by Monica Wood
“That’s what she gets for palming the critter off in the first place,” Stewart says.
“She loves that stupid cat, Stewart. ‘How’s Bob,’ she asks me, the second I pick up the phone. She doesn’t even say hello.”
“Take a bath.”
She laughs a little. It sounds like old times. “I’m going out to look. At least I won’t be home if she calls.”
Connie has gotten used to walking, and knows all the turns of the neighborhood now. She walks slowly, calling “Bob … Bob …” in a self-conscious stage whisper. She has no real thought of finding him; he has never been outside, either here or in Brooklyn.
“Lose your dog?” someone asks, an old man standing in his yard with a pair of pruning shears.
“Cat,” she says. “Big brown cat, no tail.”
“I’ll let you know,” he says, and she knows he will, for she sees him out in his yard every time she comes this way.
She trudges on, trying to appear nonchalant while she rubbernecks back yards and half-open garages, hoping to see a pair of haughty yellow eyes. Ahead of her looms the specter of loss: not of the cat, but of Isadora somehow. The creature entrusted to her has disappeared. She’s not sure what the protocol is about losing your sister’s cat. Say you’re sorry? Buy a kitten? Say he turned up dead on the bedroom rug? In any case, she has bungled her sisterly duty. She stops calling for the cat and makes the rest of the circuit to Faith’s house.
The front door is open. “Faith?” Connie calls, but no one answers. She sticks her head inside but the house is silent. She knows this silence, its hidden comforts.
“Faith?” she calls again. She mounts the stairs and spots the attic ladder hanging down like a prop in a funhouse. She hears a faint scuffing above her.
When Connie pokes her head through the opening, she has to blink back a gauzy beam of sunlight coming through the south window. Faith is there, her pink blouse the only identifiable color in the dusty, unpainted room. Among the ordinary odds and ends of a household stands an extraordinary object: a great, gilded traveling trunk with a rounded top, ornate as a treasure chest. Faith is on her knees, rummaging through it.
“I’m looking for something to give Chris,” she says. “I thought the baby should have something.”
Connie gazes into the trunk’s vast opening. “I’d almost forgotten this thing existed.” She remembers hauling it out of the trailer with the help of Faith’s new family.
“He’s been asking about Billy and Delle,” Faith says. “His upcoming fatherhood has put all sorts of notions in his head. Not to mention Isadora’s performance on that talk show.” She grimaces. “Heritage and destiny are his new favorite words.”
“Look at all this,” Connie murmurs. Although Faith has already removed one layer of things and stacked them on the floor, the trunk is still full.
“I know. I can’t imagine what he might want. I’d was hoping “I’d find something of Grammy’s in here.”
Connie’s mouth opens. A thought streaks across her consciousness like a riff of music. “It just dawned on me, Faith. This baby’s going to make you a grandmother.”
Faith laughs, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “How does ‘Great Aunt Connie’ sound to you?”
“It sounds old,” she says, “but I guess I don’t mind.”
“God knows they aren’t ready,” Faith says, “but I can’t help feeling happy.” She begins to sift idly through the trunk. “I’d never mention this to Chris and Tracy, of course, but I feel like I’ve got some kind of claim on her.”
“Her?”
“I’m hoping for a girl.”
“A baby girl,” Connie says. She crouches down to help Faith look for this baby girl’s present. The backstage scent of costumes and old wood permeates the room, rising like steam from the heap of belongings. Connie watches Faith extract one item after another from the chest, stunned by the clarity with which they return to her.
Faith holds up a pink feather boa. “Mister Mistake,” she says.
Connie nods. “That’s the one that closed in Seattle. Aptly named, as I remember it.” She pulls a red velveteen cape from underneath a nest of photographs. “This is from Count Your Change.”
“Smythe and Smythe, the courtroom scene,” Faith says, lifting a pink gavel and laying it on the floor.
