I remember clinging to Lacey as Freddie and Clive hustled us to privacy. Hearing Gaz cry with us. Cilla getting us on a flight. Lady Bollocks waving us off down the long gravel drive, kinder than I had ever seen her. I remember my mother’s face, too, stoic and empty, more wrenching than if she had greeted us in tears. I remember how brave she was, moving her trembling finger down the phone list, repeating to friends what none of us could believe. I remember understanding what a brutal thing it is to be the bearer of truly bad news—to break off a piece of that misery and hand it to other people, one by one, and then have to comfort them; to put their grief on your shoulders on top of all your own; to be the calm one in the face of their shock and tears. And then learning that relative weight of grief is immaterial. Being smothered a little is no different than being smothered a lot. Either way, you can’t breathe.
I remember saying good-bye. Caressing his cheek. Seeing his lively, joyous face reduced to a remote serenity, his mouth curled into a final half smile that was only an eighth of how big it had seemed when he turned that smile on you. I remember the sense that it wasn’t him. Not anymore. And I remember feeling gutted, hollow, as if someone had scraped out my insides. Busywork was all that sublimated the pain: planning, organizing, shepherding, greeting, hugging, hosting, organizing the casseroles—an endless parade of aluminum-wrapped apologies from friends who wished they could bring Dad back instead. I’d flip the switch and plow through the list with robotic efficiency, then flip it back and lie awake, destroyed, disbelieving, devastated.
It was such a stupid damn thing, too. He’d missed going to games, so he drove to Cincinnati to see if he could break the Cubs’ five-game losing streak. He never made it. The doctors said it was fast, that he may not have known it was the end, likely never felt his heart quit on him, much less the median. And the Cubs still had the indecency to lose. There was cold, dark comedy in realizing he was right; the Cubs were the death of him.
The church was packed. Dad would have been so embarrassed and so pleased. I kept making fruitless mental notes to tell him about all the people who’d come, from grade school friends whose soccer teams he coached, to employees at Coucherator, Inc., tearstained and swollen. There were the regulars and bartenders from his local, The Shortstop; classmates of ours who’d deemed him the parent they’d most like to acquire in a trade; and teachers from as many as two decades ago, armed with stories about what a great guy he was. Hardware Pete, Auto Sal, and Electric Bruce of Bruce’s Electric sat shoulder to shoulder in the same pew, with the barber who cut his hair. I don’t remember giving a eulogy, although I know I sat up all night trying to write it, my Hot Cubs of Yore looking at me with silent, yellowing support. I’d been compelled to chip Derek Jeter off the wall and hide him in a drawer, because my father thought the Yankees were Hell’s foot soldiers, and it seemed disloyal to let one stay.
My friends called, kind and helpless: “Bex, I’m so sorry,” “Bex, if there’s anything I can do,” and from Gaz, whose mother died when he was fifteen, “Bex, this is the worst thing that’s ever happened. I love you all.” Bea sent a beautiful wreath, Cilla sent a ham. An enormous bouquet that required three men to carry it was simply signed Steve and family.
For the better part of three weeks, we Porter women wandered around like zombies, every room full of Dad’s echo, as if he had just stepped away and would be back any minute. We avoided his spot on the couch like it was sacred, yet Lacey and I surreptitiously repositioned whatever might remind Mom too much of him. We emptied the Coucherator, we threw out the Funyuns, and I smuggled all the Cracker Jack up to my room, then binged on it while crying over the box of baseball souvenirs, still tucked under my bed—every gaudy plastic ring I’d ever found in the box of sticky sweet popcorn, every ticket stub, shirts I’d outgrown, and old cards and pencil nubs from when Dad and I would score the games together. I read about a change in the pitching rotation and thought, “Earl Porter will have feelings about this,” before realizing that he wouldn’t, that he’d never even know, and it seemed pointless suddenly that they bothered playing at all. And every night Lacey and I crawled into Mom’s king-size bed, the three of us a human chain, as if hanging on tight would prevent the universe from ripping off another link.
“I’m sorry we fought,” Lacey had whispered one night.
“Me too. Never again.”
“Never again,” she repeated.
It hurts to think about how much we meant it, lying there, crying into each other’s hair. We used to joke that we needed a safe word whenever we wanted to complain about subjects we’d already covered ad nauseam, so that we could save time by just saying Altoids, or whatever. I wish we’d made up one that could take us back and remind us how essential we are to each other, more priceless than any of Eleanor’s antiques.
And yet, the whole time, I also yearned for Nick, the only man in the world I’d loved as fiercely as I loved my father. The criminal loss of one dredged up the egregious loss of the other, and I started to develop a very real antipathy for my hometown. My two most recent stays had coincided with two suffocating hazes of grief, and Muscatine had become synonymous with a dull, comatose emptiness. The people who would one day so glibly coin the name Fancy Nancy didn’t understand that England was an escape, that the ghosts in Iowa would sometimes become as unbearable to Mom as they already were to me. And as our third week without Dad drew to a close, my mother poured me and Lacey coffee at the breakfast table and, in the Lady Porter robe that had become her uniform, ordered us go back to London and to our lives.
“Earl would not have wanted you to mope around with me,” she said. “Your aunt Kitty isn’t that far away in Michigan, if I need her, but I have to learn how to be on my own.”
“But I don’t want you to be,” I said stubbornly.
“Neither do I,” she said with a sad smile. “But we can’t always get what we want. And I think it is what I need.”
The three of us hugged tightly at the airport, extracting promises to visit frequently, to call often, to be honest about our good days and bad. I cried through security in Des Moines, through the movie on the plane, through the sweltering customs line in London and the cab ride to Lacey’s flat, in Lacey’s arms when we dropped her off, and up the path and into my home. I was drained and devastated when I walked through that front door, and the last thing I expected to find inside was a miracle. But there he was. Nick. Waiting for me.
Chapter Seven
For a long moment, we just stood there, Nick on the verge of motion, me swaying, still holding my luggage, wondering if the grief was making me hallucinate the one person in the world who could help me feel whole again. He wore a Cubs cap Dad sent for Christmas one year, and his cornflower-blue eyes were red-rimmed and wet.