by Sandra Kring
“Lucy, did you see that? He smiled at you!”
I turn and see Oma standing in the doorway.
“He did?”
“He certainly did!” Oma comes inside and stands next to me. “When you were patting his hand.”
“Oma? Do you think there’s a part of Grandpa Sam that knows when we do nice things for him?”
“Of course. That’s why he smiled at you. He knows you were helping him get comfortable. And I’m sure he hears us too. Besides, even if his brain was totally gone—which it isn’t—his spirit is registering everything, and it’s communicating with you, right here.” Oma taps me right over my heart, brushing one of the tiny new buds my chest is sporting these days. It hurts a little when she pats me. “And if you listen, you’ll hear what he’s trying to tell you.”
After Oma leaves the room, I tell Grandpa Sam about visiting Nordine Bickett, and about the photograph and the puppet. He turns his head as I tell him these things. “Would you like to see them?” I ask, and his dry lips open and close, and although no words come out of them, I know he’s said yes.
I run up to my room, put both items into one of Mom’s old backpacks that I’ve claimed for my own, and go downstairs. Oma is busy cleaning the house for Peter’s visit, so I slip into Grandpa Sam’s room and close the door behind me. I take out the photograph and show it to him. I don’t know if it’s his poor health or his failing vision that makes his eyes water as he looks at the picture jiggling before him, but the sight of his tears makes my eyes water too.
“You loved her, didn’t you, Grandpa Sam?” He doesn’t answer, but I feel in my heart that the answer is yes, and that makes me sad. Sad for him, and for Nordine. But most of all, it makes me sad for Oma, because she’s the one he was supposed to love.
I slip the photograph into a pocket on the backpack flap, then take out the puppet. “You gave this to Nordine,” I say softly. “I think you gave it to her so that she’d have a part of you with her when you couldn’t be.”
I move the wooden X in my hands and try to make the puppet wave at Grandpa, but making him move as though he’s real isn’t as easy as one would think, and the puppet spasms as though he has cerebral palsy.
“Nordine told me this is you, but I would have known it even if she hadn’t told me. And then she said, ‘Always a puppet. Always a puppet.’ I think she was reciting something you’d said to her when you gave it to her. Milo would call that pure speculation, and I guess it is, but it feels right in here,” I say, tapping my chest.
“I’m people-smart, if you haven’t noticed, and I think I know enough about you to guess that it was your dad who made you feel like a puppet. Was he bossy and mean to you?”
He turns away and closes his eyes, and I know he’s no longer hearing me with his mind—and maybe not even with his spirit—so I gently put the puppet back in the bag and I just sit there for a minute, looking at him. With the shade drawn and the light in the room dim, his deep wrinkles aren’t as pronounced, and it’s easy to imagine him a young man again. A man young enough to love more women than a rock star and strong enough to cock the noses of nasty men and crash the heads of sweet, gentle wives.
He’s moved his hands to rest on his belly. His right hand is over the left now, and I stand up. “Have a good nap,” I tell him, then I switch his hands, left one up, and I kiss his cheek. I go into the kitchen and sit at my laptop. I have work to do. Not search for a topic for my oral report, as Mom keeps harping at me to do because she is going to find a place for us to give them yet, but to see if I can find all the sperm banks in California.
I HAVE JUST hit the jackpot when Milo comes into the kitchen, his pterodactyl helmet in his hands, his face flushed from his ride.
“Milo, come see. Hurry, before Oma gets inside. I’ve found our father! Well, not him per se, but I’ve found the place where …” I stumble over how to explain the links that brought me here, so instead I stop myself and give him the bottom line: “We are the products of artificial insemination. But not sperm donated by some derelict who just needed a couple bucks for a beer. Our donor was a Nobel Prize winner!”
“That’s absurd,” Milo says as he gets himself a glass of water.
“It is not! I read in one of Mom’s notebooks that when it came time for her to have children, she was going to skip the relationship angle and go to a sperm bank. She wrote it twice. Once when she was a kid, and another time when she was grown.
