Big Love

by Rick R. Reed

  The man responded, “Do you think you could come down to City Hospital? I’ll meet you at the ER. Just ask for Bill Rogers. I’ll wait.”

  “Is she okay?” Dane repeated, gripping the phone—hard. But the patrolman had already hung up.

  Chapter 2

  TRUMAN HELD his hand up to his eyes to shield them from the sun as he watched for his mother’s car—a rusting Dodge Neon that was older than he was. Patsy called it “Herman,” although Truman had no idea why. Truman would hear its grumbling muffler before he actually saw the car. But right now, seeing the car was the most welcome sight Truman could imagine.

  He tried to hold it together, the tears and the sobs inside threatening to break free like an itch needing to be scratched.

  He closed his eyes with a kind of relief as he saw the little gray car coming down the street, a plume of exhaust belching out of its back end. The car swung rapidly to the curb, front wheels going up on it, and screeched to a stop right in front of Truman.

  He was used to his mother’s driving. He rushed to get in the car, ignoring the whine it made when he opened the passenger door.

  His mother sat across from him, looking glamorous as always. Today Patsy had on dark jeans, a blue lace crop top, and strappy rhinestone sandals that matched her dangling earrings. Her dyed black hair hung in loose curls to her shoulders. Truman thought she could waltz right into the school and fit in perfectly with the other teenage girls—no problem—even though Patsy was the ripe old age of thirty-one.

  All his life, it had just been the two of them against the world. Truman didn’t know who his father was and, in darker moments, figured Patsy didn’t either. She took her hand off the shifter and looked over with concern.

  “What happened? What’s wrong?”

  Truman had never been able to keep a secret from Patsy. He sniffed once and said, “How’d you know?”

  She touched his cheek, which had the paradoxical effect of making Truman want both to flinch and to bask in the warmth and comfort of her hand.

  “Honey, that sad face is lower than a snake’s belly.”

  “We were at an assembly, and I dropped my books and paper, and—” He could barely go on, getting his humiliation out in fits and starts between gasps for breath. He lowered his head and released the real sobs he’d been holding in since the kids had been so mean to him in the gym. His shoulders shook. His eyes burned. His nose ran. He felt like a baby, and at the same time experienced relief at finally letting his grief go. The worst part, he thought, was that jock who had tripped him telling everyone over and over to kick his stuff. And they all did what he said. And thought it was hysterical!

  Patsy had the sense to drive away from the school as Truman sobbed into his hands. He felt like there was a tennis ball in his throat. He just wanted to get home, where he could curl up in bed with his dog at his side. The dog, a mix of bulldog and dachshund that everyone but Truman thought was hideous, was named Odd Thomas, or Odd for short, after a character from a series of Dean Koontz books that Truman adored. The name, though, fit the mutt.

  Patsy also had the sense not to say a word until they pulled up in front of their house, a little two-bedroom cottage sided with some kind of tarpaper that was supposed to look like brick but just looked like shit. The front porch appeared as though it could fall off at any time. But Truman never complained—he knew Patsy was providing the best home she could for the two of them on her waitress’s salary and tips.

  She put a gentle hand on his shoulder that felt as good as a hug.

  Truman, able to speak at last, said, “And don’t say I shouldn’t have worn this shirt to school! You bought it for me!”

  “I wasn’t gonna say that, sweetie. I think it’s a cute shirt, and you have every right to wear it.”

  Truman should have known. His mother had found the shirt at Goodwill last month. Truman had thought how lucky he was to have a mom like Patsy when she brought it home to him. It was a kind of tribute to Patsy that he had worn it today. He knew he’d probably catch shit for it, but as Patsy always told him, there was no shame in being who he was. If someone had a problem with it, the problem was theirs, not his.

  It all sounded good when they were curled up in front of the TV watching Grey’s Anatomy together or something, but in the real world? Truman was not only gay, he was a very sensitive boy whose feelings were easily crushed. What was he supposed to do with that?

