The Edge of Grace

by Christa Allan

  "Cruise. Mediterranean, I think. They're supposed to be home for New Year's Eve. It's their wedding anniversary, remember?"

  "Of course. I don't think I've been to any other wedding reception until midnight and sent the bride and groom away with party hats and horn tooters."

  "Or it could be the Christmas tree hunters we sent out. I have a feeling they're going to come back with the Charlie Brown Christmas tree. Ben's attracted to all the trees no one else wants. He thinks they should be adopted. Set up a table at the Christmas tree lot. Let people pay for them, and then plant them in the woods."

  "You know, he may have something there."

  "Just what I need. Another investment."

  Again the phone vibrated.

  "Caryn, maybe it's Ben sending you a picture of the Christmas tree he wants. Or Trey warning you about the one on its way home."

  "Well, by now, I think somebody would have thought to call you, huh?"

  I slipped my phone out of my pocket. The call and the texts came from David's number. I scrolled to the message:

  "David in Mercy Hospital. Seriously injured. Please call."

  20

  The phone shivered in my hand. I shivered with it. I heard Julie, but I couldn't make words come out of my mouth to answer her. They seemed trapped in a hollow tunnel between us.

  "What? What happened? Oh, dear God. Please, please not the guys." Julie grabbed my phone. She gasped. "Who sent this message? This is David's phone number? Right?"

  I nodded and grabbed the top of the ladder as if it prevented me from falling off a ten- story building. The movie played. A rerun. The glass doors of the ER. Harrison's face.

  "Let go, Caryn," her voice as soft as her hands over mine. Julie steadied the ladder as I made it down. "Come sit down. I'll call for you and find out what's going on." She wedged herself on the chair next to me, and patted my knee. She hit call and the speaker button. It rang twice. The voice that said, "Hello, is this Caryn?" belonged to a man. A man not David.

  "No, this is Julie, her friend. She was at my house when she read the message."

  She wiggled off the chair and took the phone off speaker.

  "Who are you talking to? Is that his doctor?"

  She shushed me. "I understand. I won't. We'll leave here in the next five minutes. Okay. Bye." She stood and walked to the key rack by the backdoor.

  I followed behind her. "What happened to him? What's wrong? Was he in an accident?"

  She grabbed her car keys. "I don't know. Max said he'd explain when he saw us."

  "Why couldn't he just tell you? I don't understand."

  "Caryn," she put her hands on my shoulders. "Stop. You don't have to understand right now. You just have to go to the hospital."

  "I have to get my purse. Call Ben." I darted to the front door. Another train, loaded with disaster and sorrow and fear hurtled down the tracks. Impact was inevitable. But maybe I could outrun it, buy myself time.

  "We're going, we're going. Help me find my cell phone so I can call Trey. And you're not driving. I told Max, I'd get you there. He didn't want you to be alone."

  "I can't find my purse. Where did I leave it? How can I be so stupid? I can't find it!" I darted from room to room, bouncing off targets like a ball in a pinball machine. I lifted stacks of newspapers, shoved towers of unfolded clothes aside, and checked the knobs of every door I passed.

  What if David asked for me? What if he needed me to be there?

  In the foyer, Julie pressed her cell phone to her left ear with one hand and held the other hand over her right ear as if to block out noise. An oversized clip holding her hair off her neck looked like a white butterfly landed on the back of her head. She stood hunched over in that body language people on cell phones used that said "back off, I'm trying to have a private conversation."

  I wanted her off the phone. I needed her to tell me what to do. I didn't want to be forced to remember how I walked through here years ago. On my way to the same hospital, then to see my husband, today to see my brother. My brother who sacrificed a night with his high school friends to chauffeur Danny, my first date, and me to dinner and then to the Sweetheart Dance in junior high and spared me the awkwardness of Mom and Dad driving. My brother who visited me and my roommates in college and always arrived with a trunk full of groceries and rolls of quarters for the laundromat. My brother who, when he held Ben for the first time, whispered, "Hi, Ben. I'm your Uncle David. I will love you always and forever."

