“How about Joey?”
“Joey’s up at G . . . Gull Lake with the Wh . . . Whitmans.”
“Someone will have to call them.”
Her shoulders shook as she remained bowed over. He didn’t know what to do: forget the details or begin handling them, let her cry or encourage her to stop, get help or leave her alone.
“Your sister—is she at the store?” he asked.
She nodded into her arms.
He went onto one knee beside her, looking down on her short disheveled hair, which was brown with copper highlights. “Would you like me to call her to come and be with you?”
“N . . . no.” She lifted her head at last and swiped below her eyes with her open hands. “No, I’ll call her.” She sniffed once, hooked the Kleenex box and began rising unsteadily. When she rocked on her heels he reached out to help her, rising with her, waiting with a grip on her arm while she hung her head, drying her eyes once more.
At last she gave him a forced, quavery smile. Without returning it, he draped his arm around her shoulders and walked her slowly toward the kitchen. There was a phone on the counter but the table seemed safer. He pulled out a chair and guided her onto it, then sat down himself, on the chair with her sweater slung over the back. Her purse, Coca-Cola and books were still stacked on the table, a reminder of the happy, normal routine he had interrupted.
“We don’t have to call anybody yet. Just take your time.”
She propped her head with one hand and turned her face to the sliding door, where the curtain still luffed in the warm summer air.
He waited in silence, so wrapped up in her grief he had momentarily set his own aside.
“Do I have to go and identify him?” she asked, turning her puffy face to him.
“No. His driver’s license did that.”
She closed her eyes and sighed in relief, opened them and asked, “Did you see him?”
“No.”
“Do you want to?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know if he was smashed up badly?”
“I didn’t ask.” Literally speaking, it was the truth. He hadn’t asked.
“Was he in his car?”
He rose and tried three cupboard doors before finding glasses. He filled one with ice from the freezer and returned to the table, popped open the Coke can and filled the glass for her.
“Was he in his car?” she repeated, stoic and insistent, ready to go on to the next step.
Christopher went to stand at the sliding glass door with his back to her, his feet spread wide and his bare toes digging into the spongy blue rubber of his thongs. “No. On his motorcycle.”
After a brief silence while she absorbed the news, her high, peculiar violin voice played some short, muffled, staccato notes. He turned to find her with the drink untouched, both elbows propped on the table, both hands covering her face. He moved behind her and bracketed her neck with both hands, just to let her know he was there, just the touch of someone who cared.
“You don’t have to see him at all. What purpose will it serve?”
“I don’t know . . . I have to . . . I’m his m . . . mother . . . oh God oh God . . .”
“You need your family here. Should I call your sister . . . or your mother?”
“I’ll c . . . call.” She mopped her face and gained enough control to rise wearily, pushing off the tabletop with both hands.
He watched her walk into the U-shaped work area of the kitchen and pick up a white phone. The dial tone hummed for fifteen seconds before she dropped the receiver into the cradle without dialing and doubled over the counter.
He went to her immediately and said, “I’ll call. Who?”
She seemed incapable of making the decision. “I don’t know,” she squeaked, beginning to cry again. “I d . . . don’t kn . . . know. I don’t want to p . . . put them through this.”
“Here.” He took her back to the table. “Just sit down and I’ll take care of it. Where’s your phone book?”
“In the d . . . drawer . . . over th . . . there.”
He found her personal phone book in the second drawer he tried, and looked up the number of her flower shop. When he’d dialed she looked back over her shoulder at him, holding a blue Kleenex plastered over her mouth with one hand, her eyes red and running.
“Absolutely Floral,” a woman answered.
“Is this Mrs. Eid?” he asked.
“Yes, it is.”
“Mrs. Eid, are you there all alone or is there someone there with you?”
Her voice became suspicious. “Who is this?”
“I’m sorry, this is Christopher Lallek. I’m a friend of your nephew Greg Reston. I’m at your sister’s house and I’m afraid I have some very bad news. Greg has been killed in a motorcycle accident.”