“Now, we know that Mom went to school at UCSD and came back pregnant with us. San Diego is close to Escondido, home of the Repository for Germinal Choice, and—”
“So what?” Milo says after he drains his glass. “She was close to Cathedral Bible College too, but I bet she didn’t go there either.” Milo fills Feynman’s dish with water and is whispering to the dog while I’m speaking.
“Will you shut up and listen?” I hiss. “I didn’t jump to this conclusion based on that information alone, dummy. I came to it only after gathering enough data to support it. It all makes sense now. Why Mom and Oma never talk about Mom’s years in California. Why she has no real name to give us. Smith—the most common surname in this country. Give me a break.” I roll my eyes. “It all makes sense now, Milo. Why else would Mom and Oma have made the topic of our father off-limits? I mean, who would want to tell their children that their father was a tadpole in a petri dish?”
Milo is standing next to Feynman, watching him crunch his dog food, as if that is somehow more intriguing than the story of our beginnings. “Milo, listen, will you? Don’t you see? This also explains why Grandpa Sam said we have no father and why we are geniuses, even though Mom and Oma—and probably Grandpa Sam in his day—are of only slightly above-average intelligence. Mom hates relationships, Milo. Something like this would appeal to her in the first place. Mix that with the family message she got from Grandpa Sam—that being stupid deserves a punch—and of course she’d resort to such a thing!”
Milo turns to me, his head protruding so far from his skinny shoulders that he looks like a chicken ready to peck my eyes out. “I can’t believe you’d believe such nonsense, Lucy. That’s not gathering data. That’s grasping at straws, grabbing one, then wrapping it in circumstantial evidence to reinforce it so it won’t bend.” I’m rather impressed with Milo’s use of metaphor, but I don’t say so.
“There’s more.” I grab my laptop and swirl it around to face us. I maximize an article from the toolbar. “Look at this. The sperm bank was started by an optometrist, Robert Klark Graham, who sold a patent for a hundred million dollars and used that money to fund the clinic himself—”
“What invention?” Milo asks, showing a spark of curiosity. I press the right lens of Milo’s glasses with my thumb and twist it, adding my fingerprint to his collage of smudges. “These, Wheezer. The shatterproof plastic lens.”
“Wow! A hundred million?” Milo leans over and starts reading to himself, his pale lips moving silently as he does.
“Yeah, well, before he becomes your hero, you should know that he was a eugenicist. He believed that the human race was slipping backward because stupid people were having the most kids and that the only salvation for this world was the birth of more intelligent human beings. I think this shows that he wasn’t all that brilliant after all. A true genius would have realized that the problem isn’t that we aren’t smart enough but that we aren’t kind enough. Anyway, in an effort to populate the world with more intelligent beings, he opened a sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners in 1980, in Escondido, California—only eighteen miles from where Mom went to school.”
Milo is no longer paying attention to a word I’m saying but is reading the article for himself. He squints when he looks up at me and pushes his glasses farther up his nose with his middle finger”—he doesn’t mean it to insult me, of course, because I doubt that Milo even knows the meaning of that gesture. “William Shockley,” he says, reciting the name of the one verified donor. “He received his Nobel Prize in physics in ’56 for inventing a
transistor. He was the father of the electronics era!”
Milo’s eyes sparkle at the possibility that a prizewinning physicist could have fathered him. “There were nineteen donors by 1983,” I add.
By the time Milo finishes the article, his eyes have lost their luster, and I realize that they sparkled only for the information itself, not because of our possible link to it.
“Nice wish, but I don’t think it’s a valid assumption, Lucy. It says that the clinic produced only 218 children, and of them, only one showed exceptional intelligence, with an IQ of 180. If we were a part of this, don’t you think we’d be included in the statistics?”
“Knowing our mother, she probably ran off and broke contact with the optometrist, just like she does with every man in her life.” But Milo’s skepticism suddenly grates on my nerves. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. I don’t know why you’d doubt this, though. It seems obvious that this is our history.”