  My feet moved forward, but my insides lurched and stumbled and crashed into one another. The clock on the microwave showed 11:57. Maybe if I ate something. Something portable. Like a bagel. But the wheat one I found in the refrigerator doubled in size when I chewed it. I gagged and leaned over the kitchen trash and spit it out. Enough time wasted, Caryn.

  On the way to my bedroom, I pulled off my tennis shoes and abandoned them in the hall. I walked to the closet where I hid the laundry basket, which was filled with dirty clothes. I dumped the basket on the carpet and burrowed through the pile. Black skirt. Black skirt. Where was it? Not there. I scanned the hangers. No. Not there. Then I remembered. I'd worn it to the luncheon, came home and tossed it in the basket of clothes I needed to drop off at the dry cleaners. The coffee blot had been joined by a number of now unidentifiable spills.

  When I finally found it, I shook as many wrinkles out as I humanly could.

  Julie appeared at my closet door. "What in heaven's name are you doing? Nobody cares what you look like."

  "I care. I care." My voice verged on hysterical. I unzipped my jeans, wiggled out of them, and pulled on the skirt. I smoothed it over my legs and slipped my feet into a pair of plain black flats.

  "Are you ready?" Julie tapped her cell phone against her leg."

  My purse. I still can't find it." By then, I'd launched so far out of our Sanity Advisory Zone, even my voice sounded as if it traveled through space. My tears seemed stuck in my throat instead of my eyes.

  "Calm down, Caryn. Don't hit the panic button over your purse. We have time," said Julie, a yoga-like calmness in her voice.

  Move with the breath. Flow with the breath. Be with the breath. I quit yoga after Harrison died. Every time she told us to breathe deeply, I closed my eyes and saw Harrison not breathing at all.

  "Time? No. We don't have time." I walked out of the closet and kicked aside a hill of sheets. Had I not replaced my clunky tennis shoes with soft leather flats, my toes would have been spared the shock of meeting one of the four bed posters. The pain pushed the tears, the anger and the fear out. "Harrison died in the time it took me to brush and floss my teeth. All those months of not wanting to be away from home for long. Days of going to bed late, waking up early. For what? So he could die fifty feet away from me? In the few minutes I spent brushing my teeth? How does that happen?" I picked up a pillow case, swiped it down my wet cheeks and under my nose, and threw it on the floor. "So, don't think David can't die while I'm looking for my purse."

  "Okay. Thirty seconds, and then we'll leave." Julie scanned the room, then walked to my dresser, where my pink shoulder bag parked itself. It looked at me as if to say, "What? I've been here all the time." When Julie reached for it, I saw her glance at the books stacked nearby. The covers didn't need titles for her to figure out they weren't book club fodder. She handed me the purse. "What are . . . never mind. Not important. Not now."

  The question in her eyes didn't disappear. It just hid behind the urgency of getting to the hospital.

  "I talked to Trey. He and the boys were on their way home. I told him to tell them we had to make a last minute Christmas run." Julie merged into the I-10 traffic, which always moved slower the week before Christmas. As if the entire town decided to do a group shop at the same time.

  "But I need to talk to Ben—" I twisted a paper towel in my hand from the roll I snatched from the kitchen on our way out when I couldn't find facial tissues. But I didn't need them for tears. I used them to have something to hold on to because my
gulping sobs had been replaced by stillness. A stillness that had returned from a place faraway. A stillness that scared me more than the tears.

  "You're not calling Ben. Not right now. Wait until we know something."

  Something like, "Ben, your Uncle David died without your mom ever telling him she loved him. Your uncle died thinking his only sister hated him."

  Saturday afternoon. Family day in traffic. An SUV passed with a mom, dad, two children. A truck. A convertible. Like individual pods moving in one direction, but only look like they're together.

  "I should call Lori. She needs to know." I scrolled to find her number.

  "No. Not yet. Wait until we . . . you have something definite to tell her."

  "You're right. Plus, if she wanted to meet us at the hospital, it'd be hard to tell her not to. She probably would want to, but how awkward would that be?"

