Secrets She Left Behind (34 page)

Keith

J
EN WAS INTO THIS “DRIVING ON THE BACK ROADS” DEAL,
which is why we were in no-man’s-land on a pitch-black night coming back from the movies in Wilmington. She liked driving any time of day or night, which was okay with me. Saved me gas money. I didn’t know what Jen’s story was, moneywise. She liked eating out and she paid for the movies and even filled my tank the last time we used my car. But she didn’t act like she was rolling in it. I didn’t care what her story was. All I knew was that I liked being around Jen better than I liked anything else in my life. She was the only person—next to my mother and Dawn and now Marcus—I didn’t feel like I had to hide my face around. She’d started helping me with my exercises, and even went with me to my last couple of PT appointments to learn the right way to do them. Gunnar fell all over himself to teach her what to do. Cracked me up.

It blew my mind that Jen never seemed embarrassed to be seen with me. At PT, it wasn’t such a big deal since there were a lot of screwed-up-looking people there. But at the movies and in a restaurant where I knew people were staring at me, she treated me like I was normal. She’d hold my hand. Even kiss me. Her attitude was, like, “Who gives a shit what other people think?” That’s how
I felt about whatever the hell her age was. With that little streak of gray covered up, she looked nineteen to me again, totally, but I didn’t care one way or another how old she was.

When I was younger, before the fire, I’d told a few girls I loved them. A couple of times, I actually believed it. I didn’t know what I was talking about. This thing with Jen was the real deal. When I could make her smile—no better feeling than that.

“I’m
starving,
” she said now. “When we get back to my house, let’s make some eggs and grits. I love eating breakfast late at night.”

Whatever. That girl could eat eggs any time of the day. “Sounds good to me,” I said. I’d just as soon skip the meal and take her straight to that king-size bed, but if she wanted food first, that was cool.

The movie tonight was one of those serious flicks where you know way in advance that very bad things were going to happen to very good people. Sort of like life. It made me think of my mother. She was the best person, and something very bad had happened to her. I had no doubt about that anymore. I had to wipe the thought out of my mind while I watched the flick, or I knew I was going to lose it.

Jen cried during the movie. She was quiet about it, but I held her hand to comfort her, thinking that crying was really an over-reaction to what was happening on the screen. I mean, it was sad, but not totally tragic. Not compared to
my
life, anyway.

Now, driving back from Wilmington, I thought again about those scars she’d said she had inside. Maybe she was thinking about
them
during the flick. I decided I should finally ask her.

We were going over the swing bridge when I figured out what to say.

“You know when you told me you had scars inside you?” I asked.

“Mmm.” She pulled up to the only traffic light in Surf City. It was blinking red. Not another car in sight.

“What did you mean?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything as we started moving again. “It’d burden you if I told you,” she said finally. “I don’t want that.”

I turned toward her as far as the seat belt would let me. “You took on
my
burden,” I said. “Let me help you with yours.”

“It’s totally different.”

“How?”

“It just is.” She glanced at me. “You really want to help me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Just keep lovin’ me to pieces.”

It was the first time either of us had said the L word.

“Cool,” I said.

“You know—” she looked over at me “—maybe you should let Andy and his girlfriend use the tower to get together.”

Wow, nothing like an abrupt change of topic. I liked the other one better. “Why?” I asked.

“You remember what it was like before you got your license,” she said. “Wanting to have sex and having no place to do it.”

“Whatever.” I really didn’t care where Andy had sex; I just didn’t want a picture of him doing it stuck in my mind.

Jen turned onto South Topsail Drive and we went a ways without talking. It was so dark. If I’d been driving, I’d’ve turned on my brights, but she was going pretty slow so it was no big deal. Just before we came to the place where South Topsail runs into South Shore, though, this small dark blur flew out of the woods and into the road ahead of us, and I felt the thud as we hit it.

“Oh, damn!” she said, hanging on tight to the wheel. “
Splat!
I hate that.” She kept right on driving.

“Aren’t you going to stop?” I asked. I could see the blur in my memory. A raccoon? A cat? A small dog?

“No way,” she said. “I don’t want to examine roadkill in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe it’s not dead, though.” Once, I ran over a rabbit in broad daylight. I could see it in my rearview mirror after I hit it. It was still alive, but writhing. Kind of flopping all over the road. I was shook up. I drove about a mile, but that stupid rabbit wouldn’t get out of my mind, so I turned around and drove back. I wished I had a gun to put it out of its misery, but of course I didn’t. I couldn’t think of anything to do but run over it again. I’d never forget the feeling of my tire flattening that poor thing. I drove miles past my destination, trying to get any trace of him off my tire and out of my head.

“I really think we should go back,” I said to Jen. She
did
have a gun. We could use it if we needed to.

“I’m hungry, Keith. We’re practically to my house. I’m not turning around now.”

