by Sarah Weeks
I ran inside.
“Bernie, I’m sorry I didn’t call you this morning. I’ve been so busy,” I said. “I was planning to call you later.”
“It’s okay, baby,” she said. “The reason I’m calling is because we need to talk about something important.”
She sounded serious.
“What is it?” I asked.
“You need to come home now,” she said. “Your mama and I need you to come home.”
Going back to Reno was about the last thing on my mind at that moment. Any minute now Roy would be there to take me to Hilltop. I was sure he’d found out something important. Otherwise why would he be coming to get me?
“I can’t come home, Bernie, not yet. I’ve got to stay here until I find out everything. Elliot says Mama’s word, Bernie, did I tell you that already? And the Santa Claus is Thurman Hill. Roy’s coming to get me right now. Something big is happening, Bernie. I just know it.”
“You need to come home, Heidi,” Bernadette said again. “Right away.”
That’s when I looked out the window and saw Roy’s car pull into the driveway.
“He’s here, Bernie. Roy is here and I have to go. I’ll call you later and tell you everything,” I said. I didn’t ask her to kiss Mama for me, or even wait to hear her say good-bye. I hung up, waved to Ruby, and ran out to meet Roy.
“Whatcha got there?” he asked as I hopped into the front seat and closed the door.
I still had the newspaper in my hand. I must have taken it in with me when Ruby called me in to answer the phone.
“I was reading something about dinosaurs,” I said.
“What about them?” Roy said.
“It turns out nobody knows what color they were,” I said.
“I thought they were green,” he said.
“That’s what everybody thinks, but nobody knows for sure ’cause you can’t tell from the bones,” I said. “Did you show my pictures to that lawyer?”
“No,” said Roy, “I didn’t.”
“Why not?” I asked, turning in my seat to look at him. “That’s the only proof we’ve got that Mama was at Hilltop.”
“It’s complicated,” said Roy.
“What’s complicated?” I asked.
“The whole thing, but I don’t want to talk about it until we get there,” Roy said.
“Why not? Why can’t you just tell me what you know?” I asked.
“It’s really not mine to tell, Heidi. We’re almost there—just leave it at that for now, okay?” he said.
I didn’t understand, but I could tell Roy wasn’t going to budge. We drove in silence for a while. Roy turned the radio on, and I looked out the window at nothing in particular.
It was Roy who finally broke the silence. As we turned off the road and started up the steep driveway to Hilltop, he asked me if I thought it mattered.
“If what matters?” I said.
“What color dinosaurs were,” he said.
“Not really,” I told him. “No matter what color they were, they’re still extinct, right?”
“Good point,” said Roy.
“But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t still like to know,” I said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Sure, but it doesn’t sound like we ever will,” Roy said.
“If somebody wants to know badly enough, they’ll find a way to figure it out,” I said.
“You think?” said Roy.
Believe me, Heidi, there are some things in life a person just can’t know.
“Yeah,” I said, not quite ready yet to believe.
Roy turned off the engine and reached into the backseat for his hat. We both opened our doors. As he put on his hat and got out of the car, he tilted his head back and looked up at the sky and I did the same. The sun was bright overhead and there was not a cloud in sight. A flock of dark birds was moving across the wide expanse of blue sky. Small parts of a bigger whole. I wondered if they knew that every time they changed the tilt of their wings, slowed down, or sped up, it altered the shape of the entire formation.
We walked up the steps past the rocking chairs and the pots of flowers, but right before we went inside, Roy stopped and put a hand on my shoulder.
“Heidi,” he said, “some of what we talk about in here today may not be easy for you to hear.”
“The only part that’s hard is not knowing,” I said. “I don’t care what anybody says, as long as it’s finally the truth.”
“Shall we start with Diane DeMuth?” asked Mr. Dietz.
Thurman Hill’s lawyer was short and bald and had a voice that sounded like someone was squeezing his neck whenever he tried to talk.
We were in the alcove. Thurman Hill was sitting in the red chair, where I had first come upon Elliot sleeping. It was turned around now, away from the window, and someone had brought in three wooden folding chairs for the rest of us to sit on. Mr. Dietz pulled a long white envelope out of his pocket, opened it, and took out several folded sheets of paper.
“According to county records, she was born here in Liberty,” he said. “There’s no record of a marriage, only a birth. A female child, Sophia Lynne DeMuth, born to Diane at Liberty West Hospital, thirty years ago on November the twenty-third. According to the medical records, the child was born with significant damage.” He stopped talking then, folded the papers, and stuck them back in the envelope.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Roy shifted in his chair and cleared his throat.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “Who’s Diane DeMuth and what does this have to do with Mama?”
“It’s complicated,” Roy said again.
Mr. Dietz nodded, turned to Thurman Hill, and asked, “How would you like to proceed, sir?”
He didn’t answer right away. Instead he sat there staring at his hands, which were folded in his lap. Finally the silence was more than I could bear.
“You lied about my mother,” I said. “She was here and you know it. Why don’t you just tell the truth now?”