He pictured Mrs. Eid with her mouth wide open during the silence, then dropping into a chair when she whispered, “Oh my God.”
“I’m sorry to give you the news so abruptly. Is someone there with you?”
She had begun to cry and was muffling the sound with her hand. Throughout the conversation his eyes had not left Mrs. Reston. She rose from her chair and came around the cabinet to take the receiver.
“Sylvia? . . . Oh, Sylvia . . . I know . . . oh God . . . yes . . . no, no . . . neither one of them . . . yes . . . oh, yes, please . . . thank you.”
She needed his arms again and turned into them after hanging up. “She’s coming,” she whispered, and clung. The smell of her hand lotion became fixed in his memory while they stood in the kitchen waiting for her sister. Other impressions were stored away, too. The exact angle of the afternoon light falling through the trees in the backyard. The way the curtain kept flapping. The distant burping of a lawn mower being started. The smell of freshly cut grass. The sight of a bouquet of flowers blurring, then clearing, then blurring again as his eyes filled and refilled, familiar garden flowers whose names he did not know. A photograph of Greg stuck into the corner of a framed print on a blue-papered wall. The beads of condensed moisture running down the side of an iced glass of Coke the way Greg’s mother’s tears rolled down her face. The feel of her denim skirt against his bare legs. Her hot face stuck to the side of his neck and his own shirt plastered to his skin by their combined tears. A note on her refrigerator door that said Give Greg the leftover lasagna. Another that said Janice, NW Flight 75, 1:35. The ceaseless drone of that mower. The radio playing Vince Gill’s mournful “When I Call Your Name.”
Greg’s mother whispering brokenly, “Oh, he loved this song.”
Chris replying, “Yes, I know. He played it all the time.” They both had loved the song; they’d both owned the CD.
Sorrow spilled upward in Christopher and Lee Reston as they realized how many such sad reminders lay in the days, months and years ahead.
They heard the car pull in and separated. Her forehead was marked with an oval red spot where it had stuck to his neck, crossed by a deeper red crease from his hot-pink Croakies.
Footsteps pounded up the sidewalk. The front door opened and Lee ran toward it, trailed by Christopher, who stood back and watched the first of many sorrowful embraces he would witness in the coming days. He saw her tears begin again and swallowed down his own.
“Oh, Lee . . .” As her name was spoken in sympathy he thought, It’s too much for one woman—a baby, a husband, now a full-grown son.
“Why, Sylvia, why?” she wailed.
Sylvia could only answer, “I don’t know, honey, I don’t know.”
The two sisters clung and wept together.
“Oh, Greg . . . Greg . . .” The name escaped Lee Reston as a lament, a long woeful call to her beloved boy who would never hear his name spoken again.
Christopher Lallek, standing by listening, watching, felt his desolation deepen with every passing minute. He was thirty years old, but was experiencing the cruel impact of true grief for the first time in his life. He was stunned by how lost and uncertain he felt. All the pas
t concerns of his life seemed paltry and inconsequential when weighed against the awful finality of death. How consuming and powerful it was, robbing one of the will to think, to move, to force one’s limbs to bend toward the next eventuality.
If he felt so, how must she feel, the mother?
She withdrew from her sister’s embrace and Sylvia Eid drew back to find Christopher hovering nearby. Through her tears she managed to speak the words “You’re Christopher.” He found himself clinging to the strange woman with an intensity he would not have imagined yesterday. He, who held people at bay, who radiated toward no one—least of all strangers—was locked breast to breast with a woman he’d scarcely spoken to before.
They gave each other momentary solace, then turned back to the one who needed it more. Each with an arm around Lee, they urged her toward the living room and sat her on the sofa between them— an odd spot at noon on a weekday, but the place that seemed fitting for mourning. Lee Reston clung to her sister’s hand, repeating the chant that Christopher would hear over and over again in the next three days.
“He was . . . he was coming over here to . . . to put a new end on a hose for me.”
