by Erin McGraw
“Maybe in a minute. Right now this is just right.” Her fingertips grazed my wrist, a touch so light I could have been imagining it.
The air was sweet and warm, and I felt my pulse moving in me like a steady current. Lights were on everywhere—patio lights and pool lights and street lights, but all I was aware of was the girl and the dark, where I wanted us to go.
Snitch
I tell the newswoman the same thing I tell everybody: “I knew it was my father. I just knew.”
“Were you frightened to go to the police, or was it a relief?” the newswoman asks. I wonder where she got the idea that those things are different.
When I was little, he took me to Disney and to the mall and to the beach. I would come home from school on Friday and he’d have the car already packed and running. He hadn’t been home in months, and bills would be spilling off the table. “I hurried so I could see my girl.” He had burned rubber across three states. Don’t tell me I’ve never been loved.
These days I take Mom out to dinner when I can. We don’t have a lot to say to each other. For a while right after the trial, we worked side by side, when she got me on in the Gardening department at Lowe’s. That was nice in the spring when we got to use the sprayer on the long shelves of bedding plants, the bright buds like jewels. Then it turned summer and hot, and Mom—she was full-time—was moved to Paints. The plants went white and leggy, lost their blooms, then collapsed in their cracked plastic boxes.
“They would have kept blooming if you’d watered them better,” Mom said.
“No one was buying anymore.”
“You used to like flowers. I made you a garden when you were little. Your father rode his motorcycle right through it, then laughed and laughed.”
“What did I do?”
“I didn’t let you see till the next day, when I’d thrown out the torn-up flowers. He was gone by then. We tried to start again, but the flowers were never as nice.”
It took me a while to find another job, but I made sure it was indoors and air-conditioned, and sometimes the manager lets me comp Mom’s dinner. It’s been six years. Time to move on.
“I have a daughter myself,” the investigator said.
“Does she know what you do for a living?” I said.
“She’s in second grade.”
“She knows.”
After the arrest, I stopped expecting to be invited to parties. Some boys, the grubby ones in thin pants, wanted to hang out, and after a while I said okay so I wouldn’t be alone. One of them watched me brush my hair for ten minutes without saying a word. I said, “It’s not going to be any more exciting than this.”
He said, “I thought you’d be different.”
Dad had a big nose and dark hair that hung straight in his eyes. He was fidgety, and I never saw his hands and wrists without crosshatch cuts, as if he scrambled through barbed wire every night. When I asked him why his hands were always cut up, he said, “Gotta feed my lion, baby girl.”
Mom was bad before the trial. At off moments she’d pull me into a hard hug. She’d say, “Lisa,” and then nothing else. I don’t think she slept for four months. I slept all right.
Usually I didn’t pay attention to stories about missing girls, but Dad liked rivers and he liked Sonics. The girl was found with river weeds tangled in her hair. The last thing she’d eaten was Pop Rocks. When Sonic Slushees with Pop Rocks first came out, I begged Dad to get me one. He made me eat the whole thing, and then I threw up half of it in the front seat. He would have told the girl that she didn’t need to finish it. He learns fast.
“Your music is crap.”
He grinned. When he was high, everything was a joke. “You wouldn’t know good music if it bit you on the butt.”
“You wouldn’t know good music if it came sneaking in your bedroom window.”
“Wait—you got any boys sneaking in your bedroom window?”
“Maybe.”
“Tell them—Tell them you’ve got a dad.”
“And that’s supposed to scare them off?”
“It’s supposed to make them careful. Then tell them your dad knows what good music is, and where to get it.”
He didn’t come to see me after he raped her. The state-appointed child psychologist said, “He wanted to protect you,” like that was breaking news.
Police were all over this one from the start—first the missing girl, then the sketch. So many clues, I was ashamed of him. After a week, it was obvious that he wasn’t coming home. He was with a girlfriend, earbuds blasting away. He was stretched out on her couch, soaking up her sun. Shaking, I went to the police station.
