by Una Mannion
Watching Abbey and Sage through the window now, a glimpse of Sage’s bright uniform disappearing through the trees, I had that same sense of my dishonor, spilling secrets nobody else in my family spoke of. Why had I ever breathed a word to Sage about my mother or father or Bill? I had told Sage almost everything. I had called her that night about Ellen. I knew Grady and Charlotte Adams didn’t like my mother, that Charlotte thought she was irresponsible. When Sage knew all this, why would she tell him about Ellen?
I didn’t realize Thomas was home. I was still staring out the window when he came into the living room.
“I heard you told Wilson we had borrowed a lawn mower to cut the grass.”
“Did Mom tell you that? Was she mad?”
“Ellen told me yesterday, after. She said you told Wilson to stay away from our grass.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know why he thought he could cut it in the first place.”
“Maybe because you and Marie let him.”
“Trust me, I don’t want him here. I don’t like him. Marie met him at a punk show or something.”
“And then suddenly one day he’s in your bedroom and another day he’s cutting our grass.”
Ellen must have told him about Wilson being in our room. We hadn’t told Thomas about Barbie Man and now it felt like it was too late.
“I know. It’s weird. But I swear he just did it. Marie didn’t ask him to do those things either.”
He didn’t believe me. “Wilson’s trouble. Stay away from him.”
“That’s like a daily goal.”
“I’ll try the Griffiths tomorrow for a lawn mower.”
I wanted to say No, don’t, anyone but them.
“Okay,” I said. I looked back out the window and watched a blue jay shoot across the sky toward the evergreens, then tilt backward into a stalling angle, the wings beating forward. We’d learned something about it in biology, how they have a bone or an extra wing that can help them brake.
After I left Sage’s that night in winter, I’d avoided her for almost three weeks. But I’d replayed our conversation in my head. Maybe Bill did make my mom happy. I had never really considered my mother’s happiness. I didn’t want her to be unhappy, exactly, but I certainly didn’t want her to be happy with Bill. I wondered if I wanted to punish her, and whether this was what was wrong between us. That she knew. It was Sage who fixed things. She called our house and spoke to Marie. Marie said to go look in the Kingdom, “whatever that means,” that Sage had left me something. I didn’t go for days, even though I was curious, and I missed her. Desperately. At school I had friends in my classes, but on the mountain it was always Sage.
I waited until dawn on a Saturday morning, when I knew she would still be in bed and there was no chance of meeting her. I didn’t know what to expect. The snow had melted and the air had warmed, but the woods looked bare in that stark late-winter way. If whatever she had left was still there, it must be in the hiding place. I pushed away the leaves and the board, and there above the tin was a parcel wrapped in brown paper shopping bags. I unwrapped the paper to find another package in bubble wrap. Inside was a black picture frame. A few summers earlier, Dad had said Sage could come with us one day to cut grass. Sage had brought her camera and treated it like a field trip, taking pictures and asking him about everything he planted or pulled. She’d framed a black-and-white photograph of us from that day, standing by the pickup truck, him in his white T-shirt and work trousers, me in jeans and a T-shirt. We were both smiling, looking sort of proud and shy. My head was tilted toward his shoulder, and he was looking toward the camera. We looked happy. In the bubble wrap was a small white card. I opened it.
I’m sorry. I loved him, too.
Ain’t life unkind?
In the picture we are both smiling with our mouths closed. I looked like him. Sage had quoted “Ruby Tuesday.” I’d recognized it straightaway.
14
It was Thomas who ended up meeting Barbie Man on the mountain first, even though he didn’t know who he was. We’d made a deal. I’d edge the what were supposed to be flower beds and pull weeds, and Thomas would walk up to the Griffiths’ to borrow a lawn mower. I used a spade, angling it to create a clean edge of earth between the grass and the beds that had no flowers. I was almost finished with the first one when Thomas came around the corner and down the street, pushing the borrowed lawn mower.
