by Lisa Wingate
He pointed toward the furniture. “What color was the furniture in the nursing home? In Frances’s room. Did you see the dresser?”
My mind zipped through a half dozen tunnels, like a mouse slipping through the walls of Mama’s house. “Blue.” J. Norm turned to look at me, and both at the same time, we said, “The blue dresser.”
Sliding back into my seat, I gripped the steering wheel. “How do we get back to that nursing home?”
His mouth worked into a grin. “Turn left.”
“Yeah, see, I was right all along,” I said. “I knew you’d figure it out about the blue dresser here in a minute. I was just trying to make you feel good about yourself.”
He shook his head, but he was trying not to smile, I could tell.
I pulled out, and we headed back to the nursing home. On the way around the block, we came up with a plan. I’d go into Mrs. Wilson’s old room and push the door shut where people wouldn’t see me snooping around, and J. Norm would hang around down the hall. If any of the workers came by, he’d stop them and ask them questions to keep them distracted, and if he had to, he’d even slip and fall down or something.
It was a good plan, and when we got to the nursing home, it went just like we’d pictured. There was a lady making her way down the hall with a laundry cart, but she was three rooms away from Mrs. Wilson’s, and I figured I’d have enough time to case the joint before she got there. She went into another room, and I ducked into Mrs. Wilson’s. There were actually two beds in there, and a lady was asleep in the other one, but she didn’t look like she knew a thing. I checked out the blue dresser on Mrs. Wilson’s side, but the drawers were empty. Somebody’d already started cleaning the place out.
The old lady in the next bed moaned and stuck her hand up when I moved to the closet. “Ssshhh,” I whispered. “It’s okay. Mrs. Wilson wants her stuff from the blue dresser.”
The lady moaned louder, and I stopped where I was. Should I try to get her to quiet down, or check the closet real quick and scoot on out the door? Finally I went for the closet, and sure enough, there were boxes in the bottom, and they had Frances Wilson’s name on them.
The lady in the bed kept moaning and moaning.
I popped opened a box. Clothes. I checked the other one. Clothes. I opened the third, and it was mostly empty—a few old pictures in picture frames, some printed pages from the Web site about St. Clare’s school. Some greeting cards, a couple of pretty bows that must’ve come on flower arrangements, a lace thing like you’d put on the top of a dresser, some loose stationery for writing letters, another box of greeting cards.
I heard J. Norm in the hall, talking to someone. Hooking a finger under the lid of the greeting card box, I pulled it up, looked inside, and there it was—an envelope with Norman written on it.
There were voices right outside the door now. J. Norm was talking loud, asking the laundry lady how often the sheets were changed here and whether the food was good, like he was either thinking of moving in or doing an inspection of the place.
I heard the squeal of another set of shoes coming up the hall. “You’d better check on her,” the person talking with J. Norm said, and I figured that in about two and a half seconds, the moaning lady and I were gonna have company. Grabbing the envelope and one of the greeting cards, I pushed the closet door shut right as a nurse walked into the room. She didn’t notice me at first. I took a step toward the door, and she saw me, and I glanced at J. Norm, who was wide-eyed outside with the laundry lady.
I held up the greeting card I’d lifted from Mrs. Wilson’s box. “I don’t know what’s the matter. I just came in here to bring a card, but I think that lady needs something.” Before the nurse could ask me who I was, I set the card on the blue dresser and scooted out the door with J. Norm’s envelope in my hand. I didn’t even look at him. I just kept going until I was out the front of the building and in the car.
J. Norm must’ve found the switch for old-guy hyperdrive, because he wasn’t far behind me. I was still trying to get my breath when he slid into his seat. “What did you find?”
I held up the envelope. “Home run.”
Taking it from my hand, he touched the place where his name was written and said, “Drive.”
