Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [40]
I AWOKE EARLY. It was a crisp New Hampshire morning, like the mornings before it during which my daughter and I had visited private schools to which she had been accepted. Cate was still asleep in the other bed at the Exeter Inn. I dialed home. John was taking depositions in Charlotte, so Wade was home alone. He finally answered. We had talked the night before, too, about his junior paper, due that morning. He had been sitting at the computer, typing his last corrections, when we talked. What did I think of this change in wording? Did I think he needed to make this section two paragraphs rather than one? He knew it was better; he just needed me to say so, and of course I did. And I let him talk to his sister—sweet words from her, I knew the same from him. Then goodnight. The morning call was shorter.
“Are you ready for school?”
“I’m up.”
“Really up? Are you standing up?”
“I’m up, Mom. I love you.”
“I’ll see you tonight. I love you.” That was it. No more talking, no more teasing. No more hugs. Click. That was it. It was over. It was April 4, 1996, and those were the last words I ever said to my boy.
The plan for all of us to meet at the beach for spring break was toppled by a wind that blew his car from the road. And Wade, just sixteen, could not stop the car from flipping and crushing some part of him that made him stop breathing. When he had tried to get his car back on the highway, maybe he overcorrected, maybe he moved too quickly, all the maybes for which I have no answers, except the final answer. The car fishtailed, then flipped on the road to the beach, and by the time an EMT who was traveling alongside him got there, Wade was dead.
I didn’t have some second sense that he was in trouble. Cate and I were flying home from New Hampshire. John met us at the airport, and we talked about the high schools she had visited, the choice she now had to make, and the long-awaited week at the beach. Wade had gone on ahead with three classmates—two cars with two boys each—leaving after school with hopes of getting down early to catch the last of the sun on that first day. So the driveway was empty when we pulled in, and empty as we began packing for the week, and empty when I walked through the living room to call upstairs to Cate that we would leave in half an hour. That’s when I saw it, the state trooper’s car, pulling into the driveway and up our hill. I opened the front door as the driver stepped out of the cruiser.
I spoke before he did. Pleaded, really. It could only be one thing.
“Tell me he’s alive.”
“Is this the home of Lucius Edwards?” No one but his friends making fun used Wade’s first name.
“Tell me he’s alive.”
“Is this the home of Lucius Edwards?” “You have to tell me he’s alive.” My voice breaking.
There was no gentle way to say it.
“He is dead.”
I suppose every death has its own story. Our story began before we came into it. John had been working and Cate and I had been away, so there was only an empty house when the patrolmen came the first time. As the troopers circled, our neighbors began to find out the terrible news. By the time John and Cate and I first heard the trooper’s words, people had gathered, waiting. The doctor from down the street with sleeping pills he thought we would need; our friend and John’s partner, David Kirby, who would drive us to the hospital where he lay; Wade’s friends; our neighbors. All in waiting, waiting for us to learn, waiting to reach to hold us up and to hold each other.
If I make myself think back on that night and on the next days, I can see everyone, I can bring everyone back. But it is so hard to do it without also bringing back that pain. The heat of it. The chill of it. What’s important and what’s not? People came, that’s what’s important. They were there. For Wade, first. And for us. A woman who had worked for us