by Sandra Kring
Then I start rambling, trying to fit in everything I can before Mom yanks the phone back.
“I learned to ride a bike, Peter. Milo learned right away, but I had to work at it. I kept falling down, so after I was done being grounded, which was yesterday—I won’t go into that—I went right on the road because there’s a hill, and I forced myself to go down it. It was sink or swim, but I made it to the bottom without falling, and now I can ride! Mom got us helmets and knee pads. Elbow pads too, and we can ride on the road now. It’s so fun!” I’m speaking at such a fast clip that I can only hope Peter is catching it all.
Peter says something, but I can’t hear him because Mom is shouting at me, Oma is trying to calm her, and Milo is whining and wheezing because he wants to thank Peter and open the boxes.
“You won’t ride that bike for a month, Lucy Marie McGowan, if you don’t give me that phone right now!”
But I want to tell Peter something, at least one of my secrets, and quietly enough that Mom can’t hear. I cup my hand over the receiver and yell above the ruckus, “I have to pee! I’m going to take the phone with me so Peter can ask me my question, then I’ll give it right back. Promise!” I dart into the bathroom and lock the door. Mom bangs on it. “Damn it, Lucy. Open this door this instant!”
“Oh, Tess, don’t swear at her,” Oma says, and then the two of them argue whether Mom was swearing at me or just swearing, period.
“Peter?” I say.
“Yes, Lucy?” and I smile, because I love the way Peter says my name. Like it’s a part of a poem.
“If I were to tell you a secret, would you keep it a secret from Mom?”
“That depends,” he says. “If it’s a secret that poses any physical threat to you, I’d have to tell—even though it sounds to me like you’re in enough trouble at the moment as it is.”
“Well,” I say, “it only possesses a physical threat to me if you tell.”
I have no idea why I want to tell Peter something, but I do. I decide not to tell him that I read from Mom’s childhood notebooks or that later today when Mom goes to help Mitzy wallpaper her kitchen, I’m going to get into her laptop again and read whatever I can find. Instead, I tell him the bottom line. “I’m finding out where Mom got her distrust of men from, and, well, just hang in there, Peter, even if she talks to you like you’re a telemarketer. She’ll resolve it. I really believe she will.”
Mom pounds on the door so hard I can see it vibrate. “God damn it! Lucyyyyy!”
“Tess, please,” Oma pleads again. To which Mom shouts, “I’m going to do more than swear at her in about three seconds if she doesn’t open this door.”
“Come on, Lucy. It’s my turn. You got to talk to him last time!” Milo’s little fist sounds like hail pinging against the door.
Peter seems to not know what to say. I flush the toilet to create the proper sound effects for Mom and call, “I’ll be right out.” I turn on the water faucet.
“Lucy?” Peter says, talking loudly because he realizes that I’m having a bit of trouble hearing him. “I’ve got an assignment for you.”
“Yes?”
“I want you to do some research for me. Do you think you can do that?”
“Sure! Now that I have a laptop, I can research anything. I’m good at it too. It’s all in what you type into the search engines. Sometimes Mom can’t find diddly, so I help her find the more obscure facts for her travel articles. I’ll help you, Peter. What do you want to know?”
“Not that kind of research, Lucy. Hands-on learning, okay? I want you to see if you can’t add a few more children’s activities to your bike riding. I really want you to do that and leave all this messy stuff to us grown-ups, okay?”
The doorknob jiggles, turns, and Mom barges in. She holds the inside of a Bic pen up for me to see. “I’ve got my tricks too,” she says. She snatches the phone out of my hand before I can even say bye and motions me out of the bathroom. “And, Mother, don’t you dare let these kids open those boxes.” She slams the door behind her and the lock clicks.
Milo groans. “Geez,” he says, then he goes to the table and looks longingly at the unopened gifts. “She wouldn’t make us send them back, would she, Lucy?”
At last! At last Milo has learned to see the value of my genius. I tip my head back as though I’m assessing the situation with my acute psychological knowledge, then I say, “Nope. She’ll let us keep them.”
“I hope you’re right.” Milo has a hold of one box, and it makes scraping noises as he rotates it so he can read the print on each side.
