Author's notes: Wow, this ended up being quite a behemoth of a story. If you are looking for mushy, kissy romance, this isn't the story for you. It is very angsty and heavy, but well worth the emotional journey Brenda takes with Fritz as her ever-patient guide. This is Part 3 of the "Welcome Home" series (Part 1 was "Thirteen Days, Part 2 was "Photograph"). Hopefully, Part 4 will be Brenda actually coming back to LA, because I have trapped the woman in Atlanta long enough.
Feedback, as always, is craved.
The Second Daughter
Fritz glanced at his watch and quickly poured himself a Diet Coke before heading to the bedroom. It was almost 8pm, which meant it was 11pm in Atlanta, where Brenda was, and their nightly marathon calls usually started after her father went to sleep. He set his drink on the side table and got comfortable on the bed, flipping through the latest issue of Sports Illustrated while waiting for Brenda's call.
He knew she was bracing herself for the task she had put off for her first three weeks in Atlanta. Now that she was only going to be there for seven more days, she had run out of excuses and was running out of time, and her father had long run out of patience. Brenda had to help her father pack up her mother's things and take them to Good Will. Earlier that day, Fritz had held up one finger to his boss who as gesturing impatiently to Fritz to rejoin the meeting he had bolted out of to answer her call. Brenda was on the other end, saying for what felt like the hundredth time, "why Fritz, why does Daddy have to get rid of her things? It just seems so cold. I mean, he's not gonna move out of the house any time soon, so why can't he just leave her stuff be? It's too soon for this." Her voice hitched and once again she was crying.
Fritz turned his back so he couldn't see his angry boss and answered her the same way he did all the other times they had this conversation. "It's not about closet space, honey. He needs to go through her belongings as part of the grieving process. It's a way for him to start letting her go. And even though it seems soon to you, it's what he wants, so help him, Brenda, OK? Remember how you started going through her jewelry with him a couple of weeks ago and how moved you were to find the necklace you had given your mom when you were a little girl? How touched you were that she had kept it all those years, along side all the nice pieces of jewelry she had?" Brenda sniffed in assent. "That was an amazing thing you discovered, and it showed how much your mother loved you. And who knows what else you and your dad might find when you go through even more of her belongings. He needs this, Brenda."
"And I need YOU," came a harsh male voice in his ear, "to get off the phone and get your ass back in that meeting. Now." Fritz had been so caught up in comforting Brenda that he hadn't heard his boss come up behind him. Brenda said, "oh crap, sorry Fritzy," and hung up the phone. With as much cool as he could muster, Fritz put his cell back in his pocket and turned around, determined not to be shaken by his red-faced superior. He strolled as casually as he could and spent the next two hours ignoring the dirty looks thrown at him by his colleagues. His girl needed him, he thought. And right now, she comes first, delicate FBI egos be dammed.
The evening calls were so much more relaxed, because Fritz didn't have to worry about rushing Brenda off the phone when she was having a bad day and needed to talk. They had hours together without interruptions, and hearing her voice was his lifeline. This month apart, with her in Atlanta spending quality time with her father before starting her new job at the DA's office, seemed like a good idea, and it had been—for Brenda. She has done much grieving and gotten in touch with her feelings in ways Fritz never imagined possible. They talked to each other on a deeper level than they ever have, and he felt things changing, small seeds of hope being planted. As if from out of the ashes of the past year—the lawsuits, Willie Rae's death, Stroh's attack—a phoenix was rising. And that phoenix was a better life, a better relationship, a better Brenda and Fritz. So yes, a month in Atlanta had been a very good thing for Brenda.
But the separation was tearing Fritz to shreds. The dull ache of missing her morphed into a constant pain. He found himself barely able to be in the duplex without her, and spent most nights at the gym, going to AA meetings, or working late, not leaving the office until it was Phone Call Time. He had lost 7 lbs and was getting great definition in his arms, between the morning jogs to work off his sexual frustration and the long sessions of pumping iron in the evenings. At least I will look good for Brenda when she gets home, he thought. If I live that long.
He sighed and rolled over and spooned her pillow, burying his face in it to catch a whiff of Brenda-scent. Seven days, sixteen hours, and twenty-two minutes and I get to hold her for real, he told himself. He glanced over at the clock and rolled over impatiently. Why hadn't she called yet? Was Clay still up? He couldn't wait anymore and reached for the phone. The second his fingers touched it began to ring, and he smiled. Gotcha, he thought, as he brought it to his ear.
"Hey honey, I thought you forgot about me tonight! How's my beautiful girl? Do you miss me?" Fritz he needed a little reassurance and attention from Brenda with her being so far away and for so long.
"My sweet Fritzy, you know I miss you. Terribly." Fritz heard her nasal tone and heavy speech and instantly went on high alert. She only sounded like this when he had been doing some intense crying. "I just wanted to take a shower before I called you. It's so hot here, and I didn't want to crawl into bed so sticky."
Fritz read between the lines: "I didn't want you to know I was sobbing so I calmed myself down before calling you." Despite her newfound self-awareness, honesty still often eluded Brenda.
"Honey, tell me what's wrong." Silence. He groaned inwardly. It was going to be one of those nights where he was going to have to poke and prod to get her to talk. Interrogating the interrogator. He rubbed his hand through his hair and got down to business.
"You said earlier today that you were going to start sorting through your mother's things," Fritz started. "And you were feeling pretty unhappy about that. How did it go?"
Another lump of silence was thrown at him. Brenda finally said, with a forced brightness, "oh honey, I hope I didn't get you in trouble at work. You should have told me you were in the middle of somethin' important and I could have called you back. I heard your boss yell at you. Were you in hot water for takin' personal calls at work?" Brenda tried to sound cheerful, as if they were discussing the weather, but Fritz was way too familiar with this tactic.
"Brenda, you are changing the topic because you don't want to talk about your day. And I'm assuming today was really difficult because you sound like you have been crying. My guess is you held it together until your dad went to bed and then broke down. You called me 20 minutes later than you usually did because you didn't want me to be able to tell you had been crying. But honey, I can always tell. What's wrong?"
"I hate that you know me so well, Fritz," she whined.
"No you don't," she said gently. "You used to hate it, but you have accepted that and it makes you feel safe. You know I am the one person who knows you, quirks and all, and still loves you unconditionally."
Brenda sighed. "You're right, of course. But I still have to say I hate it. I have a reputation to uphold, you know."
"And right now you are working really hard to uphold your reputation for avoiding talking about your feelings. Come on, tell me about your day."
He could hear her take a deep breath, and then another, before she answered. "It was…rough. Really rough."
"Go on." Fritz adjusted the pillows behind him and leaned against the headboard. It was going to be a long evening.
"Well, Daddy asked me to go through Mama's sewing room. Now, you know that room was her inner sanctum." He grunted in agreement. "That's just not where she sewed, but where her desk was, where she kept her books and I don't know what all. Well, I do now. She even took her naps on the day bed in there. It was her personal, private space and Daddy was not welcome. I think that's why he wanted me to go though the things in there, because he felt guilty touchin' anythin' in that room."
"And what did you find?"
"Nothin' too disturbin', at first. Tons of cloth, which believe me, I had no qualms piling up to give away to her friends that like to sew. She saved fabric from the ugly pink gingham curtains she made for me when I was five, for heaven's sake! And there were issues of Southern Livin' that went back several years that I threw out. Mama liked to read, so I took a couple of new newer novels and am going to have Joyce take a look at the next time she's over, but I got most of them packed in boxes ready to be donated. I was doin' real well, in terms of feelin' sad and all, until I went to the closets." She stopped speaking, and Fritz knew she was going to need some persuasion to continue. He remembered watching old Westerns with his father when he was a child, and there would be scenes where there was a fire and the horses would be terrified, and they had to be blindfolded so they could be led to safely. He sometimes felt like he had to do that for Brenda. He had to reassure her and gently take her reins and pull her safely through that fire, or she would just stand stock still and burn up in her own misery. This was one of those times.