Mom won’t say his name, or the raped girl’s. She’ll say, “Lisa—”
One of these days she’ll figure out what to say next.
He taught me red-winged blackbirds. A man doesn’t have to be a criminal one hundred percent of the time. He taught me times tables, too, smacking me when I started to twist and whine. “This is something you’re going to need.”
The only boy I liked at school was Alan Peery. When we were doing Personal Histories in health class he looked over at mine, and then on my birthday he put flowers on my desk. Five months later. He said, “I have a good memory.”
I wanted to be with him, but he was just a nice person, not a player. I’d sit on his lap and he’d gently push me off, pat my hand. He wasn’t gay, according to Hot Pants Heidi Connor, who would know. Alan was just careful. I knew better than to say a word about him to either Mom or Dad—Mom would be too hopeful, and Dad would hurt him.
I wanted the police to figure it out, but they kept going on TV to say, “No leads,” and I drove my fingernails hard enough into my palms to draw blood. When I went to the police, my mouth felt like it was full of paste. The officer taking my statement had to keep getting me bottles of water, and I knew he thought I was high. It took forever to get the statement out. Then I left the station and looked both ways before I crossed the street. When I got to the car, I looked in the back seat, then underneath.
The detective wanted me to testify, but she couldn’t force me. I was only fifteen. I told her what to look for, and when we were finished, she took my hands and thanked me. I never asked her to touch me.
I was surprised that Mom went to the trial. She came miserably home every day, dragging her shadow as if it were made of lead, and I wondered what man she thought she’d married.
“Do you want to hear?” she said. Some days I did, some I didn’t. Her face got complicated when she told me that the girl was twelve, “younger than you.” No kidding. That’s why I went to the police.
Someday he’ll get out. His sentence was fifteen years, and he’s smart, he’ll get out in eight, less. He’ll come to see me.
“You still listening to that so-called music?”
“I’ve moved on.”
“Not my little girl anymore?”
Smile. It’s important not to lie.
“You’ve grown up, I can see that. You don’t eat Pop Rocks anymore.”
“I never should have eaten them in the first place.”
“No,” he’ll agree, his hand light on my wrist. No need to think any further. Anybody knows what comes next.
Edits
No, I won’t give your daughter an interview. No, I have no statement for your class. I don’t actually care about activism and disability rights. I will not be your sponsor or your spokesperson. I will not sign your petition. Your enrichment is of much less importance to me than you think.
I had no say in my mother’s books, and if I could have stopped them, I would have. The money from them supported my therapy, and many days I would have stopped it, too. My whole life I have been a role model. I would have rather been a fashion model, but crippled girls don’t get that choice.
Reviewers loved to wax on about how witty Mom’s writing was, and how vividly my personality shone on the page. Strangers would come to the house and wait for me to shine. When I was eight I said to one of them, “Is your hair supposed
to stick up like that?” and everybody laughed. I saw Mom look at me and assess. Would it be funny on the page? Apparently not. It didn’t go into the books.
I’ve changed my name, moved to Chicago, work as a data inputter for an insurance company. “You don’t make it easy to find you!” sing my fans. No, I don’t. That ought to tell them something.
“Things have changed so much,” the fans sigh. “This country. When you were a girl, people knew how to do for family. They took care of their own.”
“I like having an accessible toilet in my apartment,” I say.
One woman blinked, then said, “I wish your mother was still alive.”
“I know.”
Mom is the one they really want to visit. On every page of her books, plucky Mom refuses to be downhearted when we face another hardship. She makes friends with politicians, she sets up clubs, she finds creative, crafty ways to make her own versions of expensive therapy equipment to teach me to tie a shoelace or hold a fat pencil. The Pinterest crowd would mob her now.