Why did it start his tears again? Because it was a reminder of how blithely he had taken life for granted until an hour ago? Because it was a reminder of how Greg had cared for his mother? Because it was one of those simple everyday things that speaks of love and devotion so much more loudly than words?
The women made it over another emotional hurdle, then Sylvia asked, “How did you find out?”
“From Christopher. He came over as soon as he heard.”
Sylvia looked over at him with reddened eyes. “How did you find out?”
“I . . .” He had to clear his throat and start again. “I went into the station to pick up my paycheck and they told me.”
Lee Reston looked up through her tears. She squeezed the back of his hand. “What a horrible shock that must have been for you. And then you had to . . . to come over here and tell me.” He looked down at her hand covering his and relived the shock, but found some control deep down within that kept his hand steady and his eyes dry. He turned his hand over, linked his fingers with hers and whispered hoarsely, “He loved you so damned much.”
She let her eyes close, battling for control; opened them to reveal large, rust-colored irises brimming with tears. “Thank you,” she whispered, squeezing his hand tenaciously.
In that moment while they sat connected by grief and sympathy for each other some ineffable bond was forged.
He had given her what she needed to make it through the next hour.
She had recognized that he’d had the toughest job of all, coming here to break the news to her.
“I’ll be here for you . . . whatever you need,” he promised, and the promise went as deep as his love and grief for her son.
“Thank you, Christopher,” she said, squeezing his hand even harder, appreciating him fully for the first time, admitting how comforting a man’s presence was and that she’d undoubtedly call on him again and again throughout the terrible days ahead.
2
LEE Reston felt as if she were moving through a phantasm, at moments so steeped in grief it rendered her incapable of anything more than weeping. At other times she’d operate almost as if outside herself, facing the next dread and unavoidable duty. Janice must be called.
“Janice . . .” Merely speaking her name brought tears welling, along with a great unwillingness to shatter her daughter’s world a moment sooner than necessary.
“I’ll call Janice,” Sylvia offered.
“Thank you, Sylvia, but Janice should hear it from me.”
“Oh, Lee, why put yourself through it?”
“I’m her mother. I’ll do it.”
There was within Lee Reston a vein of implacability so strong it sometimes amazed even her. To escape in a faint, to collapse uselessly would have been totally out of character. What needed facing, she faced. Always had, always would. Sylvia was here, and the young man, Christopher. She would rely on their support and do what must be done.
She did, however, allow Sylvia to dial the phone. Lee’s hand shook as she took the receiver, and her legs felt rubbery. A chair was nudged behind her knees—a sudden blessing—and she withered down to it.
Janice sounded agonizingly happy. “Mom, hi! What a surprise! Five more minutes and we’d have been out the door. We’re going to Fisherman’s Wharf today!”
Oh, Janice, my beloved daughter, how I wish I didn’t have to do this to you.
“Honey, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come home. I have some very sad news. Janice, dear, I’m so sorry . . . there’s been a very bad motorcycle accident.” Saying it for the first time was like hearing it for the first time: shock and horror coupled with a sense of unreality, as if it were someone else speaking the words about her son. “Our sweet Greg is dead.”
“Oh no . . . no . . . nooooo. Oh, Mom . . . Oh God . . . no . . .”
She gripped the receiver in both hands, wanting to be there with Janice, to hold her, cradle her, help her through this. Instead they were separated by 2,000 miles and she could only listen to her daughter weep. “No, no, it can’t be true!”
“Oh, Janice, darling, I wish I were there with you.” Through those terrible minutes on the phone, Lee was vaguely aware of Sylvia’s arm surrounding her shoulders and Christopher standing nearby.
“Janice, you’ll have to . . . to get the first . . . first fl. . . fl . . .”She broke into tears and tried to stifle them so Janice wouldn’t hear. Sylvia turned her into a hug and Chris took the receiver.
“Janice, this is Christopher Lallek. I’m here with your mother and so is your aunt Sylvia. I’m so sorry . . . yes, we’re all in shock.”
