Running Barefoot (23 page)

They’d taken me to him but wouldn’t let me out of the truck. A highway patrol officer had arrived at the accident, and he’d covered Kasey up with some kind of sheet or tarp. My dad wrapped his legs and arms around me to hold me back as Johnny brought Old Brown to a stop and jumped out, running to the officer. It was one of the Carter boys, all grown up and official in his police uniform - dark glasses and all. He was five or six years older than me, but he’d grown up in Levan, too. I’d known him all my life, but at that moment I couldn’t think of his name. He put his arm on Johnny’s shaking shoulders as they walked to where Kasey was covered. He knelt and gently pulled back the sheet just a little bit and Johnny nodded in response to something he said. I caught the briefest glimpse of Kasey’s curly head. I heard Johnny say Kasey’s name, and I put my head down on my dad’s lap and wept.

After his funeral, Kasey was buried in Levan Cemetery next to his Grandpa Judd who had passed away when Kasey was ten. Kasey had loved his grandpa and would have liked that, but I secretly wished he could be buried next to my mom, that in his death I could claim him, that he could be numbered with my family, as I would now never be numbered among his. The anger I felt towards God kept me distracted from my grief for a while. I had suffered my quota already-it wasn’t fair that He should take
two
people from me. It was someone else’s turn. I fumed at Him. Even when I tried to pray for strength and understanding, I found myself too angry to finish, and would leave my knees in fury.

Underneath the anger there was also a question. In sorrow, I found myself asking Him, “Why was Kasey given to me, God, if You were only going to take him away?” It seemed so cruel, and the God I knew was not that God. It was the first time in my life I questioned His love for me.

The date I was supposed to marry Kasey came, and Tara came and got me, keeping me busy for the day. But when night descended, I found myself in my room fingering my mother’s wedding dress, the dress that would have become mine that very day had Kasey lived. It was simple in style, high-waisted and long sleeved. It looked very Jane Austen to me, and I had loved it all my life. My mother had stored it carefully, and it was almost as white as the day she wore it.

I had a picture of her in this dress, looking up at my dad with the most serene smile on her face. She held yellow roses in her bouquet and wore a flowered wreath in her hair. Her hair was a rich, heavy brown, and it hung down almost to her waist. I didn’t have her coloring, but my wide eyes and my heart shaped face were hers, as well as my slightly fuller top lip, which gave my mouth a Betty Boop effect. Dad had affectionately called us Boop and Boop Two when Mom was alive. She and my dad looked so young and happy. The picture had caught my dad with his eyes closed, but somehow that just made me love the picture more, like he was counting his blessings at that moment, eyes closed in profound gratitude.

I wondered…if they had known that time would pass quickly and my mom’s life cut short, would their eyes have lingered longer? Would their hands have gripped each other tighter? I was suddenly envious of my parents, of the time they did get. They had twenty years together. They would always belong to each other now. My mother would always be Janelle Wilson Jensen. I would never be Josie Judd.

When the house was quiet and Johnny and my dad were asleep, I put her wedding dress on, arranged my hair, and carefully applied my makeup. I played Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
very softly on my CD player. When I finished the comforting feminine rituals of many a bride, I stood in front of my full length mirror and stared at myself for a very long time. The words of
Jane Eyre
came to my mind, and I understood my literary friend as I never had before.

“
Where was the Jane Eyre of yesterday? Where was her life? Where were her prospects? Jane Eyre, who had been an ardent expectant woman - almost a bride - was a cold, solitary girl again: her life was pale; her prospects desolate.”

My dad found me asleep on the front porch swing the next morning, still fully dressed in my stiff white dress, wrapped in the long lace of my veil. I had come outside to sit in the pale light of the moon, unwilling to remove the dress and relinquish what remained of my wedding day. I had fallen asleep to the creak of the wooden swing. My dad had spoken my name, waking me up to the dawn of the day after. He had sat down beside me and pulled me into his lap, rubbing my back in slow circles, rocking gently, letting the sun rise and the horses wait while he sat with me and held me in his arms. My anger eventually unraveled as it was sucked into the black hole of my profound disappointment. The life I had envisioned would never be, and I mourned for it almost as desperately as I mourned for Kasey.

The months after Kasey’s death were like a strange play where I became the leading lady with a helpless supporting cast, and where the props of daily life kept me functioning in a stilted parody of existence. No one knew what to do or say. My outrage at my loss would return randomly, causing me to keep my own company in order to not lash out at loved ones who only wanted to help. I played my music constantly, even as I slept. It wound its way around me and through me, and helped me retreat from my reality.

