Poor Your Soul

by Mira Ptacin

  But all this fades. The cards stop arriving, the flowers wilt. People fall back into their regular routines. People move on. Who can blame them? Life must move on, just as the boy moved on. The company eventually retreats; some remain, but for the most part, after the drama evaporates, you’re left alone to figure out what to do.

  The dynamic of the family shifts, too. It contracts, expands, tightens, weakens. A week after Jules died, we took to our bases. Dad had sick patients that needed to be taken care of; Sabina drove back to college in Ann Arbor, two and a half hours away; and I was failing math and couldn’t miss any more school. A week after the funeral, we all got back into the game. Life kept going, but we were just going through the motions. Mom said, “We have to be present.”

  Mom told me the restaurant was her salvation. When Jules died, her routine, one that was so deeply entrenched in her subconscious, vanished. She didn’t have to take him to school anymore—just me. She didn’t have to bug him to mow the lawn. She didn’t have to buy him nicer shirts or pack him a lunch. She’d go into the kitchen and there would be no one sitting at the table eating Cheerios—just me. Everything was quieter, everything was a reminder of the emptiness. When Dad and I left for the day, Mom would be alone in the house. Her son was gone and there was nothing she could do about it, so Mom went back to the restaurant. The hardest part was always the beginning of the day.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  Mom told us to keep ourselves sane because that’s what she tried to do. She was always pulled together. She got out of bed, ate, exercised, bathed, dressed, and went to work. She cooked. She worked long days and nights at RSVP, sometimes seven days a week, always appearing fresh and happy, no matter what was going on inside her heart and behind the bathroom doors. She cooked and cried at the restaurant, but by the time the guests arrived, she had pulled herself together, put on her red lipstick, and pushed open the doors from the kitchen to the dining room, smiling and greeting each person as they sat down to eat. Even if it was just a week after her son died. She pulled herself together, tightly, and she worked. She was always tired. We didn’t talk much. I rarely saw her. It went on like this for a long time.

  For a long time, she wouldn’t go in or near his bedroom. The Jimi Hendrix poster to the left of his bed; the autographed Scottie Pippen basketball that Dad purchased at some charity auction; the photos of him and his neighborhood buddies swimming in the lake—it was all too much. Going into his room would turn him into a memory, not a person. Going into the room would turn the present into a past. He was a picky eater. He had a crush on a girl named Tina. He never needed braces for his teeth. He liked to be with his dad. He was good at math, and he was a good traveler. Once on a family trip to Poland, Mom took him to visit his birthplace. We all arrived in the town where Jules was born and he got very quiet and afraid. He was worried we were there to drop him off, that we were getting rid of him or returning him. He actually thought we were going to leave him there.

  “Drunk Kills Teen Everybody Liked.” There was a thick stack of newspapers from the morning after, piled on top of a chair in his room. Lots of people from town saved it and for some reason gave their copies to us. “Julian Philip Ptacin, age 14.” Not many people knew who he was, unless they knew my parents or played football for Pennfield High School or saw the yearbook photo of him in the Battle Creek Enquirer on the morning of Sunday, October 12, 1997.

  But Jules was also the boy in the photo Mom held in her hands many mornings while sitting on her bed, crying and praying. I walked past this often. In the picture, he is standing next to his dog, Gonzo. They’re approaching the edge of a forest, both in orange vests, preparing to hunt quail. Jules’s smirk expresses ambivalent enthusiasm. They are going on an adventure, they are going to hunt down some birds, but he doesn’t want to kill any of them, so he doesn’t.

  Jules was also the boy who would let his mother and sisters know that he loved them by sneaking up from behind and messing up their hair. Mom said he was an affectionate guy. She told me that anytime she drove him anywhere, he had to hold her hand if he was sitting in the passenger seat. She said Jules would take her hand willingly, as long as his friends weren’t around, as long as nobody could see.

  I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  Three months after I moved home, he died. I left the house, just for one night, and he died.

  So I became docile. One child had died, so I needed to be the goodness of two. I became submissive. Obedient. When I had done things my way, I caused nothing but disaster. I didn’t know what to do with myself.

  I chose a college close to home. I’d visit every weekend. I’d make up for my past, my years of being a ridiculous child who thought she knew everything there was to know about life.

  “Just try to keep yourself sane,” is what Mom told us the very first morning we went to court. A couple months after he T-boned Dad and Jules with his car, James Gordon was summoned to court. We all were—Dad, Deborah, the policemen, hospital technicians that tested Gordon’s blood samples, Bobby from the liquor store, and other eyewitnesses. None of us can remember how long the trial lasted—maybe ten days, maybe eight days—but it felt like eternity. It felt like purgatory, or hell with a business-casual dress code. It was horrible. We had to sit quietly and relive the night over and over and over as lawyers narrated different versions of how it all went down; day after day of contradictory accounts of what really happened the night Jules died. Each side battling to represent The Truth.

