Through the Window

Short Story for creative writing class
Sept. 2012

Daniel couldn’t see. He never could when he climbed into his mother’s car. His body felt so small when he buckled his seatbelt and looked around the cavernous back seat. He would always feel the car move – first backward, then forward – and as he looked up out of the window he could make out the tops of trees, and he could see telephone poles. And the sky; mostly sunny with light clouds that when the beams of light shone through it looked heavenly. But the actual road, with street signs that helped lead the way? Forget it. When he saw his mom turn the steering wheel, he figured she knew what she was doing, so Daniel never asked why, but rather when.

            “Almost there,” she said, in a steady voice like that of a captain of a ship. An annoyed grunt in the backseat followed her response.

           “Patience, Danny.”

           “I don’t like the backseat,” he said, tugging on his seatbelt. “I can never see.”

            They pulled up to a stoplight, and his mother gasped. “Oh wow, a deer!”

            “What?! Where?” Daniel contorted his frame and reached for the window. When his efforts were met with resistance, he unclicked his seatbelt.

            “Oh, Danny, no,” his mother said, seeing the light was about to change. “Stay in your seat.”

            Daniel paid no attention, and got on his knees to see out the window. But he was disappointed. “I don’t see anything,” he said.

            His mother turned back to look as well. “They’re quick,” she said. The light turned green. “Seatbelt, Danny.”

—

His mother sat with him outside on the porch swing. “This isn’t how I thought it’d be. Or how I wanted it to be.”

            “No one wants it like this, Danny,” she said, putting her hand on her son’s back. He was slumped, head down in his right palm. It was night.

            “I just wasn’t ready for this.”

            When love struck Daniel, it struck hard, and it occupied a space in his heart that had pushed out almost everything else. There had been a hole where he missed sleepovers with his childhood friends; blazing summer days at the water park; and a space when his grandparents went away.

            But then his heart wasn’t empty anymore when she arrived in his life. For a while, she made everything better. His favorite days were with her on the weekends in his car, driving through the canyon, or to the beach. The windows were always rolled down, and her hair would blow everywhere. It’s so beautiful, she would say. Daniel would look at her, and then out into the sky, and the palm trees lining the streets, and the smooth road ahead. It sure is, he would answer.

            But he was at his mother’s house now. The moon was covered with clouds, and the porch light was dimming. Danny’s feet were on the ground, and they gently moved the swing back and forth. His mother’s legs were crossed on the swing, her hand still on his back.

            “We thought she was a good one,” his mother said.

            “Not helping.”

            “Oh, Danny,” she said in a comforting voice. “I’m sorry. There are other good ones out there, too.”

            “I don’t know.”

            “You don’t want someone that’s going to do that anyway. You’ll see. Eventually.”

            “I hope you’re right.”

            “Trust me.”

Danny finally lifted his head up. He looked out onto the bank where his mother planted flowers. Through the dim light, he saw several white, pink and red roses. Where some other roses should have been, he saw only stems.

            “Some of your roses are gone.”

            “Oh, yeah, the deer,” she said. “They’ve been coming like crazy lately, chewing up the scenery. We had one just before you got here, actually. I came outside and it was just standing there. It looked at me for a while. It wasn’t scared or anything. It was beautiful.”

            “Too bad I missed it,” he said halfheartedly. “They’re quick.”

            “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe next time.”

            They still sat there in the night. There wasn’t any place in particular Danny wanted to go; being by his mother’s side was at least familiar.

            “Can I stay over tonight?” he asked.

            “Of course.” Then she remembered something. “You’ll have to move your car to the driveway, though. They’re doing work on the streets tomorrow.”

            “About time,” he said firmly. “All I see are cracks and potholes around here.”

—

Danny could sense the ride was almost over. He felt excited. His mother pulled over and the tires slowly stopped next to the curb. He unbuckled again and pulled the handle and opened the door, and set his feet down on the pristine lawn before him. The front door of the house opened and an older woman came out. She walked toward the mother and son.

            “Hi mom,” said Danny’s mother.

            “Hello, darling. Good to see you.” The older woman wrapped her in a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

            “Grandma!” Daniel said, eager to get noticed, standing next to his mother.

            “Why hello, dear!” She took Daniel and was able to lift him up – just barely – and plant a kiss on his forehead before letting him down. “And how’s my grandson today?”

            “Good!” he replied. “We saw a deer on the way over!”

            “You did? How ‘bout that?”