Thurman Hill looked up then. I thought he would be furious at me for accusing him of lying. I expected the sea-glass eyes to be flashing angrily at me the way they had the day before, but instead to my surprise I saw that they were filled with tears.
“This is wrong,” he said. “I’d like to ask you two gentlemen to leave so that I can talk to the girl alone.”
“I don’t want to be alone with you,” I said. “Roy, don’t leave.”
But Roy and Mr. Dietz both stood up.
“I don’t want to be alone with him,” I said again. “He thinks I’m somebody I’m not.”
“No, Heidi,” said Thurman Hill, looking directly at me now. “I know exactly who you are.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Uh–oh
“Diane DeMuth is your grandmother, Heidi. And her daughter, Sophia, is your mother,” Thurman Hill began.
It had not even been twenty-four hours since I had stood in front of that same red chair, hearing Elliot say Mama’s word. Now here I was again, frozen in time as I heard Mama’s name for the first time. Sophia.
“When Diane came to me asking for help, I wish to God I had turned her away, sent her over to Roscoe or farther north to one of the state-run facilities in Syracuse. Instead I let her talk me into accepting Sophia as a charity case at Hilltop. She stayed here at no cost to her mother for a little over a year. She did well here. She was happy, and she had a best friend. Elliot. They were inseparable, Sophia and Elliot. And I was so happy for Elliot, who’d never really had friends, I was too foolish to see what was happening. When Diane came to me with the news that Sophia was pregnant, at first I didn’t believe it. And when she accused Elliot of being the father, I thought it was impossible.” He paused. “They were like children themselves,” he said.
I hadn’t been looking at him as he spoke. Instead I’d kept my eyes fixed on the plant sitting next to his chair, the one with the long pointy leaves and the perfect little dangling flowers. I reached over then and took one of
the fragile blossoms between my fingers. It came off easily and fell apart, the wrinkled petals falling down onto the carpet like tiny white tears. It was real.
“The chances of Sophia and Elliot producing a normal child seemed slim at best,” he went on. “I felt the right thing to do was to end the pregnancy. But Diane refused. She insisted that she could raise the baby herself. I didn’t want anything to do with bringing another damaged child into the world, not after I’d seen the way Elliot suffered. Diane pleaded with me, and when that did no good, she threatened to go to the authorities. Hilltop’s reputation would have been ruined. I would have lost everything.”
Thurman Hill sat forward in his chair, and as he moved, the sunlight coming through the big window behind him caught in the crystal of his watch, making a tiny circle of light dance up the wall.
“And so we struck a bargain,” he went on. “I gave Diane enough money to take Sophia away to have her baby, and I agreed to give her more money every month to cover their living expenses. She chose the place, Reno, and I opened an account there, arranging for Diane’s rent and utility bills to be paid directly from that account, so that I could keep track of how the money was being spent. She wasn’t to contact me, not when the baby was born, not ever. I wasn’t to know anything about their lives from that point on. I paid a small fortune not to know.”
Promises have been made and paid for.
“I knew that Elliot would miss his friend, but I thought that over time, like so many things, he would forget Sophia. If I had known how wrong I was about that, maybe I would have done things differently. Elliot was never the same after Sophia left. He cried a lot and banged his head at the slightest frustration. And as if that wasn’t enough to fill me with guilt, for the past thirteen years at some point in the course of every single day, he has said your mother’s name. He never forgot her. The biggest mistake I ever made was to think that Elliot’s love wasn’t deep because he had no words to express it.”
For the first time since he’d begun talking, I looked at Thurman Hill, my grandfather. There were dark circles under his eyes, as though he hadn’t slept well the night before, and he was rubbing his forehead with his fingertips. Our eyes met, and then I looked away. He sighed and sat back in the chair.
“For thirteen years Diane kept her end of the bargain, and while Elliot held on to his memories, I did my best to forget. Then out of the blue I began to get calls from someone in Nevada named Bernadette. I thought it was Diane—I was sure it was. And when you came, I figured she’d sent you here to try to squeeze more money out of me. But there isn’t any more. There’s only Hilltop, and when I go, Hilltop is all that Elliot will have left.”
Thurman Hill stopped then and looked at me.
“Do you have any questions?” he asked.
All this truth, spilling out around me, crashing over me in giant waves, left me sitting in the middle of the flood with nothing to say. What questions did I have? Only one. The same one I had started with.
“What is soof?” I asked.
He smiled sadly.
“It was Elliot’s nickname for your mother,” he said. “He couldn’t pronounce Sophia. Neither could your mother. She called herself—”
I knew.
“So be it,” I said.
“So be it,” he echoed. And the way he said it, it sounded like “Amen.”
Thurman Hill asked Roy and Mr. Dietz to come back in then, to help fill in the last of the blanks.
All those years of no rent or electricity bills were the result of a bank account in Reno that Thurman Hill had set up to pay out automatically.
“Where is my grandmother now?” I asked.
It was obvious from the way they looked at each other that they’d been expecting that question.
“I’m sorry, Heidi, but she’s dead,” he told me. “I had the folks in Monticello run a cross-reference with Reno, and they had a certificate on file out there.”
The death certificate Roy had found for Diane DeMuth listed the cause of death as a traffic accident.
