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In honor of my wonderful father:

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His book never deterred me, or his closed eyes. I was sure that as soon as my dad felt the mattress rise under him as I climbed onto the green comforter with small blue flowers, nuzzling next to his warm body, that he would set the book face down on his chest and tilt his head until he was gazing at the top of mine. His chin would graze my red hair, but I’d wait a moment before leaning back to meet his gaze, my cheek against the soft flannel of his shirt, listening to his heartbeat in the silence of the sleeping house (it was “quiet time,” Sunday afternoon). We’d laugh and for a moment the heartbeat would disappear. Then it was back, steady, reminding me that he was there and I was next to him and sleep would come after counting the light thump until it was hooves on a country road, a turning jump rope, a boat bumping against some dock….

All of my life, I’ve put my ear against the door in an attempt to hear the turn of a page like the sound of a piece of paper slipping out of my notebook, like a light wind, an invocation for me to come listen and dream beside my dad; I’ve knocked and jiggled the locked door handle, called “Dad?”, and seen his face emerge as he cracks the door open; I’ve barged into the bedroom to find him asleep with his “good ear” towards the pillow, a closed book in his hand. He rests—head propped by a few pillows, a book held upright on his chest, legs extended and crossed, his socked feet rubbing against one another. That image has changed very little over the years though his hair has gone from dark brown to “salt and pepper” to grey and the wrinkle between his eyebrows has deepened and now reading glasses perch on his large, but handsome, nose. His cheeks still look like they hide 25-cent gumballs when he smiles; his skin is still ruddy and smooth as leather.

Sometimes he would read to me from the book he had chosen that day from the five or six that are always stacked on the night stand. His voice—the voice of an army medic, then a preacher, able to send “Yes, sir!” rumbling through an open field and “Praise God!” through a high-ceilinged sanctuary—was, to me, deep enough to engender respect but soft enough to soothe and still. I tried to retain in my maturing mind the theology or biographies or science fiction or scripture that reached me just a few inches below with slight puffs of breath that tickled my forehead. He must have known that words like omnipresent and Pelandria wouldn’t mean anything to me, but he also must have known how much sharing his world would mean to me. He would listen to my interrupting questions and answer with a precision that astounded me. Words gushed from me, but he wasted none. As I grew up, joining him less often while he read, I started to resent the frequent periods of silence between us if I didn’t monologue or ask him questions when we were together—I wanted him to start the conversation, ask me about my life. I thought only then could he ever understand me. He proved me wrong, in seventh grade, the first time I experienced heart-break.

At the finale dance of the Beta Club NC convention, my “boyfriend” danced with another girl for two songs, her head on his shoulder, their bodies close. Justin was the first boy I had ever not treated like one of my brothers. I kept each note from him and filled my journal with thoughts about our relationship. A phone call from him was “like the greatest thing ever” as long as my parents didn’t find out. For the month that we “dated,” I never considered what would happen when we “broke up.” The pain was as new as the feeling of having a crush had been; it was like the rejection I had felt when my BFF started sitting next to another girl at lunch, but fiercer.

After a friend’s mom dropped me off at home that night, Dad was the person I had to talk to, no one else, in my room, as soon as possible, please! He listened to how Justin had asked Anna to dance, how I had been okay with it until the first song ended and they kept dancing, how I cried alone in the bathroom, how I never ever wanted to look at either of them again. He wrapped his arms around me as I wept into his chest.

* * * * *

During summer beach trips as a child, my dad used to take me out into the ocean where only he could stand; I clung to a boogie board with both hands, afraid to let go and wipe my eyes that would burn from the splashing salt water. From behind he would push the board, lifting me up and over the white foam of the cresting waves, then whip me around towards the shore so I could catch the next breaker. After the moment of fear, when my dad released his hold and I felt the pull of the hungry wave, came the freedom of being carried in the surge, wet hair flailing behind, eyes wide until the skid of sand under the boogie board, the water swirling about and someone’s beach chair just a few yards in front. I would pull my legs under me, hop up, hoist the board under my arm and run to meet my dad who was swimming towards me. We’d head back out into the turbulent ocean until my feet were unable to touch its bottom. My dad gripped the sides of the board; when I would forget myself and start kicking with excitement, his arms were there.

*****

There were his arms around me. I was safe. I was grateful that my dad didn’t say anything for a long time, and when he did speak, his words were tender and few. I’ve forgotten what he said, but I haven’t forgotten the feeling of being weak and miserable but accepted and loved in his strong embrace.

