Yard Sale Chapter 4

Chapter 4

 

I could feel the eyes of the neighbourhood on me as I tried to hurry the officers into the house. Ellen was dawdling, as per usual. She was looking everywhere, but yet, nowhere. The sound of just his name showed visual confusion on her face. I hated her feeling anything but happy and content, so I felt bad when I lost my cool and whispered to her, ‘for god’s sake Ellen, get in the house!’ She looked at me as if I had ten heads, so I put my hand on her lower back and ushered her in. The cops followed. I turned to see how much of a scandal this was going to be in the rumour mill of our front yard.

Already, the news of my daughter being pregnant got around. Even those who didn’t know who Patricia Cooper was before today, knew.

No one, not even Ed and Amy, had ever heard the name James before. Mrs Oakley might remember, but if she did she didn’t let on in the twenty years we have lived here.

We moved to this particular house to get away from all the busybodies, and it was a bonus to be closer to nana. We used to live four towns south of here. The story of James going missing started gossip and presumptions. There was nowhere we could go in the town without people talking and snickering in our direction. It even made the state paper.

Once I finally got both Ellen and the cops over the threshold of the front door, I reluctantly turned my back and saw Patricia walking towards me, holding her ever growing belly. I could see that everyone was looking at me, but, somehow, I managed to make eye contact with Patricia and shook my head and put up my hand, indicating for her to stop advancing, that I’d look after our unexpected guests. She nodded back, understanding what I meant and backed up a step. Mike followed her lead and they both began to work hard to see if anyone needed any help with the yard sale.

Once I closed the front door, I faced it for a few seconds before turning towards the cops. I led both them, and Ellen, into the sitting room, closing the glass paned double doors as Ellen began to pick up and plump the cushions. I took her hand, she was shaking like a leaf, poor thing, and just shook my head. She picked up one more discarded cushion, and took a seat on the toy littered couch.

Whatever was in the kids cereal that morning was astounding. I knew that Mike had cleared the room the night before, but it looked like a tornado had hit it. There were toys everywhere and the cushions were dotted all over the floor. I knew that had Ellen not been in shock, she would have been mortified. She cleared a seat for us both and put the cushion in her hand behind her back.

‘Sorry about the mess!’ I explained, ‘our daughter and her family are staying with us until the renovations on her house are finished, and this is where the kids play!’

‘Oh don’t worry Mr Malone, we’ve seen much worse!’ detective Spencer answered, a grin attempting its way out.

I gestured for them to sit. Detective Spencer, had to move some of Kate’s dolls before she could get comfortable. To Ellen’s embarrassment, she took a cushion off the floor and placed it behind her own back. Officer Moore sat, then stood up with haste. Just as he put his ass on the seat, he had sat on a puzzle. He rubbed his backside before removing the toy from the couch and felt around for any more treasures. Two GI Joes later, he was finally content and sat beside his colleague.

Officer Moore looked new to the force. He had such a fresh face, and hair that hadn’t one grey in sight. If I wasn’t mistaken, I would have put him down as a teenager. Detective Spencer, on the other hand, looked as though she had seen things, terrible things, things that make you mature much quicker than is natural. Although she looked to be about Patricia’s age, I wouldn’t be surprised if she was younger.

I was nervous. I hadn’t heard the name James in years. We never really talked about him. Yes, he was our son, but we had no idea if he was dead or alive. I just took my wife’s hand just as she began to bend down and attempt to pick up yet another cushion. She was quivering, poor thing!

She opened her mouth, but no words came out. That’s when I knew I had to speak up. ‘So, what can we do for you officers?’

Detective Spencer opened the brown file that sat on her lap and took out a photo. ‘Is this your boy?’ she asked, passing the picture to Ellen. Ellen looked at it and gasped, she began to breathe so quickly, I was afraid she was going to hyperventilate. From my dear wife’s reaction, I knew that whatever photo was on that piece of paper, it showed our son. I looked everywhere but at the picture, tears welling up in my eyes. I just wanted another minute more to pluck up the courage to see what could have been my worst nightmare.

