The prayer ended. Feet shuffled. Somebody blew his nose. Chris drew a deep, shaky sigh and said to Wender, “Greg and I are . . . were roommates. I’d like to tell his family.”
The chaplain squeezed his arm and said, “All right, but are you sure you’re okay yourself?”
“I’ll make it.”
Wender dropped his hand and nodded solemnly.
Outside, the sun was still radiant. It hurt his burning eyes. He covered them with his dark glasses and got into his car, scarcely noticing the hot upholstery beneath his bare legs. He started the engine then forgot to put the car in gear. He’s not really dead. He’s going to pull in beside me and come over here and lean his hands against the car door and say, “See you out at the lake.”
Only he wouldn’t.
Never again.
Christopher had no awareness of passing time, only of a lump of sorrow so overwhelming it controlled every atom of his being. Sluggishly he put the car in gear and pulled out onto the street, functioning within a haze of emotions that removed him from the mundane process of operating an automobile. He searched for Greg’s face as he’d last seen it, struggling to recall the absolute final glimpse he’d had of his friend. Greg had been going out the apartment door— that was it—dressed for the beach with a red bill cap on his head, an apple in one hand and his keys in the other. He’d anchored the apple between his teeth while opening the door, then had taken a bite and said with his mouth full, “See you in an hour or so.”
A bill cap instead of a helmet.
Swimming trunks instead of jeans.
A T-shirt instead of a leather jacket.
Not even any socks inside his dirty white Nikes.
Chris knew only too well what happened to the victims of motorcycle accidents who failed to wear proper gear.
Skulls crushed . . .
Bones laid bare by the hot blacktop . . .
Skin burned . . .
Sometimes their shoes were never found.
A car horn shook Christopher back to the present. The world swam beyond his tears. He’d been driving at ten miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone and had just gone through a stop sign without slowing. Hell, he was in no condition to be operating a vehicle. He’d be the next one to kill somebody if he didn’t look out.
He dried his eyes on his shirt shoulders and speeded up to thirty, trying to push the horrifying images from his mind. He had to get his emotions pulled together before he reached Mrs. Reston’s house.
The thought of her brought a billow of dread. A mother—God almighty, how do you tell a mother a thing like this? Especially a mother who’s lost a child before?
She had lost her secondborn to SIDS—Sudden Infant Death Syndrome—when Greg had been so young he’d scarcely remembered it. But she’d talked about that time with Greg, after he’d
gotten older. It had been her philosophy that Greg had admired so and set out to duplicate. She’d held that nothing was as important as the happiness of her marriage and her family, and to let either be undermined by extended grief would have been unpardonable. She’d had a responsibility to be a happy mother and wife for her husband and surviving son, and she’d done so by immediately trying to get pregnant again. The result had been Greg’s younger sister, Janice, two years his junior. Nine years later Joey had been born.
Then at age thirty-six, Greg’s mother had been widowed, losing a husband she’d loved immensely. He had died of a brain aneurysm after lingering for three days in a hospital bed. But Mrs. Reston had shown the same grit as before. Left with three children who needed her, no career, and a measly $25,000 in life insurance, she had refused to curl up with grief and self-pity. Instead, she’d consulted a vocational counselor, taken some business courses, spent a year in a trade school, bought herself a florist shop and established a firm foundation for supporting her children for as long as need be.
Strong? The woman was the Rock of Gibraltar. But even rocks can crack under intense pressure.
Driving to her house through the noon heat on this tragic late June day, Christopher Lallek wondered how to break the news that she’d lost another child. There simply was no good way.
Her house wasn’t far from the station, just two miles or so. After spending most of the drive oblivious to his surroundings, Christopher became startlingly alert as he turned onto Benton Street. It was a shaded avenue that followed a bend of the Mississippi River, with older, well-maintained houses on both sides. Hers was several blocks off Ferry Street, facing southwest, across the street from the river. It was a nice old rambler, white with black shutters and a beige brick planter full of red geraniums flanking the front step. The maples in the yard were mature and as perfectly round as lollipops, as if they’d had professional pruning their entire lives. Around their trunks pink and white petunias bloomed inside circles of brick. The grass was neatly mowed but drying near the curb where an oscillating sprinkler fanned desultorily back and forth. It threw water across Christopher’s windshield and his left elbow as he pulled into the driveway and stopped before an oversized detached garage. The garage door was up. One stall was empty; the other held her car, a five-year-old blue Pontiac sedan with some rust surrounding a bumper sticker that said FLOWERS MAKE LIFE LOVELIER.
Chris turned off his engine and sat awhile, staring into the garage at the testimony of her life: rakes and hoes, a garden cart, a bag of charcoal, her dead husband’s workbench with tools still hanging above it, an old yellow bicycle hanging from the rafters, probably Greg’s.
A new swell of grief struck and he pinched the bridge of his nose while an invisible winch seemed to tighten around his chest. He felt as if he’d swallowed a tennis ball.
