I feel ok.
Sure, I know that's not what people say.
Maybe they're wrong?
Maybe you weren't on my side all along?
I know you're out there.
I know you're gone.
You can't say that's fair.
Can't you be wrong?
"I Know You're Out There" Dinosaur Jr
I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, feeling an urge to silence, not wanting to say a thing, and not knowing why.
Good morning, she said, and I muttered something back, something unintelligible to both of us, she not knowing what I'd said and me not caring, I muttered something and crawled out of bed and headed straight to the coffee pot.
The sun blasted through the kitchen window and I emptied yesterday's grinds into the bin, and I felt miserable, shit, I thought, there must be some reason for this, but I couldn't find it.
I emptied yesterday's grinds into the bin and ran the cold water, rinsed out the pot, and felt miserable doing it.
Damn, I thought.
There's no reason for this, no excuse.
Cheer up, I thought.
Yeah, we gotta move outta here, the word's come down, we gotta be out in three months and change, and we weren't expecting it and we got no plans and no dough, and dough always makes this shit a lot easier to deal with and figure out, but still, I thought, you've lived through worse, you've lived through THE worst, you watched your wife and the mother of your children die in front of your eyes, and you got up the next day and told those kids they no longer had a mother, shit, what could be worse than that, I empty the grinds, bang the filter-holder into the garbage can.
I make a pot and head back to bed for a few minutes. I don't sleep, but everyone else does.
I wait until I know the pot's done and then I get out of bed. The wife doesn't make a move and the kids, the whole lot of them, still lay asleep. It's five after seven in the morning, and I have a cup of freshly-brewed in my hands, and I thought that would raise my spirits, but on this day, it doesn't.
I feel miserable.
&&&
The kids wake up eventually, and I rush around and get them showered and dressed and fed, Sheila gets their mid-day snacks into their book-bags, everything proceeding normally and somewhat smoothly, but something nags at me, and I can't figure what it is.
&&&
I get the oldest into the car and drop him off at school. We mutter our goodbyes at each other and I drive off.
And then it hits me.
It's April 17th.
&&&
The angle of the sun, or something else, reminds of what day it is.
April 17th.
I flip through the dial and try to find a song to match the occasion.
I go awhile before I find one that comes close.
"Are You Gonna Go My Way?" God, she loved that song.
I can see myself in a little black car, driving, on another April day almost twenty years ago, listening to that song with her in the passenger seat next to me.
And it hits me. Hits me what day it is.
&&&
Something about the angle of the sun, reminds me.
Seventeen years ago, to the day, seventeen years straight back to April 17th, 1995.
I drive on towards work, and I remember the day.
&&&
She was from England, and I was from here, from upstate New York.
That presented problems; they didn't then, and they don't now, let people in from other countries to do whatever they want.
We decided to get married, because we knew we wanted to live together, now and forever, and we got married, over there, in July of '94.
She liked her mother country well enough, but there was never any doubt; she wanted to live her permanently.
As much as we - justifiably - bitch about this place, she loved it. She wanted to be here, full-time. When I offered to go live there, she always pooh-poohed me, even though she had a good full-time job and I had nothing more than crappy temp jobs.
&&&
We got married in July of '94, July 23rd, 1994, to be exact, and a week later, after an incredibly romantic honeymoon spent traversing through the sparsely populated towns of the English Lake District, I came home to America to await her arrival here.
&&&
They, they being the INS, told us it might be three or four months before she got cleared to come here.
A month or so after the wedding, I got a letter from those fuckers which made it perfectly clear she wouldn't be getting here for six, seven, maybe nine months. Maybe.
At that point I'd moved back into my parents' house to save some money. I still remember the day I got that letter from the INS. I can't remember exactly what it said, I just remember it made me cry like a baby. I remember my mother coming into the house, into the dining room, to the sight of me sat at the dining room table weeping with this letter in my hand.
&&&
Eventually, after my father had intervened with a local Congressman, the paperwork got processed and Lauren got her own letter in the mail, in March of 1995; a letter saying she needed to come to the Embassy on the 31st for an interview that would determine the status of her application to live in the states.
We burned a lot of ninety-cent-a-minute long-distance minutes reviewing strategy for that interview, but in the end, it was nothing; they asked her a couple of perfunctory questions, gave her a chest X-ray to ensure she didn't have tuberculosis, and then they stamped some papers and told her she was free to go and live with her husband in the United States.
&&&
April 17th, April 17th.
I drove on toward word, feeling sick to my stomach.
Something was not right, and I couldn't put my finger on it.
Yes, we'd been told that we'd have to vacate our current premises, far sooner than we'd expected, before Sheila had even had a chance to find some sort of gainful employment, before we'd really had a chance to talk about where we wanted to go, this town or some other, rent or buy, discussions we'd expected to have in a year or two foisted upon us now.
And for other reasons, I'd needed to do a whole of juggling to pay the bills on time and keep food on the table, and as anyone with a bunch of kids and too much income to qualify for any help but not enough to income to make things easy, or even manageable, these things can get tricky, and they did, at least this month, but still, that wasn't it, I knew it; by the 17th, I knew I'd hustled everything into places I could handle.
