by Lisa Wingate
“Tomorrow is Saturday.” He chewed the side of his lip, looking toward the stairs. He was thinking about taking himself up there again; I could tell.
“I can come anyway,” I said, and he gave me a suspicious look, like he thought maybe I was trying to pull something over on him. I toned down the enthusiasm. “Well, like, the more days I work, the sooner I can get the money I need and get out of here. It’s not exactly party central. I’ve got a social life, you know.”
He rubbed his chin, turning the idea over in his mind. Finally he leaned back, deflating like a birthday balloon, and the newspaper came up again. “Deborah will be here.”
“Tell her you don’t need her to come,” I said. “Tell her I’m gonna be here, so she can do whatever she likes to do on Saturday.”
The paper lowered. He squinted over it. “She’ll wonder what’s going on.”
I looked down at my magazines, and an idea hit me. “Tell her I’ve got to write a research report this weekend about . . . rockets, and you’re helping me. We do have some stupid semester project. We’re supposed to write about some . . . history . . . something. I forget what the English teacher said. It’s not due Monday, but nobody has to know that except you and me, right? Deborah will think I asked you to help me out.”
J. Norm chewed his lip some more, and then he started to nod real slow. “You’re a clever girl.”
I liked the way he said that—like he was impressed. Mrs. Lora used to tell me I was smart, but in this new school, it didn’t seem like anyone even knew I was there. When you’re toffee brown, and you don’t have all the fine clothes, and you live in a run-down house off the Hill, people don’t think you’re smart. “I just know that the minute I’m not here, you’re gonna go back up those stairs,” I said.
Norman just smiled at me and lifted the New York Times so he could hide behind it. He knew I’d figured him out.
Chapter 7
J. Norman Alvord
I see the grand stairway again. This time I am walking up it. The stairs are smooth, polished wood, and my shoes are slick. The stiff leather soles click and slide upon each landing. The stairs are tall, and I’m taking them one at a time, looking down at my feet in the brown leather shoes, a boy’s dress shoes with mud on them. There’s a spate of fear, quick like a charley horse twisting my ribs. The mud shouldn’t be on the shoes. I am afraid I may be punished for it. I’m afraid of being hurt—spanked, perhaps? I stop and look down the stairs and consider not going up at all. But there’s someone at the top I want to see. I have flowers in my hand, the sort a child might pluck from a garden without asking. I look at them, then gaze upward to the hallway. The doors are open, morning light tumbling from them, but it is the closed door that holds my interest. The one with only a dingy gray glow underneath, evidence that the curtains are still pulled in the room. I move up another step, and then two, on tiptoe. I am trying to make the shoes land silently. I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.
Finally, I reach the upper hall, take a few steps toward the door. There’s a crash, and I stop short. My fingers tighten around the flowers, crushing and bending the stems, drawing water into my hand. A rose makes a pinprick on my thumb. I wonder if it’s bleeding, but I cannot look. I’m frozen in place.
Another crash, and then a man’s voice shouts, “Get up out of that bed! You put on this dress. Do you hear me? You harlot! You cheap, stinking scrap of trash. You get out of that bed and make yourself decent today, or I’ll give you what you really deserve. What you ask for every day!” Something strikes the door then, and it vibrates in and out. I catch a breath, move back a step, then two, feeling my way. There’s something warm on my leg. It oozes slowly downward, soaking the fabric of my short pants and draining into the tall socks that lead into my shoes. I look down and see the muddy tracks on the floor. Terror races through me. I can only think to run. I drop the flowers, spin around, prepare to take flight. An arm catches me, robbing my breath so that I cannot cry out.
“Ssshhh!” A hand goes over my mouth. The hand smells of lard and flour, and I am suddenly comforted. Her lips brush close to my ear. “Git on down in the kitchen now, honey-love.” The arm releases me, and I grab the banister to sprint away. From the corner of my eye, I see the gray fabric of a woman’s skirts, her white apron folding as she kneels on the floor and reaches for the flowers. I hear the handle turn in the door down the hall. . . .