“Two words to prove my point, Lucy: Scott Hamilton.”
chapter
NINETEEN
I’M STILL on the road, five yards yet from the driveway, pedaling with all my might to catch up to Milo, when he cocks his head around as he coasts and shouts, “He’s here! Peter’s here!” My chest is already heaving, but I get a second wind when I see Peter’s black Suzuki. It’s the only vehicle in the drive, telling me that Mom is going to be caught off guard too, since he wasn’t supposed to arrive for another two hours.
“Peter!” I shout when I get inside, racing toward him and hugging him with such force that he says, “Whoa!” as coffee from the mug he didn’t have time to set down sloshes onto the table. He stands up, laughs, and puts his arms under mine. He picks me up off the floor, twisting from side to side so my legs wave like pendulums until my foot bangs into the leg of the table. He sets me down and grabs Milo, giving him a bear hug too.
“Where’s Mom?” I ask, suddenly scared that maybe they’ve already exchanged angry words and she’s left—especially when I glance at Oma, whose face is morphing like grown-ups’ faces do when they are talking about something serious and private but then have to shift gears quickly and look chipper because a kid enters the room.
“She was out shopping with Mitzy. I just got a hold of her and she’ll be home soon.”
“I learned to ride a bike, and now I ride seven miles per day,” Milo tells Peter, pumping his hands up and down Feynman’s neck.
“Wow, buddy. And it’s showing too. You’re bulking up.”
Milo pulls back his shoulders to try and make his concave chest look a bit more convex.
I race into the living room to get the book I left on the end table while I sat with Grandpa Sam earlier and bring it to Peter. I don’t need to tell him why. He opens it up at random, points down the page, and reads, “Thinking is not only a cerebral process: but we also think with our emotions and our bodies—”
“Page thirty-nine, third paragraph!”
Peter whoops, then turns to Milo. “May twenty-ninth, 1962?”
“Tuesday!”
Peter whoops again, then he reaches in his jacket pocket and hands us each one Hershey’s Kiss. I am torn between saving mine and eating it, then decide that if I save it, it says that I don’t trust I’ll ever get another one from him again. So I unravel the foil wrapper and pop it into my mouth, sucking on the chocolate and saving the crunch of the almond inside for last.
When Mom comes through the door, though, our chatter and laughter stop, and it’s suddenly as if the house itself is holding its breath.
Mom looks pretty in a subtly tiered turquoise skirt I’ve never seen before, flats the color of buttermilk, and a matching shirt. She rotates the turquoise bracelet on her wrist, then smooths the sides of her hair self-consciously (no doubt to flatten it, since Mitzy had moussed it and blown it dry until it was the size of a basketball), as she waits for Peter to move Feynman and rise. Her head is half dipped to the side so that she almost looks shy, and there’s a nervous smile on her face as Peter stands up and shimmies between the table and counter to reach her. He puts his arms out and Mom walks into his hug.
Peter’s hug for Mom is not a rambunctious bear hug, like he gave Milo and me, but one that is as intense and gentle as a deep sigh. Oma tilts her head and smiles—that is, until she sees the price tag dangling from Mom’s armpit. Peter looks at Mom’s lips when he whispers a hello to her, like he wants to kiss her, but he doesn’t. Maybe because Milo and I are watching, or maybe because Mom has suddenly turned her head to harp at Oma, who’s got her head bent right in Mom’s armpit as she uses her teeth to free the price tag’s plastic string.
It’s only mid-afternoon, but Peter hasn’t eaten lunch, so Oma bakes the lasagna she prepared earlier. Once we’re seated, Milo and I chatter as Oma takes a pan from the oven and Mom slices French bread. Peter doesn’t take his eyes off Milo and me as we babble on, but he occasionally reaches out and gives Mom’s arm a quick stroke.
“Guess what I’m going to do, Peter?” Milo doesn’t wait for Peter to guess. “I’m going to work on beating the world record for reciting pi!”
Peter laughs. “A lofty goal, Milo,” he says. “I’m sure you heard about the high school student who recited it to over eight thousand digits?”
“I did. I read it online. He recited it to 8,784! That’s what gave me the idea to try it.”
