Tender Grace (13 page)

Despite the fact that I had recently survived a wild man wielding a gun, fear filled me as I looked up at the first slide. Just climbing the stairs higher and higher, children rushing past me for another go at it, raised my heart rate substantially. Standing at the top and looking down the three miles to the pool below, I might have walked back down the stairs if I hadn’t turned and looked down at a skinny little boy behind me, hair sticking out all over his head, skin the color of tea steeped in the summer sun.

“Go, lady,” he said, “you can do it!”

I looked into his confident blue eyes and then at the petite girl in charge. She smiled and told me to sit down, lie back, cross my ankles, and fold my hands over my heart.

Is that a comforting image?

But before I could answer my own question, I flew down the thing (I know for a fact that I was riding the air at one point), submerging into the waiting water fewer than thirty seconds after I had been hurled from the top. Having watched the kids and Tom through the years, I knew to yank on my bathing suit underwater until I was decent, and then I popped to the surface to find steps and the next slide. Before I got up the stairs though, the boy from the top of the slide torpedoed into the pool and, without bothering to adjust his swim trunks, splashed through the water to give me a high five.

“Are you going again?” he asked.

“Not on this one,” I said.

Next thing I knew, he was padding along beside me, telling me the slide I was walking toward wasn’t as fast as the one we had just gone down.

“It’s fun, though,” he said.

I could see I had a slide enthusiast on my hands. The boy, ten-year-old Jared, lives in Albuquerque and uses his season ticket to come to the water park several times a week. I think he was in a panic that the park would be closed after Labor Day. His mom and sisters were somewhere in the park suntanning, he said with some disdain as he escorted me to the next slide. He was to meet them later at locker 152.

After the fourth or fifth slide, I thought I should say something. “Jared, surely
someone
is waiting somewhere to play with you!”

Someone a tad closer to your age
, I thought.

“My buddy had to leave,” he said.

“What about your sisters?”

“Nah, you’re a lot more fun.”

Hearing that sad news, I didn’t feel the need to meet his sisters.

Jared and I went down all seven slides, saving Lightning for last—his favorite, and as it turned out, mine as well. When we finished the marathon, I decided a few laps around the lazy river might revive me enough to make it back to the hotel unassisted.

“So,” I said, “what time are you supposed to meet your mother and sisters?”

“Five thirty,” he said.

I looked at the waterproof watch I had worn, surprised it still worked. “It’s quarter to six, buddy.”

“Whoa!” he exclaimed and zoomed off, a horizontal bottle rocket aimed for a bank of lockers.

I was wrestling my inner tube into the lazy river when he walked by with a woman and two teenage girls. He hollered something at me and waved, all he could manage as they yanked him by his Superman T-shirt and herded him toward the exit.

The first thing I did when I got back to the hotel was e-mail the kids and tell them about my adventure. “I wish I could tell your dad,” I wrote. “He’d say, ‘Good going, Audrey!’ ”

“Stay here and swim,” Tom had said in that awful dream, and it seems I took him up on it.

September 3

Before church this morning, I turned to John 8, where Tom had marked verses that record Jesus saving the adulterous woman from her accusers and then saying to her, “Go now and leave your life of sin.” Such passages were among Tom’s favorites. He used to say Jesus is in the forgiving business. There was no theme he loved to teach more than God’s forgiveness. Because of that, my husband was a peacemaker in our church and in the school he oversaw. “Seventy times seven” wasn’t an incredulous number to him; it was love’s concession.

I’ve always thought I was quite good at forgiving, that in any lesson Tom taught on forgiveness, I was not student but merely moral support, if not prime example.

So I was as surprised as I was irritated when I got Andrew’s latest message this evening.

“Are you ever going to forgive me?”

Several one-line replies came to me:

Who did you say you are?

What a stupid question!

Choices have consequences.

Get a life, Andrew.

On the twelfth of Never.

I have no desire to answer him. If I did, however, and if I let the Holy Spirit work in my heart first, I would likely say:
Don’t be silly, Andrew, I forgave you long ago.

