Cracks in the Sidewalk

by Bette Lee Crosby

  He waited until Liz slipped into her brand new cotton nightgown, then helped her into the bed. “How about I read to you? Would you like that?”

  Elizabeth nodded.

  “Catcher in the Rye? How’s that sound?”

  She nodded again and allowed a happy but tired smile to settle on her face. Her father could have read anything—an encyclopedia, a dictionary, the telephone book. She just wanted the loving sound of his voice.

  Before Charles turned the third page Elizabeth was sound asleep. He closed the book and tiptoed from the room.

  ~ ~ ~

  Claire had to do something she didn’t want. Charlie would staunchly oppose it, but she had to do it nonetheless.

  “Can you stay here and keep an eye on Elizabeth?” she asked as Charlie settled into reading the latest copy of Business Week.

  He looked up and smiled.

  Claire shrugged on a brown sweater, dug the car keys from her purse, and descended the steps leading to the basement and garage. She made her way toward the back of the basement and the furthermost area to Charlie’s workshop. For several minutes Claire looked around; then she picked up a large sledgehammer, stashed it in the back seat of the car, and slid behind the wheel.

  As Claire drove she thought about the last words she’d heard from Jeffrey. “I want out,” he’d said. “You take care of her!” Claire had tried any number of times to speak to him since, but he refused to answer the telephone and the doorbell. She’d seen cars in the garage and people moving behind the drawn shades, but not once had he acknowledged her. Today he would have to.

  This was not a snap decision; the thought had rumbled through Claire’s mind for days. She considered discussing it with Charlie but decided against it. He would have stopped her. In fact, she would have stopped herself if she had an alternative. But she didn’t. Not when JT refused to talk.

  Claire reasoned Jeffrey deserved whatever he got. What kind of man walks away from a wife who’s sick? Only the lowest of the low! The anger swelled in Claire like rising dough, the thoughts coming so rapidly they pillowed over one another. It was time somebody stood up for Elizabeth.

  “Enough is enough,” she grumbled. Jeffrey would no longer prevent Elizabeth from seeing her children. She gave birth to those kids, and she had every right to see them!

  Claire was seething by the time she turned into Jeffrey’s driveway. A light glowed upstairs and shadows of people moved. She climbed from her car, slammed the door, stomped around to the side of the house, and peered through the garage window. The red Nissan stood alongside JT’s Chrysler.

  “Enough!” she yelled, then stormed back to the front door and jabbed the bell.

  Whispers came from inside, then silence. Claire pressed the bell a second time.

  “Jeffrey Caruthers, you’d better answer this door!” she screamed. “If you don’t open it right now, I’ll knock it down!” She continued to ring the bell for several minutes then stopped, stomped to the car, and returned with the sledgehammer.

  At first Claire thought brandishing it would be enough. But her anger slipped out of control, and she found herself attacking the door. The heavy sledgehammer took considerable effort to lift and swing. Once Claire got in motion it came crashing against the brass knocker, tearing it and several chips of paint loose from the door. Seconds later, Jeffrey yanked open the door and faced her with a menacing glare.

  “You do that again,” he screamed, “and I’ll call the police!”

  “Apparently it’s the only way to get your attention,” Claire answered. “We have things to discuss. Let’s go inside and talk.”

  “You’re not coming in my house!”

  “It’s not your house! Half of it belongs to Liz!”

  “Well, she’s not here, and when she’s not here it’s my house!”

  Claire reminded herself this was not why she had come. “Forget about who owns the damn house,” she said. “Let’s not stand out here and air our dirty laundry in front of your neighbors.”

  “I don’t give a shit. Air what you wanna air! Just get outta here and leave me alone!” JT began to close the door, but Claire wedged herself between the door and the jamb.

  “Get out!” he shouted and pushed harder.

  “No,” she answered, holding firm although the door dug into her thigh. “I came to ask about some things, and I’m not going to leave until you listen.”

  “Then you’ll go?”

  “Yes,” Claire answered, maintaining her hold on the doorway.

  “Go ahead,” JT said, easing off the door but still standing firm.

