Stars in the Grass

by Ann Marie Stewart

  “Somebody call an ambulance! He’s bleeding!” Mom cried as she stood to plead with the growing audience. And then Mom saw the woman from the blue car. “You hit my son! It was you! You hit my son!”

  Dad grabbed Mom’s arm to keep her close, away from this woman who stood crying, clutching the hand of her little girl. Maybe it was the sight of the little girl holding her mother’s leg, sobbing in fear. Mom turned and knelt back down.

  “He needs a doctor,” she whispered.

  “Don’t touch him!” Dad warned and Mom gasped. “Not yet,” he said more gently. “Just don’t move him right now.” Dad put his hand on her shoulder.

  Mom caressed Joel’s arm and brushed the hair from his forehead. “Oh Joel,” she said, crying. “It’s all right. Mommy’s here. It’s going to be all right. Open your eyes, Joel.” As she pulled her stained hand away, I saw the blood she couldn’t feel.

  The strap on Joel’s overalls had slipped off his shoulder, and I pushed it back up. Then I remembered I wasn’t supposed to touch him. Where was the ambulance? Dad took off his T-shirt and put it over Joel, as if he needed it on that warm summer day.

  Right then I knew something was very wrong. “He’ll be okay, won’t he, Dad?” I asked.

  “He’s my son,” Dad said to someone hovering over us. But not to me. Still, I was satisfied with the answer. Dad had always taken care of everything. “We have to do something,” Dad said, his voice hazy, as if a cloud had suddenly covered the warmth of that day. He looked around at the growing congregation. “We have to get him to a hospital.”

  “He’s not breathing, John. I don’t think he’s breathing!” Mom exclaimed as Dad bent over and listened.

  “Is there a doctor?” Matt yelled and then ran through the growing crowd, even stopping at the cars stalled in the train of traffic. “We need a doctor! Are you a doctor?” Matt banged on car windows as he ran farther and farther away from us.

  “Heal him, God,” Dad said softly. I thought Dad should remind God that He had a Son, too. I really wanted to pray with him, but the only thing I could remember from Sunday school was the Twenty-Third Psalm, which began with “The Lord is my shepherd” and had that scary line about the valley of the shadow of death.

  A fire truck, the sheriff, then finally an ambulance arrived in quick succession. A woman with red hair kept repeating, “He was in his dad’s arms.” One officer took her aside to question her while another officer talked to the woman from the blue car. The men from the white ambulance broke our circle and dispersed the crowd, then huddled over Joel, blocking our view. Not a minute later, one man stepped back and announced, “He’s got to go now.“

  “I want to go with him,” Dad said as a man in a uniform placed Joel on a cot in the back of the wagon.

  “Don’t leave me, Dad!” I cried, choking on the forgotten melting caramel.

  “I’ve got to go,” Dad said as he released my grip.

  “I’m going, too,” Mom cried.

  “Your husband’s been hit,” one officer said, pointing to Dad, who stood with his weight on one leg. “He needs to go with your son, ma’am,” the man explained. “You can ride in the sheriff’s car with her.” He pointed at me. Mom stood, slack-mouthed, as they helped Dad into the ambulance.

  “Where’s Matt?” I asked, suddenly feeling strangely alone. I looked across the faces and trail of cars. “Where’s Matt?” I repeated more urgently. “Wait for Matt!” I screamed, but nobody was listening.

  “Where are they taking him?” Mom asked, and then I realized we didn’t know the way. We were strangers here. And where was Matt?

  “St. Luke’s,” the officer said, “Bellingham.” But where was that? They slammed shut the back of the ambulance.

  As the siren screamed and the wheels turned, I saw Matt running to catch the ambulance, knowing he had been left behind.

  And suddenly it was over and they were gone, leaving Mom and Matt and me standing there in the summer sun, by the side of the road, which was so very hot on our bare feet.

  TWO

  I’ve always wondered if Joel heard our prayers as we stood over him on that sidewalk.

  When we arrived at the hospital, we ran into the emergency room looking for Dad. A nurse at the main desk took us to a waiting room, where we stood around until a doctor arrived. Mom studied his face and then slowly shook her head as she backed away from him.

