Regret List (2 page)

We had been in Oregon for a couple months by then and
had finally moved out of my grandparents’ house into our own
apartment. One day at school, mid-November, the first snow began to
fall from the skies. It went unnoticed at first until one of the
fifth graders ran past our room, screaming that it had started
snowing. Instantly, we were all up out of our seats, staring out
the windows, ignoring our teacher’s pleas to regain our attention.
We began checking to see if it was sticking to the dusty ground and
if the clouds looked thick enough to keep dropping down the fluffy
flakes.

It was at that moment, in all the commotion, that our
principal stepped into the classroom. Asher, standing silently
beside me, noticed him first and nudged my shoulder, gesturing with
his head to get me to turn and look. He was speaking quietly to my
teacher, their heads bowed close together. My heart leapt in fear
as they glanced over and I realized they were talking about me.
What had I done wrong? Did they find out about the pen I nicked
from the kid who sat next to me? Was it the spelling test we had
earlier that week? Then, when the two adults parted and our teacher
walked in my direction, I realized with dread that it was none of
those things. It was something my little seven-year-old mind
couldn’t even imagine. I looked back over at Asher, but his
attention had already returned to the snow, his back to my
plight.

I felt my lower lip quiver before I had even been led
out into the hall to be talked to in private. The principal stayed
in the room to watch over the other kids. Once outside the door, I
could hear the excitement in all the other classrooms, the teachers
trying to continue the lessons while every head was turned toward
the windows. My teacher knelt before me, taking my little hands in
her own.

“Paige,” she said quietly, her own eyes full of
tears, “Paige, you have to go home now. There’s been an accident.”
See, I’m not the only one who prefers that word. From the sorrow in
her eyes to the length of time she had spoken to the principal, I’m
sure she knew more than that. But how do you tell a little kid what
had really happened?

I was shaking by that point, but too scared to cry.
“Who’s hurt?” I asked.

“Your dad,” she said softly. “Your mom will pick you
up soon and she will tell you what happened, okay?” I nodded.
“Remember you always have us at school, okay? Be brave, Paige.”

Brave. I heard that word so much in the next few
days. “Oh Paige, you’re being so brave.” “Such a brave little
girl.” Just because someone isn’t crying doesn’t mean they’re
brave. Sometimes it means they’re too scared to cry, to do anything
but brace themselves against the flurry of mourning. When my mom
picked me up from school that day, she was already a mess. She
couldn’t drive because she was crying so hard. Her mom, my grandma,
was in the front seat, her fingers tightly gripping the steering
wheel as she stiffly drove us to the hospital.

“Oh honey, oh Paige,” my mom gripped me tightly as I
slid into the backseat next to her, “your daddy’s made a mistake.
He’s all gone now, sweetie.” I remember staring out the window,
watching the snow fluttering down around us. It seemed so dark to
only be early afternoon. “We’re going to go say goodbye to him now,
but you’ll have to be brave. He’s sleeping, but he can still hear
you.”

She was talking so fast and yeah, I was only a little
kid, but I knew she wasn’t telling me everything. And when I saw
him, lying so still in a hospital bed, his chest unmoving, I knew
he wasn’t “sleeping.” Why do parents use that word, anyway? Do they
think it will make the sight of a dead body less frightening?
Because trust me, it doesn’t. Dead is dead and using a different
word doesn’t make it any less unnerving. Soon, I found out my mom
was lying in another way: my dad knew exactly what he was doing.
But I guess there are several definitions of the word
“mistake.”

It was my grandpa who let that one slip. We stood
there, in front of his dead body, not saying anything. My
grandparents, my mom and I all stood there, just looking. The only
sound was my mom’s sobbing. Finally, she stepped forward, slumping
over him. I couldn’t understand what she was saying, just
meaningless words of grief.

My grandma urged me forward. “Go on now, Paige. Say
your goodbyes.” I stepped forward and opened my mouth, but found I
had nothing to say. I inspected his face closely, unsure if this
really was my dad. It didn’t
look
like him. Maybe they were
all confused.

