Family Blessings (3 page)

"Greg," she uttered in a squeaky, distorted voice.

"He was on his way over here. A car ran a red light and hit him broadside. He was dead by the time our squad car reached the scene."

"Oh my God," she whispered, her hands dropping slowly. "Not Greg .

.

.

oh no, not Greg."

Involuntary spasms replaced her indrawn breaths, each one accompanied by a tick in her throat. Her mouth opened and stayed open in a wide, silent call. It erupted at last in a dolorous, elongated syllable as Christopher caught her in his arms and felt his sunglasses bruise his chest. He pulled them free and held her as hard as human arms can hold. Her keening took on a pitiful tone like a child playing a high, uncertain violin note "No . . .

no . . . noooooo . .."--squeaky, sliding off-tune near Christopher's ear with her face pointed toward heaven. Finally, when it seemed her lungs would burst from lack of air, she broke into wretched, full-scale weeping that racked her body. He held her firmly, feeling her weight deliver itself into his safekeeping until her knees finally buckled and she hung on him.

"Not another one . .." she mourned. "No . . . not another one."

His heart broke. Surely it did, for he felt the splintering deep within, putting pressure on his bones, his belly, his lungs.

"H . . . he . . . w . . . was . . . c . . . coming . . . over .

. . to . . . fix . . . my . . . ho . . . ho . . . h . .

."

She could not complete the word.

"Yes . .." he whispered in a strangled voice. "He was coming to fix your hose." She began quaking terribly, and he lowered her to the floor. It was hardwood, cool against his bare knees as he held her from tipping sideways. She drooped with her forehead against his throat, against the bare triangle of hair and skin above his ridiculous Hawaiian shirt, to which she clung, sobbing and sobbing, rocking and rocking, pushing so hard against him that he swayed backward with each lunge.

"He tr . . . tried to f. . . fix it o . . . o . . . once but he b .

. . bought the wr ... wrong-sized end."

"I know . .." he said, "I know . . . ," rubbing her back, aching from pity, wishing he could spare her this, bring Greg back, bring her other dead baby back, or her husband to help her through this ordeal.

Instead, here he knelt and did his best at comforting, not quite a stranger but certainly not a friend, merely a young man she'd met a few times in passing to whom she'd been kind because he worked and lived with her son.

They knelt together so long his shirtfront grew soaked. His knees began aching. She was still weeping and rocking and keening. He gripped her arms and set her on the floor, leaned her back against the hall wall and sat with an arm around her while she wept against his chest.

Wept and rocked. Rocked and wept. Until the blue denim of her skirt was dotted with dark spots.

"I'll be right back." He propped her against the wall, then hurried off to hunt for Kleenex, which he found in the kitchen and took back to her. He sat down again, put the blue flowered box on her lap, pulled out three tissues for himself and three that he stuffed into her hand.

It lay limp on her lap while she sat like a muscleless lump, propped against the wall. He put an arm around her and gave her all the time she needed, resting a cheek on her hair and stroking her arm, wiping her face now and then, and his own, dropping the used blue Kleenexes on the floor beside them.

Out on the street a car passed. The sprinkler splattered across the end of the driveway ten times ... fifteen ... twenty .... Her head felt hot in the hollow of his shoulder. Her bare arm stuck to his.

Finally she let out a ragged sigh and rolled her head upright, running the heel of her hand up her forehead. He removed his arm from around her and wondered what to do next. She blew her nose hard and discarded the Kleenex.

"Oh God," she whispered, as if unsure she had strength for more than remaining slump-shouldered against the wall. Her eyes closed and residual sobs jerked her body.

"Where's Janice?" he asked.

Tears seeped from between her eyelashes and she bit her lip to hold in some squeaking sobs. She drew her knees up, crossed her arms on them and buried her head, her shoulders shaking.

He put a hand on her shoulder blade. "Where is she?" he whispered.

"In S . . . San Fr . . . Francisco."

"San Francisco?"

"With her fr . . . friend K . . . Kim."

That's right. Greg had said his sister was going out west for a week's vacation.

"How about Joey?"

