by Sandra Kring
“Lucy? Is Grandpa awake?” Oma shouts.
“Yes,” I yell back.
“Okay. Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.”
Grandpa Sam is trying to rise from the bed. Or so it seems, since he’s bending forward. I try to show him how to rock to gain momentum, but he doesn’t mimic me, so I wrap my arms around his chest and clutch my hands together at his back, and with his help I manage to get him standing. I put the walker in front of him and take his hands, wrapping them over the metal bar, and I walk him out.
“You got him up?” Oma says when she sees us, a mop in her hand. “Oh, Lucy, he’s too heavy for you!”
“We did it together, didn’t we, Grandpa Sam?”
Oma helps Grandpa get into his lift chair, then hurries off to scoot the refrigerator back in place.
I watch Grandpa Sam as he gazes out the window, where a red squirrel is hanging upside down on the feeder’s pole, gobbling bird seed. Grandpa tries to lean over far enough to reach the window with his knuckles. “Goddamn red squirrels,” he says slowly as he gazes out the window.
“Mean sons of bitches. They bite the balls off the gray ones.”
I purse my lips to keep my giggle inside.
He turns back to me, and I realize that since we got here, I’ve not seen one expression on Grandpa Sam but this one. The sad one. As if his face were molded out of wax by a starving artist too poor to buy Paxil, and he is helpless to change it. I tap the pointed collar of his flannel shirt in place. “Grandpa Sam, did you like my mom? You know, when she was a girl like me?”
His eyelids slowly scrape down over his watery eyes. He opens his mouth like he’s going to answer my question, but he doesn’t say anything except to swear again at the squirrel at his feeder. I rap on the window and the squirrel scurries off. Two fat-bellied blue jays come to take his place. “Look, blue jays,” I tell Grandpa. He opens his eyes and stares out the window. “Pigs,” he says. “They chase away the good birds.”
Once he dozes off, I go into the kitchen, where Oma now has the top of the range propped open like a car hood. She’s clanking on the burners to free them of black crud. “Oma, what was Grandpa Sam like when he was young?”
“Well, it depends on when you’re talking about.”
“Like, when he was a kid.”
“I didn’t know Sam then, and he didn’t talk about his childhood much. His mom died when he was ten. I know that much. And people say she was a sweet little thing. I knew his dad because he was still alive when we married. He was very hard on Sam.”
“Was he glad Grandpa Sam married you?”
“That man wasn’t glad about anything. Not that it would have mattered one way or another to me. I was head over heels in love with your grandpa. How could I not be? He was the most handsome man I’d ever seen. And so smart he was like a walking encyclopedia. He was obsessed with learning, as if knowledge was his water and he was always thirsty. You and your brother take after him like that.”
Oma and I don’t hear the hum of Grandpa’s lift chair, nor do we hear the click of the front door. What we hear instead is the horn of Oma’s car bleating frantically. “Oh, Mom must want help carrying stuff in,” I say. Oma apparently feels the gust of cool air entering the kitchen at the same time I do, because she rocks back on one foot and peers into the living room, the grungy dishcloth dangling from her hand. “Is that the front—” Before she can get the rest of the words out, we hear a deafening crack and the echo it makes as it reverberates against the trees, followed by Mom’s shrill scream.
“Oh, my God, was that a shotgun?”
Oma and I race to the front door, which is hanging open.
Grandpa Sam is at the bottom of the steps, one foot bare, a rifle lifted only high enough to tuck it against his side. The rifle is haphazardly lined up with Oma’s parked car, its door open. I scream then too, because even though I can hear Mom, I’m suddenly afraid that she’s lying on the front seat in a bloody mess.
But then I see her crouched alongside the car, a book bag dangling from one hand and a shopping bag clutched in her other. She lets go of the bags and makes a beeline for the maple tree between the house and the car. The tree is too narrow to hide all of her, though, and maybe that’s why she screams and screams.
“Give me that gun, Sam! Sam!” Oma grabs the rifle and yanks it from his hand. She’s shaking hard. “It’s okay, Tess. It’s okay! I’ve got the gun!”
