Sample from "SEE YA"

July 4, 1996...

The Fourth of July dawned hot and bright and blue. We were giving a party that afternoon, Cameron and I, under the oak trees that stood sentinel in the back yard of our new home.

The gathering would be a celebration of several things. We had just bought this house from my parents, Matthew and Ginny, an article had just come out that mentioned Matthew, and there was just plain catching up to do with old friends.

We rose early that morning to ready tables and chairs under streamers hung from fat oak branches, stack plates and cups and fill ice chests with drinks against the heat.

At 8:00 a.m. I broke for a moment from wrestling a picnic table into place and leaned back against the limestone wall of the house. My skin was already moist and I pushed my hair from my forehead with an impatient hand.

The house breathed out the curious cool that thick stone walls hold even in the worst summer heat. This house was built in 1869, in the days when Austin was first settled. The limestone blocks were rough-hewn and chunky. Inside, the rooms were dim. And silent, as if within them time stood still.

I looked down the long sloping back yard to the creek at yard's end and took a deep drink from my cup of water.

The oak trees lay heavy pools of shade, branches stirring, streamers and tablecloths fluttering gently in the faint breeze. Beyond them, creek water winked in the sunlight. The red, white and blue decorations were a standard Fourth of July theme, but in this case they also honored Matthew's thirty years of Air Force service.

He had been the focal point of a story about his Pentagon days published just the week before in Stars and Stripes. Once he had been a full colonel, admired and well-spoken of. People still kept track of him.

Now in town by chance for a unit reunion, many had called, and the party went from little to big in nothing flat, the way many of our happenings do.

I looked around our yard. We had only recently moved in, and we were a long way from House Beautiful material. It would be Matthew and Ginny's first time as guests here. They had moved into this house more than twenty years ago, when Matthew came back to Texas after long tours with the Pentagon.

The two of them were full of plans these days, new condo owners delighted with having nothing to do but shut the door and go. They were ready to travel light at last, it seemed.

I went back to work, and the morning sped by.

At eleven the doorbell began to ring, and by noon people were gathered in chairs scattered around in two groups, one beneath the live oaks and pecan trees that edged the creek and another near the chips and drinks on the porch.

The heavy scent of citronella lay over the party, keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Voices grew into a hum, laced with the sounds of laughter and old rock and roll from the CD player someone had switched on.

At noon Cameron lit the grill for burgers and took a head count for the first batch, his familiar long length wreathed in smoke. Our girls flitted in and out between him and everything he was trying to do. Our oldest, Linnea, at seven, was barely ribcage-high when she got right up next to him and determinedly tried to match his stride and reach as he moved and set things out.

From inside I watched and smiled and kept putting things together. After twelve years, I still liked to look at him. Linnea and Leah both had Cameron's hazel eyes and my brown hair. They were saddle-tan, hair sun-streaked, so that they looked like a play of moving light and shadow even when they were standing still, which was almost never.

The door opened and Ginny came inside. My mother and I looked nothing alike. I was dark and slender, like the Indian great-grandmother I had, sharing even her dark, dark eyes. She was slender, had high-cheekbones and wore her frosted bob tucked behind her ears. She did not ask if I needed help, just glanced at what I had done and went to the fridge for the trays of tiny quiche we had prepared the night before.

She was competent, quick and self-sufficient, the essence of Air Force wives who juggled households for months on end when husbands were gone. Ginny carried on that "do-it-myself" mannerism even when Matthew came home. They made a team but moved independently of each other.

And what about Cameron and me? I tried to decide while I refilled my glass with iced tea. I wasn't sure, but before I could take the thought further three-year-old Leah burst into the room, crying. Behind her the screen door slammed with a crack, a sound that always called summer to me.

"Her won't let me be outside!" she pointed indignantly to Linnea, who entered behind her, rolling her eyes. Leah's lower lip stuck out in a pout, and her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, the picture of misery and suffering. Mad at her big sister. At three all she wanted to be was what Linnea already was. That made her older sister a star to reach for, one that burned when it reached down from its great height and told the little sister "no."

"Okay," I dropped into the kitchen rocking chair and pulled Leah into my lap, shifting my iced tea as I settled her weight. The ragged breathing slowed enough that she could explain that Linnea was getting in her way while she tried blowing bubbles through the smoke from the hamburger fire. I held her heavy on my shoulder and peered out the window to see how people were doing.

Cameron waved a spatula that the first burgers and toasted buns were ready. And Matthew, laughing, was the first in line at the grill, taking a patty from the burgers heaped at one end. He turned to sit down and simply sank to the ground. The move was oddly slow and graceful, like a dancer at the end of his performance. But Matthew had never been a dancer.

I rocked and waited my daughter in my arms. But he didn't move again. I remember feeling the icy glass sliding through my fingers as I watched him lying oh so still. I do not recall putting Leah down, or moving from kitchen to yard.

The next thing I knew I was beside him.

"Matthew — Dad," I said, kneeling. But he didn't answer, and in the sudden hush I heard someone calling for an ambulance, the words far off and tinny-sounding to my ear. Cameron pushed me to the side and tore open Matthew's shirt, already counting for CPR. Someone else held Matthew's head steady and echoed Cameron's cadence.

I stayed there, my father's hand in mine, until the sirens shrilled to a stop at our door. The other voice went on calling when to breathe and not. I recall watching Cameron raise his head and say "Matthew, come on." Ginny was there, too, kneeling beside us, calling Matthew's name in a high keening cry.

I only remember the rest in bright and vivid flashes

Heart attack; they said, nothing more they could do there — he needed to be transported at once, already sprouting tubes, covered in blankets and attended by urgent murmurs. And so we went.

A flash-forward of pulsing lights and sirens, Ginny and I were at the emergency room of with cold steel and tile and Matthew quiet on a table.

Somewhere between one second and the next, faint breathing became final stillness — one moment, breath drawn, and then not another. I do not remember why, but suddenly everyone was gone and it was just Matthew and me in that cool and silent place. Ginny had gone down the hall with the preacher. I could hear her, her voice climbing, wound up tighter and tighter, refusing the calming words.

Matthew, I willed. But no breathing answered my wishes, my prayers for my father on the table. I watched the clock on the wall make its slow way on to each second. I kept thinking that I could make it one more count without screaming, but oh, they were so slow. Tick…tock…tick…tock.

In the faraway place that is reality, I thought, so this is it. This is dying. But I really didn't believe. In my sandals and shorts I kept looking at him, kept wondering just when the soul wafts away. In so visible a person, character so strongly felt, how could it not be seen when it went on its way?