30 Feet Strong

by Hannah Paige

  “Oh, well, you spend so much time here, I just assumed—”

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not exactly the friendly type. Grace was always the one who wasn’t afraid to get the conversation ball rolling. If she saw someone more than once she’d make a point of asking their name, favorite ice cream, how their day was going. Ever since…well, there just hasn’t been a reason to be friendly now that I’m alone,” Rick answered as they ducked under the shade of the red oak tree.

  Her white headstone was unchanged, with a few dry leaves scattered around the base and thin grass blades sticking up around it in its attempt to sprout new growth.

  “So, how does this work?” Rick asked.

  “She has some questions for you. Actually, really just one as of right now. Are you ready to answer?”

  Rick took a deep breath and crammed his hands inside his jean pockets, needing to do something besides just stand there, “Sure, yeah. Are you going to relay the questions or write them down? Is there an Ouija board or something?”

  Will laughed, angering Rick because he felt miles, no, light years, out of his element, “No, Mr. Griffin. Those are childish gifts, they don’t work. She will ask me the questions and I will repeat them to you.”

  “I don’t get to hear her?”

  He shook his head, “I’m afraid it doesn’t quite work that way. I’ll be the only one that can hear her questions.”

  Rick nodded, “Okay. Alright. Okay. Let’s do this. Is she here?”

  Will folded his hands in front of him, smiling at the space under the tree on the other side of the headstone, “Yes. She’s here. She wants to know why you read her the newspaper every Tuesday. She remembers how you hated to read about everything in the news, it was always too sad for you. Yet—” he paused, “Yet, you bring in the newspaper every morning, still.”

  Rick felt his throat tighten. He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t believe this. After ten years of people telling him that she was gone, that he needed to move on, he couldn’t roll over and answer some questions for someone that he couldn’t even see.

  He shook his head and turned away from the boy, “I can’t. You’re lying, I don’t know how you know all this, but I—”

  “Mr. Griffin, Grace is here. She’s here, beside you. She needs you to answer her questions, she needs to help you. If she can help you move on, then so can she.”

  Rick spun back around but kept his distance from Will, “Move on? She—you want me to move on by talking to a ghost? That’s not moving on, that is putting the car in reverse and hitting the gas. People get locked up for this kind of stuff. I don’t believe in this, I don’t. I can’t. You can’t expect me to talk to some empty spot under a tree. There’s nothing there, nothing and nobody! And this…this is killing me.”

  Will hadn’t flinched from Rick’s intimidating, gruff voice, “She says that she’s sorry for how this has affected you. But she—”

  “I don’t believe you, Will! I thought I could, but I don’t. I believe what I see in front of me. And I see a bunch of weeds growing around a tombstone with my daughter’s name on it. I see the imprints where I ground beer bottles into the grass and I see the tree roots that I dug out last year with the edge of a bottle cap because, for a crazy second, I wanted to climb in that ground right next to her. That’s what I see, so that’s what I have to believe.” He cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck, hanging his head.

  “What if there was a way that you could see her?”

  He jerked his head up, “What?”

  Will hesitated for a second before explaining, “There is a way. It’s taxing on her figment, so you will only have a few brief minutes that you’ll be able to see her.”

  Rick wanted to believe him, more than anything. It was what he had hoped and wished, even prayed for, for ten years: to see his baby girl’s face again.

  “You have to trust me, Mr. Griffin. That’s the key. If you don’t, you won’t be able to see her,” Will’s voice was as soft as the breeze that rustled through the oak tree’s boughs.

  Rick blocked out his thoughts, closed his eyes and told himself to do this, to trust in the little boy who somehow seemed insane and enlightened at the same time. Grace would have trusted him, she would have believed every word he said, because Will had faith in himself. The boy believed in all of this, with everything he had, and if that didn’t count for something…

  “Fine.”

  Will sighed, relieved, “Good, Mr. Griffin. Grace says thank you. I need to tell you, first, that you still won’t be able to hear her. You’ll only see her for a minute and then, as long as her question is answered, and she has fulfilled what has kept her here, she will leave.”