  Julie nodded. I could tell there was a conversation going on in her head she wasn't sharing because she did this weird almost pucker thing with her lips and her forehead wrinkled. When we played Monopoly, and we saw that look, we knew to start saving our cash because the girl would be soon putting up houses and hotels.

  "What? I know there's something you're not telling me."

  "It wasn't a big deal, just thought of something funny. But you probably won't think so, and I don't want to upset you."

  "Upset me? Past that. Go ahead . . . what?"

  "I thought of Max, Lori, me all in waiting room—like a gay version of while you were sleeping—we could call it While You Were Awake."

  When I tilted my head against the passenger side window, I saw my face reflected in the rearview mirror. It needed blush. And lipstick. "I should have started going back to church. I wanted to. But then David called and everything changed."

  "David's not gay because you didn't go back to church." She glanced at me. "And are you saying you didn't go to church because David came out? You're going to have to explain that one to me."

  Julie exited and stopped for the red light at the four-way intersection. Gas stations anchored three of the four corners. On the other corner, Starbuck's and Babycakes, where David had picked up those designer cupcakes for Ben's party, peeked out from between Ane's Art Gallery and TipToes Shoe Boutique.

  "Well, David's changed to another church now. And he was the one who tried to get me to go there. And now he's not there, and I have no idea what the pastor thinks . . ."

  "Church isn't an AA meeting. You don't stand and say, 'Hi, my name is Caryn, and my brother's gay.' And I've not heard too many stories of people saying things like, 'By the way, is it true you have a gay brother?' Sometimes I think you worry that David being gay says more about you than it does about him."

  "I wanted to get back to church. Especially now that Ben's older. But then I worried that Ben would get confused hearing, you know, how some people can talk about gays. And I'm already confused."

  "You didn't give anyone a chance to help you feel comfortable. You're assuming things about people in that church just like you think they're assuming things about you." She turned at the hospital sign that pointed to the Emergency Room. "Plus, going to church isn't about you and David. It's about you and God. He's the one you focus on when you're there."

  She turned into a parking spot, and when I looked at the Emergency Room doors, a beehive exploded in me. I saw myself, tap dancing on the rubber mat in front of the electric doors as if it would make them open faster, walking in breathless, even though David had dropped me off at the entrance. I remembered scanning the faces of people in the waiting room, as if I expected Harrison to be waiting for me, telling me that everything was okay. But he wasn't okay. And he wouldn't be okay. Ever.

  Today, I didn't search the room looking for David's face. Today, the man who all those years ago, followed me into the ER was the man whose name I repeated at the front desk." David Collins. I'm here to see David Collins. I'm his sister."

  The receptionist wore a red Christmas scrub jacket decorated with red-hatted, white bearded, smiling Santas. Patsy (according to her name tag) looked like she could have been Mrs. Claus. Or Santa's sister. She reminded me of Aunt Bea, from Mayberry reruns, and her face was kind. "Wait one minute, honey," she said as she flipped pages on a clipboard. "He's in surgery." I felt Julie's hand squeeze my shoulder. "If you follow the green stripe down that hallway . . ." She pointed to the one directly across from her desk, ". . . it'll take you to the elevators to the family waiting room on the third floor. When you get there, check in with the volunteer so they'll know someone is here from his family."

  Except for the occasional doctor paging and the measured clapping of our shoes, we walked in silence.

  "It's not that difficult to locate the elevators." Julie looked back down the hall. "People really need a green stripe? Maybe I should paint one of those from Nick's room to the laundry room."

  We stepped in the elevator, Julie pressed the button for the third floor, and elbowed me as we both faced the door. "Great idea. That can be our post-Christmas mission."

  "Sure. You first. Let me know how it works, and then I'll start painting." Assuming enough paint existed for what I wanted. A green stripe that would lead from my life to a normal one. Or maybe I had a green stripe for normal, but someone forgot to mark the detours. Today was definitely a detour and, I hoped, not a roadblock.

  We followed the signs and, this time, a red stripe to the Surgical Waiting Room. Julie turned to walk in, and I clutched her arm. "What do I say to him? To Max?"

  "Why don't you start with 'Hello'."

