Playdate after Leonie Died

If you had met me three weeks ago, everything would have been different. I would have arrived at the park twenty minutes late. You would’ve waited while I unloaded three pieces of a wheelchair, possibly swearing when I banged my leg against its base—a terribly large monstrosity that must have weighed several tons and had it out for my shins. I would have tried at least five times to slide a stained red seat into that base with the straps tangling themselves around my arms and legs—so many, many straps—before getting it right even though, yes, I did this almost every day. Through the windows of our minivan, you’d have seen two of my daughters shoving each other and crawling over the seats begging for me to let them out, while my other girl, Leonie, would’ve been kicking and waving her arms above her head shrieking, wild with excitement.

I would’ve carried her out first. You would have seen her raise her head over my shoulder wide-eyed looking around for her sisters and grinning so big if you happened to be close enough you could have seen a gap between her lower teeth. You would’ve wondered if you should intervene as I sat her in the chair and she squealed again and arched her back throwing herself forward, barely able to contain her emotion. But you’d have decided not to get involved as I unloaded diapers and wipes, a pump, an emergency breathing machine, a feeding bag, a burp rag, milk, water bottles, and two balls in case anyone wanted to play at the park. You’d have wondered if all of that was really necessary as I shoved them one by one under Leonie’s chair, and then you’d have breathed a sigh of relief as I finally let the other two girls out and slammed the doors, checking three times to make sure my keys were in my back pocket. We’d have walked together as I looked for a place to push the wheelchair up onto the sidewalk and finally made it to the park. And you’d have felt bad mentally criticizing another mom and someone who clearly had her hands full, but you’d have also wondered how I hadn’t come up with a better system to do this by now…unless this little girl in the wheelchair wasn’t really mine, maybe? You’d have had to get the details later though because I would’ve been breathing hard and clearly trying to pretend that things were under control.

It doesn’t matter. I would’ve had an idea that you were thinking those things about me anyway because I would have known as I know now that there are other moms in similar situations who still manage to arrive early and carry around stylish bags with everything organized. I’ve also always been aware that some moms have their other kids much better trained so that they are extra little helpers to their siblings in need instead of slightly feral creatures jumping up on the sides of wheelchairs and demanding rides. Three weeks ago, you would have seen clearly that I wasn’t a poster mom for special needs parenting. Now you just know I never will be. Leonie died long before I could get it together.

But let me tell you in my defense that that wheelchair was a piece of shit even when it had been new. My husband broke his finger the first time we tried to set it up, so we didn’t use it for six months after that, terrified. It was an alarmingly dangerous contraption that had to have been designed by some sadistic engineer who derived a kind of pleasure imagining frazzled, pudgy parents getting their fingers caught up in metal springs as they fumbled around for hidden buttons or tripping on straps that seemed to reproduce overnight and then reach out eagerly for our clumsy wayward limbs. It was so complicated to put together, half of the pictures on my phone are still of that chair, so we could try to reassemble it after washing the seat. I was always finding loose buckles and straps around the house. And just transporting it proved to be a staggering task. Only after a year of Beach Body could I throw it in and out of the van on the first try, which I was proud of, but which didn’t protect me from permanently bruised legs.

And as for the condition it was in? Three weeks ago, you would have seen that it was ripped in places, stained in others, and that Leonie’s legs reached almost to the wheels. You’d have also noticed with alarm that she repeatedly let her head fall forward off the tattered too-small headrest, the harness catching her around her neck as I quickly put her head back in its place and she laughed, thrilled with this game. “She needs a new chair,” I would have said immediately, to let you know I knew. I hope I would have spared you all the details about how just getting the chair serviced had taken seven months the year before and that we had been waiting almost a year for a new chair—that we’d been on a lot of flights recently and there was a new rip in the fabric. I would’ve told you the new chair was on its way, which was true. It was shipped two days before her heart attack.

Last Friday, we met right at her feeding time, so if had been three weeks ago, I would have had to shake up her milk, hook up her tube (that I was amazing at) and start the pump. I’d have adjusted her constantly in her chair as we sat together on the bench, but she wouldn’t have lasted long in it because she had spent most of her almost six years of life in my or my husband’s arms. For the five minutes she would have stayed in her chair, I would have put her feet on my lap and rubbed her legs constantly, pushed her head back when she thrust it forward and held her hand, rubbing my thumb over her little dimples. Then, especially because it’s been chilly, the first time she fussed, I would have lifted her out, her feeding tube catching dangerously on every screw in that hideous seat and sat her in my lap even though you would have noticed that she was way too big for this and her skinny little legs would have hung stiff and long, crowding us on the bench. You would have felt bad wondering what my long-term plan was—would I hold a forty-year-old on other future benches…or…? I would’ve bent her knees as best I could, squeezing her socked feet.