  “I need to get Elizabeth’s things. Now that she’s home from the hospital, she wants her clothes and jewelry, photo albums, personal stuff. It means a lot to her—”

  “Home from the hospital?” JT repeated.

  “Yes,” Claire answered.

  “Elizabeth’s okay now?”

  “Not one hundred percent,” Claire said, relaxing her guard. “Apparently this new treatment is working, and Liz’s feeling much better. She’s had such a positive reaction that Doctor Sorenson said she could come home and—”

  “But she’s still dying, right?”

  “Everybody’s gonna die sometime—”

  “But Liz is dying right now!” he said angrily. “Are you people blind or stupid? Do you really think pumping her full of these crapshoot drugs is gonna change things? It’s not! All it does it prolong my agony!”

  “Your agony?” Claire snorted. “Your agony?”

  JT began to exert pressure on the door again, but Claire held her ground. “I’m not leaving until I get what I came for!”

  Again he eased the pushing. “Okay, you can have the lousy clothes. I’ll send them over when I can. What else?”

  “You have to let the kids come visit Liz.”

  “I’d rather burn in hell,” JT sneered. “There’s no way she’s seeing the kids! They’re finally getting used to her being gone. You think I’m gonna let them get attached to her all over again? No way! She’s dying, accept it! Get on with your life! That’s what me and the kids are trying to do!”

  “They’re not just your kids,” Claire argued. “Liz gave birth to those kids, she’s their mother, she deserves—”

  “She deserves to die for doing this to us!” JT screamed and gave Claire a violent shove, sending her tumbling from the doorstep.

  Before she could gather herself from the ground, he slammed and bolted the door.

  Claire knew she’d get nothing more from JT. She could take the sledgehammer and pound on the door until it was a pile of splinters, but Jeffrey still would not answer. She returned to her car and sat there watching until the lights turned off and she saw no further sign of life inside the house. Then she backed her car out of the driveway and went home.

  ~ ~ ~

  Later that night Claire told Charlie, “I stopped by to see Jeffrey.”

  “Oh,” Charles answered, waiting for bad news.

  “I told him Liz would like to have her clothes and jewelry and personal stuff now that she’s home from the hospital. He said okay. He’ll bring them over.”

  “He agreed?” Charles gave a sigh of relief. “Good. Maybe he’ll come around. One step at a time, Claire, that’s all we can hope for. One step at a time.”

  She struggled with whether to tell Charlie what JT had said about not allowing Liz to see the kids, but in the end decided against it. Jeffrey had agreed to bring the things Liz needed and there was always a chance he would change his mind about the kids, especially after he saw how well she was doing.

  ~ ~ ~

  Although Elizabeth’s left side remained paralyzed, she began to take interest in things she’d ignored for months. She slept less, listened to radio talk shows, and read—books, magazines, even the daily newspaper’s advertising inserts. Each night she’d cream her face with moisturizer and in the morning apply lipstick as pink as the peonies on her bedspread. She hadn’t done these things in the hospital. Her smile re
turned, rosy as the glow of the walls in her new bedroom.

  Claire told her daughter Jeffrey would bring her clothes, and Elizabeth tried calling on the pretext of thanking him. He never answered. Instead of giving way to depression, Elizabeth began telephoning friends she’d not spoken with for months and asking if they’d come for a visit.

  After just one week at home, she said, “Nancy’s coming over this afternoon. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Mind?” Claire smiled. “Why, I’m delighted.”

  That afternoon when Claire heard the ripple of Liz’s laughter, she began to believe in the impossible. Somehow, some way, the tumor’s size would continue to decrease. She imagined it shrinking, shriveling to the size of a pea, and then disappearing altogether. Claire still heard the far-off echo of Doctor Sorenson’s warning, “Not a cure,” but it disappeared beneath the sound of her daughter’s laughter.

  The Following Month

  For the first ten days of April Westfield awoke to an abundance of bright sunshine, each morning more glorious than the previous one. Then on the eleventh day, a Saturday, it began to rain. It started before dawn and grew heavier as darkness puddled into a watery gray morning.