Five books! By a woman with a high school diploma and a stenography course. The Wounded Lark, The Song of the Lark, Fledgling, The Lark Lives, The Lark and the Rainbow. While she raised five other kids in the baby-besotted ’50s. She should have written one called The Crowded Nest. Her books never included the mornings I wet the bed waiting for my brothers and sisters to finish in the bathroom, where I needed half an hour to use the toilet.
When the first book bought us a new house, she moved her Underwood to the dining room table and kept clacking. Dad worked at the exchange downtown and probably got a lot of ribbing about his working wife, but her noisy hours at the typewriter got us train tickets to expensive doctors, and once they got us fifth-row tickets to The King and I.
I owe everything in my entire life to her and to her books, and that is why I have no interest in telling my inspiring story at your granddaughter’s graduation. If she’s so hot on inspiration, tell her to just read a chapter. All the good stuff is in there anyway.
I wonder what I would have been like without Mom to put me on the page. Would I have been so perky if she hadn’t diligently typed out scene after scene starring funny, indomitable me? I might have been a little dullard. I might have been an ordinary child, who didn’t think that she was somehow created for greatness because she had already overcome so much.
Often, in the long nights when it’s hard to sleep, I imagine the shadow me, the one Mom wrote about. Her neighbors look in on her; she has a joke and a kind word for everybody. “I’d rather be a bright spot than a stain on your day. We have enough stains already.”
For her neighbors’ children, she has learned to make apple crumble and thumbprint cookies, sweets that look better when they’re messy. Covered in flour and apple peels, that me hardly even remembers the St. James Theatre, where Gertrude Lawrence sang “Shall We Dance?” wearing a hoop skirt big enough to hide several Siamese children while galloping in Yul Brenner’s arms around the stage. But the other me goes with her friends to see movies where people dance. She doesn’t clutch the scrap of memory from one night’s joy that happened sixty years ago.
Please don’t start in on gratitude. Someone like me, who has to be helped out of bed and helped to the table and helped to get toothpaste on the brush doesn’t have a moment in which I’m not grateful to somebody. Gratitude is an iron chain I pull from room to room, every link clanking. The sheer weight of my debt leaves me hunched over my rigid, spastic legs, a physical imbalance so debilitating it takes me to the floor.
The other me lurches debt-free around the kitchen and the bathroom, relying on crutches and grab bars. Plucky thing that she is, she hardly even thinks about her disability, except on the days when her hip seizes up and she makes the requisite joke about Arthur Itis. When her hands disobey her, she leans in harder to correct the crumble or wayward bit of handwriting. She’s sixty-seven, not eighty. Plenty of good years left.
One woman who found me actually said, “I didn’t think you’d be so old. In the books . . .” In the books I’m in pigtails, I know. In the books I’m adorable. Even I am charmed by me. There was no telling what I might learn to do. Every moment of the day was devoted to the life I would have. Now, already, that life has happened, and my mother isn’t here to make it sparkle. Without her, I can only see the long difficulty of every day. You, my friend, would be bitter, too.
Right now the other me is walking—left foot, right crutch, right foot, left crutch—into the kitchen where she will drink another cup of coffee. It’s only September, but the first tendrils of cold are winding around the window frames. She can feel it in her hands, sometimes too stiff even to pick up her shoes. Her friends say that she should go to Florida in the winters, but what would she do in Florida? She likes the feeling of cold air on her face, and has always welcomed a challenge.
Without warning, her hip pings and her legs give way and she’s on the floor. Now she’s facedown on the linoleum, the breath banged right out of her. In a moment she’ll reach for a crutch and pull herself back up, but she understands that her body has turned traitor. Will her legs let her cross the street? Can she carry a plate? Prone on her kitchen floor, she is filled with a trapped animal’s rage, something she’s never felt before.
I replay the scene over and over, feeling a thrill every time she hits the floor and feels the new wisdom fill her. “You’re not who I thought you’d be,” my visitors say, and I shrug and smile. “This is who I am.”