Conversation would have been easy, all filled in with Leonie. I would have pointed everything out to her, and you would have been able to pretend to speak to her the way we get to do with babies. We also wouldn’t have had to get up from that bench one million times to follow the other girls around, carrying their discarded shoes and little backpacks, because we could have just told them that we had to stay on the bench because Leonie was eating—sorry. Only when she finished would we have had to get up briefly to walk her around and push my youngest on the swing. And if Leonie didn’t look too nauseous after her feeding, I might have sat her on my lap and swung a little myself, or we would have had an excuse to walk and talk, pushing her along the trail behind the other girls skipping ahead and racing her on the trail around the volleyball courts.

But as it turned out, we met last Friday, and Leonie’s chair had already been in the dumps for two weeks. In the dumps. I chucked a shoe at my husband when he told me he’d thrown it away and then fell on the floor in uncontrollable sobs. The chair? Thrown away? How could he? How could he? That insensitive impulsive heartless prick. That was her chair. That was our chair. That diabolical horror of a device. That shoddily engineered, beat-up piece of metal shit with the ripped-up red fabric and those murderous little straps. All those straps. Those long black straps that flew out behind her like little limp flags when we ran down the hallways. Pieces of her. Where were they now? Were there any left back for me, tucked between the cushions of the couch or hidden away in a closet? Because if I found one now, I’d wrap it around my finger, run my hand along the ribs in the fabric and think of her. Just her. But they seem to have all disappeared with the rest of the chair—the chair that’s buried somewhere, mangled and bent, crushed under the weight of other forgotten, discarded things. And oh my god. My god.  

So, when you met me, I didn’t have that chair anymore. It had been stolen from me and I stood in front of you unencumbered, stark naked. I was only ten minutes late and that was because I had attempted a trip to Starbucks on the way, out of last-minute desperation for something warm to hold at the park and for a dose of caffeine to snap me out of a rapidly descending depression. You watched as two girls and I jumped out almost simultaneously from the minivan and I quickly shoved the keys in my back pocket. I had nothing with me except a little ball I carried in case they wanted to kick something around. You didn’t wonder even once if I’d be able to make it from the parking lot to the playground because everything looked easy—because lots of people have two girls spaced three years apart that they take on playdates. You might have noticed the dark circles under my eyes or that I was shivering even before the sun started going down, or that I didn’t know what to do with my hands. But if you didn’t happen to notice those things, maybe last Friday, you thought for a few minutes that I was normal because everything seemed that way until you asked me the inevitable question I knew was coming. “So just the two then?” You smiled and pointed to my two girls, pushing each other to get on swings. I’d known when I made this date that you were going to ask that and I’d already made the decision to tell you the truth, but my voice still shook, and my hands flitted everywhere when I told you that actually I had another girl who had died just three weeks before.

Three weeks ago, I’d had three kids. Three weeks ago, she was alive. Three weeks ago, after the sun had gone down and the kids were sitting in the sand on the volleyball courts, letting it slip between their fingers again and again—that’s when you would have asked me for the details about Leonie’s brain and you would have told me about a kid you knew once that had some similar problem or maybe you would have just listened.

But we didn’t meet then. We didn’t meet until her ashes had been in my closet for a few days, until most of her equipment had been donated or thrown away or shipped back to EMD companies. We met last Friday. And so just a few days ago as the sun went down and we followed the girls, picking our way through metal poles in the darkness as they ran fast, sure darts in the night, your own voice shook as you told me about your brother who had died when you were young—about your mom putting his things away and how both she and you were still learning years later to live again.

Because we didn’t meet three weeks ago, because it was just last Friday, Leonie’s things had also been put away, and I didn’t have a chair to push anymore—that unwieldy appendage that had somehow without my realizing it become a part of me as well. Instead, we walked together through the closing park, between dangling empty swings and under the monkey bars that drew perfect lines over the tops of our heads. And as the shadows lengthened and the dark figures of our children ran farther in front of us, mixing in with the others, their laughter disembodied now in the dark, we shivered together and I saw under a light that your eyes, like mine, were filled with tears.