His First Wife

For so long, somehow in my head I’d managed to accept the fact that my father was dead. Well, at the tim

e, he wasn’t really dead, but my anger over his illness and fear of facing it left me and my mother with no choice, emotionally, but to bury the love we had for him deep down inside. So, while his body was alive, to my heart, he was dead. But after moving beyond that hurt and developing a new love for my father, even with his illness still controlling his mind, the thought of really losing him was unimaginable. Running into the hospital with Aunt Luchie at my side, all I kept thinking was that my father had died. My father had died and he’d never gotten to really see who I was, what I’d become and the life I’d made for myself. My son, his grandson, who was only a baby, but growing stronger each day, had never known my father to be the strong man he was when I was a child. The man who could hold me up with one hand when I was five years old and spin me around the room, calling me Super Girl. Tyrian would never know that man, and now he would never have a grandfather.

When we got off the elevator at the floor where they’d been keeping him, I saw doctors encircling the doorway and heard my mother’s cries. Like me, she must have been feeling now, for the first time, the reality of losing him again.

“Hurry,” Aunt Luchie said.

We ran down the hall to see my father for the last time. The doctors turned toward me as I got closer and I saw a look of compassion in their eyes. Tears began to fall as my feet carried me closer to the place where my father had spent so many days alone, so many days thinking the world had forgotten about him. I wanted to scream that I had not forgotten and I was here now to comfort him, for whatever it was worth.

When I stepped into the room, Jamison came toward me. There were tears in his eyes,.

“You made it,” he said. “They don’t know how long he’s going to be like this.”

“What?” I asked.

“Baby,” my mother cried again, looking away from my father lying on the bed. “Kerry, come here. He’s asking for you.”

I can hardly describe the flooding of emotion that engulfed my body in those two seconds as I realized what my mother was saying. My heart went from sinking to flying as it thumped into action. What was my mother saying? Why was Jamison smiling, his tears now obviously happy? Was my father alive? Really alive?

“Daddy?” I called, dashing around the bed to stand next to my mother. His head was turned toward her and she had his hand in hers.

“Daddy?” I called again desperately. I didn’t expect anything. This was the same man who I’d left at the hospital the day before. His mind had left him. There was no response that he could give me then to even let me know that he knew who I was. I had no reason to believe in my mind that there’d be anything different today. But this desperate call wasn’t coming from my reasoning mind; rather, it came from my heart.

Then he moved. He turned his head just one inch away from a focus on my mother and his eyes, just as glossed and tired as Tyrian’s the day he was born, as if he’d just come off a long journey, set on me as if I was the miracle in the room.

“Kerry Ann?” He reached to me with his other hand.

I hadn’t heard that voice in so long. It was scratchy and faint, but it was my father’s, no doubt. And the weight it carried inside of me, the mere sound of my father calling my name pushed me to my knees. I fell to the side of the bed and buried my face in his hand.

“Yes, it’s me, Daddy,” I cried. “It’s me.”

He looked confused; I guessed it was because I wasn’t the little girl he was expecting. But he smiled at me and moved his frail hand to the top of my hand.

“Super Girl,” he said, running his hand through my hair. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too, Daddy.” I looked at Jamison, who was standing on the other side of the room holding Tyrian. He was still crying, but he had a smile on his face that I hadn’t seen in so long.

He nodded at me and winked his eye.

“A miracle,” he whispered.

Husband

That night, the night my father woke up from fifteen years of darkness, I felt like I was dreaming. It wasn’t just that he’d woken up. The miracle was nothing like the one Jamison had predicted. My father was weak and still fading in and out of consciousness. One minute he’d be awake and crying, asking for someone or something he’d been thinking about. The funniest request was for a root beer float. Apparently, he and my mother used to split floats when they’d first started dating. But then he’d fade out and sit there not speaking for minutes at a time. The doctor said it would take months, maybe years before his mind fully pulled itself together, and then, he still might not return to being the man he once was.

So my father’s waking was certainly a wondrous miracle, but the dream I was having was truly a combination of many things that were taking shape in my life. My mother. My husband. My child. My father. Myself. Pieces that I never even knew had been shattered were becoming whole again and the cloud I’d found myself floating on because of it seemed nothing short of the stuff that dreams were made of.

That night I rode home in the car with my husband in the driver’s seat and my son in the backseat. I felt so secure, so complete in that position I couldn’t stop crying.

Jamison kept telling me that if I kept crying my father would think he’d done something wrong by waking up and go back to sleep. I laughed, but it was more than that. I was crying for all of us. For the love we had between us and the future ahead.

Jamison and I said nothing to each other about the separation. And it wasn’t because we couldn’t face it. It was because, as Aunt Luchie said when she handed me the key to my house and said she would not be returning, it was “time to go home.” What we were doing was right, and after talking to Aunt Luchie, I knew that while I’d been hurt by Jamison’s affair, I was ready to move on . . . with my husband. And he was my husband. The man I loved. The man I missed. The man whose feelings I now knew I had to protect. Just as he’d done for me. We’d shared a covenant, an agreement that said that we’d grow together and forsake all others for one another. I believed that and I was ready to move on and do just that. And while I didn’t care to hear the name Coreen or read an e-mail ever again, I knew that I could trust my husband. With my new clear heart and open ear, I knew that I could trust my husband to talk to me, and more importantly, trust myself to listen.

After Jamison put Tyrian to bed, he returned to a bedroom that was shining with the light of white pillar candles, and a bed that was covered in purple rose petals, and a wife who was sitting in the center of the bed wearing the same nightgown she’d worn on their wedding night.

“What’s all this?” he asked, his eyes as wide as a child’s on Christmas morning.

“It doesn’t look familiar?” I asked in return.