My Life, Deleted Read online

  “Don’t change things just because of me,” I said.

  Joan said she was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to take the boisterous running around that my two- and six-year-old nephews were apt to do, but I told her I could handle it.

  “How much more can my head hurt?” I joked.

  So Joan gave in. “Well, if you need to go lie down, you go lie down,” she said.

  I was curious about the meaning of Christmas and why we celebrated it, and while I was learning at a relatively rapid rate, I could take in only so much information at once, so Joan parsed it out little by little. I’d been picking up quite a bit by watching television, such as the Christmas episode of The King of Queens, in which Doug and Carrie Heffernan’s working-class friends and family come over with gifts and everyone laughs together while eating a special dinner.

  “Is this how our Christmas is?” I asked.

  The holidays seemed to be a generally happy time for these and most other TV characters, and I wondered if I could even pretend to be happy considering all my pain and fear, not to mention the ongoing pangs of emptiness and loneliness.

  “There will be funny moments,” she said, explaining that her father, Harvey, was similar to Arthur Spooner, the father on the show played by Jerry Stiller. Like the crotchety older man with a big heart and a biting wit who lives in the Heffernans’ basement, she said, Harvey tries to be funny and often blurts out whatever is on his mind, and sometimes it’s inappropriate. You never know what he’s going to say next.

  I’d also seen the Christmas episode of The Sopranos, which provided quite a contrast, with their lavish spread of food and the expensive cars and jewelry they bought each other. Every time I acquired a new reference point like this, I’d question Joan or Taylor about what I could expect and where we fit in.

  As the days went by, I saw Joan bringing home more and more bags—some with handles from nice department stores and some white plastic ones with a big red circle on the side from a discount store called Target. I watched her secretly pull out jackets covered with rhinestones, long necklaces, and a leather tote bag for Taylor, a number of gift cards for Grant, and packages of action figures for my nephews. I was mesmerized as she wrapped each gift with colorful paper and a shiny bow then stuck a label on it, saying who it was for and from. I was puzzled why she wrote “Santa” on some of Grant’s and Taylor’s gifts, so she explained all of that. I also didn’t understand the purpose of this giving of gifts or why there were so many of them.

  Joan said we also exchanged presents with my parents in Chicago and that she’d already sent my mother several restaurant gift cards because she and my father loved to go out to dinner. Joan had also sent her a toy Santa with a saxophone, one in a long line of goofy presents over the years. But she noted that she’d had to scale back on the home front this year because she simply didn’t have the time to do her usual shopping, so there wouldn’t be the same gag gifts, gold chocolate coins, or ornaments she traditionally bought for the kids. Somehow, she’d still found time to do her usual wrapping job, hiding one small item in at least five larger individually wrapped boxes, so the kids would keep pulling off the paper until they reached the payoff.

  Joan clearly enjoyed this holiday, and although she kept trying to convince me that this Christmas wouldn’t be any different, I knew better. I figured it would be a memorable event for us; I just wasn’t sure how.

  No one expected me to help with preparations for the big day, but I wanted to, thinking there was no better way for me to learn about memories I shared with my family than to relive them as best as my body would allow. So while Joan ironed the tablecloth, I helped hold it and guide it. And when I couldn’t figure out how to help with a given task, I retreated to my chair and nursed my aching head.

  Joan took breaks from her shopping, cleaning, and other responsibilities to spend some quality time with me in my big chair in front of the television in the living room, rubbing my head and snuggling in my lap. I appreciated the attention, but I was somewhat preoccupied with hiding the pain of my headaches and the day-to-day battle of simply trying to exist.

  On December 23 she went out to run some errands, leaving Taylor and me at home to watch TV and talk about holiday rituals in the Bolzan household.

  “Is there anything you and I do together?” I asked.

  “We make Christmas cookies,” she replied.

  “Well, then, let’s make Christmas cookies,” I said, reminding her that she’d have to teach me what to do.

