The Edge of Grace

by Christa Allan

  I grabbed a clean polo bodysuit out of the dresser and wrestled Ben out of the foul clothes and into the fresh. As soon as I released him, he flopped on his belly, pushed himself to standing, then wobbled away like he was walking on the deck of a ship in a storm.

  "Caryn?" My name called from the back of the house. "Caryn?"

  David's voice. Why didn't I hear the door open? I reminded myself to tell Harrison the time had arrived for the wireless door alarms. What if Ben decided to roam the streets?

  I wanted to answer David. I really did. But I knew he'd find us anyway. In those few seconds before he did, I wanted to sit in the in-between place. The place between what was and what will be. Because whatever David was about to tell me would close one of those doors forever. And I knew that pain. Even from a distance it looked familiar. Sometimes it tiptoed into a memory, invited itself into a dream, spilled itself into a conversation.

  "What are you doing?" David's voice was equal parts confusion, franticness, and irritation, stirred and poured into the room. He held out his arms to Ben, who sputtered, "Bubba, Bubba," his own little arms stretched forward with expectancy as he propelled himself toward his uncle.

  What was I doing? Still sitting on the floor next to a poopy diaper. Worried you'd never get here and afraid you would. "Ben needed a diaper change," I said, but it sounded more like a question than an answer. "What happened, David?"

  I shivered with the realization that Harrison, not David, would be here if something had happened to my father. And the panic I willed myself to ignore since David called vibrated under my skin like electric currents.

  "It's Harrison. He's on his way to Meadowbrook Hospital. Sam called and said he collapsed at the office—"

  Words swayed through the air like confetti falling from the ceiling. Fragments of thoughts. If only my brain could connect the pieces.

  "Sam? Who's Sam? What does that mean, ‘collapsed'?" I stood, shoved the diaper into the so-not-magical Diaper Genie. "Wait, Harrison's boss? That Sam?"

  "Caryn," David paused to still Ben's fingers tap-dancing on his cheek, "I'll explain on the way. We'll take your car so I don't have to move the car seat." His calm voice rode on tracks of urgency.

  "My purse. I need my purse. And my cell phone. I think they're in the kitchen," I walked past David, stopped, looked down at my wrinkled linen shorts, brushed petrified banana crud off where earlier Ben had grabbed on to steady himself. I smoothed my hair as if to make sure it was still there. "My face. I need to fix my face. Do I have time?"

  "No. We really don't have that kind of time." David handed over Ben, shoved diapers and wipes in the diaper bag, and steered us out of the room, his warm hands on my shoulders.

  While Ben and I headed home from buying groceries, Harrison's right leg buckled underneath him as he walked into his boss's office. And while we sang along to "Goin' for a Ride" on the Sesame Street CD, Harrison's words traveled through sludge, never quite making their way to understanding.

  An aggressive assault by an otherwise puny blood vessel incapacitated my strong husband. A hemorrhagic stroke. One of fifteen cases out of 10,000. That's what Harrison's doctor said was the risk for males ages 15-34.

  .

  A few months later, Ben almost passed the Mayo Clinic's potty training readiness quiz. The first question, "Does your child seem interested in wearing underwear?" he bombed on a technicality. I never doubted his interest in his Superman briefs. He clapped every time I showed them to him. He simply wasn't interested in wearing underwear. Or his diaper.

  After a week of chasing Ben in his au natural freedom, I decided I wasn't so much interested either. I informed Harrison, who had already relocated to the hospital bed by then, that Ben could be naked butt boy until school started.

  "He's wearing me out, and I'm just too tired to play tag." If only I could have sucked those words back in before they'd splattered themselves on Harrison's face. As if he'd needed to be reminded that his role as father had been usurped.

  I fixed Harrison his latest mushy meal favorite of mashed potatoes laced with sharp cheddar cheese. Like most nights, I pulled Ben's high chair next to Harrison's bed and supervised while they both attempted to feed themselves. Sometimes Ben reached one arm out as far as he could in his father's direction while his other hand grabbed the edge of the high chair tray. The Big Bird spoon Ben wielded looked like a yellow stick sprouted from his palm. Whatever food it started its load with had already been deposited between the bowl and the floor. No matter. He'd focus on Harrison and screech "Da-deeeee" until the last syllable sounded more like a siren. His father usually rewarded him with a lopsided smile.