“What if it was a cat or dog?” I asked. “Maybe it’d have tags and we could call—”

“It was only a possum or something.”

“But what if it wasn’t?” In my mind, the blur had turned into a black cat. Someone’s pet. “Wouldn’t that bother you? Wouldn’t you want to know if your cat was run over?”

“Why are you making such a federal case out of this?”

I pointed to a driveway. “Just turn around here,” I said. “You don’t even have to get out of the car. I’ll look. Do you have a flashlight?”

“I’m not turning around, Keith. You’re being silly.”

I stared at her.
“Man,”
I said, “you’ve got a real cold side to you.” In fifteen seconds, she’d totally blown the stupid romantic image of her I’d been building up in my mind.

“It was a
possum,
Keith!” she said. “It’s not like I hit a person. Not like it’s your mother. Or my mother. Or any other human being.”

I hated that she’d mentioned my mother like that, in the same breath as a squashed possum.

“We’re going back,” I said.

She stopped the car in the middle of the deserted street. “I do
not
believe you.”

“Come on. Just turn around in the next driveway.”

She made this huffing, annoyed sound, but she pulled into the driveway of an old cottage and turned around. We drove back to where she’d hit the animal, and we got out of the car and searched the road and the bushes in the light from her headlights. Nothing. Not even a clump of fur or a trail of blood.

“See?” she said. “It’s probably fine. Just bruised. And I’m starving.”

I wasn’t ready to give up. I started walking back up the road, checking the ditch on one side of it and the bushes on the other.

“Keith!” she called after me. “You’re driving me crazy!”

I hardly heard her. I picked up a stick and started pushing the tall weeds out of the way so I could see behind them. Then I started whacking the bushes. Whacking the street. And I knew I was losing it, that I wasn’t looking for any injured cat or dog or possum. I was looking for my mother.

Sara
Healing Our Hearts
1998

K
EITH WAS THE LIGHT OF MY LIFE. I DOUBT ANOTHER MOTHER
ever loved a child more. He was handsome and bright, loving and lovable. I saw Jamie in him more and more each day, something that both saddened and comforted me. Since his birth, I’d been getting Keith’s heart checked, as prescribed, every year at UNC in Chapel Hill. For the longest time, I thought we’d dodged the bullet. He seemed so healthy. So active and playful. His doctor thought he might be okay and that he’d never need surgery. Shortly after his seventh birthday, though, I began to see a change in him. He couldn’t keep up with the other kids on the soccer field the way he used to, and sometimes I’d see him breathing hard just from his horseplay around the trailer. I tried to convince myself that he was fine. One day on the soccer field in Hampstead, though, I knew his doctor had been wrong.

Laurel was there that day. I was sitting on the lower bench of the metal bleachers, watching the last fifteen minutes of Keith’s game when she and Andy sat down next to me.

“Maggie’s team’s playing next,” she said, and I spotted Maggie
with her teammates at the side of the field, wearing their blue-and-white uniforms. “What’s the score?”

“Two-three,” I said. “The other team’s ahead.”

We were coming up on a year since Jamie’s death and much had changed. Laurel and I saw each other with some frequency, but always around the kids’ activities. Keith and I often had dinner at her new house on the sound so the children could play together, but it was never the same without Jamie. Marcus, who’d usually been a part of those family get-togethers, was never around, either. I knew Laurel let him see Andy and Maggie, but she wanted nothing to do with him. Occasionally, she’d ask me to lunch when the kids were in school, but I always made up some excuse. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be alone with her, just the two of us. I didn’t want to hear her talk about how much she missed Jamie. I didn’t want to hear her talk about the designer she’d hired to put the finishing touches on the interior of her four-bedroom house. Should she go with a floral or a stripe for the draperies in the family room? Should she replace the fixtures in her brand-new bathroom because the finish on them didn’t quite match the finish on the doorknobs? Her insensitivity to my own financial situation was galling to me. Sometimes I hated her.

“Is Keith all right?” she asked suddenly as we sat side by side at the soccer game.

I looked at my son. He was running with his teammates toward the goal, but he was undeniably sluggish, as if he was trying to run through mud. I bit my lip, wondering if I should pull him out of the game. Before I could decide, he stopped running altogether and bent over from the waist, fighting for air.

I was instantly on my feet, running toward him. “Keith!” I yelled.

A whistle blew when I ran onto the field. I reached him and only then realized that Laurel was at my side. Keith looked up at me with
his big Jamie Lockwood eyes. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t find the breath to get the words out. Before I knew what was happening, Laurel had scooped him into her arms and was carrying him off the field, with me close on her heels.

She set him down in the grass near the bleachers. People brought us water and orange slices, but I knew he needed far more than that: he needed surgery to repair the hole in his heart. I fought back tears, running my hand over his hair as Laurel took his pulse and counted the number of times his chest rose and fell in a minute. Sometimes I forgot she was a nurse.