I would run through the hills around my house, down the long country roads that meandered around the familiar farms and homes of my neighbors. The distances became longer and longer, endless nocturnes, concertos and sonatas saving me from thought, the tempo of my breath whooshing in tandem with the percussion of my pounding feet. I’d decided to wait until January to start school, but I was actually looking forward to leaving for the university after Christmas. My lifelong dream of musical renown now felt very empty, the loss of someone to share it with had made it seem as hollow as an abandoned shell. But I still wanted it. I needed it. I needed to reclaim it, to reshape it. And I craved the anonymity of a town where nobody knew about my pain. Hiding it would be so much easier.

My dad was relieved that I seemed to be moving forward, and I’m sure a cloud lifted whenever I left the house, though he never would have admitted it. How painful it must have been for him! How intimate his knowledge of my pain! Ten years before his anguish had mirrored my own. But his empathy provided him a seemingly endless patience, and he cared for me now as I had tried to care for him then.

And poor Johnny. I had been so irrationally angry with him. He’d tiptoed around me for the first month, trying to communicate his love for me in little ways…making my bed, stocking the fridge with cold Diet Coke though he and my dad drank nothing but Pepsi. One day he’d even washed a load of my whites, folding each sock and lacy under thing neatly and placing them on my bed. I’d eventually started doing some of the same things for him ... asking his forgiveness and returning his love by gathering the clothes from his bedroom floor, putting Twinkies in the freezer so he could eat them frozen the way he liked them, cleaning the mud from his work boots and shining them up, leaving them sitting neatly on the back porch - such little acts of kindness that were easier to perform than words were to speak. And we never did speak of that horrible day.

About a week before I planned to leave for school, my dad left work early because of a terrible headache. I was upstairs boxing up some of my things when I heard the kitchen door bang open, and I called down to him in question. I heard the cupboards slam and then a glass break and I sighed, wondering what he was up to.

“Dad?” I plodded down the stairs and into the kitchen to find him swaying at the sink with a bottle of aspirin in his hand and broken glass around his feet.

He turned to look at me and teetered, grabbing for the edge of the countertop. He lost hold of the opened aspirin bottle, sending little white pills scattering all over the floor.

He started to speak, but his words were slurred, kind of the way he sounded when he’d had too much to drink.

“Dad! It’s 2:00 in the afternoon! Are you drunk?” I accused angrily, arms akimbo.

“No booze,” my dad mumbled out, and he fell to the floor as if his legs would no longer support him.

Fear slammed through me like a freight train, and I rushed to him, seeing the shadow of death’s long sickle pulling him from me as he tried to right himself, his eyes squeezed shut in a terrible grimace.

“No!” I shouted, momentarily crazed at death’s all-too familiar and terrible visage. I put my arms around him and threw his left arm around my shoulders

“Dad, we’ve got to get you to the hospital!” I helped him to his feet, and we staggered like a pair in a three-legged-race out the kitchen door and down the back steps. Somehow we made it out to his truck, and I toppled him onto the passenger seat and wrapped the seat belt around him, trying to hold him upright. Calling 911 would mean waiting for an ambulance to come from Nephi, and we didn’t have time for that. I didn’t know what was happening, but something was very wrong.

My dad had had what his doctors called an ischemic stroke caused by a blood clot in his brain. When we got to the hospital, his speech was unintelligible and there was no way he could walk. I had run into the emergency room calling for help and within minutes he’d been wheeled in while I had shouted out exactly what had transpired in the kitchen. After a scan to make sure that the stroke wasn’t caused by a brain hemorrhage, he was put on blood thinners to loosen and break up the clot. But a great deal of damage had already been done.

After a week in the hospital, my dad came home unable to walk and unable to speak clearly. The part of his brain that controls movement and speech had been damaged. His left side was particularly weak, and he was unable even to feed himself.

I drove him back and forth to the rehabilitation clinic in Provo every day, where he spent three to five hours relearning everything from tying his shoes to writing his name.

I learned how to care for him by watching the team of doctors and therapists that worked with him each day. My brothers and their wives assisted where they could. Jacob took most of the farm work on, and I gratefully left that in his capable hands. Often, one of my sister-in-laws would drive Dad to rehabilitation or bring him home, spelling me on one stretch or another, but for the most part I was the caregiver, and I took on his care with a ferocious determination that he would be whole again. I had lost too many, and my dad would not be numbered with them.