“It was endless, wasn’t it?” Connie says. “Always one more show.” She picks up the yellow bowler hat from Same Old Song and plucks a thread off its rim. The hush of the attic settles like hands on her shoulders. She takes a stack of photographs from a fat envelope and lays them down, one on top of another, exchanging brief, wordless glances with her sister as the chameleons that were her parents mug and preen from old glossy squares.
On and on, through the layers of the great trunk: newspaper reviews with lines blacked out and superlatives underlined in red ink; playbills and smeared musical scores and parts of scripts and pressed roses and small props; dozens and dozens of photographs, most of them publicity shots, including the one Isadora presented a year ago in Armand’s office, the gold heart laid flat against Marie Lazarro’s chest.
“Look at this one,” Faith says. She hands Connie another photograph. An ordinary snapshot, probably from Armand’s camera, of Billy and Delle under the marquee of Silver Moon, their hands elegantly poised on the shoulders of two stiff little girls. Their frilly white dresses look foolish as frosting on their stalwart postures. They are already tall.
“There we are,” Faith murmurs.
“We don’t look very happy,” Connie says. She stares into the picture, remembering that white dress, its prickly constrictions. Billy and Delle look shorter than she remembers, and not as mean. “I hated those dresses,” she says. “Those stupid shoes. Even back then I knew a prop when I saw one.” Faith’s breath is cool on her neck as she leans in to see the picture again.
“We were sort of pretty, don’t you think?” Faith says.
Connie places her hand on her heart, staring at the two little girls as if they were strangers she might once have tried to help. “But Faith, we were so unhappy.”
Faith takes the photograph in both hands. “You wanted everything to be different,” she says softly. She’s holding the picture close to her face, her head bent down, her voice a small and distant thing. “My God, you were heartbreaking.” She seems to be speaking directly to the child in the photograph. “They should have named you Hope.”
Connie hugs herself. “It feels like they’re here.”
Faith looks furtively around. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I do,” Connie says. “I believe in anything that can hurt me.” A timid, curiously intimate smile from Faith, which Connie takes as understanding, calms her.
Faith sets the photograph down on the floor, so precisely that Connie realizes that she means to sort in earnest, to lay these things out as if laying out bones. Within a few minutes they have three careful piles: one for Chris, one for Ben, one for Isadora. Still no present for the baby.
“Do you want anything?” Faith asks.
“No.” Connie looks at all they’ve unearthed and recognizes that she already has the only things she wants that are connected to Billy and Delle: Grammy Spaulding’s lace doily, and Isadora.
Faith curls her fingers over the lip of the trunk. “I kept them from my children all their lives,” she says. “Until Isadora showed up they never asked a single question.”
“They had Phoebe and Joe Senior. Why would it even occur to them to ask about Billy and Delle?”
Faith looks up. “They had a right to know where they came from.”
“They came from you, Faith. You and Joe. What more did they need to know?”
Connie waits, but Faith does not answer. Instead she is still, listening, waiting for more. Is this what it is to be sisters? Isadora never listens and Faith never talks—how can Connie figure out how it’s supposed to go?
“You brought them luck, Faith,” Connie says finally. “That’s wha
t I think. You’ve got two lucky boys.” She falls silent herself now.
Faith smiles faintly, a thank you. “There’s no harm in the truth, I guess,” she says. She lifts the dog-eared remains of a written-over script from the depths of the trunk, yellow and sick-looking. “They were good actors. They sang like angels. Maybe the other things they were will eventually fade away.”
They paw through more musty items—costumes and posters, even some pots of congealed greasepaint—until the trunk stands empty. Then they begin on the boxes. As Connie strips the tape from their tops, she remembers the vengeance with which she had once taped them shut, and her mother’s dreary trailer reappears: the heavy, autographed pictures that once hung on its dim walls, the trophies and framed awards, trinkets large and small whose significance has long been lost. One by one she removes them, placing them on the floor with the rest.
They are done, sitting amidst the wreckage of cloth and paper and glass and wood, the leftovers of a life. The trunk and boxes stand empty. Stripped of their contents, they are no more than harmless empty spaces.
