The Conversation

This time, over bookstore coffee, we do not sit in silence across an ever-expanding table, hidden behind shields of reading material. She has too many questions and I, too many answers. This time the table length decreases as our conversation lengthens drawing Jamie and I so close that I can hear her heart beat increasing.

“So mom said you and she are old friends. How long is old?”
“About 20-some-odd years I suppose. Ever since she was your age.”
“Wow. How come I’ve never met you before?”
“Distance is probably the closest answer. Besides, personally I don’t think your father would have agreed with my interaction with you or your mother. Mike and I never really got along.”
“That’s because he’s a drunk.”
“Actually, we used to have that in common.”

She sips her coffee.

“But he and mom have been divorced for years now. And she seems calm, peaceful…almost happy around you. She’s never looked at anyone the way that she looks at you. What took you so long?”
“I suppose I was just waiting for the perfect time.”
“Well, what have you been doing for all these years?”

I have no answer for her question. Honesty? “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”
“No.”

The look on her face is a mix of perplexion and annoyance. She’s not buying it.

“You don’t know. That’s bullshit.”

Again I have no response.

“So how did you and mom meet?”
“One of my book signings.”
“You’re a writer?”
“Was. I was a writer. I haven’t written anything since long before you were born.”
“Why not?”
“It’s a very long story.”
“I thought that was why we were here.”

This was true.

“Something very sad happened to me and I haven’t been able to express myself properly since.”
“So you gave up?”
“I gave up completely.”

I am unsure of the boundaries that encumber our conversation, unsure as to how much information Jamie wants me to reveal about our past together. I feel it best to gloss over the details about our love affair, keeping the spotlight completely focused on me and my own personal fall from grace.

“So have I read anything you’ve written?”
“I doubt it.”
“You might be surprised. Were you any worth reading?”

Was I? Twenty years ago I would have known the answer. Today I am unsure.

“For a while, yes.”
“Then maybe I’ve heard of you. I’m a lit major you know, so there’s a slight possibility.”
“Ok,” I relent. But instead of simply telling her my name, or explaining that I’ve written one of her favorite books, I decide to physically show her the evidence in order to suspend disbelief. “Ok, follow me.”

We leave the table and enter the stacks, winding through the aisles of cookbooks, biographies and self-help books. Finally, entering the fiction area, we find ourselves in front of the B’s.

I grab the three-volume set containing, “So The Wine Won’t Blow It All Away”, and pull it from the shelf. I quickly loathe the fact that the publisher has opted to lump it together with two of my other works, but acknowledge that, at least people are still reading me.

Handing her the novel I explain, “This was written for your mother. I hear that it’s one of your favorites.”

She slowly takes the book from my hand and holds it limply as she stares back at my face. “But…” she begins.

“But what?”
“But you’re dead.”
“Yes. I thought that too.”
“You killed yourself in 1983. We studied you in my class last semester.”
“Once again, we’re in agreement.”
“But how can you be here?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“You and mom were in love?”
“Very much so.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“Do what?”
“Kill yourself.”
“I believe that’s a conversation your mother should be involved in.”

She puts the book back onto the shelf, cautiously, being careful not to bend the front or back covers as it slides back into position between my other works. Then she turns to face me with a longing look that reminds me of her mother’s.

“So, how long are you going to stay?”

Another impossible question. Another impossible answer.

“That, my dear, has yet to be determined.”

Chapter 60

60

Your mother fractured her leg in three different places sometime during the fall and hopefully lost consciousness before she landed face down in a pile of brush and stone.

I stood frozen as she fell in slow motion, powerless, all my movements including my breath were miles away from my body. It felt like the space between death and rebirth. It could have been an eternity before I was finally able to panic.

As soon as I regained control I climbed down to get her and could see from a good bit of distance that she was bleeding from somewhere, anywhere, everywhere. I couldn’t seem to reason, my mind was everywhere and nowhere all at once. She was bleeding; you were inside of her. I knew better than to move her, but I couldn’t have left the two of you lying there in that brush, bleeding, slowly and painfully dying. So I lifted her without turning her over. I couldn’t look at her face. I found myself too…

She was heavy. Dead weight. Pregnancy. Maybe I caused another fracture trying to lift her. Maybe she’ll walk with a limp for the rest of her life because I had such a hard time with her body, but who would I be to just leave you both there alone while I went for help?