            “Well, I didn’t see it. I missed it. But mom did!” he said excitedly. “She said it looked really cool.”

            “I bet it was really cool,” said the grandmother. “You know what? I bet another one will come along soon enough.”

            “I hope so!” Daniel smiled big. “I’m tired of missing out on stuff.”

These are for you, David

Short Story for creative writing class

October, 2012

Photo Caption: Father and son, at peace, 2012

This is definitely one of my favorites, David; Just you and me. (And Len taking the picture of course! He always seems to be around, huh?) It’s a real father-son moment, and to me it represents our coming out the other side of everything we’ve been through. Your mother was so brave, and she fought so hard, and I know you miss her (as do I), but afterward we needed to get out. I made a decision and I think it was best to leave our home and make a new one here. Believe me, I was scared, but I hope you realize how peaceful everything is here, how beautiful it is. Even if I didn’t learn all there was to learn about fishing from my dad, I think it’s okay. This picture says we don’t have to be experts; we’re together, out of a place we needed to escape, for good. What I really wanted – and what I thought you needed — most of all, was peace. I think I achieved that, but only time will tell. Look at you in this; you are so young. You’ve got everything ahead of you.

Photo Caption: Rob looking like an ass outside a liquor store, 1999

Look at your father, David. We were out near Barstow when I took this picture. At least, I think it was Barstow. He was supposed to go in and get us some gum and chap-stick, and he comes out and notices the ‘No Loitering’ sign. So what does he do? He stands there, of course! And he wouldn’t move for a good five minutes. Just acting like some annoying guy on a curb. He could be such a jerk back then, just for the sake of being a jerk. I think being a parent has really changed him, even though you are still so young. I was pregnant with you in this photo, and sometimes I look at it and I see a man who doesn’t want to get off the curb just yet. Sometimes I tell myself he wasn’t just playing around because of the sign, but that he kept standing there because he didn’t know what do to, or how to deal with you coming. He’s very indecisive, as you’ll find out when you’re a little older.

Photo Caption: Rob, King of the World, 1998

Someday we’ll show you the movie “Titanic,” David. It was the biggest movie of all time. Everybody saw it. And there’s this one scene where the character Jack goes to the front of the ship and gets up on the railing and spreads his arms out and screams, “I’m the King of the World!” Your father was sort of like that. This was when it was just him and me, engaged to be married. We loved to travel and hike. We were so adventurous. But Rob was more bold and brash; he really didn’t care too much for rules. I told him to put sunscreen on when he took off his shirt here. Of course he didn’t listen! He later joked his body was so great, it would be a pleasure for the sun to soak his skin in its rays every minute of the day. At least I think it was a joke. Such an ass. But that was him, unafraid of the world.

Photo Caption: Rob looking for Teresa’s ring, 1997

This was not our finest moment, David.  We were visiting your mother’s parents in Oregon, and we found this quiet place, this lake a few miles from the house. We were engaged at this time, and for some reason, it was a real rocky trip. It’s a shame I had any bad days with your mother. They were usually my fault.

I had only met her parents once before, and on this trip, I didn’t appreciate some of the more subtle digs at my character — they thought I wasn’t good enough, to be frank — and I felt like your mom didn’t stick up for me enough. That afternoon at the lake began peaceful, but when the conversation came around to her parents, I let your mom know how I felt. She brought up the fact that, well, I really wasn’t showing any drive to make my life better. Stupidly, I then brought up the fact that she had been recently laid off of her job. She then threw her engagement ring in the water and said, “You’re so adventurous, right? Have at it.”

The funny thing is, while looking for it, a water snake swam up my shorts! That was the most afraid I had been in my life up to that point. I rushed out of the water and we both hugged, and I was trembling. Of course, that wasn’t the photo she took. No, it had to be the one of her embarrassing me.

Photo Caption: She loves me, and here’s proof, 1996

Oh wow, David, this one. What are we, six months into dating here? Your mom said she liked to hike, and be adventurous, so she was asking for it. We went out to a desert area here. Something about the vastness, the openness of it all. It was a place where it felt like anything could happen, and yet who would know besides the two of you? We came upon muddy place with water streaming down the side of a hill. This was after the rainy season. Your mother always fancied herself someone who would try something at least once. Maybe she felt like she had to keep up with me. She made a joke about how if we were thirsty we could drink from that puddle. I dared her to go first. She said no, and I said if you love me you’ll do it. I was half-joking, but she looked at me for a good, hard minute. I couldn’t figure out what that look meant. Then she got down and drank some of the water. She got back up and looked at me smiling. Then I knew.