  That night, Harrison scooped a spoonful of mashed potatoes and motioned for me to scoot the high chair closer. With the arm the stroke left behind, he moved his spoon toward Ben, opening his own mouth wider as the food neared Ben's mouth, in that way parents feed their children as if waiting to be fed themselves. Harrison's internal GPS pointed east instead of north, so Ben had tilted to his left like a sailboat listing in the water to meet the spoon.

  That one shared moment between them was ordinary, which is precisely what made it so spectacular. In that frame of time, we could have passed for any family.

  Dinner ended, mouths and hands wiped, and I rocked our son to sleep while Harrison struggled to squeeze a rubber ball. I'd carried Ben to his bedroom and returned to ours, flipped on the lamp between our two beds, and turned off the ceiling light. I'd just opened the door to our bathroom when Harrison called "KK," my post-stroke name, as if he'd been telling me a secret. The familiar tenderness in his voice. Months ago, that tender voice would have tugged me into his arms, soothed and weakened me like a warm bath. Now, I tugged at the rope of responsibility, scaling a mountain whose peak was obscured by uncertainty.

  After we'd come home a few weeks earlier, Julie and Trey brought over the Rocky Anthology DVD collection. Julie pushed aside the comforter on our king-sized bed that hadn't yet been replaced, plopped herself next to Harrison, and asked Trey to hand her the boxed set. She pointed to the American-flag-draped, bruised and sweaty Sylvester Stallone on the cover and said, "Forceps baby. Paralyzed the whole lower left side of his face. You'll be in good company once you start talking again."

  I glanced at Trey who looked like he'd just bitten into a chocolate-covered pickle. He provided one of those coughs intended to break the silence of an uncomfortable moment. "Uh, Jules, I think maybe Harrison and Caryn might—"

  "Trey, it's okay. Harrison could use a laugh," I said, and I'd meant it. At the time, I didn't know how much I would miss laughing with him. I didn't know how much I'd ache for those nights washing dishes when he'd stand behind me, slide his arms around my waist, and kiss the top of my head. When he bent to whisper, "Let's go to bed," his breath warmed my ear. I didn't know I would miss the smell of pine trees and lemongrass when he reached for me in the middle of the night.

  But after months of care-taking, weariness shared my body. That night I'd turned around, one hand on the door knob, which signaled I'm only pausing, not changing direction. Harrison signed, "I love you," his forefinger and pinky like a goalpost, his thumb straight out. His face, still chiseled handsome, but in a perpetual state of that just waking up look. The stroke recast his features, a portrait artist ignoring attention to details, and drew one eyebrow higher, made one eyelid less taut. A remnant of possibility, the seduction of hope flickered between us. I saw myself walk toward him, rest my head on his chest, lift his useless hand and place it on my cheek. But my body sighed and stayed.

  "Me too," I said.

  I walked into the bathroom.

  Millions of Harrison's cells prepared themselves for another assault.

  Rivulets of blood rinsed from my aching gums raced one another down the sink and into the drain.

  Gathered by a silent alarm, the cells traveled.

  I brushed my teeth. 120 seconds. Upper. Lower. Inner. Outer.

  The army assembled in Harrison's middle cerebral a
rtery. And when not one more could fit, they exploded through the wall. Flooding the spaces between his skull and brain. Spaces they were never meant to be.

  I stepped out of the bathroom, mint fresh, ready for bed. Harrison had already surrendered.

  I don't remember how many doors had to open before I stopped expecting Harrison to walk through one of them. Months and months and months of them. Grief was the rope in a perpetual tug of war between remembering and forgetting.

  It didn't seem at all fair that Harrison's death reduced me to commonality with a spider. For a while, I even busied myself with fact-finding missions about my female counterpart. Ben seemed amused when I'd entertain him during meals with my latest spider news.

  "Hey, did you know that there would be at least 299 more of you if Mommy really was a black widow spider?"

  He'd take a bite of his grilled cheese sandwich, his mouth churning, and look entirely engaged in the conversation. All eye-focused and solemn-faced.

  "And, they don't all kill their boyfriend spiders after mating, so maybe they're not all widows." I rolled a few blueberries on his high chair table.

