Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [5]
She yawned and looked at the clock. It was half past midnight, and the next morning—Saturday—was a workday for her. She rose to go to the sink for a glass of water. As she walked back to the table, an odd thing happened: something flicked inside her, like a light switching off. For an instant a cold blackness whooshed through her, darkening her spirit. Then it passed.
“Lord, what does that mean?” she wondered.
Mary shrugged it off and readied herself for bed, joining Bob in the back bedroom, which he had added to the house a couple of years before.
She uttered a silent prayer, the same one she’d been saying for years: “Dear Lord, bless my husband and children. Hold them safely in thy merciful hand.”
Joy Griffith was driving her ’82 Dodge Ram D50 pickup down Bollingen Canyon Road with brother Ed beside her, and Nancy and her girlfriend Wesley in the open part of the truck. This was what passed for recreation on a Friday night in the suburbs.
The blowing wind swept away a pair of sunglasses plunked in Nancy’s hair. Joy pulled to a stop, and Nancy got out to search for them. At that moment, inexplicably, Joy thought of Bobby. The thought provoked a deadening fear, as if someone had told her she had cancer, as if a tumor had been growing inside her without her knowledge. Nancy found her glasses and they went on.
It was Joy who picked up the receiver of the ringing phone on the wall in the kitchen the next morning. Nancy and Wesley were waiting impatiently outside. Joy had promised to drive them to Santa Cruz for a day of fun on the boardwalk. Her cousin Debbie was on the phone from Portland.
“I have something terrible to tell you,” Debbie said.
“What? Is everybody okay?”
“Bobby jumped off a bridge.”
“What?”
Nancy and Wesley began to walk back into the house from the backyard. Joy, fighting for self-control, said, “Nancy, get out. Go back in the backyard.”
Joy turned back to the phone, hysteria rising.
“Who found him?” she asked Debbie, thinking he had jumped off a railroad trestle or something.
“Joy, it’s okay. It’s okay.”
“He’s okay?” Joy almost shouted.
“Joy, do you know what I’m telling you?”
Joy said, “Bobby’s dead.”
“Yes,” Debbie said.
Joy began to wail involuntarily. “Oh my God! He jumped off a bridge! Daddy, come here quick!”
Bob Griffith grabbed the phone. He seemed to take the news calmly, asking for details. Then, suddenly, he let the phone drop from his hands and walked away. Reflexively, he denied the reality, trying to push it back. Underneath was the beginning of a giant maw of pain.
Joy drove the short distance to I. Magnin in downtown Walnut Creek, where her mom worked as a shipping clerk. It was a gorgeous California summer day. At the employees’ entrance she numbly asked the attendant to summon Mary. “And please tell her to bring her purse,” Joy added. She crouched in a corner to wait, curling herself into a ball of grief.
Upstairs, Mary got the call and assumed the kids were out of gas and needed money. When she came down and saw Joy slumped in the corner on the other side of the glass partition, a rush of fear gripped her.
“What’s wrong?”
Joy blurted, “Bobby’s dead! He jumped off a bridge.”
Mary tried to push through the glass employees’ door, forgetting it was locked. She scrambled for the buzzer, but the attendant didn’t seem to hear it. Mary banged frantically on the partition.
“My son is dead! Let me out!”
The attendant released the latch.
On the short drive home in her truck, Joy told Mary what she knew. Mary listened and understood the words, but they did not yet connect with her emotions.
At the house, Mary and Bob embraced, weeping. “It was God’s will at work,” Mary heard herself intoning. She had done everything by the book—capital B. The prayers, the Christian counselor, the admonitions. Four long years.