by A. E. Kaplan
“Can’t find my charger. There used to be one in here someplace I thought might work for my phone.”
I reached in after her. The drawer was full of opened bills, most of them marked PAID, and a bunch of random things like stamps and tape and, oddly enough, four staplers. “It probably got buried. Jeez, there’s a lot of paper in here.”
My hand found a filmy piece of plastic in the bottom of the drawer, and I pulled it out.
It was a stencil of a maple leaf, the edges covered in splotches of red and yellow and orange paint.
It felt like putting my hand on a ringing bell, the vibration that went through me. Some fiber of memory tugged at my mind.
“Wow,” Zip said. “I can’t believe we still have that.”
My fingers fit into the sharp edges of the stencil. “Do you remember the tree?” I asked.
Zip closed her eyes. She nodded.
When I was eight, we moved onto the base at Fort Meade, and behind our new house lived a huge maple. When October hit that year, it went from green to yellow, then orange, then a red as bright as anything I’d ever seen.
Zip told me that it was inhabited by a dryad who would grant me three wishes if I raked all the leaves after they fell.
It was only later that I realized she’d tricked me into doing her chores.
“It took me forever to rake all those leaves,” I said.
Zip gave me a lopsided smile. “I couldn’t help it. You were so gullible.”
My mother loved that tree, and she and I had the idea to paint it into a mural in the basement so that we could keep it inside with us, even in the winter, on dark and rainy days. My father primed the wall, and after my mother painted a floor-to-ceiling tree in the corner, the four of us took turns stenciling different-colored leaves that spanned the length of the room, made to look like they’d been caught in a whirlwind.
Afterward, we sat on the couch staring at our wall and drinking hot chocolate. Our hands wore leaf-colored splatters. My mom was wearing an old undershirt of my dad’s that came halfway down her thighs and was covered in dried paint, and there were streaks of paint in her hair that would take days to wash out.
“This was so much fun,” she said.
Dad got stuck cleaning all the brushes, but he was a good sport about it. “You know, they have art classes over at the college. You should sign up for next semester.”
She made a face. “I don’t know.”
“Why not?” he asked. “You love all this stuff. And it’ll give us something to hang over the fireplace.”
“I think those classes are pretty time-consuming, Aaron.”
He took a gulp of cocoa. “Then you should do it now, while I’m stateside.” He smoothed the wrinkle between her eyebrows with his finger. “It’ll make you happy.”
“I’ll think about it.” She glanced over at me and jabbed a finger into my armpit, which made me double over and scream with laughter. “What do you think, Tom?”
“No tickling,” I said, without really meaning it. “You should do it. We can do our homework together.” My parents both gave me the look. I was notorious for leaving my homework half undone, if I remembered to do it at all. “What?” I protested. “What?” But by then, they were both tickling me until I howled, laughing and laughing until Zip announced that the paint fumes were making us all crazy.
I handed the stencil to Zip, and she stared at it for a minute before putting it back in the drawer. “You can use mine,” I said. “I mean, you can use my charger.”
“Thanks,” she said absently. She blinked and shook her head, pulling herself up to sit on the counter. “You were saying you needed some time.”
I leaned into the counter with my elbows and rubbed my nose against my palms. “Yeah,” I said. “I do. I just.” I sighed. “I can’t be here right now, Zipora.”
She patted my shoulder, then muttered something I couldn’t hear and ran her hand up and down my back a few times. When I looked up, she had an unfamiliar look on her face. After a few seconds, I was able to identify it as worry. “All right,” she said. “Where do you want to go?”
I thought about that for a minute. My two surviving notebooks burned in the back of my mind. I thought of the voicemails I’d had from Mrs. DeLuca, and I knew I should call her back, but then I got to thinking about what Zip had said about Mom. About how the interviews would never be enough. None of them would ever replace all the missing stories and lost memories of my mother.
My father was drifting away, and I couldn’t stop it. I needed something real to hold on to, something tangible and immutable, a physical thing I could touch that would stay where I put it. An anchor that would keep me from drifting away, too.
I straightened up so that Zip and I were eye to eye. “Do you remember the class she took? After she painted that mural?”
Zip’s eyebrows drew down. “Yeah. She was taking that painting class right before…you know.” She died was the implicit part of that sentence.
“Yeah,” I said. “Well, do you remember the one she did in the kitchen? She worked on it forever.”
She opened the drawer next to her knees and closed it again. “I’m not really sure.”
My fingers were tingling, and I drummed them on the counter. “Yeah, it was some flowers and a teapot? And…I don’t know. I really loved that painting. But I never saw it after she turned it in. I asked Dad about it once, and he said he didn’t know.”
“Did you check the attic?”
“I did, last year. I didn’t see any paintings, though. Well, here’s the thing: I was wondering if maybe the school still had it.”
“Patuxent State? The college?”
“Yeah. Remember they had some program where military spouses could take classes for free? I was thinking, since none of the paintings were here, maybe they got left there.”