“Didn’t a mathematician in Tokyo figure out pi to 1.24 trillion decimal places or something like that?” Peter asks.
“He did. In 2002, but he had the help of a supercomputer. That’s cheating. I wonder how far I could get on my own.”
While we eat, Peter and Milo busy themselves talking about Milo’s stupid quest. I don’t participate. Partially because I hate math, but mostly because I’m busy watching Mom’s and Peter’s body language.
I know the gestures that show interest and even love, but unfortunately, from my vantage point at the table, I can’t tell if their pupils are dilated when they steal glances at each other. I let my napkin fall to the floor and glance at their feet as I scoop it up. Yes! I shout inside when I see the telltale body language that I was hoping for. Peter’s ankles are crossed, the sole of one shoe pointing toward Mom. Mom’s legs are crossed too, one foot off the floor and pointed at Peter, her shoe dangling from her toes. I’m so happy to see that their feet are positioned like Cupid’s arrows that I come up too quickly and whack my head on the table.
“You okay?” Mom asks, and I nod as I rub my head.
I ask Peter if his niece who’s read Little Women fifteen times will be at the wedding. He says yes.
“Hey,” Milo says. “If you don’t have to be in Bayfield for the rehearsal dinner until Friday, you can spend the night tonight, can’t you? You can borrow Lucy’s bike and ride with me in the morning. We could race. It’s really cold in the mornings, but there’s extra stocking hats here if you don’t have one with you. Gloves too.”
I don’t see Mom slip her shoe back on and stomp on Milo’s foot, but I’m sure she does, because Milo groans an ouch and asks, “What did you do that for?”
Mom pretends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about and turns to look at Peter.
“I don’t know. I …” Peter’s eyes are on Mom as he speaks.
“You’re welcome to stay if you’d like,” Oma says. “We have a spare room downstairs.” I hope she says this for Milo’s and my sake, not for Mom’s.
Peter thanks her and then says, “We’ll see.”
Mom is quiet through most of the meal, though she smiles a lot. She picks at her food, carving fork lines into the sauce on her square of lasagna and rearranging her steamed broccoli.
I alternate between watching her and Peter and thinking about all the great things we could do if he was my new dad. “Do you know how to ice skate?” I ask Peter, suddenly realizing that there’s an awful lot I don’t know about him.
Peter laughs. “A little.”
“A little’s enough,” I tell him. “There’s a sled i
n the basement,” I add. “It used to be Mom’s and Uncle Clay’s. Grandpa Sam used to make toboggans, but there’s none of them here. Do you like to sled? Not that we can do that now, but do you like to?”
“Who doesn’t like to sled?” Peter says. “When I was a kid, my brothers and I went inner tubing down Bottle Rocket Hill every weekend in the winter.” Peter takes his hand from Mom’s arm and brings it to his face to show us a small bubbled scar a quarter of an inch into his hairline. “I got this as a reminder not to stop and abruptly hug a tree while whizzing down a hill,” he says, and we laugh.
“So your father made toboggans?” Peter says to Mom, after we’re mostly done laughing.
“He did,” she says, stiffening her back against the chair.
“He carved too,” Oma adds. She takes the cardinal off the windowsill and hands it to Peter, then gets up and goes into Milo’s study. She brings back a number of small birds and a ferocious bear that’s standing on a wooden block, paws arched and teeth bared.
“Wow, these are incredible,” Peter says. “He certainly was gifted with his hands.” Mom mutters something under her breath that I don’t catch, but Peter apparently does, because he hands the carvings back to Oma and changes the subject, talking instead about a new class he’ll be teaching next spring.
AFTER OUR meal, Oma heads outside to smoke and Mom takes her plate to the sink. We haven’t had dessert yet, but that can wait until the table is cleared and our stomachs aren’t so full, Oma says.
“Come see my study Peter,” Milo says, and Peter says he’d love to. I get up to follow, but Mom tells me to help her clean off the table. “How stereotypically sexist,” I grumble. “I have to help clean the kitchen, but Milo, being a boy, doesn’t. I get Peter next!” I call after Milo.