Eventually I gazed down, a shadow of my James looked back at me. He looked very young, maybe twenty five? It was a mug shot, and an old one at that. My stomach dropped, like I had just missed the bottom step on the stairs. His sunken red eyes gave the impression he was high. I raised that boy, and, although he turned out to be a social deviant, I would never deny him as my son!

My eyes turned towards Ellen. She was stroking his unkempt, greasy hair in the picture, just as you would a sick child. In a way, that’s what he was. I looked down at it again. The last time I saw my son, he had a lot more weight and muscle on him.   

‘What happened to him?’ Ellen asked, her brow raised.

‘Unfortunately that is why we’re here ma’am,’ Spencer said with a southern twang in her voice. ‘Unfortunately we have some bad news!’ Ellen gasped. ‘I’m so sorry to inform you that James committed suicide in Pennsylvania penitentiary last Monday.’

Ellen clutched her chest, ‘my boy?’ and began to sob. I stared at the detective with eyes as wide as saucers and pulled Ellen into me. She wrapped her arms around me and cried hysterically into my shoulder. ‘Not my boy, please god not my boy!’ she kept uttering over and over. I rubbed her back and squeezed her tightly.

When she calmed down a bit, I asked, ‘how? How long was he there? What had he done?’

Detective Spencer was aware that Ellen was hysterical, so she leaned over and put a comforting hand on her knee. ‘I’m so sorry for your loss!’ she said sympathetically.

Making these types of calls could never be easy, especially with the reason how my boy died. As to the why, I figured she was getting there. After all, they wouldn’t send out a detective to tell us that kind of news with no catch.

I had never seen Ellen that upset in all my years of knowing her. She surprised me though, by removing her head from my smelly armpit and just began staring at the photograph which she still had in her hand. ‘My precious angel is dead?’ she asked, mucus running down her trembling lip.

‘I’m so sorry Mrs Malone!’ the detective said, her counterpart not opening his mouth, letting her do all the talking.

‘How?’ I repeated.

‘James was incarcerated twenty years ago,’ detective Spencer began. ‘He had killed another junkie for a fix! He was deemed unfit by the medical examiner to have known what he did. A deal was made and his charges were dropped to manslaughter on the condition he plead guilty and did every day of the maximum sentence…twenty years!’

She looked into our eyes, one at a time. I didn’t realise I was crying until I felt the tears drop onto my top.

I remembered back to 1979. Myself and Ellen had been married a little under a year, and knew we wanted to start a family. We did all the right things, trying hard when we knew Ellen was ovulating, getting our hopes up, only for them to be squashed when she got her period. We did that for two years straight, always ending up disappointed.

It was I who decided to stop trying. I knew if it was meant to be, then it would happen. We threw caution to the wind, and braced ourselves with a life without the pitter patter of tiny feet. In 1981, we got some amazing news. We heard we were not only pregnant…but it was twins!

The second I heard the news, I was instantly so proud of them both, even though they were only the size of a grain of rice. Ellen was ecstatic also. We weren’t god worshiping people, but, after us not trying for six months and then getting twins, it made us realise there was a higher power somewhere, looking out for us, and blessing us with not one but two little miracles.

Even though it was not necessary, I made sure Ellen got all the rest she needed, and even some she didn’t! I wouldn’t let her lift anything heavy, like a pot of potatoes off the stove, and was, in my opinion, the doting husband.

No matter how much she rested, or how attentive I was, she began spotting just as we entered the third trimester. I brought her straight to our gynaecologist in our local hospital, and he said there was a strong chance she was developing pre-eclampsia. He admitted her and she spent the last three months, growing our precious angels in hospital.

We nearly lost them again. I thank god every day that my poor angel was in hospital, because when she started to haemorrhage like there was no tomorrow, the team all worked at warp speed and rushed her in for an emergency caesarean. I wasn’t allowed into the theatre. The doctors thought they might lose my sweetheart, so I was left in a chair just outside the operating room.

When I heard that first cry, I began to cry myself. It was Patricia, she was out! Exactly ninety seconds later, there was my boy, James. My two babies were crying in there. I was such a proud papa. I sat on the chair outside the theatre, my head in my hands, my elbows on my knees and tears rolling down my face. I was a father! I couldn’t believe it!

