Yellow Flags

Maybe it was best I ignored the signs.

It wasn’t like him to not show up for something like this.

Maybe we should have spent the night together.

Maybe I should have called at our usual time, right after American Idol, instead of calling too late. He probably fell asleep and forgot to set his alarm.

Now, I had to go. I couldn’t miss my flight. Of course, I could drive myself and pay for parking in the short-term lot.

Mom was my arrival pick-up, waiting to transport me to my grandparents’ house in a blue-collar suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. As we made our way over familiar potholes, I continued to call Steve’s cell. I didn’t bother leaving more messages.

Instead, my mind continued to imagine legit excuses — maybe his phone was dead. Or maybe he was working on dock repairs and lost his phone in the lake. In that case, he was in line at the Verizon store, working on getting another cell phone.

Dinner at Grandma’s rolled around early (5 p.m. sharp was the traditional grandparental suppertime.) I took small but polite portions of ham, baked beans, and Gram’s potato salad; meanwhile, my mind created darker scenarios. Maybe he’d been in an accident on the way home from yesterday’s sales call. He could be lying in the ditch along some rural road in South Carolina.

Pap watched me check my phone once again, and as he finished his beans, he pushed his plate away; he said, “It is time to worry.”

This proclamation jolted me. Suddenly I’d been handed a permission slip to do something, and I hadn’t prepared for that. Thinking of a practical next step up the anxiety, like putting one more breath of air into a bulging thin-skinned balloon.

I decided to call my best friend, Tim. Tim knew Steve, of course, and had been to Steve’s house by the lake. I didn’t ask, but Tim offered to drive out there and check on Steve in person.

I agreed.

The next call I got was from Tim asking for the code to go inside the house. He said that Steve’s car was in the drive, but no one answered the door. Nervously, Tim said he was going to get the neighbor to go in with him. I gave him the code and waited, pacing around my grandparents’ kitchen, not doing a stellar job of helping clean up.

What Tim held back from me was that, through the slender glass windows that flanked the front door, as he rang the doorbell, he saw Steve motionless on the couch.

As much as the ego attempts to use fear to “protect us,” it has other tricks up its sleeve if we ignore its worries. In this case, it pulled out its big gun of denial. I imagined Tim and the neighbor finding Steve coming off the lake on his pontoon boat or jet ski.

The rest of that night cannot be reassembled. My brain stored it in bits and pieces because the whole evening was too hard to process. What I remember:

• Tim called back and said, “Susan, I am so sorry. Steve is dead.”
• A phone call from Steve’s teenage son, his namesake, calling to ask if I knew where his dad was.
• Pap shaking his head, “Why him, and not me?”
• Me croaking to Steven, “Call your mother…go to your mother’s house now.”

The many clocks in the house, including two grandfather clocks and one cuckoo, ticked loudly throughout the night. The grandfathers gonged relentlessly, in fifteen-minute clockwork increments, not in synch, but one like an echo of the other. Worse was the cuckoo, a solid five minutes later, chortling its presence every half hour.

Time was inching forward for my friend, Tim, too. The police had lots of questions.

Sleepless on the fold-out sofa bed in the porch room, I called to share the tragic news with my closest girlfriend. For the first minute, she thought Steve and I were pulling an April Fools. Yeah, it was April first. She sobered quickly and apologized.

Two days ahead of our intended schedule, my mom and I drove back to South Carolina, taking a small Chevy, a gift from my grandparents for my son. The weather was still wintry, and the northern roadways were slick with slush and sleet. Paying attention to the roads was a direction for my mind to go, and the effort of concentration had a welcome numbing effect. I was highly grateful for the presence of Mom, who sat with me in long silence, no radio playing to distract us from navigation.

Getting back seemed urgent, but as it turned out, the days ahead of the service were a great vacuum to be filled with sadness and one discovery about Steve that ripped my blinders off.

The truth was, I had glimpses of “yellow flags,” as I called them in conversations with my besties. But I can’t beat myself up about wearing blinders. Alcoholism carries a stigma in families. Perhaps because there’s a genetic propensity for it to be handed down. Or maybe it’s because the alcoholic’s behavior invites judgment. Add that Steve’s family was Catholic, and you’ve got a perfect storm of a secret conspiracy; no one dared to pull a string that could unravel everything. I was an outsider.

Steve’s ex was the one who broke the alcoholism headline to me, over the phone, in the days leading up to the funeral. During several long conversations, I walked with the phone pressed to my ear, listening to her side of the stories I heard from Steve but suddenly saw in a new light and connected to my own yellow flag moments during the 21 months Steve and I were together.

Memories of our relationship strung together like video snippets, endearing, if alcohol weren’t the inspiration, that is. Roll video:

“Honey, I’m home!” It’s Steve doing his best Ricky Ricardo imitation as he waltzes into the house.

Then there’s us, “Snoopy dancing” in our bathing suits at the lakefront dive bar, a jet ski ride across the lake.

His Fourth of July parties (how we first met), complete with a live band and him launching big fireworks over the lake.

Steve tearfully saying grace at the dinner table with the kids and their friends.

Me watching him make perogies from scratch, flour everywhere, and stories about his “Babcia,” then baking cookies while singing the romantic lines to his favorite country songs, a private karaoke show for me.

Should these sloppy, romantic moments have been yellow flags, too?

There were more vivid yellows, however, that were getting bigger with time. Maybe our relationship was a ticking time bomb, anyway.

The night we stayed too long at the dive bar, he jetted ahead on his ski, losing me. I pulled in at a small public dock because my jet ski didn’t have lights. It was a landing operated by a strange older man and a weird younger character (think the 1972 flick Deliverance), and there was me, no phone, just my flip flops, bikini, and life jacket, lost on the lake.

There were nights I would never have let Steve drive if I had known his condition in advance.

Then, there were times I wondered, what happened? How did he possibly get so drunk so fast? Turns out, the house hid tons of empty liquor bottles. His smoke breaks in the basement weren’t just about puffing a cigarette.

Steve visited me twice in the earlier days after he passed.

The first, I was in full grief, sleepless night mode. He swooped in and grabbed my hands, pulling me to a vista like the one from the deck at the back of his house. He took one hand and threw a ball of sparkles and a glittering yellow path across the water. I felt the wind blow my hair, like riding on the back of his jet ski. He assured me his life on the other side was great.

As tears rolled down my cheeks towards the ground of my pillow, I extended my arms and felt his hands grasp mine. It felt so real. He went for one of his old jokes, “Big hands, big feet…you know what that means?”

“Big gloves, big socks!” We said together.

About a year or so later, he caught me by surprise. I pulled out an old iPad to pass on to a friend and opened the email app. I had sent Steve a message in March, shortly before he passed. It read:

“This is a test. Are you there?”

At the top of the thread was his reply, “Yes, I am.”

While I had imagined a lifetime with this man, the yellow flags I ignored were apparent indicators of turbulence beneath the surface. His death, and the grief that followed, was an invitation to simplify things through acceptance. Was it better that I got to love him without knowing the struggles he hid from me? Quite possibly so.