Saving Graces (10 page)

Neither John nor I had ever been in a law office prior to law school. We went to our first jobs—each clerking for federal judges—with only one summer’s legal experience each behind us. And during our judicial clerkships we applied for permanent jobs by writing letters to law firms across the country, many in places we’d never seen. It was not a focused evaluation of what was right for either of us. We were simply doing what the map to success suggested: law school, law review, federal clerkship, corporate law firm. None of it was bad for us. In fact, we learned a lot. Among the things we learned, though, was that this wasn’t what we wanted. We ended up in Nashville, practicing law with people we enjoyed immensely. We had a beautiful home, two cocker spaniels, and a station wagon. A picture-postcard life, really. We had good friends, friends as close to us as family in George Masterson and Sol Miller, young lawyers who, like us, had been transplanted to Tennessee.

We were not all that young, but it seems now, from this vantage point, that we must have been. Working at our first real jobs, painting the rooms of our first house. George was our best friend, a best friend to both of us. When George wanted to buy a place for himself, we looked with him, the three of us checking the bathrooms and the view. No wonder George did not marry then; he was nearly married to us. It was George we first called when the doctor told us we were listening to our “daughter’s” heartbeat. We learned to mimic the sound: I would do the
sh-sea
and John would do the
pa-tum, pa-tum
. My sister’s home Drano test said we were having a girl as well. So my mother gave all the girl baby clothes to us and all the boy baby clothes to my sister, who was having a baby a month later. Only the Korean man who worked in the parking garage in my building disagreed. “Korean saying,” he said. “A woman having a boy baby look rough. You having a boy.”

I had not been asleep long. Awaking, I knew I was in labor. I got up and took a shower, thinking, correctly, I might not get another shower for a day or two. Then I got John up, and we went to Baptist Hospital. There my labor progressed, slowly but surely through the night and into the morning, until it didn’t progress anymore. The resident spoke in whispered tones to someone about what he should do. He needn’t have whispered; in the next room a woman was delivering a baby she already knew to be stillborn, and her wail was all any mother on the maternity ward heard. For hours. Finally my obstetrician came, looked at the X-ray they had taken, and started preparing me for a cesarean section. As was the practice then, I left John at the operating room door. As the anesthesiologist leaned over me, I could hear my obstetrician talking through each step. And then I heard him say, “It’s dead.” “What did he say?” I asked the anesthesiologist. Had he really said the baby was dead? I was frantic. “Don’t worry about anything,” the anesthesiologist said, “the baby is fine.” But all I could think about was the mother of the stillborn baby and her pitiful wail. “Tell me what is happening,” I insisted, speaking loudly enough for the obstetrician on the other side of the curtain to hear me, but only the anesthesiologist answered: “Be still. It will be fine.” When, seconds or minutes or hours later—I was too frightened to calculate anything—they showed me our son, I didn’t count his fingers or toes. I simply saw the contorted face and heard the beautiful scream, and I cried. It turned out that what was “dead” was the power to the cauterizing machine, and you can just imagine what I said to the obstetrician later about his choice of words. In the recovery room, I didn’t tell John about the scare, and he didn’t tell me that Wade’s head—having been stuck in the birth canal for hours—was shaped like a cone. We were just happy.

There was another problem. Wade’s blood and mine were not compatible. It was a problem each baby I had would suffer. And his liver was having problems because of it. For days he was under a lamp, his eyes covered with patches, his bare bottom high above his tucked legs. And during those days, we tried to find a boy’s name. Catharine Wade Edwards would not do. If only we had listened to the Korean garage attendant. Each day the nurse would come in and ask, Does he have a name yet? Not yet. He needs a name. Yes, we know. Finally, when he was four days old, we settled on Lucius Wade Edwards, Wade from John’s mother’s maiden name and a family name on my side of the family, and his first name from a nearly forgotten Lucius from my mother’s Mississippi roots. Wade he would be. And although spelling Lucius was a trial for him at first, it was a name he liked. Even when substitute teachers called him Lucius, he liked it. When his friends said it, or changed it to Bubblucius, he recognized it as affectionate teasing. It is a strong and gentle name, a Southern name without any foolishness about it.

Those three years in Nashville are, for me, a collection of unrelated remembrances, I suppose because I was learning to become a lawyer and, more importantly, learning to become a mother, and there wasn’t much room for anything else. I remember that the hardest part of leaving Nashville was taking Wade away from Shirley Mayberry, who worked at the child care center Wade attended in a big old home on a park-like lot near our house. We never went by when Wade wasn’t in her lap or on her arm. And I remember the Anti-Swan Ball that Paul Sloan, with whom I practiced law, held in the woods of his family’s farm on the night of the high-society Swan Ball at the Belle Meade Country Club. I remember feeling out of place at the victory celebration at the Opryland Hotel when Lamar Alexander, from John’s law firm, was elected the Republican governor. And I recall buying furniture at the fairgrounds flea market and at an auction in Lebanon, and refinishing it in the backyard with John, as his mother had taught us.

