Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  “Hello,” a man there said. “You’re the Quinns, is that right? I’m very sorry for your loss. My name is Nate McLaren—I’m Mr. Quinn’s lawyer.”

  He had a round face, with rimmed half-glasses down near the tip of his nose, and a mustache so bristly you could shine shoes with it. He took us all in, his expression half sad and half kindly, as if he’d practiced the right way to greet people in mourning. Then I told myself not to be so harsh; he might be a decent person, someone who genuinely wanted to help us.

  “I’m afraid I hadn’t expected so many of you,” he said.

  He dragged some more chairs to a table in the corner and we sat down and introduced ourselves. I thought he looked up when Ms. Burden gave her name, but maybe I imagined it. There was no reason why he should have, anyway.

  He picked up some papers on the table, pushed his glasses up, pulled them off. “So,” he said, looking up at us. “The first thing I have to tell you is good news. Your father had a life insurance policy, a big one, because he knew you’d need it if he wasn’t around. So you don’t have to worry about finances for many years yet. You’ll get the entire sum when you come of age, and there’s enough there for you to go to college.”

  He beamed through his mustache, as if he’d said something remarkable. I hadn’t really heard anything past his first few words, though, which had caught me and suggested an entire story in the space of a few seconds. The good news was that it had all been a mistake: the EMTs had been wrong and Philip was still alive. It took me a while to drag myself back to reality, to force myself to pay attention.

  My sisters were all nodding, so I nodded too. “So maybe I should read the will itself,” Mr. McLaren said. “Being of sound mind, so forth, so on . . . In the event of my death I would like my good friend Katherine Burden to be my children’s guardian—”

  “What!” I said.

  “What?” Ms. Burden asked, an instant later.

  Mr. McLaren looked at her. “Is there a problem? That’s you, isn’t it? Katherine Burden?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  “Okay, very good. And you’ll be able to be the children’s guardian? There’s a sum set aside for their maintenance, a good-sized amount, so you won’t have any trouble on that score—”

  “I have a problem with this,” I said, finally getting my voice back. “We were supposed to go to our uncle in Indiana.”

  “Yes,” Mr. McLaren said. He took his glasses off. “So this is a revised version of Mr. Quinn’s will, dated, let’s see, October 22, 2000. He’s signed it, right here, and had it witnessed by two people, and then he couriered it over on the twenty-third. All legal and aboveboard.” He looked at Ms. Burden. “Did he tell you what he’d done, that he’d made you the children’s guardian?”

  She shook her head. “No. Honestly, I’m surprised as they are. And delighted, of course. I’d love to take the children—I already feel we’re very close.”

  “Let me see it,” I said. I slid the will closer. I had the crazy idea that she’d forged it, but Philip’s signature looked just as same as all the other times I’d seen it. I pointed to the two signatures below his. “Who are these people?” I asked.

  “His witnesses,” Mr. McLaren said. “I don’t know who they are, colleagues maybe. One minute.”

  He went to his desk and used the intercom to talk to his secretary, then came back to the table. His finger hovered in the air, pointing toward him, and he walked into it, pushing his glasses up. It would have been funny at any other time.

  He sat down and looked over the will again. “There’s a bequest of ten thousand dollars to someone named Esperanza Suarez,” he said. “Do you know who that is?”

  I didn’t feel like talking, or cooperating in any way. “She’s our housekeeper,” Beatriz said.

  “Oh, very good,” Mr. McLaren said.

  The woman we’d seen in the other room came over to him and handed him some papers. He flipped to the last page and turned it to face me. “So this is the will your father made in 1994. That’s when his wife died, your mother, is that right?” Beatriz nodded. “He told me he knew he had to make some provision for you children if anything happened to him.”

  I looked at both signatures, the earlier and the later one, as if the answers I wanted would be written there. They were very similar, with only slight variations. So the newer signature probably wasn’t forged, I thought; a forger would have copied it exactly.

  “The witnesses are different,” I said.