Now, in a moment of genius, I give the other me my mother’s face and wait for whatever she’s going to say, so I can change it.
Hello from an Old Friend
The impulse comes over me when I’m bored and out of sorts. Paul would say that it’s Satan at work in me. Since I know what he would say, I don’t tell him.
Looking up Marla from high school leads me to Jody, posing with two kids and a car. Her husband works for Union Carbide. Reading about her reminds me of Lisa, living in Mobile now. She has a picture of a magnolia on her website, and her husband works for the state.
Idaho is too far from Florida for me to go to reunions, but using the Internet is almost as good. In emails I don’t have to explain that Paul surrendered to the call and is a preacher now. He’d been at Allied for five years. We lived in a two-story house with rosebushes when he came to me and said he wanted us to pray. We’d been trying for a baby. I thought, why not?
He said, “Lord, if you are calling me, I will come. Janine and I will serve you.”
I dropped my hands and stared at him. We went to church twice a week and he taught Sunday school, but a lot of our friends did that. None of them were talking to God about service.
Outside, a jay squabbled at the top of its lungs. Paul took a few minutes to find the right words. “Sometimes at work I’ll feel everything fall away. Or rather, I’m the one falling. I’m dropping and dropping, and there doesn’t seem to be any bottom, and all that’s around me is God. What is that, if not a call?”
His face was soft, and I could see the fear there, and who knows? He might have been right. The stupid jay made it hard to think. “I’ve never heard a call, but maybe that’s one,” I said. Nobody asked what I’d heard: a bird jabbering outside a window.
When I got pregnant a month after Paul quit his job to go to seminary, he told me this was God’s reward to us. I still won’t say he’s wrong.
God proved to be a fruitful giver, providing us with six children as Paul’s ability to feed and clothe them dwindled. “Couldn’t you at least have been called to a nice, big TV church in Houston?” I asked when we moved from Eagle to Blackfoot. He looked hurt. His sense of humor had been the first casualty of the call, while mine sharpened right up.
The pictures of Suzanne and Colleen and Annie, who’s now living in Connecticut where she says she can’t get used to the winters, show women who have kept their figures and their faces. Their husbands have, too. Occasionally their posts or websites will thank God for some blessing, but mostl
y they’re busy chronicling those blessings, which sometimes include skiing.
There is nothing wrong with going to the Internet and looking up the lives of my old friends. No sin there. But I’m left queasy with resentment. Sometimes I write to them, subject line “Hello from an old friend,” and hear back “How wonderful it must be to live such a faith-based life. I envy you.”
Try it. Paul has taken to saying, “What have you thanked God for today?” instead of hello. The kids make up answers when he’s not around. “Thank you, God, for giving Dad bad hearing so he can’t tell I’m watching rap videos.” “Thank you, God, for making it rain so I didn’t have to rake.” I laugh. Be honest: I encourage them.
I had exhausted my list of girlfriends before it occurred to me to look up Richard. He existed in that zone that comes before dating, when boys and girls look at each other with terror. Our little Jonathan, age twelve, is there now. Maybe it was watching him that made me go to Google, chasing the other kids away from the family computer that the church is still unhappily paying off for us.
Most of my searches take a little while, especially when I have to hunt down married names. But Richard Volking came right up, over and over, with images. He is an architect. He is famous.
He has a house in Barcelona and an apartment in New York, and is married for the third time. In one picture his wife is kissing a cat, which makes me like her. One child from each marriage: three little saplings in a row.
I rewrote my message over and over. “What a pleasure to see your success! Our old days in Cool Springs must seem far away from you now. I just wanted to reach out and say hello, and send blessings.” The last two words are Paul’s usual sign-off.
There was so much to do. Mary’s homework, Esther’s soccer practice, visits to Mrs. Berry and Mrs. Polkman. Cookies for the soccer team, the children’s choir, Jonathan’s homeroom. In a typical week I make eight batches of cookies, and Paul and I are soft as bread dough.