The dream vanished like smoke, and I was aware of Deborah shaking me awake. I caught my breath in a gush of air and sat up so quickly that we nearly butted heads. It wouldn’t have been the first time, of course.
“Deborah!” I gasped, and discerned that I was in my recliner. Judging by the light outside, it was early morning. Friday . . . no, Saturday. It was Saturday. I must have fallen asleep in the living room and stayed there through the night, after the girl left.
Last night’s plate of food was sitting beside me, dehydrated now. The girl had insisted on putting it there before she went out the door. “Don’t you forget to eat that,” she’d said, and wagged a finger at me in that haughty way of hers. “I don’t wanna find that here tomorrow.”
Now Deborah was frowning at the plate. “Is that last night’s supper?”
“Leftovers,” I answered, thinking quickly. “A second helping. I thought I might eat it, but then I decided against. How are you this morning?”
Deborah drew herself upward, taken aback by what might have passed for a pleasantry had it not been coming from me and offered in her general direction. “Fine . . .” She surveyed the room, trying to piece together the reason for my being in my chair so early and wearing yesterday’s clothing. The clock in the hall chimed, and I counted. Seven.
“Did you sleep here all night?” Deborah queried.
Shaking my head, I folded the footrest and sat up, making an effort to appear alert and fully within my faculties. “Of course not. I was up early and couldn’t go back to sleep, so I decided to warm some leftovers. I suppose I wasn’t as wide-awake as I thought.”
Deborah seemed to debate the explanation, but then she abandoned her investigation and held up a bag of take-out food. “Well, I brought a breakfast sandwich for you. I’m going into work for a little while this morning. It’s so much easier to get things done on Saturday, when the building is quiet.” She sat down and opened the bag, then began placing the contents on the coffee table. Two bottles of orange juice, and a variety of paper-wrapped food.
“I imagine you’re backlogged. I don’t want to keep you from your projects,” I offered, to encourage her along. I had plans in the attic again today. The girl was coming to help at nine o’clock. “I always found weekends to be a productive time at work.”
She flashed a glance my way—a wounded look, I thought. “Yes, you did,” she bit out, and I knew I’d chosen the wrong comment. Most of her life and Roy’s, Saturdays had been spent without me. It became the usual way of things—so much so that even Annalee seemed to accept it.
“You need not have stopped by. I’ve asked the girl to come today. She can watch me eat.” That brought another glance from Deborah and an irritated narrowing of her eyes.
Deborah raised a brow suspiciously. “She has a name, Dad. Epiphany.”
“Epiphany?” I repeated. “She refers to herself as Epie, I think.”
“That’s a nickname, I guess. Her mother calls her Epiphany. Either way, she does have a name, other than ‘the girl.’ ” Deborah opened my orange juice and set it on the end table, then unwrapped a breakfast sandwich and laid it in proximity of my hand. “So you are at least being decent to her?”
“Certainly. Why wouldn’t I?”
“Just to be stubborn. Because you don’t think you need anyone here.”
I paused to swallow a lump of pride along with the first bite of my biscuit, and worked up some encouraging words. When a mission is under way, sacrifices must be made. “I don’t mind her so much. It was a good idea you had. Aside from that, I can be a help to her in her schoo
ling. I’m of the impression that she isn’t afforded much assistance at home. That mother of hers is a crass, disagreeable woman. Smokes, too. Brings that smell into my house. It’s her I don’t need. I’ll be working with the girl on some of her schoolwork today—a research project of a sort.” That much was not entirely untrue, and I prided myself on being quite convincing.
Deborah’s expression remained incredulous. “Well, that sounds lovely. I just find it a little hard to believe. All of a sudden you’re helping her with her homework?”
“It’s good to be useful . . . to someone.” I took another bite of my biscuit, but it came with a bitter taste.
Deborah leaned against the sofa as if she intended to stay a while. “Please tell me you’re not using her so you can . . . do something again.”
