The First Day of the Rest of My Life

by Cathy Lamb

  “My whole life I’ve felt like I failed you.”

  “You didn’t. You’ve never failed me. Never. We were kids. They were shits. They’re in hell being prodded by a pitchfork and I’m here on The Lavender Farm, with my family, my explosives, my chain saws, and my animals. I’ve got a job taking care of animals that, in their most violent moments, are still tame and polite compared to mankind. So,” she said, businesslike. “Who is it? Who’s blackmailing you?”

  “I don’t know.” I was still reeling a bit from what she’d said. Could I let the guilt go?

  “I see the envelope you’ve got. Give it to me.”

  I handed it to her. She slipped the photos out. Her expression didn’t change much, but she was grim. “This isn’t all of them, is it?”

  “No.” It wasn’t even a quarter of them.

  “Who are you thinking it is?”

  “Do you remember that Pauly had a creepy son who lived with his mother most of the time? He had reddish hair, he was fat, and he pulled down his pants twice in front of us?”

  She glared, not at me but at him, the creepy son, the vision in her mind. “His name was Sam.”

  “Yes, Sam. He may be living in that house, although it was so run-down, it’d be hard to believe a rat would live there.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Decisive. Done.

  “Annie, I want to call the police.”

  “Absolutely. Call them. But I need to go to Fiji first and make sure those photographs, whatever is still there, are incinerated, then you can call and we’ll make sure Sam’s going to jail. God knows what he’s doing to other people, so let’s lock the scummy flasher up. Do we have a deal? You can call the police when I return from Fiji.”

  I paused. “Yes. But don’t kill him.”

  “I’m not going to kill him. It’s not my style. But the photos are going to get a sunburn.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  “No.”

  “Please.”

  “Don’t even ask, Madeline. Remember my specialty: Explosives. And I work alone.” She snapped her fingers. “That line, ‘I work alone,’ that’s from a movie, isn’t it? Sure sounded good.”

  We laughed. She leaned over and hugged me. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Annie.”

  “Let the guilt go, Madeline. Please. Explode it. It’s killing you.”

  I bent my head and nodded. Door and Window crawled under the table and licked my hands. I would try. The guilt was killing me, day by day, constantly. It lived beside my lies to myself.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It wasn’t mine. It was theirs, and you can’t let them continue to rent space in your head like this. You have to block them out, shoot them, decapitate them. They have to go. The guilt has to go with them.” She hugged me close. “I love you, sister. With all my heart and all my explosives, I love you.”

  Annie left the next day for Fiji because she is a wee bit off her rocker. She was back in two days. She did not have a sunburn.

  I scoured the papers from my hometown. It did not take long to find the article. “Home owned by former convict burns to the ground. Inspectors believe the home may have been hit by a rogue lightning strike. . . .”

  I stared at the ashes of what used to be the shack and the oak tree behind it. The tree was taller than I remembered. We had spent hours studying the knotty trunk, the interlaced branches, and the wind-brushed leaves of that tree. The trunk had burned in the explosion, but it was still standing. I did not miss the analogy there.

  “Did you find anything?” I asked her over a pile of nachos with avocado and sour cream at the kitchen table about ten o’clock at night.

  “Yep, I did. Pauly’s son, Sam, is the one who’s blackmailing us. There were stacks of photos of us in there, two envelopes addressed to you, one to me, and letters cut from magazines for the notes. I think Marlene tipped him off to who you were during her reporting—she told you she was going to interview Pauly’s, Sherwinn’s, and Gavin’s families—and he went through his dad’s stuff. The police were supposed to gather all that as evidence before his dad’s trial, but obviously there was more. Pauly probably had some under the house or hiding in storage or at the photo shop.”

  So Pauly’s son was living in his father’s shack all these years. Disgusting. He was disgusting, his father was disgusting. But there had been no hope for him with a father like Pauly.

  “The photos are gone. They’re in Fiji.”

  “Thanks for sending them to Fiji.” I envisioned that fiery explosion. “I’m impressed, as always, with your Blown to Kingdom Come skills.”

  “Thank you. I pride myself on my talents with explosives.”

  “Cheers to that.” We clinked glasses. “Not every woman can blow up houses repeatedly and get away with it.”

  “Nope. Takes a lot of skill and training, thank you, and a salute to the United States government and various agencies.”

  We ate our nachos, extra cheese for me. “It makes me sick thinking of you even being in that shack again.”

  She was quiet for a while. “I waited till he left. He’s fatter now with an odd tuft of hair on top of his head like an upsidedown bird. I sat in that back room where they kept that cage. I stood in the living room where they did those terrible things to us. I looked out the same window at the oak tree. I smelled the pot, the mustiness, the dust, and all these horrible visions pummeled me, like I was being hit and hit and hit, but after about five minutes, I put my head up and I beat the hell out of those memories.”

  “Excellent. Did you beat them hard?”

  “Yep. I hated being at that shack. It still smelled like infected and crazy male brain. But it was freeing in a weird way, too. We were attacked as little girls by three heinous men. We couldn’t have prevented it. We were victims then but we’re not now. We are not victims. Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin are all dead. Look what we’ve done with our lives. Look who we are. We’ve overcome what happened to us. We’ve overcome them and their shit-ass ways.”