"What did you find, Brenda?"
After a minute of silence were he could practically hear her wiping away the tears from her face, she answered in a shaky voice, "I've told you about Grace, haven't I?"
"Yes, you have. Very sad."
"It is. Mama wanted a girl so bad, after having three boys, and begged Daddy to have another baby. He was more than happy to stop at three, but he could never say no to Mama, so she got pregnant at the ripe old age of 34." Fritz had heard all this before, but he noticed, since Willie Rae had died, that Brenda had the need to repeat stories in their entirety, as if Willie Rae's death altered a narrative so completely it needed retelling: funny anecdotes became bittersweet tales; sad moments were now retold as tragedies. Fritz didn't interrupt her to tell her he knew all this, because he understood the importance of Brenda feeling the words flow though her, the familiarity tainted by Willie Rae's absence.
"Mama was overjoyed to give birth to a girl, and named her Grace Anna, 'Anna' after my grandma. But right after she was born the doctors could tell somethin' was really wrong with her, and it turned out she had a hole in her heart. It's one of those things that if it happened today, they would operate and the baby would be fine. But this was the mid-60's, and medicine wasn't so good back then. They were going to operate on Grace when she was stable enough, but she died when she was two weeks old. She never even left the hospital." Brenda's voice was heavy.
"Daddy said Mama was devastated. They had a small private funeral for Grace, just family, and afterwards Daddy thought her bein' with her other kids would help her feel better, but he said she pretty much ignored the boys, which is just so hard for me to imagine. She just stayed in the bedroom and cried all day, barely eatin'. She probably had severe post-partum depression on top of grievin' her baby, but they didn't know about those things then. After a few months of this Daddy suggested that they try for another baby, that having another little one, especially if it was a girl, would help Mama out of her depression. When I talked about it with Daddy today, he said he had never seen Mama so angry than when he made that suggestion. Mama accused him of not loving Grace, of not caring she was dead, and on and on. She even threw several things at his head, including one of their framed wedding pictures. She told him she didn't want any more kids, and if he wanted to do anything but sleep on the couch he better make an appointment to get a vasectomy."
"Your father told you this today?"
"Yea, after I found some things I'm gonna tell you about I went and asked him some questions. I didn't know he was gonna be talkin' about vasectomies, not exactly appropriate father-daughter topic of conversation. I kinda wanted to crawl under the table when he went on about how he and Mama fought about birth control and havin' more babies and 'gettin' snipped,' as he called it. He finally announced to Mama—" Brenda stopped talking and snorted a laugh—" that he couldn't have a vasectomy because it would compromise his manhood." She laughed again. "Can't you just hear him say that, Fritz?"
"I certainly can. I bet that didn't go over too big with your mother."
"Daddy said he was pretty much kicked out to the couch permanently after that declaration. And Mama marched herself to her OB's office and asked to get her tubes tied. She mentioned she wasn't feelin' too well, so they did a pregnancy test, and what do you know, she was pregnant. With me."
"When did they have a chance to conceive you with all the fighting they were doing? Did you ask your father that?" Fritz smiled as he pictured Brenda's face growing red at the very idea of asking her daddy such a thing.
"I wondered the same thing myself, and NO, Fritz Howard, I sure as hell didn't ask my daddy about how he got my Mama to sleep with him, what with all the depression and then his stubbornness over his 'manhood.'"
"I always thought you got your persuasive gifts from your mother, and now I'm starting to think your father must have had a pretty silver tongue too, or I wouldn't be talking to you now," Fritz joked.
"Stop!" Brenda yelled, in mock horror. "No more jokin' about my parents' sex life. Today was traumatic enough." The humor drained out of her voice.
"I'm sorry, honey," he said soothingly. "This is a sad story you're telling. But it's good to see the funny things, even in the middle of sorrow."
"I know, I know. But I just need to get this all out. So Daddy told me—and I never knew any of this before today—that Mama was not happy at all to find out she was expectin' again. I figured I may have been a surprise, not that Mama ever told me that, but I had no idea I was pretty much a tragedy to her." Brenda's voice wavered. "Mama was terrified something would happen to me, because by now she was 36, and back in the 60s that was considered really old to be havin' kids, so she worried that I would have a horrible birth defect too. Daddy said it was the longest nine months of his life. He hired a maid for Mama, continued to have his sisters help out with the boys, did the cooking himself, and did everything he could think of to pamper and reassure Mama. But she was a nervous mess about me until I was born, a couple weeks early but completely healthy."
"She must have been so relieved."
"Daddy said she was. And havin' a new baby got her back into the motherin' thing, and she started takin' better care of the boys. He kinda hoped that she had recovered from baby Grace dying. I mean, he knew she'd never forget Grace, but he hoped that with me, and Mama finally havin' the girl she so desperately wanted to have, she could really move on."
"But I can tell by the sound of your voice that that wasn't the case, was it?"
"Well, I knew about Grace ever since I was a little kid. Mama told me that I had my very own angel named Grace who watched over me. I thought I was special and all, to have an angel, until Clay Jr. told me who Grace was when I was about 5. And then all I could think about was a dead baby floating around me everywhere I went, and it started to give me nightmares. I told Daddy what my dreams were about, and he forbade me to ever tell Mama about them, because she would get upset."
"Poor baby," Fritz murmured.
"And then there was the whole white candle ritual thing. That kinda freaked us kids out."
"And that would be?"
"Well, every year, on Grace's birthday, May 1st, Mama would have a big white pillar candle lit on the mantle, next to a framed picture of Grace. I think it was the picture they took in the hospital when you are first born, because her eyes were shut and she looks awful. And around the pictures were things like I found in the closet: a rattle, a pacifier, baby things. It was like a Pagan alter. We kids thought it was so creepy. Daddy just ignored it. When we saw that candle go up, we knew what was comin,' cuz it meant 15 days later was the anniversary of Grace's death, and that was not a good day to be a Johnson. Mama would be out most of the day, either at the cemetery or at church, or she would be locked in her little study, but if us kids did see her, she was a mess, cryin' and such. And if any of us made a noise, just goofin' off like kids do or playin or somethin', and Mama was home, she would come and find us and, as Lieutenant Provenza would say, go medieval on our asses. And then the next day, she would be back to normal. I learned young that Grace was both a sacred and a very sore subject in our house."
"You found something today," Fritz prodded. "In the sewing room. Something about Grace, to bring all this up."
"Yea, I did," she said sadly. "I certainly did. First of all, I found almost a whole closet full of Grace things, like baby blankets, dolls, rattles, gifts people had given Mama when Grace was born. And then there were two boxes full of completely unused, beautiful, expensive, baby clothes for girls, the tags still on them so I know they weren't mine, plus I didn't recognize any of them from my baby pictures. Dresses for a princess, and they looked way nicer than anythin' my parents could have afforded back then. I showed Daddy the box and asked him about it. Grace didn't live long enough to require clothes,
so what where they doing in the closet? Daddy said that Mama was sure she was carrying a girl when she was pregnant with Grace, women's intuition and all that. And since she had been waitin' through three other pregnancies to buy girl clothes, she went out and bought a bunch of really beautiful dresses for the baby girl she was sure she was carrying. Daddy said he was so mad at the waste of money, because if it was another boy she would just end up givin' the clothes away. There was even a brand-new Christenin' gown in the box, satin and embroidered and fit for a queen, even though all of us kids got baptized in the Johnson family gown. After she died Mama refused to give away any of the clothes, and she was so sad Daddy wasn't about to argue with her. But when I came along he said, kinda off the cuff, that those dresses would look beautiful on me. Well, I guess Mama went a little nuts then too, the idea that I would wear Grace's clothes, or I should say clothes bought for Grace, because she never wore them, was just blasphemous to her. Daddy argued back and said she was being wasteful and I deserved those pretty dresses, and they shouldn't be rotting away in some box, but Mama wouldn't budge. So for 47 years, those frilly dresses have been sitting in a box in a closet in the sewing room, along with a bunch of other memories of a dead baby."
