Anyway, today I am to personally convince Robert Carlo, who is seven years old and wants to be called by his whole name, that high school is a great place to be.
Robert Carlo is more interested in me than in high school.
"I've never met a blind person before," he says.
"We go to math first," I tell him. "I bet we have juice and something to eat and watch a movie."
"How do you find the room?"
"With my cane."
"How does your cane tell you?"
"It's got an electronic elf inside that sends radio wave messages to my brain. In code."
There's a long pause while Robert Carlo considers the possibility. I laugh.
"My math class is around the first corner from where we are now, then six doors down. I use my cane to count the doors."
Wrong thing to tell Robert Carlo. "You ever, lose count?" he asks as we walk. "Two, six, nine. Can you add forty-three, thirteen, and a hundred and fifty-five?" he jabbers. "Eight, eleven, one million..."
Charla goes by. "He's my next-door neighbor," she says. "You've got my sympathy."
We reach a second corner and I realize we've missed the room. "We have to go back," I say. "This time, Robert Carlo, shut up."
A small, grimy-feeling hand slips into mine, and a moment later I hear, "Mandy? I'm sorry."
Robert Carlo eats doughnuts and asks questions nonstop. Fortunately, the TV volume is so loud our whispering during the movie doesn't seem to bother anyone.
Robert Carlo wants to know if being blind hurts.
Why I bother to keep my eyes open.
If my fingers get sore when I read braille, and I have to tell him I don't read braille very well yet.
He wants to know if I can see anything at all.
"Light, sometimes, if it's very strong. And once in a great while I feel what color something is."
"No way," he says. "You can't feel color."
And of course he grabs my hand, sticks it on a book, and demands, "What color? Can you feel what color this is?"
"I said, sometimes."
How do I explain what I don't understand myself? How every once in a while I'll touch something and my brain will be flooded with an image of red, or blue, and when I ask I find out that's what color the thing really is?
The movie sound snaps off midsentence. For the first time I am aware that other kids have edged in close to Robert Carlo and me. A boy who sounds like another second grader asks, "How do you take tests?"
A girl asks, "Do you have to help at home?"
Some snot says, "What could she do?"
"Plenty," I say, I guess a bit snappy. "I set the table, dust, help with feeding the cows. I wash my own clothes, make my bed every morning..."
The same kid says, "Your folks must be dictators."
"Right," I tell him. I start to leave it at that and then realize I can't. What if it got back to Aunt Emma and my uncles?
"My folks are not dictators," I say. "They just want me to know how much I can do."
The bell rings but nobody moves. Then Mr. Casie says, "Thank you, Mandy."
Robert Carlo takes possession of my hand again. And a little girl says, "Mandy, you have pretty eyes."
The days are going by quickly, punctuated by feeding times for my opossum. It seems every time I pick him up, he's grown a bit and become a bit more independent.
Hannah comes over on Wednesday afternoon. The weather has turned cold and rainy, and we take cookies and soda up to my room, which is the warmest place in the house. I ask Hannah if there's ever snow in Texas for Christmas.
"I suppose, but not often, except maybe in the panhandle," she says. "Not over here, anyway. Mandy, everyone in town seems to know my folks are considering a divorce. Every place I go, people are nice." After a moment she adds, "I hate it that everyone feels sorry for me."
"Welcome to the club."
"Mandy," she says, "I'm scared."
She sighs and then, like she's forgetting the whole subject, gets up and goes to my dressing table. I hear her picking up first one thing, then another.
"Mandy," she says, "tell me again who the man is."
"My grandfather."
"He's so young in the picture. Is he still alive?"
"No," I say, "I never met him. He died years ago, before I was born, even before my mother was born."
"Then why do you have his picture out?"
I answer carefully because I've been thinking about that myself. "I guess because it was important to my mother," I say. "She always kept that picture on her dresser."
I think back, wondering how much to tell Hannah.
Think back to how my mother would look at that picture, sometimes for ten, fifteen minutes without moving. Then she'd tell me, "That's my father, Mandy, your grandfather, wearing his airman's jacket. Did you ever see anyone so proud? I think he must have just learned my mom was going to have me."
I tell Hannah, "That was all my mother had of her father. He died months before she was born."
Hannah says, "I think that's one of the saddest things I ever heard."
I agree. Still, I can't tell Hannah how sometimes I heard my mother crying in the night. How once I found her standing in front of the picture. "You're promising," she was saying, over and over. "You're grinning like you're promising to come back."
Instead I ask, "Hannah, do you mind very much about your folks splitting up?"
"It hasn't happened yet."
"If they do?"
"It's their lives," she says, and her voice has a new hardness.
"Yeah," I say, thinking I should have minded my own business. "There's no point getting upset over other people's lives."
Alone after Hannah's gone home, I go back to the pictures, hold my grandfather's in one hand, my mom's in the other.
I know exactly how my grandfather's picture looks, the image of a young man's face as it was at one moment. I memorized it years ago.
