Porch Lights (2 page)

Before I get too far ahead of myself I should tell you a little about my mother, Annie. Basically, she’s the antithesis of Aunt Maureen. She’s rock steady like Maureen, but she’s got this other side that, well, let’s just say that a little bit of Momma goes a long way for some people. She’s just too much. You know what I mean? She’s too effusive, too dramatic, too fussy about the superficial and not fussy enough about other issues—for example, she still wears red lipstick, she drives a Sebring convertible, and she thinks she can interpret dreams. Okay, maybe that’s a lame indictment, but what I’m trying to say is that she says and does these things all the time that make me cringe. And how did she let my father just walk out of the door after twenty-something years of marriage? There was no history of screaming fights, no tears were shed, and no marriage counselors were brought in to help. They just split. Yes, that happened the day after I got married. It was all over the fact that Dad’s fishing tackle was left on the back porch and she had company coming. At my mother’s house, the back porch is the main entryway. God forbid someone tripped over a smelly cast net. It is the single dumbest story in my family’s history. And I’m a little embarrassed to admit that for a long time I thought it was a dramatic move on her part to steal some thunder from my wedding weekend. Now I can see that Dad had simply had it with her, her rules, her house, her everything. I understand. I escaped too.

They’ve been living apart now for almost eleven years. I know they’re lonely without each other, but wow, are they ever stubborn. They’re like two mules. At least I
think
they’re lonely, and they must miss each other. Dad has never been out with another woman, to the best of my knowledge, and Momma has never dated either. If anybody’s stepping out on the other I don’t want to know.

When I have asked him why he doesn’t just go home, he says he’s waiting for Momma to cool down. For eleven years? Hell, volcanoes cool faster. When I ask her how Dad’s doing, she says Dad’s just gone fishing up in Murrells Inlet and she imagines he’ll come home when he’s had enough sun. I know, I know. It’s their business, but when Jimmy died, I needed my parents. Both of them. And so did Charlie.

So Momma came to Jimmy’s funeral and Dad stayed home because Momma said she couldn’t be in the same room with him. She said the thought of having to look at him made her nerves act up. She always said that as though her nerves were a separate entity with a will of their own. How could I forget that? I’d been walking on eggshells around her my whole life, living in fear of making her nerves act up. Isn’t that great? I was in such a state of disbelief and anguish over losing Jimmy that I didn’t object, but it was typical of her to think of herself and her nerves first and to never give a thought that maybe I needed my father too. Here we have a fine snapshot of the differences between us.

Momma stayed for a week and a half. The first thing she did was ask me with a smile when was the last time we had pushed all the furniture away from the walls to clean. Was she implying we lived in squalor? Didn’t she realize how long I’d been away? I just let her take over and do whatever she wanted. As if I could have stopped her anyway. Annie Britt was a whirling dervish with paper towels in one hand and a sponge in the other. She reorganized all our closets, packing up most of Jimmy’s clothes for Goodwill, something I was loath to do. I kept his sweaters and a few other things, like neckties and his FDNY uniform, that I thought Charlie might like to have one day. Next she cleaned the bathroom and kitchen until they glistened. Have at it! She filled the freezer with single-serving containers of soups, stews, and pasta sauces, and she helped me write thank-you notes for all the flowers and cakes that people brought and brought—to her surprise, as though people in the North didn’t offer condolences like people in the South.

“We mostly bring hams and pound cakes,” she said. “I mean, how much baked ziti can a person consume?”

“The same amount as ham,” I said and thought, Oh, brother.

Charlie’s toys were dusted and rearranged on his shelves, and all the while she dusted and rearranged them, Charlie sat on the side of his bed telling her in fragmented mumbles what each one meant to him. As he spoke, he was so subdued that my heart ached for my little chatterbox to reappear.

The week after she left, Charlie’s troubles mushroomed. He seemed to have lost interest in everything. Even his skateboard, the one physical activity he was crazy about, stood by the door, abandoned as though the idea of fun belonged to his past. I had to argue with him to go to school. Maureen was right. He wasn’t eating enough for a boy his age. He didn’t even want to take a bath. He began having nightmares about terrorists and burning buildings. Then he dreamed that I died and that he was all alone, lost somewhere in a place like Central Park surrounded by strangers and no one to help him. After one of those horrific episodes, he would appear at the foot of my bed sweaty and shaking. I’d get up, throw my arm around his shoulders, and lead him back to his room. After a few nights of putting him back to bed, not once but many times, I let him bring in his comforter and sleep on the floor next to me. Obviously, I knew Charlie sleeping in my room could become a bad habit, but I didn’t care. My poor boy was just as distraught as I was, and we were both exhausted from grief and lack of sleep.

Every night after we lost Jimmy, I’d lie in bed in the pitch-black dark just thinking. It wasn’t that I couldn’t accept his death. God knows, I’d seen plenty of death in the hills of Afghanistan—men, women, and children, torn apart and literally blown up by the insanity of their own countrymen. And what happened to the Americans was just as bad and sometimes worse. Hell, I’d seen the Taliban use children as suicide bombers for the promise of candy. No, it wasn’t about death per se. It was that I was just completely and utterly heartbroken; that’s all.

The day I married Jimmy was the happiest day of my life, next to the day when I held my newborn Charlie in my arms. Our love and the love I felt for our little family pulled me through a war. Overseas, I was so careful all the time because coming home to them was always on my mind’s front burner. Charlie was my sweetheart, and Jimmy McMullen was the only man I had ever loved. I would never get over the horror of losing him. Never. And now I worried that maybe Charlie wouldn’t either.