My grandpa’s reaction confused me even further. “It’s
for the best,” he turned away, his face angry. “At least it’s the
last life he’ll take.” He stalked out of the room, but I heard him
slump against the wall in the hallway, breathing hard.

My grandma put her hand on my mom’s shoulder. “Don’t
blame yourself,” she whispered, although I heard every word. “You
know you couldn’t have stopped this.”

In the next few days, I heard more. Family and
friends filled our house, talking softly and offering gifts of food
to my mom. My dad’s parents flew in from Chicago for the funeral,
but didn’t say a word to my mom or me. It was the last time I ever
saw them. Can you really blame them? From their view, my mom stole
their only child away with absolutely no notice, no goodbyes, and a
couple months later, they were on a flight to go to his funeral. I
don’t think my mom had a good relationship with them, even before
we moved.

The words “suicide” and “pills” echoed off our walls,
a ceaseless whisper that I heard everywhere, although they always
stopped talking when they saw me near. Instead, they offered me
unwelcome hugs and kisses, telling me how very sorry they were. I
absorbed everything I heard, not understanding most of it. Over the
next few years, I worked out what had happened.

When I was only a couple years old, my dad was in a
car accident. It wasn’t terrible and no one else was involved, but
he hurt his back and was prescribed some kind of hardcore pain
pills. However, the pain didn’t get better and there was nothing
the doctors could do, except relieve it temporarily with
chiropractors and pills.

I know there was more to it than that, because I
remember that day at our old house when he locked himself in the
bathroom and my mom was so desperate for him to come out, so
desperate that she moved us all to her parents’ house 2000 miles
away. I’m pretty sure he must have been depressed and threatening
suicide even back then, but no one has ever mentioned that bit of
it. I’m not even sure if he would have gone through with it, if the
accident hadn’t happened.

No one who told me this story said so, but I think he
must have been taking more pain pills than he should have. I know
he lost his job shortly before I started kindergarten and it had
something to do with his injury. The day he died, he had been at
the bar, trying out his newest form of dulling the pain – alcohol.
Of the few people who would let me in on some of the details,
everyone made sure to tell me that he was
not
over the legal
limit to drive, but what about the pills? Even I know you’re not
supposed to mix stuff like that. And what was he even doing at the
bar so early in the day, instead of out trying to find a job?

Regardless, as he drove home just after noon, his car
found its way onto the sidewalk, hitting a woman taking her
eight-year-old son for a walk. The kid was fine (physically), the
woman was dead. Without even waiting for the police to show up, he
raced home, downing pills as he went. When he got home, he picked
up the phone and called my mom’s work number while she was on her
lunch break. He left her a message on the answering machine and I
have no idea what he could have said, how he could have apologized
for what happened. He finished off the bottle of pills, washed them
down with a few final swallows of vodka, and collapsed without even
hanging up the phone, waiting for the end to take him.

I often wonder what my mom found when she came home.
She returned from her lunch break and received his message. She
tried to call home and her only reply was the busy signal. She must
have known what she was going to find as she drove home, but what
runs through your head on a drive like that, or comes from your
mouth when you find your husband, dead on the kitchen floor? I
imagine it sometimes as I’m trying to fall asleep.

After he died, when all those people filled the
house, it took them a few days to realize there was something wrong
with me. At first, they just thought I was in mourning, then maybe
that I was sick. Ever since I saw that dead body on the bed, I
realized I had nothing to say. Then, later, when I wanted to talk,
I found I couldn’t. I’d open my mouth and no sound would come out.
It was like I had forgotten how to speak. My mom even got the
doctors to stick a tube down my throat as I thrashed on the exam
room bed, choking and gagging. They found nothing wrong with me and
suggested taking me to a therapist.