"That is a little strange she held on to those things for so long," Fritz said.
"She held on to a lot," Brenda said, and the biting undertone of her words had Fritz on alert.
"There was something else in that room, something you found that made you really upset," Fritz said to her softly. "Tell me, Brenda. Please."
There was silence on the other end for moment, and he heard her shift her position on the bed. "Yes, there was somethin' I found that was really upsettin,'" Brenda, her voice tight. "But to understand why it bothers me so much, I have to tell you a little bit about my childhood."
"I'm happy to listen to anything about your past, honey. Go on."
She took a deep breath. "Growin' up, everyone made a deal about how I was the only girl in the family, after three boys. I have to admit, I was a bit spoiled. " Fritz snorted, he couldn't stop himself. "A bit spoiled" was the understatement of the century. Brenda returned his interruption with a stony silence. He pictured her glaring at him, her lower lip extended in a pout and looking utterly adorable. "I'm sorry, Brenda, please go on," he said, in his most contrite voice. She sighed and went back to her story. "Mama and I were really close. Daddy and I were too—we still are—I was his little princess. But Mama and me, well, she just loved me so much, and she was my whole world. Even my brothers were good to me, except when they couldn't resist roughousin' with me, and then Mama would really get on with their case. I felt loved and treasured and safe.
"Anyways, a few months after I turned 10, I was walkin' toward the kitchen one day to get some of the chocolate chip cookies Mama had just baked. She was at the kitchen table with a lady from church I didn't know, and they were talking about me, so I stopped and listened right outside the door." Once again Brenda paused, and Fritz knew Brenda had overheard something unpleasant that day.
"The church lady, I don't remember her name, was saying what a sweet thing I was, and how it must have been the greatest day of Mama's life to give birth to a daughter after havin' three sons, how I was a gift from god, on and on. I was smilin', feelin' pretty good about myself, when Mama finally answered the woman. Mama said "—Brenda's voice faltered, "—and I remember this word for word. Mama said, 'I had a little girl about a couple of years before Brenda was born, but Grace only lived for two weeks. Brenda is my second daughter.'" Fritz could tell Brenda had to force the words out through a constricted throat. A long silence followed.
"And all at once, the wind went out of my sails," she continued as if she hadn't paused. "I was Mama's second daughter. Second, as in second place, second best, second hand. I wasn't the wanted, beloved daughter of the family, I was a consolation prize. "
Fritz started to speak, the heartache in her voice eliciting the response to comfort her, but Brenda hushed him. "I am only gonna be able to tell you all of this if you let me get it all out at once, Fritz, please," she said. He gave his assent and silent apology by saying no more, and she continued. "After that day, everything felt different. I was convinced I was living in Grace's shadow, a poor imitation of what she would have been if she had lived. I couldn't think of anything else. Everything I did, I thought about how Grace would have done it better. If I got an A- on a test, I would think, 'Grace would have gotten an A.' I looked at myself in the mirror and told myself that Grace would be so much prettier than me. Mama would hug me and tell me she loved me and I would wriggle free, saying to myself, 'yea, but you would have loved Grace so much more.' I began to pull away from my parents, absolutely convinced that they looked at me and saw their dead daughter, and what a poor substitute I was for her. I had built Grace up in my mind as this flawless, beautiful, perfect girl, better than me in every way, and so much deserving of my parent's love. I tried to compete but I knew I couldn't, and it ate me up inside.
"When I became a teenager, I stopped berating myself for not bein' as great as Grace. Instead, I tried to be her exact opposite, thinking, screw her, I'll be my own person, since my parents don't really love me anyways. In my mind Grace was the most popular girl in school, so I had few friends and mainly kept to myself. Mama was always bugging me make more girlfriends, but I found other teenage girls silly, and preferred to hang around with the boys. Grace, of course, was Homecoming queen and Prom Queen. I didn't even go to my own prom, which about broke Mama's heart. And Grace was, of course, a perfect Southern young lady who was saving herself for marriage. Once I turned 16, I saved myself for nothin'. I started smokin' and datin' all kinds of boys, and nearly sent my Daddy into apoplexy. The only thing I did do right was I was a good student. I got good grades without really tryin' and graduated salutatorian. Grace, I thought to myself, would go to a local college, major in something useless like History or English, and start working on her MRS. I, on the other hand, got a full scholarship to Georgetown, majored in Criminology and International Studies, and went to work in the CIA, not interested whatsoever in gettin' married.
"I grew out of this eventually, of course, but I never regained the closeness to Mama I had as a child," Brenda said softly. "I have so much regret about that. I punished her for something she never even knew she had done wrong. She was just holding on to the memory of her dead child, and that didn't make her love me any less. All my fantasies of how Mama dreamed Grace was gonna be the perfect daughter—beautiful, popular, with traditional values—were just figments of my own insecurity." Brenda drew a ragged breath. "Or this is what I thought. Until today."
"Honey, what got you so upset?" Fritz prodded.
"I found what I guess you would call a baby book. One of those books where you record everythin' about a baby's life, startin' before they are even born, what your pregnancy is like, stuff like that, then it moves on to the day they were born, baby's first step, other milestones. You can buy them now, but this one was homemade, by my Aunt Joan. Mama was convinced she was havin' a girl, and she had such an eerie way of bein' right about things like that, that everyone believed her, so I think Aunt Joan wanted Mama to have a special book to record everything about her daughter. And this book, Fritz, it's just beautiful. It's pink, with pictures of flowers and cherubs and all things girly hand-drawn on each page. It's barely faded and it's over 40 years old. It must have taken Aunt Joan forever. It's a work of art."
Fritz could tell it wasn't the artistic beauty of the baby book that was affecting Brenda. It was whatever was in it. "Go on, honey."
Brenda sighed. "Mama started writin' in it the day she got it. There was a page for the day you found out you were expectin,' and she gave the date, and then went on to say she knew in her heart right away it was a girl right away, like the baby was whisperin' to her." Fritz heard pages rustling. "The next page asks about possible baby names. Mama only lists one, 'Grace Anna.' 'Anna' for my grandmother, like I said before." Brenda sounded angry. "I know she didn't know it at the time, but I was the one who was so close to Grandma Anna, I was her favorite, and Grace got her name. And I got stuck with this stupid beauty-pageant, airhead, 1960's name and Grace got, well, Grace. I know I must sound crazy to be jealous of a dead baby, but…"
"Brenda is a beautiful name, honey, every bit as lovely as Grace." Brenda snorted.
"There are other questions, like 'first trip to the doctor' and a page for 'baby's family.' There's an old black and white picture of Daddy and the boys in front of the Christmas tree. There's another page for the family tree, which Mama drew out meticulously. There are cousins on here I never even heard about." Fritz waited for more as he heard pages shuffling. "And then I get to the page entitled 'hopes and dreams for your baby.' Mama wrote so much here she had to insert a few extra pages. Oh Fritz—" a deep sob ripped from Brenda's throat, and he could tell by how far away she sounded that she had dropped the phone on the bed. He yelled her name into the phone several times, and after a minute or two, she picked it up.
