by Layla Lawlor
"Miss, is this your car?"
"Yeah," I said. It came out gravelly, and I cleared my throat. "Yeah, it's mine."
She took in the shattered window, the glass all over the driver's seat. "I'm so sorry. We very rarely have vandalism here, at least during the daylight hours. Do you want me to call the police? Was anything taken?"
"No, it's okay, I'm good." I wasn't, but what was I going to tell the police? What's missing, ma'am? Oh, just my invisible magic sword ...
"Can we call someone else for you?" the park ranger prompted, and a proverbial ton of bricks dropped on me.
"Oh shit," I burst out. "Grandma." I scrambled to my feet and started brushing glass off the front seat. "Sorry—I'm late—no, really, I'm fine, I have to go. Sorry!"
I was out on Flatbush Avenue, with the wind through the broken window whipping fast-food wrappers around the interior of the car, before I thought of checking to see if anything else was missing. I knew before looking, though, that nothing would be. There wasn't anything in the car to steal. It had a tape deck, for crying out loud. There was no reason why anyone would want to steal my handful of scuffed paperbacks or the assorted seat-of-the-pants repair equipment that owners of beater cars tend to collect (duct tape, pliers, the screwdriver I used to start the car's semifunctional ignition, and so forth).
I tried Muirin's number and got the same out-of-area message I'd been getting all week.
The list of suspects went on and on. Anyone from Shadow New York. Jill Frost. The Gatekeepers themselves. I hated to think that Millie's smile or Irmingard's sweet, open face masked a hidden agenda, but how well did I know them, really? Any of the Gatekeepers might have their own reasons for wanting the sword out of Muirin's hands and into their own.
I'd made a bunch of new friends, but now prudence dictated that I keep them at arm's length. Prudence ... or rampant paranoia. I'd been spending way too much time around Muirin.
Still, I thought grimly, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.
I was forty-five minutes late to the airport. No panicked messages from Mom, which made me even more nervous than if she'd left fifteen of them. I didn't have Grandma's cell number—did she even have one? By the time I stepped into the baggage claim area, I'd already come up with a dozen nightmarish scenarios. Weren't airports supposed to be a mecca for con artists who took advantage of people needing rides, only to rob and beat them? Or what if Grandma, being Grandma, had taken matters into her own hands and purchased a bus ticket, which meant I'd have no idea where she was until the bus got to Ithaca five hours later ...
But I saw her right away, sitting on a bench in a neat, powder-blue suit dress and matching hat. A suitcase rested against her leg, and there was a small satchel in her lap. She wore an air of quiet self-possession wrapped around her like a blanket, and she was sitting calmly, watching people go by with a look of interest.
"Grandma?"
A smile broke over her face. She started to rise, jerked to a halt and reached for her cane—the medical sort, with little gripping feet on the bottom. An old-person cane. It hit me like a punch in the gut.
But her smile was the same, brilliant and a little coy at the same time. When she gripped my shoulders, I noticed she was wearing ivory-colored gloves. "Kay. Sweetheart. You're so tall. I always forget how tall you are."
"I'm so sorry I'm late, Grandma Geraldine." I picked up her suitcase and then hesitated, wondering if I ought to offer my arm, but Grandma was already off and away. She was limping, leaning on the cane, but still moved at a pretty good clip. Her heels clicked briskly on the floor.
"Please don't apologize. Sometimes it's good to be still for a while. I knew you'd come, so I entertained myself by people-watching. Airports, train and bus stations—the only better place for people-watching is a jail. Did your mother ever tell you about the time we were both incarcerated in Alabama? She was just a little girl then—they weren't exactly sure what to do with a mother and a young child, so they put us both in the warden's office." She laughed, a bright sound that made me think of Fresca.
"It must have slipped her mind," I said. That seemed like exactly the sort of anecdote that Mom would have attempted to scrub from her personal history as thoroughly as possible. "Do you have a cell phone? I'm so sorry that—"
"I don't have one. I hate telephones. Dreadful things. I only have a landline—that's the word, right?—in the condo because your mother insisted, and because I received a discount with that and the internet."
