“Mom!” Color washed over my mother’s cheeks in a rush of crimson. I looked down at the tiniest mounds of flesh barely holding the silk from my ribs.
Grandma Jo laughed at both of us. “Oh, Zorrie! You need to lighten up before those frown-lines settle in for good. With Ansel gone you have forgotten how to laugh.” She didn’t mean it, but the statement landed on my mother’s face like a physical slap.
“And as for you . . .” She tugged the shirttails in line with the waistband of my Levi’s. She was studying me closely, as though reading the small print of my body, and I wondered if she could tell I’d gotten my period. “Don’t move.”
Grandma Jo disappeared for a second, reappearing with a pair of scissors. With a single snip, she poked a hole in my jeans and gave it a hearty tug, ripping the knee casually. “There. That’s how the girls are wearing them now.” I can only imagine the sparkle in my eyes, but I saw clearly the shock in my mother’s and the way it melted into resigned silence as my grandmother snuggled back into the sofa, lifting Luke into her lap. “So, this is the newest addition to the family?” Taking a sip of her tea, she scrubbed his belly, sending him tottering happily onto his side.
I nodded as Luke’s eyes blinked lazily then closed, content in her care. There was no doubt about it; the air around us had shifted. Grandma Jo had arrived.
“Any new boys in your life?”
I rolled my eyes.
“Well, you’ll have some choosing to do in that outfit! You just wait and see. What about you, Zorrie?”
“No, Mom. I don’t have time for anyone else in my life. I’m too busy. That’s what I was trying to tell you on the phone. It isn’t that we don’t love having you, but truly, I am so swamped with work right now—”
“My love, sometimes the swamp finds a person, and sometimes a person finds the swamp.”
Grandma Jo did not believe in holding on to the past. When my grandfather passed away, she’d worn fuchsia to his memorial service and asked a friend to play “Homeward Bound” by Simon & Garfunkel on the guitar. Afterward, everyone let a fistful of white daisy petals tumble into the breeze. And when they had flown away from the sorrow below, so had she. Since then, my grandmother had spent most of her time traveling. It was the reason she’d given me a map of my own, so I could always see exactly where she was. In the three months since I’d last seen her, Grandma Jo had lived for two months in Africa teaching at a small school and spent one month farming on a kibbutz in Israel.
“Okay, who wants to see pictures?” Grandma Jo reached into her bag, drawing forth a stack of photographs and waving them in the air.
“Sorry, but I need to finish up my estimates for an auction I’m working on. Iz will show you to your room if you’d like to freshen up.” With that, my mother made her way stiffly into the study and shut the door heavily behind her.
“Funny, I don’t feel like I need freshening.” Grandma Jo looked at me perplexed. “Do I look like I need freshening?”
I shook my head. Watching the two of them together was better than front row seats at a Barnum & Bailey Circus sideshow.
“Well, I guess that just leaves the two youngsters of the family,” Grandma Jo winked. “I may not need freshening, but I could air out. How about we go for a walk and you can reacquaint me with this island of yours?”
I hopped off the couch, heading for my shoes, then decided to go barefoot like Grandma Jo.
“I’ll bring my pictures, you bring your journal,” she called as she opened the door and let Luke scurry between her ankles into the day.
The noon sun slipped behind a white puff of cloud in the shape of a powdered doughnut as we followed a thin trail through the meadow. A hundred yards away, the cliffs of Knockberry Ridge curved around us, jutting out over the water. Grandma Jo turned inland, heading toward a hedge of sugar maples that had been tapped and hung with weathered tin buckets. When we reached the first she stuck her finger into the sap, lifting it back into the air dripping, and let the liquid fall from her fingertip in oozy drips. When no more would fall away, she stuck the finger in her mouth and puckered, sending a smile spreading over both our faces.
“Do you think they’d miss one?” She peered back at me, wrestling the bucket off its hook. “I’ll hang it back up tomorrow.”
I raised a brow at her.
“I made sugarcane syrup and molasses in Africa. How different could it be?”
I shrugged.
“Pancakes tomorrow!”