Chapter 15
J. Norman Alvord
I left the envelope unopened until we reached home. I wasn’t certain why, other than the knowledge that the mere act of traveling across town with Epiphany at the wheel was excitement enough. I had the sense that the envelope contained something of significance—a life-altering bit of history that shouldn’t be discovered while clinging to the seat by my fingernails as the car threaded through rush-hour traffic. Epiphany didn’t argue the matter greatly. She was busy trying to deliver us home in one piece.
At slightly after five thirty we reached my house, having both perhaps sacrificed a year or more of life span. I was never so relieved to be pulling into my own driveway.
Safely back in the house, I sank into my chair, sliding my fingers along the crease of the plain brown envelope. The paper was crisp, somewhat aged in feel. The envelope had a pliability to the edges and a stiffness farther in, indicating that whatever was inside hadn’t been intended for this particular package.
“Open it!” Dropping to her knees, Epiphany squirmed into the narrow space beside my chair. “I risked my life for that thing. It better not be last year’s Christmas card.”
I examined the crease again, partially just to torment her, but there was also a sense of foreboding in me. If my mother had chosen to hide whatever knowledge this envelope contained, perhaps there was a good reason. “Now, that would make both of us look foolish, wouldn’t it? All this running around for a Christmas card.”
“Well, hey, at least I know how to drive in rush-hour traffic now, right?” Epiphany’s hands flipped through the air, mobile exclamation points.
“I presume you’re using that term loosely.”
She blew a raspberry at me. “I got us back here. Open the stupid envelope.”
I slid a finger under the flap, and the glue popped free quickly. Inside was a single sheet of floral stationery folded around a newspaper clipping.
“What is it?” Epiphany leaned close, her chin touching my arm. “What’s it say?”
My hands shook as I unfolded the paper. At the top, my name had been written in shaky cursive, and beneath that, the single paragraph of writing ran downhill, the scrawl labored, crooked, almost illegible. I lifted it closer to my face, trying to make out the words. In my mind, I heard the voice from my childhood, Frances’s voice.
Norman, I fear I cannot take this secret to my grave. Please know that I believe your mother had your best interests at heart. I suspect that to her dying breath she would have told you that you were always hers, but you came to her at five years old, following a trauma of some sort. You dreamed often of a house fire. I believe you had or may yet have siblings. A woman who helped with parties in your mother’s Houston circle, Aldamae, may have known something of this. She was a colored woman from Groveland. She came to the back door late one night and spoke privately with your mother. Shortly afterward, you were brought into the family. Aldamae knew your history, I am certain. I overheard things later on. There were secrets which your mother never confided to me, but . . . The words became indiscernible then, except for the final few . . . from Groveland, I think . . .
The letter ended abruptly, unsigned.
“Whoa,” Epiphany breathed, leaning away to look at me, her eyes wide circles of tarnished silver. “That’s like something out of a movie.”
“Except that it isn’t a movie.” Everything I had suspected was true. The christening pictures that my mother had placed in my baby book, the grainy photographs of her building sand castles with a toddler at the beach house, were bits of someone else’s history. My hair had not darkened from sandy blond to red, as she had always asserted when she’d shown those pictures of a towheaded child. In reality, I was not the child in those pho
tographs.
I was another child. Someone else’s child.
Epiphany squeezed out of the corner and stood up. “You think we can get Terrence’s computer again today?”
I glanced toward the door. “He’s out of town. When I spoke with him this morning, he said he was leaving for an art show in Oklahoma, and then he’d be spending a couple days with his daughter, Dell. She’s expecting his first grandchild.” Epiphany’s look of consternation took me aback slightly. “Why did you want the computer again?”
She paced to the entry doorway and back, her fingertips drumming together. “The library’s closed by now. We need to get to a computer. . . .”
“For what purpose, exactly?” Clearly I’d been left in the dust of a speedy, youthful mind.