But Mom's photo has ceased being a fixed thing. I hold it and see how she looked, first at one time and then another, Mom in a set number of memories that won't ever be added to. I hunt through them, find how she'd ask me into her room and show me her father's picture.
"Look, babe," she'd say, "he's grinning. I think he knows I'm going to be born and he's saying, 'Chin up, kid. Hit the world running, kid.' He loved me, Mandy. See how he looks?"
And I'd stand there, thinking that even with just a picture, she'd had more of a father than she'd given me.
I guess it wouldn't have hurt me to say, "Yes, I think he must have loved you." But I never did.
I wonder if, like Gwen, my mom is out there, past the dark, living again in some year when she was young. I want to tell her I'm sorry.
It's the middle of the night, and I'm having trouble sleeping. I pull the covers close. Should I open the window? Hold a piece of lace curtain to my face, smell the faint bleach, the fainter dust?
I tumble, roughly ... I hear Gwen's voice...
Gwen, Gwen ... Stop screaming, Gwen...
"I saw a bird. I couldn't make it keep flying."
And?
"He was fast, falling fast, and his brown feathers were covered with oil and fire. He screeched with wind and terror."
You could hear him?
"His mouth cawed open and he crossed the sky, between me and the plane, he crossed the sun and came cartwheeling down."
The bird?
"Paul."
You saw him?
"Mandy, I wish I could give you my eyes."
Aunt Emma is shaking me, and I hear the uncles in the doorway.
"Mandy, wake up," Emma's saying. "Mandy, you're having a nightmare."
But I know I'm not, and I say, "No, it was Gwen. She was seeing Paul die. He was cartwheeling, down and down."
And then Aunt Emma squeezes my arm so hard it hurts and I jerk the rest of the way awake. "Is that what happened?" I ask. "Did Gwen see her husband die?"
It's Uncle Gabriel who answers. "We never h
eard," he says. "She never wrote home after she left."
I hear Abe's footsteps; he's going slowly down the stairs like an old man.
Aunt Emma asks, "Do you often think about Gwen?"
And, maybe because it's the middle of the night, I say, "Sometimes I can see everything going on, like I was there, when she was my age."
I wait for them to tell me I'm imagining things, but they don't.
Aunt Emma says, "There have been stranger things."
And Gabriel says, "I'd like to think Gwen knows you, Mandy. She'd be proud."
Only Uncle Abe is upset. I find him alone in the living room the next morning, not doing anything.
"You didn't like me talking about Gwen, did you?" I ask.
I think he shrugs, even though I can't see him.
"Would you please tell me about her?" I ask.
Abe's voice is gruff. He says, "I've got work to do outside. Besides, Gwen went away before I was old enough to remember."
He leaves, and I go to find Aunt Emma. "How old was Uncle Abe when Gwen left home?" I ask.
She does some figuring, subtracting ages and dates, and says she guesses about five or six.
That's what I guessed, too.
Old enough to remember at least a little. But maybe he doesn't want to. Maybe remembering her hurts him too much because he believes she abandoned him.
And then I feel so sorry for him, for them both. I want to go after him and say, "Uncle Abe, Gwen did write, but your mother tore up her letter."
But what good would that do? He probably wouldn't believe me.
Aunt Emma says, "I've often thought how sad it is that Abe can't seem to remember anything about being a child. It's like a part of his life is locked away and he can't get at it."
"Gwen loved her brothers," I say, and I know it with absolute certainty.
"Gabriel realizes that, I think," says Emma. "But I don't know if Abe ever will."
Chapter 14
I MIX SOME MILK formula in a bottle and go outside to see if the opossum will come for it, before I have to leave for school. He doesn't stay in his carton anymore, although we leave it on the porch so he can get back in if he wants.
Uncle Abe thinks the sooner the opossum is completely on its own, the better chance it will have of surviving. And I know he's right. When you have to take care of yourself, about the only way to do it is to just get out and start.
Still, I'm glad when I hear the little guy come scrambling up the porch steps. He knocks at my hands and at the plastic bottle before settling down to eat. I don't know if the milk is dessert after food he's gotten on his own or if it's his whole meal.
I wonder if he thinks I'm his mother.
Don't be dumb, Mandy, I tell myself. Opossums can't think.
"Whatever," I say out loud. "I'll take care of you as long as you want." I feel so responsible and ... so old. Like I really am sort of his mother.
Thinking that makes me think of my own mom. It's the strangest thing, how she seems to be getting younger and younger in my mind.
"It's pretty amazing, how you took care of me," I whisper. I remember back, a lot of things. My mom and me eating hot dogs together at a park, loading a car trunk so full we had to tie it shut, taking in one of her skirts to fit me, trying to make crocuses bloom on a windowsill.
She tried to be a good mother, even though she didn't have any more training at the job than I've got in taking care of opossums. Of course, if she had, maybe sometimes she would have told me she loved me. She would have known it was something I wanted to hear.
The opossum is scratching my hand, probably hoping for more to eat.
"Sorry," I say. "Too much food could kill you."
I pick him up. "But I guess a little love won't hurt."