“Do something?” Of course, I knew very well what Deborah meant.
“To yourself. Please tell me you’re not just trying to keep me out of the house because you’re planning something.”
That had always been the trouble with Deborah. If you tried to pull the wool over her eyes, she’d quickly break down the DNA of it. “I’ve been a model citizen.”
“Stop saying that!” She yanked the straw up and down in her cup, and the plastic emitted a loud whine. “You’re not in prison. I’m trying to take care of you. I’m trying to do what I promised Mom I would.”
I turned my face away. Therein lay the heart of our discontent. Deborah was caring for me only out of a sense of duty to her mother. Annalee was wrong to have put that burden on her, but since Annalee had placed it there, I had no power to remove it. My reassurances that I was perfectly capable of caring for myself would mean nothing to Deborah. Anything I said to her now would be twisted into a knife.
We fell into silence, and I finished my sandwich. That, at least, would make her happy. I drank the orange juice, too. Afterward, I read the label. “Frozen reconstituted. What a waste of perfectly good oranges.”
“I’m sure it’s not the kind you like,” Deborah said wearily.
“The only way to drink it is fresh out of the grove, like we did when we lived on Switch Grass Island. There were stands selling it fresh all along the highway there.” My mind went back, and I smelled the orange groves, the scent of blossoms hanging so sweet and thick that the air itself was a pleasant drink. I heard the earthy call of the lake, took in its warm, moist scents—pine, and Spanish moss, and oleander.
Deborah didn’t want to hear about life at the cape, of course. The ones closest to you grow weary of your glory days. To her, the glory days were the enemy—the very demon that had initiated the wrestling match between work and family.
It crossed my mind that when my work had afforded opportunities to travel in the early days, Annalee had sometimes gone with me before Roy was born. Deborah had stayed with my mother. By that time, my mother and father were spending summers at a beach house near Mother’s family in Galveston. Deborah was young, but she might remember something. “Deborah? Do you recall before Roy was born, those times you stayed with Grandmother and Grandfather Alvord and Aunt Fleeta?” A younger cousin of my father’s often visited with them when Deborah was there, and Deborah adored her, as I recalled.
My mention of those long-ago times drew a confused frown from Deborah. “A little. That was a lot of years ago, Dad. By the time I was in the second grade, Roy came along, and Mom stayed home with us.”
“I know. I just thought you might remember something of those last summers on the coast.”
Deborah’s face softened a bit, and I sensed that we’d finally found a mutually agreeable topic of conversation. “What kinds of things?”
I thought about my dreams, mentally thumbed through the notations in my project notebook. “Do you recall any of the relatives’ houses, other than Aunt Fleeta’s? Places you might have visited in Houston? Perhaps one with a tall, open room and a grand staircase at one end. The walls were dark wood paneling. They had a maid working there. A black woman.” I’d begun wondering if the house plaguing my dreams might have been a relative’s. Perhaps the patchwork of memories I’d experienced hailed from some time when my mother had left me in the care of a cousin or friend in a house that was strange to me. My parents did travel, on occasion, just as Annalee and I had.
Deborah’s lips twisted to one side, a smirk she’d inherited from Annalee. “That description fits most of the relatives and everyone in Grandmother’s bridge club. They all had those big, two-story houses down in the old-money neighborhoods. They all had black maids, too. Everybody did. Except Grandmother had the college girls. You know, she loved to flout the unwritten rules of the bridge club set there in Houston and Galveston. I remember her and Aunt Fleeta having a knock-down, drag-out fight one time because Grandmother wanted to go pay her respects at a black funeral, and Aunt Fleeta thought that was about the worst idea in the world. I thought Grandmother was going to run over Aunt Fleeta in the driveway. I hadn’t ever seen adults get in a wrangle like that. I mean, you and Mom hardly ever fought, or not where we kids could see it. I don’t remember whose funeral Grandmother was headed to, though.”
