by Isla Morley
My grandmother returned from church to find me with my head in Beauty’s lap, my mother’s letter still in my hand. So long had I lain there that I no longer noticed Beauty’s odor—the spiky scent of wood fires and Vicks and unnamed things—or her fingers unknotting the tangles in my hair. The soft song of Africa accompanied my guilty tears. “Tula tu tula baba tula sana, tul’umam’ uzobuya ekuseni.”
“It’s all my fault,” I cried when my grandmother sat down on the bed next to us.
“Now, now,” she said.
“It is—it’s my fault she stays with him, and now she’s never coming back.”
Beauty lifted me off her lap and ushered me into the crook of my grandmother’s arm before leaving the room.
“If anyone is to blame for her staying with your father, dear child, it’s me.” When I looked up at her, she explained. “Your mother came to me long ago, on a day when she had gotten between your father’s hand and your brother’s face. She wanted to know what to do, and I said something I have regretted all these years, something I have tried to reverse a hundred different ways.”
“What did you say?”
“I never did think she should have married him, your father. He was a bad apple right from the beginning, but your mother could be a stubborn girl in those days.”
“Grannie?”
“I told her she had made her bed so she had to lie in it.”
I hate going away, my mother had written, because it means we have to be separated again. And though it must feel to you as though I leave you again and again, I never do . . . I just go away. But please believe me, Abbe—I will never leave you. The truth of it was that we had all left her, deserted her in some way by what we had said, by our expectations of her. The only one not to have left her was her amber-haired boy who had grown up and gone away.
“I’M PICKING YOU UP AT SIX,” announces Jenny in an early-morning call. “Petal is coming too; the grandparents are going to watch Blossom.” Hearing my groan, she goes on, “Hey, she could do with an evening out too.”
“Okay,” I relent.
“It will be fun,” she insists, perhaps too keenly, because she asks, “Are you going to be okay today?”
“We’ll see,” I answer.
In the three weeks since Greg left, not a day has gone by without a call from Jenny. If it is not before school starts to make sure I intend to get up, it is in the evening after she has fed Mr. Finnegan his saimin, changed his diaper, and put him to bed. It seems I am also part of her flock, as is Petal, for whom she babysits every other Friday. Just as she once did, and then stopped doing, for us.
I do get up. The first few mornings, it was just to double-check that Greg had not just gone away but left. For good. I looked for bits of Greg, but the house, covered with Cleo like a coat of dust, offered barely any signs of him, as though he had never quite lived here. Besides his clocks and his gray easy chair, which Ronnie has agreed to haul to the curb, there is nothing much to remind me of him that isn’t attached to my memories of Cleo.
His absence does mean I have to remember more things. Besides remembering to eat breakfast before going to work, I must remember to fill the pets’ food bowls. When I come home in the afternoon, I must remember to attend to the litter box and fill the bird feeder. It was a week before I remembered to clear the backyard of Solly’s business, which is when I noticed Greg’s orchids, withered in their pots. When I tipped out their remains behind the torch ginger whose stalks had taken custody of Greg’s pitiful tomato patch, I said out loud to those things still stubborn enough to grow, “You will all just have to fend for yourselves now.”
The church, according to Jenny, is fending for itself quite nicely. The interim pastor, a middle-aged woman recently graduated from seminary, has a portable electronic keyboard and the zest of the newly ordained. Some people say she is going off in too many directions—if you can call replacing hymnals with praise song sheets a direction. “She means well” is the general consensus, but there are still those who miss Greg. They did not have time to host a farewell luncheon for him, so Cleo’s memorial service turned out to be their last social gathering. Jenny said many more than the anticipated thirty showed up, filling Sylvia Horton’s house, her yard, and half of her neighbor’s.
And today, on the anniversary of Cleo’s death, I wonder who minds the date. A handful of us, is my guess—Greg and his mother, Cicely and Rhiaan, Jenny, yes; Theresa—bad with dates—no. Mr. Nguyen, if Greg still corresponds with him, yes; the clergy who officiated at her service, no. Perhaps I should have put something in the paper, for people to say, “Gosh, has it been a year already?” No, I’m glad I didn’t.