And I remember the sad day we were driving to watch the U.S. Open on television at George’s house. We were trying to turn left in a residential neighborhood, but there was a car stopped, blocking the lane ahead. I could see a man in the car holding a woman around the neck with his right arm and slugging her in the face with his left fist. I jumped out of the car and pulled open her door. As I pulled her out of the car, he swung open his door and headed for us both. It occurred to me then that I had always inserted myself into these situations on the premise that a man wouldn’t hit a woman, and that premise clearly didn’t apply here. But as he stepped toward us, John was standing there. Calm down, man, John said. He walked the man back along the road, talking to him, almost whispering to him, as I took the woman across the street, into someone’s yard under a tree and went to the house to get help. Her face was covered in blood. The police came, but the woman wouldn’t press charges. The police would not arrest him based on what I saw without her complaint, and so we all got back in our cars and drove away.

I saw them both about a year later at the grocery store, an old yellow bruise on her cheek. I suppose I had always thought that even strangers could intervene and make things right, if only they would, and this was a hard lesson that it wasn’t always going to be that easy. You couldn’t always fix everything.

CHAPTER 6

RALEIGH

I’ve now come to a chapter that I knew I would have to write. By an unspeakably vast margin there is no part of my life, or any life, that speaks more to what this book is about. I found a community that stood by me in the worst of times and allowed me to emerge, eventually, from a place of profound pain. I will try to write from a repose that should come with the passage of the years, but I cannot honestly say that it does. I do not want to endure the writing of this chapter, but I will. I will write it because it is a story of tribute to those who stood with me, not simply a story of our loss.

I
AWOKE EARLY
. It was a crisp New Hampshire morning, like the mornings before it during which my daughter and I had visited private schools to which she had been accepted. Cate was still asleep in the other bed at the Exeter Inn. I dialed home. John was taking depositions in Charlotte, so Wade was home alone. He finally answered. We had talked the night before, too, about his junior paper, due that morning. He had been sitting at the computer, typing his last corrections, when we talked. What did I think of this change in wording? Did I think he needed to make this section two paragraphs rather than one? He knew it was better; he just needed me to say so, and of course I did. And I let him talk to his sister—sweet words from her, I knew the same from him. Then goodnight. The morning call was shorter.

“Are you ready for school?”

“I’m up.”

“Really up? Are you standing up?”

“I’m up, Mom. I love you.”

“I’ll see you tonight. I love you.” That was it. No more talking, no more teasing. No more hugs. Click. That was it. It was over. It was April 4, 1996, and those were the last words I ever said to my boy.

The plan for all of us to meet at the beach for spring break was toppled by a wind that blew his car from the road. And Wade, just sixteen, could not stop the car from flipping and crushing some part of him that made him stop breathing. When he had tried to get his car back on the highway, maybe he overcorrected, maybe he moved too quickly, all the maybes for which I have no answers, except the final answer. The car fishtailed, then flipped on the road to the beach, and by the time an EMT who was traveling alongside him got there, Wade was dead.

I didn’t have some second sense that he was in trouble. Cate and I were flying home from New Hampshire. John met us at the airport, and we talked about the high schools she had visited, the choice she now had to make, and the long-awaited week at the beach. Wade had gone on ahead with three classmates—two cars with two boys each—leaving after school with hopes of getting down early to catch the last of the sun on that first day. So the driveway was empty when we pulled in, and empty as we began packing for the week, and empty when I walked through the living room to call upstairs to Cate that we would leave in half an hour. That’s when I saw it, the state trooper’s car, pulling into the driveway and up our hill. I opened the front door as the driver stepped out of the cruiser.

I spoke before he did. Pleaded, really. It could only be one thing.

“Tell me he’s alive.”

“Is this the home of Lucius Edwards?” No one but his friends making fun used Wade’s first name.

“Tell me he’s alive.”

“Is this the home of Lucius Edwards?” “You have to tell me he’s alive.” My voice breaking.

There was no gentle way to say it.

“He is dead.”

I suppose every death has its own story. Our story began before we came into it. John had been working and Cate and I had been away, so there was only an empty house when the patrolmen came the first time. As the troopers circled, our neighbors began to find out the terrible news. By the time John and Cate and I first heard the trooper’s words, people had gathered, waiting. The doctor from down the street with sleeping pills he thought we would need; our friend and John’s partner, David Kirby, who would drive us to the hospital where he lay; Wade’s friends; our neighbors. All in waiting, waiting for us to learn, waiting to reach to hold us up and to hold each other.