&&&
April 17th, April 17th.
I don't know exactly what song it was, or what combination of song and sunlight it was, but it hit me, halfway to work, driving a silver four-door sedan with leather seats toward a job I felt ambivalent about (I like the work, but it's glaringly obvious to me now that they pay me far too little for it), it hit me:
April 17th, 1995.
That was the day she came here for good.
The day she got her green card.
My heart sank, and I thought back, in great detail, to that day.
I thought back to the white limo, hired by my mother, that drove me down from Albany to JFK, I thought of reading the sports sections of the NY papers in those leather seats, drinking a cup of coffee. I thought back to the sight of the driver getting out to pump gas on our way down there. I thought back to him dropping me off at the door to the arrival gate of the British Airways terminal, and him telling me he'd circle the road until he saw her and I waiting outside. I thought back to seeing her flight number showing up on a closed-circuit TV as arrived, and I thought back to waiting outside the gate they'd put up for that flight.
I got out of my car, in a daze, and walked into work, muttered my hello's to my co-workers, aching the whole time for the solace of my desk, where no one could see me, where no one would bother me, they always call or email first,
and I thought back to waiting at that gate and seeing scores of people coming through, people from all over the world, meeting long, lost loved ones, and eventually the traffic cleared out and no one came through the gate, and I must have waited a half hour, maybe more, and then, with no one else around, a door swung open, and there she was, my Lauren, my bride, the love I hadn't seen even once in more than nine months, and with something between a grimace and a smile she practically hurled herself at me, and I threw my arms around her, and we were together again, forever, I thought, never knowing that a brain tumor, that she probably had even on that day, would shrink forever into twelve years and change.
&&&
Within minutes I had to find a bathroom, I couldn't believe that scene at the airport had ever even happened, yet it seemed so real, and I felt the tears coming, and I knew I had to get somewhere alone, somewhere private.
I don't cry much anymore. I don't even feel that torn about it anymore. Oh, don't get me wrong, not a day goes by where I don't think of her a hundred, or even a thousand times, but the thoughts come and go in a matter of seconds, fleeting, and usually they just make me smile, and make me appreciate the life I have now.
But there was something about this day, this April 17th, that was different, and I knew I'd have to let it happen, and the very first part of letting it happen involved finding a bathroom where I could sit down and have a good cry.
&&&
By ten I knew the feeling wasn't going to pass, that it wasn't going to be one of those little moments that come and go; I knew I was in for it.
I kept to myself all day, I dug up you tube videos for songs off of "Goodbye Jumbo" by World Party; that was, and always shall be, our album.
Lunch came and went, I took a long and brisk walk during the noon hour, but that, too, failed to clear my head, and the afternoon came and went, and that feeling never lifted; if anything, it intensified, like a storm you hope will pass but instead worsens as the hours pass.
I listened to those songs, and thought back those thoughts, and pretended to get work done, I answered calls, even those from my now-wife, but by then, I had decided that I would keep this all to myself. At some point I read something about a guy named Levon Helm, who had played with a band I had once loved, entering his final hours. I thought back of what it's like to hold the hand of the love of your life as she dies in front of your eyes, I wondered whether someone out there would be holding Levon's hand as he passed over.
&&&
On the way home from work I decided I just had to stop at the cemetery and say hello; it seemed the only honorable thing to do on April 17th.
So I drove on over, and I got out of the car, and I went over to the gravesite. Days like this, I thought, are exactly why I got a stone bench instead of an old-fashioned stone. I sat down on the stone bench, one side says, "loving mother of Bailey, Evie, and Riley", the other says simply "Sweet Soul Dream", our wedding song.
I sat there for a long time.
Usually when I go up there I have one or more of the kids with me, in fact, I'd been up there not much more than a week ago, for the first time in months, I had Sheila, Evie, and Riley with me, Riley had asked if, "we could go see our old mom."
On this day, on April 17th, I sat there, alone, for a long time.
I thought about the joy in that reunion. I thought about how young and foolish we were, convinced, oh, I mean, convinced, that we'd grow old together. I thought about the joy I'd rediscovered in the new life I'd found the past couple of years. I thought back again to the day of that reunion, about how, in both our views, a moment like that boils life down to its essence. I thought about how it felt to feel my arms around her, about the relief and elation that brought after so long apart.
I didn't want to leave.
No one else was around. A stiff breeze blew from the west, it chilled me at times.
The quiet was intense. Occasionally I heard a bird or two, but other than that, nothing: just me and my thoughts.
I must have sat there for a good forty minutes, thinking about a lot of things, mostly, though, thinking back to April 17th, 1995.
Finally, I stood up.
I wiped a tear or three from my eyes.
I kissed the two fore-fingers of my right hand and then I put those fingers down onto the grass that covers the spot where Lauren is buried.
Miss you, dear, I said. Funny, her and I fell into calling each other dear, while Sheila and I have fallen into calling each other baby.
The wind blew from the west.
Miss you, dear, I said.
Love you.
I turned and walked slowly through the new, thick grass.
I turned and walked back toward the living.