by Lynne Hugo
I didn’t make the same mistake with the next pregnancy. Or the next. She stopped telling people—including me—when she was pregnant. She’d only tell Mom. Mom would let it slip to me, so I’d be careful what I said around her, I think. Not ask her anything, for one. And then Mom would tell me when she lost another one. Sometimes it was right away. Sometimes she’d carry it longer, six or eight weeks. As long as nine or ten.
Phillip wanted to “take a break,” so she said they weren’t trying when Harold and I got married, and I admit, I was glad of it. She was my matron of honor and only attendant. I thought it would distract her and she’d be able to celebrate with me. Even though as far as I knew she wasn’t pregnant again then, she hadn’t given me a shower, and she was wan as a lily on a coffin in the pastel pink gown I’d thought was so lovely, devoid of expression. My wedding pictures were spoiled. I knew it was selfish, but when I saw them, I wished again I hadn’t asked her to be in it at all.
* * *
I turned my attention to making my own home. We were living in town then, and Harold—back from Vietnam, of course—was working in the machine shop, and still trying to get himself grounded again in America. Which wasn’t proving easy. Now I could tell you that he was haunted by what he’d seen; what did we know of that then? What did we know of what soldiers needed to heal? I thought just I could be enough! One of my hundreds of mistakes.
Maybe Harold and I would have waited longer to have a baby. But I was so scared that CarolSue’s story would be mine that I had to find out. Especially after she lost yet another one. I think most of us had lost count. Maybe it was the sixth—or perhaps it was the seventh. You might think, Louisa, how could you possibly not know how many babies your sister lost? But it’s true. When something painful happens over and over, your mind doesn’t want to keep track of how many times it’s already happened. How could you go on if you remembered that?
As you might guess, because it’s the way these things go, I got pregnant the second I tried and never even threw up.
But here’s what you wouldn’t guess, and how what should have been so happy—like my wedding—turned into a confusing forest, canopied with branches of sadness and fear. Just weeks after I spilled to the family that Harold and I were expecting, CarolSue told us all that she, too, was pregnant again. I admit, I was annoyed. I wanted this to be my time, and not have us all go through another depression with her. And, of course, it scared me. I was just clearing the end of the first trimester myself, and I well knew, from her experience, that even though the odds were now in my favor, I could still lose the baby.
But there was an upside. She hung on to that pregnancy, and as our bellies expanded, we grew close, planning how the cousins would grow up like siblings. We hoped they’d be the same sex, and pored over the book of baby names for ones that would sound cute together.
I imagine you can read the danger signs here. I’m the one who didn’t. CarolSue’s son was stillborn, a week before Gary, robust as a horse, arrived and latched on to feed like he’d been taking classes in how to do it for the past nine months. And gotten an A plus.
Harold and I had to scramble to choose a name that CarolSue and I hadn’t considered. We settled on Gary because neither of us objected too strenuously and the birth certificate had to be filled out. Also, it sounded nothing like David, which is what CarolSue and Phillip named their lost baby, because it means “beloved son,” he explained. So Harold and I made Gary’s middle name David, in his memory. It was the only thing we could think of to do. She took it the way we meant it, to honor her lost son, and asked to hold her nephew. Handing Gary to her felt all wrong, like it would make everything worse, if that was possible, but I did it. CarolSue took some strange comfort in it, seeing something in my son then that she’s held to ever since. (You’ll notice the softness she feels for him, how she takes his side.)
It’s only now, after all that’s happened, that I think I understand what CarolSue must have felt as our family and Phillip’s gathered in a ragged circle in the cemetery beside New Hope Community Church to bury her son’s ashes, which were in a little white box that looked like marble, but might have been quality plastic for all I knew firsthand then about death. The hole had been dug and was covered with bright green felt that didn’t match the patchy winter-burned grass around it. Everything looked wrong, all wrong.
CarolSue picked up the box and held it against her chest, while the minister read the service committing the baby’s ashes to the ground and whatever else there was of him to God’s eternal care. Even back then, I wondered what that meant. We were supposed to put the first dirt on top of it at the end, when it was put in the prepared hole, each family member contributing.