"Well, I'm sorry I'm late. Someone broke into my car."
"Oh, honey." Grandma patted my arm. "I could tell by your face that something was wrong, but I knew you'd speak up if you wanted to talk about it. Did they take anything?"
I floundered briefly: Nothing I could report to the police gave entirely the wrong impression. "I don't think so," I lied at last, not meeting her eyes. "Nothing important."
"It still feels like a violation," my grandmother said. "I know how it is. Someone else has been in your space. Your mother would use this as a pretext to complain about the high crime rate and the disintegrating morals of American youth. I disagree strenuously, of course, as any person of intelligence must."
This launched her into talking about overpolicing and her (alleged) activities with the Black Panthers back in the 1960s. I would normally have been all ears—I was always there for young Grandma stories—but in this case it gave me an excuse to leave most of the talking to her, making listening noises in the right places.
Back at the car, I wrapped a towel around my hand and brushed the rest of the glass out of the window. At least this way it looked like it was rolled down. My entire car was a red "pull me over" flag and I hated driving it in the city.
"Oh, baby," Grandma said quietly, looking at the window.
I shook my head. Tears stung my eyes and I forced them back; she didn't need to see me cry. "I'm sorry the car's such a wreck, Grandma. Mom keeps wanting to buy me a new one, and I probably should just let her ..."
Grandma shook her head. "You live your life as you see fit, Kay. Your mother always liked to tell people what to do. Good for you standing up to her."
Grandma and I always did get along.
It was dark when we reached the outskirts of Binghamton, hours later. I'd tried calling and then texting Muirin when we stopped for gas. She still wasn't answering, and I hated it.
"Grandma Geraldine, I know you've had a long flight and it's late, but do you mind if I stop and see if a friend of mine is home? It's important. I don't need to visit for very long, I just want to talk to her."
"Honey," my grandmother said, "you're the one who's in a hurry to get there. If you need to stop along the way, I'd love to see a little of this town."
"It's Binghamton," I said. "Don't get too excited."
I wasn't confident of my ability to find Muirin's street by myself, especially in the dark, and experience seemed to prove me right. But Grandma was more fascinated than annoyed by a succession of wrong turns. This was, I reminded myself, the woman who'd been functionally homeless for most of her life, sleeping in tents and hostels and on other people's couches.
I'd been thinking all along that Mom had twisted Grandma's arm about coming out to see me, but I wondered if the arm-twisting had actually been the other way around. Mom was very good at making other people's decisions seem like her idea. After her free-wheeling life, Grandma must be going out of her mind in her nice, cozy Colorado Springs condo. Ithaca was no Paris in the springtime, but it was somewhere new, and a whole new set of experiences.
Hopefully Grandma wasn't about to get way more excitement than she wanted.
I drove past Muirin's house twice before I finally managed to recognize it. The house was dark, but I told myself it was late; maybe she was asleep. My heart sank a bit when I saw no sign of her car. I parked behind the dump truck anyway.
"Your friend must be an interesting person," Grandma said, admiring the dump truck. She sounded appro
ving.
"You have no idea. Do you mind staying here? I'll only be a minute."
I jogged to the front door and rang the bell. No answer, but by this point I wasn't really expecting one. I rang it again, knocked, tried calling again and got the out-of-service-area message. Fuck.
We'd been back on the road for some twenty pensive minutes before Grandma said, "You're worried about your friend?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sort of. We ... we haven't talked in a while, and she was having some problems the last time I saw her."
"If you'd like to talk about it ..." Grandma said. Then she laughed. "Oh, I know what that sounds like, coming from someone my age. I wouldn't have wanted to confide in my grandmother either—even if I could. I never knew her."
"That was Lily-Bell's mother?" I asked, grateful for an opportunity to do something other than obsess about things I couldn't change.
Geraldine nodded. "I believe her name was Mary," she said. "I'm not entirely sure. My mother died when I was young, you know."