Mom slips out and stands alongside the tree, hugging it as if she might fall down if she lets go. “I saw him with the gun and beeped for you. Why didn’t you come?”
“What on earth did you think you were doing?” Oma shouts at Grandpa. Mom stumbles to Oma, and Oma wraps her arm around her, a hand nervously thumping Mom’s back. “My God,” Oma says again.
“He waited for me like a sniper!”
Grandpa Sam blinks at us with dull eyes, then looks to the tree Mom just vacated. “Goddamn red squirrels,” he says.
chapter
NINE
IT TAKES Oma a solid week to get the house “in order.” She pares down the clutter and boxes up mounds of knick-knacks, pans with peeling nonstick finishes, and the afghans she says Grandpa’s third wife must have made compulsively. Then she scrubs the whole place with baking soda, vinegar, and salt, until the entire house smells like a pickle. When she’s finished scrubbing, she feng shui arranges the house, moving the kitchen table from the center of the floor over toward the living-room doorway, so close to the cupboards that I can’t see how a full-grown adult or even a kid—or chi, for that matter—is going to be able to squeeze around it to roam freely through the house.
Mom knocks over a green vase with artificial flowers in colors that don’t quite match as she sits at the table working on Missy Jenkins’s tale and surfing the Net with the DSL hookup she finally got (but only after she called to harp at Connie Olinger at least twice). She cusses as she scoops it up. “If you were cleaning out junk, why in the hell did you leave these ugly fake flowers everywhere? Whoever came up with the idea of making flowers out of feathers should have been shot. And what’s up with all the mirrors?”
“She’s using the flowers to create chi, as a remedy against shars—negative energy,” I say. “And mirrors reflect shars.”
“I wish I had my crystals here,” Oma says to herself.
Mom tilts her head to the side and glances into a small mirror tacked up under the cupboard. “This one looks like a fun-house mirror,” she says, “which is somehow wryly appropriate.”
Oma leans over Mom to check the mirror and gasps, since mirrors that are distorted have a negative effect on chi—then she asks Mom to move her chair so she can take it down. “Damn it, Ma, I need to find a way to get some work done here, since here seems to be where I’m stuck for now. You understand?” Mom gestures toward the living room, where the TV channels are going spastic again, and Oma squeezes between the counter and table to get into the living room to grab the remote.
“What in the hell is the table doing over here, anyway? Never mind,” Mom says. She sighs. “Between being back here and not having a damn thing to my name right now … God, I’m ready to slit my wrists, even if I have to use a dull butter knife to do it.”
“Tess, the way you talk!” Oma shouts from the living room.
I think even Mom believes she might bring some bad karma on herself for saying such a thing, because she apologizes quickly for her mood, blames it on the circumstances, suggests maybe she needs her antidepressant dosage upped, then tells me to get back to my reading. I put my head down before I roll my eyes.
In spite of what Mom says—that it’s the stress of being homeless and back in this “dump” that is making her so edgy—I know it’s about more than those things. “You’re only crabby because you haven’t talked to Peter in weeks,” I tell her.
“Fourteen days, six hours, thirty-two minutes, and twenty-six seconds,” Milo says, as he comes into the room and glides to the fridge to pour himself a glass of
orange juice.
“Stay out of my business, you two.”
I did a paper on the effects of love once, so I know that Mom’s in chemical withdrawal. She’s restless and not sleeping well, judging from the bags under her eyes. Eyes, I might add, that obviously cry in the night, because they’re red and puffy when she wakes. And the other night, when she plugged the charger into her cell phone and the little red light wouldn’t go on, she got so upset that she yanked it out of the wall and whipped it against the counter. If the charger wasn’t broken before the crash, it certainly was afterward.
