Tory looked at Barry as Betty reached out to hug her. They had agreed to tell her the moment they arrived, so that Tory wouldn’t have to keep hiding her stomach. They hadn’t even been sure that the children wouldn’t shout out the news as soon as they came inside.
Barry caught her look, and drew in a deep breath. “Mom, we need to talk to you. Would you mind sitting down?”
“Well, sure.” She sat down in a chair and let Barry and Tory have the couch. “What is it?”
Tory looked at Barry, offering him a chance to go on. “Mom, we’ve had a rough couple of months, and that’s why we didn’t come Thanksgiving. The truth is, Tory and I weren’t getting along real well.”
She looked from Barry to Tory, then back again. “Well, I hope everything’s all right now,” she said.
“It’s better.” Barry looked down at the floor. “There’s something that we’ve kind of been holding back from you.”
“I knew it,” she said. “What is it?”
He couldn’t look up at her. “Tory and I are going to have another baby.”
A smile stole across her face, and she threw her hand over her mouth. “Well, for heaven’s sake. Why didn’t you tell me? What’s the big secret? I had terrible thoughts going through my mind.” She saw their serious expressions, and her joy floated down.
“It’s…the baby,” Tory said.
Betty’s face fell. She had been through this herself. She knew the shock and the grief and the anger and despair. She and her husband had probably gone through many of the same things Tory and Barry had.
“Mom, there’s something wrong with the baby.”
Her eyebrows came up. “What is it?”
“Down’s Syndrome,” Tory said.
She nodded as her eyes began to mist over. “When did you find out?”
“A few weeks ago,” Tory said. “Barry didn’t want to tell you.”
She shot a stricken look to her son. “Why not, Barry?”
He cleared his throat and looked down at his hands. “Because I didn’t know how to take it, Mom. The truth is, I wasn’t sure about the wisdom of bringing a baby into the world in this condition.”
Her eyes softened at once. “I wish you’d told me,” she said. She got up and went across the room to her son, sat next to him on the couch, and hugged him with all her might. He clung to her as his own eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.” Then she moved over to Tory and embraced her with all her might. “Oh, you poor thing. Your heart must have broken.”
“It did, but I’m okay now.”
“You should be okay,” his mother said, pulling back. “Children with Down’s Syndrome can usually walk. Most of them can talk. They can learn things. They can smile. Compared to my Nathan, your baby will be incredibly gifted.”
Tory realized that everything was relative.
“Have you called the American Association for Retarded Children?” Betty asked. “Has anybody given you the number for their support group?”
“A support group? Well, no.”
“I didn’t know you belonged to a support group,” Barry said.
His mother smiled and used her apron to dab at her tears. “Well, I haven’t needed them in a number of years, but it helped me a lot when I first had Nathan. Sometimes I thought I was going to die from my broken heart. We didn’t know ahead of time, you know, didn’t know until Nathan was several months old that things weren’t right with him. And then I found other parents who had children like him, and it helped so much. It’s what got me through.”
Barry’s brows drew together. “Mom, I thought you’d always accepted it. It always seemed like a joy to you, and I’ve been feeling so guilty because I haven’t been able to feel that.”
“It’ll come in time,” she said. “Trust me. It will. What a blessing to know in advance. By the time the baby comes, you’ll have gotten over the shock.”
Tory moved the coats aside and showed her mother-in-law her stomach. “It’s a girl,” she said with a smile.
“A girl!” Betty touched her stomach, and tears came to her eyes again. “A new grand-baby. Oh, I can hardly wait!”
After they had shared Christmas dinner and exchanged gifts, the children begged to look at the scrapbooks of Barry when he was a little boy, something they always did when they came to visit his mother. Tory knew where Betty kept the scrapbooks, and she got them out and sat between the children on the couch. Barry had disappeared into the garden, and she assumed he was sitting with Nathan, probably contemplating his wasted life. She hoped that Nathan’s subconscious wasn’t picking up on the condemnation from his brother.
“I found some more pictures,” Betty said, coming out of the bedroom. “The other day I was going through some of Stanley’s things and I ran across this scrapbook that Barry kept when he was a boy.”
Tory looked up, surprised. She’d thought she’d seen everything of Barry’s, but now she felt as if she’d stumbled on a new treasure. She set down the photo album they had seen so many times, and took the new scrapbook. It was crumbling at the edges, and some of the Scotch tape he had used for the pictures had come loose. Pictures lay loose between the pages.
She opened it and saw a picture of Barry in a children’s orchestra, holding his violin. She didn’t know he had ever played. “That’s Daddy,” she said.
“Who’s that?” Spencer asked, pointing to one of the kids beside Barry.
“I don’t know,” Tory said. “Probably just a boy in his class.”
“Who’s that?” Brittany asked, pointing to a girl.
“Just a girl in his class, Brittany. I don’t know these people.”
“Is this Daddy?” Brittany asked, pulling a picture out.