“I don’t know, Tom. That was eight years ago. I doubt they’d have kept them.”
“I know. But maybe her professor remembers her or something. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe we could talk to him.”
She frowned. “You want to go up to Maryland?”
“Maybe, yeah. I don’t know. Maybe they keep a file of old student artwork. Is that possible?”
She shrugged. “I never took any art classes. It doesn’t sound like something they would do, though.”
“Well, what have we got to lose, right?”
Zip chewed her lip and hopped down off the counter. “That,” she said, “is a good question.”
Patuxent State University was a handful of miles from Fort Meade, the last living location of our mother. It was a good three-hour drive, through the hills and around the Beltway as we passed DC. The traffic was awful, worse than usual, because it was summertime and we were heading in the general direction of the Delmarva beaches.
We were stuck on the north side of the Beltway when I dropped my water bottle.
“Damn it,” I said. Zip bent over and picked it up, but my shoes were already soaked.
“You know,” she said. “We could just can this and go to the beach like everyone else.”
“You want to go to the beach?”
“Sure. It’s hot. We could go down to Rehoboth and eat fries and ride the bumper cars.”
“You don’t want to do this?”
“It’s not that. Okay, maybe it is. I don’t know. I’m just worried you might be—”
“Might be what?”
She shook her head. “Forget it. Anyway, I would kind of like to go to Rehoboth. We haven’t been there since Mom died.”
“That’s right. When you abandoned me on the boardwalk.”
“I didn’t abandon you. Jeez.”
“You left and never came back. I think that qualifies as abandonment.”
My parents had given us each five dollars to go get some ice cream while they finished lunch. Zip promptly ditched me in front of the ice cream stand, promising to be back in five minutes, but when fifteen went by, I went back to the restaurant alone.
My parents split up to look for her. My mother’s hand was a vise on mine as she dragged me past the candy store where we’d eaten saltwater taffy earlier in the afternoon. When I complained she was cutting off my circulation, she only held on harder, saying, “I’m not losing both of you!”
To this day, I still don’t know how Mom knew where to go. She was like a bloodhound, leaning forward as if her legs couldn’t keep up with her upper body. We found Zip twenty minutes later at the carnival we’d visited that morning, standing in front of one of those booths where you knock down bottles to win a prize. Zip was watching the game from a few feet away, crying silently and clutching her empty wallet. She’d spent her ice cream money trying to win a giant stuffed collie.
When my father arrived a few minutes later, my mother said something to him out of earshot. He shook his head vigorously, but she touched his shoulder in that way she had and he nodded, resigned to her judgment because Mom was always right. Without a word, he slipped five dollars onto the counter, threw a handful of baseballs, and won my sister the dog. I was outraged, of course, because how dare my parents reward her for wasting her money and breaking the rules? I’d done everything right, and where was my giant stuffed animal? I pointed out the injustice of this enough times that my father guided me by the shoulder to the nearest ice cream stand—never mind that I’d just had ice cream an hour before—bought me a double scoop, and told me to shut up about it already.
Two weeks later, Zip wrapped the collie in three layers of wrapping paper and gave it to Mom for her birthday.
It was her last one.
“Did she know the dog was for her, do you think?” I asked. I’d wondered at the time. I’d even asked Dad, but he’d just mussed my hair and sent me off to clean my room or something.
Zip played absently with her shoelaces. “She had to. I’d seen her looking at it earlier. She had a collie when she was a kid, remember? Ginger. When she saw it that day, she said it looked just like her. Maybe you were on a ride then.”
Oh. Oh. Of course. I’d forgotten the stories about Ginger. “That’s how she knew where you were.”
I was an idiot. I’d remembered that afternoon but forgotten or misunderstood all the important parts.
“Mom always knew what to do,” I said. She would have known how to fix this mess with Wolf. She had this quiet way of solving problems, tweaking things until they were just so when nobody was paying attention.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. Zip was someplace far away in her head, wearing an expression that usually lived on our father’s face. Sometimes I forgot that Zip was the one who found Mom in the kitchen the day she died. It wasn’t something she ever talked about. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll go to the beach after, all right?”
She smiled, her eyes snapping back to me, the car, the real world. “You’re my favorite brother.”
“If we had another brother, I’d be touched by that.”
She waved me off and I fiddled with the radio, which couldn’t get anything but NPR, so we listened to the news until we got to the exit for Patuxent State. It was another few miles to the campus, and a five-foot sign marked the entrance. In large letters, someone had stenciled on it: ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE.
“Well,” Zip said. “That’s a good sign.” She shifted in her seat. “Let’s just park someplace. We’ll find the admissions building or something.”
“You want to apply?” I asked.
“I want to find a map.”
Inside the admissions building, people were crowding around waiting for campus tours. A girl who looked like she’d just woken up was staring at a list.
“One o’clock?” she droned. “Who’s here for the one o’clock?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me where we could find a map?”