It may be that feeling (the one from seven years ago) that seems so tangible to me now, or a feeling much like it that I had a couple months ago when I stumbled into my dad’s study at home, sitting next to his desk. I needed counsel about a recent break up: “Dad, I was so cautious, waited so long before dating him; he liked me so much, I mean, he pursued me for months. I liked him so much too. I still…how do I let him go, how do I trust? and move on?...Does it get easier?” I really was unsure. The emotions and questions surged like the waves at Figure Eight Island.

Dad got up from his chair and knelt next to me to hug me.

His slate-colored, wool sweater smells like toast and peppermint and Polo cologne.

I’m leaning against his chest. I hear his heartbeat in the breath between sobs.

Allie

At a party last night, I found myself sharing about how my "balloon-making" skills (or lack there of) made me a popular volunteer with the kids in the UNC pediatric unit.

Afterward I was thinking about my dear Allie (her last name is changed in the story) and felt prompted to share a story I wrote in honor of her precious life. At her funeral, the preacher shared how he led Allie to Christ shortly after the doctors became aware of her tumor. I am confident, and await the day, that I will see her completely healthy and happy in heaven.

Spring 2007

Seven-year-old Allie walks in front of me, wearing a pink pajama set. Her thin arms are visible; the sleeveless top stretches around her swollen belly (a tumor inside refuses to shrink, making a grave for itself). Her bald head is soft with the hair struggling to grow back. She is using both of her hands to hold six pink and red cards, so I wheel her I.V. It is twice her size.

Often, on the bus ride over to the children’s hospital, some homework assignment or broken relationship or sense of loneliness would leave me leaning against the window, eyes closed to the smile of the friendly bus-driver in the mirror. But as the hospital elevator rose, my problems became small and selfish. It was wonderful to leave them, to step through the doors of the elevator, opening at the sixth floor.

I have on my Carolina blue polo (“UNC hospital volunteer” stitched in maroon thread over my heart) and photo I.D., clipped to my collar, in the corner, a glittering flower sticker that Allie gave me. These allow me to be here, to draw closer to Allie and her family with each visit—however unprepared and inadequate I feel.

Allie looks over her shoulder at me—that big smile on her wan face, bright as the afternoon sun that gleams through the windows and those life-filled eyes, blue, completing the smile: “C’mon, Lizzie! You’ll pull out my I.V. if you can’t keep up!” (A frightening thought. I laugh with her but match my step to her shuffling slippers.)

We’re on a mission to deliver special valentines that Allie has made from the new packs of Crayola markers and multi-colored construction paper her mom Ruth bought her at Wal-Mart. As we walk down the hallway, Allie waves to the small boy in the room next to hers (his door is opened and the T.V. is on; his parents are gone); he’s “sick too.” We round the corner, approaching the reception desk where young nurses in colorful scrubs—pink, green, and blue; floral or polka-dot patterned—pull and replace charts, chat a moment before darting to answer a patient’s call, and laugh at the two of us “rolling up.”

“What have you been up to Miss Allie? What’s that in your hands?” The nurse’s name is hidden by the long, brunette pony-tail that has fallen around her shoulder after bending to grab Allie’s hand and smile into her face.

“I made a card for you; well, actually I forgot to make one for you, but I’ve brought some for a few of the nurses…and I can make some more.” It was the truth, so she said it.

Allie loved honesty and animals and arts and crafts. We strung beads, colored, and made ornaments on the tray that folded up from the side of her bed where she also ate the cafeteria food she mostly disliked (and the McDonalds and Chinese she begged for when her appetite returned after chemotherapy) and where she finished her homework, assigned by the hospital teacher (whom Allie also mostly disliked). She’d sit upright with her covers around her waist like the large skirt of Mother Ginger in the Nutcracker.

After a few months of visiting Allie in the hospital, I brought in a balloon animal-making kit. She pumped air into the flimsy balloons that looked like oversized tadpoles and passed the sausage-like result to me to tie its end. Two twists, maybe three, and “Pop!” We’d laugh until she held her stomach and moaned a little behind her smile. At the end of our time together that day, we gazed in pride at the pink dog, neon-green rabbit, and the white swan which we were most proud of. As I left the hospital room, on Allie’s strict orders, I placed the swan by the sink to prevent it from meeting its end like the other rubber creatures we had spent the afternoon making. The next day when I returned the swan was gone, but I didn’t ask what had happened to it.