  “Well, that’s not surprising,” Mr. McLaren said. “The wills were six years apart, after all. He probably couldn’t find the same people, or didn’t know them anymore.”

  I was furious at everyone. At Philip, who had done this without asking me, when he knew what I thought of Ms. Burden. At Ms. Burden, for agreeing to it. Even at Uncle Len, who I blamed for not being enthusiastic enough about taking us in, for making Philip change his plans.

  “Well, that’s the general outline, anyway,” Mr. McLaren said. I added him to the list of people I hated. “I’ll have to talk to Ms. Burden here, work out the details, but you kids can be assured that you’re provided for.”

  “And this way you won’t even have to move,” Ms. Burden said. “You can stay in Eugene, go to the same schools, keep all your old friends. That’s good, isn’t it?”

  I turned to her. I felt Piper rising up triumphantly within me, felt his blasphemous joy, and for the first time I welcomed him completely.

  “Listen, you malicious, mendacious, overweening smudge,” I said. “You hanger-on of other people’s families. You envious giraffe. My father’s dead, and there’s nothing remotely good about any of this.”

  I hadn’t even known Piper could talk. He wasn’t finished, though, or I wasn’t; I wasn’t sure which of us was saying these things. “You thief, you cut-rate Bonnie and Clyde. You—”

  Everyone was looking at me, stunned. “I had no idea you could express yourself so well, Ivy,” Ms. Burden said drily.

  Mr. McLaren cleared his throat. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Ivy. Unfortunately, your father’s will is clear on this point.”

  The jubilation I’d felt from Piper was ebbing now. I sat back in my chair, saying nothing. We didn’t seem to have any choice; we were going to go home with the person I was starting to dislike more than anyone in the world.

  “It won’t be as terrible as you think,” Mr. McLaren said. “You’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 9

  HE WAS WRONG, though. Things were that terrible, or worse. It was a Möbius strip of terrible—awful events coming back around over and over again.

  There was the funeral, for one thing. The day after we saw the lawyer, Ms. Burden sat Beatriz and me down and looked us over, her eyes bright. “Is there anyone you think we should invite to Philip’s funeral?” she asked.

  Beatriz shrugged. “We didn’t really know his friends and stuff,” she said.

  “I was thinking more of relatives—aunts or uncles or cousins, like that.”

  Aunt Maeve! How could we have forgotten her? But Philip had told us often enough not to mention her to anyone outside the family. And my suspicions of Ms. Burden had returned stronger than ever, especially after she’d become our guardian.

  I made some kind of face at Beatriz, hoping that she’d guess my meaning. “Well, we have an Uncle Len,” she said. “He lives in Indiana somewhere.”

  “Uncle Len, good,” Ms. Burden said. “Here, I have an idea.” She sounded cheerful, too cheerful for what we were talking about. “Let’s look at your phone book.”

  We paged through it slowly, looking at names, some familiar or nearly so, some we’d never heard of. I grew more and more anxious the closer we came to the “M”s. Philip hadn’t written down Maeve’s new phone number, I knew, but I didn’t want Ms. Burden even to see a crossed-out name, to know that Maeve existed.

  Our phone book was a ring binder, with hole-punched pages that could be added or taken out. When we got to “M” I saw th
at Philip had done exactly what I’d hoped: he’d taken out the old page and rewritten all the names except Maeve’s on a new one. Ms. Burden held the page between her fingers and flipped it back and forth for a while, saying nothing.

  I let out my breath softly. Beatriz seemed relieved as well. We became tense again when we reached the “R”s, in case he’d put her under “Reynolds,” but she wasn’t there either.

  “I guess that’s all, then,” Ms. Burden said when we came to the end. She’d written down a few names, including Uncle Len’s. “Unless you can think of anyone else?”

  “No,” Beatriz said, and I shook my head.

  Beatriz and I discussed Ms. Burden a lot, mostly after we’d gone to bed and turned the lights out. How often had we talked like this, two distant satellites, beaming our signals out through the darkness? Those conversations always seemed different from everything else in our lives, nothing to do with the daily world of school and homework and the rest of our family.