Oh, how I loved it when Mom was in the throes of new love! When her brain was shooting dopamine, estrogen, oxytocin, and testosterone into her body like an oil field, tempering her worrying and critical thinking system. During those first couple of months, even when I brought the mail in, she didn’t flinch and go into distress mode. I knew, though, even back then, that we’d be in trouble when her brain calmed down and she and Peter had to rely on the bonding chemical, oxytocin, to keep them together. Oxytocin. It’s also the “trust” chemical. The one Mom seems incapable of producing when it comes to men, just as some bodies are incapable of producing insulin.
Sure enough, a few months into the relationship, Mom started getting fearful that it wouldn’t last—like she thinks all good things can’t—and I saw her getting jealous and suspicious every time Peter was late. About that time, I noticed that Peter was spending the night less often too, because I stopped finding him on the couch in the morning, the pillow not even dented from his head, the blanket still folded neatly on the opposite end, and him stretching and giving a fake yawn so that Milo and I would believe (and Milo probably did) that he’d slept on the couch all night, rather than in Mom’s bed.
I wrote a second paper then, explaining how after those first five months or so, those outrageous hormones settle down, but a twenty-minute hug or cuddling session is all it takes for a good dose of the trust hormone to be released by the brain all over again.
I pointed out, too, how males need to be touched four times more than females, thinking maybe she’d make those small gestures—a hand on Peter’s shoulder, a tap to his belly, or a brush across his back as she passed him to go into the bathroom or kitchen—like she used to do when her brain was going nuts. I was sure she’d get the hint and be grateful for the information and use it. So sure was I that on the night I gave her that second paper, I tagged after Milo when he went into our room to grab a library book and I asked him what he was reading. He turned it around so I could see the cover, some nonsense about quantum superposition and multiple universes. The poor kid got so excited I thought he’d have an asthma attack when I asked him a question just so he’d stay out of the front room and give Mom and Peter enough time for an effective hug. “So,” I asked. “If there’s more than one universe, how do you know we’re both in the same one?”
I flopped down on my bed and endured a forty-five-minute lecture on the topic, thinking that Mom, deficient in the trust hormone as she is, probably needed a little extra time. At first I tried to feign interest, but then I remembered it was Milo and he wouldn’t notice the difference. I let my mind drift aimlessly, studying his nostrils and wondering if mine were shaped like two puny peanut shells too and what that shape might mean in Chinese face reading.
Apparently, I suffered through Milo’s lecture for naught, though, because after I thanked him for enlightening me, I headed into the front room and found Peter standing by the door. “A good-night hug?” he asked me. As I hugged him, I peeked under his arm at Mom, who was staring down at her laptop screen.
“Why are you leaving so early?”
“I have an early meeting tomorrow, kiddo.”
Mom didn’t even look up when she said, “Bye, Peter.”
Even Mom’s farewell to him upset me, because Oma says that people should say, “See you later,” or something like that when they part from people they love, knowing they’ll see them again (even if it’s in the afterlife). Otherwise it can be like a bad omen.
I look back down at my almost-finished book report on the book that did turn out to be depressing enough that it made me want to swallow Paxil and slit my wrists with a butter knife. I jot a note at the bottom of my page, asking Mom to please let me pick out my own books from now on because I’m sick of reading sad stories about girls with dead or dying parents.
When I finish, I scoot the report over to Mom, who takes it and stuffs it into the folder sitting beside her laptop. I see Oma out of the corner of my eye, suspiciously watching Mom. She goes off to her room, and when she comes back, she’s got a conch shell filled with dried sage. Mom’s head is down, but I know it’s not going to stay that way long. Oma strikes a match and touches it to the clump of herbs. She gently blows into the shell to get the sage burning, then she starts fanning the thin ribbons of smoke into the air, right over Mom’s head. Mom bats at it and cusses, which only makes Oma fan more smoke at her. “You need to be smudged, dear, like it or not. It will help rid you of negativity.”
Mom cusses and coughs dramatically.
Oma squeezes between the table and counter, heading into the other room. She fans smoke over Grandpa Sam, who’s blankly staring at the TV, then she heads toward the study. “Hey, where you going with that?” Mom shouts. “Oh, she’s not taking that in …” Mom leaps from her chair. “Not in there, for God’s sakes!”