No sooner have I called Buella to tell her I won’t be coming in than I realize my mistake. There is a day to fill. The walk to the mailbox and back takes two minutes, even with a pause to hear Mrs. Chung’s updated tally on her oranges. If I am diligent about reading the entire stack of mail, including the credit card offers, I might kill an hour. I have never been so eager. Sandwiched between the weekly coupons and the mortgage loan preapprovals is a postcard. On the front is a field of flowers; on the back an Ohio postmark and Greg’s handwriting. We’ll never forget. She lives on. The note brings with it images of Greg on a ladder, scraping off old paint from shutters, his mother coming around the corner with a soda, licking her lips in that nervous fashion of hers, saying, “Be careful now, Gregory.” Of him standing up there, with a view of the fields and their spring flowers and the old highway that no one uses anymore; up there with God and the big blue sky and thoughts about Cleo living on.
Cicely calls and, surprised to find me home, stammers the sentiment she had intended for the answering machine. When I ask about Rhiaan, she speaks as though she has been let off the hook. His trip back to South Africa went well, and she thinks her decision not to go along probably accounts for part of that. He met some people who are making a film that they want him to coproduce, so that was good too. And he had paid a visit to the cemetery. Someone, apparently, had left flowers on my mother’s grave. Who, I puzzled, would leave my mother flowers?
After Cicely’s call there are no more distractions. There is nothing left to do but sit on the floor in Cleo’s room and go through her closet. I gently lift the dresses free from their hangers, fold them along the seams to avoid creasing, and put them in the boxes left over from Greg’s move. One box is going to be just for all her dress-up clothes, with their wands and crowns and wings.
It is only among her stuff where I find bits of Greg, in the things he couldn’t resist buying her. Suddenly it seems wrong to pack up her closet, so I stack the empty boxes at the foot of the shelves and close the doors. Maybe another day. Returning from the linen closet with clean sheets, I remake her bed and fill the empty vase next to it with a hibiscus flower. I straighten her bookshelf. Her sketch pad opens to a crayon drawing of three people. From enormous lollipop heads sprout root-thin limbs, the tips of which have Ping-Pong ball fingers. Two of the figures have curly hair; the one whose hair is short and spiky is me. Around them are green shoots. “Lost in the Forest” is what the picture is titled. On the bottom, in my handwriting, is a written account of her story: The mommy and the daddy are lost in the forest. They are calling and calling. The little girl finds them. She is brave and kind. She takes them home and gives them bread and honey. The End. As if being “brave and kind” is all it takes to find the lost and fix the broken. There is only one place to which the lost and broken can go at an hour like this: daytime TV.
IT IS ALMOST half past six when Petal knocks at the door, wearing what looks like a dishcloth around a floor-length paisley skirt and a tank top with a picture of an orange on it with the word “art” printed below it.
“Jenny’s in the car,” she lisps, and gives me a quick kiss before I can pull away.
“You’re late,” I snap, feeling like a scratchy sweater my grandmother might have knitted.
“It’s all my fault. Sorry about that. Blossom got all wo
rked up just as we were about to leave, so I had to nurse her till she fell asleep. Didn’t want Granddad to be all in a tizzy from the get-go.”
“Didn’t know he could be anything but,” I mumble.
“You sit in the front, Abbe,” she says, holding open the door for me as though I were a cantankerous elderly aunt.
The car is not even out of the driveway before Petal hands me a gift wrapped in hand-stamped paper. “It’s for you in memory of Cleo,” she says, chewing her bottom lip. “Hope you like it.” I unwrap it to find a CD, the back of which is listed with song titles from the sixties. I really must roll my eyes now. “I wrote some of the lyrics down so you could sing along if you wanted to,” she says, pointing to the insert.
I see Jenny glance at me from the corner of my eye, and I know she is pleading with me to be kind. Brave and kind.
“Thank you, that’s very thoughtful,” I say.
“SHALL WE HAVE WINE?” asks Jenny, peering over the top of her menu.
“Why not?” I reply.