And yet I'd just been talking to her today. The same sense of mental whiplash that had hit me on the runway, with Millie, came back for an encore.
"I have her books of her poetry with me in Ithaca, you know. I'm glad you gave them to me."
"We're a creative family," Geraldine said proudly. "Well, it skipped a generation in me, I'm afraid. But I see a great deal of your great-grandmother in you, Kay, and in your mother too. I regret that I never had an opportunity to get to know my mother as an adult. But one of the reasons I kept those poetry books through all my moves is because those are the way I visit with her. I never could sit down with her and have a cup of coffee, one woman to another. So our coffee cup is passed through the pages of a little book, where she poured out her heart and so gave me a chance to meet her."
Grandma might claim that the creative impulse had skipped over her, but listening to the soft cadence of her voice in the dark, I thought she was wrong.
"Where did she come from?" I asked, remembering Lily's slight, soft Southern drawl.
"I don't know for certain," my grandmother said. "Somewhere down in bayou country, I think. Louisiana or Mississippi." She laughed gently. "I keep going back to the water. I always felt at home there. On boats, in swamps. Did your mother ever tell you about the stilt house? I know she doesn't talk much about the years we lived together."
The years we lived together. Mom's entire childhood, in other words. From what I knew of those years, I gathered Geraldine had raised Mom as a partner and traveling companion more than a daughter. I already knew that Mom had found her rootless, unstructured childhood miserable, but it occurred to me now to wonder if it had hurt Geraldine, the way that my mother brushed all those adventures aside to concentrate on the normal adult life she'd built for herself. It must have hurt.
But perhaps not as much as it would have hurt a different mother, who'd pinned all her hopes on her daughter. Geraldine had never been one to live through her children and grandchildren; she had too much living of her own to do.
"She did mention the stilt house," I said, and then, hoping that it would make Grandma happy to know that at least a few scraps of their partnership in crime had been passed down to the younger generation, "I used to play stilt house, did Mom ever tell you that? I used an armchair as the house, with a pillow from the couch for a little boat. It was one of my favorite games."
I didn't mention that I did it only when Mom wasn't home, under the indifferent eye of a babysitter or during those quiet hours after school and before Mom came home from work. Mom hated me climbing on the furniture.
Geraldine's laugh was a little less wistful this time. "Your mother loved that stilt house. Oh, she'll deny it to her dying day, I'm sure, but when she was seven, she was a little spitfire, all scuffed knees and elbows. That place was a child's dream. So much of what we did was a child's dream."
And like so many childhood dreams, left behind when the child grew up, I thought.
What had Muirin dreamed of? Did fairy children think about who they wanted to grow up to be? Certainly she hadn't anticipated what she became: a bean sí, a banshee tied to the O'Connor family for hundreds of years, brought across the ocean with them.
Why? I wondered. It was a thought that had occurred to me more than once over the last few months. Muirin hadn't wanted to be what she was. What had happened to her? Was it a punishment? A penance? And this Jill Frost person, for whom I'd done a service, or so she said ...
"Geraldine—" I began, then looked over and realized that she'd fallen asleep, her head resting against the window.
The lights of our house glowed through the dark when I pulled into the driveway. I couldn't believe I'd only left that morning, tiptoeing out in the gray pre-dawn light. It seemed so much longer.
Grandma woke with a start, blinked and rubbed her eyes. "Was I snoring?"
"Don't worry about it." I got her satchel and suitcase out of the backseat. As I unlocked the kitchen door and ducked under the little protective charms hanging at the top of the doorframe—Fresca and I subscribed to the "can't be too careful" school of thought these days—I hoped that whoever was still up didn't turn out to be Leanne. That was a conversation I wasn't looking forward to.
The kitchen lights were on, but no one was around, although I could hear music and voices from the living room. Looking through the open doorway between kitchen and living room, I saw Fresca sprawled on the couch, with Drew sitting crosslegged on top of the couch back. They were watching a movie on Fresca's laptop—well, technically Fresca was the one watching it, since she had no way of knowing Drew was behind her.