  21

  Several years ago, the family of a high school cheerleader severely injured in a car accident involving a drunk driver, donated a generous sum of money to renovate the hospital's surgical waiting room. Her parents told the local news that Haley survived three surgeries, but they almost didn't survive the boredom of reading the same two-year-old magazines and the anxiety of not leaving for long stretches of time for fear the doctors would come out and find no family there.

  The room could have been featured in Southern Living. Two plasma televisions hung on opposite sides of the room on sand colored walls. Each had a seating area with a caramel brown leather recliner, upholstered chairs, and floral chenille sofas. An aquarium on the opposite wall separated a children's play area with game stations from computer stations on the other side. In the middle, a granite island held beverages, coffeemakers, and trays of cookies and fruit.

  So entranced by the unexpected serenity of the room, neither one of us realized we were standing in front of the check-in desk. I heard the receptionist before I saw her.

  "Welcome. May I ask the patient's name?" To my right, a woman sat behind a desk, her face barely visible behind the computer monitor until she rolled her chair away. Mrs. Samuels. A royal blue ribbon stamped "20 Years of Patient Service" hung from her name tag.

  I wanted to ask if patient described her or the people in the hospital but I gave her my brother's name instead.

  She lifted her zebra-striped reading glasses away from her round face, folded them before she freed them to dangle from her beaded neck chain, and peered at us. "The gentleman here earlier also checked in for Mr. Collins. He said he was going to the cafeteria. He left about an hour ago, so he should be back soon." She handed me a digital pager. "If you need to leave, we'll be sure to page you if the doctor needs to speak to you."

  I handed the pager to Julie. "Here. You're in charge of this thing. No telling where it might end up if I am."

  "One more thing, ladies," Mrs. Samuels handed us a Welcome to the Meredith Robichaux Surgical Waiting Area brochure. "Please silence your cell phones."

  A beat of silence later, Julie pulled her cell phone out of her purse, hit the screen twice, then showed it to the receptionist." Silent," she said.

  "Mine too," I said as I adjusted the volume.

  Mrs. Samuels nodded, clasped her hands and, in her soothing, inside voice, said, "Please let me know if there's anything you need.
As soon as I have some information about your brother, I'll let you know."

  "Let's go sit over there," Julie said and pointed to the seating group that faced the entry. "That way, we can see Max when he comes in."

  We sat in two barrel chairs that faced a small round coffee table. Julie tugged her chair closer to the table, propped her feet on it, and found her cell phone. "I'm going to send Trey a message to let him know we're here."

  I ran my palms along the soft chenille of the chair arms." This is so smooth. Like velvet." The movement calmed me, though, the weight of the silence in the room, between me and Julie, pressed itself against me.

  Julie stopped texting, looked at me and raised an eyebrow." You, okay?"

  I almost went for the easy answer. The, "Of course, I'm fine." I moved my hands to my knees to still the shivering. Maybe with a little pressure I could push it down my legs and through the bottom of my feet. I talked to my shoes. "No. I feel like I'm going through life on a train that keeps stopping at the wrong stations. First, it's the 'your husband has had a stroke' stop and then the 'your husband died' stop. And just when I think I've gone through the tunnel, it's the 'David is gay and is in surgery' stop. This isn't the trip I planned. When—"

  "I think this might be Max," Julie slipped her feet off the table and leaned toward me. "Remember, he's meeting you for the first time, too."

  I don't know if Max, or at least the man we assumed to be Max, saw us before he stopped by Mrs. Samuels' desk. But in the seconds before she pointed in our direction, I had already decided that Max was not what I expected him to be. Maybe I watched Will & Grace too much and thought he'd be more Jack than Will. Maybe I expected to be able to pick him out of a lineup of straight men. And, maybe, I tossed every gay stereotype I knew into my brain blender and added a pink boa. The real truth was I wanted to not like him.

  When he looked our way, I saw a look of relief and of recognition that softened his otherwise square face. He shortened the distance between us in long strides, reached out his hand, and said, "Caryn, I'm so glad you're here." He didn't shake my hand so much as hold it between both of his.