Thomas and I were the two who had cut grass and worked with my dad the most, ever since we were small. Thomas had always tried to prove himself through hard work. I watched him coming down the road, and I knew it had humiliated him to ask. I remembered a day at the Cat Lady’s when we were working with my dad. She lived alone in an old Victorian with at least forty cats. My dad had looked after her garden for over fifteen years, since before I was born. She had been trying to sell the house for a long time, and a few summers ago it had finally sold, even with all the cats hanging around, lying on counters and sitting in sinks. When she was moving, she hired my father to do some work inside, pulling up carpets and taking old furniture to the dump. Marie, Thomas, and I all went to help with the job. It was late July and hot, well into the nineties. We’d peeked through her windows before to look at the cats, but had never been inside. The heat and stench were stifling. The ammonia from the cat pee burned our eyes and squeezed the air out of our lungs. It was a three-story house, and the cats had been everywhere. To make it worse, she had turned off the air-conditioning.
“The mean bitch,” Marie muttered.
We started on the third floor, where it was hottest, and tried to pull out the small carpet nails at the edges. Dad told us to go back to the truck and get gloves. The fumes were in my mouth and throat. When we rolled up the first carpet, which was damp, the floorboards were rotten underneath.
“Get out of the house and wash your hands and faces at the outside spigot. Get the soap in the truck,” Dad told us. “Thomas, you stay with me.” He said that the odor would never come out; the new owners would have to take out the floorboards. Marie and I sat outside for hours, saying very little, while Dad and Thomas finished the work alone, carrying rolled-up rotten carpets and heaving them into the back of the truck. Thomas worked intently, staggering under the weight and smell, never wanting to let my father down. He was fourteen.
I sat on the curb with Marie and looked over at the garden that my father had planted for the Cat Lady years earlier. That year’s tomatoes were ripe and red on their vines against her deck. Dad had canes supporting them with soft string so as not to damage the tender stalks. The Cat Lady had a Venus de Milo statue in the garden, a naked woman about as high as my hip with missing arms. Marie walked over and kicked her to the ground and came back and sat next to me on the curb. Her face was dirty and streaked.
“Fucking people think they know something about culture,” she had said.
Now, Thomas wheeled the Griffiths’ lawn mower into the drive and stopped where I was working with the spade.
“Were they nice about it?”
“Yeah. Jack’s going to collect it later after work. They invited me to go to the shore with them tonight.”
“Oh. You should go.” I tried to disguise the pang in my voice.
Thomas started to push the lawn mower up the driveway and stopped. “Hey, doesn’t that Kowalski kid drive a green Impala?”
“What?”
“A green Impala? Some weird guy was just asking.”
I could feel the thuds of my panic in my stomach. “What do you mean, weird guy?”
I knew the kid he was talking about. Craig Kowalski drove a green car, and he hung around with Danny Shields.
“What weird guy?” I repeated.
“Some guy just stopped me on the road and said he was looking for a kid with a green Impala, that he had something belonging to him, and did I know who he was.”
“What made him weird?”
“He was a freak. Long hair. I don’t know. Scary. Even if I knew where the Kowalski kid lived, I w
ouldn’t have said. His face was all messed up.”
“What?” I looked at the top of the street to see if there were any cars, if he had followed Thomas. I tried to think. Where was Ellen? She and Beatrice had both gone with Mom this morning on her way to work. They were with school friends.
“His face. It was all bruised and swollen.”
A grenade was exploding in my head. He wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t so hurt that he couldn’t drive. And he was here. Thomas moved the lawn mower farther up the drive and leaned over, setting the choke and pulling the starter. The engine kicked in. Barbie Man was up here, and he was looking for the people who had done this to him. He had come alone in broad daylight. I tried to pull a clump of weeds, but my arms were powerless. I sat on the front steps watching Thomas cut the grass. Barbie Man was up here, and who could I tell? Marie was gone. Sage and I weren’t speaking. Wilson was the one who had brought this trouble to us. I kept looking toward the top of the street to see if a car—Ellen had said he drove a black car—passed or turned down toward us. Thomas came and sat beside me when he’d finished the grass.