"Joey's up at G . . . Gull Lake with the Wh . . . Whitmans."

"Someone will have to call them."

Her shoulders shook as she remained bowed over. He didn't know what to do: forget the details or begin handling them, let her cry or encourage her to stop, get help or leave her alone.

"Your sister--is she at the store?" he asked.

She nodded into her arms.

He went onto one knee beside her, looking down on her short disheveled hair, which was brown with copper highlights. "Would you like me to call her to come and be with you?"

"N . . . no." She lifted her head at last and swiped below her eyes with her open hands. "No, I'll call her." She sniffed once, hooked the Kleenex box and began rising unsteadily. When she rocked on her heels he reached out to help her, rising with her, waiting with a grip on her arm while she hung her head, drying her eyes once more.

At last she gave him a forced, quavery smile. Without returning it, he draped his arm around her shoulders and walked her slowly toward the kitchen. There was a phone on the counter but the table seemed safer.

He pulled out a chair and guided her onto it, then sat down himself, on the chair with her sweater slung over the back.

Her purse, Coca-Cola and books were still stacked on the table, a reminder of the happy, normal routine he had interrupted.

"We don't have to call anybody yet. Just take your time."

She propped her head with one hand and turned her face to the sliding door, where the curtain still luffed in the warm summer air.

He waited in silence, so wrapped up in her grief he had momentarily set his own aside.

"Do I have to go and identify him?" she asked, turning her puffy face to him.

"No. His driver's license did that."

She closed her eyes and sighed in relief, opened them and asked, "Did you see him?"

"No."

"Do you want to?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know if he was smashed up badly?"

"I didn't ask." Literally speaking, it was the truth. He hadn't asked.

"Was he in his car?"

He rose and tried three cupboard doors before finding glasses. He filled one with ice from the freezer and returned to the table, popped open the Coke can and filled the glass for her.

"Was he in his car?" she repeated, stoic and insistent, ready to go on to the next step.

Christopher went to stand at the sliding glass door with his back to her, his feet spread wide and his bare toes digging into the spongy blue rubber of his thongs. "No. On his motorcycle."

After a brief silence while she absorbed the news, her high, peculiar violin voice played some short, muffled, staccato notes. He turned to find her with the drink untouched, both elbows propped on the table, both hands covering her face. He moved behind her and bracketed her neck with both hands, just to let her know he was there, just the touch of someone who cared.

"You don't have to see him at all. What purpose will it serve?"

"I don't know . . . I have to . . . I'm his m . . . mother . . .

oh God oh God oh God . .."

"You need your family here. Should I call your sister . . . or your mother?"

"I'll c . . . call." She mopped her face and gained enough control to rise wearily, pushing off the tabletop with both hands.

He watched her walk into the U-shaped work area of the kitchen and pick up a white phone. The dial tone hummed for fifteen seconds before she dropped the receiver into the cradle without dialing and doubled over the counter.

He went to her immediately and said, "I'll call. Who?"

She seemed incapable of making the decision. "I don't know," she squeaked, beginning to cry again. "I d . . . don't kn . . . know.

I don't want to p . . . put them through this."

"Here." He took her back to the table. "Just sit down and I'll take care of it. Where's your phone book?"

"In the d . . . drawer . . . over th . . . there."

He found her personal phone book in the second drawer he tried, and looked up the number of her flower shop. When he'd dialed she looked back over her shoulder at him, holding a blue Kleenex plastered over her mouth with one hand, her eyes red and running.

"Absolutely Floral," a woman answered.

"Is this Mrs. Eid?" he asked.

"Yes, it is."

"Mrs. Eid, are you there all alone or is there someone there with you?"

Her voice became suspicious. "Who is this?"

"I'm sorry, this is Christopher Lallek. I'm a friend of your nephew Greg Reston. I'm at your sister's house and I'm afraid I have some very bad news. Greg has been killed in a motorcycle accident."

He pictured Mrs. Eid with her mouth wide open during the silence, then dropping into a chair when she whispered, "Oh my God."

"I'm sorry to give you the news so abruptly. Is someone there with you?"

