We counted tragedies. These cruel numbers crept into date night, trailed along our evening walks, and covered our eyes when the sky blistered to five shades of red. I recognized the first brutal volley with our inability to fund our daughter’s college. An implosion in the housing market and my sudden aneurysm (a month in intensive care) clipped our financial wings and made us dubious of God. From there, the tragedies came easy: missed mortgage payments, a looming bankruptcy, two hurricanes and the BP oil spill.
But before I share with you the worst of our tragedies, let me first tell you about a wedding.
The nuptials of our friend’s son came with flowing dresses, camera flashes, the contract of “I do’s” sealed with a kiss. The reception hall was on a college campus. An elegant building filtered through Spanish moss dripping from trees was to be the setting of toasts and speeches, a band playing cover songs, an open bar concocting courage in a glass.
Unable to attend, my wife inserted our twenty-year-old daughter, Jenny, (my wife’s doppelganger) as her proxy, and I had Seth. Seth was my sixteen-year-old son who stood six-three when fully erect. But an unexpected mishap had diminished his height to the elevation of a wheelchair.
Jenny hovered near my shoulder; Seth distractedly rolled by my left hip as I swept up the pen to sign the guestbook. Instead of printing boring names, I made a bold statement:
Ginger and I just celebrated our 27th anniversary, I dare you to catch up!
“Really,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes. “No one reads those things.”
“No?” I look at my daughter, then at my son.
Seth only shook his head. “Dad, you’ve gotten corny in your old age.”
I wanted to tell them how it was important to always search for champions with the divorce rate holding at fifty-six percent but shrugged an apology as if I couldn’t help myself.
The bottom floor was a dissection of hallways where people lingered and looked lost. I asked Seth if he’d seen an elevator. He shook his head.
Jenny nodded toward the stairs. “Seth, you think you can make it up?”
Seth looked determined and shifted to give it a try.
A C-6 contusion, from years of uncontrolled tics, had shredded nerve endings in Seth’s neck. It was telephone lines now sending vague messages on the wire or no messages at all. The injury caused Seth to lose control of his legs as well as his balance, and each day he navigated the world of upright people with a lot of handholding, leveraging, kinetics, and for long distances, the confines of his wheelchair.
On the stairs, Jenny carried his crutches, and from behind, I inverted the wheelchair, awkwardly pulling it up.
Seth’s knees buckled on each step as his large, pronated feet were lifted and swung with a sway of his hips. He would pause and move up a step. Pause and move again. Spasmodic movements riddled through legs, him huffing, gripping tight to the railing, tackling the last mountain.
The two years of hospitals and medications, of physical therapy and searches on the internet for cures and religion, uncovered nothing. “He’s still young,” was one of the answers that came from the wise pixels on the screen. “Technology is advancing, and with stem cell research and biomechanics, who knows, ten years from now he might walk again.”
The mother of the groom greeted us at the top of the stairs. Looking frazzled in heavy eye makeup and strands of hair kicking loose in splayed halos, she hugged us all, said “gosh” a lot, smiled, eyes fogged in some forgotten dream from the past. I watched what she looked at and what she avoided and wondered if her nervous pantomime was her attempt at an apology for the fallout between my wife and her five years ago.
Does a tragedy allow itself to be forgotten?
The reception space was a cavernous room with gigantic windows, thirty-foot ceilings, taupe-colored carpet and candles. An edible island of dishes sat between tables draped in white on one side, an empty area beckoning dancers on the other.
When the live band cranked up, many sips of merlot already swirled in my head. I attempted to blend in with the wood paneling on the wall, reminding myself how I was approaching fifty and now had limitations when it came to dancing.
Jenny’s boyfriend arrived with his dancing feet and dragged her out into the gyrating mix. Seth parked himself on the edge of the dance floor, face eager yet guarded, clearly wanting something magical to happen. His large web-like hands swallowed the small plate of food he held, and it was here the first tragedy of the night could be counted.
