One night I was lying on the couch in the dark watching television. Aubrey was asleep in her crib in the next room, the bedroom I alone shared with her now. It seemed I was doing a lot of this tv watching in the dark thing lately, staying up way past when my head normally hit the pillow. It dulled the senses and for a second I could forget the worst of the pain.
But mostly there was no forgetting. In the quiet times after Aubrey slept, I remembered. I remembered Rob’s face after not shaving for a day or two. Scruffy. I remembered when he’d stroke my hair and face. He was so tender. I remembered that when we were dating and still living in the barracks at the base in Colorado, we’d walk in the nighttime and find places to sit and snuggle. Find private places where he’d get all shy, or he’d sing to me, or tell me his darkest secrets in Portuguese. I remembered his laugh, and the chest hairs that would peep out from above his tee shirt, and that when he got sleepy, he’d get extra snuggly. Or that when I walk away to do something, he’d pull me back to him for a kiss or a hug.
Sometimes he’d think of song lyrics just to sing to me, or play for me. It was like reading me poetry.
The show was a re-run but I watched it anyway because I didn’t want to go to the bed alone and know that he wasn’t down the hall playing his online computer game.
The phone rang. I needed to pick it up because Fernanda wasn’t home from work yet – it was maybe only 9:30 in the evening. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but I didn’t want the ringing to wake Aubrey. I lifted my fae from the arm of the couch.
“Hello?”
It was my Aunt Mary from North Carolina. Her husband, my uncle, was the only one of my family members that could attend the funeral.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
“I’m fine, I guess.” I quietly clear my throat. It’s been a couple hours since I spoke last.
I remember when my dad called me right after Rob died. A day or two later maybe. I was pacing the blackened parlor room where my happiness was stolen. The computer screen my only light in the sleeping house.
“You’re strong,” my father said.
“I don’t feel strong.”
And another phone call a couple days after that. Again, in the parlor. Why did I haunt this place? A place I rarely hung out in before Rob died? Was it because this was the last place I’d seen him alive? And therefore closer to him somehow, in this room?
This time the call was from my uncle Phil. It’s a call I remembered long after all the other words of condolences were given to me. Long after the neighbor rang our bell and handed me a musical water globe with two doves in it “for your little girl” and a white business sized envelope of cash collected for me from all the neighbors that I’d never met in the two years I lived in that house.
After a few beats of silence over the phone line I say,
“I don’t know what to say.”
It was honest. I actually didn’t know the man but he was one of my favorite uncles and the only family member, it seemed, that tried to keep in touch with me – save my mom and grandmother.
His answer was truthful, too. And poignantly perfect.
“Neither do I. But that doesn’t matter. You won’t remember what I say anyway. You’ll just remember that I called.”
My heart paused, swollen with love and relief.
So now it was his wife calling. Someone he married when I was a young teen and whom I knew even less about. I think I’d met her twice.
“Are you praying?” she asked.
I closed my eyes and quieted my sigh with effort. She was Catholic, too. It seemed I was surrounded in unwanted waves of Catholism, everyday holding myself apart a little from almost everyone I knew in Massachusetts and out. Not wanting to be preached to -- or converted -- in my weakened state, to a religion I felt was filled with frivolous hypocrises. But at the same time desperately wanting connection and a warm soul to lean my aching head on.
“I’m trying.” I gave in and bowed to the love and peace I knew my aunt was trying to offer me. “It seems I’ve forgotten how to though.”
It did seem … relieving, to be able to spill your angst at the feet of a diety that claimed to love you with no conditions – except the hundreds the priests threw at you.
“Have you tried praying to your husband?” she asked.
I was silent.
“To Rob?” I asked, thinking I must have misunderstood.
“Yes.”
As far as I knew you could only pray to God, through Jesus’ name. Anything else was, well –
“Isn’t that blasphemous?”
Aunt Mary laughed. Her dad was a bishop, for Christ’s sake!
“No.” I could hear the smile in her word. “If it helps, do it. It might lead you back into prayer to God. Get you used to praying again.”
We said good-night and I hung up the phone, thoughtful.
I turned off the tv and sat in the dark for a few moments.
“Rob? Can you hear me? I miss you.”
No comments:
Post a Comment