Photo Caption: Going on our first big vacation, 1995

Sometimes, David, we just had to get out of our home. This is from our first big vacation your dad and I took, at Sequoia National Park. He asked why in the world I would take a photo of a freeway sign. I just like to take a lot of pictures, I guess. He had an Eagles in his CD player when we were on the freeway. “Already Gone” was playing. It felt good. I hope you travel a lot when you’re older. I hope we can have tons of adventures too! What I remember most about this trip though is the feeling afterward, driving south back on the same freeway pulling up to your dad’s apartment. He said as beautiful as the stars were out in Sequoia, it felt good to be back. He said he couldn’t imagine ever leaving for good. I said I couldn’t either.

She doesn’t lie here anymore

Have you ever run over your own dog? I did one time … sort of. I park my car in the cement area in our backyard. When I back up about 15 yards that’s when the driveway drops down on a decline. At that point we have a gate that we always leave open, which is where Dakota usually sat, overlooking our cul-de-sac and playing guardian of the driveway. (Although as a golden retriever, she would never be mistaken for an intruder’s worst enemy).

On a July afternoon two years ago I got in my car to head out. Usually, if I was aware that Dakota was inside the house, I had no hesitation in backing out. If however I saw her by the gate when I left, I knew to be cautious so that if she was behind me I could give her enough time to realize I was leaving or I could just yell at her to move.

But Dakota’s hearing was well gone by then. She wouldn’t have heard my engine starting for all the Purina Dog Chow in the world. I got in my car without looking down toward the gate to see if she was there. I put my car in reverse and backed down, only seconds later I heard a thud. I paused for a second and asked myself what the hell that was, then realized in horror what I did and accelerated forward. I got out and rushed over to Dakota, whimpering softly as she got up and came to me. She was heavily favoring her right shoulder. Fortunately, after I checked her over, a bruise seemed to be the only problem. She had been lying vertically with my car, and my bumper must have hit her in the back. If she had been laying down perpendicular, who knows what body parts my tires would have run over.

Even though I didn’t kill her, two weeks later an injection did at the Veterinarian’s office. She had a tumor in her throat, and had been bleeding from her mouth and chest. She used to be put on a special diet because of her weight, but by the time she went she was nothing but fur and bones, too weak to even lower her hind legs to sit, so much so that one day she just tipped over straight-legged and slammed to the floor.

My grandfather walked her all the time, either to the post office or at the park. When he passed, it fell on me. I didn’t keep it up as much as he did, but Dakota and I still had our share of adventures. The day before she died, I took her back to the park, a place that we circled countless times; where we used to go up back into the wash to climb toward the waterfall; a place where other dogs ran up to her with no leash, but where she stayed perfectly still because she was the best-trained dog there, and she would look around as if to say, “I hope you get done sniffing me and barking at me soon, because I have a walk to finish.”

But she was too weak this time. Her farewell tour didn’t even last halfway before I thought she might collapse right there if we went any farther. It’s okay, I said with watery eyes, we can go. When we got home, I climbed into the back seat and held her and petted her for a long time, to let her know that I was sorry for losing my patience with her the past year. She was 15, and old dogs can get annoying. She smacked her lips a lot, smelled worse and worse, and followed me everywhere to the point where I had to thrust my finger toward the door to let her know I just wanted to be alone. Sorry excuses to be annoyed, I realize now.

When the end comes for animals, it comes fast. You barely get a warning sign. But the time after Dakota’s death has gone by just as quickly. It’s now been two years. Two years without her playing keep-away from me with her favorite stuffed bear; two years without her racing up to me after she had been groomed so that I could run my hands through her; two years where the only times I have stepped foot in the park was strictly to cover stories, and I plan on keeping it that way.

Her ID chain is retired in a closet in the pantry, as well as her brown leather leash, the one I casually flung over my shoulder when I walked her the way my grandfather did, because when you walked Dakota there was no reason to hold it tight in your hand.

Not having a dog allows you some freedoms to be sure. You don’t have to pay for their food or medical bills, and you don’t have to wake up in the middle of the night to let them out. As for me, I don’t ever have to watch out for Dakota again when I back down the driveway.

Although sometimes, I still do.