  Taylor found a sugar cookie recipe on the Internet, but not wanting to leave me alone, she waited for Joan to return before she ran to the store to pick up the necessary ingredients. Joan cleaned off the center island and laid out a collection of cookie cutters—trees, angels, snowmen, and stars—then left us alone to share some daddy-and-daughter bonding time.

  Taylor exhibited great patience as she walked me into the pantry to show me where we kept the flour, sugar, and vanilla. After I retrieved the bucket of bottled red and green sprinkles and tubes of frosting from a cabinet she couldn’t reach, she dotingly pointed out how the lines on the measuring cups corresponded to the amounts in the recipe, demonstrating how to carefully transport the ingredients from the cups and spoons to the bowl.

  “Are you sure that’s right?” I kept asking. “How much was it again?”

  We weren’t all that careful, however, because the floor was soon covered with flour and sugar. The dogs were only too pleased to help with the cleanup.

  I felt a great joy, a sense of peace and a feeling of safety with Taylor. I barely knew this beautiful, intelligent girl, and yet she was displaying a love that had clearly grown over a lifetime. For those two hours we spent making several trays of cookies, some of which we ate warm, right out of the oven, I felt as if no one else mattered to her as much as I did. She also seemed to enjoy the experience of letting me learn about her all over again—her friends, her cheerleading, her boyfriend, and the time she split between her regular academic classes at Mesquite High School and her fashion design and merchandising courses at East Valley Institute of Technology, splitting her day between the two schools.

  At one point I started to cry because I couldn’t believe I didn’t recall a single thing she was telling me. The realization that I had lost all those precious moments of watching her evolve into this sweet young lady made me so very sad.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, hugging me. “It’s only been a couple of days, Dad.”

  It was almost as if we’d switched roles of parent and child, a pattern that continued as she reassured me that my obviously poor job of decorating the tree-shaped cookies with frosting was better than it really was. I wasn’t sure how good my artistic talents had been before, but my newly subpar motor skills had surely undermined them.

  “This tree is terrible,” I said. “The boys coming over could do a better job.”

  “No, it’s so much better than mine,” she fibbed.

  Her kind words made me feel better for a while, but inside I sensed that this could be a very long journey. I felt in my gut that something was really wrong with me.

  By Christmas Eve the house seemed to be filled with all the holiday trappings that I had seen on TV—the string of lights lining the exterior of the house, the stockings hung along the fireplace for everyone, including the two dogs, the dishes of green and red M&M’s, and the plates of the cookies Taylor and I had made, even the nativity scene with ten-inch figures that covered a tabletop in the foyer.

  That night after dinner I was finally feeling strong enough to help with decorating our nine-foot artificial pine tree. Grant came over, and we headed into the garage to bring it down from the attic, where the four sections that made up the main post were stored in boxes. Joan climbed up the ladder and handed down each section to Grant, who passed it on to me. All together, the thing must have weighed three hundred pounds, and it didn’t help that the two biggest pieces were stuck together.

  Joan exp
lained that we used to have two trees. One was a soft white artificial pine, which we decorated with the perfect red round bulbs, red velvet ribbons, and lights you’d see in Macy’s. The other was also an artificial pine, on which we’d hung our family’s collection of homemade and sentimental ornaments. After realizing that the pine tree was much more meaningful, we’d done away with the white one entirely.

  Grant did most of the assembling in the foyer, extending the branches into position, checking the lights, and helping us flesh out the needles that had been crushed from a year in the attic. The tree began to look elegant as I watched Grant work, and I hoped that I’d taught him to do it that way.

  Even though Grant had his own apartment, I found it odd that he hadn’t come around much since I’d gotten home. He’d been complaining of stomachaches and not sleeping well, and I wondered what was going on with him.

  Joan brought in two bins of bulbs and ornaments, with a gold and red skirt to go underneath the tree. Apparently the coveted job of hanging the big star alternated between the kids each year, and I had the honor of lifting up the winner so he or she could reach the top spot.

  “You did it last year,” Taylor told Grant.

