A Little Hope(18)

Alex thinks of Benny then and the blue bicycle, how twisted and mangled it looked. He always tries not to think of that bike. His first instinct was to bend down and start untwisting with all his might. He wondered if they could loan him a pump for the deflated tires when they showed it to him in the back of the police car.

He closes his eyes and tries to cast that image away. Greg. Think about Greg. Greg who’s still among the living.

Greg’s eyes, his quietness: he knows it’s bad. Will Greg be able to know what he knows and shake this? Alex hopes so. To stop working and do the treatments and listen when the doctors say to rest? He can’t imagine Greg Tyler in a hospital bed. He can’t imagine Greg in pajamas, lying still. He watches the candle he’s lit for Greg, and can’t help but feel powerless as the small lightbulb flickers its best. You can do this, he thinks. We are rooting for you.

Kay whispers a few more things, rosary beads now in hand. The heavy artillery. Good. He turns around and notices they are alone in the church. The long aisle, the gleaming wood of the pews. In the back is a framed corkboard with announcements and a box where people take the weekly news bulletin. Alex thinks of his third candle. He and Kay each always light their own for Benny.

Could Benny really be dead twenty-four years? He thinks of their son, their only child, the child they didn’t have until their early thirties because “God was taking his time,” Kay said. The kid who turned fourteen so fast, who only ate Kraft macaroni and cheese and Honey Smacks most of the time; the kid who made a sculpture out of old egg cartons that won an award in the junior high art show. Benny with his ribs always showing, with his cowlick. Benny trying to learn Spanish at the kitchen table, his accent so Connecticut.

Alex tries to imagine him in his late thirties now and can’t. He can only see that bike, and for the millionth time, he tries to remember the last moment he had with him that Saturday, and has no idea. Benny was going to Ryan’s, Alex knows. He was wearing that Vermont sweatshirt he loved. Alex only knew from seeing it on the floor in the hospital. So much blood. Can Kay get the stains out? he wondered as he stood there, hand over his mouth. What was the last thing he said to his son that day? What did Benny’s voice sound like? Did he look up from his newspaper or whatever he was doing when Benny said goodbye? Please, please, he thinks. Tell me I did.

In the days that followed, how quiet their house was. He couldn’t say anything to Kay because there was nothing, not one thing, to say. Do you want him back, too? Do you hate the sound of our house, too? Do you wish you had died instead? Do you keep thinking we can’t have dinner because we’re waiting for Benny to come through the back door, head sweaty, clothes smelling like outside the way they always did when he played football? He can see Benny’s fine hair, his clear blue eyes. That scar on his hand from carving the pumpkin when he was seven.

He can go back to that time so easily, because he can pinpoint that it was his worst year. Kay mostly ignored him those days. He remembers how she’d make herself a piece of toast with honey for dinner and stare out the window. He remembers how she just left the loaf of bread on the counter, as if a vague gesture to him. This is what we need to eat to stay alive, even though we have no reason to stay alive. He remembers wanting visitors on those quiet days, but their friends avoided the house.

How did people survive these things? He wondered that all the time. He would go to work, and everyone would nod politely and look down. He would close his office door and put on the AM news station and listen to the traffic report and the weather and sob in his hands.

Some days at lunch, he’d leave his briefcase below his desk and drive and drive. He would let the cold air of late autumn hit his face and pretend Benny was out biking on the road beside him. Alex would keep driving until he escorted him everywhere safely. When a big truck would come by, Alex would give it the middle finger, a gesture he rarely used. He’d pretend to watch his boy cycle beside his car, beside the stretches of field. “Ride in the field,” Alex would say. “Ride where no one can get you.”

Then he’d sit at that family restaurant drinking black coffee and maybe have a cup of soup: pepper pot, beef barley, New England clam chowder. The waitress Melinda was always working, and she started saying, “There’s my guy,” when he walked in. Sometimes she’d touch his shoulder when she brought him the check. Sometimes she would put the coffeepot down and tell him about her day. About her mother who owned the antiques shop in Ohio, about the stray cat she fed. She was in her thirties, and when she smiled, her eyes were almost purple. Like Liz Taylor’s.

One day he said, “Your eyes settle me,” and when she gave him the bill, she drew a small heart by the total.

Driving to her house that first afternoon when her shift ended, following her old Chevy in his polished black Lincoln, he tried to talk himself out of it, but it was exciting. It was the first time he drove that he didn’t imagine Benny biking beside him.

“You sure you want to?” she said, and he nodded.

He went there at least seven times, and she would take off her work clothes as soon as they walked in the door. Once, she convinced him to get in the shower with her, which he and Kay had never done. On his last day there, she poured them each a glass of cranberry juice and put out a plate with Triscuits and cheese. “You know I can’t continue this,” he said.

She sipped her juice and shrugged. “I figured—sooner or later.”