This one Sunday, she made her pot roast, which Matt loved, and his favorite dessert, chocolate cake with peanut butter icing. We rushed home from church so Grandma could make her homemade blueberry biscuits. He loved those, too.
Matt was late. Really late. In fact, he was so late that Grandma and I ate dinner and cleaned up. When he did show up, it was late afternoon.
I was playing with my Barbie dolls in my bedroom. Grandma had made me a Barbie house out of a bunch of old cardboard boxes she fastened together. It wasn’t as fancy as the Barbie penthouse complete with an elevator that Tracey Carmichael had, but I liked it better because Grandma had made it. She even made Barbie clothes out of the same material she used to make my clothes so we could match.
I heard Matt first. It sounded as if someone fell against the apartment door.
“Grandma,” I yelled. “Did you hear that?”
I found Grandma snoring on her favorite chair with the Sunday paper on her lap. I shook her arm to wake her.
“Someone’s at the door.”
Grandma put the paper on the coffee table. By the time she reached the door, Matt was inside, swaying and trying to remain on his feet.
“Matt,” Grandma said. “I told you never to come here like this.”
Matt looked at me, clutching my Barbie to my heart. “What ya lookin’ at, kid?”
I looked down at the floor.
His speech was slurred. “Maybe you should come live with me?”
“Sarah,” Grandma said. “Go to your room. I’ll take care of this. It’s not good to see your dad like this.”
“He’s not my dad,” I yelled, and ran to my room, slamming my door and locking it. I could hear Grandma’s muffled voice. It sounded as if she was in the kitchen. Probably making Matt coffee. That was usually what she did. Made him coffee and got him sober enough to ride his Harley home.
Matt left a couple of hours later. I came out of my bedroom and heard Grandma crying. I found her in the kitchen doing the dishes.
I hugged her waist and she bent over to brush the curls away from my face.
“I love you, Grandma,” I said.
“I love you, too, Sarah. I wish you had a better dad.”
“I don’t want a dad. I want you.”
“And you’ll always have me, Sarah.”
“And you won’t let anyone take me?”
“Never.”
That night, I dreamt that Matt kidnapped me while Grandma slept. I don’t think I’ve ever screamed louder. Grandma let me sleep with her. In fact, it was weeks before I slept in my bed. It was the worst nightmare ever and I kept having it over and over until Matt died. I didn’t have it anymore after that.
Olivia sits on the couch next to her dad. Tom puts his arm around her, pulls her in close and kisses the top of her head.
“Do you like helping people, Daddy?” Olivia asks.
“Yep.”
“Then why are you sad?”
“Today was a tough day.”
“Why?”
“You know how when you fall and hurt yourself?”
“Like the time I fell out of Emma’s tree house and broke my arm?”
“Yeah, like that. A doctor fixed your broken arm, right?”
Olivia nods.
“But doctors can’t fix everything. Sometimes a person can’t be fixed. They’re too broken.”
“Like my ball that got run over by the lawn mower?”
“Yeah. Like your ball. Sometimes there’s just too much damage and you can’t make something whole again.”
I wondered why Tom was so sad. It wasn’t like him to be this sad. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him this upset about something that happened at work. He seemed to be hugging Olivia more than usual and I suspected that a child was involved.
“I want to be a doctor just like you,” Olivia says.
“But I thought you wanted to be a ballerina.”
“I want to be a ballerina and a doctor. And a teacher. Like Miss Bogart.”
Tom smiles.
Olivia hops off the couch and returns with her white doctor’s kit she got from Santa. She takes out all of the instruments and places them on the couch beside her dad.
“First, I’m going to listen to your heart.”
She puts the electronic stethoscope that plays a heartbeat in her ears and listens to her daddy’s heart.
“You got a little cough. You need a shot.”
She grabs the squeaky syringe and gives him a shot in his left arm. She places the pretend bandage on his arm where she gave the shot and feels his forehead.
“You feel hot.”
She picks up the thermometer with four temperature readings, holds it up to his mouth and selects the highest temperature. “You are hot.”
Then she wraps the blood-pressure cuff around his arm and squeezes the pump, which makes the dial on the gauge spin. She wraps up her examination by checking his reflexes with the play hammer and his ears and throat with the light scope.
“You need to rest. Doctor’s orders.”
Later that night, after Olivia has fallen asleep beside him on the couch, Tom tells Elizabeth what happened in the ER that day.
“God, Liz, it was awful,” he says. “There were so many bruises on that girl’s tiny body that I couldn’t find a patch of white anywhere.”
Elizabeth dabs her eyes with tissues. The toddler had been bludgeoned to death by her mother’s boyfriend. He had whipped her repeatedly with a video-game controller.
“And just because she had a dirty diaper,” Tom says. “She was two, Liz. Two. And she never had a chance.”
Tom tells Elizabeth that the neighbors heard the toddler screaming for her mother. The mother was in the next room stuffing her face with potato chips and watching the soaps. The screaming got so bad that the neighbors called the cops. But it was too late.
I understood now the depth of Tom’s sadness and anger.
“God, after I pronounced her dead, I went to my car and cried, Liz. I’ve never done that before. But I felt so helpless. How can a human being do something like that?”
“He wasn’t human,” Elizabeth says. “He was an animal.”
Tom leans against her and Elizabeth wraps her arms around him and kisses the top of his head. “I wish I could take away your pain,” she says.
Tom sees Olivia’s white doctor kit on the floor, and he smiles.
I used to love to pretend that I was a doctor. I remember the day we found my doctor’s kit at the Goodwill store. It was brand new. Never been opened. Wasn’t often I found a toy that had never been opened at the Goodwill store, but that was my lucky day. And I was even luckier because Grandma bought it, after she got the clerk to take a dollar less than the ticket price.
I brought that toy kit home and played and played and played with it. Grandma would lie on the couch and I would do all of the things I just recorded Olivia doing – checking her reflexes, temperature