“Look at this,” Faith says.
Connie looks up. Faith is holding a small marble box, the one that sat for years on Delle’s dresser, the little gift from Helen Hayes that they had swept into the trunk on their last day in the trailer. The lid is flipped up, Faith staring hard into it. Connie leans over, peers in, and finds, pinned to a tiny satin cushion, two faded but unmistakable locks of hair: Billy’s fine, golden blonde, and next to it Delle’s chestnut-colored curl.
“Oh!” Connie shrinks from it, as startled as if she had just seen her parents’ dead bodies.
Faith lowers the lid. “They thought they were so romantic.” Her voice is bitter, but she lays the box down carefully, as if it contained a living thing.
“What should we do with it?” Connie says.
“Pretend it’s not there.” Faith pushes it a few feet away, its delicate legs scratching painfully against the floor.
Connie eyes the box for a few minutes to make sure it can’t move, then she begins to riffle through some more photographs. At the edge of her vision she senses Faith moving once again through the piles, lingering over the ashes of their childhood; and at the center of her vision she sees herself, a little girl in a white dress with a terrible throbbing at her throat.
For a long while there is no sound but the occasional click of an object being moved from one place to another. It is so quiet, Connie can hear Faith’s breathing, and then the sudden change in it.
Faith’s skin has gone dust-white. In her hands is a sheaf of papers she has taken from a large brown envelope. Something about them looks official and dangerous.
“What is it?” Connie asks.
“It’s—” She takes a breath, and another. “It’s a court document. State of Connecticut.” Her lips form a thin line. “It’s about us.”
Faith holds out the papers, but Connie doesn’t move. Whatever it is, she knows it can’t be good. “Read it to me,” she says.
Faith reads it over silently. “It’s a petition,” she says. Connie can almost see through her skin, the delicate network of veins pulsing beneath the white. “It’s”—she is reading directly now—“a release of parental rights.” She doesn’t look up. Her eyes are huge with wonder, translucent as sea glass. “A bunch of forswears and whereases, but the gist of it is that Grammy Spaulding was planning to adopt us.”
Her heart thundering in her ears, Connie takes the document from Faith. “Faith Spaulding, age three years, seven months,” she reads. “Constance Spaulding, age twenty-six months.” She looks up. “It’s dated August.”
“Grammy died in October, two months later.”
Connie scans the second page, the third, unwilling to make the words mean what she knows they mean. The fourth page is decorated by the exuberant signatures of Billy and Delle Spaulding, the prim hand of Mary Elizabeth Spaulding, and another name, equally familiar.
“Faith,” Connie says. “The lawyer of record—”
“I saw it.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?”
“Would you? How would you tell two girls their parents tried to give them away?” Faith’s voice is worn out. “How on earth would you tell somebody that?”
“You wouldn’t,” Connie says. “Armand especially wouldn’t.” She tosses the papers into the middle of Billy and Delle’s things, half expecting them to ignite.
Faith is stone still, her hands loose and open in her lap. “I don’t know why I’m finding this so hard to believe.”
“All this—junk,” Connie says. Her throat is a bunched fist. She moves to the trunk to make sure it’s still empty. “That’s it,” she says, running her hand along the trunk’s smooth sides. “Here’s their whole life, and there’s only one snapshot and that sickening document to prove we were ever born.” She closes her eyes. “There’s nothing here. Nothing. No birth announcements, no baby booties, none of those cards we used to make for them …” When she opens her eyes Faith is staring at her, steadfast as a statue, listening. “Where are we?” Connie demands, her voice thickening. “Where are the report cards, the school pictures? There’s nothing here, not one stupid little kid treasure, not a goddamned stick man or paper doll, not one pot holder or paint-by-number, not one, couldn’t they have saved just one goddamned fucking anything from their own kid?” Faith is moving toward her now, crawling over the bumpy dross of Billy and Delle’s small, mean life, short cries escaping her lips. Connie’s own voice is rising, sailing, a tether thrown loose at her throat. “It’s all erased! It’s like I never even existed! There’s nothing here, Faith, nothing! Why didn’t you help me? Why didn’t you help me?”