I heard a bit of commotion to the left of me. I stood up. Out came two incubators, both accompanied by machines that were beeping and buzzing and had an entourage of doctors and nurses running with them in the opposite direction to me. I stood there, helpless, my heart in my mouth! I wanted to share my sadness, but Ellen didn’t come out of the door, she was still in theatre!

I turned around, torn as to whether I stay with my babies, or I stay with my wife. With my hands on my head, I paced outside that operating room for over and hour before a doctor came out.

‘Is she ok?’ I hurried over to him, desperate.

‘I’m sorry Mr Malone, but your wife lost a lot of blood.’

I gasped, ready to faint. ‘Please no! Doctor, please, please, no! Not my Ellen!’

The doctor looked at me as I reached for the wall, put my back to it, and slid down to the floor. With my head still in my hands, I wept uncontrollably. The doctor went on his honkers and put a hand on my shoulder.

‘Mr Malone,’

I looked up.

‘Your wife is going to be ok, we just had to remove her womb to control the bleeding!’

I looked at him as if he had just given me an elixir of life. ‘You mean Ellen is ok?’

‘Yes sir,’ he started, ‘but I’m afraid you won’t be able to have any more children!’

I looked from him, to the door my babies came out from, and back again. ‘Are my babies ok?’

‘I’m not sure,’ the doctor admitted, ‘but give me a minute and I’ll find someone who will be able to answer that question for you!’

With my eyes as watery as Niagara falls, and mucus running from my nose to my mouth, I looked up at him and through my sobs, I thanked him and shook his hand. ‘When can I see my angel?’ I asked.

‘In about thirty minutes. She’s just waking up from the anaesthetic.’ He patted me on the shoulder again and said, ‘everything is going to be alright, okay?’ then smiled and went back in the door from whence he came.

I could finally take my head out of my hands, and cried happy tears. I didn’t find out anything about the health of the twins before I got to see Ellen. She was very drugged up and loopy. It was as if she was talking gibberish. I could only make out words here and there. One thing she was saying over and over was, ‘babies…where?’ something I couldn’t answer.

In the end, I had enough. We hadn’t heard anything about our kids yet. I reluctantly left my loves side to ask about them. ‘Excuse me nurse, but we are the Malone’s, and my wife here, almost died bringing our twins into the world. We need an update on their condition, and we need one now!’

The nurse looked at me sternly at first, but then a smile crept onto her face. Her focus wasn’t on me, however, it was on something behind me. I rolled my eyes up to heaven, and turned to see what was so amusing to her s0 much. There, being rolled into the room, were two incubators, one, my daughter, looked like a burrito wrapped in a pink blanket. I should have known that the other, my son, was going to be a football player as he fought against the tightness of the blanket, screaming at the top of his lungs as he did it.

I returned to Ellen’s bedside where the nurse was able to take both babies out of the boxes, as I called them, and into their mothers arms, one in each. They raised the head of her bed so she could hold them properly. Suddenly, all of her anaesthesia had vanished and she was making full sentences again.

I sat at the edge of her bed and marvelled at the sight of my family. The nurses happened to have a camera and took a picture of the four of us…our very first family portrait, on the 5^th of February 1982. To this day it lies in a photo frame above our bed. We figured that that’s where the family was made so that’s where the evidence of our amorous activities should be displayed.

There was a great discussion over the names of our babies. I wanted to call my son Patrick. It was my name, and my fathers before me, and his fathers before him. There was a long line of Patrick Malone’s. Unfortunately, Ellen put her foot down. She wanted to call him James after her own father. I gave in easily, after all, the woman nearly died giving birth to him! She counter offered though. Ellen put it to me that I could call my daughter Patricia. That way the feminine version of the name made it live on. I was such a proud father!

We were in the hospital for two weeks before we all came home together. I don’t think I could have brought the babies home without Ellen, or vice versa.

I heard someone talking to me, a stupid grin on my face, remembering the best day of my life.

‘Mr Malone?’ I heard again. ‘Are you ok Mr Malone?’ I heard before I realised I was in my own little world.

‘What?’ I asked, feeling like reality had hit me in the face like a brick!