  Rick swallowed hard, “Okay.”

  Will extended his pale pink hand towards Rick, “I’ll act as a link between you two. Once you take my hand, you’ll be able to see her, if you trust me, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Okay. I…” Rick scolded his hesitancy, boarded it up behind Grace’s wishes, “I trust you.” And he took the boy’s hand.

  He gripped Rick’s own callused and scarred hand with Herculean strength and Rick stumbled back, feeling nauseous. For a second, his head pounded, he felt blood climb through his veins and clump right at the base of his head, pulsing there. He heard a heartbeat, strong and drumming in rhythmic sounds. He opened his eyes and they instantly pooled with tears.

  “She’s…My God, you’re beautiful,” he whispered, his voice raw and hoarse. “Why…why does she look different, older?” he asked Will, who was smiling up at Rick.

  “She is a figment, Mr. Griffin. Those that remain appear to us as how those that they left behind imagine them to be. Grace was taken from this world too soon, before she made a life for herself, before she grew up. Because of that, you create your own image of what Grace might have looked like if she had survived that day. When you think of Grace, you imagine her like this, and so this is how she is seen.”

  She was breathtaking. She was wearing a glittering white dress, her blonde hair was pulled into a braid off to the side on one shoulder. She was taller. The freckles that once invaded her plump cheeks, new, orange ladybugs set loose on fresh leaves, had faded slightly, and echoed the little golden flecks in her eyes. Her rosy, full cheeks were the same: filled to the brim with optimism and hope.

  “My God, Grace, I can’t—”

  She smiled softly at him and reached her hand out, hovering it right alongside Rick’s chin.

  “She’s happy to see you, for you to see her the way you always wanted her to be,” Will whispered.

  “She—you were here this whole time, and I couldn’t see you?” he asked his daughter.

  “She says that she couldn’t leave you, not how you were after her death.”

  Rick stood there for a second, just staring at his daughter, and he suddenly couldn’t remember all of the things that he had dreamt he would say to her if he could just see her one more time. His mind was completely blank.

  “Mr. Griffin, she’s running out of time.”

  Rick wiped his eyes, “Right, sorry, I’m sorry, Grace. I just—you’re so beautiful, I can’t—the newspapers, you want to know why I collect them every day and read to you every Tuesday?”

  The young woman in white’s smile faded a little; she nodded.

  “You’re right. I always hated reading the paper, I only subscribed to it because you wanted me to. Once you were gone, I guess…it was something that I needed to do every day, to remind me of you.”

  There was a pause that hung in the warm air that afternoon. Then, Will whispered, his own voice becoming even lighter than usual, “She says that one little memory isn’t enough to compensate for how sad it makes you to do it every day. It’s not worth it, there are other ways that you can remember her.”

  “But, I should be sad, Grace. You were—you are my daughter. It’s my job to protect you and I couldn’t. I sent you on that plane that day, and you didn’t—you didn’t even want to go. I shoul
d have let you stay, I should have listened to you.” Rick balled his free hand into a fist, “You were going to go so far, Grace. You were going to go to a good school, a college prep school. That’s what Miss Adkins wanted to talk to me about that day she called me into her class. You kept asking and asking and I never told you because I didn’t want you to worry about it too much while you were at your mom’s. But I never got the chance to tell you.”

  Will was quiet for a second, looking up at Grace, then he laughed, and Rick felt the tension in his body soften.

  “What? What did she say?” he begged.

  Will smiled, “She says that she doesn’t blame you for any of it. Besides, it’s better this way. She never would have fit into one of those snooty prep schools. She looks terrible in plaid.”

  Rick felt himself laugh and he wiped his eyes again, “There’s that sense of humor I’ve missed so much. Even now you can still make me laugh.” He breathed for the first time in what felt like days or maybe years, he couldn’t be all that sure and at a moment like this, his judgment of what was real felt skewed.

  “I miss you, Grace. I miss your laugh and your smile and your statistics, no matter how much I complained about them, I didn’t mean it. I miss you so much, and I want you to know that I’m proud of you and I love you. I’m just sorry that you didn’t get a chance to live a full life, I’m so sorry, Grace.”

