by Jill Barnett
While my older sons were talking, my gaze drifted up to the sky and for one brief and fanciful moment, I wondered if I could gather every balloon on that mountain and fly right up to heaven.
“Where’s Renee?” Scott was looking around the group.
“I don’t know,” Molly said, searching, too. “She was here a few moments ago.”
“Mommy’s sick again,” Miranda said and pointed toward a work shed behind the lift. “She’s over there behind the building throwing up her breakfast. Like she did all the time with Tyler. Are we going to have another baby, Daddy? Another baby? Mommy said she’d talk to me about it later. I want a sister this time. A baby girl would be perfectly perfect.”
Molly looked at me with wide eyes that said, oh no . . . . I didn’t know until then she was in on the secret. She was very close to Keely. That Scott and Renee felt they had to hide their wonderful news was tough and not something either Phil or Keely would want, especially with so much loss. Suddenly we were standing in the midst of one of those family moments where you don’t know what to say.
But I knew Keely must have been reeling inside. The blood had drained from her face and she stared off bleakly at the shed. Phillip dropped his arm and faced Scott. “Is Renee pregnant again?”
The word again said more about what he felt than any other, and I hoped no one but me caught it. Scott, however, looked completely uncomfortable. With guilt in his eyes, he glanced to me as if for help, then back at Keely and his brother. Resigned, he nodded.
“That’s great, big bro.” Phillip was genuinely happy for him and went to shake Scott’s hand but between Tyler and the balloons, he had to clap him on the shoulder instead.
“I’ll go check on Renee,” Keely said hurriedly, her voice sounding higher-pitched than normal, and she took off toward the shed before anyone could stop her. Phillip watched her slide down the grade with a pensive look.
“I’ll go, too.” I started to step into my board and follow, but Phil grabbed my arm.
“No. Stay here, Mom.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” My eyes were on Keely who leaned against the shed, clearly talking to Renee, who was still hidden from view.
“It’s fine,” Phil said. “Let her help Renee. She needs to help her. Renee needs to know we know.”
With perfect twenty-twenty hindsight, I understood then that trying to protect Keely was the wrong approach. I couldn’t blame Renee or Scott. Instinctively no one wanted to hurt Keely, but hiding the news so she found out this way was not fair to her.
I could only guess at what kind of conversation she would have with Phillip later. For all his jokes, and chatter, and clowning around, Phillip, with his vulnerable and gentle heart could be the kindest, most sensitive of all my boys. Often he was more tuned into the colors of my moods than anyone else in the family, certainly better than Mike was at gauging me.
With perfectly lousy timing, some official blew the damned whistle again and announced we had to follow the others down the mountain. Renee and Keely joined us together by then, but Renee’s pallor was still grayish. “I’m sorry,” she said, clearly out of sorts.
“Are you going to be okay?” Scott asked her before I could.
“Renee,” I said. “You do not have to go down that mountain.”
“I want to, Mom. I’m okay now. Really I am. Someone hand me some balloons. I won’t get sick again.” She laughed facetiously. “There’s nothing left in my stomach.”
“Except a baby,” Miranda said brightly, tugging on her mother’s jacket. “I want a girl, Mommy. One stupid brother is enough.”
“Boy, isn’t that the truth,” Molly said to Miranda. “I’m plagued with stupid brothers. So is your Aunt Keely. Give me your hand, sweetie. You come down the hill with us and we’ll tell you some of the tricks they played on us so you can be prepared for when Tyler gets bigger.”
Across a sea of knitted beanies, I saw Mickey extract himself from a gaggle of balloon girls and plod across the packed snow in his boots. He had the biggest feet of all the Cantrell men, size thirteen, and was already six foot three.
“Glad to see you could pull yourself away from all the snow bunnies, Casanova,” Phil said, teasing him.
“Jealous, old man?”