  “No, no, no!” she said, louder and louder, as if she could make it not true.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. McAndrews.” And then the doctor turned to Matt and me. His eyes looked sad.

  “No!” Mom cried out. “Don’t say that. He was just here! He was fine! The car wasn’t going that fast!” Her voice pleaded as she gasped for breath.

  “His head struck the windshield and then the road,” the doctor continued. “The brain injury was more than he could survive. He never suffered,” he added, as if that would make us feel better.

  Matt slipped out the door and I didn’t know if I should go to him or stay with Mom. Mom sat down and began to sob so loudly I couldn’t hear myself cry.

  Joel is dead, Joel is dead, Joel is dead. I couldn’t believe it. I started shivering, and I couldn’t make myself stop. Was it my wet bathing suit or was the hospital so cold? I smelled like salt water. My hands tingled and I shook them back to life.

  “Where’s my husband?” Mom’s voice was paper thin.

  “They’re treating his leg,” the doctor answered.

  Mom stood shakily and staggered. I rushed to steady her.

  “Oh, Abby.” She wrapped her arms around me. I held her and she held on to me, and I never wanted to let go of her again.

  The doctor waited and then escorted Mom into the second room down the hallway. He talked with Mom and Dad in Joel’s room while Matt and I sat outside the door on folding chairs. I could feel wet sand grind against smooth metal. When I took Matt’s hand, he didn’t pull away.

  I watched the sterile black-and-white clock on the wall, the second hand circling and the minute hand shifting almost imperceptibly. I could anticipate each subtle movement. How long would they stay in there?

  When the minute hand had moved more than seventy-two times and I had stopped counting, the door opened.

  A doctor pushed a man in a wheelchair. It was my dad in a blue robe, but not really my dad because he didn’t seem to notice us. I don’t know what he was staring at. I started to say something, then closed my mouth.

  “Dad,” Matt said as he slid his hand from mine and stood. But Dad didn’t turn. At last Matt put his hand on Dad’s shoulder and Dad turned to look. That face is the one I don’t want to remember. A rope of fear tightened across my chest. I could hold Mom’s sadness, but Dad’s grief was overwhelming. He seemed broken in a way I wasn’t sure could be fixed. The clock behind Dad now read 4:27, and then the hands blurred with my tears as I watched them wheel Dad down the hall.

  I wanted the day to be over. But then again, if the day was over, my brother was really dead. Today Joel had been alive. If only we could go backward, our afternoon would be morning and we’d wake up and Joel would say, “Get up and play with me, Bee!” and this would not be happening.

  When we returned to the cabin, Mom rummaged through our suitcases, laying out Joel’s clothing on the bed. The little suit from the wedding, another pair of overalls, a few shirts and shorts.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

  Neither did I. What was she doing?

  “They asked what we wanted him to wear …” Her voice drifted off. I picked up the suit and threw it back in the suitcase. Definitely not that. Then Matt removed the shirt with the scratchy tag on the back. We were left with a T-shirt and Joel’s blue overalls.

  That night we went to bed with our clothes on. Now there were just four of us. This was our family. I closed my eyes and then quickly opened them, staring at the ceiling for so long my eyes felt dry. My stomach growled. We hadn’t eaten since the candy, but I wasn’t hung
ry. My mind would not stop. Oh, to sleep and never wake up.

  “You’re having a nightmare!” Matt whispered as he shook me awake later that night. “No!” I cried out in a strange voice, the memory of yesterday rushing back. I had fallen asleep? I actually fell asleep even though my little brother had just died? How could I have fallen asleep?

  In the other room my mother wept, a soft, haunting moan, accompanied by the unfamiliar sound of my dad’s low, muffled sob. Whenever my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see Matt on the cot nearby, his eyes wide open, staring straight ahead. Somehow I wanted it to be a shared secret that we were all awake. As if that could be a secret.

  Dad wouldn’t leave Joel in Washington, so the congregation sent money to have Joel’s body transported by train back to Ohio, and Dad would ride with the body. Mom had to drive Matt and me all the way home. Our same bags were loaded into the same purple station wagon, ready to return on the same roads, yet nothing was the same.

