her, before she turned and hurried back to the emergency room. Only then did he let himself look at his son, certain of the blame he would see in his eyes. And shocked to see something very different.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “I HAD NO IDEA.” Caleb heard himself say the words, heard, too, their complete inadequacy.

  “She didn’t want you to know, son,” Jeb said, his voice low.

  “How long has this been happening?”

  “She had a few episodes over the years, but in the past few, they’ve become more frequent.”

  “Since Laney died,” Caleb said, a sick feeling washing over him.

  Jeb didn’t answer for a moment, and then he said, “Yes.”

  Caleb shook his head. “What a selfish bastard I’ve been.”

  Jeb put his hand on Caleb’s shoulder. “Son. No one blames you for any of this.”

  “This is why you left. Why you couldn’t support my efforts to bring Grace into our lives. Because you knew what it was doing to Mom.”

  Jeb shoved both hands in the pockets of his faded Levi’s. “It was the coward’s way out. I see that now. I love your mother. I never stopped loving her, even for a minute. She needs me. And from now on, I’ll be there for her. No matter what.”

  Caleb walked over to a nearby window and stared out at the passing traffic for a long time before answering. “I’m sorry, Dad,” he said finally. “Sorry I’ve refused to look outside my own misery. Sorry I couldn’t see what was happening to the two of you.”

  “Caleb—”

  “It’s all right,” he said, holding up a hand to stop his father from making excuses for him. He was tired of making excuses for himself, and he realized now how very self-centered he had been. “I don’t want to stay in this same place, Dad. And the last thing I want is to hold either you or Mom here with me.”

  “Everything’s going to be all right, son,” Jeb said, his voice thick. His eyes bright with tears, he clapped Caleb on the shoulder. “Let’s go see your mom.”

  Caleb nodded, and they walked side by side through the emergency room’s swinging door.

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Caleb pulled into his driveway and sat for a long time, staring at his house. He couldn’t get the image of his mom in that hospital bed out of his head. He felt as if he’d been in some kind of dream state for years on end, each part of his body finally coming awake again.

  He got out of the truck, opened the front door of the house and let Noah out. Ecstatic, the Lab flew down the steps, made three circles of the yard, before returning to the porch to lick Caleb’s hand.

  Caleb rubbed the underside of Noah’s chin the way Noah liked, then went inside the house. He stood contemplating the stairs to his bedroom, not sure where he was headed until he sat down on Laney’s side of the bed.

  It was the first time he’d sat here since she’d been gone. He closed his eyes for a moment, then looked at the nightstand on which sat a lamp and the Bible she’d read every morning. He opened the top drawer, the red leather diary she’d written in each day just as she had left it.

  He stared at it, then reached for it before he could change his mind.

  He rubbed a thumb across the embossed lettering of her name in the red leather. Laney Scott. After they were married, she’d crossed out Scott and written in Tucker above it.

  He’d considered looking at it countless times before now, but had never found the courage. He put one hand on the cover, slowly opening it to a random entry.

  Dear Diary,

  Caleb and I went Christmas shopping today.

  We’ve been going out a little over six months now, and I feel like I should pinch myself every day just to make sure it’s still real.

  He bought me this really cool book on famous competition swimmers and what it took for them to make it to the Olympics.

  He thinks I’m good enough to do that if I want. What a rush it is to have someone like Caleb believe in me. Swimming at the Olympics. Me. It’s a fine dream, but the truth is I don’t think I’ll need anything that big to make me happy.

  I have some dreams. I’d like to go to college. Be a teacher.

  And then there’s the dream where I’m married to Caleb, and we have this house full of little ones, Christmas and the other holidays bordering on out of control with all the racket and hoopla.

  So back to the shopping. I found this cool backpack for Caleb. He loves to go hiking, and I love it when he takes me with him. It’s so great being away from everyone else, just the two of us. It’s as if the world is ours, and there’s nothing we can do to screw it up.