“I don’t have to be jealous. I have the most gorgeous woman on the mountain,” Phil said, and he rubbed Keely on the behind. The grateful look she gave him told me things would be okay for them. Phil would do what he needed to do to make things right for her.
“Here’s my favorite snow bunny.” Mickey pulled me into a hug, resting his chin on the top of my head the same way his father used to do. “You okay?” he asked quietly.
“I will be now,” I said. For just that moment I let him hold me in his lanky arms the way his father had so many times, my cheek against his shoulder, thankful and trying not to get choked up and silly at my youngest son’s moment of thoughtfulness. Please go to college. Please don’t be an idiot. Please , , , please . . . please . . .
A little while later we released those balloons. Without a plan to do so, all of us stopped mid-run, and we linked arms, a daisy chain of Cantrells, as we watched all those huge and brightly colored balloons drift higher and higher. The crowds below us, the ones held back by the ropes along the run, cheered and whistled and applauded when balloons of every color filled the skies.
One of my favorite lines in the Nora Ephron film You’ve Got Mail, was when Meg Ryan’s character told Tom Hanks she thought daisies were happy flowers. It was a simple truth: there were certain things in this world that were happy solely because they existed. In a tender moment of enlightenment, I realized that balloons were just happy, like Meg Ryan’s daisies. And because Mike existed, both in my life and in this great confusing and impossible world, he made me incredibly happy for more years than I could count.
The official renaming of the annual winter event was announced from the network television box after we all reached the bottom of the run, and for a short while, we mingled together until the start of the boarding events drew close. My family had disbursed into the crowd when I caught Spider Olsen’s eye and walked up to him.
“How did it go with Mickey?” I asked.
“We talked. I let him ask questions. But I had called Seth and some of the others late last night, after I left you, and told them what I needed from them. They met us this morning. I told Mickey he needed to talk to all of us to make a solid decision. I don’t think you have anything to worry about. None of us painted the kind of glory and guts picture Mickey was dreaming about. Those boys were blunt. I think Mickey walked away believing half of them wanted to quit the circuit now. The last thing your son said to me was that he wasn’t going to let his dad down.”
Joy spread through me like warm sunshine. Everything would be okay. Mickey would be okay. My youngest was made for college, the smartest of the bunch, grades and studies came almost too easily for him. With his SATs and GPA, his apps letter, community service and outside activities, he was almost assured of getting into one of his top three picks, and there had been no more pranks involving the police.
“Thank you.” I threw my arms around his neck and gave him a huge hug. Laughing with relief, I pulled back, but he loosely held my hands in his.
“I was glad to do it. For you and for Mike. He was a good guy.” Spider paused and then said, “My biggest regret is that Mike didn’t take me up on my offer that night—to fly home on the network jet the following day—but he was in a hurry to get home.”
I stood there with my stomach somewhere near my feet. His words sank deeper into me, wounded me even more than I thought words could. I was bleeding inside. He was still holding my hands, but I was in shock and couldn’t pull them away, and I couldn’t believe what he had just said to me. His biggest regret?
A flash of familiar red hair stepped into my line of sight and Molly elbowed right between us, breaking contract. My hands felt scolded and I stared down at them.
�
�Scott’s looking for you, Mother,” she said sharply.
“I didn’t move.
“Mother!”
I looked up at her, frowning. What did she say?
His biggest regret was echoing in my head and I could barely hear anything else.
“Scott. He’s over by the stands.” Molly spun around, clearly dismissing me, but not before I caught her expression, a mulish one I knew all too well and had seen only the night before.
The network jet? The next day?
“I want to talk to you,” she said and grabbed Spider’s arm, pulling him away with her, but not before I heard her say, “You need to stay away from my mother.”
“Whoa . . . Wait a second.” Spider held up his hands. “You’ve got this all wrong.”
“Mom!” I turned slowly at the sound of Scott’s voice. He waved at me and was threading his way around the crowds toward the sideline ropes, and stepped under them. “I know we were supposed to go home tonight, but Renee’s sick again and I think I need to get her home now. Mickey wants to stay for all the events and so does Phil.”
