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Little Jonny sat in the middle of the living room at the
Palmero family home, picking up and throwing his cushioned blocks a little more
confidently than before. He was growing up fast, and in as little as a couple
more weeks he could start chattering small words, standing and walking. His big
green eyes were more like his father’s every day, and the dark hair like his
mother’s grew ever thicker. His constant smile was a symbol for his and his
mother’s future. And today, for the first time in a long time, his mother
shared that smile.
Sophia’s smile disappeared as she looked at her watch and realized she was going to be late for her interview, and called to her mother
who was still flittering about in the kitchen.
“I just need to make another phone call and then you can
go,” Catherine called out to Sophia.
“Mum, seriously, I have
to go!”
“I know, I know! I’m coming! Anyway, what are you stressing
about,” Catherine continued to yell as she flittered about in the hallway now,
“with the experience you’ve had this last couple of years, you’re bound to
get this job.”
Sophia’s raised her eyebrows, looked at her son and whispered
to him, “I don’t think they want me to kill people in this trade office,” and had to giggle. Jonny made that gurgle of a
laugh that all babies make, for no other reason that he wanted to do what his
Mum did.
“All right, here I am,” Catherine announced as she entered
the living room and scooped up her baby grandson, “off you go, and good
luck!”
“Thanks,” Sophia shouted over her shoulder as she grabbed
her resume and handbag and darted for the front door.
As she was halfway out, her mother called her back with a
screech of what sounded like alarm. Sophia dropped her keys and darted back into
the living room, with that fear of dread in her stomach that only a mother can
feel. “What is it?” she shrieked, but her heart relaxed as she saw that
Catherine was smiling.
“Listen,” and they both looked at the baby boy.
He fiddled with his fingers for a moment, tried to shove his
whole hand into his mouth, then looked up at Sophia and said, “Mum!”
“Oh my God!” Sophia squealed as she grabbed him out of
Catherine’s arms and gave him a squeeze. “Oh my God! Mum, did you hear
that?”
“Yes I did,” Catherine replied with a smile, but couldn’t
be heard over Sophia’s giggles and Jonny’s repeated blurting of that one
simple word that caused everyone so much joy. He couldn’t understand it, but
enjoyed the excitement all the same. “Come on, you have to go, he’ll be
saying it when you get back, go, go!”
“Okay, okay. Oh,” Sophia planted a huge kiss on the top of
her son’s head, “see you soon my baby,” and she waved at him all the way
down the hallway and out the front door, her face beaming.
And her face continued to beam all through the drive into the
city, it beamed as she sat in the waiting room at the trade office, it beamed
during her interview and it beamed as she rode the elevator back down to the car
park. She wasn’t quite sure how one little word could make her feel the best
she had in her whole life, but she wasn’t about to argue with the logic. She
felt alive at last. All it took was one word.
The elevator doors seemed to take forever to open once the lift
reached the ground floor, and as soon as they did she darted outside to her car
to get home to her son.
As she drove home, that one word repeated over and over in her
brain. At one point, she could clearly see her son in front of her, smiling at
her and mouthing the word, so that she could see nothing else.
Including the garbage truck that was coming straight for her.
Then it was dark.
It was dark in baby Jonny’s new nursery; only the faint
orange glow of a night-light permeated the blackness of the room. He lay on his
back and slept, his tiny chest rising and falling with each carefree breath that
he took, and the pain of knowing his innocent, carefree days were numbered—that one day sooner than she liked she would have to tell him that he had no
parents—made Catherine begin to cry again. She tried to stop as she heard
Palmero coming up the stairs, but just couldn’t help herself. It had been like
this for weeks.
Palmero said nothing as he came in and put his arm around his
wife’s shoulders. He knew there was not a thing he could say to ease her pain,
because he felt the same and knew in his heart that it would never go away and
useless to think that it would. He said, instead, what he knew was the only
thing they could do.
“We just have to look after Jonny for her.”
Catherine nodded. She tried to say something but had to wait a
few moments and force herself to calm down before she could make her voice work.
When it did, it was cracked and worn from her endless tears. “She’ll know we
are, won’t she?”
“Of course.”
“She’ll know we’ll do everything we can to make sure
he’s happy and healthy and never gets hurt?”
“She knows we’ll try our best.”
“I just wish … I wish I had known her better. She was a
baby herself, so young, and her life had only just started. Now she’s gone,
over so soon …”
“I think she lived more than you think she did,” Palmero
said, hoping that his blurted comment wouldn’t invite questions. It didn’t.
Catherine was too overcome with the emotion of having lost her only daughter to
really listen to anything her husband said. “Come on, you have to try and get
some sleep.”
“I can’t.”
“I know, but you have to try. We’re no good to Jonny if
we’re walking around like zombies every day.”
“I know,” Catherine nodded, half asleep already from
exhaustion but her mind, racing at a mile a minute, would not let her rest, “I
just keep thinking about how he’s lost both of them. Sophia said his father
died in an accident too. How cruel can the world be if it takes both of one
baby’s parents away like that?”
“I don’t know, sweetheart, I really don’t know.”
Palmero’s heart sank with the truth of Jonathon’s death, shot by one of his
own. And he would never forgive the world for the irony of Sophia’s death.
Killed in an instant, one unthinking instant, when she had escaped so much and
made the ultimate change in her life to escape it for good. There was no
escaping it, Palmero realized; just realizing you can’t and living for today
and hoping that the hereafter is kinder. “We can just hope heaven is making up
for it, and that they’re both together now. And if they are, they’ll be
watching over him every day from up there.”
And he led his wife out of the nursery, away from the cot where
little Jonny slept, none of them knowing that Palmero’s words were truer than
he knew.
Sophia smiled, took Jonathon’s hand, and began
singing to her baby boy.
© Cynthia M. Piromalli
©2004 StoriesByEmail.com
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