I wondered at the picture of my mother planning to cross to the other side of town to attend a funeral. It must have been for someone who mattered to her a great deal. “But you don’t recall a house with a tall room like that, with a balcony on the second floor? There were stained-glass windows in transoms above the doors. I recall the shape of a script letter in them, the letter V. The maid there was named Cecile.” Imagining the windows brought back a scrap of memory. It floated by, tumbling as a bit of birthday wrap might on a windy day. I chased it, but couldn’t catch it quickly enough. I recalled something to do with smoke, and papers burning. . . .
“Nope.” Deborah set down her sandwich and fished a napkin from the bag. Her hands hung in midair with the napkin between them. “Why? What’s this about?”
I pretended to be busy cleaning crumbs off my pants. How much should I tell her? If I revealed too much, she might think my mind was going, along with my circulatory system. “I’ve been having some dreams. Things in the past, I think. I’ve been trying to sort them out—making a study of them, so to speak, while there’s still time. It seems as though it’s something important. Do you suppose it’s possible to forget entire blocks of your life?” I stopped short of telling her that I’d been wondering whether the memories could have been awakened by my recent flirtation with death.
She took in a breath that shuddered in her throat. Her fist tightened around the napkin, squeezed it as if she were trying to contain some emotion within it. “You’ve been dealing with a serious loss these last few months. Right now, I think you need to focus on your health and the future. Have you thought any more about that grief recovery group at the Villas?”
“I can’t see what good that would do.” Deborah and her agendas—anything to lure me down to the old-age home. It was no surprise that rather than considering the question I’d asked, she would use it to turn the conversation in the direction she wanted. “And aside from that, how would I get there? Certainly not in my car, since you’ve taken the keys away.”
Deborah bristled. “Do we have to do this today? I just came by to bring you some breakfast and make sure you’re all right.” Her defenses went up, as impenetrable as the heat shields that protected our Apollo capsules upon reentry.
“Well, clearly I am all right.” It would always be this way between us, I supposed. Deborah and I on opposite sides of the divide.
“Clearly,” she muttered, then rose to her feet, scooped up the trash from breakfast, and stuffed it into the bag. She didn’t say another word, just breezed through the living room, gathered her things, and headed for the door. The click-click of her footsteps paused in the entryway. I waited, trying to peer around the corner. I could feel Annalee beside me, nudging my shoulder and saying, Go tell her you’re sorry.
But an apology, a softening, would soon lead to the discussion of grief recovery groups, medical treatm
ents, and the merits of the conveniently located old-persons’ village, which Deborah had already visited, priced, and decided upon in her own mind. She’d move me there and conduct an estate sale here—a cleaning out, as she’d called it after Annalee passed. Answers to the family secrets, if they were hidden in this house, would be lost forever. The pieces of my life would be sold to the highest bidder. My daughter would manage me as if I were some nincompoop, some incompetent incapable of making my own decisions.
For this reason, I let her go out the door without another word between us. With Deborah, there was no aimless conversation. With Deborah, there was little pretense. She merely wanted to dispense with matters as quickly and easily as possible. There was no room for the idea that I might have something left to do in life.
I waited for the girl to arrive. I waited until nine, and then half past, and then ten thirty-five, forty, fifty-two. Having no phone number or other means by which to contact her, I had little choice but to pace the floors. Perhaps she wasn’t coming. Perhaps, after the stairway incident, she’d decided to divest herself of me altogether.
The idea was disappointing to a degree for which I was not prepared. I stood in the entryway, considering the situation. I could, of course, climb the stairs and proceed to the attic, moving along with my project myself. Until yesterday’s incident, I’d been doing fine. I was sore from the fall down the stairs, but not incapable of making my way up there.
Instead, I found myself hovering near the front door, listening as each car passed, even though I knew that the girl normally walked here from school. How was she planning to travel here today? By city bus, I supposed, since that mother of hers didn’t seem to have a vehicle. Where did they live? How far away? I hadn’t asked. I hadn’t so much as inquired about a phone number.
