Authors: Elizabeth Richards

Every Day (29 page)

I take his hands, press my cheek to his, and kiss his lazy mouth. I draw back.

Isaac stands expressionless as a Buckingham Palace guard. Then Fowler flips the brakes off and they go, into the conveyor to the plane, and I am left to the long avenue of chairs and carpet at the gate.

“No!” I say, loud enough to startle myself. “No!” Like a
deranged person, over and over again until I gain the sense to direct myself to a stable piece of furniture, in this case a railing, and just hang on to it and look at it and hang on and look until my son returns.

And when he does come back, free of luggage, free of that beaten man he’s learned to care for, he is weeping so uncontrollably that I have no choice but to let go of my rail, my help, and be his.

“Oh, my sweet, sweet boy.”

“Mom,” he cries. “Mom, help me. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to put him on the plane. I had to tell them how to do everything for him. I didn’t want to do that.”

“I didn’t want you to have to,” I say, folding him into my arms as naturally as the first time he was given to me.

We walk, away from the engine blast. We walk out of the terminal, out of the airport, to the lot, our arms locked. We drive home.

• • •

A week later I hear from Evelyn by mail, the same day I receive Gillette’s wedding invitation. First I attend to Gillette via the answering machine. “Rue the day,” I say. “Of course we’ll be there. Bells on.”

Then I open Evelyn’s letter.

Dear Leigh,

I have first to thank you for sending Jim home with this marvelous computer and all the instructions for his care typed out so very helpfully. We have been in constant touch with his New York doctors, who have established us with local specialists, and I do believe he is growing used to his old home again, as doddering as his parents are, and we are trying to give him everything he needs. You have been good to him, good to us.

Thank you also for the photograph of this beautiful child, who, as I understand it, is our grandson. I think I have seen
this face before, in the younger version of his father. I wept upon seeing it. All the years you managed on your own must have been trying indeed. I wish we had been told before now about Isaac, whom I would like to meet.

Of course, this is a desperate time for me and for J.T. and more so, for Jim. I trust you’ll understand my reluctance to overwhelm myself with meeting Isaac right now. J.T. and I feel pressed to spend every minute with our son, who, we understand, will not see the new year. I fear our next communication with you will not be a cheerful one. But hear from us you will, and again, our thanks to you and your family for taking care of our boy.

Yours,

Evelyn Fowler

I roar through the end of the class, the end of the book. I find Kirsten at our booth in the diner.

“Oh, love,” she says. “I’m so sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

“Deserve this!” I howl. “I deserve every second of this, and then some!”

She ignores me. “I ordered for us. I want you and Simon to go away for a weekend. I’ll take the kids.” She slides a flyer, from a Catskill lodge, in front of me.

“I can’t leave my kids for a second these days without weeping. A weekend would kill me. When I drop Jane at school, she tells
me
I’ll be okay.”

Kirsten smiles. “It’s okay not to be okay, so Adrienne tells me.”

“Our daughters. They should go into practice together. But Adrienne needs to be a little easier on the terminally ill.”

“She’s a kid,” Kirsten scolds. “Now, eat. You’re too thin.”

I shovel in a tuna melt, fries, and coffee while Kirsten talks just to let me know she’s still around and that these meetings are still available on request. I’ve resisted her; she’s been such a wench. I’ve wanted to stay away from everyone because
meeting and talking means there’s something to get over. He’s not even dead yet. But I can no longer hear him. I cannot call his face clearly to mind. It does seem I’ve lost something. I know what he meant:
Every day.
He was never fully gone from me, as he is now, into that foreign, kudzu-smothered place. Nor was I, I see, gone from him.

I thank her, drive home, and throw up.

• • •

The call from the South comes two days before Christmas, very early, after an hour of snowfall, when it’s just Daisy and me playing on the floor beside the tree, where we set up a small village and the electric menorah.

It’s J.T., with the news.

“When?”

“Four-thirty.”

I’d woken up! I’d woken up to see the clock, to wonder why I was up and Simon wasn’t. And then I’d drifted back.

“Evelyn couldn’t call. She’s overwhelmed.”

“How did he go?” I so very much want it to have been peaceful.

“There was a fair amount of coughing,” J.T. says. “It was a difficult end.”

“Oh no,” I say. “Oh, I wish that weren’t true.”

“I do too, Leigh.”

We are both crying, listening to the other. It’s permissible. There are no rules in death.

“I’m going to write you a very long letter,” he says. “Will that be all right with you?”

“That would be most welcome.”

“All right then.”

He says that he’ll be in touch about the funeral, and that if it’s too much for me, I shouldn’t strain myself to come, but they would like to see me at some point, me and Isaac.

I leave Daisy at the base of the tree and climb the stairs.
Through Isaac’s slightly open door I see he’s awake, staring up, waiting for me to pass into his line of vision.

“I heard, Mom.”

I sit on the bed, dry my face with the end of the bedspread. Isaac doesn’t cry. He rakes his fingers through that hair.

“Mom, you’re fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine.” He swings his legs past me, to standing. “It’s like you said. It’s the winter. He wasn’t supposed to live longer than the winter. He was too sick! We have to go downstairs now, Mom, and eat something. Where’s Simon? Is Jane up? What have you done with Daisy? Let’s go, Mom.
Now.
Come on. Get up.”

Lord, but the life anyone leads can bring them to their knees.

He takes me by the hand, leads me through the house as he hollers, “Breakfast! Get up, punks! Let’s eat! Waffles! Pancakes! Syrup!” Sounding the alarums, raising Cain, summoning the living and the angels in our house, Isaac, my answered prayer, Isaac, who has come to me this time.

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.