Where Yesterday Lives (18 page)

No, it would be better to wait a few days—give her time to forgive him for not going with her.

He walked past the phone, past the portrait of him and Ellen, past the bookcase and the unopened Bible, and found a comfortable spot on the sofa. Then he kicked up his feet, grabbed the remote, and ran his finger deftly over the power button. Before flicking on the evening news he wondered once more whether Ellen was still mad at him. He thought again of Jane and Megan, Amy and Aaron, and he shuddered.

He was glad he had stayed home. Ellen would simply have to understand.

B
y the time Ellen and Megan came back inside, forty minutes had passed and two half-eaten pizzas were laid out on the dining room table. Their mother was on the telephone, talking in hushed tones, and Jane was in the den reading a book to her children. Amy and Frank had gone home for the night. Only Aaron remained in the living room, positioned in the chair as he had been when they left.

“How’s it going?” Ellen sat down near him and leaned over her knees, studying him. Megan took the cue and left the room for a slice of pizza.

Aaron turned and stared at the wall.

“Aaron, you’ll feel better if you talk about it. We’re all going through the same thing.”

Aaron smothered a sob and wiped a tear as it fell from beneath his dark glasses. He stuck his chest out and crossed his arms more tightly around his body. He had always absolutely refused to cry He wasn’t going to give in now, Ellen guessed, especially not in front of her.

“He-llo?” She held out the last syllable, aggravated. “Aaron? I’m trying to talk to you.”

“Don’t want to talk.” Aaron rose to his full, towering height and hitched up his jeans. Then in one movement he grabbed his keys from the ledge near the front door and left without saying a word.

“Who’s here?” her mother called from the kitchen as the door slammed shut.

“No one. Aaron just left.” Ellen wandered into the kitchen and took some pizza. Her mother was still on the phone and
she raised her hands, silently asking Ellen where Aaron had gone.

“I don’t know. He’s not talking to me.”

With a sigh, her mother returned to her conversation. Ellen moved in beside her and began helping with the few dishes from dinner.

Aaron climbed into his full-size, silver-and-black pickup truck and headed down Mitchell. In a matter of minutes he reached Spring Street and turned right toward the water. He slipped a Garth Brooks CD into his car stereo and blasted the music—as if that could take away the pain in his heart.

He drove, unsure of where he was headed until he pulled off Highway 31 and turned right on Country Club Road. Suddenly he knew where he had to go. He headed the same way he had a hundred times, making the necessary turns and stops until the street came to a dead end on a hill overlooking the Bay View Country Club. He turned the music off and stared over the golf course, across the eighteenth hole, out toward the bay.

The clubhouse was just to his right and although it was after eight, there were still people leaving, heading for their cars. During July, Petoskey stayed light until nearly ten. He shifted his foot to the gas pedal and drove through the parking lot toward the roadway that divided the course’s front and back nine. He passed what was probably the last cart of the day heading back to the clubhouse, then he pulled into a gravel area just off the road so that he faced the golf course. Trees on either side made the spot private, and Aaron killed his engine.

The only sounds were the gentle rustling of trees and the distant traffic on the highway. Over the tops of the trees that lined the ninth fairway, the bay was still visible, and Aaron saw that the sun was moving slowly toward the water. The course
would be closed in a few minutes. He could be alone here.

He took a deep breath and then, surrounded by the silence of the empty golf course, he gave himself permission to feel.

Bitterness and anger flooded him. How could his father have done this? How could he have left him?

His anger swelled as he unleashed it and memories ran rampant …memories of times he had been mad at his father, times when he had been punished more severely than his sisters, times when he had hated his father for being so hard on him.

“
Son, don’t tell me they hit you first
,” he could hear his dad say “
You’re a boy and no matter what happens you don’t hit girls
.”

As far back as Aaron could recall, his sisters had ganged up against him. They had teased him and threatened him and once they even put eye shadow on twelve-year-old Megan’s cheek so that their father would believe Aaron, three years younger, had hit her.