  Will repositioned his grip on Rick’s hand, “She’s almost out of time, Mr. Griffin. But she has something else she wants to ask you to do, a favor for her.”

  “Anything, baby girl,” Rick breathed.

  Rick kept his eyes right on Grace as her dress fluttered in the wind, her hair shone in the afternoon sun, and Will spoke for her, “She wants you to do better, Mr. Griffin. She wants you to remember the advice that you once told her; to not let others’ actions define your life. Don’t let her death define you. Get up in the morning and don’t collect the paper. Dear Joan, the mail lady, will wonder why you’ve stopped, but that will give you two something to talk about, because she knows that you never know what to say to people. She wants you to keep going to your meetings at the library. She says that Lena seems like a nice lady, maybe a new friend that you’ll keep in touch with this time. Keep drinking root beer and finally throw away the bottle of scotch that you keep in the top cupboard, just in case. She wants you to smile at people, learn their names, remember them, because it’s the right thing to do. She says that just because she’s gone doesn’t mean nothing matters, it just means that other people matter more. Make new friends and hang on to the ones that you have, especially Mick and April. They both need you more than you think. Most importantly, she wants me to tell you ‘Don’t worry, Daddy. Everything will turn out alright.’ She says that the Beach Boys always had it right.”

  Thick, hot tears welled in Rick’s eyes, and at Will’s final words, they popped free and spilled down his cheeks. He shook and knelt down, unable to keep his knees straight anymore. He craned his neck to look up at Grace, only to see that she had knelt down in front of him. Eye to eye they remained for a second; Rick stared into his daughter’s beautiful, crystal blue eyes and he cried, welcoming the memories that flooded through him, that had been…building up inside him for he didn’t know how long.

  “I guess they did, Grace. I guess they did,” he choked out and she gave him one last soft smile, not the toothless grin that she once showed as a child every single day, but a more mature one, one that reflected the sadness and hope and happiness that flowed between the two of them. She smiled and leaned forward. Rick closed his eyes as he felt warm air whisk across his cheek, kiss his skin, and when he opened his eyes again, his daughter was gone.

  He felt Will’s hand fall out of his grip and looked to his left to see the boy collapse on the ground. His chest stilled and his eyelids fell closed, unmoving.

  Rick shouted, shaking the unconscious boy, “Will? Will!”

  “Mr. Griffin?”

  Rick jerked to a standing position as the nurse called his name. The title sounded strange coming out of her mouth. He was more accustomed to hearing it from a nine-year-old boy’s, “Yes?”

  “He’s awake. We’ve just called his mother in, but he would like to see you.”

  He followed the nurse back to the recovery room, where Will’s mother stood by the door. She smiled at Rick, an exhausted smile that told him this wasn’t the first time that her son had been in the hospital. He slipped past her and into the pale blue room where Will sat upright in the twin cot. He looked smaller, somehow, plugged into an IV and propped up on several pillows.

  “Hello, Mr. Griffin,” he greeted Rick with his usual, quiet voice and cotton smile.

  Rick stood over the hospital bed with both of his hands in his pockets, “You scared me, kid. What was that for?”

  Will nodded, “I’m afraid that I might not have mentioned that allowing you to see Grace was not only taxing on her soul but taxing on me, as well.”

  Rick raised his eyebrows, “You don’t say?”

  Will smiled, “How are you, Mr. Griffin?”

  “You’re the one in the hospital bed and you’re asking me how I am?” he scoffed at the irony, though he wasn’t surprised at all by the question from the selfless boy. “I’m alright, Will. Considering I’ve just seen my daughter, sort of, for the first time in ten years and then lost her in the same day, I’m doing alright.”

  “Good. I’m quite proud of you, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Oh yeah? Did I complete all the steps or phases, whatever tests you put me through?”

  There was that mischievous smile again, “Not yet, Mr. Griffin. But I have a feeling that the next time I see you, you will.”

  The comment puzzled Rick, “What do you mean, the next time you see me?”