Lugging the pail along with her, she followed the path to a mound of boulders and sat down, which sent a garter snake slithering out between her feet and me nearly twisting an ankle to let it through. Luke bounced to his feet, nipping the air behind the snake until it dodged under a rock.
“Come. Sit. Tell me everything.”
When I was certain no more snakes were going to make their way over my toes, I settled in beside her on the rocks, holding the new pen and journal, intent on hearing all about her travels.
Tell me all about Africa, I wrote.
“I spent a month in Porto-Novo helping to build a small school for the village, and another in Monrovia teaching, although I think I did a whole lot more learning than teaching. The children were so smart and friendly. Most of them only had two or three outfits, but they were the happiest little pips I believe I’ve ever met. Look!” Grandma Jo bent her wrist, showing off a woven bracelet decorated with carved beads. “Isn’t it lovely? They made it for me! And the oldest was twelve years old. Each bead has a different meaning. This one means hope, and this one means health and unity. You would love it there, absolutely love it. Next year you’ll come with me.” She patted my hand.
Really?
“Really. Look. This picture was taken at the Ivory Coast. And this is the first village I stayed at, in Lagos. That man is the village elder, and this one is the Oloogun.”
Oloogun?
“Medicine man, but he doesn’t just heal people, he watches over the crops and weather and infestations. Stuff like that. Oh! Look.” Grandma Jo opened her bag, pulling out a white stick wrapped halfway with leaves and tied with a string. “It’s a talisman! He gave it to me for protection. This is the bone of a wild boar, and it’s wrapped in rooibos leaves. He blessed it with goat blood.” She held it out to me, laughing when I curled my nose up at it. “Oh, and this is Kitzi, the daughter of the host family whose hut I stayed in.” Grandma Jo flipped to another picture, but I was barely listening.
Did they talk about a witch named Yemaya? She’s the matron of Tillings, I scribbled.
“I had forgotten that.” Grandma Jo nodded. “Yemaya isn’t really a witch. She’s an orisha of the ocean from Yorubaland. And Yemaya isn’t really a name, it’s sort of a contraction—Yeye omo eja means ‘Mother whose children are the fish,’ hence Yemaya. She’s revered more on the western coast in villages along the River Ogun than where I was. That’s really all I know about her. Why?”
No reason, I wrote, which wasn’t entirely true. Remy and Mr. O’Malley know all about her.
“Remy?”
Remy Mandolin, Mr. O’Malley’s daughter.
“Tom O’Malley?”
How did you know his name?
“I met him many years ago. You were still a baby.”
What about Remy and Mrs. O’Malley? I’d forgotten that Grandma Jo came with us to Tillings several times when I was young, and it never occurred to me that she might know anyone here. I set the journal on the ground beside the bucket of sap, which now had three honeybees crawling laps around its rim.
There was a long pause. “I might have met Mrs. O’Malley and Remy. It was a long time ago.” Grandma Jo lazed back on the boulder to watch the honeybees. “I just remember Mr. O’Malley coming to fix things around the property anytime something didn’t work.” Her toes curled and uncurled over the rock’s edge. “So tell me: how are you really?”
By the time I was done writing, I had told her about everything: the crimson stain on my underpants, the weird
déjà vu feeling of the house, which made me worry somewhere in the basement of my brain that I might be going insane, and what I had remembered about my mother crumpled up beside the closet. It all spilled onto the page like water from a spring and when she had read the pages, rubbing Luke’s stomach the whole while, she sat back and looked at me thoughtfully.
“So it feels like the world is trying to tell you something. Is that so insane, Izabella?” I liked when she talked to me this way—one woman to another, not grandmother to child. She didn’t ever shorten my name or try to dig my voice free. “Do you know a lioness can communicate with her mate three miles away? There’s just so much we don’t really understand. Why don’t you stop worrying about being crazy and just try listening to what the world has to say? And as far as déjà vu, have you considered the fact that maybe there is something familiar here, something trying to get in that you may be keeping out?” She set the journal on my knee, looking at her watch. “Oh my, it’s getting late. We’d better head back. But first . . .” Words don’t glitter, but if they did my grandmother’s would have. “Do you still smear honey on your toast?”