  In court, Gordon showed no remorse. Mom said he looked arrogant, even, but all I could remember were the dirty looks his family gave ours every time we arrived at the courthouse, and the guilt I felt for being white. James Gordon was black. He had a couple of grown children who came to the trial, and they were black, too. Then there was Deborah and her family. Deb’s family was white, but they were Gordon’s family now. White versus black. I was worried the case was going to be perceived as a race issue. Gordon could’ve been polka-dotted and it wouldn’t have mattered to me or anyone, but I was worried the difference in skin color would be used against us by Gordon’s lawyers. It was.

  After Jules died and before the trial began, Deborah and Gordon got married, maybe so she wouldn’t have to testify against him, but it didn’t do much good; the defense had no case. The only question in the trial in need of an answer was whether or not the following had happened: Gordon drank a lot of liquor, ran a stop sign, and crashed into another car. Black or white. There was no gray area. Either it happened or didn’t. And it did happen.

  Still, words scissored through the truth as Gordon’s lawyers concocted reason after reason for why it all happened. Their theories were bizarre and insensitive: the police tampered with the evidence, the stop sign was hidden, the road was too slippery. They suggested my dad was a liar, mentioned something about it being a race issue, or that the hospital technicians altered Gordon’s blood-alcohol test results because Dad was a doctor. When my father was on the witness stand, Gordon’s lawyers toyed with him. They drilled him and impatiently waited for his response. Dad tried to answer as honestly as he could, tried to be transparent and to answer all their questions, but Gordon’s lawyers made him cry. One defense lawyer sighed, rolled his eyes, and kept pushing, and we weren’t allowed to do anything about it. We had to just sit there. They brought out photos of the accident scene. I remember the picture of the car. The car was black and shiny and smashed. It looked like an accordion.

  We tried to be contained; we tried to be present and strong like Mom suggested we be, but a couple of times we couldn’t hold it in. Once, when Sabina and I were returning from a lunch break, Gordon’s lawyers jumped into our elevator just as the doors were shutting. One of the guys, the plump one, stuck his foot in the door and pried it open. They both slid in, smiling. Their suits were ugly. Once the elevator started to move, they tried to make small talk with Sabina and me, as if what had been happen
ing inside the courtroom wasn’t really real, like it was all business, or theater, or make-believe. I started to get really hot, but I kept to myself. Sabina didn’t. “You are scum,” she said to them. “You are scum of the earth.” Another time, an early morning when we arrived at the courthouse, Mom lost control. She walked over to Gordon’s lawyers and, in a steaming breath, asked them how they could do their work with a clear conscience.

  They lost the case, and Gordon got eight to fifteen years (and was released after eleven). But it didn’t matter. We were drained, now even more brittle with sadness. None of it could bring Jules back.

  Months passed. I hung around. I was meek. We turned gray. We cried a lot. Mom cried a lot, too, but she didn’t always let us see it. She worked a lot. She prayed. She’d go to church with her friend Claire, to a small cathedral called The Chapel of Perpetual Adoration. She read books about death and dying, books about people having paranormal experiences. She tried to find something that would give her hope. She hoped that maybe she’d have some kind of message or communication from Jules, like what the people in the books said they’d had. Sometimes, when she was alone, she would float into his bedroom, look at his pictures, touch his pillow.

  Mom said this was around the time she learned how sweet people in small towns really are. For months, there would always be fresh flowers on Julian’s grave. For months, people put things on his headstone: pretty stones, flowers, stuffed animals. They still do. Even though she had a hard time going to Pennfield football games because it was too painful not to see him there. Amanda and I would go with her, though, and she said she had to be sensitive to his classmates—they invited her to their school to visit. She also wanted to be considerate to his class, she wanted to help them grieve, let them know there was someone there with them.

  Either before or after work, Mom would drive to the cemetery and just sit there, sit in the car just to be physically close to Jules. She said it gave her some idea that they were being together. It was something that reminded her of him. For a long time, that’s how it was: Mom worked at the restaurant, Mom worked for peace, and Mom worked to preserve the memory of her son in her mind. For a long time, she worked tirelessly to conserve the image of him in her heart.

  I stayed at home. I was quiet. I just watched. Mom said she had to be strong for the other people. She would take care of Dad, support him when he needed it. She became very involved in Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD). She met a lot of people, people who felt the same things she had felt: Sadness. Anger. That knot of grief. When she wasn’t working, she’d get in her van and drive two hours north for MADD meetings, then two hours back. On the drives up, she’d listen to NPR. On the drives home, she’d cry the whole time. She would come home so angry. She’d be tired and frustrated because she’d be talking about things that reminded her of Jules’s death even more vividly. Soon, she became an advocate and spokesperson for MADD. She worked with the Michigan government to change the law, and she went to D.C. to speak to Congress. She stayed busy; she said it kept her sane. Tell yourself, At least Julian’s death can help someone else. It doesn’t have to be in vain. She told us that the people she worked with were nice people. She said some had lost their kids, too, or were injured by a drunk driver. They rallied together.

  She and I grew apart.

