The Moment Keeper

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 and heart; taking her blood pressure; and giving her a shot.

Grandma even put some of the cinnamon candies we used to decorate Christmas cookies in an old plastic prescription container for me to use as pretend pills.

“How am I doing, Doc?” Grandma asked.

“Pretty good. But you need to make more cookies. That would make you feel better.”

Grandma laughed. “Are you sure, Doc?”

“Yes. Making cookies will make you feel better. And maybe some brownies.”

Grandma made the best chocolate-chip cookies in the whole universe. She didn’t buy the ones you break apart and bake like Rachel’s mom. She made them from scratch. And her brownies were good, too. Rachel’s mom bought brownies. They came individually wrapped.

“You rest while I check on my other patients.”

I always placed my dolls and stuffed animals around the room and pretended to do hospital rounds, visiting each patient.

I walked over to my stuffed panda bear, Lucy. “How are you today, Lucy?”

Grandma always provided the voices for my patients. “It hurts when I swallow.”

“Let me check your throat.” I grabbed the light scope. “Open wide. Just what I thought. Strep throat. Here’s a pill.”

I pretended to give Lucy a pill and moved to my next patient, a doll named Suzy who broke her arm. After examining Suzy, I used the roll of toilet paper Grandma had given me to use as pretend bandages and wrapped Suzy’s arm. After seeing my other patients, I returned to Grandma.

“Do you think I could go home tomorrow?” Grandma asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Provided you take this pill and get a good night’s rest.”

I gave Grandma one of the cinnamon-candy pills and she rolled it in her mouth until it dissolved.

“I feel all better,” she said.

And she closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep, even pretend snoring for more effect.

How I wished I could have cured Grandma with a cinnamon-candy pill when she got so sick that she couldn’t get out of her chair. Funny that as a child I could fix everything and as an adult, very little.

Chapter 11

Olivia holds a keepsake handprint plaque she made out of clay for Mother’s Day.

“Do you think Mommy will like it?”

“No,” Tom says, picking Olivia up and twirling her around. “She’ll love it.”

Tom puts Olivia down. “But you know what the best present she’s ever received is?”

Olivia’s gappy smile widens. She’s been told this over and over.

“You,” Tom says, tickling her belly.

Olivia giggles. “Do you think the lady’s tummy I grew in will get a plaque?”

Tom catches his breath. “I don’t know.”

Tom and Elizabeth have been very open with Olivia about her adoption, always explaining to her in an age-appropriate way where she came from. They’ve told her over and over that they are her forever family and will always love her. Still, Olivia sometimes wonders about her birth mother.

I, too, have wondered about Olivia’s birth mom. What kind of person was she? How old was she? Where did she live?

“Let’s wrap mommy’s present and then we’ll go for ice cream like I promised.”

Elizabeth is working at the hospital this weekend and when it’s just Tom and Olivia on a Saturday night, they always go for ice cream. Olivia’s favorite is vanilla with rainbow sprinkles.

When I was in kindergarten, we made pictures with our handprints for Mother’s Day.

Miss Becky gave each of us a piece of white construction paper and told us to place our hand in the poster paint on the plate in the middle of the table then press it on the paper. After we washed our hands, we were to print our name and the year in our “very best printing”.

“But Sarah doesn’t have a mom,” Reid said, wiping his snotty nose on his shirt sleeve.

Reid always had a snotty nose. His shirt always looked as if it had snail tracks on it. I knew what snail tracks looked like because I’d seen them on our screen door at home.

Rachel put her hands on her hips and gave Reid her squinty I-going-to-punch-you-in-the-noggin look. “She has a grandma.”

“That doesn’t count. It’s not the same.”

Rachel raised her hand. “Miss Becky, can you tell Reid that Sarah can make a picture for her Grandma since she doesn’t have a mom.”

“That’s right, Reid. Sarah’s grandmother is her mom.”

“But my grandma’s not my mom. She’s my mom’s mom.”

Reid always was a smarty pants. That’s something that never changed. It only got worse the older he got. By the time we were in high school, I stopped being in his classes. He was always in classes with the super-smart kids. I wasn’t so smart. Or maybe I just didn’t try.

But Reid’s comments did make me wonder about my mom, sort of like Olivia wonders about her mom. Grandma said my mom loved me, but I could never figure out why Matt, if he loved my mom so much, didn’t love me.

I know she died when she had me, but Grandma always told me that my mom knew she was going to die. That she chose my life over hers. Grandma said Matt let anger eat away at him like a cancer. When Grandma got cancer, I saw just what she meant. The eating-away part, I mean.

“Daddy,” says Olivia, sitting in a booth at the ice-cream shop. “That boy scares me.”

She points to a red-haired boy about her age with big ears and a Band-Aid on his forehead sitting across from his dad.

Tom looks in the direction Olivia is pointing. “Why? He doesn’t look scary to me.”

“He has his dad’s eyes.”

“What?” Tom asks.

“The lady who gave him his ice cream said that he has his dad’s eyes. And she pointed to that man across from him. And if he has his dad’s eyes, then his dad doesn’t have any eyes.”