The therapist tried in vain to talk to me and after a
while, she was able to get me to draw and (mostly illegibly) write
down my thoughts, but I still couldn’t talk. They gave my mom all
sorts of explanations: I was in shock, I was traumatized, I just
didn’t have anything to say. None of it was true, though. The
problem was I had something invisible stuck in my throat that had
to come out before any words could.

I went back to school after a couple weeks, still
unable to speak. I often wonder what the teacher told everyone
before I returned. She must have said
something
, because my
classmates were unusually interested in me. They all tried to get
me to talk by poking at me, making funny faces, taking my things
away, or jumping out at me. Eventually, they got tired of it and
left me alone. None of them really wanted a friend who wouldn’t
laugh at their jokes or commiserate with the unfairness of the
teachers and their parents.

Well, everyone except Asher. He stood silently to the
side until they all got tired of me, then sat next to me during
free time one day. “I need to teach you something,” he said to me,
slowly, so that I would understand. I glared at him. At that point,
I hated school and the last thing I wanted was more to learn. And
then, he made his hand into a loose fist and held it up to me. “A,”
he said. I mirrored the way he formed his hand and he nodded.

He taught me how to speak again.

We started with the alphabet, which we used loosely
to spell out names or to sound out a word that I couldn’t
understand him say. I was too young, too slow at spelling to write
anyone lengthy notes of what I needed to say, but this, speaking
with my hands was a way to reach at least one person. After the
alphabet, we moved onto people: teacher, grandma, grandpa, mom…dad.
Then feelings, and things, and actions.

At first, our only free time for this was during our
two short recesses, but our teacher soon caught on to what we were
doing and turned a blind eye to us during class. We were free to
sit in the back and silently sign to each other, Asher jotting down
words occasionally to teach me something new, sometimes adjusting
my hand or gestures.

That is how Asher became my best friend.

After two months of silence, I woke myself up in the
night. The thing that had gotten stuck in my throat finally emerged
as a grief-stricken howl of pain. My mom was in my room instantly,
holding me close as I let out the noise, the remorse of having my
dad disappear so suddenly. My words were back after that and Asher
stopped teaching me new signs, but our friendship was cemented. You
can’t break something like that – at least, that’s what I thought
at the time.

As for my family, my dad’s name became forbidden. Not
that my mom actually said anything like that, but she never brought
him up and whenever I did, the pain on her face was unbearable.
Soon, I stopped mentioning him and froze whenever anyone else did.
I forced his memory from my mind and now I rely on others to tell
me about him. The only thing I remember about him is how he looked
as he lay on that bed – gray, stiff, and broken. When I think of
him, I remember the sorrow of his funeral, the sobbing of my mom.
What he was like before that, all our happy memories are gone. And
that is my first regret.

After second grade, things changed. Literally. They
opened up a new elementary school in the district and the
boundaries changed. Most of my class stayed at the same school, but
the ones closest to the new school were separated from the others.
They pulled kids from two other elementary schools to fill up the
new one, which meant everyone was placed into a class where the
majority of their classmates were strangers. Asher stayed at the
old school. I got pulled into the new one.

Fortunately, we weren’t apart for long. The church my
mom and I had started attending had a back-to-school picnic and my
mom dragged me along. Back then, I was kind of scared of strangers,
so I stuck close to my mom. It was while we were eating that I
spotted him. I had never noticed him at any of the church functions
before, but then again, he was easy to overlook. Slouched down at
one of the tables with a sour look on his face, Asher was
surrounded by his much more social older brothers. It was easy to
see they were related – they all had the same unruly brown hair and
wide eyes. I waved my hand at him until he glanced over.
A
,
I signed. The first letter he had ever taught me and the first
letter of his name. My usual greeting.

His face brightened.
Page,
he flipped an
imaginary page back at me. My mom noticed and looked at me
strangely. In all the months since he had taught me a few basic
signs, I had never shown my mom. There was no need to. The woman
sitting next to him was giving me a curious look as well.