  That’s what it’s like when I’m with him. I can be me. Just me. And he’s fine with that. Really fine. Maybe that’s how I know what we have is real.

  xxoo

  Laney

  The words washed over him, but instead of the anguish he’d expected to feel in reading them, he knew an unexpected sense of comfort, the same peace he’d felt those nights on the porch when he’d either felt her presence or teetered on the verge of losing his mind.

  He flipped forward, stopping at another entry.

  Dear Diary,

  I think I weirded Caleb out tonight.

  We went with our church youth group on a day ski trip up to Canaan, West Virginia. On the way home, we sat in the back of the bus, cuddled up under a blanket because the heater wasn’t working.

  Sometimes, we get off on these strange discussions, like what we’ll look like when we’re sixty-five, how it feels to skydive out of an airplane, what happens after we die. Do we go straight to heaven, or sit in some kind of holding pattern while everyone else on earth gets a chance to make things right?

  I think we go straight there unless there’s something back here we still need to do. Caleb disagrees, though. He thinks once we’re gone, we’re gone, and if there’s any work left to do, that’s up to God.

  I suspect He’s pretty busy though, and I wonder if He expects us to help out with the hard stuff.

  Caleb doesn’t like to think about dying. It’s scary stuff, I agree. But for me, it’s all about knowing what you believe.

  So here’s the part that weirded him out. I don’t think I’m going to live to be an old person. I’ve just always had this feeling that I would die young. No idea what that is. Young is relative, I guess. Anyway, it pretty much freaked him out that I could say such a thing, like I was tempting fate or something.

  But then I finally figured out it wasn’t the dying part that upset him. It was the thought that we might not be together. That he might have to live without me.

  I suspect these are the kinds of words a person hopes to hear once in her lifetime. I wouldn’t say this to Caleb, but I could die happy, now that he’s said them to me.

  xxoo

  Laney

  Tears streamed from his eyes. He didn’t bother wiping them away, but let them fall across the pages, the words in the next entry so blurred he could barely read them.

  Dear Diary,

  So this sucks, still being in high school, being the one left behind.

  I hate it.

  Today was the day. Caleb’s first day at college.

  I went with his parents to drop him off and get him settled in.

  It was so much worse than I ever imagined it would be. With every minute that passed, I could feel the divide between us growing wider and wider. Me still in high school, while he transitions to dorm life, keg parties and no parents to answer to.

  The worst part was when we were getting ready to leave. There was this girl out front sitting on a bench with a book on her lap. She had dark hair with these incredible blue eyes.

  I saw the way she looked at Caleb. Different from the girls who gawked at him in high school. Like he was the most amazing thing she’d ever seen, and she couldn’t even meet eyes with him.

  Driving away, I looked back, biting my lip to keep from crying. The girl got up from the bench, walked over and asked Caleb something. He smiled and p
ointed toward the dorm.

  It was like I was already gone and could only watch them from somewhere really far away. Like he was already out of my reach, moving on.

  But this was the weird thing. There was something a little comforting in seeing it, moving farther and farther away until they were a pinpoint, then nothing. And the sad part? I realized I could let go. If I had to.

  xxoo

  Laney

  Caleb closed the diary, his heart throbbing. Like so many things he could not explain about his wife’s death, he wondered if she had led him to these pages. If this was her way of telling him it was time. Somehow, he knew that she had, and with the acknowledgment came an instant wave of peace. The kind of peace he had not known once since losing her.

  Grateful, he put the diary back in the drawer and slid it closed. He let her go. And somehow knew she was gone for good.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE REST OF THE WEEK FLEW BY. Sophie had two sets of essays to grade and a faculty meeting on Thursday. By Friday, she felt in need of a weekend. She picked Grace up from day care just after noon, then stopped by the grocery store. At the house, she unloaded the car while Grace played in the living room with Lily. The answering-machine light blinked. Sophie tapped the button and began putting the canned goods she’d bought in the pantry. The message began to play.

  “It’s Caleb.” He paused and then said, “I noticed there’s a new children’s movie starting tonight. I wondered if you and Grace would like to go.” He left his number and the machine clicked off.