  In August, ten months after the accident, I left home. I was starting my freshman year at college in Kalamazoo, Michigan, the same college I was visiting the night Jules died. On a Saturday, Dad and Sabina helped me pack my belongings into the van and unpack them into a dorm room that smelled like wet carpet. Mom was working at the restaurant that night. School started, I got on with my life. I’d come home every weekend to visit, but I didn’t get to see her that much.

  The hardest part was—still is—the passage of time. My sister driving back to college. Me back in school. Grass growing over the fresh soil at the gravesite. Football season turning into basketball season. The passage of time meant that it would be one day more that Julian was gone, one day more difficult to remember things that were fresh in the mind. Soon, it would be six months, seven, eight, ten, fifty. When the one-year anniversary of his death approached, none of us knew what to do. I suggested we go for barbecue, wherever we were, regardless of whether we were vegetarians or not, in honor of Julian’s favorite food.

  Soon after, my parents started to develop their own traditions of remembering Julian. They began traveling with their friends during the week surrounding October 11th. Mom’s friend Claire suggested it—that they take a road trip to someplace they’d never been to. That it’d be something happy happening around that time of year, something positive to look forward to, where they could talk about their kids, where they could talk about Julian. They dubbed themselves the FUN PIGs: Four Unusually Nice People In General. The first year, they went to Vermont to see the fall foliage. The year after, they went to Intercourse, Pennsylvania. They sent me postcards.

  I did well in college. I worked hard. I made friends. I got along okay. I avoided taking risks. I didn’t party. I played racquetball. I stopped playing the violin. I avoided participating in the arts; I dated a violinist and watched him play. I bought a ticket and sat in the audience instead. I visited home every weekend. I was restless. Afraid. Maybe a little bored. Soon, I graduated college, and moved to Maine, and then New York. I didn’t know what to do.

  A child dies and there is an elemental shift in everyone. But who is moved when that child was never born?

  fourteen

  September 13, 2008

  It is raining hard outside. Andrew and I are standing before our mothers, and our mothers are facing us, dressed in gowns, perfumed and glowing, with their arms entwined. They are both short, and at this point, they are both crying. Andrew’s mom wipes a tear off my mother’s cheek with a tissue as mine addresses us: “If I speak in tongues of men and of angels but have not love, I am just a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.”

  I steal a glance at Andrew. His posture is very upright and very proud. He is in a tuxedo and is listening to the words my mother is giving us. His brows are furrowed, as if he’s concentrating very hard, trying to memorize everything. He looks like a real man, and together we look like a giant replica of two miniature figures that belong on top of a wedding cake in a bakery storefront window.

  My mother continues. “If I have prophecy and know all the mysteries and knowledge, if I have all the faith so as to remove the mountains but have not love, I am nothing.”

  She has known all her life that this is the chapter she would be reading. Corinthians 13. That, she was prepared for. Last night, I helped my mother print two copies of the Bible verse (one extra script for backup) on two thick sheets from the box in the computer room. Fancy sheets, the leftover paper Mom used to print her restaurant’s holiday menus on. The stock we chose is the kind she used for Valentine’s Day dinners. It is salmon-colored, with cupids and roses and lacy hearts. Mom is gripping the pink paper now, and although her voice is steady, I can see the Corinthians trembling between her fingers. “Love is patient,” she continues. “Love is kind. Love does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud or rude.”

  We are forming an arrow out of our bodies. On this side are my maids: my sister, Sabina; my best friend, Amanda; cousin Maya; and Andrew’s sister, Kerri. My maids are in bright red satin gowns and each woman cups a yellow sunflower with her hands. On that side are Andrew’s men: four square-shouldered boys from Murphysboro, Illinois. The boys of his youth. Country boys. Andrew’s men are in black tuxedos and all hold their fisted hands in front of their crotches, like they’re shielding them from something. Then there is Andrew and me. We almost make the tip of the arrow—we just need to move a few steps closer together—but it’s not quite time.

  I’m wearing scarlet lipstick and have a plastic, white orchid in my hair. I wear a long, light gown. A versatile dress; a white maternity wedding gown, versatile in the sense that I can
still look just fine in it even though I’m not pregnant. I’m not pregnant anymore, even though I just was. It feels like it was yesterday; it feels like it never happened; it feels like it did happen, years ago, all at once. I still fill the dress nicely, but I am anxious to move in it. I’m trying to look good, just get through this and steer away any attention from the tragedy, keep things moving forward, be celebratory. I’m trying to listen to my mother’s reading, but I need to come up with an alternative route to the unity candle, some way I can get over to that table without showing my backside—what if I’ve started to bleed again? I’m not wearing a pad. This silk is thin. There’s no way to know if it’s going to start again. And watch the breasts, careful with the breasts. Any sudden squeeze may bring about leakage or lactation. This dress is white. Damn it. I let out a breath of tension and look over again at Andrew. He’s still concentrating on my mother’s words and I remind myself to try and follow his example.

  “Love is not self-seeking and does not delight in evil,” she reads, “but rejoices with the truth. Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”