Aaron closed his eyes and remembered the hard spanking he’d gotten for that.

“Dad, I swear I didn’t do it,” he had yelled throughout the punishment.

But John Barrett was not a man interested in excuses. He punished Aaron and let him know in specific terms the extent of the punishment he would receive if he ever hurt the girls again.

Even after he had received the unfair punishment, the girls did not let up. He remembered a little miniature wind-up robot he’d bought with his own money when he was seven. The girls found it and placed it in the ice-cube tray so that it froze under water. Aaron searched the entire house before finding it in the freezer. The girls had thought it was the funniest thing ever.

Seventeen years later he could still hear their cruel laughter.

The afternoon breeze had stilled and the trees barely rustled. Aaron kept his eyes on the golf course, his anger building with
each memory. There was another incident, when Aaron was eight. He had been given his own pack of gum and did not want to share it Led by Ellen and Jane, his sisters had taken out each piece, chewed it, and rewrapped it. Then they placed it back in the package with a handwritten label across the front: ABC Gum. Give it a Try.

Aaron’s eyes narrowed angrily and his grip grew tighter on the steering wheel. Already Been Chewed.
Ellen probably wrote that
Ellen, who pretended to care about him these past years, but who had treated him miserably when he was little. Ellen, who had stolen John Barrett’s attention away from him.

There had been a time when he didn’t care about Ellen and her relationship with their father. No matter how much Ellen did right, she couldn’t play football. When Aaron was a young teenager, football had been his surefire way of winning his father’s attention.

Aaron played offensive lineman for Petoskey, and John Barrett was at every game. He cheered louder than any parent and was quick to compliment his son’s burst of speed off the line of scrimmage. But after two years on the varsity squad Aaron could no longer fool himself. He had the size and speed to be a college player but he had one very big problem. He didn’t like the game. He was only playing for his father’s approval and after his sophomore year, he could no longer pretend.

“Son, is it true?” Aaron could still hear the disappointment ringing in his father’s words. “You quit the team?”

Aaron remembered hanging his head. “Yeah, Dad, it’s true. I’m really not into football.” He had looked up then, expectantly “You’re not mad, are you?”

“Son, of course I’m not mad. I’m disappointed. Not for what I’ve lost, but for what you’ve lost. You were really something out there. You can quit the team and it won’t change how I think about you. But maybe you should give it some more thought. You could play college ball with your size, son.”

“Dad, I’m done with football. That’s the end of it. All right?” Aaron spent the rest of the evening in his room certain that his father would never again view him the same way.

That was 1990, when Aaron was sixteen and Ellen had just graduated from college with her journalism degree. She was hired to work for the
Detroit Gazette
sports section and cover high school football games. That season instead of watching Aaron play, John helped Ellen. He gave her pointers and helped her understand football so that she could write better stories.

With Ellen and their father spending so much time together talking about football, both in person and on the telephone, Aaron felt as if he had ceased to exist in his father’s eyes. As long as there wasn’t a blizzard, Ellen would come home each Saturday and watch football with their father. They talked about first downs and reception averages and kickoff returns while Ellen hung on every word the great John Barrett said.

The whole thing made Aaron sick. There had been a time when he cherished taking in a football game with his father. After Ellen’s indoctrination into sports writing, Aaron no longer wanted anything to do with the game.

“Aaron, come on out here and see this.” His dad would wave to him from his easy chair. “It’s the big game. Michigan and Ohio State. We’re about to score.”

“I’m busy,” Aaron would shout from the next room. “Maybe later.”

Why bother? He’d figured there was no point. Ellen so monopolized their father’s attention that Aaron no longer had any interest in watching sports with his father. In fact, he had no interest in doing
anything
with his father, and for years there seemed to be a distance between them no bridge could span.

Then Ellen moved to Miami, and the relationship between Aaron and his father improved dramatically. Overnight the two men discovered they had something in common: golf.