"I was right about everything, Fritz. When I overheard her call me her second daughter, and I painted this picture in my head of what Grace was supposed to be, I was somehow channeling what Mama wanted Grace to be, too. And since Grace was dead, what I was supposed to be. Oh Fritz, she must have been so disappointed in me."
"Slow down, honey, slow down. You are putting ideas into your mother's that you don't even know existed. Don't do that to her, or to yourself."
"Fritz, listen to me. I do know. I mean, I do know now. After readin' this baby book. See, Mama wrote page after page of her dreams for Grace, and they were everything I imagined Grace would be if she lived. Listen here. 'I want my daughter to be strong but sweet, a polite Southern girl who knows how to be charming and makes friends easily. I want everyone to love her as much as I do. I want her to be the type of little girl, and some day young woman, who walks in a room and everyone stops talking to stare at her. She will live up to her name, and her gentle spirit will be outdone only by her sweetness.' Fritz, does that sound like me?"
"Brenda, do you want that to sound like you? You have never cared if people like you or not."
"That's my point exactly. My Mama wanted a daughter that was kind and gentle, not a bulldozer like me." She sniffed. Here's more: 'I know Grace will be beautiful, since the three boys are so handsome. She will have curly blonde hair like I did as a child. I will get to teach her how to cook, like my Mama did. I will finally have someone to keep me company in the kitchen!' Mama tried to teach me how to cook, and I just didn't have the patience for it. I mixed all the ingredients wrong than burnt everything I tried to bake. I couldn't stand needlepoint or knittin' or battin' or anythin' else she tried to teach me. It all just bored me to tears and mad me restless. Mama never did get that buddy in the kitchen she longed for."
Fritz sighed. Brenda had been feeling so guilty for not talking to her mother and finding out what Willie Rae wanted to tell her before she died, and now she was beating herself up for not meeting expectations Willie Rae had for a baby who died almost 50 years ago. He didn't know what to say to stop Brenda from slipping farther down the rabbit hole of her grief.
"…it goes on like this, for pages, about the beautiful, well-behaved, polite little girl Grace was going to be. These early pages mainly focus on what she hoped Grace was gonna be as a little girl, but later on, that's when things get…specific."
"Okay," was all Fritz could think to say.
More pages turning. "Here's the section called 'the big day!' It's all about the day Grace was born. Mama wrote the date, the time, how much Grace weighed, and how long she was. Her handwritin' here was so shaky I could barely read it. Mama must have been real upset, because they knew the second Grace was born somethin' was wrong, she was all blue and not breathin,' but the funny thing is, Mama put none of this down in the book. It's like nothing was wrong with her, nothin' at all. The next page asked about the weather the day the baby was born, who was president, what song was popular, what was the top news story, on and on. And Mama filled out all of these stupid questions. She was in the hospital, just got this horrible news that her precious baby girl had somethin' really wrong with her and might not live, and yet she took time to fill out these silly questions. I don't get it."
"People do strange things when they are in shock, Brenda," Fritz said gently. "I bet that book, which she obviously treasured, was a way of making her feel like everything was normal, even though it wasn't. It was her way of holding it together."
"You're probably right. Mama went on and on like this, writin' on the pages that were supposed to be about baby's first tooth, baby's first smile, she just crossed out the headin's and kept writin' until the entire book was filled up. On the last page, oh, this is so sad. Mama wrote, 'Grace Anna Johnson died today, May 16, 1965 at 7:31pm. She was 15 days old. I feel as if a part of me has died and gone with her. The minister from our church came and gave Grace Last Rites, and told me it was god's will that she go home to him instead of staying with us, but I don't believe in a god that would be so cruel as to take a child away before she has had a chance to live. I have never wanted anything more in my life than I wanted this little girl, but she got taken away from me. I don't think I will ever understand why this happened, and I don't know if I will ever feel like my heart isn't broken. But I do know this, because there are just some things that a mother knows in her heart, like how I was sure that Grace was going to be a girl. Everything I wrote in this book, about what an amazing person Grace was going to grow up to be, what a strong and gentle lady, full of love and compassion, I know this was her destiny. I looked into her beautiful brown eyes and saw a tender soul, and I have no doubt that she would have brought joy to every life she touched.. What a horrible loss for this world today that she died and will no longer be a part of it. All I can do is think of my beautiful daughter as an angel who will never leave me, one who will always guard my family, and make sure that she is never forgotten.'"
Fritz tried to swallow the lump in his throat away when Brenda was finished reading Willie Rae's missive, the suffering seeped in those words amplified by the naked pain in Brenda's voice as she spoke them. He thought of sweet Willie Rae, with her endless patience for both Brenda and Clay's moodiness, and wondered how she was able to be such an optimistic, warm person after enduring such a loss. It only confirmed to Fritz who Brenda got her strength from.
And that is the end of the book," Brenda continued softly. "There were a couple of pictures of her in the back, when she was in the hospital all hooked up to tubes, that I had never seen before. There was even one of Mama holding her, looking so sad, with this fragile little baby in her arms." Brenda sniffed. "There were clippings from the newspaper of both her birth and death announcements. There was a lock of her hair in an envelope, just a little peach fuzz, but Mama was right, she did have blonde curly hair."
"Just like you," Fritz said.
"Yea," Brenda said with a near hysterical laugh, "just like me."
Fritz could hear the desperation in Brenda's voice, the loss and the grief now complicated by the crushing feeling that she had been nothing but a tremendous disappointment to her mother. He knew he had to help her, to run in and rescue her from the burning house of self-recrimination she was in, and quickly. Saving Brenda from herself, after all, was what he did best.
"Brenda, let's put this in perspective. Think about what was going on for your mother when she was working on that baby book. She was pregnant with her fourth child and convinced she was having a girl, and obviously very excited. She was probably sitting in that little study of hers, writing in it, dreaming about what it would be like to have a daughter in a houseful of men, while listening to your three brothers beating the crap out of each other and knocking over furniture in her living room. It's not surprising she was dreaming of a daughter who was going to be the exact opposite of your brothers, one who was polite and neat and kept her company while she cooked and knitted and pursued other, quote, womanly, tasks. I think her real hopes for Grace was that Grace would be your anti-brothers, Brenda, and I really wouldn't read too much into that. Grace could have been a tomboy, wrestling with the boys and giving them bloody noses as good as she got, who knows. And as for what your mom wrote in the book about her hopes for a grown up Grace after Grace was born, just think about it. Your mother was desperately hoping that Grace would get the chance to grow up at all. That's all she really wanted, with her whole being. All the things she wrote were just a way of assuaging her fears about Grace dying. So she created the perfect daughter in that book. The cheerleader, the Prom Queen, the young mother who lives nearby and gives her grandchildren…she was just writing out stereotypes of a Southern Belle while watching her child die. It gave her comfort, Brenda. Nothing more. It doesn't mean she wanted this for Grace. Or for you."
"How do you know?" Brenda countered.
"Because I knew Willie Rae. She was proud you were your own person, that you didn't fit any stereotypes."
"Bull," she said bluntly. "You weren't there for all the fights we had about my career choice. She was horrified that I went into law enforcement, just horrified. I tried to protect her and Daddy from what I did as long as I could. I wasn't about to tell them I joined the CIA, cuz Daddy would have had a heart attack. So I told them I worked for the State Department, and they reacted to that badly enough because I was travellin' around the world and Mama worried I wouldn't be safe. But I couldn't hide it when I joined the DC police and went to the Academy for trainin.' She said to me like a billion times, 'Brenda Leigh, you are such a smart girl. Why in the world do you want to become a police officer?' She thought it was beneath me. So don't be tellin' me she was proud of me, Fritz. You weren't there in the early days, before she resigned herself to the fact that I was gonna do whatever I wanted."