Beyond his height, Seth had other large features. Measuring a whole person from one outstretched fingertip to the other fingertip, what his body once contained were prospects: swimming records, baseball or tennis scholarships, golf, but all of those paths had gotten trapped in unresponsive flesh. It was a tragedy of what-if’s: a lifeline not particularly interrupted but partially rubbed out to continue as what? a sideshow always placed on the peripherals and pitied? He wanted a girlfriend and wore this search like his disability wore him.
Seth watched his friends who were girls, smiling when they flurried near, bending to his level, speaking with him for a moment, only to drift back to the dance floor, their eyes searching the crowd for more able-bodied partners.
It was a frenetic hot mess, the whole wedding scene: photo bombing, drinks sloshed, faces flushed, shirts pulled from waistlines. Drums splashed heavy and hard, and like tentacles, it reached out and grabbed anything including the atoms deep in the walls. What else could explain why a lit candle toppled from the shelf, tumbling in a half-pike to the couch below, vanishing behind a floral-patterned pillow?
I waited for the new tragedy, one we could all share. It was combustible possibilities of tapestry and foam igniting any second, enveloping the furniture in a hug, then spreading unnoticed to the corner. There would be screams—screams always came first—then the mob-rush to the exits because the flames were bound to get greedy, lap at the walls and drapes, dropping lit offspring to the taupe-colored carpet, taking only minutes to set the record straight.
I quickly moved to the couch. Wax coated over the furniture’s fabric like an opaque wound. Pulling the pillow away, the candle innocently stared back, its blackened wick curled to a hook, the flame evidently snuffing itself out with the fall. No one else saw it but me. Me being both the villain and hero wrapped in one.
Easing back to the wine and my section of the wall to watch, I was surprised to see Seth had left his wheelchair and was up on his feet. His hand braces were extended, and the throngs of dancers had become momentarily distracted by this interloper from the handicap shadows. Two girls hovered, rooting Seth on. His tall body trying to twist, lifting one way then the other, his rigid half-stumbles attempting to gyrate with the musical beat. But his legs threw in the towel and his knees buckled, dropping him to the dance floor like a sack of potatoes. He landed flat on his back, head bouncing off the parquet flooring. There were half-lunges to help, sighs and hands opened. Then came the smiles and laughter seeing how Seth was laughing at himself, comically waving at the prospect of ever attempting to dance again as he was lifted and dragged back to his wheelchair.
Will he ever find the love of a woman, have kids, and grow old gently? If tragedy can’t be forgotten, are there limits one can receive in their lifetime? Or is it an endless play without intermission?
The world watered as tears rushed through my eyes. Seth’s failure to simply dance possessed me, drowned pores, blurred lines on existence. It was only made worse trying to hide my emotion, making a hard-lump-of-a-fist press deep into my gut. As if ashamed to watch my executioner, I faced toward the window, wanting to ease past the panes of glass and seep out onto the dew-covered lawn. But I didn’t turn to mist and escape through the panes. Only my reflection was there crying back, a double misery that whispered, “What keeps us here?” After a moment of listening to what those tears were really trying to say, I whispered back, “Because we have no other choice.”
I let the tears have their moment, and when they were done, I pinched away the evidence. The music played. Jenny and her boyfriend were still kicking up their feet. And Seth, he too was still there, smiling, watching the rest from the outside, shackled to his wheelchair. But the thing was, he had no idea how poorly they all moved. I needed to show my boy how it was done, how the choreography of a great dance involved the flailing of arms and legs, spirit fingers, a phenom of tornadic swirls to include a John Travolta move, breakdancing, hip hop and shag with a bit of ballet unexpectedly thrown into the mix. It had to be done. I needed to make the sun and moon upend, shift heaven around by six degrees. Maybe Seth would join me. We could both clear the lanes and open up a vista he can claim as his own.
Here I come, people below, ready your cameras!