Tory studied it. “Yeah, Daddy and Nathan.” She saw the much younger-looking Nathan sitting in his wheelchair as Barry horsed around next to him. She turned the page and saw a picture of Barry jumping from the high dive at the YMCA, and another one of him coming up out of the water. She saw a baptismal certificate and his first Bible memorization ribbon. She kept turning, fascinated at the memorabilia from Barry’s past, at all the signs and clues that he had once been a child, though it was hard for her to imagine.
She came to several pages folded up and stashed between pictures and opened them up. “What’s this?” she asked his mother. “Looks like a report or a paper.”
“Yep, he wrote that in the seventh grade,” Betty said. “You should read it. It’s about Nathan.”
Tory surrendered the scrapbook to her children and their grandmother, and sat back quietly to read the story that her husband had written about his brother.
It was crudely written, by no means a work of art, but it was the story of a boy named James who had a retarded brother. The work had a touch of science fiction. It started with a newspaper report, claiming that technology had been invented whereby parts of other people’s brains could be transferred to retarded children. James, the character, decided that he would give half of his brain to his brother. But the doctor pointed out that, in order to do this and make his brother normal, he would lose half of his own intelligence. The doctor told him to think it over.
She followed the story as the boy walked home, thinking over his plight, trying to decide if it was worth it for him to stop making straight A’s in school, to stop being one of the smartest kids in the class, to stop outshining his brother in so many ways. Instead, he tried to picture what it would be like if his brother was more like him…and he was more like his brother…If there was some kind of middle ground between the two. Finally, he made the decision. He would gladly give up his intellect to make his brother normal.
It was not meant to be a tear-jerking story, or even one that gripped the emotions. It was written matter-of-factly by a boy who desperately wanted his brother to have a better life. But she found herself crying at the end, realizing that this came from a child who loved his brother, not one who rued the day he had been born.
; CHAPTER Sixty-Six
While Tory and the children were poring over his scrapbook and his old pictures, Barry went outside to sit with Nathan. It was getting cool, and his mother had put a sweater on his brother. She had buttoned it all the way to the neck, and Barry realized that it might be too tight at his throat.
“She’s got you bundled up here, doesn’t she, Nathan?” He unbuttoned the top two buttons, giving Nathan some relief. “So did you get everything you wanted for Christmas?”
Nathan was whistling “Silver Bells,” the last song playing on the tape his mother had put on during dinner. He had sat at the table with them, his wheelchair pulled up to a plate, complete with a place setting she knew he wouldn’t use. He had stared at a place on the wall and whistled along with the tape.
Now, Barry pulled a chair up next to his brother and sat down. He patted his arm. “It’s good to see you, man.” He realized the peace he felt when he was sitting next to his brother. There was no pressure, no need to be clever or funny. With Nathan, he had always been able to be himself, exactly as he was. Nothing more, nothing less.
“Remember how we used to play?” Barry asked. He pictured his brother answering. He always had, though Nathan just stared straight ahead. Instead of reminding Nathan of the game they used to play, he started whistling the tune to “Away in a Manger.” In just a couple of beats, Nathan had changed tunes and was whistling along with him. They whistled several verses of the same song, and finally Barry changed the tune to “We Three Kings.” Nathan switched gears again.
He could hear the energy and the vibrancy in Nathan’s whistle, could almost sense an invisible smile carrying out over the notes as Barry whistled with him. It was the only thing the two brothers had ever been able to do together, yet there had been times when it had been enough.
He changed the tune to “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” and Nathan picked up the tune again. Barry’s eyes grinned as he whistled with his brother in perfect unison.
When Tory finished reading the story, she went looking for her husband. She found him in the prayer garden with Nathan. Through the window, she saw them sitting side by side, and wondered why Barry had been out there so long.
Quietly she opened the back door and stepped out onto the patio. She wasn’t surprised to hear the whistling, but this time it wasn’t just Nathan. Barry was whistling, too, in perfect unison with his brother, so precisely and perfectly, that one might have thought they had rehearsed for many years.
Stricken, she realized they probably had.
She stood just outside the door, not willing to disturb them, listening to the moving sound as tears came to her eyes. Then Barry turned and winked at her as he whistled, and nodded for her to come closer.
She stepped slowly up to him, and he quickly changed the tune to “Jingle Bells.” Nathan was quick to follow.
Barry started laughing at the look on her face, and finally stopped whistling. Nathan kept going. “It’s a game we used to play,” he said. “No matter what I ever changed the tune to, Nathan could whistle it all the way through.”
“He’d whistle with you?” she asked.
“Sure,” Barry said. “In perfect rhythm. If I slow the tempo, he slows down, too. It’s the only way I’ve ever been able to communicate with him.”
She studied her brother-in-law. “Fascinating,” she whispered.
“There’s a lot about Nathan that’s fascinating. When I get to heaven, the first questions I’m going to ask will have to do with Nathan.”
“Maybe you won’t have to ask,” she said with a smile. “If he beats you there, he can tell you everything himself.”
Barry leaned forward, looking his brother in the face. The whistled tune of “Jingle Bells” sounded as festive as any tape she’d heard that day. “Maybe that’s what it’s about,” he said, his face sobering.
“What?” she asked.