"Okay, so maybe she didn't understand your interest in law enforcement when you were younger, but Brenda, I'm telling you, and I'm not making this up, she was very proud of you and the position you held in the LAPD. Remember how she told us the story of running into one of your high school teachers, the one who didn't like you very much?"
"Yea, Mrs. Fleischman," Brenda said. "She always said that unless I adjusted my attitude I would never amount to anythin'. Bitch."
"Well, when your mother saw her, she took great pleasure telling her that you were a Deputy Chief in the LAPD, the highest ranking female ever," Fritz said. "She bragged about you, Brenda. She wouldn't have done that if she wasn't proud."
"Like I said, Fritz, she resigned herself. But I disappointed her in so many other ways. She wanted me to get married so bad, wanted me to have kids and settle down in Atlanta." Fritz could hear regret leach through every word. "She was so excited when I married Hart, thinkin' that her wish would come true. I'd get pregnant and leave my job at the Atlanta PD, and she wouldn't have to worry about me gettin' shot any more. And she would get more grandchildren. I knew I had made a huge mistake marryin' Hart almost from the beginnin', but I didn't want to disappoint Mama by leavin' him. Gettin' a divorce would just be one more way I would have disappointed her, and even though I had outgrown the competition in my head with the perfect Grace, I'm sure somewhere in the deep recesses I'd be thinkin', cuz it was kind of a reflex, that Grace would never have married a loser and ended up divorced. So I put up with Hart tryin' to control me, beratin' me all the time and insistin' I get pregnant…I put up with all of that so I wouldn't disappoint my parents. Then he pulled that crap about reportin' I was havin' an affair with an officer in my division, and I got suspended and there was a piece about it in the paper, and Mama was so horrified she wanted me to leave him." She sniffled. "God, I was so stupid. I married that jerk because he was so different than Will, and then stayed with him so I wouldn't disappoint Mama. I completely forgot to think about what I wanted."
"And then you moved to California and took a position that made her brag about you, and you married someone you really loved, whom your mom loved too," Fritz said. "You ended up making her very happy, honey, and very proud. And, I like to think, you married me because it was something you wanted." He waited for an affirmation but didn't get it.
He could tell she wasn't listening, that she had slipped back into her own private world of self-flagellation. She gasped, as if just realizing something, and called out to him in a panicky voice. "Oh Fritz, what would Mama have thought if she knew about Will, that I had an affair with a married man? She would have been so ashamed, so disappointed. She would have disowned me!"
Fritz weighed whether or not he should speak, knowing his words could wound Brenda deeply, but decided to take the risk. "She did know," he said softly.
"What?" Brenda sounded puzzled, like Fritz was answering a question she had asked five minutes ago. "What are you talking about?"
Fritz cleared his throat, already wondering if perhaps he should have let this secret remain buried. "Brenda, your mom did know you had an affair with a married man. More or less."
Brenda seemed incapable of forming complete words, and sentences were beyond her. "Wha—? How —? Mom—?" She took a deep breath and tried again. "No. No way. Unless—did you tell her, Fritz?"
"Of course not, Brenda. I would never tell your mom about Pope. I'm sorry to spring this on you, I never told you before because I knew you would be upset, but I thought you needed to know that Willie Rae loved you no matter what."
"Tell me what you know," Brenda demanded.
"Remember when your parents were visiting to plan the wedding, on their way to a Hawaiian cruise? We were taking care of your dad at our house after his stint collapse, and your mother looked like she needed a break, so I took her out for a walk. We were talking, and she was telling me how glad she was we were finally getting married, how much she liked me, and how good I was for you. She said that you had a history of selling yourself short, going out with boys that weren't nearly good enough for you. And then she said, 'and I know Brenda was seeing someone in DC she shouldn't have been. Either a married man or her boss.' I didn't say a word, I swear, I just kept walking, although your mother was looking at me for some sign of confirmation. I couldn't believe that she knew, she really hit the nail on the head, since Pope was married and your boss. She went on and said she was sure he had broken your heart, and that's why you left DC and moved back to Atlanta, and as glad as she was to have you back, she could tell you were an emotional mess. She looked directly at me and asked, 'weren't you and Brenda friends and coworkers in DC, Fritz?' And I answered, 'Willie Rae, if you have questions about Brenda's love life, you have to ask Brenda. I am pleading the fifth.' Your mother smiled and went on to say whoever it was in DC, he did a number on you to get you to fall for that idiot Hart and marry him in 6 months. She complained about him for awhile, what he did to your career, and then said again how wonderful I was, and then we turned around and headed home, and I successfully changed the topic. She never brought it up with me again. And I'm guessing she never asked you about it either."
"No," Brenda whispered, sounding a little stunned. "She never said anythin'. She did ask me, when I moved back from DC, if something had happened to me down there to make me want to come home, but she never asked if it was about a relationship or anythin'. I have no idea how she knew. I was careful about makin' any calls to Will when she visited, or when I was home visitin'. And Mama was used to me makin' clandestine calls, since I was workin' for the CIA. She always had amazin' intuition, but how she knew…" her voice trailed off.
"The point, Brenda, and the reason I told you this at all, is that your mother suspected for years you had an affair with a married man. And that didn't affect how she felt about you, how she treated you. She loved you just the same."
"You don't think she told Daddy, did you?" Brenda asked in a small voice reminiscent of a child in trouble.
Fritz laughed, confident that Willie Rae was adept at screening out information that would send Clay through the roof. "When exactly did your father have his first heart attack?"
Brenda snorted in a much-needed moment of brevity. In his mind's eye he could see her, sitting on her childhood bed with the baby book on her lap, her shoulders hunched and her eyes puffy from crying. She had gone through so much over the past year, and he worried about what her breaking point might be. He knew from being in AA and hearing heartbreaking story after heartbreaking story about terrible lives that got swallowed up by addiction and the tremendous struggle to reclaim them that humans are very resilient. People can survive terrible things, but are often left so vulnerable that something relatively small and insignificant is what pushes them into the chasm.
Like finding out you lived your whole life in your dead sister's shadow.
He heard the springs of her old bed creak loudly and had could tell she had stood up, and from the soft rhythmic thump, thump, thump in the background, he guessed she was pacing around her old bedroom. "I am so…my head's spinin', Fritz. I don't know how I feel. I mean, I feel upset, I feel crushed, but it's more than that, I feel somethin' that I don't know how to put it into words." Her voice was rising in frustration, and the thumps of her footsteps grew more frenetic.
"You feel angry," he whispered.
The sounds of pacing stopped suddenly. "What did you say?"
He cleared his throat, knowing he just stepped in a minefield. "I said you feel angry. At your mother. And the reason why you are having a hard time identifying what you are feeling is that you are uncomfortable with that, which is understandable. The last person you want to be upset with is your mother."
"Of course I don't want to be mad at my mother!" Brenda shouted, so loudly that Fritz almost dropped the phone. "She's dead! You don't go around getting pissed off at dead people Fritz, what is wrong with you?" She drew a deep, ragged breath, and when she spoke again, her voice was calmer, but with a deadly undertone that made Fritz shiver. "I just bared my soul to you, told you about some of my deepest, darkest thoughts, and all you can come up with is some crazy talk about how I feel about Mama? Well, you have certainly been wonderful tonight, Fritz. Thank you so much for helpin' me clear things up." Her voice dripped icicles.