Damn you, Greg, why didn’t you wear a helmet?
He sat awhile, crying, dimly registering the thought that Mrs. Reston shouldn’t leave her garage door open this way; anybody could walk right in and steal anything in sight. Greg used to scold her for it but she’d laughingly reply, “I’ve known every person on this block for twenty years and nobody locks their garages. Besides, who’d steal anything from me? Who’d want that junk out there? If they need it that badly, let them come in and take it.”
But Christopher was a police officer who knew the dangers of leaving doors unlocked, just as Greg had.
Who would warn her to lock up from now on? Who would remind her to have the oil changed in her car? To replace her furnace filter? Who would fix her hoses?
Christopher dried his eyes, put his sunglasses back on, drew a fortifying breath and opened his car door.
Outside, the heat from the blacktop driveway beat up through the soles of his blue rubber thongs. It struck him suddenly what he was wearing—a man shouldn’t bring news like this dressed in beach clothes. He closed up three shirt buttons and was rounding the hood of his car when he encountered the garden hose lying coiled on the driveway waiting for Greg to replace its end.
Everything inside him mounded up volcanically again.
Oh hell, would every reminder of Greg bring this awful af. iction? Sometimes the force of it seemed as if it would send his ribs flying in two directions like a pair of gates bursting open. His life would be a series of reminders from now on; would every one bring this terrible desolation and urge to cry?
He stepped around the coiled hose and continued toward the front door.
It was open.
He stood awhile, looking through the screen, summoning courage. Inside, from some distant room, a radio softly played an old Neil Diamond song. The front hall led straight to the rear of the house, where a kitchen table stood before an open sliding glass door. A sheer drapery was being sucked and blown against the screen. Beyond it he could see a deck and a big backyard, shaded by trees, where he was supposed to come with Greg for a Fourth of July picnic. He made out the silhouettes of other things: a bouquet on the table, a sweater hanging on the back of a chair, a soda can and purse atop a stack of books, as if she was getting ready to go someplace.
Deeper in the house a fau
cet ran, then stopped. A female voice sang a line along with Neil Diamond, then disappeared as if around a bedroom doorway off to his right.
He stood in the shade of a small entry roof with a wall jutting to his right and the strong-smelling geraniums poking up out of the planter at his left.
The button for the doorbell was black, mounted in a pitted brass casing.
In his entire life Christopher Lallek had never dreaded doing anything as much as ringing that doorbell.
He knocked instead—somehow a knock seemed gentler— knocked and waited with the tennis ball still filling his throat.
LEEReston shut off the water, polished the faucet, hung up the towel and gave her head a little shake, watching in the bathroom mirror as her plain brown hair fell into its customary place. Sometimes she thought about letting it grow, doing something different with it, but she’d never felt comfortable with fuss. Her hair parted where it would and hung in a short, simple Julie Andrews cut, a blow-and-go hairdo that suited her just fine and seemed to go well with the childish freckles that plagued her whenever summer came. She gave a yank on the knot holding her wraparound denim skirt at the waist, glanced at her plain white blouse and twirled both of her tiny gold stud earrings in her ears the way she’d been instructed when she’d had them pierced many years ago. Singing a line from “Cracklin’ Rosie,” she shut off the bathroom light and zipped around the corner into her bedroom, took a shot of hand lotion from a dispenser on her dresser and was rubbing it in when she heard a knock on the front door.
“Coming!” she yelled, glancing at her wristwatch. Five to twelve already and she was due at the shop at noon. Ah, well, her sister Sylvia was there handling things. She and Sylvia didn’t watch clocks on one another.
She cut through the living room on her way to the front door wondering if she’d have to buy a new rubber hose. That darned Greg had promised three times already that he’d come over and fix it, but no luck yet.
Rounding the living room archway into the front hall she was surprised to find her son’s apartment mate on the step.
“Christopher!” she greeted, smiling, opening the screen door. “What are you doing here? I thought you and Greg were going to the lake. Come on in.”
“Hello, Mrs. Reston.”
“He’s not here, if you’re looking for him. He promised he’d come over today to put a new end on my hose, but he never showed up. He still might though. You can wait for him if you want.”
He stepped inside, wearing bathing trunks and a wild orangeand-green Hawaiian-print shirt, his hairy legs bare, his feet in rubber thongs. As she looked up she saw her distorted reflection in his mirrored sunglasses, which were looped from ear to ear by a hotpink string.
She stood before him, still working the flowery-smelling lotion into her hands, impatient to be off to work.
“I understand you can join us for the Fourth. That’s great. We’re going to try injecting a turkey with garlic juice and doing it on the grill. Then if we can stand one another’s breath for the rest of the day we’ll play some volleyball and bocce. How does that sound?”
He didn’t answer. In very slow motion he removed his sunglasses and lowered them gently to the limits of the hot-pink string. She could see immediately he’d been crying.
“Christopher, what is it?” She took a step toward him.
He swallowed once and his Adam’s apple drifted down like an ice cube dropped into a drink.
