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I opened one of the boxes and saw board jigsaw puzzles, the kind with sturdy pieces in the shapes of animals. I opened another and found picture books: Dr. Seuss, Richard Scarry, the Berenstain Bears. Several more contained clothes, including shorts and paired tee-shirts with various cute twin-isms on them. So this was where the shorts and shirts on the stroller had come from. The question I had was whether or not a prankster would have known how Allie placed those things on the stroller, like a child dressing invisible dolls. Officer Zane would have said yeah, word gets around. I wasn’t so sure.
Grief sleeps but doesn’t die. At least not until the griever does. This was a lesson I re-learned when I opened the last carton. It was filled with toys. Matchbox cars, Playstix, Star Wars figures, a folded Candy Land game, and a dozen plastic dinosaurs.
Our son had Matchbox cars and toy dinosaurs. Loved them.
My eyes stung and my hands weren’t quite steady as I closed up the carton. I wanted to get out of this hot, still garage. And maybe off Rattlesnake Key, too. I had come to finish grieving for my wife and all the years we’d foolishly wasted apart, not to re-open the long-healed wound of my boy’s terrible death. Certainly not to have psychic flashes of the Inside View type. I thought I’d give it another two or three days to be sure, and if I felt the same I’d call Greg, thank him, and tell Mr. Ito to keep an eye on the place. Then I’d head back to Massachusetts, where it was hot in August but not insanely hot.
On the way out, I saw some tools—a hammer, a screwdriver, a couple of wrenches—on a shelf to the left of the door. There was also an old-fashioned oil can, the kind with a metal base you pump with your fingers and a long nozzle that reminded me a little of Allie Bell’s snake pole. I decided that even though I had no intention of pushing the pram back to Greg’s house, I could at least oil that squeaky wheel. If there was any oil left in the can, that was.
I picked it up and saw there was something else on the shelf. It was a file folder with JAKE AND JOE written on it. And, in bigger letters: SAVE THIS!
I flipped it open and saw two paper hats made out of the Sunday color funnies. I forgot all about oiling the squeaky wheel, and I didn’t want to touch those homemade hats. Touching them might bring on another vision. In that hot garage, the idea didn’t seem silly but all too plausible.
I shut the garage door and went home. When I got there I turned on my phone and searched for Tampa Matinee. I didn’t want to do it, but I’d found the hats, so I did. Siri brought me to a nostalgia site created by a former employer of WTVT, Tampa’s CBS affiliate since back in the day. There was a list of local programs from the fifties to the nineties. A puppet show in the morning. A teen dance party on Saturday afternoons. And Tampa Matinee, an afternoon movie that ran from four to six each weekday afternoon until 1988. Once upon a time, only three years after my son died, Joe and Jake had sat crosslegged in front of the TV, watching King Kong clinging to the top of the Empire State Building.
I had no doubt of it.
We had ten years after remarrying. Nine of them, before the cancer came back, were good. The last year… well, we tried to make it good, and for the first six months we mostly succeeded. Then the pain started to ramp up, going from serious to very serious to the kind where you can think of nothing else. Donna was brave about it; that lady had no shortage of guts. Once she faced a rabid St. Bernard with nothing but a baseball bat. With the cancer burning through her she had no weapon except for her own will, but for a long time that was enough. Near the end she was little more than a shadow of the woman I’d taken to bed that night in Providence, but to me her beauty remained.
She wanted to die at home and I honored her wish. We had a day nurse and a part-time night nurse, but I mostly took care of her myself. I fed her, and when she could no longer make it to the bathroom, I changed her. I wanted to do those things because of all the missed years. There was a tree behind our house that split apart—maybe because of a lightning strike—and then grew back together, leaving a heart-shaped hole. That was us. If the metaphor seems overly sentimental, deal with it. I’m telling the truth as I understand it. As I felt it.
Some people have worse luck. We did our best with what we were given.
I lay in bed staring up at the slowly turning blades of the overhead fan. I was thinking of the stroller with the squeaky wheel, and the newspaper hats, and the toy dinosaurs. But mostly I thought of the night Donna died, which was a memory I had avoided. Now it seemed somehow necessary. There was a nor’easter with heavy snow blowing and drifting in a forty-mile-an-hour wind. The night nurse called from Lewiston at three that afternoon and canceled. The roads, she said, were impassable. The lights flickered several times but hadn’t gone out, which was good. I wasn’t sure what I’d do if they did. Donna had been switched from OxyContin tablets to a morphine pump in late December. It stood sentinel by her bed, and it ran on electricity. Donna was sleeping. It was cold in our bedroom—the furnace couldn’t keep up with that howling January wind—but her thin cheeks were wet with sweat and what remained of her once thick hair clung to the fragile curve of her skull.
I knew she was close to the end, and so did her oncologist; he had taken the limiter off the morphine pump and now its little light always glowed green. He gave me the obligatory warning that too much would kill her, but didn’t seem overly concerned. Why would he? The cancer had eaten most of her already, and was now gobbling the leftovers. I sat beside her as I had for most of the time during the last three weeks. I watched her eyes moving back and forth under her bruised-looking lids as she dreamed her dying dreams. There was a bag inside the pump, I reasoned, and maybe if the power went out I could get a screwdriver from the basement and—
Her eyes opened. I asked how she was doing, how bad the pain was.
“Not bad,” she said. Then: “He wanted to see the ducks.”
“Who did, honey?”
“Tad. He said he wanted to see the ducks. I think it was the last thing he said to me. What ducks, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you remember any ducks? Maybe the time we took him to the Rumford Petting Zoo?”
I didn’t remember ever taking him there. “Yeah, that’s probably it. I think—”
She looked past me. Her face brightened. “Oh my God! You’re all grown up! Look how tall you are!”
I turned my head. No one there, of course, but I knew who she was seeing. The wind gusted, shrieking around the eaves and throwing snow against the shuttered bedroom window so hard that it sounded like gravel. The lights dimmed, then came back, but somewhere a door crashed open.
“You wouldn’t BREATHE!” Donna screamed.
I went gooseflesh from head to toe. I think my hair stood up. I’m not sure, but I really think it did. I wouldn’t have believed she still had the strength to scream, but she always surprised me. Right to the end she surprised me. The wind was in the house now, a burglar eager to turn the place upside down. I could feel it rushing under the closed bedroom door. Something in the living room fell and broke.
“BREATHE, Tad! BREATHE!”
Something else fell over. A chair, maybe.
Donna had somehow managed to get up on her elbows, supported by upper arms not much thicker than pencils. Now she smiled and lay back down. “All right,” she said. “I will. Yes.”
It was like listening to one end of a phone conversation.
“Yes. Okay. Good. Thank God you are. What?” She nodded. “I will.”