  “Yes, I suppose we have. Or at least I’m working on overcoming them.”

  “No one can walk away from that and expect their whole life to be glorious and perfect, but we’re here, Madeline. We’re here and we’re not letting what happened to us for a few months as kids dictate the rest of our lives. We’ve never done that, even if we’ve been chased by nasty visions.” She had another nacho. It crunched. “I’m a vet, you’re a life coach. We work hard, we’re healthy. We have Grandma and Granddad and each other. Good things have happened to us. Many good things.

  “And, those three,” Annie went on, “they’re all rotting in graves, maggots in their eye sockets, their bones cracking, while we spend a lot of time walking up and down rows of lavender, helping animals, hiking the property, and you tell everyone from your fancy schmancy downtown office what to do with their lives.”

  “That’s true, but I don’t like my fancy schmancy office. I don’t like my fancy schmancy house or my fancy schmancy car. I do like these nachos.” I had another one. I love the crunch of nachos.

  “You’re cracked, so am I. If you want to uncrack yourself you should let the lease go on the office, get rid of the house and the car, and start over. Live here permanently.” She dipped her chip in a hunk of guacamole. “But we have the choice to start over. We’re still here. No maggots anywhere.”

  “Starting over sounds good. A reset. And I’m pleased we have no maggots anywhere.”

  “Take your own advice, Madeline. Move. Change. Alter your freakin’ path. Don’t you use words like that?”

  “Yes, I do.” I thought of my upcoming speech for the Rock Your Womanhood conference, then dunked my nacho in salsa.

  “I also went to the beach when I was there.”

  “You did? How was it?”

  “I sat there for hours, watching the waves, back and forth, in and out.”

  “And?”

  “And, I loved it. As you know, like you, I haven’t been
to the ocean in years, but maybe it’s time, Madeline, maybe we should go.”

  The idea made me sad a bit, but excited, too. Our whole family had loved the sea until it had eaten two members. “I miss the sea.”

  “I’ve always missed it.”

  “So have I. I thought it would make me crack if I saw it again.”

  “You’re cracked, anyhow.”

  “I am.”

  “Maybe we should dare, Madeline.”

  “I could take that dare. Maybe.”

  We sat for a bit, eating our nachos, cheesy, salsa-y, yummy.

  “Love you, Annie.”

  “Love you, too, sister mine.”

  We put a nacho in each other’s mouth.

  They crunched.

  Why is it that at nighttime we usually get most honest with ourselves?

  Is it the cover of blackness?

  Is it because what’s bothering us—loneliness, frustration, anger, worry, regret, ambition, greed—keeps us up at night and we’re alone with our thoughts?

  Is it because night is quiet, the moon is staring at us, the stars are far away, and there’s more truth in the air, more clarity, without the hassle and stresses of daytime?

  Is it because people are asleep around us so we feel more alone as they skitter and toss through their own dreams?

  Nighttime, way late at nighttime, is when I think best.

  It was so darn dark and cold out that night. So darn dark. My dad would have said the weather felt threatened.

  In my head, through that darkness, I heard Mozart’s Great Mass in C Minor.

  It was appropriate background music for my curiously methodical thoughts.

  “That reporter, Marlene, called here today,” Granddad told Annie and me the next night after a spaghetti and meatball dinner on the deck.

  “Dammit,” Annie muttered.

  I stood up and paced, trying to find my breath, which felt like it was hiding in my lower back. I wanted to kick Marlene. I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to shove her against a wall and pummel her.

  Annie got up and paced, too. We paced and passed each other, turned on our heels, kept pacing.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked. Damn, but I hated Marlene. What was she thinking, talking to an old man who had had a heart attack after I told her not to?

  Granddad didn’t say much at first. He continued to swing on the swing. “I told her not to write the article.”

  “And she said?” Annie asked.

  “She said the article was being written. She had a melodious voice.”

  “Did you tell her that you wouldn’t speak to her?” Dread entered my body and whirled around, freezing cold and threatening.

  “I did. We talked about how I wasn’t going to speak to her. She was very pleasant.”

  “And you hung up?”

  He nodded. “I did. But first she asked me if my parents were from Holland.”

  “Which they are not,” I said.

  “Granddad, where is she getting Holland from?” Annie asked. “Why Holland?’

  Granddad went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Jews have been running around the globe forever. Scattering to all corners, persecuted, hunted, destroyed . . . prey for others.”

  “Did she ask anything else?” Annie asked.

  “She told me she had been looking at Holocaust records. She was very conversational.”

  The word Holocaust sunk heavily between us. “Why did she ask you that?”

  Granddad’s face crumpled for a long minute until he visibly pulled himself together, head up, shoulders back. “She asked because Anton, Emmanuelle, and Marie Elise Laurent died in Auschwitz after being in Drancy. So did their two other children, one boy, one teenage girl.”

  “What?”

  “What the hell?” Annie muttered.

  “Yes, the Laurents died in Auschwitz,” Granddad said.

  “They died.”