  "Blerries!" He palmed a few and held them out to me as if discovering a treasure.

  When would I feel that kind of pure delight again? Not even new flavors of Blue Bell ice cream made my insides smile.

  The first year of my official widow-ness, David devoted himself to Ben and me. A week after Harrison's funeral, David dropped in one night on his way home from work. Ben was already in bed, and I sat cross-legged on the den floor in front of the television watching Seinfeld reruns, wearing one of Harrison's white shirts over my sweats and eating pork 'n' beans out of a can. At first David insisted we eat out because that forced me out of my jammies. Other times he'd cook, and my freezer started sprouting plastic containers labeled with meals.

  He'd stay until I fell asleep or he'd crash on the other sofa since I still couldn't sleep in my bedroom. One morning, I woke and found a note taped to the Krups coffeemaker, the one appliance he knew I'd never ignore. David's handwriting looked like it could have been designed by Architectural Digest:

  CARYN,

  ADD THIS TO YOUR GROCERY LIST: SOUR CREAM, AVOCADOS, CILANTRO.

  NACHO NIGHT!

  CALL ME WHEN YOU WAKE UP.

  Grocery list? Who needed a list for "buy food"? I could write that on my palm. But after the third note that week, I realized David gave me what I couldn't yet give myself—a reason to brush my teeth, comb my hair, and change my clothes.

  He admitted months later he looked for recipes with ingredients voted the most unlikely to be in my pantry. "When I first started cooking at her house," he'd told Lori one night when she joined us for dinner, "salt would have made the list."

  One weekend during those early months when I felt marinated in sadness, David mentioned having lunch with a bank loan officer after a recent closing.

  "Lori and I ate at Acme Oyster House. We need to go there one night. Great fried shrimp—"

  "Whoa. Did you just mention a woman's name?" I stopped shoveling cheesy orzo into Ben's mouth and looked at my brother. Ben took advantage of my moment of distraction and plunged his hands in his bowl. His attempt to grab the little rice noodles didn't work, but he entertained himself finger painting his face with cheese sauce.

  "Were you just mentioning spiders again to your son?" David tossed fresh green beans and garlic in olive oil. The beans hissed and spit when they fell into the pan. He wiped his hands on the cotton dish towel draped over his left shoulder, then tossed it to me.

  "I asked first." I cleaned Ben's hands and face, and handed him a few green beans David had steamed earlier. He picked up one in each hand, pounded the high chair table, and mumbled mostly consonants. "You actually had a date?"

  "Does that surprise you?"

  "Of course not. You spend so many nights and weekends with me and Ben, I wondered if you had a social life."

  "I'm insulted. We haven't been social?" He grinned and stirred the sizzling beans. "I wouldn't be here unless I wanted to be. And if a better offer came along, I would have let you know."

  "True," I said. Even in high school and unlike me, David never felt compelled to go places because his friends were going. "But, you've never really mentioned dating anyone."

  "Because," he said and spooned the beans into a serving dish, "I've been busy trying to build my real estate business, and there wasn't anyone worth mentioning."

  "Until now."

  "Exactly. But I wouldn't call one lunch ‘dating.' "

  "Ben, honey, eat the beans. Stop mashing them in your hair." I sighed as I scraped green goo from his scalp. "So . . . tell me about this Lori person."

  "She's smart, easy to talk to . . ." He handed me the tub of wet wipes, then carried two plates to the table.

  "And? She looks like . . . ?" I attacked the sticky stuff on Ben's face and hands, and waited for David to answer.

  Instead, he maneuvered Ben out of the high chair and into his lime green baby walker. As soon as Ben's bottom hit the seat, he slammed the bright red button on the tray and squealed with in concert with the siren noise. "Try to stay under the speed limits okay, Ben?" My son rewarded David with a series of "glks" and "brps," kicked his legs and bashed everything else on his tray that beeped and whistled.

  "So, are you going to tell me what she looks like?" I eyed Ben's untouched jar of bananas. If he wasn't going to eat it . . .