Connie is shrieking now, crying, the room is tilting, her fingers are caught in the collar of Faith’s blouse. She can hear Faith calling to her, can see her mouth opening and closing, her hair flying out from the sides of her face, all of this a blur as she twines her fingers through Faith’s buttonholes and pulls hard, tries to shake her, make her answer in words she can understand, until she does understand, “It’s all right, it’s all right,” Faith is saying, and “Shhh, stop now, stop now,” the words forming like bubbles in the air, but Connie can’t stop, she’s pushing Faith away, fighting her sorry comfort, until she feels herself reeling forward, feels Faith pulling her in, her strength a shock, her body warm and enveloping, shuddering against her, holding on until Connie is finally still.
The house settles.
“Look at me,” Faith says quietly. Connie lifts her head. “I was just a little girl. I couldn’t save you any better than I could save myself.”
Connie nods, her face hot and wet. Faith’s blouse is torn at the neck, exposing a delicate collarbone and its deep hollow, one more way they look alike. Faith loosens her hold and slides her hands down to Connie’s wrists, gathering them. “It’s not erased,” she says, “not for me, not as long as I can look at you.” Thin tears run down her cheeks. “You’re my proof, Connie. You were there. God knows they were miserable years, but imagine if we’d each been there alone.”
Connie looks away, her wrists warming where Faith holds them. “Sometimes I think we were there alone, nothing more to do with each other than two little hamsters in a cage.”
Faith drags her palms over her wet cheeks. “But Connie, imagine being one little hamster in a cage.”
All at once, the memory of a high-up room: a hotel room, with flimsy carpets and vinyl chairs and a strange city throbbing outside the windows. Connie tries to picture this room without Faith in it—Faith, slung over the couch reading a book, or standing by the window gazing into the street, or examining the directions for a toy from Armand. She sees herself alone with the avocado drapes, the pale food from the next-door restaurant, the paintings of daisies, the sounds in the hall. For a moment she longs to go all the way back there, to feel herself a child again with a sister who accompanied her, silent but steadfast, through the steely corridor of childhood; she longs to go back for the
click of time it would take to thank Faith for existing. For bearing witness.
Exhausted, she slides into Faith’s lap, soothed by the gentle pressure of her sister’s cool hand on her forehead. “Faith,” she murmurs. “You’re my one decent memory.” Within her reach lies the marble box. She tucks it into her hand and brings it close, cuddling it like a doll to her chest.
It is a long time before she speaks again. The room has fallen utterly silent, their shadows have shortened with midday. She thinks she might have slept some, but her hand is still curled around the box, and Faith is still holding her.
Connie blinks in the sun streaking in at a new angle. “Faith, how old was Grammy?”
“I don’t know. About sixty, I’d guess. Sixty-five, maybe.”
“Can you imagine a sixty-five-year-old woman wanting to adopt two babies?”
“No.” Faith shifts position, stretching one leg out, the scent of laundry soap whiffing off the sleeve of her blouse. “I’m not even sure it was legal.”
“Probably Armand got around it somehow.”
“It might not have gone through anyway,” Faith says. “When all was said and done.”
“Maybe not.” Connie slides her finger over the sleek marble surface of the box, damp from her grip. “But she must have wanted us.” She turns her head, looks up into Faith’s green eyes. “She must have really, really wanted us.”
“That’s just what I was thinking,” Faith says. She shifts her leg again.
“Are you stiff?”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m sorry I tore your blouse.”
“It’s just a blouse.”
“We didn’t find anything for the baby.”
“No, we didn’t,” Faith says. “I guess I’ll have to give her something of mine.”
Connie has lain in Faith’s lap a long time by now, but she can’t bear to move. Their touching seems like the most natural thing in the world, less a touching than a fitting together, as though, stationed among the ruins of their parents’ life, they could be two parts of the same person.
