TWO

I’ve always wondered if Joel heard our prayers as we stood over him on that sidewalk.

When we arrived at the hospital, we ran into the emergency room looking for Dad. A nurse at the main desk took us to a waiting room, where we stood around until a doctor arrived. Mom studied his face and then slowly shook her head as she backed away from him.

“No, no, no!” she said, louder and louder, as if she could make it not true.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. McAndrews.” And then the doctor turned to Matt and me. His eyes looked sad.

“No!” Mom cried out. “Don’t say that. He was just here! He was fine! The car wasn’t going that fast!” Her voice pleaded as she gasped for breath.

“His head struck the windshield and then the road,” the doctor continued. “The brain injury was more than he could survive. He never suffered,” he added, as if that would make us feel better.

Matt slipped out the door and I didn’t know if I should go to him or stay with Mom. Mom sat down and began to sob so loudly I couldn’t hear myself cry.

Joel is dead, Joel is dead, Joel is dead. I couldn’t believe it. I started shivering, and I couldn’t make myself stop. Was it my wet bathing suit or was the hospital so cold? I smelled like salt water. My hands tingled and I shook them back to life.

“Where’s my husband?” Mom’s voice was paper thin.

“They’re treating his leg,” the doctor answered.

Mom stood shakily and staggered. I rushed to steady her.

“Oh, Abby.” She wrapped her arms around me. I held her and she held on to me, and I never wanted to let go of her again.

The doctor waited and then escorted Mom into the second room down the hallway. He talked with Mom and Dad in Joel’s room while Matt and I sat outside the door on folding chairs. I could feel wet sand grind against smooth metal. When I took Matt’s hand, he didn’t pull away.

I watched the sterile black-and-white clock on the wall, the second hand circling and the minute hand shifting almost imperceptibly. I could anticipate each subtle movement. How long would they stay in there?

When the minute hand had moved more than seventy-two times and I had stopped counting, the door opened.

A doctor pushed a man in a wheelchair. It was my dad in a blue robe, but not really my dad because he didn’t seem to notice us. I don’t know what he was staring at. I started to say something, then closed my mouth.

“Dad,” Matt said as he slid his hand from mine and stood. But Dad didn’t turn. At last Matt put his hand on Dad’s shoulder and Dad turned to look. That face is the one I don’t want to remember. A rope of fear tightened across my chest. I could hold Mom’s sadness, but Dad’s grief was overwhelming. He seemed broken in a way I wasn’t sure could be fixed. The clock behind Dad now read 4:27, and then the hands blurred with my tears as I watched them wheel Dad down the hall.

I wanted the day to be over. But then again, if the day was over, my brother was really dead. Today Joel had been alive. If only we could go backward, our afternoon would be morning and we’d wake up and Joel would say, “Get up and play with me, Bee!” and this would not be happening.

When we returned to the cabin, Mom rummaged through our suitcases, laying out Joel’s clothing on the bed. The little suit from the wedding, another pair of overalls, a few shirts and shorts.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just don’t know.”

Neither did I. What was she doing?

“They asked what we wanted him to wear …” Her voice drifted off. I picked up the suit and threw it back in the suitcase. Definitely not that. Then Matt removed the shirt with the scratchy tag on the back. We were left with a T-shirt and Joel’s blue overalls.

That night we went to bed with our clothes on. Now there were just four of us. This was our family. I closed my eyes and then quickly opened them, staring at the ceiling for so long my eyes felt dry. My stomach growled. We hadn’t eaten since the candy, but I wasn’t hungry. My mind would not stop. Oh, to sleep and never wake up.

“You’re having a nightmare!” Matt whispered as he shook me awake later that night. “No!” I cried out in a strange voice, the memory of yesterday rushing back. I had fallen asleep? I actually fell asleep even though my little brother had just died? How could I have fallen asleep?

In the other room my mother wept, a soft, haunting moan, accompanied by the unfamiliar sound of my dad’s low, muffled sob. Whenever my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could see Matt on the cot nearby, his eyes wide open, staring straight ahead. Somehow I wanted it to be a shared secret that we were all awake. As if that could be a secret.

Dad wouldn’t leave Joel in Washington, so the congregation sent money to have Joel’s body transported by train back to Ohio, and Dad would ride with the body. Mom had to drive Matt and me all the way home. Our same bags were loaded into the same purple station wagon, ready to return on the same roads, yet nothing was the same.

I needed to say good-bye to Dad, but he’d left early that morning. It seemed Dad couldn’t leave Washington fast enough, but how could he go without saying good-bye? Suddenly good-byes seemed so much more important. Gossamer. Life was so delicate.

Our car felt empty. Mom in the front, Matt in the middle, and me lying in the back. Matt never talked, and I had yet to see him cry. Mom was silent, too, her eyes locked on the road, occasionally blinking hard as if to stay awake, or sometimes to hold back the tears. If I could have read their thoughts, I wouldn’t have. My sadness was enough for me alone.

“I feel sick,” I said, after two hours on the highway.

“Crawl up here with me and look out the front window,” Mom suggested.

The front seat was Joel’s special place. Joel always sat on her lap or curled at her feet. That was not my place. I climbed into the middle seat and sat next to Matt, then cranked the window open and hung my head out like a dog.

I reached forward and flicked on the radio only to hear about a war I didn’t understand. All those unfamiliar words and acronyms that didn’t want to be explained, Cambodia and Kent State and Tet Offensive and North and South Vietnam and POWs and MIA. Those casualties were too far away to comprehend. Especially when my own battles seemed more real.

When we hit eastern Washington, the temperature soared to one hundred and four degrees, and we were so miserable we had to peel ourselves off the sticky vinyl seats. We rolled the windows up and sweated until we were wet, then rolled them down so the wind cooled us. “It’s evaporation,” Matt explained dully. Was it this hot for Dad in the train with Joel’s casket?

We didn’t ask, “How much farther?” or “When are we going to get there?” After all, would getting home make anything better?

This was the end of our first family vacation. With Dad’s sister getting married and Grandpa’s heart attack, the timing was right for Dad to go home. I had looked forward to standing under the Peace Arch, where I could straddle the border of Canada and America and say I had stood on foreign soil. But life had turned from happy to sad as easily as heading west and returning east. We had left for a wedding and were returning home to a funeral.

I imagined how the journey would be if Joel were still with us. I considered his toes tickling the rear window as we lay in the back of the station wagon. In Montana, when we drove by a bear and a baby cub in the forest, I wondered what Joel would have said. I did a double take when I saw a small boy in overalls with a diaper-fattened bottom, thrown in the air and caught by his daddy. In the Dakotas, we stopped at a roadside park, but I didn’t want to play on the swing set. There were too many preschoolers. When we bought groceries in Wisconsin, I instinctively looked for Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries and Hostess CupCakes. But by the time we hit Ohio, when we returned to the car, I stopped counting to check if we were all there.

It was all about split seconds. One followed by another. And we couldn’t make them go backward. If we had known, we never would have gone. We would have unpacked the station wagon and said, “Not this year.” Or we could have played longer on the beach, or we could have skipped buying the candy. I could have stopped complaining for the length of a heartbeat. I could have held Joel’s wrist a split second longer.

I thought about that a lot, and it made me wonder about God. And about what He stops and what He doesn’t. And I know it’s not because He can’t. My dad preached about a good and loving God who can do anything, but now I didn’t know what that meant.