For My Grandmother

There are few people I’ve had a harder time figuring out in my life than my grandmother. A good example of this were some of the last words she ever spoke. She had a small stroke (that’s what we’re calling it) on a Monday night last month in her recliner. I called 911 and we got her to the Emergency Room, where she spent the night. The next evening she was cleared to come home. I came and got her, and as we were driving home I asked her if she was scared when she was having the stroke. Predictably, she didn’t answer the question.

“Well, you know, I just couldn’t move my left side. I just felt numb, and that’s what happens when you have a stroke,” she answered.

Right, I said, but … were you scared? She paused for a moment and then in a confident voice simply said “no.”

The next day she suffered another stroke, this one so damaging most of her left brain was wiped out. That morning she said she still wasn’t wasn’t feeling right. I had to go to school, but I called my mom and she came over and took her back to the hospital, and in the waiting room is where the stroke happened.

But  right before I left for school, I came into her bedroom. She was sitting up, sort of hunched over on the side. I asked how she was doing and she said she wasn’t doing well.

“You know how you asked me last night if I was scared and I said no?” she said. “Well, I’m scared to death.”

And that was the Donna Hopley I knew for the past six years. Equal parts assuring and vulnerable, although she would never let anyone see the latter when the sun was out. Maybe her balance was horrible, and maybe her hair became whiter and thinner each year, and her coughing and throat clearing grated on our nerves recently. But when she entered a room she controlled it. She was Donna, loud and proud,her voice booming as it bounced off the walls. She’d sit down and if someone else was smoking, she’d bum a cigerette off of them, put her elbow on the table and puff away, in between telling stories I had heard a million times before. Yes, grandma. OK, grandma. Whatever, grandma.

I also thought of her as someone who was void of of any emotion or sentimentality (She scoffed at me for holding on to some of grandpa’s belongings when he passed away in 2006).

Then she fell ill the day after the Super Bowl. She was bed-ridden the whole week, and what strength her legs were holding onto evaporated. She regained just enough energy to get to the breakfast table by the weekend, only to suffer those strokes days later, and the week after that we pulled her off the ventilator. She was strong, as she held all the way until last Friday afternoon.

The night the doctors told us the prognosis I went home and I dove into the closet in the office. I pulled out the photo albums I had looked through so many times before (I am a walking example of someone obsessed with nostalgia and sentimentality). I thumbed through a bunch of photos of her and grandpa I had seen before — presumably moments when they were not bickering, which were few and far between — but as I went along in the office and even in her bedroom, I uncovered much more than I thought I would. In her room I found Barack Obama on the cover of Time in 2008. There were also covers of the JFK assassination and the War on Terror coverage during George W. Bush’s presidency.

I looked for more and I found several postcards she had sent to our family while she was traveling to various places. I could never make out her writing (she wrote in cursive, always, and her D’s looked like G’s to me). But the important parts I was able to read. There was one addressed to me and my mom. It wished us well. There was one to me specifically, and she said she missed me and my basketball games. And then there was one to grandpa. It talked about her trip and what she had done, but then I read the bottom. She said she was homesick. She told him she was “getting lonesome.”

Then I came across an envelope of pictures sent by their old friend George Key. I took them out and saw several photos of a very young Donna smiling back. In those her waist is thin, her eyes are that like she is half squinting into the sun, but the smile is big and innocent.

She’s in several of them; her dark, curly hair showing more than ever, her posture a little slumped. She is, though, undeniably attractive on this day. She is all but 21 years old, a young Donna Hopley, shooting guns in a rocky, flat area with her husband and friends.

Then I began to think. Time has a way of reshaping thoughts and perception. It also redefines people. And, as I got older, it redefined my perception grandma, in a negative way. But I know, for whatever her faults were, she wasn’t exactly who she was when she died. She was once a little girl who admired Shirley Temple. Then she was a young woman completely in love (“when I saw your grandpa come up the driveway back then I had butterflies”). Then she was a mother of two, and a Realtor as well. Then she finally became my grandma, and we searched for monsters in the dark of her house with flashlights, and we got caught in the sprinklers one night in a park and had to make a run for it. And she welcomed me to live with her not once, not twice, but three separate times. And she wrote in a journal for me when I was still very young, “You are the joy of my life … I love to watch you grow and change … I wish you all the good things in life.”

So, yeah, maybe I was wrong. She was sentimental; she appreciated more things than I thought. Maybe I knew that, but somehow it just got away from me. But time does that. It takes things from you in an unforgiving manner. This doesn’t take away the fact that my grandma was imperfect, but in death I can appreciate her in a way I never had. I guess time has a way of doing that as well, which is pretty neat if you think about it.