When the waiter brings the bottle, Petal announces that she really ought not to, cupping her breasts quite unexpectedly, which I take to mean she is still breast-feeding, but Lord only knows what the waiter thinks. Evidently he sees it as a sign to move on to the next empty glass—mine—but she says, “Oh, what the heck. It’s a party, innit?” and then just as quickly her smile falls. “Oh, blimey, Abbe, I am so sorry. I never seem to say the right thing.”
It is as though we are locked in a game of Statues, the waiter bent over with his bottle poised at the lip of my glass, Jenny nose-up from the top of her menu, me with hand ready to remove the napkin from my plate, Petal with hers clasped to her mouth.
“No, you’re right. It’s not a wake. Tonight, just for tonight, how about we live a little.”
The waiter, relieved, pours the wine and Petal reaches over and gives me another hug.
“To life,” says Jenny, wineglass poised in a toast. “And to Cleo, who showed us how to live it.”
“To life, and to Cleo,” we say before Petal drains half her glass of wine.
By the time the desserts arrive, Jenny and I have both exchanged half a dozen glances each time Petal drained and then refilled her glass. We have listened to all the “brilliant” things Blossom has accomplished in the past few months, moved through a litany of Kelsey’s idiosyncrasies and Fay’s reasons for sainthood, and ended with Petal’s decision to return to England.
“That’s good,” I remark. “I am sure your father misses you very much and is eager to see the baby.”
She nods. “You have to go back eventually, haven’t you? Can’t put it off forever.” Well, yes you can, I want to tell her; I have.
“Speaking of trips,” Jenny announces, “I think I might go back home for a visit.” When she sees what must be a look of shock on my face, she explains. “A visit, I said.” While Petal nods with the enthusiasm of a plastic dashboard-mounted chihuahua, Jenny explains. “I talked to my sister the other night and she says my mother is getting a bit feeble, and you know how it is with old people. Besides, I have been waiting for something to spend my tax return on.”
“I would love to visit Jamaica if I had the money,” gushes Petal. “All those things you hear about—spells and voodoo—it must be a very spiritual place.”
“Well now, don’t go believing everything you hear. Poor’s what my hometown is more than anything else.”
Petal is not to be dissuaded from the topic. “Where would you go if you had the money, Abbe?”
Without hesitating, I tell her, “If I had the money I wouldn’t have to go anywhere,” but I can’t keep the tremble from my tone.
“What’s wrong?” asks Jenny.
I shake my head. “I don’t think I am going to be able to hang on to the house much longer. Greg’s got his own bills to pay come June, so unless I get a buyer for my grandmother’s property soon, I’m going to have to sell the place.”
“Where will you go?” asks Petal.
“We’ll just add that to the bullet-point list of things to worry about,” I snap.
Jenny, who will gladly forfeit her trip to Jamaica to pay just one month of my mortgage, is quick. “You can always stay with me.”
The waiter clears our dessert dishes and I ask for the check.
“I am sure there will be a buyer—it’s a nice place, right? Farms have such good energy—you know, from all the growing things.”
“Not this one, apparently.”
“What do you mean?”
I look over at Jenny. “She’s going to love this,” I say.
“What? What am I going to love?”
“It has a curse.” There. When I say it, it sounds as ridiculous as it did when I brought up the matter with Rhiaan.
As though at a séance, Petal gasps. “What kind of curse?”
“Well, Petal, the bad kind.”
“What was the curse?” This must be as close to pulling teeth as Petal can get.
“It was a curse on the land, that none of the trees would produce fruit until wrong was made right. I’m not one to believe in stuff like that”—and I can just see Petal’s incredulous look: Why not?—“but the weird thing is that those trees haven’t produced fruit in twenty years. They’re barren, and that’s why no one has bought the farm. It doesn’t have anything to do with the curse; all anyone has to do is take a look at those poor trees to figure the soil’s gone bad. And what farmer is going to buy a fruit farm with bad soil?” The waiter brings our check, and for a moment there is a flurry of handbags and a race to see who can draw their wallets first. Petal stirs her coffee, sucks on her spoon, and then points it at me as though it were a wand. “Curses can be broken, you know.”