“Mrs. Reston . . .”
She knew things about this young man that he didn’t know she knew, about his pitiable childhood and the parents who’d treated him as if he were a mistake they never should have made.
“Christopher . . .” She touched his arm, prepared to let Sylvia work alone a little longer. “You need to talk?”
He cleared his throat, caught both her hands and gripped them hard. They were still sleek from lotion and smelled like honeysuckle.
“Mrs. Reston, I have some terrible news.” He’d decided the best way to say it was straight out, avoiding any prolonged limbo. “There’s been a very bad accident. Greg is dead.”
Her face changed neither shape nor line. Her eyes either. “Greg?” she repeated in a perfectly normal voice, as if the message he’d delivered was too bizarre to be believable.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.
For the longest time she didn’t move, only stood before him while the shock waves rippled in and changed her life. Finally she covered her mouth with both hands and stared at Christopher while tears made her rust-colored eyes gleam like polished copper. “Greg,” she uttered in a squeaky, distorted voice.
“He was on his way over here. A car ran a red light and hit him broadside. He was dead by the time our squad car reached the scene.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, her hands dropping slowly. “Not Greg . . . oh no, not Greg.”
Involuntary spasms replaced her indrawn breaths, each one accompanied by a tick in her throat. Her mouth opened and stayed open in a wide, silent call. It erupted at last in a dolorous, elongated syllable as Christopher caught her in his arms and felt his sunglasses bruise his chest. He pulled them free and held her as hard as human arms can hold. Her keening took on a pitiful tone like a child playing a high, uncertain violin note—“No . . . no . . . noooooo . . .”— squeaky, sliding off-tune near Christopher’s ear with her face pointed toward heaven. Finally, when it seemed her lungs would burst from lack of air, she broke into wretched, full-scale weeping that racked her body. He held her firmly, feeling her weight deliver itself into his safekeeping until her knees finally buckled and she hung on him.
“Not another one . . .” she mourned. “No . . . not another one.”
His heart broke. Surely it did, for he felt the splintering deep within, putting pressure on his bones, his belly, his lungs.
“H. . . he . . . w . . . was . . . c . . . coming . . . ov . . . er . . . to . . . fix . . . my . . . ho . . . ho . . . h . . .” She could not complete the word.
“Yes . . .” he whispered in a strangled voice. “He was coming to fix your hose.” She began quaking terribly, and he lowered her to the floor. It was hardwood, cool against his bare knees as he held her from tipping sideways. She drooped with her forehead against his throat, against the bare triangle of hair and skin above his ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, to which she clung, sobbing and sobbing, rocking and rocking, pushing so hard against him that he swayed backward with each lunge.
“He tr . . . tried to f . . . fix it o . . . o . . . once but he b . . . bought the wr . . . wrong-sized end.”
“I know . . .” he said, “I know . . . ,” rubbing her back, aching from pity, wishing he could spare her this, bring Greg back, bring her other dead baby back, or her husband to help her through this ordeal. Instead, here he knelt and did his best at comforting, not quite a stranger but certainly not a friend, merely a young man she’d met a few times in passing to whom she’d been kind because he worked and lived with her son.
They knelt together so long his shirtfront grew soaked. His knees began aching. She was still weeping and rocking and keening. He gripped her arms and set her on the floor, leaned her back against the hall wall and sat with an arm around her while she wept against his chest.
Wept and rocked. Rocked and wept. Until the blue denim of her skirt was dotted with dark spots.
“I’ll be right back.” He propped her against the wall, then hurried off to hunt for Kleenex, which he found in the kitchen and took back to her. He sat down again, put the blue flowered box on her lap, pulled out three tissues for himself and three that he stuffed into her hand. It lay limp on her lap while she sat like a muscleless lump, propped against the wall. He put an arm around her and gave her all the time she needed, resting a cheek on her hair and stroking her arm, wiping her face now and then, and his own, dropping the used blue Kleenexes on the floor beside them.
Out on the street a car passed. The sprinkler splattered across the end of the driveway ten times . . . fifteen . . . twenty.
. . . Her head felt hot in the hollow of his shoulder. Her bare arm stuck to his.
Finally she let out a ragged sigh and rolled her head upright, running the heel of her hand up her forehead. He removed his arm from around her and wondered what to do next. She blew her nose hard and discarded the Kleenex.
“Oh God,” she whispered, as if unsure she had strength for more than remaining slump-shouldered against the wall. Her eyes closed and residual sobs jerked her body.
“Where’s Janice?” he asked.
Tears seeped from between her eyelashes and she bit her lip to hold in some squeaking sobs. She drew her knees up, crossed her arms on them and buried her head, her shoulders shaking.
He put a hand on her shoulder blade. “Where is she?” he whispered.
“In S . . . San Fr . . . Francisco.”
“San Francisco?”
“With her fr . . . friend K . . . Kim.”
That’s right. Greg had said his sister was going out west for a week’s vacation.