I tried so hard not to get upset in front of Charlie, knowing it wouldn’t do him any good and believing I had to be strong for him. But alone in my bed at night, tears would come, memories of the three of us by the score would come rushing through my brain in some kind of a landslide of scenes, skipping from last Christmas to the summer before, Charlie’s first day of school, holiday programs, another summer preceding it, telling Jimmy I was pregnant, on and on. By some godforsaken hour I’d sleep again in fits and starts, only to wake up once more and remember again that he was gone. In so many ways, Jimmy’s death
was
unbelievable. I’d stare at the ceiling, waiting for the alarm to ring and worrying about what would become of us. Intellectually, I knew that eventually I would somehow adjust. Eventually, I
would
adjust. But what about Charlie? How deep was his wound?

Finally I called my father, and the next thing I knew I was weeping as though the news were brand new.

“I’m getting on a plane today,” he said.

Dad arrived that night to assess the situation and to offer what comfort he could. He worked his grandfatherly magic on Charlie, and for a little while it seemed that my boy was perking up. Dad took him to the Museum of Natural History one day and on another to the Yogi Berra Museum out in Montclair, New Jersey, where Yogi Berra himself happened to be that afternoon. He signed a baseball for Charlie that he carried around with him wherever he went, including the dinner table. They went out for ice cream every night after all the dishes were washed and put away. Dad told Charlie stories, wonderful stories about how he used to churn peach ice cream when he was a kid, and Charlie marveled at the fact that you could actually make your own. They were still talking about making ice cream when they came home one night.

“It’s a heckuva lot better than what you can buy in the stores,” Dad said with a laugh.

“Can you teach me how to make it?” Charlie asked.

“You betcha booties, baby! You can count on it! Get your momma to bring you down south to see me, and we’ll make ice cream every day.”

“Even blueberry?” Charlie asked.

“Even blueberry,” Dad said.

“You still have that old churn?” I asked.

“It’s somewhere under your Momma’s house,” he said. “You bring Charlie and we’ll find it.”

Dad’s magic had a shelf life with an unfortunately short expiration date. Within just a few days of his departure, I began to see all the signs of Charlie’s depression returning. God, I felt so impotent and so deeply sad to realize there was so little I could do for him or for myself that could change a thing. And feeling that useless made me more depressed. But hell would freeze before I would tell my mother. She’d have me in a shrink’s office in five minutes.

Who was I kidding? It was right after the Fourth of July. I knew it was time to head south, shrink or no shrink. It wasn’t that I didn’t have enough love to take care of Charlie on my own. It was anything but that. It was that I thought he needed to be buoyed by the love of everyone. Maybe the love of my parents, the friends of our family, and the island old salts would fill the air, he would breathe it in, and my little boy would be restored.

He was half sleeping, slouched against the window with his pillow bunched in between his shoulder and his cheek. His DS was in his lap, never too far from him. I know every mother in the world feels this, but my heart was so filled with love for him at that moment I thought it might burst.

I looked over at him for another moment and whispered, “Love you, baby.”

He grimaced a little, not liking being disturbed, and then he reached out and put his hand on my arm. It was a proprietary touch but also one seeking for reassurance that I was still there.

A few minutes later, he sat up rubbing his eyes with his fists. “Mom? Where do you think Dad is?”

“Heaven,” I said. “Don’t you?”

“Yeah, but you know, it’s like he’s still around. But not in a creepy way.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, like when before the end of the school year, I’d be studying for a hard test? It was sort of like he was there, telling me to keep at it, not to give up. Do you know what I mean?”

“Yes. I do know. And you want to know something else?”

“What?”

“It makes me feel a little better.”

“Yeah, but not for long enough.”

“I agree with you, but you know what? I think it would be mighty strange if we weren’t sad right now.”

“Yeah.”

“One more thing: you don’t have to be sad every minute of the night and day, you know. And you can talk to me about it anytime you want.”

“That’s two things.”

“Right.”

I sighed then, realizing we were little more than two hurt birds flying back to the mother nest to heal. I hoped I had made a good decision. A long vacation of salted breezes, hammocks to while away steamy afternoons, building sand castles, and making ice cream with my sweet dad—all those things could go a long way to mend our broken hearts. I hoped.

Chapter 2

Near the western extremity, where Fort Moultrie stands . . . is covered with a dense undergrowth of the sweet myrtle . . . attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet . . . burthening the air with its fragrance.

—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Gold-Bug”

Meet Annie Britt

F
rankly, we had precious little to say to each other,
but
because he actually took his Old Man and the Sea hand off his fishing rod long enough to call me, I spoke to him. I had not heard from my estranged husband since the funeral. Of course, I was very polite to him. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said the spirit of James McMullen was conspiring to have us kiss and make up, but I don’t believe in that kind of nonsense. Well, not as a general rule. And that’s not why he called anyway. Buster, as he was known to all, had been to visit our daughter, Jackie, and our adorable grandson, Charlie, way up the road in Brooklyn, New York, and he didn’t like what he found. Like I had? Who in the world would be happy to see their daughter and her little boy struggling under the weight of that kind of traumatic and horrendous loss?

I mean, I don’t want to sound judgmental, but Buster’s not exactly the expert of the world on the hearts of women and children.
Apparently
there had been a recent conversation between Jackie and Buster, and
apparently
Jackie had cried him a river. Weeping is not my daughter’s style. At all. She’s a soldier, for heaven’s sake! But everyone has a limit of what they can endure. His call truly alarmed me. Truly.

She told Buster that she’s very, very worried about Charlie. He wasn’t coping well. He was having terrible nightmares, he was lethargic and not eating well. Oh, my poor dear little grandson! And just the idea of my daughter sobbing made my chest tighten. Buster, unsure of how to handle her, did the right thing. He brought the problem to me.
As! He! Should! Have!
After all, I was
still
the mother of the family, even if our child was a military nurse, toting a loaded gun around the world and even though her father preferred the waters seventy-seven miles to the north.