Second Chance Friends (24 page)

M
elinda couldn't get enough of the baby. She could think of nothing she wanted to do more than hold her. Count her fingers and toes over and over again. Run her hands across the soft spot on her head. Touch her cheek to see the reflexive yawn of her mouth. Smell her.

She was beautiful and fragile and perfect. Anything could happen to her. Anything. She could be president or the person to cure cancer or she could end up like Karen's son, Travis, or she could blink out of existence when she was six. But Melinda instantly knew, by the weight of her sweet little body, that whatever journey this baby went on, it would be worth it to take it with her. No matter when or how or if it ended.

Maddie had mostly slept after the baby was born—conking out the way she had when she'd come home from the hospital after her last suicide attempt. But Melinda didn't mind. She would sit with the baby as long as was needed. She didn't want to ever put her down. Paul understood. He was waiting for her at home, but he knew this was something she had to do. He knew it was something she wanted to do.

Karen and Joanna had gone home. Joanna had a dinner to get to at her parents' house, and Karen wanted to turn in early before work the next day. Helen and Cleve had come and gone, surgical masks over their faces. Helen refused to hold the baby, in fear of getting her sick, but Cleve had held her, big tears soaking into the top of his mask. They both kissed the sleeping Maddie on the temple before leaving, their arms around each other's waists.

Finally, when dinner arrived, Maddie woke up.

“Mommy's awake,” Melinda said to the baby. She walked to Maddie's bedside. “You want to hold her, sleepyhead?”

Maddie yawned, nodded. She held out her arms and Melinda placed the baby in them. Maddie stared into her face for a long time as the infant squirmed and wriggled. She would be waking up soon, wanting to eat. “She looks like him,” Maddie said. She brushed the baby's nose lightly with her fingertip. “Right here. He would have been so upset that she got his nose. He always thought it was big.”

“I think it's perfect,” Melinda said.

“It is, isn't it? I think I was most worried that I wouldn't
be able to see him in her at all. Like, if I couldn't find him in her, it would be proof that he was completely forever gone. But there he is, right in the middle of her face.”

“You'll see him every time you look at her,” Melinda said. “You'll be surprised how many things she'll do that will remind you of him.”

“I hope so.” She went silent, running her fingers along the contours of the baby's face, arms, hands, seemingly mesmerized by the shape of her child.

“Have you thought of a name for her yet?” Melinda asked.

Maddie nodded. “Rose. Tea Rose Routh. But I'll call her Rose for short.”

Tea Rose. A unique name for a unique baby born in the most unique circumstances. Ordinarily, Melinda might have snubbed her nose at such uniqueness. Might have thought it too theatrical, kitschy. But somehow it really fit this baby. Somehow it was not theatrical or kitschy at all, but more of a badge.
Look what I survived,
the badge seemed to say.
Look who I am.

“Rose,” Melinda repeated. She smiled and wiggled the baby's fist with her finger. “Hello, Rose.”

“You think Michael would like it?” Maddie asked.

Melinda reached over and clutched Maddie's hand with hers. “I think he would love it.”

 

 

 

Baby's First Birthday

When . . . April 30th

Where . . . At our house, a backyard party

Who Was There . . .

They say you have friends for a reason, friends for a season, and friends for a lifetime. From the moment I met your father, Michael Routh, at a fraternity fund-raiser my sophomore year in college, I knew he would be my friend for a lifetime. I just didn't understand that the lifetime would be so short.

I know I've written so much about him in this journal already, Rose, and maybe you're even sick of hearing about him. Maybe you wish I'd write more about you, so that you can look back and know who you were. Were you born with the stubborn cowlick that will cause you all kinds of
problems when you're a teenager and you want your hair to just obey? (Yes, you were.) Did you always sleep on your back with your fists flung up alongside your ears? (Yes, you did.) Was your voice always so deep and melodic and full? (Yes, it was.) But, for me, it's not that easy. Because when I see that cowlick, I think of your father's cowlick, in a different spot, but just as unruly. When I watch you sleep or listen to your voice, he is there. He is always there. And so it's not easy for me to separate you from your father. And I feel as if I need to say it when I think of him, because I'm the only one who can. If you're reading this, hoping to get a glimpse into who you were, know that you were him.

He would have been so excited for today, Rose. He would have hired ponies or bounce houses or ponies and bounce houses and magicians and jugglers and a whole damn carnival if he thought it would make you happy. I don't know how I know that, except to say that I know he would have done those things for me, and he wanted you just as much as he ever wanted me. He loved you just as much, too. Maybe even more.

So even though technically he wasn't here for your first birthday party, I'm writing about him anyway. He was the first to arrive. I saw him, as soon as I opened my eyes this morning. He was standing at the foot of my bed, grinning that goofy grin of his, the one that meant he was either excited about something or up to no good. It hit me like a punch to the chest, Rose, because I realized he had been grinning that same way right before he died. The last thing he knew, in full consciousness, was that he was excited for
something. That something was you. Realizing this makes me love you even more.