Tom laughs and tears pool in Olivia’s green eyes. “Oh, princess,” Tom says. “It’s not what you think. That little boy didn’t take his daddy’s eyes. His daddy still has his eyes. The lady meant that his eyes look like his daddy’s.”

Olivia breathes a sigh of relief. “Do I have your eyes?”

Tom runs his fingers through his hair. This is the second tough question of the night and I wonder how he’s going to answer. “No, you don’t have my eyes. But we see the same thing with our eyes.”

Olivia smiles. His answer satisfies her – for now.

I asked Grandma once if I had my mom’s eyes. I knew I had her blonde curly hair. Grandma had told me that. But I wondered about her eyes. We were studying dominant and recessive genes in high school and our assignment was to see how our eye color compared to our parents’. My dad had brown eyes and Grandma told me that my mom had green eyes. I was glad I ended up with my mom’s eye color. It was bad enough I had my dad’s dimples. I hated those dimples. I didn’t want to have anything of his. I had always planned to get my dimples fixed when I got older and could afford it. I had read in my teen magazine that you could get them fixed.

“But, Sarah,” Grandma said the day I told her how much I hated my dimples. “When you smile your dimples are like exclamation points.”

“It’s a birth defect, Grandma,” I said in my know-it-all-teen voice. “A defect just like Matt.”

Grandma cried when I said that. I was mean and I shouldn’t have been. But Matt was meaner and Grandma knew it. Even so, I think I broke her heart that day. She had dimples, too.

I look at Olivia. She has dimples, too, and I don’t think they look like a defect. I think they look cute, just as Grandma thought mine looked cute.

Ice cream drips from Olivia’s cone onto the red laminate tabletop.

“Lick around the edges,” Tom says, placing a couple more napkins in front of Olivia.

Tom finishes his dish of raspberry ice cream. Steam snakes upward as the waitress refills his white coffee mug. He picks it up and takes a sip. “So what movie do you want to watch when we get home?”

“Snow White.”

“Didn’t we watch that the last time Mommy worked?”

Olivia nods.

“And you want to watch it again?”

Olivia nods again, trying to lick her cone faster than it can melt. She has been on a Snow White kick lately.

“OK. We’ll watch Snow White, but maybe the next time we can watch something different.”

Olivia nods.

I know what it’s like to love a movie. I loved Bambi. It wasn’t one of Grandma’s favorites. I noticed that she always left the room when Bambi’s father told him that his mother couldn’t be with him anymore.

“That’s kind of like my mother,” I told Grandma the first time we watched the movie. Rachel had all of the Disney movies and let me borrow them.

Grandma put her hand to her heart. “Come again, Sarah?”

“Bambi’s mom died like my mom, but she saved him just like my mom saved me.”

Grandma dabbed the corners of her eyes with one of her handmade cotton hankies. “Well, I suppose in a way it is,” she said.

“Was it my fault, Grandma, that she died?”

“Oh, come here.”

I jumped off the couch and bounced over to Grandma, who was sitting in her favorite rocker. She sat up straight, brushed the curls off my face, put her hands on my shoulders and looked me straight in the eyes. “Don’t you ever, ever think that it was your fault. Your mother wanted you more than anything. When she got sick, instead of saving herself, she saved you. And just like Bambi, you’re going to grow up and experience great things. Promise me that, Sarah.”

“I promise.”

I had forgotten about our Bambi discussion and my promise. In a matter of seconds I had broken my promise to Grandma, and a raging fire of guilt consumed me.

Chapter 12

Olivia and Emma approach a two-story brick house with its porch light on. Just as Olivia is about to ring the doorbell, a short woman with salt and pepper hair and pointy glasses opens the door.

“Trick or treat,” the girls say.

“What do we have here?” the lady says.

“I’m a cat,” Olivia says. “See?” And she turns in a circle to show her long black tail.

“And I’m a cheerleader,” Emma says. She shakes her blue and white pom-poms.

“You’re a very pretty cat,” the lady says, “and you’re a very pretty cheerleader.” She puts a chocolate bar in each of their plastic Halloween bags.

Olivia’s dad waits on the sidewalk as the eight-year-olds go from house to house. Olivia’s neighborhood is the type of neighborhood I would have loved to have gone trick or treating in when I was her age. She gets full-size candy bars at nearly every house. One couple even fires up the grill and gives away hot dogs and orange drinks to kids and parents.

In the apartment complex where Grandma and I lived, most people gave out lollipops or Smarties. Chocolate was a real treat. And when you got it, it was the miniature candy bars, never the full-size ones.

Olivia and Emma skip up the sidewalk to the next house. As they approach the porch they see three older boys standing in front of a bench with a big black plastic cauldron filled with giant Reese’s peanut butter cups. One boy is dressed as a pirate, one as a ninja and the other is wearing a scary mask that looks as if it got caught in a meat slicer. With its cuts and gashes and blood, it’s the scariest mask Olivia and Emma have ever seen.

Olivia sees the sign taped to the candy bowl. It says: Take one, please.

“Look at all that candy,” Scary Mask says. “We could take it all. They’d never know.”

Olivia and Emma look at each other. Olivia swallows hard. “No, that’s wrong.”

Scary Mask turns around. “Says who?”

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