“You didn’t finish spading.”
“I’m tired. I will, though.”
“The grass still looks shit.”
“It’s a lot better than it was. A few more cuts.”
“Yeah.”
I wished I could tell him everything, how the weirdo in the car could be coming for us, what had happened to Ellen. But we were so far in, and I didn’t know how to undo not telling him in the first place.
“Mom will probably kill me if I take off for the shore without asking her first. I should call her at work.”
“Don’t. It’s not an emergency. Get Mrs. Griffith to call later. Swimming’s finally finished. You haven’t been anywhere. You should go.”
Marie said Thomas was one of those people who was funny when you got to know him. Smart-funny, Marie called it, which she said was wasted on people our age. He seemed lonely to me.
“It’ll mess up my study schedule.”
“What study schedule?”
“SATs.”
“Are you kidding? That’s what you’re doing up in your room? You hopeless geek.”
Thomas pushed me on the shoulder. He had achieved a near-perfect SAT score the fall of his junior year. He was insisting on taking them again. I thought how sensible both Marie and Thomas were, studying hard. We all worked hard at school. Sage was always messing up, not turning stuff in and missing tests. She was smart, smarter than me, but she didn’t care as much as we did. Marie said the difference between us and other people was that we didn’t have the same safety net. We couldn’t afford to fuck up.
“A few days isn’t going to blow your SAT scores.”
When we went inside, I walked through the house locking all the doors, then lay down on the couch in the rec room, where I would be able to hear any door or window open.
I must have drifted off, and I woke with a start. Thomas was standing over me with his school bag. For a moment I was confused, thinking I had overslept for school.
“What?”
“I’m leaving. Jack’s here, and we’re going to the shore.”
“What?” I rubbed my eyes. Jack Griffith was standing at the door of the rec room, looking at me. I sat up, wiped the sleep-drool from my cheek, and pushed my hair back. He must have rung the bell or knocked, and I hadn’t heard. I had fallen asleep when I was supposed to be on watch.
“Do we have a beach towel?” Thomas was talking to me. I was still half asleep.
“One of Sage’s is in the linen closet.”
Thomas dropped the bag and went upstairs. I looked down at my legs, streaked with dirt, grass blades stuck to them. I tucked them under me.
“You good?” asked Jack, looking around the room but not at me.
“Yeah. Good.” I would have loved to tell him how shit everything was.
“I saw Sage the other night.”
“Yeah?”
“She didn’t say?”
“No,” I lied. He didn’t seem able to look at me. I couldn’t think of anything to say. “Do you want your T-shirt back?”
Jack glanced toward the stairs. He didn’t want it mentioned. “No. Keep it. I don’t want it.” It was awkward.
“Pink fucking flamingos?” Thomas walked back into the rec room, holding Sage’s beach towel. I’d forgotten how pink it was. We all laughed.
Jack took a few steps toward me and reached out his hand. Oh my God, he’s going to pat my head. He pulled something from my hair. My hand instinctively pressed against the side of my head. I almost said “What the hell was that for?”
He was holding a leaf in his hand. He had taken a leaf out of my tangle of hair, and he turned to Thomas, still holding it. “Libby in her leaf world,” he said. I knew that there was some kind of rejection happening, that the gesture of pulling the leaf from my hair was supposed to make it like before, when he was just my older brother’s friend. The gesture was for Thomas, sort of a joke at my expense.
“Okay. We’re heading out. You’ll tell Mom? Jack’s mom is going to call her later in case she’s upset or whatever.”
I said okay and watched as they walked toward the door. Jack was still holding the leaf. It was from the magnolia tree.