She had begun to cry and was muffling the sound with her hand.

Throughout the conversation his eyes had not left Mrs. Reston.

She rose from her chair and came around the cabinet to take the receiver.

"Sylvia? . . . Oh, Sylvia . . . I know . . . oh God . . . yes .

.

. no, no . . neither one of them . . . yes . . . oh, yes, please .

.

.

thank you."

She needed his arms again and turned into them after hanging up.

"She's coming," she whispered, and clung. The smell of her hand lotion became fixed in his memory while they stood in the kitchen waiting for her sister. Other impressions were stored away, too.

The exact angle of the afternoon light falling through the trees in the backyard. The way the curtain kept flapping. The distant burping of a lawn mower being started. The smell of freshly cut grass. The sight of a bouquet of flowers blurring, then clearing, then blurring again as his eyes filled and refilled, familiar garden flowers whose names he did not know. A photograph of Greg stuck into the corner of a framed print on a blue-papered wall.

The beads of condensed moisture running down the side of an iced glass of Coke the way Greg's mother's tears rolled down her face.

The feel of her denim skirt against his bare legs. Her hot face stuck to the side of his neck and his own shirt plastered to his skin by their combined tears. A note on her refrigerator door that said Give Greg the leftover lasagna Another that said anice, NW Flight 75, 1.3S.

The ceaseless drone of that mower. The radio playing Vince Gill's mournful "When I Call Your Name."

Greg's mother whispering brokenly, "Oh, he loved this song."

Chris replying, "Yes, I know. He played it all the time." They both had loved the song, they'd both owned the CD.

Sorrow spilling upward in Christopher and Lee Reston as they realized how many such sad reminders lay in the days, months and years ahead.

They heard the car pull in and separated. Her forehead was marked with an oval red spot where it had stuck to his neck, crossed by a deeper red crease from his hot-pink Croakies.

Footsteps pounded up the sidewalk. The front door opened and Lee ran toward it, trailed by Christopher, who stood back and watched the first of many sorrowful embraces he would witness in the coming days. He saw her tears begin again and swallowed down his own.

"Oh, Lee . .." As her name was spoken in sympathy he thought, It's too much for one woman--a baby, a husband, now a full-grown son.

"Why, Sylvia, why?" she wailed.

Sylvia could only answer, "I don't know, honey, I don't know."

The two sisters clung and wept together.

"Oh, Greg . . . Greg . .." The name escaped Lee Reston as a lament, a long woeful call to her beloved boy who would never hear his name spoken again.

Christopher Lallek, standing by listening, watching, felt his desolation deepen with every passing minute. He was thirty years old, but was experiencing the cruel impact of true grief for the first time in his life. He was stunned by how lost and uncertain he felt. All the past concerns of his life seemed paltry and inconsequential when weighed against the awful finality of death.

How consuming and powerful it was, robbing one of the will to think, to move, to force one's limbs to bend toward the next eventuality.

If he felt so, how must she feel, the mother?

She withdrew from her sister's embrace and Sylvia Eid drew back to find Christopher hovering nearby. Through her tears she managed to speak the words "You're Christopher." He found himself clinging to the strange woman with an intensity he would not have imagined yesterday.

He, who held people at bay, who radiated toward no one least of all strangers--was locked breast to breast with a woman he'd scarcely spoken to before.

They gave each other momentary solace, then turned back to the one who needed it more. Each with an arm around Lee, they urged her toward the living room and sat her on the sofa between them-an odd spot at noon on a weekday, but the place that seemed fitting for mourning. Lee Reston clung to her sister's hand, repeating the chant that Christopher would hear over and over again in the next three days.

"He was . . . he was coming over here to . . . to put a new end on a hose for me."

Why did it start his tears again? Because it was a reminder of how blithely he had taken life for granted until an hour ago?

Because it was a reminder of how Greg had cared for his mother?

Because it was one of those simple everyday things that speaks of love and devotion so much more loudly than words?

The women made it over another emotional hurdle, then Sylvia asked, "How did you find out?"

"From Christopher. He came over as soon as he heard."