I've known as long as I can remember that my mom was put up for adoption when she was born, only the adoption didn't work out and she grew up in a series of foster homes.
All she knew about her real family was what she could guess from a couple of pictures that had arrived in the mail one-day, when she was still a kid. They had come with a note that said, "For the little girl."
One was the picture I still have, of her father, taken just before he died. That was written on the back. The other photo was of the house where her mother grew up, this house that I'm living in now.
"Didn't anyone try to find out who sent them?" I once asked.
"Not that I know of," Mom answered. "I was only four or five."
The photo of the house got lost a few years ago, but by then I knew it by heart. Whenever we moved to a new town, I'd watch houses, hoping to find where my grandmother had come from. I had this scene that I'd imagine, how Mom and I would walk up to a door, introduce ourselves...
Dumb, but sometimes I'd see Mom checking out houses, too.
I hope she knows I'm living in that very house now, and that it's a nice place.
Hannah's visiting again.
"I hate my parents," she says. "All the fighting, all the time, and they try to be polite about it."
It's late afternoon, and we're walking through the back pasture, the one where there's just cows. The uncles keep the bulls in a different field. It's safe for us to be in this one.
"I'd like to live in the country," Hannah says. She stops to pet a cow that has come over, but as soon as the cow realizes we don't have food, it wanders off. "Other times," Hannah says, "I think I'd like to go away, just run off and disappear forever."
A shiver goes through me. "Don't say that."
"Well, it's what I think," says Hannah. "Sometimes I try to imagine the ways I could go away and not leave a trail that people could follow."
I think, Gwen found a way.
"The bus would be best," Hannah says. "It's hard to lie about your name on a plane ticket because you have to show ID when you check in, and cars are too easy for the police to look for."
"Hannah, I told you, don't talk that way."
But she won't stop. "I'd take a bus going in a direction where all the towns have good-sounding names. And I wouldn't get off until I was at least two states away."
There's no way I can make her understand. Disappearing is not something to joke about. A person doesn't know who she's going to hurt when she goes off and doesn't come back.
If Gwen hadn't disappeared, hadn't gone off and left her baby for strangers to raise, then all those years later my mom wouldn't have started looking for her, and ... Well, maybe everything would have been different.
Chapter 15
MOM GOT the idea one evening this past summer. I was fixing a torn swimsuit and she was quietly reading, which was not the way she usually read.
Usually she talked.
"Mandy," she would say, "it says here you can get cancer from the sun," or "California workers get some of the highest wages in the country." Stuff I'd already know, but these things always came as news to Mom.
But this particular evening, Mom wasn't saying a word, and that distracted me so much I asked, "What are you reading about?"
"Nothing," she said, putting down her magazine.
Then five minutes later she said, "Mandy, I'm going to find my mother."
Like, "Mandy, I think I'll get a leather belt for my new slacks."
Mom got up, pulled a package of cookie dough from the freezer, and knocked her knuckles against it. "You think this would thaw pretty quick?"
"Is that what you were reading about, finding parents?"
Mom shoved the dough back. "I guess I don't need the calories. There's a story about how adoption records used to be sealed up, but now they're being opened. More and more people are being reunited with their birth parents."
Poor Mom. I could see the signs—we were going to move again. This time in search of her birth mother.
And she probably expected to find some loving, real-cookie-baking woman delighted to see us. Right. Just the way she'd expected to find sunshine and good jobs and a great life at the end of our other moves.
My
mom may have been well into her forties, but sometimes she didn't have a clue about how the world worked.
"So when do we leave?" I asked. "And where to?"
Hannah's voice startles me, and for an instant I struggle to remember where we are.
She says, "Mandy, let's start back. My feet are getting cold."
But then she stops me. "Mandy, I wish you could see that cow over by the watering trough. Her sides are bulging so far out she must be going to have twins."
"I don't think cows do, at least not very often."
"Do you think there will be any babies soon?"
"Uncle Abe says the first calves will be born in early February."
Without warning, Hannah switches subjects. "Mandy," she says, "you've never told me about your accident. What happened?"
"Why?"
"I don't know." She sounds hurt but goes on. "I guess I've been thinking how strange it is, how I thought my life was all settled. And now my folks are probably getting divorced, and because of that one thing, all of a sudden everything else is different. Wasn't the accident like that, for you?"
I consider what she's said.
"It was and it wasn't," I finally answer. "It made everything different, but ... there wasn't much in my life really settled before, either."
Although, I remember, I'd had hopes that things might settle down.
I remember how, for the briefest time, Mom and I had thought maybe we were going to stop being just the lonely pair that we were.
It had taken Mom several weeks and a staggering phone bill to get the name of the place that had her adoption records. But, finally, she had an agency's name and address, and it wasn't all that far north of Baltimore, where we were living.
"They said I'd have to come in person with my questions," she said.
We went up together, catching an early morning Amtrak, and by eleven we were watching a woman examine all the identification papers Mom had brought with her. Finally the woman put them down and opened a folder.
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