• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 937 0

years before was at the sink, washing dishes the next day, not talking to anyone much, probably because she didn’t know them. Becky, who helped us with the chores now, wanted to make sure Wade’s room was clean; she busied herself elsewhere when she saw the sign my sister, Nancy, put up not to vacuum or change the sheets. I wanted the room to smell like Wade as long as it would, so Becky just helped in the kitchen. Chris, who cut all our hair, stood by the kitchen door. My brother, who is a filmmaker, sat with a camera in the living room and interviewed the children about Wade. He left the tapes for me, but I cannot yet watch them—even ten years later. Kim, whom I knew only slightly from having worked on a PTA project together, sat with the house while we buried Wade. Whole families came, because we had known most of these people as a family—through school events, soccer teams, the Jaycee Center and the YMCA, sitting on blankets at Pops in the Park, walking the downtown mall on First Night—and they were all there, helping and holding us and one another.

And the letters. I still have them, though they, like the memories, are hard to revisit. I didn’t revisit them to write the notes I should have written. I didn’t thank every teacher he had ever had, all of whom came to the funeral. I didn’t thank my UNC basketball e-mail group or the gardener; both sent flowers. The food, the flowers, the notes, people stricken and desperate, and I was apart from it all and held up by it all at the same time. They allowed me to do what I needed; I just immersed myself as much as I could in Wade and held on. And I loved them, for what I will always believe was their love for him.

David drove us to the Duplin County Hospital that night. John sat silently in the front seat for the hour drive. Cate and I were literally huddled in the backseat. Everything outside was black. Everything inside was black.

The little hospital waiting room was full. The parents of the other boy in Wade’s car, who escaped with a turned ankle, and the parents of the two boys in the second car were there. A local husband and wife with whom John had worked had come and with them an elderly woman from their church, who brought cookies and lemonade. I’ll never forget her kindness, but I only wanted one thing, and she couldn’t give it to me. We walked back outside and, with the help of Dick Henderson, a tall and gentle man whose son was in the car following Wade’s, went up the stairs to the small morgue. He left at the door. John and I went in. There, on a cot, lay Wade, as beautiful and peaceful as I ever remember him. Sleeping, really. Couldn’t he be? There was a bruise on his forehead, and as I stroked his face, I saw that the lobes of his ears had darkened as the blood pooled there beneath the skin.

I do not know what killed Wade. It doesn’t really matter. It wasn’t alcohol or speed. Knowing what killed him wouldn’t tell me why, and it couldn’t change the one thing I did know: he was dead. We called our parents. John told his parents; I told mine. Or I told my mother, since my father didn’t speak on the phone much after a massive stroke in 1990 narrowed his once wide life and quieted his once gregarious voice. I heard Mother cry out, and I heard her tell my father. Then I heard the real sound of grief. Dad couldn’t form words easily, so the sounds he made were not the no, no, no, no, no, no, that I screamed when the trooper broke my heart. His voice was the sound of pre-language pain, guttural and uncivilized, and the most powerful and mournful sound man can utter. He opened his mouth and the sound bled through the phone line and wouldn’t stop. I hear it today.

That first night Cate slept with us. Our bedroom was downstairs. She and Wade shared the second floor, and it seemed too much to ask this child, who had just turned fourteen, to return up there alone. We pushed two club chairs together, with an ottoman between them, next to our bed, and she slept there that first night, and the second and the third. She slept beside us for two years, finally sleeping upstairs