"Brenda—" Fritz knew what was coming. He had just become her target.
"I think you have insulted me, and my dead mother, enough for one conversation. Seein' as the only person I'm angry with is you, I'm callin' it a night." And with that, she hung up.
Fritz stared at the phone in his hand, a sinking feeling in his stomach. He should have kept his big mouth shut. He closed his eyes and leaned back on the pillow. Brenda wasn't ready to face her feelings about Willie Rae and the dead sister who had haunted her, and he had pushed her, too far and too fast. He sat up and put his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes and thinking about what he should do. He knew if he left her in the state she was in, upset, depressed, and essentially alone, she could self-destruct. No, he had to get ahold of her. He had to let her know he loved her, even if she was being mean to him. He couldn't leave her hanging with all those feelings swirling around, the woman who saw an emotion coming toward her and ran like hell.
Fritz called her cell and, not surprisingly, she didn't pick up. Fritz tried three more times, hoping she would answer out of sheer irritation. On his fourth try the call went straight to voice mail. Great, she turned her phone off, he thought irritably. He knew she was going to go ballistic over what he was about to do, but he was left with no choice. He opened the Contact folder on his phone, found "Johnson, Clay," and hit the "home" number. After several rings an irate male voice came on the line.
"What?" Clay demanded. It was 1:30AM Atlanta time, and Fritz had really hoped Brenda would answer the phone so Clay wouldn't get woken up. She was punishing him.
"Mr. Johnson, it's Fritz. I'm so sorry for calling so late," he started.
"Then why did you?" Clay interrupted. "You've got Brenda's cell phone. What are you doing calling the house in the middle of the night?"
"Mr. Johnson, please listen to me. Brenda is really upset about something, and she hung up on me and turned off her phone. Now I know she's not going to want to come to the phone, but I have to talk to her. Please. I'm really worried about her state of mind right now, and I need to make sure she's okay. So even if she says she doesn't want to speak to me, I am begging you to get her on the line."
Clay sighed. "Is this about her sister Grace?" he said, sounding weary.
"Yea," Fritz answered. "It is."
Clay cursed softly. "I wish that poor baby could be left alone to rest in peace. Okay, I'll go get Brenda and drag her to the phone if I have to. You're the only one who knows how to calm her down when she's in a state."
Fritz didn't get the word "thanks" out of his mouth before he heard the clatter of the phone being put down and followed by Clay's heavy footsteps and his rough voice calling out for Brenda. Then in the distance Brenda's voice, laced with anger, answered back. They argued for awhile, too far away for Fritz to make out the words, but he caught his name once or twice. Gradually Clay's voice grew louder and Brenda's grew softer, and the footsteps that eventually approached the phone were lighter than Clay's, but with a distinct drag of a reluctant child's. The phone was picked up and he heard Brenda's signature impatient huff.
"You woke my daddy up!" she said accusingly, her voice once again in that low, deadly tone. Fritz knew she was smarting from whatever tongue lashing Clay had given her to force her to the phone.
"And you hung up on me. And then turned off your phone."
"I was done talkin' to you for the night, Fritz."
"But I wasn't done talking to you, Brenda. Even if you don't like what I am saying, you have no right to hang up on me like that, leaving me a thousand miles away worrying about you. We just spent two hours on the phone talking about what a horrible day you had, and I'm worried about you, very worried. And you go and hang up on me because you don't like what I have to say? Is that your idea of punishment, leaving me to a sleepless night wondering what kind of shape you're in? That's crap, Brenda, and incredibly unfair."
She let out an impatient noise. "Well, if you're lookin' for an apology, I don't think I have any to hand out."
Fritz closed his eyes in frustration. Give me strength, he chanted to himself. "I'll forgo the apology if you take the phone and go back to your bedroom so we can talk, Brenda. So I can explain what I was trying to say before you got mad and hung up. I would settle for picking up where we left off. Can you do that?"
She huffed again, but he got the feeling he was being transported back to her bedroom. At one point he heard her voice, muffled by her hand over the receiver, and Clay's deeper voice answer back. Then the distinct sound of a door shutting, and the familiar creek of the ancient bedsprings.
"What!" she said testily, sounding like a moody teenager.
"Brenda, I know you've had a hard day, but that in no way gives you the right to treat me badly. You are supposed to be concentrating on the living from now on, remember? You might want to start with your husband." Fritz was angry. She had been doing so well lately, really opening up to him during their late-night phone calls. This childish behavior was quite a regression.
"Yes, I am supposed to be focusin' on the livin.' Then how come the dead keep followin' me around?"
"Maybe because you need to let them go."
"That's very poetic, Fritz. But I'm not quite ready to let Mama go yet. It's too soon. And I'm certainly not ready to be mad at her for anything, for heaven's sake! What do you even mean by that?"
He settled back in to the bed, pulling Joel close to him for support, and tried to relax his tense muscles. Brenda really knew how to stress him out, and he needed to be calm if he was going to be any help to her. He practiced a few deep, cleansing breaths he had learned in a meditation class before resuming their conversation.
"Listen, I need you to be quiet for a few minutes and listen to me, okay? I need to share some painful stuff of my own, and maybe it will help you understand what you are feeling a little better. But I need you to respect that this is difficult for me to talk about, and cut the attitude, Brenda. Agreed?"
"Agreed," she answered wearily. "And I'm sorry," she added, as an afterthought. "For hangin' up on you. That wasn't very grown up of me. Even if I didn't like what you were sayin."
"Apology accepted," he said. "And thank you." He was grateful her temper had cooled, because he wanted her full attention, and support, for what he was going to tell her. He was entering the deep seas and choppy waters of his past, and he needed an anchor.
"Let me try to explain this as best as I can," he began. "When you are an alcoholic, you don't go through the normal ups and downs of life that make people develop into better human beings. If you're drunk you're never really present during the tough times in life; you're numb to the feelings and experiences that challenge you and make you
grow." He shifted on the bed again, feeling his skin crawl as he went back to a place in time he hating visiting. "My parents died within a year of each other, about 5 years before I got clean. As I told you, my dad was an alcoholic too. When he was sober, he was a great guy, really funny, and he loved us kids. And he loved my mother. But when he was drunk, he was a bastard. He used to scream at my poor mom if it was a good night, he would stop there, and if it wasn't, he would hit her. He started hitting me, too, when I was about eight. My mother did everything she could to distract him from me, which always resulted in a worse beating for her. In the morning, he would be hung over and grumpy, but by the afternoon he would be showering my mother with attention and buying toys for me and Claire. And the cycle would start all over again the next night."
"Oh, poor Fritzy," Brenda breathed.
He ignored her. "I loved my mother very much. If I am as kind and decent as you tell me I am, it is because I got it from her. She had the biggest heart in the world. Too big. She forgave him over and over, and always believed his promise that he would stop drinking, and we would be a really happy family. The thing was, she really loved him, and he loved her. But that didn't stop him from beating her when he was drunk. But her love for him, and her belief that he really could change, kept her from leaving. It wasn't until the night he hit Claire for the first time, when she was only five, and gave her a bloody lip, that my mother realized the situation was hopeless. We left New York the next day and moved in with her parents in New Jersey.
