The room seemed emptier after she left. I pulled back the curtain to let a little of the light into the room. I lay on my bed, and watched the birds dive bombing each other and circling the feeder. What could they teach me? They were ferocious with their appetites. They were willing to fight for what they wanted. I wanted to be like them. I swear, as I lay there thinking of Margaret’s offer, I could feel the beginnings of wings growing on my back when I decided to say yes.
Those first weeks with Margaret were uneasy for us both. I was able to walk without my cane, but I will always limp. If you put me in a park and tell me to walk across it, I have to concentrate and work at it to not end up going in a circle. I’m like a canoe with only one paddle. I can walk a straight line, but it isn’t without effort. Margaret had lived alone for fourteen years before adopting Frankenstein. Then I came along. We were both fiercely independent. We needed each other and both hated to admit it. We were silent mourners, circling each other and avoiding our pain. We had to work out a dance, an uneasy step, tap, step around each other until we found a rhythm.
Everywhere my eye rested were reminders of Randy. Framed pictures filled the house. A picture of a six-year-old Randy in his first little league uniform, posed as he would appear on a bubble gum card, sat on the mantel. Randy with his first guitar sat smiling at me on his bed with posters of nearly naked girls pinned on the wall behind him. Randy with his blond hair falling in his eyes at the beach and his arm around a pretty bikini clad brunette hung in a grouping with other pictures of Margaret’s friends and loved ones. Randy in his graduation gown and mortar board was in the hallway on my way to the guest bathroom. My favorite, a snapshot of Randy and Margaret laughing, their heads thrown back and ice cream cones in their hands at Disney World. They were both wearing those Mickey Mouse ears. These were all the Randys that I never knew. I can see the progression from child to man. Each one I passed sent stabs into my heart.
One day, I got my nerve up and asked Margaret to tell me about the Disney World picture. “Disney Land,” she said, correcting me. “What a wonderful time we had.” Her eyes were shimmering with tears, but she seemed to want to tell me about it. “He was eleven, the perfect age,” she said, “so much little boy energy and a personality all his own. He would say the darnedest things, and he kept me laughing that whole day,” she said with a faraway look in her eyes and a hint of a smile. Then she wiped her eyes and looked around the kitchen as if waking up from a dream.
“Well, what shall we have for breakfast,” she said standing up and opening the refrigerator to hide her tears. I didn’t ask again, she seemed so fragile. I was glad she didn’t ask me anything. It took all I could do to listen to her story without breaking down.
After I’d been living with her for a couple of months, I gathered the strength and asked her to take me to the cemetery. She agreed, and we went that very day. She drove us to the outskirts of town and pulled into a wide drive that wound its way around graves marked with weeping angles and large granite stones. She stopped at last, and we walked down a small gravel walk. I had to lean on her for balance, so it took us a while. At one point we stopped, and I rested on a stone bench engraved with “In Memory of Our Daughter, Our Angel, Taken Too Soon.” I traced my finger over the chiseled lettering, and tears dripped down my face. Margaret stood facing away from me with her arms folded across her middle. I could see her shoulders shaking.
The sky was a brilliant robin’s egg blue, and there were only a few white fluffy clouds in the sky. A slight breeze kept it from being too warm, but the bench was quickly warming me up. I knew I could sit and cry for hours, and we still hadn’t made it to Randy’s grave, so I got myself up and limped over to Margaret. This time I took her arm, and she leaned on me. We stood that way for a minute or so, not saying a word. Then she started walking again. The grave was under the shade of an old oak tree. There was a huge, pink granite, standing marker with Jason Randall Mathison carved along with twining roses. “Randy is here,” she said, pointing down, “I buried him beside his dad.” And there it was, Randall Jason Mathison, February 23, 1978 - September 8, 2011. She had them carve a guitar into the stone. So much more should be said, but neither of us spoke. We stood with our arms around each other’s waists until my leg grew too tired, and we had to leave. We made it back to the car carefully and not a word was exchanged all the way back to the house. I went into my room and Margaret went out the back door. I just sat on the bed and let the tears run freely.
I learned early on that Margaret was a gardener. She would put on beautiful linen clothes and be out in her garden for hours. She always came in for lunch looking fresh and clean. I have no idea to this day how she did that. When I could walk easier, I took to sitting on a bench and watching as she pulled weeds, fertilized, or separated plants. She made it look simple, but I know it wasn’t. It was something she obviously loved to do. I would catch her humming at times. After a while, we grew easy with our silences. She would putter in the soil, I would journal, and Frankenstein would coil around my legs until he found a good spot in the sun to sleep. It was around that time that I started drawing in my journal again.
The flowers in Margaret’s garden were full of color and texture that fascinated me. Frankenstein unwittingly posed for me. I was able to forget my pain while drawing. Margaret told me that I had fierce concentration, and she surprised me one day with colored pencils. My doodles weren’t beautiful, but they were therapy to me. She bought me a drawing pad. Things seemed to pop up for me. I would go out to the garden in the morning to sit on the bench with a cup of coffee, and like magic, a new graphite pencil would be strategically placed beside my usual spot. I would try to thank her, but she would wave me off with a flip of her hand and go back to trimming a hedge.
Before we knew it, we smiled at each other occasionally. At some point, we found the energy to talk about the rain she so hoped would fall to help the sweet bay magnolia. She began to ask me if she could see my drawings. They had progressed from stick figures of childlike flowers to something that slightly resembled the things she grew. I would google the weather channel to help her know if rain was headed our way, and she would encourage me to keep drawing. She told me that she killed hundreds of poor plants when she started planting. She spoke of how she planted shade plants in full sun, and drought loving plants in bogs. She would laugh at her own exploits, and soon I found myself overcoming my reluctance to share my artwork. She never criticized anything. She would look at a peony drawing that looked like a sad head of lettuce and point out the beautiful shade of pink I’d been able to capture. She had a gift. I came to see how Randy became the man he was. He had this gentle mother to guide him and encourage him.
I asked how he came to play the guitar one day as she knelt in the path weeding around the wax begonias. She sat back on her feet and brushed the hair out of her eyes with the back of her glove leaving a streak of dirt just above her left eyebrow.
“Oh, that was such a surprise to me,” she said. She turned and then got up to sit beside me. “He was crazy about Randy Travis,” she said. “I guess because of the name first, but also because of that deep voice.”
“A lot like our Randy’s voice,” I said.
“Yes, similar after he got older, but when he first started out, his voice hadn’t changed,” she said this with a laugh in her voice that made my heart feel lighter than it had before.
“I’ll bet he was cute,” I offered.
“Oh, no, he was dreadful!” she said. “He nagged me for months and months, and he played Randy Travis CDs constantly until I thought I would have to take the player away from him.”
“So, he was pretty determined?”
“Heavens, he was as hard-headed as could be. He wouldn’t rest until he got his way,” she said.
“Well, that never changed,” I said. “So, when did you give in?”
“I surprised him for Christmas on his tenth birthday,” she said smiling with the memory shimmering in her eyes.
I wanted to ask her why she never went to his gigs when he got older, but I dared not. This day was perfect and my questions could wait. Having a perfect day was about all I could take. Margaret had been so kind to me. She needed to grieve and heal, and I think we helped each other.