Email Kathryn - - - Kathryn's Main Page - - - Inditer dot Com Index - - - Inditer dot Com Main PageWhat happened next was blown from his mind on impact with the unyielding concrete so many feet below onto which he crashed with a dull thud, a sound not unlike an immense bag of sand meeting rock hard, frozen ground.
That his brains remained anchored, that no permanent damage ensued save the fact that one brow lodged forever a good inch above its mate once the stitches healed and the scarring faded, was what his father pronounced 'a grade A, GD miracle,' and nobody disagreed. His inert and bloody form had been whisked from the pavement by Fulton Wainsborough who, still delivering mail on that route forty years later, banged the cumbrous brass knocker of the pink stucco home at 1079 Second Avenue one Saturday morning and met that same little boy, all decked out in middle age.
"Edward Haines, I'll be damned!" Fulton grinned into the uncomprehending face before him, its uneven brows working. "I scraped you off the sidewalk in forty-seven, boy! You're the kid who jumped, right?" He leaned forward, scrutinizing the tell tale brows. "Well, I'll be damned," he said finally. "How are you?" He rocked back on his heels, patiently waiting, confident that everyone was in the habit of reconstructing the past forty years of their life for the benefit of their mail carrier.
But it felt good to Ed Haines and he shut the door some ten minutes later feeling deeply at home in the neighborhood whose boundaries had always defined his world. In his lifetime, where everything familiar had become foreign, where five cent ice cream parlors evolved into glitzy Starbucks peopled by heavily pierced and tattooed cashiers, and the park where he'd played as a kid was no longer safe to venture into for evening strolls, it was damned swell to be remembered by someone who had shared the same journey, and to be asked how it had all turned out for him. He pumped Fulton's hand vigorously, spewed an update on the past forty years, and turned from the door, his heart racing in a very good way.
"Leanne!" He pushed past their mammoth cherry wood dining table, through the heavy oak swinging doors into the kitchen at the back of the narrow house. "Leanne, guess who I just -"
She was talking into the wall phone in the breakfast nook and shooshed him with a wave, an impatient gesture he'd fielded countless times in twenty-five years. Leaning against the refrigerator, hands folded across the chest of his maroon sweatshirt in a defiant gesture meant to convey that he would only wait so long, he watched her finish her conversation. "Yes," she said, that will do fine." Her thin lips pressed close to the receiver, her head bobbing affirmation. Newly permed curls bounced upward with each movement and she struggled vainly to restrain them with her free hand until, flashing Ed a 'thumbs up' gesture, she slipped the receiver back into its cradle. "Safe Haven's coming at one!" She was triumphant.
The absolute relief delivered by that call faded the fine lines of tension in her thin face as he watched, bringing the summer of 1962 into their narrow kitchen. She'd smiled the same smile then, tossing an unruly mane of thick auburn hair when he'd finally worked up the courage to approach her across the crowded dance floor, stiff and miserable in his Air Force uniform, the only words that would come to him a shaken, "I don't suppose you'd like to dance, would ya?" That smile deserved this entire moment to itself. Nothing matched Leanne's joy in knowing they'd soon join the ranks of those protected by electronic fields and ultraviolet sensors, their security vested in keypads which were the brains of their home security systems.
"I haven't felt safe since Terry's place got hit." She waved a spatula at the greenhouse window he'd installed above the sink, as if he didn't know where Terry Cayle, their neighbor of ten years, lived with her German Shepherd, Lisha. Lisha The Waste who'd been bought off with a three dollar cut of sirloin the intruders brought along. While the dog enjoyed the unanticipated delicacy, they'd forced open a side window, having 'cased' the place earlier, according to the police report, and learned that Terry spent Friday nights out with friends. They took everything worth taking and busted up everything left behind, knifing through the cushions on Terry's leather couch and scattering groceries throughout the house.
Leanne scurried between oak cabinets in the kitchen where she'd prepared twenty-five years of dinners and brewed formula for each of their boys, tapping milky bubbles onto her wrist in a temperature check defying any future technological advance. In this narrow kitchen she'd planned Boy Scout outings and both weddings. In this refuge she'd kicked off low slung heels at the close of each day's work as a secretary at Danston Engineering, a job she'd happily retire from in ten years when Ed left his own job. She deserved to be safe here, and it pained him that she was not. They hadn't believed the metro area break-ins and invasion robberies were spreading to Second Avenue, had happily ignored their wake of fear and suspicion, and now they'd arrived. Right across the street.
In the garage, between the Christmas tree decorations and the boys' old Flexible Flyer, a single gold key hung from the same twisted coat hanger he'd threaded through its hole fifteen years earlier, the night they'd set off to celebrate their tenth anniversary with dinner at the marina. He'd slammed the back door with his keys still waiting on his dresser. Leanne, carrying only a slim costume purse, had left hers in her bureau. Forcing open a window in the boys' room, he'd ripped his dress slacks on the ledge, smashing a carefully constructed Lego and Tinkertoy contraption when he landed smack on top of it. Changing clothes cost their dinner reservation and they'd settled on Chinese in an eerily lit red and yellow booth at Chin Wah, three blocks away. He'd reached across a steaming platter of potstickers to present a sapphire and diamond anniversary band that fit snugly against her wedding band and when they returned home, he hung the key in the garage with the same somber ceremony as he'd presented the ring. She'd smiled up at him, resting her head against his chest and wrapping her arms around his waist, and they'd remained that way, silent in the garage, for what felt like wonderful years.
For fifteen years that key had let them in faithfully, allowed the boys access after school, quelled the terror of that sickening moment when the door slammed shut before they were honestly ready to leave. But by three-fifteen that afternoon, when Safe Haven Security's sterile gray van pulled away, use of that key would trigger a sensor, and unless the proper sequence of numbers was punched onto a keypad installed outside their laundry room, an alarm would sound within forty-two seconds, close cousin to the air raid sirens of World War II. A blip would flash across a screen at the local precinct, and all hell for unwanted intruders would be loosed.
Ed noted that as Leanne signed the invoice and listened to final instructions from the installation team, she wore that same whole-face, contented grin she had the day she first announced he was going to be a father. Waving as the van pulled away, she turned to him, her arms snaking around his waist. "Oh Ed, I feel like we can be happy here again!"
When the bulk of their friends joined the mass exodus further inland, seeking the sameness that spelled security in the split level suburbs, they'd stayed behind, voicing no regrets. Maybe their dining room wasn't as immense as Jack and Tina's, and they'd never have a vaulted-ceilinged 'recreational room' to rival Karl and Eva's. But the boys' room had converted nicely to a snug, comfortable den, they watched the pine in the side yard reach each year for a little more of the sky. It was something, Ed thought, to face your fifties in the same kitchen you'd fed your babies in. It was something to hold the proverbial pink slip to your own home, the home right around the corner from the home you grew up in. In the neighborhood where the mailman not only knew your name, but had once saved your life. It was something, owning outright this piece of their lives in a world where so much had either changed beyond recognition or disappeared altogether.
They contented themselves with this, when distant sirens wailed and thoughts of the suburbs crept into their minds. They were doing the right thing, of course they were. So neither confided in the other, after tapping out the code and crawling beneath stiff percale sheets, that sometimes, in the middle of a particularly long night, they remained awake and waiting, listening for the siren, wondering when. And in the dim space before sunrise, Ed would turn uneasily, plumping his pillow and remembering the feeling of so many years before, his knees aching from the ascent up the trellis, his ears ringing with fear and his own indecision in a sweaty, miserable moment of not knowing which way to go, with Eric shouting after him, "What're you afraid of? C'mon, JUMP!"
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