  “Come on. I brought home some fries and gravy from the diner, and if they get too cold, they’re gonna taste like crap.” Patsy got out of the car and waited for him to follow.

  Truman wanted to simply dash from the car and hole up in his room with Odd, but he knew Patsy wouldn’t leave him alone. He loved her and hated her for it.

  So he shuffled in behind his mother, snuffling and rubbing at his burning eyes. Odd jumped off the couch and ran up to him. Truman stooped and let the dog lick his face hungrily. Truman wasn’t kidding himself—he knew the dog’s extra kisses weren’t meant to be a sign of joy at his homecoming or a comfort, but simply a way to taste the saltiness that was so delicious on Truman’s skin.

  Truman endured the facial tongue bath for several seconds, then scratched Odd behind the ear and patted him on the head.

  “I’ll go in and heat these up and make us some burgers while you run him out, okay?” Patsy smiled and nodded toward the leash hanging on a hook by the door.

  Truman set his school stuff down on the table and headed out with the dog.

  “Don’t be long,” Patsy called after him.

  Outside, it still felt like summer. The quality of light, so bright, promised forever day. The breezes were still warm. And those clouds, puffy cotton-ball affairs, seemed painted on the bright blue sky. Insect life hummed as a soundtrack.

  Odd urged him on, down toward the banks of the Ohio River where he was happiest. Truman was happy there too. The river was muddy brown and smelled fishy, but the low-hanging trees, willows and maples mostly, shielded Truman from the world, made him feel blissfully alone. And alone was not such a bad thing to be when the world seemed to take every opportunity to kick him in the teeth.

  Truman released Odd from his leash and let him run on the riverbank, sniffing at the detritus the river had thrown up. There were old tires, tree branches, cans, and other stuff so worn down by the water it was impossible to identify. Truman sat down on a log while the dog splashed at the water’s edge.

  Maybe Patsy would say he could just stay home from high school. Was fourteen too young to drop out? Or—wait—maybe she could homeschool him? Right! Like she had extra hours on her hands for that.

  Truman stood and skipped a rock across the water’s surface, wondering how it would feel to just walk into the brown current until it swallowed him up and carried him away, erasing all his woes. He imagined the cool green surrounding him, his blond hair flowing in the current, those last final bubbles from his nose and mouth ascending toward the sunlight above the water….

  But then he thought of his mother. He could imagine her grief, her utter devastation if he was gone. She’d be alone. He couldn’t do that to her.

  He sighed.

  He trudged home, knowing what Patsy would say—how he had to be strong, how he had to be proud of who he was and not take shit from anyone. He’d heard the same speech a thousand times over the course of his short and sissified life. It was cool that his mom was so in his corner, that she was so accepting, but sometimes Truman just wished he wasn’t one of the misfit toys, that he was just a normal boy, playing Little League or whatever it was that normal boys did. One of the guys. His mother would tell him that what he wished for was to be common, to be unremarkable, and that someday he’d be glad he was different. It was easy for her to say, or at least so he thought, since she was beautiful, and the worst she had to deal with was being hit on by the truckers and traveling salesmen who came into the diner.

  As he neared the porch, he called for Odd to come and, when he did, squatted down to reatta
ch the leash to his collar. Patsy didn’t allow the dog to roam free outside. She said it was because she was afraid he’d run away.

  Truman wondered if it was really Odd Thomas she feared running away.

  He turned and faced the house. Through the screen door, he could hear and smell the ground beef sizzling in its cast-iron skillet and could smell the brown gravy as it surely bubbled on the stove, and the aromas made him, surprisingly, hungry.

  Home was a good place.

  And tomorrow was another day. Maybe things would be different.

  “Yeah, right,” he whispered to Odd as he followed him through the door.

  Chapter 3

  BILL ROGERS, state highway patrolman, was gone. Dane sat alone in the City Hospital waiting room, feeling stung, Rogers’s words echoing in his brain like some mantra: “dead at the scene, dead at the scene.” Dane laughed, bitter, and thought the words should be set to music. Rogers had tried—not too hard because it wasn’t working—to comfort him by saying that when that drunk driver had swerved into Katy, causing her SUV to flip, that she was “killed instantly.” It was like his wife had won the death lottery, the best way to go. Killed instantly. Woo-hoo.