  David picked up the jar and returned it to the pantry. "I saw you sizing that up. Have a real banana. And I'm concerned that you're fixated on Lori's looks. I thought women didn't like being objectified by men. Never considered you women did that to one another." He opened the oven, removed the roasted chicken, and set it on the stove. "I'm not serving you, so if you want to eat, get your butt moving."

  "I'm not ob-jec-ti-fy-ing," I said, moving my head with each syllable. "I'm curious."

  "Is that a synonym for nosy?" He speared two chicken thighs.

  "Give it up already, will you?" I pretended to poke him with the serving fork.

  "She's classy, understated, Ann Taylor-ish. Angled bob haircut, hair the shade of a Starbucks café mocha, eyes to match, and she runs. Twenty miles a week."

  "Yuck. Is that the best you could do?"

  He set his plate on the table, poured us each a glass of iced tea, and handed me one as I sat across from him. "For now," he said, his lips pressed into a smile that didn't quite connect with the seriousness in his eyes.

  8

  David and his mystery man returned from Mexico over a month ago, but I still couldn't make voice contact with him. Julie told me "couldn't" meant "chose not to." Either way, he and I had not spoken since his Saturday phone call. If one degree of separation mattered (Julie said it absolutely did not), I called Lori. I didn't think getting together to mutually mourn over David would be healthy, but I did want to see her. The upcoming book club selection we were charged with conveniently provided a reason for us to see each other.

  Walking to my car that morning, I mentally flogged myself for not suggesting Lori meet me at the thermostat-controlled café at Barnes and Nobles. Even though Labor Day and the possibility of slight breezes hovered around the corner, the end of August in New Orleans was like a relentless steam iron pressing the wrinkles right out of our skin.

  The line of people waiting for café au lait and beignets at the Morning Call Coffee Stand already stretched past the news stand and the art gallery. Seeing it made me feel a little less guilty about being late. I parked in the shopping mall's lot and walked across the street, making myself later still.

  Lori waved when she saw me and spared me the awkwardness of scanning the string of faces in search of hers. For someone who carried the debris of disappointment, she looked fragile, a whisper of herself. Wedding-broken-off-bya-fiancé-who-announced-he-was-gay exploded her world, but what remained of the rubble she carried in the hollow spaces David once filled. Months ago she fretted her wedding gown wouldn't fit unle
ss we reenacted the scene in Gone with the Wind where Scarlett grabbed on to the bedpost while Mammy cinched her waist. Today, the dress would fit if she wore a child's floatie around her waist.

  We hugged, and when I wrapped my arms around her shoulders, I prayed she wouldn't break. Lori must have drawn the Dr. Adkins of grief.

  I didn't starve my stress. The Italian grandmother of grief moved in with me after Harrison died. Food soothed me. Two months later I broke a zipper when I tried to shimmy into a pair of shorts. I accused Julie of having washed all my clothes in hot water. "Sorry I was late. The teacher dinners have really taken off. Another late night cooking. Even with Julie helping. I crashed on the sofa. Didn't set the alarm," I told her.

  "Where's Ben?"

  "Since school started, he and Nick haven't had much play time. I dropped him off at Julie's." Ben also asked me to tell Lori he missed her and wanted to know when he'd see her again. I'd tell her that later, when I wanted to open the David conversation. Ben would understand. Yes, Harrison, he would.

  "You know you could always ask me if you're that busy," she said. The door yawned and swallowed a party of six ahead of us. "Oh, good. We're almost in."

  I counted the bodies in front of us. "Um, ten people are not 'almost.'" Only five minutes out of the car, and I felt like a tea bag plunged in a cup of hot water. My sunglasses were already sliding down my nose. I tossed them in my purse and squinted at Lori. "If you promise to actually eat something, I'll call you. Maybe I should start delivering to you." I pointed to her jeans." I don't think baggy's in right now . . . or ever."

  "Not you too. I'm already hearing that from my mother." Lori rolled her eyes at me, lifted her bangs off her forehead with one hand and fanned with the other using one of the free real estate magazines off the newsstand rack. Her purse slipped into the crook of her arm making her look like the Queen Mother in a royal parade.

  "Sorry." I stared at my feet and wondered if this was how Ben felt when I fussed at him yesterday for daring Nick to make farting noises during dinner. A few years ago, I wouldn't have wanted her to comment on the way my jeans looked like the forerunners of body shapers.