  “Okay, let’s go,” I said, crouching to grab Taylor around the thighs and hoist her up.

  “No, no,” Joan said, worried.

  “No, I can lift her,” I said, and proved as much.

  I was amazed at how many ornaments we’d collected, but even more, I was enthralled by the stories that went with them. After Joan and the kids peeled away the tissue paper and revealed each one to me, I watched as they hung them on the tree.

  Joan’s favorite Kenny Rogers CD of holiday music was playing as Grant showed off the prized paper plate ornament with red and green macaroni that he’d made as a kindergartner.

  Some of the store-bought ornaments reflected our children’s accomplishments, such as Grant’s hockey skates or Taylor’s pair of glass ballerina slippers. There were also motorcycles, football players, ice-skaters, and even a trinket to represent every dog we’d owned. I was struck by the little white pillow with the words Our First Christmas stitched in red, partly because Joan gripped it so tightly as she told me we’d had it since we got married in 1984.

  Our marriage must really be important to her.

  When Joan pulled out a miniature stuffed moose on skis that we’d gotten on a family trip to Telluride, Colorado, they all started laughing.

  “You want to fill me in?” I asked.

  After she explained that I’d had a bad cold on that trip and kept blowing my nose like a moose, I was laughing too.

  The cable car ornament, Joan said, was a memento of our trip to San Francisco, where her grandmother Anna lived. Reminiscent of Aunt Bee on Mayberry R.F.D., she was a jolly old German woman who had become like a grandmother to me because my own grandparents had died before I was born.

  Grant, antsy to go see his girlfriend, left before we’d finished, but by then I’d noticed the curious number of angel ornaments, including a glass child with wings and a dark-haired child that Taylor had unwrapped so gingerly. Wearing a purple robe, the angel was praying while floating on a cloud.

  “This is Taryn’s, and we always put it up next to the star,” Taylor said softly.

  Joan sat me down, and her voice broke as she started to tell me the most important story of all, cupping the family’s most treasured ornament with both hands before she handed it over to me.

  “I was so hoping your memory would return before we had to relive this. Taryn was our first child, and she was stillborn full-term. Oh, God, Scott it was awful,” she said, pausing as she began to cry. As Joan talked and wept, I stared down at the angel, knowing I was supposed to feel the same loss that she did. But I simply felt blank.

  “She was so beautiful,” Joan went on. “They called it a cord accident since the umbilical cord was up over her shoulder when she was delivered. Her blood flow was cut off when she lowered into my pelvis and I had contractions, so the cord was pinched off. It was the worst day of our lives, and we have always agreed that nothing outside of losing Grant, Taylor, or each other will hurt so deeply.”

  Joan said this incident had reshaped how we viewed the world, and she apologized for making me learn this all over again. “I know this is a lot. I’m sorry, I love you. . . . Do you want to finish the tree?”

  I said yes, but the festive mood had been broken. Seeing Joan cry had made Taylor cry, and I’d started crying too. How could I not remember such a traumatic chapter in our lives? It had to be one of those days I’d heard people talk about, the ones that are so important you remember every little detail about them, from where you were to what you were wearing, what you ate, and how things smelled. Joan had lived through those memories, and yet I couldn’t even remember my own name or birth date without help, let alone a tragedy that must have hurt me to the core. I wondered if I would ever recover not just the memories but also the pain that came with them, the pain that we’d shared. Watching Joan and Taylor’s reactions made me feel even more isolated. I just hoped I’d wake up the next morning and everything would be back to normal.

  The next morning started out like every other one since my accident: it was bright, sunny, and about seventy degrees outside. This morning, after another sleepless night, my headache was still raging. I hadn’t been sleeping more than one to three hours since my accident. On a scale of one to ten, the pain was an eleven. Thankfully, the Percocet was slowly working.

  After seeing the winter wonderland on television, it didn’t seem right that our local trees and streets weren’t blanketed with white flakes. “Where’s the snow?” I asked, wondering how it smelled and tasted, sure I used to know such things.