Her voice was broken and distorted by weeping. She asked questions and he answered—the difficult ones a mother should not have to repeat. Afterward he said, “Janice, put Kim on the phone.” Realizing Janice was too overwrought with shock to function well, he spoke to the other young woman about changing plane reservations, told her to call back and that he’d be out at the airport himself to pick up Janice whenever she came in. With these details handled, he returned the phone to Mrs. Reston and listened to a painful goodbye.
“J . . . Janice? . . . Yes . . . me, too . . . Please hurry.”
Hanging up, Lee felt depleted. Still, she said, “I may as well call Joey, too, and get it over with.”
“Let me,” Sylvia pleaded in a whisper. “Please, let me.”
“No, Sylvia. This one I have to do, too. And the mortuary. Then I’ll let you and Christopher do the rest.”
As it turned out, the Whitman family couldn’t be reached. It was a hot summer afternoon: They were probably out on the lake.
Lee said, “We’ll keep trying them.” She stared at the telephone, which seemed both friend and enemy. She’d been through this before; she knew what must be done but resisted making the move to pick up that instrument once more and order a caretaker of dead bodies to take care of her son’s. Dear God . . . on his motorcycle.The image struck with horrendous force but she buried it behind a memory of Greg hale and smiling as he drove his cycle out of her driveway, lifting a hand in farewell, shouting, “Thanks for the good grub, Ma. You’re a helluva cook!”
Other memories came, of the day Bill died, and their threemonth-old baby, Grant. She shuddered and summoned a picture of her two remaining children, thinking, I’m lucky, I’m lucky, I’ve still got them. I’ll be strong for them.
Keeping their images clearly before her, she dialed the mortuary. She did fine until the question “Where is he?”
Suddenly reality dropped and crushed her. “Why . . . where?” she repeated, casting her eyes around as if searching for the answer in the paint on the walls. “I . . . I don’t . . . oh, goodness . . .”
Immediately Christopher came and took the phone. He spoke in a clear, authoritative voice. “This is police officer Christopher Lallek of the Anok
a Police Department, a friend of the deceased. May I answer any questions?”
He listened and said, “Mercy Hospital morgue.”
“At ten-thirty today.”
“A motorcycle accident.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, I think so.”
“910-8510.”
“Faith Lutheran.”
“Yes, if she doesn’t have one we have one at the police department.”
“If it would be all right I think she’ll need a little time to make that decision. Some of the family members haven’t even been informed yet.”
“Yes, tomorrow would be better.”
“I think nine would be fine. Thank you, Mr. Dewey.”
When he’d hung up he wrote Walter Dewey’s name and number on a pad beside the phone and told Lee, “You’ll need to meet with him, of course, but tomorrow is time enough. He suggested nine o’clock and I said I thought that would be fine. Meanwhile you don’t have to worry about making any other arrangements. He’ll take care of everything.”
“Greg is at the morgue already?”
“Yes. At Mercy Hospital. When the department responds to a fatality that’s where they’re taken. Mr. Dewey will handle everything.”
It struck Lee again how glad she was to have Christopher Lallek here. He, too, must still be in the throes of shock, but he was hiding it well, taking over some of the unpleasant tasks as a husband would if she still had one . . . or as a grown son would. Whenever she was near crumbling, he stepped in and relieved her without being asked to. She recognized that having him here—not only a masculine presence but also Greg’s best friend—moving around her kitchen, lifting her burdens in whatever way possible, was much like having Greg himself here.
She left Sylvia and went to him. “Christopher,” she said, putting her hands on the short sleeves of his wild Hawaiian shirt. “Thank you. I’m sorry I broke down and left that to you.”
“You’ve got a right to break down, Mrs. Reston. This is one of the worst days of your life.”
“Of yours, too,” she said understandingly.
“Yes . . . it is. But . . .” He looked at the notes on her refrigerator door. “I think he’d want me to help you any way I could, so if you don’t mind, I’ll stick around.”