  How did Bill Rogers know, anyway? How did he know she didn’t feel terror, loss, and pain in mere seconds as her life rushed out of her like water swirling around a drain, faster and faster? No one knew, or could ever know, what Katy’s final moments might have been like. Had her life flashed before her eyes? Had she been happy with what she saw? Had she felt loved?

  Was she now in some dark but warm corridor that Dane imagined as the interior of a softly beating heart, moving toward a welcoming light where she knew loved ones who had passed on before waited with open minds, hearts, and arms? Or was she hovering above this very waiting room, watching Dane as he waited for his kids to arrive?

  Did she, watching, at last see her husband for who he really was? Did she finally see his secrets? Did death give her the capacity to still love him despite what she saw? Did she understand why he’d worn a mask all these years? Did she know, in her stilled heart, that in spite of everything, Dane had really loved her? That he had no regrets?

  Or if she was here, floating somewhere near the ceiling, was she disappointed in what she saw in her husband?

  Dane felt guilty he wasn’t a wreck. He wanted to pinch himself hard to perhaps start the flow of tears he knew he should be crying. Yet for all the stinging numbness within him—and there was a wall of it, rising—he couldn’t manage a single tear.

  He felt, pardon the expression, dead. He wondered if he was in shock. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? When he got up that morning, preparing to head back to the school where he taught after the summer off, the world was normal. Now it had been spun around, turned upside down, changed so completely that nothing would ever be the same again.

  This numbness, this lack of emotion, felt weird, like an alien presence had invaded his body and mind. As the minutes ticked by, Dane would remind himself where he was and what had happened. He would forget for whole minutes, staring, blinking at the sterile waiting room, uncomprehending. He would have to pull his location up in his head—City Hospital—and would have to grope for the reason he was there. Had he hurt himself? When a cursory check of his own body showed no wounds, the truth and the reason he was there would all rush back—cruelly.

  His sport coat, the blue-and-black-checked one that looked so good with jeans, was on the chair beside him. Dane would stare at it in his worst moments, wondering to whom it belonged.

  He tried to bring himself to the present, to feel something by remembering his last moments with Katy, that morning in their kitchen. She had made him a lunch—Tupperware filled with tomatoes and green onions from her garden, some feta cheese, olive oil, and a little red wine vinegar. To this she had added one of those pouches of tuna and a Granny Smith apple. Everything was packed neatly into a brown paper bag.

  Dane had looked through it, rummaging through the bag, and then up at her, peering suspiciously into her brown eyes. “What is this? No chips? No little Hostess cupcake?” He cocked his head. “Are you saying I need to lose weight?”

  In response she had patted his gut, which they both knew had been expanding little by little over the past decade, but Katy was too kind to tell Dane he was getting a bit of a beer belly. “Of course not, sweetie. I just think we need to eat healthier.” She had pressed the bag in, toward his chest. “You take this. I made the same for Clarissa and Joey too.”

  “They’ll never eat it. Joey will want to get a cheeseburger in the cafeteria, and Clarissa will probably have, oh, I don’t know, a bottled water, and maybe a Tic Tac if she’s really famished.”

  Katy shrugged, sat down at the table, and sipped her coffee. “All I can do is try with you guys.”

  “Well, thanks, babe. But I think I’ll pass.” He’d left the lunch on the kitchen table, and the last thing he did, he remembered now, was to kiss her—not on the lips, but on the top of her head, as though she were a child rather than a wife. And the last thing he said to the woman who would be dead only a few hours later? He had looked down at the part in her auburn hair and remarked, “You need to touch up these roots. I can see gray.”

  She had slapped his butt and told him to be on his way. “And take the lunch I made for you with you!”