“Okay,” I said blankly.
“I need some help with the kids.” Scott was usually my calm and thoughtful son. He seldom overreacted or let his emotions rule his decisions, but he sounded stressed.
“Of course I’ll come with you now.” I turned for a moment and saw Molly and Spider were still talking heatedly. I had this sudden urge to get my daughter away from Spider. What he had said to me was unconscionable. “Maybe Molly will want to go with us.”
Scott shook his head. “She’s staying late, too.”
I could barely stand to watch them without wanting to drag Molly away. What if he told her that? I took a protective step toward my daughter, but Scott stopped me.
“Leave her alone, Mom. Spider Olsen has plenty of experience dealing with hotheaded twenty four year olds. We need to leave. Now.”
So I followed Scott instead, but in my head was the haunting question: if only Mike had stayed. If only he had taken that jet. If only . . .
Chapter Twelve
Time slogged by, the days and hours and minutes, and I spent much of that time in my bed. I lay there unable to move, my mind as blank as I could make it. I had stopped sleeping at night. Some days, though, I could sleep all day. God knows I understood why, I’d had psych classes, but understanding the ramifications of trauma didn’t help me overcome my fear of falling asleep.
Intensely real dreams swept through my sleeping mind and I would awake with night terrors, something I have never experienced. In fact, in my lifetime I have seldom dreamt, or at least remembered any dreams. But now my mind played wicked games with me.
In those cruel dreams, I was in bed and I would wake up to discover Mike’s death had only been a nightmare, that he was there sleeping next to me, or he’d walk out of the bathroom in a towel, laughing at me. These moments of illusion seemed so real that sometimes, right after I awoke, I couldn’t stop my heart from racing as though it were trying to jump out of my chest. Other times, I would wake up already crying.
So instead of twisting and turning in bed, I tried to keep myself busy. There was a twenty-four hour market open a few miles away, and a twenty four hour Starbucks drive thru. Grocery shopping around giant pallets of organic soup and dog food wasn’t so bad, and I began to crave venti caramel macchiatos at three thirty in the morning.
The house had always been big but seemed hollow and cavernous now. So I cleaned all the time, even though I had a cleaning service that came twice a week.
It was a wide-awake Wednesday today, rather than troublesome Tuesday or frenzied Friday. (I had names for each insomnia-laced night of the week, now that I was better at knowing what day of the week it was.)
Around four A.M., I finished vacuuming, so I emptied the canister, took out the trash, did two loads of laundry, and wiped down the kitchen counters. Armed with a Pledge can in hand, I went from room to room, polishing the furniture, dusting lamps, newel posts, the wooden slats on the stairs, under the Louis XIV Bombay chest in the hallway. I cleaned the wedding silver I seldom used, my grandmother’s tea service, and changed the toilet paper rolls in the three downstairs bathrooms so they were all dispensing from the bottom. That way, when you tore from right to left, the paper ripped along its perforations and didn’t puddle down to the floor. Unless you were left-handed, like Scott and Molly.
These jobs were not important, except to me, but only because they were proof I was still functioning on some bizarre anal-retentive-toilet-paper-unrolling level.
Sometimes, when I looked up at a clock, I found time was belly-crawling by. I was born with a razor sharp internal clock and could look easily out a window or up at the sky and instinctively know what time it was. Now I lived within a skin and body where time had no reason to matter, and my instincts didn’t seem to work anymore.
Across the room Mike’s closet was empty, and if not for the three shirts the laundry had lost and delivered a month after his death, there wouldn’t be a single piece of his clothing left in my world. You could look in the closet and never know he existed. The thought almost killed me, to think he was gone and so many people would never know him. The day the cleaners delivered those shirts, I unwrapped them and ran upstairs holding them to my chest. I hid them in our dresser like some survivor of a plane crash who hid her granola bars from everyone.