That was The Plan, but I can tell you it didn’t happen. The minister had to finally take the box away from CarolSue. I was afraid he was going to end up wrestling her for it, but she finally let go. I couldn’t help; Gary was in my arms, swaddled in a blue-and-white blanket, wearing a little white cap against the grey chill of the day. Anyone I could have left him with was at the service. Mom and Dad half led, half carried CarolSue to the car, Phillip walking alone behind them until Harold dropped back alongside him, which I thought was kind. I walked by myself then, carrying Gary, like a guilty stranger who had the poor taste to bring an infant.
That baby was CarolSue’s last. She told Mom—not me—that she couldn’t stand to lose any more, she wouldn’t survive it. Then Phillip left her, seven months later. Phil had had his “fill of sadness,” which were his exact words, and I thought an ironic way to put it coming from him, but I managed to keep my mouth shut at the time since no one else was in the mood for a bit of levity. Had I taken my eyes off my newborn and really felt CarolSue’s loss, the enormity of what anyone can lose, the yawning chasm would have swallowed me then. I know that because now it has.
Or it’s tried to. But over the next years I saw how CarolSue managed by clutching the smallest twigs of hope that grew out of the sides of that chasm she’d fallen into. Some of them broke off, and she’d fall farther.
Some didn’t, though, and then she’d cling and maybe get a toehold, too. She clawed her way toward daylight. I wasn’t much help to her then, not nearly the help she’s been to me since I’ve joined The Bereavement Club.
So, you see, I thought it was only fair that I might have to go on largely alone now, and sometimes tell her what I thought she could bear to hear. I’m sure that’s what she did for me, when she’d lost her only child, and I was fragile with fear and guilt. Her attention needed to be on saving Charlie now, just as mine had to be on my baby back then.
If she wasn’t coming to help me in person, then The Plan might have to be developed and revised without CarolSue. I figured I’d do what I had to do, tell her what I could, keep the rest to myself. There’s a first for everything. I’d done my thinking; it was time to get serious.
14
Thanks to daylight savings time, the long shafts of late afternoon light stretched through supper hours. I was trying to get a look inside Larry Ellis’s ranch-style house. I knew he and a woman left the house because I’d been staking it out since four o’clock. (Is that overage Barbie doll his wife? Is that a wig? Where do they even sell those ridiculous shoes? Who wears hot-pink stilettos? Lord, how I wish CarolSue was with me.)
I wished for CarolSue like crazy, but she’d have a fit if she knew I was skulking around Larry Ellis’s house. She’d get on her high horse and say, “Louisa, this has bad idea written all over it.” She can be impossible sometimes. She’s the one who said I had to find out what he cares about, and how could I do that except by following him? And I tried, but I just didn’t realize how hard it is to follow someone. I have no idea how detectives actually do this part.
By five thirty, I had to pee so badly I decided I simply had to get over to Jamie’s Gas N’Go Market where I know the bathroom isn’t disgusting because I’ve stopped there when I’ve driven to Indy. But before I even turned the key to start up the c
ar, the twosome came out. I guessed it had to be Larry; it was his address, and he got into the truck that’s registered to him. The Barbie got into the passenger side and they drove off.
That’s when things really deteriorated. Not only did I have to uncross my legs to drive, I had the car facing south when Ellis turned north out of his driveway, so I had to find a place to turn around. A U-turn would have put me in a ditch. I should have backed up and turned in Ellis’s driveway, but I didn’t think of that in time, further displaying my lack of aptitude for the police academy. That maneuver must have taken me a quarter mile in the wrong direction. Then I got behind a mattress store delivery driver going twelve miles an hour trying to read numbers on mailboxes that aren’t there. People way out here apparently think that if you don’t know where they are when you’re looking for them, they don’t want you finding them anyway. I couldn’t get around him because we were headed up a hill right then.
But once I could speed, I thought, Oh! Is that the tail of Ellis’s truck making a right turn in the distance? It was a pickup truck, but far enough ahead that even making out the color wasn’t possible. It might have been him, and I made the turn, but then within a quarter mile, there was a four-way stop, and I knew I was only guessing.