“Can you believe Peter sent these, Lucy?” he says. He looks toward the bathroom. “I hope she lets me thank him.”
Grandpa Sam coughs in spasms, and Oma, who is hovering outside the bathroom door, her ear almost stuck to it, steps back and motions for me to check on Grandpa.
Grandpa Sam is in his wheelchair, propped in front of the window. Outside, a handful of chickadees peck seeds in the feeder. He’s breathing okay now, so I call back, “He’s okay, Persephone.”
I’m about to leave him so I can get back to the action in the kitchen, but he actually turns his head and looks at me and says my name, like maybe this is one of those mornings where he’s partly with it, so I feel bad just running off and leaving him all alone. I glance into the kitchen, where Oma is now at the sink, filling it with water, and Milo is sitting at the table, his face in his hands. It’s obviously going to be a while before Mom comes out, so I sit down on the arm of the lift chair.
“Peter—that’s Mom’s boyfriend, or was, anyway, before she ruined it—he just sent Milo and me computers. I doubt if that means anything to you, but, well, it’s a really big deal to us.”
The bathroom door opens and the back door slams. Milo pops his head into the living room. “We still can’t open them.” He shrugs, then heads back to the table to stare at the boxes some more.
I lean forward and peer out the window. Just as I suspected, Mom is headed for the trees off to the side of the yard. “Mom goes there whenever she’s upset or just wants to be alone to think,” I explain to Grandpa Sam. “See? Right over there. She’ll sit like that for a long time, her back against a tree. When she’s really, really upset, she keeps her legs drawn up and her head down. She’s only half upset now. I can tell because her legs are drawn—which means upset—but her wrists are propped on her knees, while her hands pull apart a leaf or something that she’s picked up from the ground. That means that she’s half upset and half thinking, which is a positive sign, because she just talked to Peter, the ex-boyfriend who sent us the laptops. I want him to be my new dad, if I can’t find my birth dad. Or if I do and he turns out to be a creep.”
Grandpa Sam is still looking where I pointed. Or not. “You know what I wish?” I tell him. “I wish your brain wasn’t damaged and that you could think and speak and understand me. Then you could tell me about my dad. It’s kind of like how someone has to get a divorce before they can marry someone else. I have to find him to see if he’ll be my dad, or else how can I have another one take his place?”
A fly walks across Grandpa Sam’s cheek, but he doesn’t flinch. I brush it away, and it comes right back. “He’s pesky,” I say. “Just like me.
“Do you know why I want to find him? My dad, that is? Or at least find out about him?” I don’t wait for a response, because what’s the point?
“Because I want to know who the other part of me is. And I guess I want to know that I’m not a bastard. I mean that in the old-world sense too, so don’t think I’m swearing. Not that there’s any stigma attached to being illegitimate anymore, but to me, I guess there is. If they got married, then that means they loved each other once, and if my dad loved my mom, then he’ll probably love me, because I’m a part of her.
“At first, when I realized that Mom has the same last name as you, I automatically thought I was a bastard. But Mom could have taken her maiden name back after she divorced him. Well, if there was anybody to divorce in the fi
rst place. There wasn’t, if you were right when you said I didn’t have a dad, and if Mom’s remark about using a sperm bank was an actual intention.”
I look out the window and see a red squirrel scampering up the bird feeder pole. “Look at that,” I say. I rap on the window to chase the squirrel away, even if he’s already chased away the chickadees. Grandpa Sam doesn’t react to the squirrels today, which leads me to believe that he is having ministrokes like Oma says he is. I put my arm around him. The squirrel is gone and the chickadees have returned. I like moments like this. Moments when it doesn’t seem so important to me that Grandpa Sam wasn’t the nicest guy back in the old days.
“It’s kind of ironic, isn’t it? Me wanting a dad so bad when I probably wouldn’t even know what you do with a dad if I had one, not any more than you’d know what you do with a computer if you had one. And there Mom is, and she’s got a dad but she doesn’t even … well … anyway.”