  I needed to say good-bye to Dad, but he’d left early that morning. It seemed Dad couldn’t leave Washington fast enough, but how could he go without saying good-bye? Suddenly good-byes seemed so much more important. Gossamer. Life was so delicate.

  Our car felt empty. Mom in the front, Matt in the middle, and me lying in the back. Matt never talked, and I had yet to see him cry. Mom was silent, too, her eyes locked on the road, occasionally blinking hard as if to stay awake, or sometimes to hold back the tears. If I could have read their thoughts, I wouldn’t have. My sadness was enough for me alone.

  “I feel sick,” I said, after two hours on the highway.

  “Crawl up here with me and look out the front window,” Mom suggested.

  The front seat was Joel’s special place. Joel always sat on her lap or curled at her feet. That was not my place. I climbed into the middle seat and sat next to Matt, then cranked the window open and hung my head out like a dog.

  I reached forward and flicked on the radio only to hear about a war I didn’t understand. All those unfamiliar words and acronyms that didn’t want to be explained, Cambodia and Kent State and Tet Offensive and North and South Vietnam and POWs and MIA. Those casualties were too far away to comprehend. Especially when my own battles seemed more real.

  When we hit eastern Washington, the temperature soared to one hundred and four degrees, and we were so miserable we had to peel ourselves off the sticky vinyl seats. We rolled the windows up and sweated until we were wet, then rolled them down so the wind cooled us. “It’s evaporation,” Matt explained dully. Was it this hot for Dad in the train with Joel’s casket?

  We didn’t ask, “How much farther?” or “When are we going to get there?” After all, would getting home make anything better?

  This was the end of our first family vacation. With Dad’s sister getting married and Grandpa’s heart attack, the timing was right for Dad to go home. I had looked forward to standing under the Peace Arch, where I could straddle the border of Canada and America and say I had stood on foreign soil. But life had turned from happy to sad as easily as heading west and returning east. We had left for a wedding and were returning home to a funeral.

  I imagined how the journey would be if Joel were still with us. I considered his toes tickling the rear window as we lay in the back of the station wagon. In Montana, when we drove by a bear and a baby cub in the forest, I wondered what Joel would have said. I did a double take when I saw a small boy in overalls with a diaper-fattened bottom, thrown in the air and caught by his daddy. In the Dakotas, we stopped at a roadside park, but I didn’t want to play on the swing set. There were too many preschoolers. When we bought groceries in Wisconsin, I instinctively looked for Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries and Hostess CupCakes. But by the time we hit Ohio, when we returned to the car, I stopped counting to check if we were all there.

  It was all about split seconds. One followed by another. And we couldn’t make them go backward. If we had known, we never would have gone. We would have unpacked the station wagon and said, “Not this year.” Or we could have played longer on the beach, or we could have skipped buying the candy. I could have stopped complaining for the length of a heartbeat. I could have held Joel’s wrist a split second longer.

  I thought about that a lot, and it made me wonder about God. And about what He stops and what He doesn’t. And I know it’s not because He can’t. My dad preached about a good and loving God who can do anything, but now I didn’t know what that meant.

  THREE

  I wish someone had put away his toys. The blocks set out like roads running through the living room were lonely without his beeping and buzzing cars. His color crayon drawings of Curious George covering the coffee table were silent without his narration.

  Matt ran up the stairs and I heard a door slam and music blare. Mom walked through the house as if seeing it for the first time. I followed her path until she stopped at the back door, where she knelt down and bowed her head. Was she praying? I stood frozen in sunlight.

  “It’s his fingerprints.” She traced a circle in the air in front of the glass door. “All over the glass. Look. It’s Joel.”

  Smudges everywhere. I could picture Joel standing at the door waiting for Dad, waiting to call out, “Daddy’s home!” as he pressed his nose and hands against the window. No warm circle of breath remained, just fingerprints everywhere.

  Mom took charge of planning the memorial, alone. Her mind was focused. She gathered pictures of Joel—as many as she could find for a third child. She looked for color. Matt’s and my childhood pictures are black and white, but everything about Joel was in color.