"Hey! You!" Fresca rolled over and paused playback. "Leanne left a note. She's moving out. What did you do, Kay?"
"Aww shit." I dropped Grandma's suitcase on the bottom step of the staircase. "I was afraid of that. She was around for a, um, thing."
"One of your kinds of things?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sorry."
Fresca drummed her fingers on the coffee table. "Kay, we can't keep going through roommates like this!"
"Tell me about it," Drew said, though Fresca didn't hear him, and I, from long practice, managed not to react.
"Come on, Fresca, I'm not doing it on purpose!"
"These are your roommates?" Grandma Geraldine said, stumping up beside me. "I love your hair, dear."
Fresca waved and sat up. "You're Kay's grandmother! Hi!s"
"Yeah, Grandma Geraldine, this is Fres—Wait a minute, did you say roommates, plural?"
Drew perked up like a dog sensing a treat. "Wait, what—can she see me?"
Fresca did the wild eyes-darting-around-the-room thing that had become her habit every time I started talking to Drew. "He's here? What am I saying, of course he's here."
"Seriously? She can see me? She's looking right at me!" Drew broke into a brilliant grin. I'd never seen him look so cheerful.
I pointed to Drew and looked quizzically at my grandmother. "Can you see him?"
Geraldine smiled the same soft smile that she'd worn during our conversation in the car. "Oh, that kind of roommate. I thought you might take after me in that way. Your mother never did. Honey," she said to Drew, "I'm not sure what you're saying, because I can see you, but I can't hear people like you. I never have been able to."
"I'll take what I can get," Drew said. He slid off the couch back and approached us—he could simply disappear and reappear in a new place, but after a few instances of me screaming and dropping things, I'd made it clear in no uncertain terms that he was going to walk around like a normal human being rather than scaring me out of a year's growth every time he popped up in front of me. "Kay can hear me. Why can't you?"
"He's wondering why I can hear him when you can't," I said, as a little sunray of delight broke in my chest. I wasn't alone: someone else had my gift, curse, or whatever it was. I gave Grandma a quick one-armed hug.
"I don't know why," Geraldine said. She patted my arm, but addressed her words to Drew. "I was never
sure if ghosts—that's what you are, correct?" Drew nodded. "I was never sure if ghosts did make sounds. I certainly never heard them."
"Guess you'll be learning sign language," I told Drew, and then frowned. "Actually, Grandma, I was going to put you in the unoccupied bedroom, but it is in fact occupied by Drew. That's the ghost. Is that going to bother you? If Leanne is moving out, you could maybe have the couch tonight, and then her room—"
"It won't be a problem for me." Grandma looked at Drew. "You?"
Drew thought about it, then shrugged, and shook his head.
"It would be a problem if you could hear him," I said. "He plays the guitar."
While Drew showed Grandma around the house, I cleared a space for her in his room. Prior to Leanne's arrival, the room that was now Leanne's had been used for storing all the stuff we'd moved out of the attic when I had taken it over. Then, to make space for Leanne, we'd moved it all into the large corner bedroom that had formerly belonged to the male roommates; Drew had told me he didn't mind. It wasn't like he needed to sleep anymore, and looking through it gave him something to do.
I lifted a box of hundred-year-old National Geographics from the bed. "Where did your Aunt Lu get all this stuff, Fres?"
"I think most of it was in the house when she bought it." Fresca peeked into a box that turned out to contain nothing but incandescent light bulbs, none of them in boxes, each one carefully wrapped in newspaper. "Aunt Lu never could say no to a bargain. Since Leanne is leaving, I guess we get to move it all back."
"Or maybe Grandma will have a screaming heebie-jeebie fit when Drew pops up on the foot of her bed in the middle of the night," I said, shaking out the fresh sheets I'd brought upstairs.
"I know I only just met your grandmother, but I can't imagine her having the screaming heebies about anything."
Indeed, Grandma looked around the bedroom with its heaps of junk (Drew sitting atop one of them, crosslegged), gave him a small wave, smiled at me and Fresca, and bid us both good night.
