His Dark Words

11 | Perfect Moments

We drive back through Allery and out to a cottage right by the shoreline. It's painted a rusty red with a faded white porch hung with all sorts of wind chimes and bright, rainbow pinwheels. The fresh sea air blows all around us when we get out of the truck, bringing with it the taste of salt and the lapping sound of the waves breaking over the narrow beaches.

Grandpa Ned swings open the door and calls out: "Martha! We're here!"

Almost at once a short old lady in a duck printed apron bustles into the entrance, "Harlow! Let me have a look at you!" She takes my limp hands and looks me up and down. Grandma Martha has a sweet face and I'm surprised to feel an instant click of recognition. She hasn't changed much from what I remember, except for now she's looking up at me, not down.

"Well now, you look... Well, you look nothing like Marcus or Lori! But my, aren't you a beauty! You must be hungry, sweetheart, why don't you come in the kitchen, I made you cookies!" She keeps hold of one of my hands and leads me along behind her, as if I'm three years old again.

"Now, these used to be your favorite; Snickerdoodles, but I wasn't sure if your tastes have changed so I also made some chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin and those over there are an experiment. I call them 'Mint Fancies'."

"Wow Grandma... You shouldn't have gone to all this trouble, really!" 

It's a truly spectacular number of cookies. Enough to feed a small army.

"No trouble at all!" Grandma Martha pulls out a chair for me and gestures for me to sit in it. "We were so happy when Lori called us, it's been... Well, it's been too long."

I sit down and try one of each of the cookies she made, they are all delicious, particularly the experimental Mint Fancies that turn out to have pieces of crushed candy cane mixed in with the batter.

My grandparents are not at all what I'd expected, though I'm not sure what I had been expecting. They're both sweet, thoughtful people. Grandpa Ned, it turns out is pretty quiet in general and Grandma Martha does most of the talking for them both. She coaxes me into telling them all about my classes, friends and stuff I never talk about like my hopes for college and life after all that. They don't mention Dad once but when I finally head upstairs with my stuff, I see pictures of him absolutely everywhere. They line the walls of the stairway and are on every free surface I see. The bedroom I'm staying in belonged to him. This house had been their holiday home until my grandparents retired here for good.

I look over the small room and think about my Dad as a teenager, spending every summer up here. The little window looks out to sea and there's a collection of shells carefully displayed on the dresser. "I wonder if he was like my Book-Boy back then..." I murmur. "I wonder if he's always been this way or if there was some period in time when he was actually happy..."

I put my bag down on the bed and go out to look at the photos of him in detail. There are ones of him as a little kid, out fishing with his dad, him in a school play, him graduating high school... College... Getting married... Then holding baby me, a helpless alien-looking thing.

"It's nice to have the memories right there to look at." A voice says beside me. 

I had been so absorbed in imagining the past I didn't hear my Grandma approach.

"And was he always so... Broken?" I ask, a catch in my throat.

She looks at me with pain in her eyes. "Come sit with me on the porch, it's so nice out."

She leads me down to the back porch and an old painted bench looking down to the water through the coarse grasses. She looks out at the grey-blue sea then sighs a long, world-weary sigh.

"Your father was always such a bright boy. So full of life and energy. But something changed when he was around seventeen." 

It sounded rehearsed, like she'd thought it through over and over before I'd arrived. 

"He would have these manic highs followed by unbearable lows that seemed to go on and on forever. It seems so foolish now, but we just thought it was growing pains. Girls, college, all the ups and downs of growing up... He had times when he was more balanced, and he met your mom and everything seemed to be going so well... Then it all began again, and it was worse this time. At the time we didn't see it... Or didn't want to see it. He was still our boy, just going through some hard times and we didn't think he was a danger until he first made an attempt on his life... He... He left you locked in the car and just walked out into the ocean..."

"I... I don't remember that." I reply, breathlessly. 

"You don't?" She stares at me with relief. "I always wondered... Anyway,  your Mom got him committed and he stayed in hospital for a while then came out again, but your Mom never trusted him with you after what he did. They kept changing his medication and I think it wore your mom down... It wore us all down. We didn't know what to do and we all ended up saying things we regretted. I guess at the time we, your Grandpa Ned and I, just didn't understand why he had to be in hospital. It felt like he was being sent to prison."

"My mom never told me any of this..." I blink, feeling the information overloading my brain.

"She went through a lot with Marcus. It's hard and resentment builds up. She wants to move on but she can't, none of us can."

"Is that why you and my mom didn't speak for so long?" I ask quietly.

She nods, tears running down her tanned, wrinkled cheeks. "When someone you love is sick you want to find someone to blame, just to make sense of it all, but sometimes it doesn't make sense..." she reaches forward and gently holds my hand, "since he had to go back to hospital your mom and I have been talking more. Learning to forgive each other a little, to communicate instead of pointing the finger. She told me your dad says he won't see you, Marcus never told us that before."

"He doesn't want me..." I bite my lip as if I can button in the emotion.

"No... I know it's not that, he does love you Harlow. He just knows what his illness did to Lori. He doesn't want to do the same to you."

"That's stupid! All I want to do is help him!" I say with sudden passion.

"Oh, sweet girl, we all want to help him. Believe me if I could do something to make this all go away I would do it in a heartbeat but that's just not how things work."

"So, what am I supposed to do? Never see my Dad again? Pretend that he doesn't exist?"

"No, no of course not! You live your life. You can't change people. You can forgive them... Accept that they're just trying their best whatever that means to them. But you know, Harlow, whether he gets better or not is not your responsibility, or your mom's or mine."

"I want him to get better."

"So do I sweetheart, so do I..."

Even though I'd been a child when we last saw one another I lean into my Grandma's shoulder and cry softly as if she were my mom. She rocks me back and forth and strokes my hair. I want to be three years old again. When this would help... When cookies and pinwheels could eclipse everything else and people didn't walk out into the ocean... Or at least if they did I was too young to know about it...