  On the day of the funeral, I wore yellow and sat in the balcony. If it were July 12 instead of August 12, 1970, Joel would be with me drawing pictures. Someone said they’d never seen a casket so small. I’d seen dozens of funerals because when Dad delivered a eulogy, Mom played the organ, and we sat in the back pew. I was probably more prepared for a funeral than anybody, but I’d never seen one for a child or for someone I loved. This time, it was my family surrounded by men in black suits and women with quiet voices.

  I spied my best friend, Rita, and her mom, Miss Patti, and that made me want to cry. I scanned the pews looking at all the people who loved Joel and cared about us and could find almost everyone. But Miss Mary Frances and Uncle Troy were noticeably absent.

  Uncle Troy is not really my uncle, but that’s what we call him. He lives three doors away and is married to Miss Mary Frances, and don’t ask me why we don’t call her Aunt Mary Frances. She’s my piano teacher and Uncle Troy is the head usher, a huge, imposing man with thick, black-framed glasses and a broad chest that makes him look like a bear. But I think he’s the sweetest man at Bethel Springs Presbyterian because he gives Matt and me a round peppermint candy every time he hands us our bulletins.

  In the dog calendar I hang over my bed, I renamed the dogs with the names of people I know. The big old Great Dane is Uncle Troy and the wiry dachshund is Miss Mary Frances. They make quite a pair.

  The kids in the neighborhood are kind of scared of Miss Mary Frances. They think she’s too particular about her plants and crabby about our noise. Mom lovingly refers to her as eccentric or peculiar. She was once the junior high band director, handing out brass instruments to the girls, claiming they were gifted with a high tolerance for pain. “Childbirth,” she explained as if she herself had delivered three or four kids. She’s tough and demanding, but I know her differently from all the Sundays I spent in the church library, hidden beneath her worktable, curled up with a book at her feet, when I was supposed to be in Sunday school or church. The Israelites worshipped in a tabernacle tent, but my church tent, a fellowship hall tablecloth, hid me from anyone who might turn in a kid playing hooky. Where was she when I needed her?

  The organist was a stranger, hired from out of town so that on this rare occasion Mom could sit in a pew.

  The pallbearers filed in, moving the box slowly to the front, and I found Uncle Troy holding one end. I wo
ndered if the box felt heavy or whether Joel was now even lighter than his thirty-one pounds. Joel would want out. My heart raced. No box should be that small. Someone had asked if I wanted to draw a picture or write a note to slip inside, as if I wanted to think of Joel trapped below the ground with only my shabby artwork or a message he couldn’t read. He wouldn’t like being in a box forever and ever. I secretly hoped Dad had slipped him out of there and put him safely somewhere else. Surely Dad would have known what to do.

  The church was warm and my gold polyester jumper felt scratchy. It was all I could do not to roll my knee-highs down to my ankles. I took short, shallow breaths of sticky August air, but the balcony seemed short of good oxygen. What a horrible day for a funeral. Funerals should be in winter. Cold. With snow on the ground. Funerals should be for old people. The whispers of consolation were true, “Nobody should outlive their own child…. He was so young … such a good boy.”

  Joel was a good boy. It was Joel who sang the loudest in the preschool choir, dropping his r‘s and l‘s. “Jesus wuvs the wittle ones wike me, me, me. Wittle ones wike me, sat upon His knee …” It was Joel who asked, “Where’s God’s mommy and daddy?” and it was Joel who let go of helium balloons, explaining, “They’re for God.”

  The stranger in the pulpit talked about many mansions. Maybe Joel was playing hide-and-go-seek in his. But was anybody else Joel’s age? I hoped he wasn’t lonely.

  Sun streamed through the stained-glass window of Jesus, with His pierced hands reaching out toward me and the seven children at His feet. Was Jesus opening His arms to my little brother? Was Joel running to Him?

  I used to check how many kids were in the window, to see if anyone had run away. But I didn’t know why anybody would leave someone who looked so kind. Today I re-counted the children. Though the number stayed the same, it looked like somebody was missing.