Her face was alive with possibilities I hadn’t yet seen. “To look it up, J. Norm—just like that stuff we found about Frances and the school. I mean, a big house burns down and there’s kids in the house, and some people must’ve died, or you wouldn’t have been up for adoption. A fire like that would’ve been a big deal, right? Even though it was a long time ago, it would’ve been a big story. We think it might’ve happened in Groveland. Maybe it made the papers, or got on some history site—like the one we looked at about St. Clare’s school. We know what happened, and we sort of know when it happened—I mean, you know about how old you were when you were in the house with the seven chairs, so we can figure out what year the house might’ve burned down, right? You said you remembered four other kids and you, all redheaded. It’s not every day five redheaded kids are in a house that burns down. You’d be surprised what’s on the Internet—all kinds of memories people have written about, old newspaper articles, lots of history. It’s worth a shot.”
“Smart thinking,” I said, and my mind picked up its walking cane and chased after hers. “We need a computer.”
“That’s what I said.” She lifted her hands, then let them slap to her thighs.
But she hadn’t gotten my point. “No, I mean to say, we need a computer. Wal-Mart is only a few blocks. They sell those at Wal-Mart, correct? And the cellular apparatus for the Internet connection. Do they sell those?”
“Well, yeah, I guess. They got a whole cell phone store right there in Wal-Mart. You can buy anything. Shoot, when we go shopping, we can pick me up a cell phone while we’re there.” She delivered the last sentence in a sarcastic tone, but with a hopeful gleam in her eye. “You know a computer’s expensive, right? And the cell phone Internet thing probably is, too.”
“Cost is not an issue. We have work to do.” Tucking the letter carefully back into the envelope, I scooted to the front of my chair, the joints in my legs popping and protesting. “You can use it for your schoolwork, as well. When you have a need.”
“Cool!” Backing away from my chair, Epiphany cast a quizzical look in my direction and then toward the clock. “You mean we’re going right now? To Wal-Mart to buy a computer?”
A check of my wristwatch told me it was almost time for Epiphany to go to the city bus stop. “Perhaps you should let your mother know you’ll be working late. I can take you home in the car after we’re finished.”
She looked askance heavenward in the way of a mother exasperated by a child’s repetitive questions. “Nobody’s there, J. Norm. Mama’s gone to her night shift by now, and Russ said he’d be away until late. He doesn’t want me calling him while he’s out doing his thing, believe me.” The answer held a nonchalance that made me wonder if anyone was looking after this child. She seemed to operate in her mother’s house as if she were a miniature adult, living with roommates she didn’t particularly like. I found the concept difficult to imagine. When I was her age, my mother could barely summon the courage to allow me to pick up a date and drive to the spring cotillion. When the time came for me to actually fly the nest, Mother wept for weeks, trailed me with letters, phone calls, care packages, and too-frequent visits.
And, in truth, I wasn’t even hers by blood. Yet she was my mother in every meaningful sense of the word.
Oddly, I found myself both missing my mother and admiring Epiphany as we proceeded to the car and drove to Wal-Mart. Based on Frances’s letter and my dreams, I suspected that my mother had saved me from a situation like Epiphany’s, or worse. Given a set of circumstances like Epiphany’s, would I have been as resilient, as determined to make a life for myself as she was?
“You’re sure you want to do this?” Epiphany asked when we pulled into a handicapped space in the parking lot. Being old does have its advantages, occasionally—handicapped tags, for one.
“Quite. We’ll purchase a computer and anything else that will be helpful in our search.”
Less than forty minutes later, Wal-Mart being the multipurpose mecca that it is, we were walking out the door with food from the deli, a new backpack for Epiphany, and a computer, complete with all the necessary accessories, some of which the charming pimple-faced boy at the counter had given us for free with our purchase. The total cost, including the Internet cell phone connection, and a pair of barbecue dinners from the deli, was less than nine hundred dollars. A pittance, really, considering that I well remembered the day when computers occupied entire warehouses and carried price tags in the millions. Comparatively, our new laptop device was a bargain. Nonetheless, Epiphany was stunned on the way home.