If I make myself think back on that night and on the next days, I can see everyone, I can bring everyone back. But it is so hard to do it without also bringing back that pain. The heat of it. The chill of it. What’s important and what’s not? People came, that’s what’s important. They were there. For Wade, first. And for us. A woman who had worked for us years before was at the sink, washing dishes the next day, not talking to anyone much, probably because she didn’t know them. Becky, who helped us with the chores now, wanted to make sure Wade’s room was clean; she busied herself elsewhere when she saw the sign my sister, Nancy, put up not to vacuum or change the sheets. I wanted the room to smell like Wade as long as it would, so Becky just helped in the kitchen. Chris, who cut all our hair, stood by the kitchen door. My brother, who is a filmmaker, sat with a camera in the living room and interviewed the children about Wade. He left the tapes for me, but I cannot yet watch them—even ten years later. Kim, whom I knew only slightly from having worked on a PTA project together, sat with the house while we buried Wade. Whole families came, because we had known most of these people as a family—through school events, soccer teams, the Jaycee Center and the YMCA, sitting on blankets at Pops in the Park, walking the downtown mall on First Night—and they were all there, helping and holding us and one another.

And the letters. I still have them, though they, like the memories, are hard to revisit. I didn’t revisit them to write the notes I should have written. I didn’t thank every teacher he had ever had, all of whom came to the funeral. I didn’t thank my UNC basketball e-mail group or the gardener; both sent flowers. The food, the flowers, the notes, people stricken and desperate, and I was apart from it all and held up by it all at the same time. They allowed me to do what I needed; I just immersed myself as much as I could in Wade and held on. And I loved them, for what I will always believe was their love for him.

David drove us to the Duplin County Hospital that night. John sat silently in the front seat for the hour drive. Cate and I were literally huddled in the backseat. Everything outside was black. Everything inside was black.

The little hospital waiting room was full. The parents of the other boy in Wade’s car, who escaped with a turned ankle, and the parents of the two boys in the second car were there. A local husband and wife with whom John had worked had come and with them an elderly woman from their church, who brought cookies and lemonade. I’ll never forget her kindness, but I only wanted one thing, and she couldn’t give it to me. We walked back outside and, with the help of Dick Henderson, a tall and gentle man whose son was in the car following Wade’s, went up the stairs to the small morgue. He left at the door. John and I went in. There, on a cot, lay Wade, as beautiful and peaceful as I ever remember him. Sleeping, really. Couldn’t he be? There was a bruise on his forehead, and as I stroked his face, I saw that the lobes of his ears had darkened as the blood pooled there beneath the skin.

I do not know what killed Wade. It doesn’t really matter. It wasn’t alcohol or speed. Knowing what killed him wouldn’t tell me why, and it couldn’t change the one thing I did know: he was dead. We called our parents. John told his parents; I told mine. Or I told my mother, since my father didn’t speak on the phone much after a massive stroke in 1990 narrowed his once wide life and quieted his once gregarious voice. I heard Mother cry out, and I heard her tell my father. Then I heard the real sound of grief. Dad couldn’t form words easily, so the sounds he made were not the no, no, no, no, no, no, that I screamed when the trooper broke my heart. His voice was the sound of pre-language pain, guttural and uncivilized, and the most powerful and mournful sound man can utter. He opened his mouth and the sound bled through the phone line and wouldn’t stop. I hear it today.

That first night Cate slept with us. Our bedroom was downstairs. She and Wade shared the second floor, and it seemed too much to ask this child, who had just turned fourteen, to return up there alone. We pushed two club chairs together, with an ottoman between them, next to our bed, and she slept there that first night, and the second and the third. She slept beside us for two years, finally sleeping upstairs again when she was sixteen years old.

Wade died on Maundy Thursday. With Easter weekend, we could not have the funeral until Monday. The days in between were impossible and, if I can use an odd word, wonderful. Every day our house was full of food and flowers and friends. The washing machine was running. The kitchen was swept. And when we finally slept at night, they went away. But they were back in the morning, with more food, more support. I had never thought about how our lives had managed to intertwine with all these people, but they had, with some by just living, with most by doing—reaching out, helping out, coaching, carpooling, just being there. And now they were all here for us.

Hargrave had volunteered to come early that first morning. When she came at 8
A.M
., John was already sitting on the front porch with his father, consumed by grief. Cate was up, and she and Hargrave hugged and cried. I was sitting at my computer printing out the phone numbers of the private schools that had admitted Cate for the next year. “I know it seems irrational,” I told Hargrave, “but I have to contact all those schools this morning first thing to let them know that Cate will not be coming. She can’t go anywhere.”

By midmorning the house was full. Diane Payne, the principal from the high school, and a clutch of teachers arrived asking what they could do. Martha from next door, or Ihrie answering the door, Sally or Bonnie answering the phone, Tricia or Ellan or Lisa—it could have been a dozen people—making hotel reservations for family coming from afar, and everyone intercepting reporters. Soccer teams from the twelve years that John had coached, and book clubs and PTA. People from the church we attended. People from the Y. From basketball and Urban Ministries. Lawyers and maids and secretaries and bankers. All there. The house was crowded with them, and yet in the most important way, the house was empty for us. There were people, just not the one person we craved.