“Hi, Keith!” Andy walked over to us and sat on the grass next to Keith.

“Hi,” Keith managed to answer. Was I imagining it, or were his lips a little blue?

Laurel let go of his wrist. “I think he’s okay,” she said, “but we should take him to the hospital just to be sure.”

I felt grateful to her for saying “we” instead of “you.” I needed someone with me.

She found another parent to watch Andy and arranged a ride home for Maggie, then she drove Keith and me to the hospital. I was a wreck. I kept turning around to touch Keith’s leg. He stared out the window and I was terrified by the blank look in his eyes.

“Has this happened before?” Laurel asked, peeking at him in her rearview mirror. She spoke quietly and I knew it was so Keith couldn’t hear.

I didn’t answer right away. I felt like a bad mother, ignoring symptoms that never should have been ignored. “Not like this,” I said after a while. “But I
have
noticed him getting winded more easily recently.”

“When was his last cardio checkup?”

“October,” I said. “His doctor seemed to think he was okay.”

“Did they do an echo or what?”

“Just an EKG.”

She looked over at me. “Maybe it’s time for some more intensive testing,” she said.

I pressed my lips together to keep from crying. Laurel reached over and squeezed my arm. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “I’ll help you.”

Laurel meant what she said about helping me. She went with us to Keith’s appointment in Chapel Hill, and she actually held my hand as the cardiologist told me about the surgery Keith needed. He talked about cutting open his chest and about the heart-lung machine that would keep him alive during the hours it would take to repair the hole in Keith’s heart. He described the weeks of recovery. My brain spun around and around inside my head, and it was Laurel who asked the questions I couldn’t seem to formulate. What were the risks of the surgery? (Death, of course.) What were the risks of doing nothing? (Decades cut off his life span.) When the doctor left the room, Laurel took me in her arms as I cried, and I leaned against her, leaned
on
her, as I would in the months to come.

The surgery was scheduled for the second Tuesday in July. Laurel set up child care for Andy and Maggie because she planned to stay in Chapel Hill with me. She reserved a hotel room for us near the hospital, brushing away my weak protests about her footing the bill for it. Five days before the surgery, though, she invited me over for lunch, telling me there was something she needed to talk to me about.

“I want to show you something,” she said when I arrived. She
pulled me by my arm through the living room, where swatches of different-colored fabrics were spread across the sofa, and upstairs to the bedroom she used as a home office. “Have a seat.” She pulled a second chair up to the desk where she had a computer with a connection to the Internet. I barely knew what the Internet was, but she was always talking about it.

“I’ve been doing some research ever since we saw the surgeon,” she said. “I didn’t want to tell you about it until I had to, in case I hit a dead end.” She pressed some buttons on the keyboard and a document appeared on the screen. “This is an e-mail from a doctor in Boston,” she said. “They’re doing clinical trials of a less invasive way to repair atrial septal defects. I’ve been communicating with him and he thinks Keith might be a good candidate.”

She leaned to the side so I could read the e-mail. Keith would need to be examined in Boston to determine if the procedure would be right for him, but from what Laurel had told him, the specialist thought it would be. Laurel used the mouse to go to a Web site where I read about the procedure itself. They’d go in through the artery in his groin and carry a tiny umbrella-shaped device up to his heart, where it would open up, lock in place and cover the hole. My own heart thumped as I read.

“That’s it?” I asked. “They wouldn’t have to open him up?”

“Right.” Laurel smiled. “There’s always a chance the procedure won’t work, and then he’d have to have the surgery. But so far, they’re having really good success with this. If you want to try it, we should go up there soon.”

That
we
again. I knew how hard it was for Laurel to leave her children—Andy in particular—with someone while she was away. When Jamie was alive and could watch the children, she’d travel the country speaking to groups about fetal alcohol syndrome, but
she never went away anymore. Here she was, though, ready to drop her own life to help my son.

Downstairs, my heart light with the hope she’d given me, I studied the swatches of fabric for her new sofa without a shred of bitterness or resentment.

“I like this yellow better than the green,” I told her, and I meant it.

It turned out Keith was a perfect candidate for the procedure. We didn’t even need to make a second trip to Boston. Laurel waited with me while they slipped the little umbrella into his heart and popped it open, telling me the whole time that it was going to work. She could feel it, she said. We had to stay up there four days to be sure the umbrella wasn’t going to budge, and by that time, Keith was already breathing like a normal boy, bored by his confinement and begging to go home. Laurel and I played games with him in his hospital room, and when he slept, we talked about our own childhoods and our dreams for our children. In those hours, I grew to love her. We were like sisters, sharing everything about our lives.

Everything, that was, except the one deep pain we would always have in common.