“Must be nice to have all that money,” she muttered as we pulled into the garage again.
I considered the quest that had consumed a great deal of my life—not so much a lust for money as for success, for accomplishment. Money had been a natural result of it, however. “Money follows hard work,” I said, perhaps by way of defending myself.
Getting out of the car, Epiphany scoffed. “It helps if you got money to start with, J. Norm.”
Her answer frustrated me, because of the implicit helplessness of it. “It helps if you’re tall, and athletic, and dashingly handsome, too, but I was not. I suppose I would have preferred it if I’d been placed in the body of one of those charmed young men for whom the world seems to roll out like a red carpet, but what good would it have done me to complain about it? I came to this earth with an acute mind and an unwavering curiosity, and I made use of those assets. One of the secrets to life, Epiphany, is to find your gifts and focus on those. Leave your liabilities in the dust of the road not taken. The world is an imperfect place. Everyone struggles. Successful people see trials as growth experiences, rather than stumbling blocks. You have everything you need for success. You’re a beautiful young woman, and you’re strong, and you have a clever mind. If you let anyone convince you otherwise, you steal from yourself.”
“Now you sound like my history teacher,” she complained as we took the computer upstairs and set up a card table in Roy’s room, a clandestine location where our equipment wouldn’t be found, should Deborah ever decide to come back.
While we ate our deli meals and configured the computer, I told Epiphany about the early Block I Apollo Guidance Computers and the giant Sperry UNIVAC 1100 and IBM mainframes, which took up the space of whole rooms, operated via punch cards, and used reel-to-reel tape to store information. “Hard to believe how things have changed,” I admitted, pointing to the computer. “Those are kilobytes and gigabytes of information, flashing through the air all around us, encrypted and encoded. We could have used that technology, back in the day. The Russian trawlers wouldn’t have given us so much trouble with our rockets.”
“The Russian what?” She paused with a fork halfway to her mouth.
“The trawlers—fishing boats off the coast,” I explained, thinking back to those cloak-and-dagger days when the Russians attempted to thwart us at every turn. “In preparation for sending the real Surveyor into space, we moved our operations from California to Cape Canaveral to test a dynamic model, placed in an Atlas/Centaur rocket. But time after time, we experienced communications failure. Before we figured out that the Russians were using fishing boats off the coast to jam our radio signals, we’d c
hanged out two complete radio transmitter systems, thinking they weren’t working correctly. It took a couple of days each time, which was expensive—not to mention the costs of the hardware. After we discerned that the Russians were waiting for our launches each time, we began announcing fake launch times, then performing the real launch tests in secret. Our tests stopped failing after that.”
“Whoa, that’s seriously James Bond,” Epiphany commented, and then turned her attention back to the computer. The software had finished installing, and she restarted the computer to allow it to take effect. It was only when the screen came on again that I noticed the time. I shouldn’t have been so surprised, as it was dark outside.
“We should be getting you home,” I told her. “It’s after eight thirty.”
Her response was the usual incredulous, “J. Norm, nobody cares. Besides, it’s not like you know how to do a search on the browser. Anyway, you aren’t driving me home.”
“I most certainly am. It’s not as though you can be walking to and from the bus stop in the dark. I won’t allow it.”
With an indignant cough, she opened the browser window. “I can handle myself.”
“Well, then, humor me,” I replied. Epiphany would have a career in the Senate someday. Winning an argument with her was almost impossible. “Allow me to feel useful.”
She ignored me and typed something into the computer. “What year were you born?”
“Nineteen thirty-five. I am driving you home.”
“So if you were five or six when the fire happened, that was 1940 or 1941, right?” Epiphany typed the information into the computer, adding bits and pieces of my life story. Clues. “Not without taking out a few street signs and a fire hydrant or two, I bet. You barely got us home from the school, remember? There were five kids in your dream, right?”
“Five, including myself. I was the eldest.”