  “We have to find her,” Beatriz said. “Aunt Maeve.”

  “We don’t have her phone number, though. She changed it after someone kept calling her, remember? And you saw the phone book—Philip never wrote it down.”

  “Well, could you find her house?”

  I sketched the route against the darkness, trying to follow it through the trees and the highway. “I don’t think so,” I said. “Anyway, how would we even get there? I don’t think a bus goes anywhere near it.”

  “Take a taxi. Tell them to drive around a while and look for it.”

  “Do you know how much that would cost? There’s no way we could afford it.” I thought of something else. “Philip used to deposit those checks for her. What if she runs out of money? Or food?”

  “God,” Beatriz said.

  We said nothing after that. We were both thinking about Aunt Maeve, I knew, imagining her alone in her house in the middle of the woods.

  The day of the funeral I put on my favorite dress, one with a print of bright red and yellow flowers. I thought that at least now Ms. Burden couldn’t complain about my clothes. But when I came down to breakfast she had that reproachful expression I was starting to find so familiar.

  “You can’t wear something that colorful to a funeral, Ivy,” she said.

  “He liked this dress,” I said. That wasn’t true, actually. He’d never said much about our clothes, just asked if they fit.

  “Well, you don’t look very sad about your father’s death.”

  “Why should I care if people think I’m sad or not?”

  “It’s a convention, like—”

  Beatriz came down then, and Ms. Burden found some fault with what she was wearing as well. But Beatriz didn’t argue, just went back to our room and put on another dress. By that time Amaranth and Semiramis had shown up, and in the confusion I never did change my clothes.

  A light rain was falling when we got to the chapel. Hundreds of people seemed to have come out for the funeral, and somehow that finally made it real to me. I could no longer imagine that Philip was just at work, that he would come through the front door at any moment.

  My sisters and I didn’t know anything about funerals, so Ms. Burden made all the decisions for us, including finding a minister. But when the minister started to talk we soon realized that he’d never met Philip; the man he talked about could have been almost anyone. Even worse were all the references to God, when Philip had been an atheist.

  My attention started to wander. I thought about the real Philip, the man who had tried to be both a father and mother to us. He’d failed sometimes, but he’d succeeded a lot more, and even when he came up short we knew he loved us.

  When the service ended I spotted Uncle Len, who stood alone, without his wife and children. We moved from the chapel to the cemetery, and I made my way toward him. “Why didn’t you want to be our guardian?” I asked, too unhappy to try to be polite.

  “I never said I didn’t, Ivy,” he said, opening an umbrella and holding it over both of us. He had the same air of grave bewilderment as Philip. “I can’t imagine why my brother changed his mind.”

  “Can you talk to the lawyer? Tell him we’re going to live with you after all?”

  “I can’t go against what Philip wanted. And he had his reasons, I’m sure—he always did.”

  School was awful as well. People had already started avoiding me, and the fact that not one but both of my parents had died seemed only to make me stranger in their eyes. There were whispered rumors: that I’d killed both of them, that my family had done something horrible and been cursed for it.

  Beatriz had started middle school the previous semester and she talked to me sometimes, but she had her own friends to hang out with. I ate lunch by myself, mostly, and tried to act as if that was my own choice. Piper helped here; being around him had shown me how to deal with embarrassment.

  I still missed my father terribly. Losing someone close is like losing a part of yourself, an arm, maybe. You keep trying to do all the things you used to do, reaching for a book, opening a door, passing the salt. And then suddenly it hits you: a part of you is gone, and it’s forever.

  It hurts like an amputation as well, a pain that never seems to go away. Once while Beatriz and I were walking to school I stopped and sobbed for ten minutes straight. There was no reason for it; nothing had happened to make that day worse than any other. But I had to sit down on the curb and give in to my sorrow until it ended. Beatriz sat next to me, saying nothing, waiting until I finished.