"Despite leaving him and eventually divorcing him, she never stopped loving him. I guess I inherited that from her too, the proclivity to be completely and utterly devoted to the person you love. Dad was diagnosed with cirrhosis when he was in his 60s, and that's when he finally stopped drinking. Of course, it was too late, and the cirrhosis turned in to liver cancer. And my mother actually moved back in with him for the last year of his life and took care of him. I told her that it was a terrible idea, he didn't deserve her, etc. But she just said to me, "I still love him, and if I can help him die comfortably, then that's what I'm going to do." I visited him a few times that year, mainly to check up on Mom. Since he was sober, he wasn't abusive, and he seemed genuinely grateful for all the care she gave him. But she completely neglected her own health because she was so busy taking care of him. I looked at her at his funeral, and my gut told me something was wrong, really wrong. Claire took her to the doctor's that week, and she was diagnosed with metastatic malignant melanoma. She ignored a funny-looking spot on her skin because she was too busy taking care of him to get it checked out, and melanoma is so aggressive the cancer had spread to her bones by the time she was diagnosed. If it had been caught sooner, it's possible she could have had the tumor removed and she would still be alive. We'll never know.
"So with all these horrible things happening, I was drinking pretty heavily, which assured that I didn't feel a damn thing. I was drunk at both their funerals." He heard Brenda take a quick intake of breath in surprise, and he felt a familiar wave of shame engulf him. "I was able to function really well as a drunk. I could be pretty hammered and not slur my speech or stumble. The only person who knew I wasn't sober was Claire."
"Anyways, when you go into rehab and you stop drinking, it's like a melting iceberg. All those painful emotions that you should have experienced are still there, inside you. They are just trapped by the drinking and held at arms-length. So here I am in rehab, my life a complete mess, wondering if I still had a job, and waves and waves of grief start battering me. I never mourned either of my parents' deaths, and all that sadness and grief was just waiting to be released. And Christ, it almost killed me, all those terrible feelings at one time. But you know what surprised, me Brenda? Besides feeling incredibly sad, especially about losing my mom, I was really, really angry. At my parents. At both of them. I mean, full of rage to the point where I could barely control it. Thank god there was an workout room in the rehab I was in, and I had permission to use it. I would feel this wave of grief followed by a tsunami of anger and I would go down to the gym and run on the treadmill and lift weights and ride the bike as hard as I could for hours, just to try and pump some of that poison out of my system. I would be down there so long one of the nurses would come looking for me. But exercising like that helped; I could at least walk around without feeling like I was going to explode."
"My lord, Fritz, why were you so angry? I can understand why you were furious with your father. But why were you so angry with your mother? You said you loved her."
"Like I've said to you before, Brenda, you can love someone and still be angry with them. Even if they're dead. I never realized until then, until after she died, how hurt I was that she didn't protect me when I was a kid. Why didn't she leave when my father hit me? My grandparents had money, so it wasn't like we were going to end up on the streets. She watched me get knocked around by him, or at least screamed at by him, night after night. It wasn't until Dad hit Claire that mom left. And it only took one time. And I thought, was I not worth anything? Didn't I count too? I was just a little kid when he started bullying me. And there I was in rehab, a 40 year old man, sobbing like a baby because my mother didn't protect me." He was barely able to speak the last words. It was as if they were covered in barbs and they grabbed at his lips on their way out. He didn't want Brenda to know he was once so broken, but he had sworn to be honest with her. But to show her the old Fritz, the Fritz who was as unstable and needy in his newfound recovery as a toddler, well, it was hard not to feel weak. He hated the idea of her thinking of him as anything but her rock.
"Oh Fritz," Brenda said, her voice wavering. "Oh honey, what an amazin' man you are to have lived through that and be such a gentle spirit. It makes me love you even more."
He relaxed a little, his insecurities assuaged by her words. "Thank you, Brenda. I won't share the violent fantasies I had about my father at the same time. I had always been angry at him, for obvious reasons. After his death he became the monster who killed her, too. This was irrational, of course. It was Mom's choice to go and care for dad. But could the selfish bastard have perhaps said no? Could he have noticed that his ex-wife looked really ill herself? It was just such a perfectly horrible ending to a perfectly horrible marriage. He took everything away from her, to the bitter end."
"You still sound pretty angry, Fritz," Brenda said.
"I'm not really, honey. I'm just reliving how terrible that time in my life was, and all the feelings I'm talking about feel fresh. I use my father as a model of what I never want to be. I never want to lose you because I fall back into the bottle, and I certainly don't want to be asking you to take care of me when I'm dying of liver cancer because I drank myself to death."
"You won't," Brenda said. "I have so much faith in you."
"My mother had a lot of faith in my father," Fritz answered. Too much faith. Faith in his slick promises about never hurting her again and going on the wagon. All it got her, and us kids, was a lot of misery."
"I think there's a difference between belivin' in someone and wearin' blinders and deludin' yourself," Brenda said slowly. "And I see you just fine."
He smiled. "With a few years of therapy, I forgave my mom, too, and came to terms with the fact that she did the best she could. It's sad she couldn't stand up for herself better, but I had to give her credit for leaving at all. Back in the '70s there wasn't the support for battered women there is today. And she loved us kids, she really did. She was so distraught when she saw that I was abusing alcohol. I tried to hide it from her, only drank a little when I was home visiting her, but somehow she knew. I always felt like I disappointed her, and I wish she had lived long enough to see me sober, and to see me married to you. To know that my life turned out stable and full of good things.
"I loved your mom for a lot of reasons, Brenda, mostly because she was a wonderful person. But partly because I don't think I was done being mothered yet. And your mom swooped in and took me under her wing and made me feel like I was her son. She filled a hole in my heart I didn't even know I still had."
"Oh baby, I'm so sorry," Brenda whispered. "I wish I was there to hold you."
"It's okay," Fritz answered. "It's really hard to talk about, but knowing you are listening helps. There is a point to me bringing all of this up, and that is sometimes, a lot of stuff we don't even know is going on inside of us comes to the surface when people die, and lots of time that is anger. You know, that is the interesting thing about being in AA. People stand up and give testimonials, they tell their stories, or parts of them. And you hear all kinds of things, really horrible things people have been through. But so often you hear the same stuff, , which goes to show we all go through the same miserable crap being human. One thing I have heard so many time is that a person will be doing really well with their sobriety until a parent dies, and then all these feelings of anger and betrayal will come spewing forth, and they'll either fall apart or fall off the wagon, or both. Having someone you love die just seems to unlock a lot of painful things we hold in our hearts about that person."
"I see what you are sayin,' Fritz, but you were abused. And I bet those people you are talkin' about, a lot of them were abused too. I wasn't. I was pretty much a spoiled princess. What do I have to be angry about? Mama doesn't deserve me bein' angry at her."
"Your mother was determined to keep Grace alive. I know what she wrote at the end of the baby book, and she really worked hard to be true to that promise, that Grace wouldn't be forgotten. But at what price? You told me earlier she said you had a guardian angel named Grace, and when you found out who Grace was you had terrible nightmares. Yet your father told you never to tell your mother about those dreams, because they might upset her. Whenever family secrets start piling up, that's not a good thing. You were just a scared little girl who didn't understand who this dead baby was, and you couldn't go to your mother for comfort. That's sad."
"But I could go to Daddy, he understood," she said defensively.
"But he had his own trouble with your mother over how she had a hard time letting Grace go, like he told you this afternoon. Things like the birthday shrine and not letting you wear the dresses, well, that's a little odd, honey."
"Yea, those dresses show who was really the princess of the family," she said bitterly.
"And what you overheard your mother say, about you being her second daughter, I don't blame you for being shaken by that. You say you didn't even know the woman your mother was talking to, correct?"
"Yea, I think she was a new member of the church or somethin,' I don't know," Brenda mumbled. "It was a long time ago."
"So your mother was divulging very personal information about your family to a relative stranger. About you, and your life, right in the kitchen."
"Yea, I guess," she said. "What are you gettin' at, Fritz?"