  Claire heard the rain pinging against the gutters and sensed this would be a bad day. Damp weather always brought a flare-up of the arthritis in her back, but she had the premonition of something far more troublesome waiting to happen. For a long while she lay there listening to the rain and trying to convince herself she was being foolish. Suddenly a loud crash splintered her thoughts.

  She jumped from her bed shouting, “What happened? What—” But before an answer came Claire saw the puddles of water and shattered glass strewn across the floor.

  Elizabeth was already becoming teary.

  “I’m sorry,” she sniffed. “I was trying to pick up that glass of water, but something’s happened to my hand!”

  “Don’t cry,” Claire said, moving across the floor without regard for the shards of glass. “It was an accident; accidents happen.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Liz said, sobbing. “What’s happened to me?”

  After making an obvious effort to lift her left arm, she finally reached across with her right hand and lifted the useless arm.

  “Look at this!” she screamed. “I can’t even move my arm!”

  Suddenly Claire realized Liz had no memory of her paralysis. She wrapped her arms around her daughter and gently explained, “You’re sick, sweetheart. There’s a tumor pressing against the side of your brain, and it causes this type of temporary paralysis.” Claire weighed each word carefully so she could explain without discouraging Liz.

  “Actually, the treatments you’re taking have helped a lot. Why, in no time you’ll probably be back to your old self.”

  Elizabeth looked at her mother, saying nothing.

  “Do you remember the chemotherapy treatments?” Claire asked.

  Still wearing a blank expression, Elizabeth shook her head side to side.

  “Do you remember the hospital? Or Doctor Sorenson?”

  “Oh.” A flicker of recognition suddenly registered. “Yes,” she said moments later, “of course I remember.”

  Claire smiled. “See, you’re doing much better. You’re not expected to remember every single thing, that’s why—”

  “But how could I possibly have forgotten something as important as this?”

  “Doctor Sorenson told us these temporary memory lapses are to be expected. Once you’re better, they’ll stop.”

  “I’ve done this before?”

  “Only a few times. Never for more than a minute or so.”

  Liz hesitated a moment, then brought her right hand to her face and covered her eyes.

  “Oh, my God,” she moaned. “Now I remember. I remember it all.”

  “Well, then, you know this is no time for feeling down,” Claire said. “You’ve made good progress, but you can’t expect to be totally self-sufficient—that’s why you’ve got this little bell alongside your bed. Jingle it, and I’ll help with whatever you want.”

  “What I want,” Liz said, a stifled sob in her breath, “is to be free of this horrible thing. I want to do things for myself, get my own glass of water, stand without someone to hold me, walk through my own front door, pick up my babies, and hug them. I want to clean house and do laundry—”

  A well of heartache and frustration broke and poured itself out in a cascade of tears.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” Claire whispered, gently rubbing the back of her daughter’s quivering shoulders. “Please don’t cry. We’ll get through this together. Everything will work out. Give it time, Liz. Give it time.”

  She wrapped her arms around Liz and held her close until the sound of sobbing disappeared beneath the rat-tat-tat of rain against the window. After a long while, Claire helped Liz into her bathrobe then into the wheelchair. On good days Elizabeth thumped from room to room using her walker. But on bad such as this, she slumped into the wheelchair and allowed herself to be pushed from one place to the next.

  By early afternoon the rain had become a drizzle with an occasional splotch of sun pushing through. In the early afternoon Liz gave in to a nap. Claire sat beside her trying to focus on a magazine, hoping she’d already seen the worst of this day but remembering that misfortunes generally came in sets of three. First there was the rain, then Liz’s accident. What next, Claire wondered?

  A little while later she heard noises outside: the rumble of an engine, the sound of men yelling. She left Elizabeth napping and stepped outside. A black pickup truck stood in the driveway, older perhaps than Claire and certainly in worse condition.

  “Get a move on!” the driver yelled to the man standing in the truck’s flat bed. “Toss ’em out.”

  “They’re gonna get wet.”

  “Just do it!” the driver commanded. “We don’t get paid for dry, we get paid for delivering!”