I thought I saw some dust settling and went to the right, thinking it might be a sign from a merciful God on my side. Don’t we all think that silly way sometimes? Five or six or ten miles later I’d not seen a single vehicle, let alone a pickup truck. I’d have settled for a pink Cadillac to follow. But there was just the vast Indiana farmland, her old, old fields, their everlasting sameness now laid open again in endless wavy furrows to become inland seas of corn. It will rise bright green, be silvered by sun, be cut down. I pulled over near a stand of forest in front of a house and small cluster of outbuildings not all that unlike my own, I guessed, though the parcels of land out here are bigger. Where was I? On an empty, bisecting road in my old car, in my old body that had to pee, following something that had disappeared.
I was fairly sure the place wasn’t deserted—it looked too well cared for—but for the moment no one was visible and I put my forehead on the steering wheel to gather myself. Already I had failed.
Is everyone like this? Your own sense tells you that a plan you’ve made is just not sensible, and yet you don’t give up on it because there’s another part of you that just pushes on, whether from stubbornness or a valuable kind of persistence. But you don’t know which. Or whether it’s because you desperately need to pee and pursuing The Plan takes you to the closest facility. As you age, you have to start watching yourself for this motive.
I drove back the way I was pretty sure I’d come, toward Larry’s house, talking to CarolSue out loud. Or maybe I was talking to Harold. Defending myself. “So I let him get away. At least Gus didn’t catch me. Unlike someone else I know. Oh Lord, I have to pee. Oh Lord, I don’t remember passing that ugly blue house before. Am I lost?”
I wasn’t. I calmed down and finally recognized the way to Larry’s house and from there, I knew the way back to my own. But I was still upset, and I couldn’t shake that “it’s now or never” feeling. I had worked myself up to do this without CarolSue, had made myself strong enough and brave enough, and then I’d lost him. Of course, this might explain what I did: I really had to pee, and I thought I knew for sure that Larry’s house was empty.
15
“You did what? Oh my God, Louisa. What were you thinking? That’s breaking and entering. You’d go to prison for that. That has bad idea written—”
“I was thinking I’d wet my pants is what I was thinking. And she was dressed up like they were going out. From what I could see, anyway. She was wearing stiletto heels. Hot-pink stiletto heels. Most stupid shoes you ever saw.”
“Forget the shoes! For all you knew they were going three houses up the road to drop off a casserole at a dead person’s house. Sorry, bad example, but good grief, you have lost your mind.”
I’d propped the kitchen door open before I called CarolSue, and as we talked, the long mid-May twilight rested like good cotton on my bare arms and legs. I sat at the table in a swatch of soft sunlight. I let it warm the sherry with which I was congratulating myself and closed my ropy fingers around the gold of it. Lovely, lovely. I was quite proud, and at the moment I did not have to pee.
“I know in your heart you are impressed,” I said. “And you’re dying to hear every detail. But you’re not going to hear any of it unless you stop lecturing.”
“For God’s sake. Are you drinking? Lay it on me,” she resigned. I knew she was rolling her eyes. We do that. Now she’d set a tone, and I had to hold back details to keep myself puffed up. Now you know why I wasn’t going to—didn’t want to—talk about how desperate and crazy I’d felt when I pulled up across the road from Larry’s house, right where I’d been parked earlier. I’d cried a little bit, and said, “I can’t do this,” out loud. I sat there a few minutes just staring at my hands and thinking that they are my mother’s hands now, the left with its thin gold band and old-fashioned diamond off-kilter next to it. Mom was lucky in one way—she had me to watch out for her when she was alone, with CarolSue as a spare. But this is what mattered: she could look in my eyes and see enough of a mirror that she knew she was home. When I look at Gary now, I recognize nothing anymore. Since he got involved with that cult, it might be easier for me to find people I could talk to if I do land in jail.