So he was here, and he brought the best gift either of us could have ever asked for: comfort.

But, aside from your father, your first birthday party was filled with lots of family and friends. Gammy and Pappy, the silly names my parents had given themselves, were there. They brought so many gifts, we had to save some to open later, after the party. Stuffed toys and dolls and blocks and—your favorite—a little red wagon. Oh, how your eyes lit up when you saw that wagon. You immediately climbed in, the ruffles on the seat of your panties showing out from under your dress as you struggled to get footing. You wanted a ride, and Gammy took you around the yard so many times I thought you might get dizzy.

Gammy is your best friend, Rose. “Gammy” was actually your first word. Not “mama,” and certainly not “dada.” “Gammy.” I didn't mind. I understood.

I spent the first four months of your life wanting to kill myself. What little progress I'd made during the last months of pregnancy just seemed to fly out the window as hormones and reality slammed into me. I had no money. I had no husband. I had no future, yet I was supposed to give you, this beautiful precious girl with eyes full of hope and expectation, a future.

I barely got out of bed. I wasn't sleeping. I was lying there thinking of all the ways I could die. I was lying there wishing for it. But, dammit, I couldn't do it. Because you were counting on me, and I knew what it was like to have
the one person you counted on ripped away from you. It was a pain I would be surprised to survive. It was a pain I would never want to repeat.

I tried imagining what your life would be like if I died. Gammy and Pappy would take care of you. Of course they would. They wouldn't hesitate for a second. But no matter how hard they loved you, no matter how much they treated you like one of their own, you never would be their own. You would have nobody to remember your first flutter of movement. And you would always wonder. You would wonder about me the way I wonder about your father—
Is he okay? Did he know I loved him? What would he have been like in twenty, thirty, forty years?
But you would also be wondering about yourself.
Why would my mother choose death over being with me?
you would be forced to think
. Am I so bad?

What a horrible thing to have to speculate on about yourself.

So I got up. I started helping out where I could. My meds started kicking in. And when I'd catch you in profile, I would see him, and the grief would hit with such intensity, I would have to disappear into my room and try to remember the way he sounded when he said my name.

Eventually, I stopped being able to hear it. That was when I knew it was time to move on.

Thank God, Gammy was as willing to let you go as I was to let her have you.

Our neighbors, Yvonne and Richard, came to your party, too. They brought their little boy, Austin, who is older than you by a few months. You were cute together,
even though you fought bitterly over your new toys. Still, I hadn't ever really talked to Yvonne and Richard much. They were always two pairs of curious eyeballs trying not to be noticeable across the yards when I was sulking on the back porch in my nightgown or when I was screaming and throwing breakable things at nobody or even that time the ambulance had to come and take us away—you in my belly, and me covered in drying stained bathwater. The fact that they were willing to embrace me when I was ready to be embraced said a lot about them. They brought you a piggy bank. It's one of those kinds that you have to break to open. I've been tucking notes in there. Just little things, like something cute that you said that your father would have laughed at, or a little encouraging quote just in case you should need one. I want you to open that bank someday and find that the riches inside aren't the bills with the presidents' faces on them.

Your father's entire family came to the party, too—aunts, uncles, cousins, the whole shebang. It was overwhelming—there were at least twenty of them—but I was happy to see you interact with them. Michael loved his family, and I saw ghosts of him wisping around their conversations. His mother would periodically look off into the distance, hands propped on her hips, teeth working her lower lip.

“I'm so glad you came,” I said, sidling up to her next to the fence. She had been watching you climb in and out of that wagon.

“I'm so glad you let me,” she answered.

“You're always welcome. Michael would have never wanted you to be apart from Rose.”

She turned to me and I could see white lines on her cheeks where tears had eaten away her makeup and the wind had blown them dry. “I hate that we have to say things like that.
Michael would have wanted this
or
Michael would have been happy about that
. He should be here.”

“I know,” I said. I leaned into her, rested my temple on her shoulder.

She tilted her head on top of mine and let out a long sigh. “I miss him so much,” she said.

I didn't say “I know” that time. Because I didn't know. I knew what it was like to miss Michael, yes, but I had no idea what it was like to miss your child. I couldn't take that extra grief away from her. It was hers alone, and one I never want to experience. I'd been completely self-absorbed for most of the early months of your life, and still I couldn't imagine being without you.

You are sunshine. You are birdsong. You are the tinkling of golden coins. You are everything.

Your “aunties” Melinda, Karen, and Joanna came to the party, too, of course.

Melinda looked nearly ready to pop, as she once told me I had looked. She said her back was hurting and her ankles were swollen and she couldn't wait to get this baby out of her. She already knew she was having a boy. She'd already named him. Paul Junior. Not very creative, but given the hell the two of them had gone through to get to this point, it seemed pretty perfect.