  “So, a different family of Laurents?” I asked, completely confused, that sense of dread eating at me like a disease.

  “Yes, they were different Laurents,” Granddad said.

  I sagged with relief. Not that I was grateful another family died, but there was something ominous here, frightening, that I didn’t understand.

  “So, she’s confused,” Annie said. “The reporter is confused and is including another family in her article?”

  “No, she’s not confused,” Granddad said, leaning his elbows on his knees, head bent, before he pulled it up, as if he was pulling up a lead weight, his eyes tortured. “The Laurents died in Auschwitz. Their names were Anton, Emmanuelle, Marie Elise, Aaron, and Johnna Laurent.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “That’s your name, Grandma’s name, Momma’s name. Help me, Granddad, what’s going on here?”

  “Why is she digging like this,” Annie asked. “What is this? Why are we even talking about it? Who are Johnna and Aaron?”

  “My dears.”

  I swear my granddad aged another ten years in front of us, as if the white light of the moon had sucked those years away.

  “We are not the real Laurents.”

  28

  Momma came home from jail, and three days later we had a bang-up, rocking-good party. “We have to celebrate life,” she told us. “You Pink Girls, you are my life.” She kissed and hugged us, then together we made chocolates brownies with mint, like our dad used to make us.

  Most of the town came, and Momma was deluged in flowers and gifts. Granddad and Grandma brought in crab, shrimp, lobster, salads, and a cake in the shape of a sailboat. Tents were set up, a band arrived, twinkling white lights were hung.

  My momma smiled, she laughed, she hardly left our side. We linked our arms around her waist and held on. Steve was there, but I couldn’t meet his eyes, couldn’t smile back at him, couldn’t go with him and the other kids to run around our property, I couldn’t. I was bad. I was less than him. Not good enough.

  We had spent almost all of the past three days together with our momma, in our house by the sea. My momma, Annie and I, and our grandparents. We played games and laughed and talked and tried to recover from the disastrous wreck our lives had become.

  My momma cut our hair and did our nails. We did her and Grandma’s nails. Even Granddad let us polish his nails, as our dad had before us, and he proudly showed them off at the party.

  The sun shone, the rain sprinkled, rainbows appeared everywhere, like magic—Marie Elise’s magic. I heard triumphant violin music in my head as my momma and I played our violins together out on the porch for everyone at the party, with Annie inside banging on the piano.

  But my momma was fading, we could all see that.

  Fading quickly.

  She went back to work at Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor, that beacon of pink, but only when Annie and I were in school. I think she did it to keep her mind off herself and her terminal illness. She left early to be home when we got home. On Saturdays we went with her.

  The hair spray poufed in plumes, the scissors snipped, the dryers blew, the chandeliers glittered against the pink walls, and the women chatted and laughed and passed bottles between them in the resting room overlooking the sea, which my momma ignored.

  Carman burst into love songs, poured champagne for all and offered up toasts.

  Shell Dee regaled us with information about the human body, how waste is made, and her frustration about losing weight. “Calories in, calories out. What I wish is that we had a bug we could swallow that would eat up all the extra food inside of us and make us skinny. Honestly, you know how many women would be scarfing those bugs if they knew they could be a size six? What’s an itty-bitty bug inside your gut when you have a tight boom boom?”

  Trudy Jo talked about her kids. “Steph is a teenage girl. That means her hormones rule her brain. She has a boyfriend now. So he rules her brain. She has lost hers. There is no fluid in there or anything else. There is the word lust. Lust rules her brain. What would Shakespeare say? ‘We should be wo
o’d and were not made to woo.’ ”

  We did our homework or read or brought the ladies pink cookies on platters with Red Hots or poured pink lemonade and helped clean up.

  Maggie Gee brought Grandmother Schiller in for a Marie Elise Dye and Cut to Die For. Grandmother Schiller hugged my momma, her white hair swinging fashionably about her shoulders. “You nice lady, Marie Elise. Good shot, too. You got good shot. Bad men gone. Good job. How you like my hair today? I brush.”

  Jessie Liz’s boy was still painting naked ladies on bare walls in town, but this time he’d painted a fat naked lady on a wall and the woman had half red and half pink hair. It was rumored that Tilda Smith was not pleased and threw a fit. Jessie Liz and Momma laughed so hard, Momma had to cross her legs so she wouldn’t pee on her pink skirt with the ruffle.

  LaShonda had not conquered her bra addiction, but she did bring three for Momma. “You’re stacked, Marie Elise, I know that, and I think these will fit you fine. I’m so glad you’re back, honey.” The bras were purple, pink, and bright green with lace.

  Momma asked our grandparents to stay permanently at our house by the sea. She did not need to ask again; they wanted to be with their daughter every day. They spoke French or German to us most of the time. Grandma taught us how to paint, Granddad taught us basic economics and how to run a business. We played by the sea, took the boat out and watched the sun set, canoed and hiked, laughed and sang French songs.

  And, one day, a day with generous sunshine, a yellow circle of fire hanging politely in the sky, and a cool, melancholy breeze, our momma could not get out of bed.

  Like that, overnight, our momma took a turn for the worse around a deadly corner.