They say I can’t blame myself. Who the fuck are they?

It took exactly forty-three minutes to get the two of you back to the house and safely onto the couch. I knew enough to check her pulse, and doing so forced me to look at your mother’s face for the first time.

She was cut. She would bruise. But I knew she would be ok. There was a small bit of blood on the corner of her mouth, which I wiped off with my shirt. I’m still wearing that shirt as I write this to you now.

I brushed back her hair, smoothed her face, and paused just long enough to kiss her. Then I went to the phone and called the paramedics.

In ten minutes they’d arrived, in another ten they were rolling her to the emergency room. I was told to stay behind, to fill out forms, to file reports, to try and stay calm. I was buried beneath all their red tape while your mother was being operated on by some doctor I didn’t know.

I’ve never liked hospitals, but then again, who does? But I have my reasons rooted outside of the realms of sickness and sterility.

But I was forced to sit idly in a secluded waiting area while your mother was in operation. As the time ticked by slowly I read every newspaper, penciled in every crossword and paced the length of the hallway, all two-hundred and sixty seven steps, until I tread a tiled trail from one end to the other.

The doctor pushed open the doors at around dusk, although there was really no way to know what time of day it actually was. There were no windows and I hadn’t seen a clock in hours, but it felt like dusk. The time felt like something was ending and that night was slowly creeping in.

His name, I think, was Thompson. Dr. Thompson, I think. He is a tall man with a dark complexion, wears glasses and has a deep soothing tone in his voice. Introductions aside, I can’t seem to hear him correctly. It’s as if a record is skipping through a tin can. He mouths details about the procedure, your mother’s injuries, complications that arose. “She had some internal bleeding, but she should be ok,” I manage to decipher, shaking my head to tune in as he tells me about you.

“I am afraid, Richard, that we couldn’t save the baby.”

I didn’t think I had heard him correctly, so I continued to say nothing.

“I’m sorry.”

Nothing.

He extends his hand like a lifeline, and as his words begin to resonate within me, I grab at his wrist eagerly like I am the one falling off the trail I’ve worn into the tile.

Still holding firm I explain to him that there must be some sort of mistake. He explains to me that no mistake could have been made. I ask him to check again. He tells me there is no need. I offer the realization that Jamie and I had never known the sex of the baby. He offers me this:

“She would have been a girl.”

I stare down at the pace marks on the tile worn away from many, many feet before me. I look up to the doctor’s shoes, still covered in sterile blue socks. The hall feels so much longer now, but much more narrow, like a rubber band that is close to snapping between here and reality.

I let go of his hand. “She would have been beautiful. She was all I ever wanted.”

As I write this, I sit at your mother’s bedside, waiting. I’m waiting for this night to be over, waiting for the dawn to begin. I’m waiting to see the color of your eyes, waiting for you to lose your teeth. I’m waiting for your hair to grow, blonde and then brunette. I’m waiting for a night to show you the stars, fall asleep under them, and then dream. I’m waiting for the first time you realize, that you’re old enough, and don’t need me. I’m waiting for your first boyfriend. I’m waiting for him to break your heart. I’m waiting for you to come home from college and surprise me, as I sit writing in the den. I’m waiting, for you, to walk down the stairs, and into my arms, where I will lead you down the isle. I am waiting for that phone call, telling me that I have a grandson.

Yet, as I sit, as I sit here waiting for you, I am also dreading an arrival.

Soon the time will arrive when your mother will wake. She’ll be groggy, medicated, and confused, but the first thing she’ll ask me about, is you.

And no matter how much I’ll want to tell her what I’m waiting for, no matter how close all those things might have been, eventually the time will arrive when I’ll have to explain that our unborn daughter is never coming home again.

Chapter 59

59

Two weeks blaze by like a brushfire, leaving the ashes of memory and regret behind an inferno of renewed feelings.

We’ve made love twice, thrice, awkwardly each time. We’re amateurs at best, trying desperately to fumble correctly under the sheets. You’d think intimacy would be much more like riding a bike than ice-skating. It’s not. We’ve barely gained our footing.