“Are you here for the one o’clock tour? Are you registered?”
“Um, no. I just need a map.”
“There are spaces left on the one-thirty. You can sign up for that one.”
“I don’t actually want a tour,” I said. “I just want a map.”
“You have to sign up for the tour,” she said. “The maps go with the tour.”
I sighed. “Where do we sign up for the one-thirty?”
The girl brightened. “At the desk.” She pointed toward a giant desk that was surrounded by about a dozen depressed-looking high school kids. Zip went over and put her name on the list. She came back with a name tag that read FLOTILDA.
“Flotilda?” I said to her in an aside.
“You didn’t think I’d use my real name and address for this? Once you get on one of those mailing lists, you never get off.” I turned back to the tour guide, who was counting and recounting the people on the tour. “Can we have a map now?”
“You have to wait until one-thirty,” she said. “Your tour doesn’t start until one-thirty.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Zip said. She turned to the guy next to her, who was standing with his pinched-looking parents. “I will pay you five dollars for your map.”
He handed her the map. “Just take it,” he said. “I don’t want to go here anyway.”
She grabbed it from him while his parents sputtered, “What do you mean, you don’t want to go here?” and “If you’d only studied harder…”
Zip and I sprinted out the front door before the tour guide could demand the map back. “That was depressing,” I said.
“It’s a safety school,” she said. “It’s to be expected. This is everyone’s third choice.”
We wandered down the walkway across the mostly empty quad until we found the art department in Wells Hall.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Are you sure the guy’s even here? The faculty usually takes off in the summer.”
“I checked,” I said. “Adams is teaching oil painting this summer.”
“And you’re sure he was her professor? How do you even remember that?”
“The name just sounded familiar,” I said. “And he’s been here since ’98, so I figured it had to be the guy.”
“So you’re not really sure.”
“I’m mostly sure.”
We pushed through the glass doors and found the department secretary moving boxes around with a couple of guys in paint-stained cutoffs.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you tell me where I can find Dr. Adams?”
The secretary put down the box and frowned. “Hal? I think he’s in his office. Down the hall, um, fifth door on the right.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Hal?” Zip hissed at me. “Like the computer HAL?”
I counted the doors, wondering whether to include the bathroom. “What computer?” I asked.
“HAL! 2001: A Space Odyssey HAL? What are you doing, Dave, I’m going to depressurize you and make your eyeballs explode HAL?”
“Never saw it.”
“Oh God. Really? Well, don’t do drugs while you’re watching it.”
“What?”
“Really, just don’t.”
“He’s here,” I said, stopping in front of a door with HAL ADAMS inscribed on a brass placard. “Why are we doing this?” I asked, suddenly wishing we’d gone to Rehoboth. The back of my neck itched.
“It was your idea!”
I stepped back from the door. “Maybe he won’t even remember her. It was, like, eight years ago. I’m sure he’s had hundreds of students since then.”
“Well, you said she was good, right?” she reminded me.
“I think so?”
“Then he’ll remember.”
From inside the office, a voice said, “Either come in or go away. You’re too loud.”
I looked at Zip. She looked back. I opened the door.
Hal Adams was sitting at his desk, tapping away at his computer. I’d sort of envisioned him painting in here, but this wasn’t a studio. It was a space for office work. In the far corner, a skinny kid with black ink staining his hands was packing a box fro
m the file cabinet. I wondered if the department was moving. Or maybe they were getting ready to fumigate the building.
“Office hours don’t start until three,” he said. “What is it?”
I glanced back at Zip. She cleared her throat, which is how I knew she was nervous. “Um,” she said. “Well.”
I took a deep breath. “See, our mother took one of your classes a few years ago—this would be, like, eight years back? And we were kind of wondering if maybe there was still some of her work filed away. Or something.”
He leaned back in his chair, making a steeple out of his fingers. It seemed a very professorial thing to do. “I don’t keep my students’ work. Who was your mother?”
“Sarah. Sarah Grendel. She was about forty—she was taking classes through the military-spouse program?”
“It’s for a present,” Zip blurted, and then shrugged helplessly when I gave her an incredulous look.
“Sarah Grendel,” he said, rubbing his temple. “Military…Oh.” He looked uncomfortable, picked up a pencil and then put it back down.
I swallowed. Maybe he’d read her obituary. She’d barely been out of his class a few weeks when she died, so he might have seen it, or someone might have mentioned it. I really didn’t want to have that conversation right now, though.
“I don’t have anything of hers,” he said. “You should go.”
I took a deep breath. He didn’t have the painting. It was probably crazy to think it could still be here after all these years. But he remembered her, that much was obvious, and that was something. If I couldn’t have the physical painting, I could at least get at his memories. Find out if she was really the artist I remembered.
I took a step closer to the desk. “But if you remember—”
“Look, I said you should go. I don’t have anything.”
“But I need to know—”
“I have students coming in fifteen minutes, and I haven’t had lunch yet.”