  “Honey, we live in southern Arizona. We just don’t get snow here,” Joan said, explaining that we’d often traveled to see snow in Flagstaff or go skiing in Colorado. Besides, she added, “Christmas isn’t about snow. It’s about the birth of Christ.”

  Joan and I had been taking the dogs for walks in the neighborhood over the past few days. Joan said we lived near an area that allowed people to keep animals such as turkeys, llamas, goats, and horses, so she took me to see some. I recognized the horses, but I got really frightened when a scary beast I didn’t recognize started running toward me. Luckily, there was a fence to stop him.

  “What is that?”

  “It’s an ostrich,” Joan said. “It’s a type of bird that doesn’t fly.”

  That made no sense to me, but as I took in the landscape of cacti, palm trees, big boulders, sand, and gravel, I was starting to form a sense of the place I lived and comparing it to Chicago and Buffalo, where I’d seen the people on television, all bundled up and tromping through snow.

  I wonder how our Christmas is different from someone who lives in New York.

  Compared to all the other stuff I didn’t know, this was one of the more pleasant things I wondered about.

  When the kids were little, Joan said, we used to cook a Christmas breakfast of pancakes or homemade waffles, usually with chocolate chips. But now that they were grown, she and I ate while Taylor slept in. She used to cook us pork sausage, she said, but now that we were both eating healthier, it was turkey sausage. After breakfast we sat in the living room enjoying the unusually peaceful stillness of the morning.

  Once Taylor got up, she started poking around the mound of gifts that had appeared under the tree overnight. Joan had been wrapping for days. As soon as Grant arrived at noon, we passed them around.

  Taylor went first, opening a box to reveal a brown and pink Tory Burch tote bag. Joan had told me that Taylor loved this designer, so it should be a big hit with her. Well, she was right. Taylor was so excited she jumped up and down on the couch, still clutching the bag.

  But when it came time for Grant to open his present from Joan and me—a series of gift cards from Chili’s, Subway, and Starbucks—he looked irritated and wouldn’t look us in the eye. He also rejected Joan’s offer of a Christm
as cookie.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I just don’t feel good,” he said.

  At first I thought he didn’t like what we’d gotten him. Then I thought maybe this was how men were supposed to act. I’d been watching him closely for his reaction, so I could determine how I was supposed to respond when I opened my gifts. On The Sopranos only the women shrieked with excitement when opening their presents while the men were more laid-back. But Grant seemed so somber, I was confused.

  Joan had told me that he’d wanted these cards because he had no money and loved to eat out, but he was clearly displeased. I didn’t understand how my two kids could respond in such polar opposite ways. I figured that Grant should be happy getting a gift, no matter what it was, and yet he didn’t even seem to want to be there.

  It wasn’t just that. My whole family seemed to be on edge, which I attributed to my injury. I didn’t want them to feel this way. I wanted them to experience the emotional closeness and joy I’d seen on TV, where Christmas was the happiest day of the year.

  As Taylor opened up her other gifts—jackets and necklaces from us and a Juicy Couture key ring from Grant—she turned to me and said, “Stop watching me. Open yours!”

  So I did. Taylor gave me a spray bottle of Dolce & Gabbana Light Blue cologne. I pulled the blue cap off the opaque white bottle and sniffed. Unsure of what to say, I aimed for a middle-of-the-road mix of pleasure and surprise.

  “It smells good,” I said. “I like it.”

  I was relieved that it wasn’t something I had to figure out. Frankly, I would have been happy with a cookie because at least I’d know what to do with it.

  Joan got me some golf shirts, and I felt bad that I had nothing for her. I knew I couldn’t have left the house in my condition, and Joan told me later that I hated going to crowded malls, so I used to pick out and pay for all my Christmas gifts and then get Robyn, my assistant, to pick them up for me. Joan said she hadn’t said anything about gifts this year because I had enough to worry about. In the photos I saw of our last few Christmases, Grant never smiled or interacted with the family; he seemed isolated and withdrawn.