  “Wait a minute!” Claire shouted as she ran toward the truck. “I think you’re making a mistake. We’re not expecting any—”

  By then the man in the flat bed had heaved two large black garbage bags onto the driveway and had a third in his hand.

  “Your name McDermott?” the driver asked.

  “Yes,” Claire answered. “But—”

  “Then we got the right house,” he answered. “I told JT, twenty bucks if we dump the stuff in the driveway. We don’t carry it inside for no twenty bucks!”

  Dumfounded, Claire stammered, “What’s Jeffrey got to do—”

  But by then the truck had already backed away, leaving behind five soggy garbage bags in the driveway.

  Bewildered by the situation, Claire opened the first bag: Elizabeth’s clothes. Had she not recognized the pink suede suit her daughter wore Easter before last, Claire would have mistaken it as laundry. Coats, suits, dresses, shoes, underwear—none of it sorted, folded, or stacked, everything damp and crumpled. Clothes Liz had been meticulous about now looked like a bunch of rags set aside for dusting furniture or polishing the car. All five bags were the same, each worse than the one before. The injustice of it suddenly overwhelmed Claire.

  “How could he?” she cried and burst into tears.

  After she’d cried for nearly twenty minutes, Claire thought of Liz. Determined that her daughter should never learn of the callous disregard Jeffrey had shown, Claire hauled the five bags into the garage. From the upstairs bedroom she gathered an armful of hangers and a hairdryer. She returned to the garage and began to sort through the bags. Piece by piece, she shook loose the wrinkles and fanned the hairdryer back and forth until each garment appeared to have been dry cleaned. She hung the slacks, skirts, suits, and dresses on hangers and put the blouses, nightgowns, pajamas, and underwear in baskets. Claire expected to come across Liz’s jewelry and treasured photo albums beneath the other things, but they were not in the first, second, third, or fourth bags.

  The fifth bag contained mostly shoes that she sorted into pairs, setting as
ide three shoes that had no mates. Once she’d completed the task she looked around, wondering if she’d overlooked something. She gave each bag a vigorous shake, then checked inside every purse. Nothing. Jeffrey had sent clothes. Only clothes. No photo albums, no jewelry, no fur coats, no camera, not a single item of monetary value. He’d sent only what he wanted to get rid of.

  With a heavy heart Claire carried the things into the house and arranged each in their proper place. She put the folded things in the bureau, dresses and such hung in the closet, and beneath the hanging clothes lined up rows of pumps and sandals like colorful soldiers on parade. With everything in place, Claire sat down to wait for the tinkle of Elizabeth’s bell.

  ~ ~ ~

  When Elizabeth awoke, Claire informed her that her clothes had been delivered.

  “Now you have no reason to lazy around in that bathrobe,” she said cheerily.

  Elizabeth’s eyes brightened ever so slightly. “JT was here?”

  “No, he had a courier service bring the things. Jeffrey probably would have come himself, but maybe he’s working.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” Elizabeth answered with little conviction.

  In an effort to redirect the discussion, Claire flung open the closet door. “Look at these lovely outfits! This suit was always my favorite. You look so beautiful in—”

  “Mother,” Liz interrupted, “that suit is a size six. It wouldn’t fit me anymore. Not since I’ve gained all this—”

  “Then it’s time for some new clothes,” Claire said, ignoring the look of protest on Liz’s face. “Every woman needs clothes that fit, clothes she feels comfortable in. If you feel up to it, we’ll go shopping tomorrow. Tuesday’s a good day. The mall is never crowded on Tuesdays. I’ll put your wheelchair in the car, and when we’re finished shopping we can have lunch at that cute little—”

  Liz closed her eyes and leaned back into the pillow.

  “What’s wrong?” Claire asked.

  “Nothing,” Elizabeth answered. But tears rimmed her eyes. “What about my wedding ring? Did JT send my wedding ring? Or my engagement ring? The Rolex he gave me for our first anniversary? Did he send any of my jewelry? My picture albums? Did he say when he’d bring the kids over?”