Three hours and a half later and I was parked outside of a cemetery in Columbia, South Carolina. I rubbed the grit from my eyes and pushed the car door open. It was pitch-black outside, but I didn’t need light to know where I was going. I’d been here enough times to know where my baby brother was buried. I traversed the path through what felt like too many graves to count before coming up on the familiar headstone.
Charles James Jackson. There he was. I leaned down on my knees at the head of the grave, the dew on the grass seeping into my pants, but I didn’t care. I reached into my back pocket and fished out my wallet. In the little pocket beneath my ID was where I kept him.
His little face, just two years old, his soft hair blond, his eyes green like mine. It was the last picture I had of him. Now it was all I had left of him.
Sitting his picture on the headstone, I said, “Hey, buddy.”
I hadn’t been to see him in a long while, probably over a year, and shame flared through me, but I kept him there in my pocket always, all of my love for him in one single photograph.
His deep dimples smiled at me from the photo and a single tear slipped down my cheek. “I’m sorry it’s been so long.” I laid my palm on the headstone next to his picture.
I’d loved Charles long before he was born. I’d always wanted a sibling. I was twenty at the time, but better late than never, right? I’d only had him for a mere two years, but in just that short time, he’d managed to impact my life more than any other person.
I’d always known I’d be a doctor, but I chose the heart because of him. I was going to go to school and learn everything I could. Become the best to make sure he and my mom had the best.
It had all been in vain, though. He wouldn’t make it to his third birthday and it had come as the greatest shock. I’d been with Kelly the night before and had the most amazing time of my life. The call had broken me. I’d wanted to cry and scream and tear my apartment apart, but I couldn’t with her there. I couldn’t grieve. So, I’d tossed her out, convinced I was doing it for her own good. Seeing me like that would scare her. She wouldn’t understand my grief, after all, we hardly knew each other. She didn’t know and love Charles like I did. How could she possibly understand?
The months that followed now seemed like a dream. I’d drifted through them dazed, and grieving so terribly. I felt like I’d failed him. So, I worked harder, became better. I’d never fail anyone again, I told myself. But medicine, God, faith, they didn’t work that way. Some things were out of my control and I lost kids all the time, my only consolation that I saved more than I would lose.
“You remember that girl, right, buddy? The one I told you I got the tattoo for? The one I was with when Mom called? She’s back. And I love her.” I thought of the night I’d gotten the tattoo only six months after Charles’ death. How I’d driven to the tattoo parlor knowing exactly what I wanted. Him. Her. Me. I missed us all. I’d been so long, but I’d promised myself that night that I’d try. I’d always try for Charles. For all the children like him.
I used my shirt sleeve to wipe the wetness from my face because I couldn’t see him. I couldn’t see him through the tears. His smiling face and messy hair.
“We have a baby. Her name is Hope. She’s beautiful and perfect like her mother, but she’s sick, bud. She’s sick like you were and I’m so scared. So fucking scared because I love her, too, and I think I’d die if something happened to her.” My voice caught on a sob at the end. But saying it, saying how scared I was, was almost a relief. I hadn’t been able to tell anyone. To voice it. I’d been protecting Kelly and my mother. I couldn’t tell them how I woke in the night with racing thoughts of Hope’s impending death. How in my dreams I sometimes lost her.
I thought of my mother and how sad and worried she was all the time after Charles was born. I’d been a naive kid. Twenty wasn’t really adult yet and I’d been the optimistic one telling her we’d get through it. How the doctors would help him. But I understood now. I understood her worry, her despair. I was living it, because when it was your child it was different, and Hope wasn’t mine biologically, but she was mine in every other sense of the word. I couldn’t have loved her more even if she were of my blood. She was mine. It was a different kind of worry. The love you feel, it’s unexplainable. I hadn’t been able to understand my mother’s undying love and devotion to Charles until I’d held Hope between Kelly and me in that dark closet the day she’d been born. When she’d cried, my heart had soared.
If I lost her, I would lose part of myself.
I finally sat on my behind, the grass soaking me through, but I didn’t care. I needed to think. I just needed to be for a few minutes without the chaos of beeping machines and sick babies. I needed to breathe. I needed to know how to make this better. I sat there for a long time thinking.
“I don’t know what to do.” I stared at his dancing green eyes, expecting answers I knew he couldn’t give me. I just wanted a sign, something. I needed to know Hope was going to be okay. “I can’t visit her here. I just can’t,” I cried into the night. I refused to walk through a slew of graves to get to her. I couldn’t do it.
I thought of how stupidly optimistic I’d been and I’d still lost Charles. In fact, I lost people every damn week.
“Mom must have thought I was so ridiculous, always thinking the doctors were going to save you. Save our family. You were gone and Dad left. I still haven’t talked to him in years.”
I let out a chilling laugh. Fuck, I’d been so young, innocent, so unassuming of the real ways of the world. You couldn’t guarantee anything, especially life or health. They could be snatched away from you any moment. The next day, the next minute, the next second were never a sure thing.
“I miss you, bud. I think of you every day.” I smiled sadly down at the only piece of him I had left. “I used to tell Mom you were our miracle. We weren’t expecting you but that didn’t mean you weren’t the best surprise ever.”
I thought of how much we immediately loved him even knowing we might not get to keep him forever. Medicine had progressed so much in the last ten years, especially hearts. Back then, the type of surgeries I did now were just in the early stages and a lot of babies just didn’t make it.
My mom had been terrified every time he’d gone into the operating room. I remembered sitting there with her, my arm around her slender shoulders. “Mom always knew. It was like she knew you were too good for this world, but not me. I was always blindly hopeful. Every time you were in surgery, I’d tell Mom, ‘Never lose hope. There’s always hope.’”
Hope. My breath stopped. I felt like my heart might have paused, too. Never lose hope. I hadn’t thought about saying that to Mom in years, but I had. I’d said it time and time again. And now I had Hope. I looked at that precious picture of my brother that held all of my love and memories and thought that maybe he had sent me her. Hope.
I’d hated how the night with Kelly had ended, with me yelling at her, screaming to leave. But if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have Hope. And God, I loved her as much as I loved her momma.
“Never lose hope.” I smiled down at the headstone. “I have to go, buddy. I have to go find Hope. I love you.”
I grabbed his picture off the headstone and placed it back in my wallet carefully behind my driver’s license. I’d show Kelly him. I would because I loved her and I wanted her to know how this two-year-old boy I adored had unknowingly mapped out the last ten years of my life and given me Hope.
I laid my hand to the gravestone one more time, the granite cold against my fingers. I ran to my car and jumped in the driver’s seat, scanning the car for my phone. “Fuck,” I banged my hands on the steering wheel. The damn phone was back at the office. I felt sick. I had to get to her. I’d been gone for hours. And I had no way of knowing how Hope was. I was sure Kelly was worried out of her mind. God, I was a fuck up. I had no idea why she put up with me. It could only be love.
I started the car and hit the interstate. I had to get home. Home to Kelly and Hope.