On the way back home in the car I am preoccupied by thoughts of those sick stick trees. When we pull into the driveway, the house is completely dark because I forgot to turn on the porch light. Petal no doubt brings up Greg because it looks overbearingly lonely. “You must miss Reverend Deighton an awful lot.”
“Actually, not much.”
“I miss him,” she continues. “It’s too bad he had to go away.”
I bend over to give Jenny a hug and get out the car. “He didn’t go away, Petal; he left. There’s a difference.”
Jenny has to drive another thirty minutes to take Petal home. For Petal, the porch light will be on and a baby will be waiting. A grandmother will greet her, while across the ocean her father will count off the days on his calendar till it is upon his doorstep she stands. For a girl just turned twenty-four, of course curses can be broken, just as Cleo’s stick figures can find their way out of the forest to a table of bread and honey—Petal, after all, is on an even-numbered year.
SIXTEEN
There are several people with blue masks and white coats standing around me as I lie on a gurney and gaze into a circle of lights directly above me. They stare at my chest, and when someone cranks open my ribs I see them remove a tiny bird where my heart should be. The bird is sticky and wet, as if newly hatched, but its eyes are white; dead. An alarm sounds and they hurry to close up the cavity, but they do not put my bird back. They have taken my bird; there is no other bird. The ringing goes on and on, and the lights are very hot, and the people have gone away. When I manage to open my eyes, the afternoon sun is blazing down on the couch where I lie and the phone is persistent in its ring. Sweaty and shivery, I put a hand up to my chest and reach for the telephone.
“Hello?”
“Abbe, it’s Jen; I have some sad news.” Without waiting for a response, she says, “Jakes died yesterday.”
“What?”
“He died from complications after a kidney transplant. Remember his brother who was so sick? Jakes was giving him a kidney, but he never came out of ICU.”
I didn’t pray for bad things to happen to Theresa, so it is not my fault, is the first thing I think. And then: God is getting even, there’s a universal justice at work in the world. And finally, I think, Dammit, Jake
s is dead now too.
Jenny goes on, “It was just one of those flukes.”
“Terrible.”
“Theresa is having the funeral here,” she goes on. After Cleo died, Theresa and Jakes moved their family to Utah to be near his family. Before I made it clear to Jenny that I didn’t want updates on how their lives were getting along, she reported that Theresa missed Hawaii terribly. “Jakes’s family are Mormons; and you know Theresa and dresses,” Jenny had said. But really it was her family that Theresa missed, her sister, her mother, her girlfriends.
“When is it going to be?”
“Saturday. But I’m flying out to Salt Lake City tonight to help her.” There goes her trip to Jamaica.
“Terrible,” I repeat.
“I know.”
“And the kids?”
“The boys are in shock, but Tess doesn’t know yet. Theresa said she can’t figure out how to tell her her daddy isn’t coming home from the hospital.”
“I’ll call Greg.”
“He already knows.”
“He’s doing the funeral?”
“No, but he’ll be there.” After a pause, she says, “They say they come in threes.”
“What do?” But I know what she is going to say.
“Deaths.”
Cleo plus Jakes. “But there’s only been two.”
“I know; that’s what worries me.”
Perhaps the best newborn photo we have of Cleo is one I have not looked at since she was alive. Pasted in the book that tells of the day she was born, the picture on page three is of Jakes. With huge tattooed biceps, rounded shoulders, and resembling a wildebeest, Jakes is cradling a bean-sized Cleo. The caption beneath says, On the day you were born, giants bent down to smile at you. He is not facing the camera but lost in the moment of swaddling new life.
You could say Jakes knew all about new life because he was in the midst of having one. Released from federal prison years before he had served his full sentence for grand theft auto, a newly converted Jakes threw himself headlong into acts of deep penance. “I am a different kind of prisoner now,” he was fond of saying, “a prisoner of the Lord,” confirming for me that Jesus always had time for people who didn’t feel like they had paid enough. Every Sunday morning before the first worship service, Jakes made breakfast for the hobos from the park across the street. Every Sunday afternoon, he went back to the prison to a motley assembly of no-gooders and held a Bible study. When his students got out, they looked him up, limped to the church like mange-riddled hyenas, and lined up patiently for pancakes and bacon, and salvation sunny-side up.