I think for a minute as I watch the squirrel return and pick up seeds to gnaw on. “I suppose having a dad would be like having a grandpa. I never knew what you do with a grandpa either, before I came here. Probably all I have to do with a dad is talk to him too.” I rap on the window, and once more the squirrel scampers off and the chickadees return.
I sit quietly for a bit, watching sunflower seed shells ping from the beaks of the chickadees. “I’m going to miss you when you’re gone, Grandpa Sam. Even if you aren’t much of a conversationalist.” I feel a pang when I say it, which tells me that when my laptop is up and connected to the Net, I’d better pause from my research on sperm banks and do some reading up on dying. Maybe look for some articles by that Kübler-Ross lady, or that Robert Neimeyer guy that Barbara told Oma about. Anything to help me prepare for it when it happens.
I hear the back door scraping open and shut and Feynman whining. I glance out the window and see Milo heading for the grove of trees where Mom is still sitting. I watch him talk to her, scratching his arm nervously. Mom doesn’t look up at Milo when she nods. He comes barreling toward the house, moving almost as fast as he does when he’s on his bike, and shouts, “We can open them, Lucy! We can keep them!” as he bursts through the front door.
I give Grandpa a quick peck on the cheek, then hurry into the kitchen, stopping on my way in to grab Milo’s inhaler off his paper-cluttered desk. I hand it to him. “Here, Wheezer,” I say, deciding that if Oma can have a new name, then so can Milo. “You’d better have a snort.” Milo sucks on it quickly, one quick in-breath, rather than his usual two, and he doesn’t even try to hold the medication in as he waits for Oma to open the boxes with a utility knife.
While Milo is ripping things out of the two boxes, Mom comes in. She doesn’t glance at the table. She just kicks a piece of molded Styrofoam out of the way and grabs her cell from the counter. She calls Mitzy, asking her if she’s up for a visitor. Mom makes her voice sound chippy, but it doesn’t fool me. Apparently it doesn’t fool Mitzy either, because Mom’s next words are, “No, I’m fine. I’ll be there in fifteen.” She grabs her purse, tells Oma she’s going out for a while, and out the door she goes.
Milo picks one laptop out of its box and tears the plastic from it. “Wow!” he says. I dig in the second box to find mine. I leave it in its plastic membrane and pull out the other items tucked around it. “What’s this?” I ask Milo. He glances up. “A router box. Cool!” he says, sounding more like a normal kid and less like a profoundly gifted geek. “It’s so we can tap into the Net without having to literally be plugged into the modem.”
“And what’s this?” I ask, pulling out a cardboard tube and tipping it upside down so that a little flat rectangular thing encased in clear molded plastic drops out.
“A memory stick,” Milo says, scooping it off the table. “Wow, Peter went all out! Is there one for each of us?”
We rake through his box and find a second one.
“Oh, wow!” Milo says with a gasp.
“You’d better take it easy there a bit, Wheezer. You just had a hit and you can hardly breathe.”
“Wheezer? Lucy, please don’t call him that,” Oma says to me, then, to Milo, “Take a couple nice cleansing breaths, honey.”
I’ve never used a memory stick before, and though Milo hasn’t either, he knows all about them because he’s a frequent visitor to tekkie Web sites. He explains their function to me quickly.
“Now we don’t have to worry about backing up our work. Two gigabytes—wow! That’s enough to store everything we could possibly put on our computers in a year’s time. If your hard drive crashes, you won’t lose anything, because we can store every document we have on it for safekeeping. Everything can be downloaded to another computer. I wish we had these for our old files.”
The memory sticks are small and dangle from a long black cord, so we can hook them around our necks like necklaces—though who would want to is beyond me.
Oma shakes her head and chuckles. “Uploads … giggle-bites … it’s all French to me.”
Across from me, on the kitchen counter, Mom’s laptop sits, plugged into its charger. “So,” I say slowly, suddenly interested in those memory sticks again. “You’re telling me I could upload all of my documents on this memory stick, then plug it into your laptop, and my documents would download right onto your computer? Is that what you’re saying? You know, if I wanted to, say, make a backup on your computer just to play it extra safe?”
“Well, you could. You just plug it into the USB port, upload your files, then take the memory stick, plug it into my computer, and download. But that won’t be necessary. The memory stick itself serves the purpose well enough.”