  If it hadn’t been for Beatriz I don’t know what I would have done. Philip’s death had brought us closer, and we were fighting less and talking more. She even seemed, ever so slowly, to be coming around to my point of view, that there was something wrong with Ms. Burden.

  She’d noticed, for example, that Ms. Burden did very little around the house. After the funeral she’d visited the lawyer to do some lawyerly stuff, get instructions or sign things or something, but since then she was usually on the phone or studying her computer.

  “Did you notice how quickly she made herself at home?” I said one day, as we were walking home. “She even took over Philip’s bedroom, even after I told her not to.”

  “Oh—you told her,” Beatriz said, laughing her snotty laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Well, she isn’t going to listen to you, is she? Or me, or any of us. She does what she wants.” She hesitated. “Here’s the weirdest thing, though. She used to hang out with us all the time, remember? Playing games, or telling us stories, or just talking for hours. When was the last time she did any of that?” A wistful tone had come into her voice.

  “It’s like—like she got what she wanted, and she doesn’t have to do that stuff anymore.”

  “What does she want, though?”

  “I told you. Our family.”

  “Why? And she didn’t plan what happened, you know that. She wasn’t the one to—to do that to Philip.”

  “Maybe she did. Do something.”

  “Oh, come on. She wasn’t even there, remember? She came into the kitchen later.”

  “She still could have done it. I mean, strange things happen.” It was the closest I’d come to telling her about Piper.

  “Is that how you explain it?” Beatriz said. “Strange things happen?”

  “Okay, maybe she—she loosened the stair somehow. Made it so he’d fall if he stepped on it.”

  For just the briefest moment she considered it. “No—I don’t think she’d do that,” she said finally.

  We started running to answer the phone when it rang, hoping it would be Aunt Maeve. Sometimes it was one of Beatriz’s friends, or a parent calling to arrange a play-date with Amaranth or Semiramis. Usually, though, it wasn’t anybody, just someone trying to sell us something. Ted-or-Ned called once and asked me to leave a message for Ms. Burden, but I never did.

  Of course it was Ms. Burden who answered the phone when Maeve called. It rang after we’d gone to bed, and
even though we ran down the stairs in our pajamas she had gotten there first.

  “Yes, this is Philip Quinn’s house,” we heard her say. Then, “No, I’m sorry to have to tell you that he died.”

  Exclamations of shock came from the phone, loud enough that we could hear Aunt Maeve’s voice. “Let me talk to her,” I said.

  Ms. Burden waved me away. “Yes, I understand,” she said into the phone. “What did you say your name was? . . . But I’ve never heard the children mention a great-aunt—how do I know that’s who you are?”

  “It’s Great-aunt Maeve!” I said. “Let me talk to her!”

  “Hush—I’m on the phone, Ivy,” Ms. Burden said. “Ivy here says your name is Maeve, is that right? . . . Well, I suppose we could come visit you. Where do you live?”

  I grabbed the phone away from her. “Hi, Aunt Maeve!” I shouted into it. “It’s Ivy!”

  “Hello, child,” Maeve said. “I’m so sorry to hear about your father. How did it happen?”

  Ms. Burden reached for the phone, and I darted away. “He fell down some stairs. Listen, I don’t have a lot of time. Could you come over? There’s things I need to tell you.”

  “Oh, dear. I don’t leave my house very often, you know. Can you come here instead?”

  “I can’t drive. I’m only thirteen.”

  “Well, can you get someone to take you? And maybe they can bring my checks, too.”

  “Give me the phone, Ivy,” Ms. Burden said behind me. “Right now.”

  “Is that the woman I was talking to?” Maeve asked. “Be careful—I don’t trust her.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “Quick—how do we find your house? What’s your address?”

  Ms. Burden snatched the phone away from me. “No, wait—” I said.

  Ms. Burden listened intently, then scowled. “Hello!” she said. “Hello, are you there?”

  She put the receiver down. “She hung up,” she said. “Never do that again, Ivy. Never interrupt me while I’m on the phone.”