Fire and ice. They don’t belong together but we keep attempting to recreate the spectacle. The sheets are crumpled like gift-wrapping, wadded up at the foot of the bed, and present themselves as incriminating evidence that she and I have forgotten how to sleep next to one another as well. But yet, we keep trying. It has been so long since we stopped.

She only comes home on the weekends, Jamie Jr., and only for a handful of hours at a time. “She has school during the week,” her mother tries to reason, “and, of course, her boyfriend.”

The first time she walks through the front door she sees me sitting on the couch, her mother’s legs draped over mine. We are remembering, the two of us, of a weekend trip we once took through the heart of Kansas. “I still remember how many windmills we counted,” she tells me, “One hundred and one.”

We’re laughing, which must have been an awkward sound to Jamie. A voice, not her father’s, reminding her mother of a time not so forgotten when she was honestly happy.

And then she sees me, the stranger from the bus stop, the wanderer she shared a cigarette with. I am an intruder, sipping coffee from her mother’s favorite coffee mug. But she has not heard the stories nor does she know our past. She’s never seen a picture of her mother and I together and been told that the tree that stands directly behind us was the one she used to climb.

To her I’m all but alarming; to me she’s all but my daughter.

Jamie quickly moves her legs from my lap when Jr. enters the room, introducing me in an off pitch sort of way.

“Jamie. Hi…uh…you’re home. I want you to meet my dear old friend, Richard.”

Her daughter and I respond in unison.

We have already met.

The sudden silence makes me beg for some sort of noise, a cough maybe, or Jamie beginning to sneeze. Maybe I should tell a joke, break the ice, yet this reunion has gone so horribly wrong that I fear comedy would merely insult the attendees.

And then it happens, a break in the silence. We are interrupted, suddenly, by a familiar cry.

Enter stage left: A completely blind twenty-three year old cat named Meatball.

“Well look at that,” I finally manage to say, making sure to look both Jamies in the eye. “The gang’s all here.”

And with that, after a collective sigh of relief, the Jamies and I begin to laugh out loud.

Chapter 58

58

I keep returning to this chapter to continually revise, edit, rephrase, and reorganize. I certainly expect something paramount to rise up out of these paragraphian ashes like some sort of poorly worded phoenix whose feathers have yet to fully form.

Or not.

Perhaps I’ll never figure this certain section of the novel out, and, upon it’s publication, I’ll regretfully mourn the misuse of literary property, noting to myself the horrible void in your experience since I have most assuredly deprived you of some sort of essential narrative information.

Or not.

But then again, you, the ever patient reader, will never really know the difference if facts such as these listed below are omitted from the final product.

Omission number one:

On a fairly sunny midmorning in July of 1978, I took a walk to my local grocery market because I was deliriously low on coffee. Half asleep and dreaming of cream I stumbled into the frozen food s section by mistake. I had no use for the thousands of bags of peas, corn, strawberries or asparagus, but for some reason or another I came out of that maze of pre-packaged nonsense holding a half-pound worth of freeze dried potato strings. I know that this recollection, this impulsive potato string purchase, makes absolutely no sense, but believe me when I say that when my good friend Robert stopped by my house the next afternoon with fresh ground hamburger meat he bought at the farmers’ market, I was certainly pleased to have forgotten to buy coffee the pervious day.

Omission number two:

Last Saturday I was wading knee deep into a small lake precisely 3.2 miles Northwest of my house, when suddenly I felt a sharp nipping at my big toe. That nipping, as it so happened to be, was an audacious prick of a fresh water fish who refused to give up his lakeside property to my size twelve feet. As the fish and I met eye to eye through the murky shallow waters I knew immediately who would wind up winning this battle of will, so I calmly and compliantly waded a bit further downstream.

And finally, omission number three:

I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately, which is understandable, considering my current descent into madness, so this lack of sleep is neither alarming nor unwarranted. I just thought I’d point out the darkening circles under my eyes to my extremely patient reader.

See? Three obvious omissions that, however, fit perfectly well between the margins of these pages although neither you nor I are better for them being written.

We constantly try to fill the voids in our lives with monotony, just as I felt the necessity to fill these pages with things better left unsaid. Perhaps, just every once in a while, these voids don’t need accompaniment. Perhaps these voids, just like this chapter, would be better by the addition of a simple blank page.

Or not.

As for now, it’s time to move on, get some sleep, and await the morning after.