Summer 2007

When I arrived at the Jones’ trailer home, Ruth hugged me, longer and tighter than usual, as if to say, “We made it. She’s getting better…for good this time. Can’t hardly believe it, but I’ll sure try!” I stood in the kitchen tying grass skirts on Allie’s fourth-grade friends (she wanted a Luau for her 8^th birthday party), cutting Allie’s birthday cake, laughing with her mother, sister, aunts, and grandmothers before Allie tugged me out the back door into her huge yard. Seeing Allie run over the grass, short and yellow from the summer drought but lovely when trampled under her bare feet, was surreal, she: no longer bound to some iron pole or machine or the fear of death.

The trips around the children’s cancer unit or down to the hospital’s basement for chemotherapy were as far as we had gone together; and now, she was grabbing my hand, running towards the shed to show me her hatched chicks, laughing and yelling, “C’mon Lizzie! Keep up!” Her face was softening, her cheekbones hidden under full and flushed skin; her hair looked like she had buzzed it, but it would be just under her chin in a year’s time.

The party was over but the leis still hung around my neck where Allie’s arms had been. Allie drove away from me in her “big surprise,” the golf cart her father and brothers had painted Giotto blue with “Allie Cat” in black on the front. Allie wanted to drive a tractor and help her dad on the farm when she grew up. I backed out of her gravel driveway, puffs of white emerging in front and behind me from wheels crushing the rocks as if they were in a crucible. We had said goodbye for the last time without knowing it. One evening, a year later, my thoughts were on applying enough sunscreen to avoid my annual “bad burn,” whether tacos or pesto pasta was for dinner, and how blue the sky and ocean were, when I listened, through static, to a voicemail from Ruth:

“Allie passed away Monday….”

I climbed the stairs to the top deck of my grandparent’s beach house to find my mom; she was dozing in a porch chair. I wanted to tell her what had happened, but the crash of the waves—the waves breaking on the sand drown everything out—those waves roar and say it all.

June 26, 2008

My mom had driven with me from the beach to Allie’s funeral. After the graveside service, we found a gas station near Allie’s home. The sun and air must have conspired together: the humidity made the heat almost unbearable. We left the car running so we could have the cool blasts of the air-conditioner while I finished pasting pictures that I took at Allie’s eighth birthday party into a Carolina-blue photo album.

After about ten minutes, an older man with a worn cap and overalls approached us, smiling (a few teeth missing). We rolled down the window, only catching the end of his question: “…all right?”

“Oh, yes. My daughter’s just finishing up something for the Joneses…. Did you know Allie?” She asked the question with an ease I couldn’t understand—I didn’t look up; instead, I picked up the pictures that had slid onto the carpeted floor.

That scuff of his shoe against the pavement, that clank as he tugged on his overall strap, that pause—I had to make sure—that look past us into the fields across the road—he had known her.

“She used to come down here just a-sittin’ in’er daddy’s lap, drivin’ that tractor-a his—or she was a-thinkin’ she was drivin’. Mr. Jones, now he mows that field just over there for me. She’d buy candy from ma-store. Just the brightest little thing you ever laid eyes on—never stopped talkin’ for a minute; that is, once you got’er started with some question ‘bout Tom ‘er dog or that cow-a hers. I’d take’er favorite candy up to’er when she couldn’t make the trip down the road no more. Sure is gonna miss’er, that Miss Allie—me and everybody….”

Ruth and I are standing in the kitchen of the trailer home as she turns and fingers each page of the album. She speaks of the party as if Allie were playing with her friends in the next room, planning her ninth birthday. Somehow we are both able to laugh when we remember how Allie chased everyone around the yard with a can of pink silly string.

I don’t know anything about Allie’s last few months, days—her final moments—and how can I ask Ruth now; she’s smiling. The last picture in the album is of her squatting by the picnic table, hugging Allie—it makes us both choose silence over some comment that will lift, flutter, and fall through the air.

Ruth has a quiet strength; Allie had it too—head bent, her bangs covering her eyes, tears and words finally come:

“When it got real bad and we knew we couldn’t hide it from her anymore, I went into her room—we’d spend all day and night with’er, you know, she couldn’t get out of bed; she’s in so much pain. I said, ‘Allie, Jesus needs you up in heaven; he needs another angel.’ She didn’t say a-thing, just shut her eyes real tight, and asked if she could have a minute to herself. I says, ‘Sure you can, honey.’ When I came back a little while later, she acted like nothing had changed. She said she was ready to die when the pain got real bad but she never said nothing else about it right up to the end.”