When I get to the study, Mom is chasing Oma around the room, hopping behind and reaching around her like the boys who play basketball at the dangerous park do when they’re trying to steal the ball. Oma manages to smudge the long shelf that is filled with books, fossils, arrowheads, and minerals before Mom yanks the shell out of her hand. Milo, working at the desk, barely even notices that he is no longer alone.
“What are you trying to do? Give him an asthma attack that sends him to the hospital? Geez, Mother, he’s doing better now. Leave it that way, will you?”
“Nonsense,” Oma says as she follows Mom back into the kitchen. I tag after them both while Milo gripes behind us that we left his door open and he can hear the TV.
“Sage is healing, Tess. Sacred. It won’t hurt him, it will help him. Tess, what are you doing? Tess, don’t! Dried sage is expensive!”
Mom has the shell in the sink and she’s dousing the smoldering sage with water. “Lucy, will you sit down and work already?”
As Oma tries to squeeze the water out of her soggy clump of sage, Mom leans her rear against the counter and rubs the sides of her head. That’s when Grandpa Sam shuffles into the kitchen, his jogging pants sagging so that you can see a patch of gray pubic hair between the elastic waist-band and his T-shirt. “Oh, for God’s sakes. I’m in an asylum!”
That’s when the phone rings.
“Lucy, can you get that while I help your grandpa to his chair?” Oma says this as she tugs up his britches and turns him around. “You have to use your walker, Sam, remember?”
I pick up the phone while Mom reaches for her purse strap, strung over the back of the chair by her laptop. “I have to get the hell out of here for a little while,” she says.
“Lucy, is that you?”
“Peter!” I shout into the phone. “I was just thinking about you! Only a half an hour ago, at the most!”
Mom’s hand freezes, her purse swaying from it like a hypnotist’s pendulum.
“Lucy, I’m so relieved that I found you. I’ve been trying to locate you guys since the fire. It’s been a nightmare trying to get information, but I finally found someone in your grandmother’s building who knew where she was. I figured you were all together. I’ve been worried sick. Are you all okay?” Peter is practically shrieking.
“We’re fine. We were here in Timber Falls when it happened. But everything is gone. Our books, our computers, everything! Did people die, Peter? Any kids or old people? And did they find out if it was arson? I haven’t heard any updates, because Mom says I don’t need to know.” The minute I say this, I know I’ve just sc
rewed my chances for learning a thing. And sure enough, he changes the subject abruptly, saying the one thing he knows will distract me. “I miss you, kiddo.” He says this as sweetly as Scotty Hamilton ever could.
“I miss you too, Peter,” I say. “I wish you were here, so you could ask me a question.” Peter says he wishes that too, and Mom motions for me to give her the phone. He suggests that we improvise with another game, by him giving me a quote and me telling him who said it.
Mom tosses her purse on the table and puts her hand in my face, her fingers snapping. “Just wait! Peter is going to give me a quote!”
Mom’s hand is as quick as a pickpocket’s, so I crouch down and clamp the phone tighter to my ear, wrapping my arm up over my head like a seat belt. “Go ahead, Peter,” I say.
He pauses for a bit while he thinks, then he says, “A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?”
“I know that one! I know it!” I shout while hopping in place. “Kahlil Gibran said that!” Then I stop hopping, because I know why he chose this particular quote.
I want to talk to Peter longer, but Mom’s fingers are biting into my shoulder like talons. She snatches the phone from me, then jabs her index finger toward my school books. “Hello?” she says, as though she’s answering a telemarketer’s call.
“Who’s on the phone?” Oma asks as she passes through the kitchen with a rolled Depends diaper that smells so acidic that my eyes begin to water.
“Peter,” I say, and Oma’s face brightens. She pauses and Mom waves her away, so she hurries the soiled diaper outside to the garbage can—removing shar from Mom’s space, no doubt, because it’s not like she doesn’t have enough negativity to deal with already. I open my book and pretend I’m reading, even though I’m sure Mom knows I’m not.