  “I’m afraid I have to go, Mr. Griffin. My mother and I are taking a trip up to New York.”

  “You got a couple of friends throwing a barbeque too?” Rick joked and Will’s smile softened, knowingly.

  “Not exactly.”

  The hospital room door opened, and the nurse stepped inside, “Mr. Griffin, I’m going to have to ask you to leave now. The doctor needs the boy for a few more tests.”

  Rick nodded to her and looked back at Will, “I guess that’s my cue. Bye, Will.” He started towards the door then turned around again, “Will? Thank you. For sticking with me, even though I fought you like hell on, well everything. Thank you.”

  A warm, peach color returned to the boy’s cheeks and he smiled, “I’ll be seeing you, Mr. Griffin.”

  Chapter One

  May 12, 2011

  Pam

  “I remember the posters,” Pam croaked, yanking the sleeves down on her arms; she was always cold these days, “I remember I had those posters up for weeks, months maybe, I’m not sure. I posted them everywhere: on churches, in hospitals, in the office buildings used as medical stations that day, and of course where it happened. I remember seeing thousands of other posters that other people, just like me, had taped up, hoping that their loved one would be returned to them. They,” she shivered and shifted in her plastic chair, “they were all different colors and some of them were stained from rain or torn from whipping around in the wind too much. Pretty soon my flyers looked like that. I can’t remember ever taking my posters down. I just remember one day, I went to the place, the place where most of the posters where, and mine was gone. Nobody took it off, but too much time had gone by. He hadn’t been found.” Pam’s eyes stung with time’s tears that still wore away at her. She rocked back and forth in her chair, digging her spine into the plastic backing.

  “He was never found. People always think that’s the hardest thing for me to grasp, but it’s not. I don’t think it would make it any easier to know that his body was buried in a cemetery instead of…instead of with all the other posters that fell off eventually. No, no, it wouldn’t. No, the hardest thing for me—well, that’s a hard question. There’s so much that’s hard, so much.” Pam felt like
someone was grabbing her throat, choking her, as she tried to spit out the words she knew she was supposed to say, “There’s so much, I feel like I’m drowning. I’m drowning, drowning all the time, and I can’t ever come up for air. I can’t breathe without him, I can’t, and if I can’t breathe then—” She didn’t need to speak the question aloud; everyone else in the therapy group knew those three words by heart: what’s the point?

  “Thank you for sharing, Pam. We’re all here for you in your fight. I think it bears repeating that you are not alone in this. Every single one of us here is suffering from a severe illness. Clinical depression isn’t something that the weak can overcome. So, I commemorate you all. You are the strong ones.” The group therapist closed the meeting as she always did and the patients stood up, either taking their leave out those double, red doors that led to the street, or taking the alternative and going back to their hospital rooms. Pam was part of the second group.

  For three weeks this had been her life: living in a sterile room, wearing shoes without laces, eating with a spork in a crowded room because she couldn’t be trusted to stay by herself with anything too sharp. Her pants were elastic—no belts—and she had a roommate that snored, making a solid sleep pattern impossible even if she could sleep, which she didn’t these days. When she’d first developed clinical depression, she’d done the sensible thing and bought a book, thinking maybe educating herself on the subject would help her. But it just made her feel more alone. It told her that she would probably sleep a lot, that she might want to stay in bed all day. But that wasn’t true for Pam. She couldn’t sleep because when she closed her eyes she smelled coffee, she saw her husband climbing into bed beside her, felt his heart against hers. It didn’t matter that the kitchen was nowhere near her hospital room or that her cot was barely big enough to fit her body, let alone a second one. The memories were there, right in front of her.

  The book talked about letting her family in, letting them help. But Pam hadn’t seen her parents since her high school graduation when they’d handed her a check as a gift for her achievement. They hadn’t even made it to her wedding. The only family Pam had was the one that she’d borrowed from her husband, but she couldn’t face them anymore, not anymore. She knew that it was her sister-in-law—beautiful, selfless, golden-hearted April—who paid for her hospital bills, but there was a gaping difference between accepting checks from someone and being able to look in their eyes and not see her husband’s.