"I guess what I'm trying to say is that your mother's devotion to your sister, to keeping her memory alive, came at a cost. She withdrew from caring from her sons, and she and your father had problems in their marriage. You imagined you had this dead sister following you around, and then you felt like you were living in her shadow the entire time you were growing up, and honestly, maybe in some ways you were. I almost wonder if you had the burden of living two lives."
"Fritz, I have no idea what you mean by that."
Fritz really hoped this wasn't going to set her off again. "I'm just guessing, because your mother isn't here to ask, of course. But here you have a sister, who would have been just a little bit older than you, who died very young. And then you came along, another daughter after three boys, and it makes me wonder if you, and your mother, subconsciously expected you to live both lives, yours and Grace's. Like out of gratitude for your own life, you owed it to Grace to live some of hers too. As if being less than perfect would be almost saying, 'Grace had her life taken away but I'm wasting mine.' Do you see what I'm saying?"
"No," Brenda said sharply. Then, softer, "maybe. Mama said somethin' to me, a long time ago, durin' one of our fights about me goin' into law enforcement. I completely forgot about it until now. She was goin' on about how dangerous it was, bein' a police officer and all, and she said somethin' under her breath, like, 'so Grace dies at two weeks and Brenda throws her life away?' I thought it was the strangest thing to say because it didn't make any sense at all, because what did a dead baby have to do with me bein' a cop? And now…now I wonder."
"I doubt your mother realized she was putting this pressure on you, Brenda. But I wonder if it's one of the reasons you are so driven in your career, that you have always been such a workaholic. You may have chosen a career path your parents didn't approve of, but you absolutely had to be the very best CIA interrogator, than the best criminal investigator, and finally you had to run the most successful unit of the LAPD. All the while closing yourself off to friendships and other relationships, using work as a drug. You numbed the pain of your childhood, of this schism between you and your mother, by working yourself into oblivion." There, Fritz had said to her what had been on his mind for a long time: Brenda was an addict too. Except her addiction was fed by her job, not by a bottle.
"And now that I'm not workin," she said, her voice high and tight, as if she was barely holding herself together, "all those feelin's are meltin' like an iceberg and drownin' me."
"Yea," he answered, his voice rough, moved that she had really heard him.
A low moan came from the other end of the phone, muffled and distant, and Fritz realized she had dropped the phone on the bed again. This time, he didn't call her name. He just sat on his bed, thousands of miles from her, and wiped the tears from his eyes as he listened to the wounded animal sounds coming from Brenda. They vacillated in their volume, and he could tell by the cadence that she was rocking herself, and he pictured her in her childhood bedroom, arms wrapped tightly around her torso as she came apart, her pain too base and animal to manifest itself in tears. Small screams erupted from her and were muffled, and an occasional soft thump told him she was pounding her fist on the bed. It was killing him, to hear his love suffering like this, flying apart in her grief and anger, and not be there to gather her against him. Fritz felt as impotent as he did when his mother lay dying at Hospice, too weak to even hold his hand.
He was sure the skin on his knuckles was going to crack and bleed from the force of his clenched fists, and the thought of seeking comfort though a bottle of Scotch flitted through his mind. He quickly chased it away, but questioned the level of his own endurance, how much of a man he was, what he could take, when the primal cries became softer. After several more minutes, he heard her voice, rough and guttural: "Fritz, are you there?"
"Yes, Brenda, I'm here. I was here the whole time. Please tell me you're okay."
"I'm angry," she answered, a bit louder. "You figured it out before I did. I am angry at Mama, and I don't care if she's dead." She drew a shuttering breath, as if shocked by her own words. "I lived my whole life a certain way because of Grace. Because I was the second daughter, and I never forgot it. I felt I owed Mama two daughters' lives, and I could only give her one. And it tore me apart, Fritzy." Fresh tears sprung in to her voice. "No no no! I am so damn tired of cryin'." She noisily blew her nose. "I always felt like a failure, even though I know she was proud of me. But it wasn't enough, I didn't do enough to make up for Grace bein' gone."
"No one should have expected you to," Fritz said softly.
"Damn straight," she answered forcefully, sounding more like her old self. "And you know what's interestin', Fritz? The night Stroh attacked me, Rusty Beck asked me if I only cared about people once they were dead. And here I've been feelin' like I've been haunted by a dead baby, cuz my mother couldn't let go of her lost child. I've been surrounded by dead people my whole life, because, because…"
A pause. "Because of my mother." Another determined sigh. "And we both suffered for it, didn't we? I lived my life both in competition with, an making up for, a lost sister, and at the same time I pulled away from my parents, convinced that I wasn't the daughter they wanted. And now Mama's gone and I can't talk to her about it, apologize to her for how I treated her, and explain why I was so distant. And I can't tell her how I felt like I wasn't good enough for her, that I couldn't compete with Grace." Her voice grew louder. "Goddammit Fritz, I have all this crap inside me now and I can't make it right with Mama, it's too late! Ahhh!" Another soft thump of her fist hitting the bed.
"Take a deep breath, honey," Fritz said, using his "Calming Brenda" voice. "If you wake up your father, there might be more dead bodies to deal with." She didn't laugh. He cleared his throat.
"It's sad that your mother's gone, and you won't have the opportunity to make things right with her." She made a small noise on the other end of the phone. "But I want to point out something, Brenda. You said you rejected both of your parents. Your father is still alive, and you have an opportunity to explain things to him. From what you told me, he certainly suffered from your mother's determination to keep Grace alive, so to speak. I think he will understand."
"I don't know, Fritz," Brenda said cautiously. "I think Daddy would be pretty angry if he knew I was makin' life choices solely to be different than my dead sister. He'd think I was nuts."
"Then explain to him why you did this, what you overhead and the pressure you felt from your mother, however subtle, to live Grace's life too. I really do think he will get it." Fritz thought about what Clay had said when he had called the house phone after Brenda had hung up on him. "I wish that poor baby could be left alone to rest in peace." He knew without being told that Brenda was having a fit about Grace. Yes, he would understand the affect this dead child had on his living daughter.
"Maybe," Brenda said. "I don't know."
Something occurred to Fritz. "Did you show him the baby book?"
He could almost hear Brenda shaking her head. "I couldn't. Once I started readin' it and saw it contained my worst nightmares, well, I know this is gonna sound strange, but I almost felt ashamed. Like here was one of Mama's deepest wishes, her writin' about the perfect daughter, and there I'd be standin', handin' it to him, well, bein' me. I was afraid he would look at me and think how much I disappointed her too."
"Stop it Brenda, just stop it. We've been through this. That book is a work of fiction, nothing more. A diary a worried new mother used to keep her sanity. Show it to him, honey, and use it to discuss…everything. All the things you told me."
Silence.
"Brenda, do you trust me? Do you trust that I know you well? Do I tend to be right about these types of things? Answer me, honey."
"Yes, yes, and yes."
"Then will you promise me you will show you dad the book tomorrow, and tell him everything you told me? Because if you get one thing out of that conversation, and that is he tells you your mother was proud of you, than it will be worth all of today's angst. But I have a feeling the two of you will discuss much, much more than that."
After awhile she whispered yes, and then said, "Fritzy I am so tired, so tired. I need to go to sleep, right now. I'm not even gonna brush my teeth. I just need to drift away." Her voice became slurred, and he knew he was losing her.
"Please call me tomorrow and let me know how things went. Brenda, you awake? Promise me."
"Mmmmmmm."
He smiled. And saw her in his mind's eye, curled in fetal position, already halfway asleep.
"And Brenda?"
"Mmmmm?"
"Everything is going to be all right."
End