“But I could if I wanted to, right?”
“Right,” he says.
MILO HAS our computers up and running in no time, and there it is, my browser, coming back to me like a long-lost friend. I race to the sites I love the most to see what I’ve missed, skimming them all. But even as I read the newest posts on PostSecret.com, I’m thinking of one thing and one thing only—using my memory stick to lift Mom’s documents off her laptop so I can read them on my computer.
I have to wait until Oma’s outside smoking and Milo’s back in his room with his laptop, but then I do it. I plug the memory stick into Mom’s computer, and in mere seconds I’ve lifted a copy of every document in her Word. I feel a wave of guilt but rationalize it by telling myself that God Himself prompted Peter to buy us the memory sticks so that Mom’s memories—my beginnings—could be given to me.
When I’m done, I unplug the stick and insert it into my new laptop, already configured by Milo. And—voila!—there it is: Missy Jenkins’s adventures (which might amuse me the same way a mindless sitcom would, if I were allowed to watch them) and, most importantly, Mom’s journal, with only dates for file names. I race up the stairs and into my room, shutting the door behind me and jamming a butter knife between the door and the door frame because there’s no lock—and because, hey, I have my tricks too. I open Mom’s journal.
I am holding my breath, suddenly feeling scared. Not so much of getting caught but more of learning something awful. I open an entry at random, trusting that what I need to know will come—just as Oma says it will—and up comes an entry written on September 24, just two days after Marie and Al and Mitzy and Ray came for dinner.
chapter
FOURTEEN
Earlier today, from the front yard, where I paced and ranted under my breath, I could see Ma and Lucy ambling back to the house, side by side, as if they were glued together. I had an explanation ready if Ma came racing across the grass to offer yet another technique meant to cleanse me, center me, and make me easier to live with. I’d tell her that I was trying to reach someone who could tell me where to apply for relocation benefits for displaced tenants. It was better than telling her the truth. That I felt desperate to talk to Peter. To tell him that I’m sorry and want to try again.
I’m coming undone, and I know it. Two weeks back in my childhood home, and I’m losing it. Lu
cy knows it too. I feel her watching me at every turn, her photographic mind skimming through the pages of every psychology book she’s ever read, checking off symptoms, no doubt, trying to figure out what kind of mental affliction has claimed her mother now. Her hypervigilance toward me is unnerving and makes me sorry that I ever supported her decision to delve into psychology.
I’m outside again. Sitting in the cluster of hard maples that were my refuge as a child, hoping I won’t be seen, which is ludicrous since I’m sitting in the glow of my laptop screen, typing. The ground is cool under me, a tree solid against my back.
I try to tell myself that I’d have it together had I not come back home, but the truth is, I’ve not had it together for a long, long time. Ever since The Absent Savior failed and unraveled my dream of becoming a critically acclaimed novelist. Ever since Peter came into my life and unraveled my determination to make it through life without falling prey to the traps of love again, turning me into a pathetic, sniveling woman who, before we came here, crept out at night three times in one week and took the bus to his neighborhood, where I paced below his windows, watching his blinds for the hourglass figure of a woman to appear and tell me he’s moved on and found another subject for his love poetry. This is the only reason I agreed to drive Mother here, of course. To save myself from becoming a full-fledged stalker.
The sky is darkening, the sunset a sickly mixture of muddy greenish-gray, like vomit Inside, the living-room light flicks on, and I can see Dad, a brain-dead lump in a lift chair, his hair ridiculously swirled on his head. I think of how he always spritzed on Ma’s Aqua Net hairspray when he went out in the evenings, and I want to spray what’s left of his hair until the peak is as hard as coral. I want to make him sit in front of that monstrosity of a mirror so he can see what he’s become.
Ma just went into the room to say something to him, Lucy at her side. Mother’s hands are gesturing like a maestro’s. One edge of Grandma’s gold-framed mirror is visible, and I can’t take my eyes off it. Nor can I steer my mind’s eye away from the events that happened in that room years ago. The events that caused that mirror to be hung in such a ridiculous spot.