They were gone. I was alone in the house. I checked again that all the doors were locked. If Barbie Man was up here looking for the boys that had hurt him, I needed to tell somebody. I took out the phone book, but there was no listing for any McVays on Valley Forge Mountain. The Mountain Directory had a list of families, but my mom kept it with her papers in the locked chest in her bedroom closet. Sometimes, when just Marie and I were home, we picked the lock with a bobby pin. I got one from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and went into her bedroom. Her room was sparse: a queen-size bed, two bureaus and a chair. There was a picture on the bureau of the five of us. Beatrice was only about one. Marie was holding her, and I was standing next to them, looking as if I were the attending nurse, just in case Marie dropped her or something. Beatrice was holding my finger. Looking at it, I thought I would do anything on this earth for her. Thomas, about age nine, was looking off to the side. Ellen was staring straight back at the camera, intensely. I couldn’t remember a photograph where she was smiling. Marie had a joke that Ellen was practiced in the art of scowling. The picture was us. Beatrice holding us together. Marie pragmatic and mothering; Thomas thinking about astrophysics or the universe; me worrying, being vigilant; Ellen angry and looking straight out at things.
I knelt on the floor in front of the wooden chest, spread the bobby pin open, laid the flat side down and turned, slowly applying pressure. The chest latch popped, and I lifted the lid. Inside, all the documents were organized into neat bundles and sectioned into packs by rubber bands. There were photographs and letters and certificates and the Mountain Directory, with the Valley Forge Mountain Association information. I opened it and looked up the McVays. The family was listed. They lived on Paul Lemen Drive. Wilson was an only child, born October 1961. That made him almost twenty. Next to “Phone,” it read “Unlisted.” I put the directory back.
I reached for the bundle that held my father’s things. His birth, marriage, and death certificates. His passport. His green card. The divorce decree. I started with the birth certificate. The last time we touched it, Marie had said it smelled like Ireland. I don’t know why we’d started doing this, looking at the documents. Maybe it was just finding proof of things that were never talked about. I unfolded it carefully and held it up to my face and breathed it. His birth was entered in handwriting. Black fountain pen. “Father and Mother: Sean Gallagher and Bridget Fox.” It was a last name I loved and sometimes pretended was my own. Libby Fox. I imagined his mother and father, Sean and Bridget, traveling into town to register the birth of their newborn son. I saw it in black and white, a long, long time ago. They had written their occupations: “Farmers.”
I’d met my grandmother, Bridget Fox, just once that I
could remember, when I was ten. We’d been to Ireland before, but I was so young I didn’t remember her from those earlier trips. I only remembered her from the time that just Dad and I went. The day we were leaving to go home, she held on to my father and wouldn’t let go. Her black skirts reached the ground, and she had a gray bun and hairs growing from her chin. She was so small she didn’t reach his shoulder, and he wasn’t a tall man. She cried little sounds and clung to him. She spoke to me, but I couldn’t understand her; I had hardly understood a word she said the whole visit.
It was the last time my father saw her. She died the following winter during a snowstorm. We had been home from school for a few days, and the morning that school reopened, the phone rang very early. I knew it was Ireland calling because the phone always beeped at the start of the call. A voice that sounded far away asked for Dad, giving his full name. I said he had gone to shovel driveways, because we were never to tell them in Ireland about his not living with us. He had no phone in his apartment. When he arrived in the pickup truck that morning to take us to school, we sat in the truck while he went inside to make the phone call home. He walked back to us in the truck, his black wool hat pulled low. He put his two hands on the wheel as if to drive and just kept them there.
“What is it?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. A few times he cleared his throat as if he was about to speak. He coughed out his first word and then tried again. “I can’t speak right now; my mother died this morning.” He looked out the driver’s-side window, away from us.
Marie handed him the roll of paper towels on the floor of the cab, and he pulled off a sheet and blew his nose. He drove us to school through the snow in silence. Outside, branches hung toward the earth, wheels spun and cars crawled, and all the strangeness was magnified by the news that Dad’s mother was dead. I looked up at him and saw a trail like a snail leaves on the carpet, tracked down the side of his face.