I nodded, giving her a “what are you up to” look.
“Me, too. And I think I know just where to find some—watch.”
And with that Grandma Jo gently brushed the bees from the lid of the bucket, gazing after them as they flitted through a hole in the side of a poplar tree. Tiptoeing behind them, her whole body seemed to shift into slow motion. By the time she reached the hole, her arms and face were dotted with fuzzy little bodies strutting up and down, as confused by my grandmother as the rest of the world was.
I pulled Luke into my lap, tucking him close to my chest, and held my breath waiting to see Grandma Jo keel over from a thousand stings. Luke must have sensed my heart racing, because every few seconds he would peel his eyes from Grandma Jo and lick my ear gently until the muscles along my neck relaxed.
Slowly, she reached into the hole, made a tiny jerking motion with her hand, and turned back to me with a fistful of dripping honeycomb. The bees lit into the air, buzzing calmly around the mouth of the hive as though bidding farewell to an old friend. By the time she’d reached the boulder again, they’d all disappeared without stabbing one single stinger into her skin. Looking at the astounded expression on my face, Grandma Jo laughed, scraping the honey onto the edge of the bucket.
“It’s really no mystical gift. They don’t mind sharing, showing off their art a bit. Just as long as you only take your fair share and don’t squish any of them in the process. If they sense aggression, they sting. If they sense calm, they just sort of visit with you while you’re there. Ready?”
I nodded, hopping off the rock, still amazed that my grandmother’s blood coursed somewhere in my veins.
Once the tin pail, with its watery sap and small clump of honeycomb clinging to the side, had been deposited in the kitchen sink, Grandma Jo turned to me with two sticky hands planted on her hips. For a second, I noticed that both she and my mother did that. Then the thought righted itself in my head because it wasn’t the same thing at all. When my mother dug her hands into her hips it was as if she was gluing her fingers to something to stop herself from smacking the world silly. The way that my grandmother did it said, “Bring it on—I haven’t got all day,” like she couldn’t wait for life to turn the page.
“Now I need freshening up. If you would be kind enough to show me where my room is, I’ll shower then make dinner while your mom works. I feel like I’m back at the kibbutz. Nothing feels better than a little dirt under the nails. Someday I’ll bring you with me, or maybe we’ll go somewhere new, like Holland. I have always wanted to go to Holland. What do you think? We can tumble through a field of tulips and chase windmills like Don Quixote.” Grandma Jo winked at me.
I nodded, trying to picture that in my head. The closest I had ever come to leaving the country was when my father brought me to Noatak National Preserve in Alaska, which is kissing distance across the Bering Strait to the Chukotsky District in Russia.
My mother was away working on an art estate sale in Alabama, and I had no idea that she didn’t know we were going. Caught up by a burning desire to become one with nature, my father had rented a cabin, packed our parkas, and booked a flight for the West Coast. When we landed, he rented a red pickup eaten through with rust and bought a crossbow with which to hunt our own food.
“Ready to go wild?” he’d joked. “We’re going to have so much fun.”
And it was fun, until I woke up the following morning in the tiny cabin shivering because the woodstove had fizzled out and my father and his crossbow were nowhere to be found. I might have frozen to death if the owner of the cabin had not come to stack wood and check on us.
“Have you ever ridden on a snowmobile?” The man had tucked me between his legs and hit the throttle.
Shaking my head, I had buried my face in the arm of his parka and let the tears come as he whizzed me away. I didn’t know where my father had gone, but I was sure he would come back for me. My mother would be upset that I had gone so easily with a perfect stranger, but my father would be worried. He would go searching.
Five hours after we arrived at the cabin owner’s house, and with no trace of my father, the park rangers and my mother were notified.
They found my dad downriver an hour later. He had painted his face and neck with clay from the riverbank like some ancient native hunter and was using the crossbow to try to shoot fish in the river. He hadn’t come back. He wasn’t looking. He’d left me behind.