And I did forgive him long ago. That I can’t pinpoint when doesn’t mean I didn’t.

I once heard a speaker say that cutting someone out of your life is the same as killing the person. While I thought that a gross overstatement, Tom seemed to understand the premise. I wonder what he would say about my refusal to acknowledge Andrew’s e-mails. I wouldn’t know. We didn’t discuss Andrew. Tom knew he broke up with me and that I left Oklahoma because of it. But only a year before we met, Tom himself had broken up with a girl he had dated almost two years.

So it goes.

But that was different, slightly more mutual, and she had some inkling it was coming. That would have to help. The summer after our freshman year at OSU, Andrew laid out our future: become engaged the summer after our sophomore year, get married the next summer, complete our last year of undergraduate work as man and wife in a cute little apartment. Then I’d teach and put him through law school, which would be followed by his brief but illustrious career as a lawyer before his inauguration as the youngest governor of the state of Oklahoma.

So I could not have been less prepared for what he did two months short of putting an engagement ring on my finger. If there were any signs, I didn’t detect them, even in retrospect.

The night he ruined everything, my three roommates had made plans for the evening so Andrew and I could have an intimate dinner for two in the apartment. I had never cooked for him before, had never cooked a dinner by myself, period. I spent part of my spring break in Mom’s kitchen learning the art of making her memorable meatballs, and back at the apartment, I made no fewer than three separate batches of spaghetti to make sure I didn’t put a sticky mess on the table. The afternoon of the momentous dinner, I made a salad and stirred up the special Austin dressing passed down from my great-grandmother, and I made a from-scratch carrot cake, promising the girls I’d save them most of it. When preparations for dinner were under control, I put flowers in the middle of the yellow Formica table and went to my bedroom to prepare myself. I wanted to look as perfect as possible.

After a lengthy shower and a ridiculous amount of time working with my long, straight hair, I could have auditioned for and won a spot in a shampoo commercial. I slipped on a new sleeveless minidress with an empire waist and put on a pair of platform shoes, somehow fashionable at the time. I lightly sprayed my whole body with Andrew’s favorite perfume and stood before my mirror for an assessment. Observing myself from as many angles as possible, I had to admit I had met my goal.

Then I went to my top dresser drawer and pulled out the package I’d wrapped with such care the night before; Mother had taught me how to tie an impressive bow during my last trip home. Shopping with Willa at an antique mall during spring break week, I had found a pewter circle with filigree edging and the letter
A
in the center and snatched it up, planning to have it made into a keychain for Andrew. The jeweler had called me last week to say it was ready, and when he opened the box for my inspection, I told him it was perfect. I couldn’t wait to give it to Andrew. A gift for no reason, extravagant according to Willa, seemed the greatest pleasure to me, a woman filled to the brim with love for Andrew Ackerman.

When he walked in, he told me I looked beautiful. He had been saying that for almost three years, but this night he spun me around to get the full effect of my dress and shoes, and he pulled my hair back in his hands, forming a long ponytail, and buried his face in my neck. He seemed to be memorizing me. I suppose
that
might have been a sign; I interpreted it as delight. I took him into the kitchen, which was so tidy one would think I’d had the meal catered, and he ate like it was his first meal of the day and complimented everything from the main dish to the dessert. He seemed to understand this evening was a gift of love.

“I have something for you,” I said as I put the dessert plates in the sink.

When I came out of my bedroom with the little square package, he had left the kitchen table and was standing in the living room.

“I need to talk to you, Audrey,” he said.

“Okay,” I said, oblivious to his mood change, “but I want to give this to you first.”

He took the small box from my hand and put it on the coffee table. “No, sit down with me for a minute.”

Those words and the seriousness with which he spoke them, and his eyes, mysteriously apprehensive, finally penetrated my bliss. He was suddenly as removed as he was serious, and sitting beside him on the couch, I began to understand, however inconceivable the thought, that this talk was going to be about us, the couple, and it would not be a good one.