“Heaven,” he said. “Maybe even if there isn’t a contribution here, maybe there’s something later. Maybe life on this earth is nothing more than a blip in God’s eternity. Maybe in heaven we’ll hardly even remember that Nathan wasn’t perfect here. Maybe he’ll have a special job, and contribute more than you and I ever dreamed.”
She thought that over as Barry got up and got her a chair. Barry started whistling “Silent Night,” and Nathan changed songs.
Tory sat down. “I found this,” she said, handing Barry the short story. “It was in an old scrapbook.”
He took it from her hands and unfolded it. He began to laugh. “Oh, no, that awful story I wrote about switching brains.”
“You gave him half of yours,” she said. “Half your intelligence so he could be normal.”
He chuckled. “It was a nice thought,” he said. “Too bad there’s never been the technology.”
She looked down at the yellowed pages, and more than she’d ever known anything in her life, she knew that if the technology had been developed, Barry would have easily given his brain to his brother. Like the whistling, this knowledge changed things somehow.
She watched as he moved his chair in front of Nathan and pressed his forehead against his, trying to get him to look him in the eye. Nathan still seemed vacant, but he kept whistling. Barry started “Oh, Holy Night,” and Nathan switched again.
As the two men whistled, face-to-face, Tory thought it was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard. She felt that admiration, that lost respect, seeping back into her heart, and she began to understand a little of what Barry had experienced earlier. Could it be that it hadn’t been a lack of love for his child that had prompted his decisions? Could it be that his ideas, though misguided, were really prompted by lifelong grief over his own brother’s plight?
Later that night when the children had fallen asleep on the floor in front of the television, the adults went back out to the prayer garden. Betty sat on the swing facing them. “Now that the shock is gone,” she said, “and I’ve gotten used to seeing Tory pregnant today, why don’t we talk about this some more?”
Barry sobered and looked out across the lawn. “Mom, I love you and I love Nathan, and I don’t want to hurt you for anything in the world. And I know it’s wrong. But I’ve had a real hard time picturing us having a baby who would never contribute anything.”
“Oh, but everybody contributes something,” Betty said.
“What could Nathan possibly contribute?” he asked. “I mean, I know that I feel good when I’m around him. And I know that he’s been an anchor for you, and I know that you’ve loved him and cared for him all these years. But I can’t help thinking that he’s trapped in there somewhere, and he can’t get out. And he can’t do any of the things he might have had the potential to do, if something hadn’t gone terribly wrong.”
His mother got to her feet slowly, dusted off the back of her pants, and reached for her son’s hand. “Come with me, Barry. There’s somebody I want you to meet.”
“Who, Mom?” he asked, getting up.
She looked down at Tory. “Would you keep an eye on Nathan for me, Tory? Barry and I are going to go next door for a second.”
“Next door?” he asked. “Why?”
“I told you,” she said. “There’s somebody over there I want you to meet.”
She walked him out the front door, then hooked her arm through his and led him to the front door of the neighbor next door. The house was lit up and the porch light was on, almost as if they were expected. His mother knocked on the door. “Millie, are you there?”
A little, decrepit old woman came to the door in her robe. She opened it and peered out with kind eyes. “Come in! Come in! What a joy! Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas to you,” Betty said, hugging the woman. “Millie, I want you to meet my son, Barry.”
“What a wonderful young man,” the woman said, shaking his hand. “I’ve been out on my patio listening to you and your brother whistle.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “You could hear us over here?”
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sp; “Of course,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things. I listen to Nathan all the time. Whenever I’m lonely I go sit out on my back patio. It’s been a real treat hearing all those Christmas tunes.”
Barry looked at his mother. “I had no idea anyone else could hear. I’m really sorry.”
“No, no. Don’t apologize. Please sit down,” she said, and she pulled them in and led them to an old Victorian couch in a parlor like something right out of the twenties.
Betty sat next to the old woman. “Millie, I want you to do me a favor and tell Barry how you came to know the Lord.”
The woman threw her arthritic hands into the air. “What a wonderful story,” she said. “Your mother hasn’t told you?”
He glanced at his mother, wondering what she was up to. “I haven’t seen her much in the last few months,” he said.
“He hasn’t heard,” Betty told her.
Millie’s eyes glowed with joy, and he could tell that whatever the story was, it meant a lot to her. “Well, you may not know this, but my dear husband of sixty years passed away last July. I thought I would just die.”
Barry leaned forward. “I’m so sorry. Then this was your first Christmas without him?”
The woman nodded, but the look on her face was anything but grief-stricken. “I had a very hard time. Mourned for months, and one night I just got to the point that I wanted to die. I had some sleeping pills that had belonged to Samuel, and I gathered them all up and figured out that it was probably enough to end it all peacefully.”
His mouth came open. “You were going to kill yourself?”
Tears came to her big eyes. “And I decided that I didn’t want my children to find me in the house, because I wanted them to feel free to come live here if they ever wanted, and I didn’t want it to have that stigma. So I took the pills and I got a big glass of iced tea and I went out back on the patio. I started rocking and drinking my tea and considering those pills.”
Barry was riveted. He kept his eyes locked on the woman.
“And then I heard the whistling.”
Showers in Season Page 31