Until his father’s triple-bypass surgery the year before, the
two of them had spent four or five mornings a week shooting nine holes before work. They would be at the course by six and finish before eight. They golfed in Harbor Springs and Charlevoix, and sometimes even Traverse City. But their favorite course was the grassy, tree-covered spread at Bay View Country Club.

Aaron allowed his eyes to scan the greens. They sloped gently downhill from the road in a velvet carpet that seemed to extend all the way to the bay beyond. How many memories had he and his father made here? It had been on the neatly mowed grass below that he had told his father his girlfriend was pregnant. Aaron would never forget the pain in his father’s face that morning.

“I won’t tell you I’m not disappointed.” He paused. “But son, you need to do the right thing and stand by the girl. She’s going to have the baby, right?”

“Right. She doesn’t want an abortion.”

“Well, let her know that well do whatever we can to help.”

Three months later they were on that golf course again when John asked about the girl, and Aaron broke down.

“She lost the baby, Dad.” Aaron had swiped at his tears, embarrassed at the show of emotion.

“I’m sorry son.” His father had faced him and put an arm on his shoulder.

“I know it wasn’t right what we did.” They Were far out on the seventh tee where no one could see them at that early hour of the morning. “But I was ready to love that child. I don’t know, Dad. It’s like I miss him. Even though I never knew him. Do you think I’m crazy to feel that way?”

Aaron would always remember the compassion in his father’s eyes at that moment. “Son, an unborn child is a child nevertheless. I understand your pain.”

No one but he and his father knew about the lost child. And that morning his dad shared something with Aaron that he said he hadn’t shared with his other children.

“Your mother had a miscarriage once, too,” he said softly. “It was two years after Megan was born and your mother was already five months pregnant. The baby was a boy.”

There were tears in his father’s eyes. The two hugged and Aaron felt like a little boy again, safe in his daddy’s arms.

When they pulled apart, his father smiled sadly. “Believe me, I understand how you feel. A week doesn’t go by when I don’t think about your brother, how old he would be, what he’d be doing now.”

Aaron thought of a hundred other such moments he and his dad had shared on the golf course. Even when he began having bouts of rage and punching holes in his bedroom door, his father would forgive him and in a few days the two would be back out playing golf.

On the course, Aaron would apologize and his dad would shrug. “Forget about it, son,” he would say. “I love you. I always will.”

Then he and Aaron would spend another morning talking and teeing off.

But there was something Aaron never said to his father, and the knowledge of that omission burned at Aaron’s soul. He had run out of time. His father was gone, and in all their years together, through all the feelings Aaron had shared with no one else, he never once had the courage to tell his father the most important thing of all.

It was growing dark and the course was becoming more difficult to see. Finally, knowing that he would explode if he didn’t give in to his desperate grief, Aaron grabbed the steering wheel and laid his head on his forearm.

There, finally, he cried.

Torrents of angry tears spilled from his heart as he remembered the man he had loved and admired, the man who had known him as no one else had. He would give anything, he thought, to be here in the morning with his father preparing to shoot nine holes of golf. Just once more.

He sobbed violently, remembering the hateful things he had said in anger, wanting desperately to take them back. He remembered the last thing he had said to his father …

Thursday night Megan and his parents had been watching television. For once he didn’t have a date so he’d gotten dressed in his jeans and boots and made plans to meet his buddies at Denim ’N Duds, a country dance club just out of town. He was running late and as he headed for the door he did not intend to waste time telling his parents good-bye.

But his father heard him leaving.

“Son? You going out?” Dad called from the den, his voice pleasant.

“Yeah. Dancing.” Aaron leaned into view and cast an impatient look at his father.

“Okay. Have fun.” Just before Aaron turned away he caught his father’s smile. That warm, full-faced smile that assured Aaron he was loved beyond anything most sons would ever know.

He could have stopped then and said good-bye or wished his father a good night in return. But instead he turned away and walked out the door. That was it. The last time he saw his father alive. His last chance to say the most important words …words he had never shared with his father.