The kids had each taken what they wanted from Mike’s things: Scott took shoes; Phil some ties; Mickey a leather jacket and Molly took a pair of blue sweats that were Mike’s favorite. I was numb to it all. Everyone had been so anxious to get rid of his clothes for me as if what was inside his closet were more deadly than driving on a one way street.
For some reason, in those first days and weeks, I had thought only in exchanges: If I let them help me, they will leave. Give in, because they need to do something. What does it matter? Maybe then everyone will stop asking what I need.
So I had let my well-meaning friends and family strip Mike from the house in the name of good sense and protection, and later regretted it terribly. I had completely lost the ability to say no and was wrapped up inside my own helplessness, which seemed to escalate the more I let everyone tell me what I should do.
For my own sanity, I knew I needed to find the courage to take control back from everyone I’d rolled over and given it to, those who only wanted the best for me. I needed to find out what was best for me. That was now the uncharted journey I faced.
Inside our bedroom where the king sized bed was made perfectly; the Chinese lamps were on the nightstand; the damask bedding on the bed, the same throw pillows, the same striped sofa sat by the fireplace, and Mike’s leather chair with an ottoman was parallel to mine—an old club chair that had belonged to my mother-in-law I’d had reupholstered—I realized most of my life had been parallel with Mike’s. I had lived more years with him than without him.
Only last night I was reading the book that lay open on my chair. There was a woman wearing a dark dress and pearls on the cover, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember what the story was about. What happened while I was reading that book was what hounded me.
While turning a page, I casually glanced up and saw Mike coming around the corner as he had a thousand times before. I sat forward so fast, afraid to breathe. For that one, heart-stopping instant, I really thought he was still alive. Struck almost frozen, I couldn’t move or breathe or blink, because of the sudden, intense, almost blindingly exquisite joy that raced though me . . . until reality checked in. I was living a nightmare, not waking from one. Talk about your mind playing tricks on you.
Dear God in Heaven wasn’t I pitiable enough? I felt crushed and mired in feelings and thoughts I couldn’t control or stop. My life had become one that existed in another dimension to the chairs, to the sitting area, the bed, which all looked as if they belonged in someone else’s world.
No matter how long I had looked in that same spot, nothing was there but proverbial thin air
. Like some fairy tale character standing over a caldron and chanting, looking for a magic goblet or ring, I tried to bring Mike back to me. I turned on the lights. I turned off the lights. I carefully positioned myself in that exact spot again, holding the book just as I had been, and I glanced up, again and again. Before me was only the doorway, unchanged and empty.
Rational thought told me seeing Mike was impossible, but what I had seen was such a vibrant image. He’d been wearing his favorite aqua blue sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up his arms, dark hair swirling around the scar on his forearm from an old board injury. Does a person hallucinate in color? You don’t imagine images that sharp and real.
Human desire was a powerful emotion. When you wanted something with such need perhaps the mind could almost make it happen. Almost. Was I seeing him in some other place, halfway back into this life and coming back to me? I’d always been a spiritual person with a strong faith. I wanted to believe in Heaven, that Mike was safe and waiting for me, but I had this big beef with God now. We weren’t on speaking terms.
No matter how desperately I wanted to conjure or wish or dream Mike back to me, he wasn’t there. When a tree shadow from the window traveled over the carpet I had my rational answer. What I had seen was only a shadow of the tree outside the window. It was just a shadow.
So I had tried to go to sleep with the drapes closed, but woke up anyway. Now, there wasn’t a single piece of furniture left in the house that wasn’t polished into shining perfection. I set down my trusty Pledge can, my panacea to tormented moments of wakefulness, and I opened the drapes.
Looking around the room, I couldn’t shake an odd feeling that I was a stranger in the one room that was most personal to me. I angled the Bose on my nightstand so the time read more easily from different spots in the room (I tested each angle myself), then adjusted the amber lamp cord so when you stood back, you had to really look closely to even notice it.