So I had that thought and it didn’t go away as I sat there parked just beyond the home of the man who’d killed my grandson and then, effectively, my husband, and turned the son I’d known into a stranger. That fearful “I can’t do this” dissolved, life changing again as if I’d stepped into a new skin. Believe me when I say this: there is nothing crazier than a truly sane old lady who can’t lose more than she already has. I was still scared, but the fear wasn’t enough to make me fail. I just wasn’t going to fail.
So I left all that out and told CarolSue how he’d worn a blue Colts shirt and cowboy boots, I’d seen that much, and had a scrawny ponytail that looked to be the greyish-brown color of dishwater that badly needs to be changed. I’d glimpsed that when he turned to get into the pickup truck. (In his mug shot, his stringy hair had been raked back over his ears. His eyes were too close together and too low on his face, as if all his features had been pinched into too small an area.) I told her about his yard, scrubby, screaming to be mowed. Two more weeks and I bet he could hide a stolen car in that grass. Between the untrimmed random shrubs where I snuck up to look in the window—my heart thudding what the hell are you doing, but I would not turn back—thorny weeds prickled around my shoelaces and the bottom of my slacks. The white paint on the windowsill was badly cracked and offered multiple spots for long, satisfying peel-offs, tiny opening acts of vandalism, but I limited myself to one to save time and because I know there’s not much point in vandalism if nobody knows you’ve done it; this house is such a mess, nobody would notice if I actually broke the window.
It turned out I was at a bedroom window—Larry’s maybe, since there was a king-size bed with a thick, puffy green comforter on it. It looked like it was the color of grass. Of course I could have been wrong; I was peering through a dirty window. But the thought of my Harold under the greened-up grass came into my mind, and so did the thought of planting an explosive device underneath Larry’s bed.
Oh my, how little we understand what the course of someone’s life may make her capable of. This was another thing I didn’t bother to tell CarolSue.
A pouf of breeze raised my hair and as quickly the breeze stopped, as if someone had blown on me. I looked over my shoulder and even turned around, but there was nothing. Just the big shed in the back of Larry’s yard, a dark red scab on the property, and the empty fields. No dog barked, nothing to warn me off. I crept around the house to the messy concrete patio, where four lawn chairs with saggy green webbed seats, a rusted bucket, and broken plastic rake looked forgotten. There was a grill, too.
Two big pots of flourishing pansies, yellow, purple, apricot, and blue, looked like pieces to a different puzzle. A single cement step led to a back door. I must have been CIA in a previous life because I sidled up to that door and peeped in as if I knew what I was doing. The kitchen. Why not? I’d come this far and had nothing to show for it. I had no idea what Larry Ellis cares about yet. I tried the door.
It was unlocked.
Yes. I did. I went in. Of course, that’s what completely flipped CarolSue out when she heard it and it derailed the conversation for a while before I got to the good part. Or the bad part. Or the important part.
“Hey, if you don’t like how I’m making a Plan, get on a plane and come help me,” I finally said, and immediately felt terrible because she went dead silent. I’d hurt her. Charlie was having radiation every day for eight weeks. “I’m sorry. I guess all this sounds dumb now. Maybe it is. Let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about you for a change. You always change the subject back. Tell me about what it’s like taking Charlie for the treatments. What do you do while he has the radiation? I know it’s got to be hard on you, all the waiting around.” And really, going on with it all was like that dime balanced again on its edge and whatever CarolSue said was the nudge that would drop it down or keep it rolling.
The dime teetered a moment and then CarolSue said, “I just read when he’s having treatments. I took out a bunch of books I was supposed to read in high school from the library. You remember, I used to get CliffsNotes, but the books are actually pretty good. Anyway, it doesn’t sound dumb. I want to hear everything. Charlie’s going to be fine. Harold would have been fine except for Larry Ellis because Cody would still be here, and Cody would be fine. Sometimes if we don’t get mad and fight back I guess we’d just lay down and die. Charlie’s fighting back, you’re fighting back. I’m fighting back with both of you. It’s stupid, I know, but I just feel so angry sometimes. And it helps to have someone to be angry at. Damn Larry Ellis. Cody was . . . such a good . . . he was a good boy.”