She told me, over huge breakfasts in the back booth that faced the bus crash divots, that she was still terrified. She
said she had nightmares where she was still at her old job, and they got a call, and when they arrived, it was her baby who needed the ambulance. She said she'd had that nightmare a dozen times and never once was she able to save Paul Junior. When she told me this story, her fingers shook around her fork and she stopped eating.

“Do you ever wish he hadn't been in your life in the first place?” she asked.

It took me a minute to even figure out what, or who, she was talking about. And then it dawned on me that she was talking about Michael. “What? Of course not,” I said, and I'd said it so quickly and with such certainty that it really hit me for the first time. Even if I'd known, way back during that frat party, that I was going to lose your father so soon, I still would have loved him. I still would have married him. I still would have tried to get pregnant with you. My memories with Michael are some of my most precious. Why would anyone want to give those up for safety?

Melinda nodded and went back to eating, smiling as if I'd done her a big favor just then. She was the one who'd given me the gift.

Auntie Joanna came carrying a huge teddy bear. So big I couldn't even see her head over the top of it. She laughed when she sat it on the ground, and you immediately toddled over and tackled it, toppling over it clumsily. Joanna had broken up with her girlfriend, Sutton, a few months before, her only reason that she wasn't quite ready to be tied down. She wanted to catch up on the dating the rest of us had done in high school and college, when she'd been too busy
hiding. She wanted to try out love and lust and hand-holding and innocent kisses in public. She was currently dating a girl named Heather, but it wasn't serious. Joanna didn't have time for much dating, anyway. She'd gotten a huge lead role in a production at the community college. She was going back to school. She smiled a lot and told me funny stories and sang for me and once, last September, we ate slices of Boston cream pie right there on the lawn of the Tea Rose Diner. You slept in your infant carrier next to us, the sunlight making your eyelids nearly translucent.

Karen and Marty came to your party together. Karen had cut her hair, colored and straightened it, and bought some new clothes. She looked decades younger. She brought her grandson, Marcus, with her. Marcus is probably your best playmate right now, Rose, and he is so protective of you. Like a little mother hen, following you around, telling you “no” when you reach for something dangerous.

Her son, Travis, who you've never met and probably never will, was back in jail, this time for robbing a convenience store. Sometime during the weeks that followed, Travis's girlfriend, Kendall, disappeared. Took a bunch of jewelry from Karen's jewelry box and split. Karen was now a parent to a nearly two-year-old boy. But she seemed very happy about it and kept going on about do-overs and how you can't predict life, no matter how hard you try. I've already learned that with you, Rose—that as a parent, you always wonder if you could have done it better.

Things were so busy at the party, with the cake and the presents and the chasing around toddlers and cousins and
refilling drinks, I barely had the chance to talk to Melinda, Joanna, and Karen at all. Not that not talking to them would be a huge deal. We talk every single day. We meet for coffee at the Tea Rose Diner most mornings, even if for just a few moments. It's our spot. The spot where we all got our second chances.

But as people began to clear out, and you curled up on the giant teddy bear and dozed off, I made my way over to them.

“Crazy,” I said, raising my eyebrows. “Are birthday parties always this exhausting?”

Karen laughed, bouncing Marcus on one knee. “Only if you have them.”

“Well, I will be having them, so go ahead and mark your calendars now,” Melinda said.

“Your baby isn't even born. How do we mark our calendars for a birthday that hasn't happened yet?” Joanna asked.

Melinda rubbed her belly, thinking. “Just go ahead and block out the entire month of May for the rest of your lives.”

Marcus wiggled out of Karen's lap and ran toward the tricycle that you had gotten and temporarily forgotten about. “Don't get hurt,” Karen called, her hands trailing after him, as if she didn't want to let go. That was when I noticed her finger.

“You're engaged,” I said.

The other two gasped as she held her hand up for inspection. “Last night,” she said. “Isn't it beautiful? I know I'm old to be starting over, but . . . life is funny sometimes, isn't it?”

Life is funny sometimes. You can go from holding poster board next to this adorable frat guy to saying, “I do,” to watching that frat boy die, to watching his baby eat fistfuls of cake on her first birthday without even taking a breath between any of those things.

You can go from happiest girl in the world to sitting in a bathtub full of your own blood before your eyelashes bat once.

You can go from husbandless and friendless and hopeless to admiring the engagement ring of one of your best friends in the instant it takes to put your foot on the wrong pedal of a speeding bus.

Remember that, Rose. Remember that life is funny sometimes. Remember that things can change so quickly and so completely that you could never have predicted them, even if you'd been told to let loose your wildest thoughts. Maybe that was why your father was sent into our lives, Rose. Maybe he was here to teach us that you can't predict life . . . but that unpredictable doesn't equal bad.