We get back to Lile’s house and his wife, beautiful Libby, is standing on the stoop, waving her hand at a neighbor rolling by with her stroller. Libby and Lile are the fun couple on the street; theirs is the place where kids end up to play and parents end up to watch the LSU game. She touches my shoulder but I walk straight past her into the master bedroom and lie in their bed. The room where Lile sleeps, wherever it may be, has always felt safe to me. I dry-swallow an Ambien and look up at the light fixture.
Where is all the good?
That night, I can’t sleep. I stand out in the yard at night the way I used to and smell the sweet air. I take the deep breaths my daddy taught me to and hope it will make me feel close to him, but my back aches as my lungs push into my bones. I raise my head to look for him in the sky, even though I’m scared that the next breath I take will be the one to break me, and I scan the constellations for a dog shape or a bow tie. I don’t see him anywhere—I don’t see good anywhere.
Show it to me.
* * *
My mom told me that the day my daddy died was the day he planned to tell me about selling the farm, his absolute everything, the earth he tilled with his hands, the magnolia tree, the hundreds of acres of playground I danced across growing up. He was going to sell it to pay for my surgery. The farm was his everything, and he was willing to let it go for me.
It’s been a week. We’re sitting around the Amish dining table in the farmhouse eating reheated sympathy gumbo, our last meal together before Jack and I go back to Nashville and life begins again.
“This came for you,” my mom says.
I rip the envelope pitifully, like I’m splitting a log. I unfold a long piece of paper from the Bank of St. Francisville. It says RUTHIE MOORE MEDICAL FUND just below the letterhead. The account balance is $75,000.
My godfather, Mr. Carter, set it all up with my mom’s blessing; they both knew it was what their boy would have wanted. The deposits are endless. There are dozens of individual contributions, some of $10, some of $4,000. As the days pass, Jack and I keep watching the balance grow from our computer in Nashville. I keep asking myself why, why these people, these strangers, would help me, and then I remember.
“He paid my college tuition.”
“Your daddy fixed my roof.”
“He bought our groceries.”
“Mr. Lindsey gave me enough to get back on my feet.”
“He believed in me.”
He shows me, he reaches for me, he fills our world with his goodness just one more time.
* * *
The Ruthie Moore Medical Fund brings a glow to our pretty yellow house. Jack is renewed, resolved that everything will be okay. Even in my grief, I like seeing him happy, just knowing that he can be. Our friends hear about the surgery and my daddy’s death and the fund and they organize a benefit concert in June to help me, help us, with the healing. It’s another party my daddy would have loved. The whole night I picture him walking around, shaking every hand he can find, and introducing himself: “Hi, I’m Ruthie’s dad.”
They raise $20,000 for me, and soon after, the surgery we could never afford, the one that my daddy wanted so badly to give to me, is paid for in full. It’s the miracle, the testimony that everybody, Jack, my family, St. Francisville, needs to move forward. It isn’t enough for me.
We have the money, I need the surgery, but I’m stuck. Fear lives where faith used to, and its roots have grown thick and knotty. Every day they don’t open me up is another day I could laugh too hard, or change lanes too fast, or fall down a flight of stairs like my daddy did. Death feels so close since he left, moving with me through my day like a partner and keeping me aware that at least now I can move. If I have the surgery, nobody knows what will happen. Jack urges me gently toward the operating room with his hopeful brown eyes.
“No matter what, we’ll get through it, babe.”
But I don’t really know that we will. I don’t know if he can love me confined to my bed forever or wash my hair for me for the next forty years. I don’t know if he’s considered the future where I don’t learn how to fish with him in the river or have his babies. For the next six months, he keeps nudging me, only bringing it up on the days the grief seems to have settled. My brothers press, too, getting as comfortable as they can in my daddy’s shoes. They urge and they prod, but I put it off through fall and I put it off through winter. I meet with doctors and surgeons from across the country but make no decisions, flying over brown plains and lumps of mountain to waiting rooms and parking lots and tones of voice that are all the same. Some doctors want to fuse three vertebrae, other doctors want to fuse two. Two doctors want to fuse my neck to my skull so that I won’t be able to turn my head without rotating my whole body. One doctor offers to do the whole thing for free. They’re all eager to break new ground, to see something inside a person that nobody has seen before. Who wouldn’t want to scrape away the surface of a new frontier? In fall, when I’ve sat in all the offices and gotten off all the airplanes, we decide on the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. We schedule the surgery for April 2010. Mayo is the most expensive, over $130,000, but it’s supposed to be the best.
Healing is a verb, a continuous motion. It’s not a thing I can just reach out and grab, but I grasp away at whatever I can to hold me up through fear and through mourning that never quits. I keep moving, keep continuing, and keep trying to walk across the mucky fields of grief all the way through winter and into spring. I redecorate our house because there’s no more Harry Potter left to read and I need something to get me through a full day from morning until night. I know I’ll be spending a lot of time inside while I recover—if I recover—so I want it to feel good. Obsessively, I sink myself into project after project. I lie in bed looking for cheap internet deals on artwork and side tables. At the end of it all, my daddy is everywhere in the space I make for myself. He’s in the brown-lacquered Amish furniture, the old history books, and the photographs.
When the house is done and I start to slip again, I reach out for something else to lift me. I have our friend Reid take pictures of each room and I submit them to the fancy design websites I fawn over. The pretty yellow house gets featured on Apartment Therapy and Design*Sponge; everyone we know—and plenty of people we don’t—notices me. My story is big and public: it feels good to be noticed for something other than my pain. For a moment, I think about how proud my daddy would have been, instead of the fact that he’s gone.
Friends tell me I’m talented and ask me to help with their spaces, and even though I need something else to grab onto, I’m still leading with fear. I can’t ever bring myself to decorate for others. I go back to bed and look around at the beautiful shell I’ve built for myself, feeling my daddy’s presence and absence in every corner.
12 What Screams the Loudest
The thing you hear first is what’s screaming the loudest. I’m not sure if I made that up or not.
When I wake up from my spinal fusion at Mayo, the pain isn’t just screaming, it’s a siren. I can’t see or hear or think—all I can do is survive from one second to the next.
Help me. Help me. Help me. This is certainly hell.