  But he hadn’t. And the image of the little brown paper bag sitting on the kitchen table was what finally caused him to lower his head and let out an anguished cry. Why hadn’t he taken it? Why hadn’t he said something nice to her? Why hadn’t he thanked her? Why hadn’t he given her a proper kiss?

  He covered his face with his hands and wept, the tears coming at last like some sort of emotional tsunami. He had wanted the tears to be there when the ER doctor had spoken to him, saying words like fractured this, internal bleeding, ruptured that. Dane had tuned the doctor out. It. Was. Not. Real. He had wanted to weep when a nurse came by, in pink scrubs with a smock imprinted with balloons, to try to offer him comfort. But he didn’t need it then. He felt embarrassed and ashamed of his dry eyes and his bearing, which radiated the fact that he was doing A-OK.

  What did it matter, anyway, who witnessed his grief? What did it matter that an image of a brown paper bag, stained a bit darker at the bottom with a little olive oil, abandoned on a kitchen table, just about tore his heart in two?

  The only people he really cared about seeing him in this pitiable state were his children. For them he needed to be strong.

  But it was too late. He heard Clarissa’s voice before he saw her.

  “Dad?” She sounded scared. “Dad? What’s going on?”

  And when he looked up, through his tear-blurred vision, he saw his baby girl and his little man. They’d taken two of the plastic seats on either side of him. He’d been crying so hard he hadn’t even heard them come in. He looked over Joey’s shoulder and saw a woman had also crept into the waiting room just behind his children. She was no one he knew, simply an old woman in a summer housedress, one his mom called a shift, sensible shoes, gray hair, and a handbag balanced on her knees beneath her folded, careworn hands. He wanted to ask her if she was here for her husband. Was it serious? Would he be all right? Did she spend much time in rooms like this?

  He wanted to do anything except talk to his children. To do so would cement this moment in their young lives as one they would never forget, and not for a good reason. This wasn’t supposed to happen. Yeah, the natural order of things had parents dying first. But not like this, not when there was a young girl just trying on what it felt like to be a woman. Not when there was a kid who was just leaving being a little boy behind yet still, damn it, needed his mother once in a while to tuck him in at night. Parents mostly did die first, but in Dane’s mind it was when they were old and gray, when they had held a grandbaby in their arms and looked up with pride and tears at the child who had carried on with the family legacy.

  No one should lose a mother this young, Dane thought. It just wasn’
t right.

  He looked at Clarissa, who had the same auburn hair and brown eyes as her mother. Sixteen going on thirty, too thin for her own good but always looking in the mirror for errant fat, for a need to diet more and eat less. Now there was expectancy in those dark eyes, the anticipation of something heavy about to be lowered, the agony of waiting for something awful to come. Clarissa was like he had been when he had driven over here after getting the state highway patrolman’s call—wishing, hoping, praying for an alternate reality, a world where things were bad, yes, of course, but not too bad. Now, in this space between waiting and the big truth, there was safety, there was hope. How could Dane take that away?

  He turned his head to look at his son. He was only twelve! That was far too tender an age for a boy to lose his mother! What would he do without her? Could Dane fill her shoes, even in small ways? Joey stared straight ahead, once in a while gnawing at a hangnail on the edge of his thumb. Joey looked more like Dane, big, raw-boned, already over six feet, towering over his classmates. His hair was coarse, the color of straw, his eyes the dark blue of a newborn. Despite his size, there was such innocence to that face. Joey’s jawline and nose, which Dane knew from his own countenance would one day be strong, angularly defined, were now softer, waiting for time to shape them.

  He didn’t want to take that innocence away prematurely.

  How to break it to them?

  Clarissa, unwittingly, urged him on.

  “Dad? Dad, what’s going on? Some cop picked us up at the bus stop outside of school and brought us here. He wouldn’t tell us anything. What’s happening? Is it Mom? Is she okay?”

  With every word, every searching gaze, Clarissa said the same thing—lie to me. She knew as well as Dane had, driving to the hospital, that the game was over, the final bell had rung, but accepting that was another step, another progression in a journey neither her feet nor her mind and heart wanted to take.