After that, any time my mother was not home, Grandma Jo came to stay with us. I wondered how far Holland was from Alaska.
CHAPTER SEVEN
By the time I got downstairs the next morning, every hall in the house was filled with the sweet smell of maple syrup, which Grandma Jo had simmered to a warm golden froth on the stove. Remy Mandolin was teetering precariously on a Windsor chair while edging the last of the storm windows into its frame in the living room, and Grandma Jo had come up behind her with a bottle of Windex and a rag.
“That’s what they’re saying,” she was telling my grandmother. “They have three propaganda videos from the Symbionese Liberation Army and it’s Patty Hearst speaking on all of them. It may be that she wasn’t kidnapped, after all. She may have gone of her own free will.”
Luke wiggled free of my arm and scampered up beside them with a whine.
“Good morning, Sunshine,” Grandma Jo twittered, lifting the rag into the air as Luke tried to snatch it.
“More like Rip Van Winkle. The day’s half gone,” Remy mumbled, snapping the window secure. “Your mother’s sending you off to Herman’s with me on a grocery run. So, if you’re having breakfast, you’d better have at it.”
“I’d go myself,” my mother said, coming into the room and sniffing the remnants of the gallon of milk she’d brought from home and wrinkling her nose up at it. “But, I’ve got—”
“A ton of work to finish up before the weekend,” Grandma Jo and Remy finished in unison. “We know.”
“Actually, I was going to say no car.” She gazed at Remy, who ignored her. “I’m the only person on Tillings running a tab with a taxi—and a perfectly good car of my own across the bay.”
I suspected the real reason my mother refused to go herself was that she did not want to admit defeat by depending on a ride from Remy while her car sat doubling as a beach chair for Telly.
“First, you are not the only one,” Remy corrected. “Second, I told you I’ll bring it as soon as I can. That ferry’s packed tighter than a wad of chewing tobacco until the festival is over. And third, I’m already tired of listening to you whine on about it. Give it a rest. It isn’t like I haven’t got better things to do than plop storm windows into your frames and cart you around hell’s half acre.”
“At least you’re getting paid for your misery,” my mother grumbled under her breath. She turned to look at me. “Maybe Grandma Jo would like to go with you.”
There was a hopeful tone in her voice.
“It’s an island, darling. She’s not going to get lost. You let that puppy out more than her. Give the child a break from all of us. She’s a teenager; they need open space to air out.”
“Hear, hear,” Remy quipped.
“Maybe she’ll meet some kids her own age instead of being cooped up in this house with a bunch of antiques.”
“I brought pictures, Mom, not the actual antiques.”
“I wasn’t talking about your musty old furniture.” Grandma Jo laughed. “I was referring to us, or more frankly, you. Besides, I’m going to take a stroll down to the beach. Remy says there’s a great place to do yoga not far from here.”
“Oh, that sounds nice.” My mother’s voice perked up. “Iz, grab a pen and make a list for me, will you?”
Still sleepy, I stumbled over to the journal Grandma Jo had brought, tore a page free, and flopped into a chair at the table.
Buried under six layers of clothes like a summer onion, my mother made her way back into the kitchen and began scuttling from cabinet to cabinet calling off items for a grocery list.
“Pasta,” she called. Then, “linguini,” as though one were not the other. I shook my head at the soft risen dough of Remy’s rear end waggling in the woodbin as she tossed a load of kindling in. Although it was not a kinship she admitted to, I felt sure somewhere in my mother’s lineage there was a shot of Italian blood. Dinner—when it was not cereal—meant pasta, the only difference being the sauce she poured over it and the chunks of meat tossed in for texture.
“Chicken and honey.” With her face shoved in the icebox, my mother sounded as if she were chewing sand. There was a tinkle of ice cubes followed by the light thud of the icebox door swinging shut.
“Izabella and I got honey yesterday.” Grandma Jo went to the kitchen, returning with a crock containing the slab of honeycomb.
From her chair, Remy studied the waxy blob with a sour face.
What the Waves Know Page 8