How he said what he said, I cannot remember. He stammered something about our being too young to become engaged. I think he said we should see other people before making such a big decision.

“What in the world are you talking about?”

He seemed frustrated with the inadequacy of his words and blurted out, “I just think we should break up for a while.”

I thought of a bumper sticker we had seen and laughed at. Something about setting people free, and if they’re really yours, they’ll come back to you.

“Andrew,” I said as calmly as I could, “don’t do this to us. Don’t throw away what we have, what we are. Don’t. Please don’t.”

I put my hands on each side of his face and looked into the blue eyes I had loved for so long and said the useless words again: “Don’t do this.”

He took my hands away from his face, put them in my lap, and studied the door behind me. I comprehended in that moment, though I was barely twenty years old, that when someone makes the decision to disconnect, even if that someone is Andrew, words are powerless to prevent it.

I began to cry, to sob really, and perhaps from pure instinct, he held me. He kissed my hair. He rocked me in his arms. But when I could stop crying, he untangled himself from me.

“I should go,” he said.

“Go? Look at me, Andrew.”

He did me the courtesy, and his pain too was palpable. I wiped any tears left on my face with my hands, hating how I must look now.

“I don’t know who she is,” I said, “but I hope she’s worth what this will cost us.”

He got up and walked to the door.

I stood too, trying to breathe, and noticed the present I had wanted so badly to give him sitting foolishly on the table where Andrew had placed it. He was on the porch, the door open between us, when I called out to him one last time.

“Andrew! Take this,” I said, walking across the threshold and shoving the box into his hand. “It’s a going-away present.”

Then I turned and walked into the house, shut the door, leaned against it, and tried to fathom his unfathomable last words: “I should go.”

During the last six weeks of school, I ran into Andrew on campus on two separate occasions, walking hand in hand with the governor’s daughter, and decided I had an answer for the Bee Gees’ question, “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” I told Willa no more running into Andrew; I was going to live with my aunt in Missouri and would finish my teaching degree there. She understood. She had been with me the second time I saw Andrew and his new girlfriend across the lawn, had stood beside me after they had turned a corner and disappeared from view, had heard the groan emerge involuntarily from somewhere deep inside of me, from a place in the human heart we didn’t even know existed. Instead of reaching out to me, she had stood back, awed by the manifestation of such raw grief.

But none of that has mattered for a very long time now.

After church today I rode the world’s longest tram and toured another Old Town, collecting them, it seems.

It was a nice Sunday until I opened Andrew’s message.

Willa wrote too: “Where are you?!!!”

Bless her.

fourteen

September 4

I arrived at the Grand Canyon earlier this evening and got a room at a lodge inside the park. It’s rustic, as it should be, I suppose, but comfortable and close to the shuttle buses that will take me everywhere I want to go. There was enough time after I arrived for me to take the blue shuttle to Yaki Point. I think it was at this very spot I argued with Tom and the kids about flying low by one of the natural wonders of the world.

“We’ve been here all morning!” Mark said.

“We’ve been at
this
observation point for five minutes!” I said.

They weren’t Philistines. This was day thirteen of a two-week vacation, and they were ready to get home. Tom had made the side trip so we could at least take a look at the canyon we had heard so much about, but now, “time was a wastin’.”

As the three of them rushed to the car, I turned and looked at the magnificent view one more time and made it a promise: “I’ll be back.”

“Here I am,” I said this evening.

I’m sure the canyon was pleased.

I grabbed a sandwich on the way up to my room and ate it with Tom’s Bible open on my lap to one of Jesus’ “I am” statements: “I am the light of the world.”

That made up my mind for me. Tomorrow at sunrise I am going to have a good spot at one of the observation points. I’ve heard sunrises over the Grand Canyon are spectacular, and I hoped it wouldn’t be cloudy so that I could witness the full effect of its beauty and symbolism. I’m ready for it, and for the first time since Tom died, I set the alarm. And I set it for five fifteen!