“She was hit by a bus,” Roy told me.
“A bus?” I said.
“Pronounced dead on arrival at County General Hospital in Reno, Nevada.”
“Was it February?” I asked.
“Yes, the nineteenth,” Roy said.
February 19 was the day Bernadette had found Mama standing outside her door holding me in her arms.
In my head a silent movie played. Mama and her mother, Diane DeMuth, standing on the corner, waiting to cross the street. Something happens, Diane gets distracted and steps off the curb too early right as the giant blue-and-white bus rounds the corner. Mama’s dress blows up and she tries to hold it down with one hand. Someone screams. When Mama looks up, Diane is lying in the street. People come out of nowhere gathering around to try to help her. The driver jumps out and pushes through the crowd, leaning over her, feeling for a pulse. In all the commotion nobody notices the panicked young woman with the wide-set blue eyes clutching her crying baby to her chest and hurrying down the street toward an empty apartment.
“Done, done, done, Heidi, shh.”
But of course I was only guessing, because, as I was finally beginning to understand, there are some things in life a person just can’t know.
At a quarter to two that afternoon I called Bernadette. She took a long time to answer, more than ten rings. At first I thought maybe she wasn’t there, but then I realized that was impossible. Bernie was always there. Finally she did answer, but she sounded funny—far away. I thought we had a bad connection.
“Can you hear me, Bernie?” I said.
“Yes, I can hear you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“I have so much to tell you,” I said. “You won’t believe it. Mama has a birthday, Bernie, and a mother and a name. Mama has a beautiful name.”
“Not now, baby,” Bernie said.
That wasn’t at all what I expected to hear. Normally she would have started right in asking me questions, eager to hear what I’d found out. Instead she asked me if Ruby was there.
“Ruby?” I said. “No. I’m up at Hilltop, Bernie. Remember, I came with Roy.”
“And Ruby’s not there yet?” she asked.
“No. She took the day off, Bernie. She’s at home,” I said.
“We’ll talk later then,” she said. “You’ll call me.”
“Wait, Bernie,” I said. “Don’t hang up. I want to tell you about Mama.”
“Not now, baby. You’ll call me,” she said, and then she hung up.
I stood there holding the phone for a while, not knowing what to think about what had just happened. Why didn’t Bernie want to talk to me? Why did she sound so strange? Maybe Mama had kept her up all night or something. I walked through the parlor and out onto the front porch to get some air to clear my head. Everything was still spinning inside. I felt dizzy.
It was cold enough for me to see my breath that day out on the porch, and I remember someone was burning leaves nearby. I looked up to see if there were more birds, but the sky was completely empty. I heard a car coming up the driveway. It was a taxicab, and I was surprised to see that Ruby was in the backseat.
I stood up and watched her through the window as she paid the driver. She got out and slammed the door, but when I think back on it now, it’s strange that I don’t remember it making a sound. It was as if the world suddenly had the volume turned down. The wind gusted and blew a strand of hair across Ruby’s face. It caught between her lips and she brushed it away, tucking it behind her ear.
She didn’t say hello, she just walked quickly over to where I was standing and put her arms around me, and suddenly I knew. That sorrowful mist I’d loosed from the drawer hadn’t come looking for Ruby at all. It had come looking for me. As it worked its icy fingers into me and wound itself around my heart, Ruby whispered softly:
“Poor thing. Poor, poor thing.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ow
&nbs
p; Even though my grandmother and my mother died almost thirteen years apart, it felt as if I had lost them both on the same day.
After Ruby hugged me, she took me inside. Bernie had called her and asked her to be there with me when I heard about Mama. She dialed the number for me, and I held the phone to my ear and listened.
“Your mama went in her sleep, baby. I thought she was just sleeping off that awful headache. The one I told you about that was so bad. But after a while when she didn’t wake up, I went to check on her and she was…”
“Dead? Mama is dead?”
As soon as I said it, I couldn’t stand being inside my own skin anymore. I wanted to turn myself inside out, shake the feelings off like fire ants. It was all my fault. I’d been so wrapped up in what was happening to me, I hadn’t even asked about Mama that morning. Bernadette knew she was getting worse.
Your mama and I need you to come home.
But I hadn’t listened.
Bernie tried to comfort me. She told me I couldn’t have made it there in time to say good-bye anyway. Ruby held me and patted my back, and Roy wrapped his big, strong arms around us both like string around a package.
We drove back to the house, where Ruby ran me a bath and tucked me into bed even though it was still afternoon. She brought me soup, which I couldn’t eat, and sat by me until finally I managed to fall asleep. It was dark out when I woke up, and the house was quiet. I lay there for a while, trying not to think, trying not to feel. I wished it would all go away. I closed my eyes and pulled the pillow over my head. Something cold and smooth touched my cheek, and I realized it was the notebook I’d put under the pillow the night before.
I sat up and turned on the light. How could I have thought it was so important? So important to know. None of it mattered. Knowing didn’t change what was. One by one I ripped the pages out of the notebook, crumpling them and throwing them on the floor until there was nothing left between the worn red covers.
I turned the light out and lay back down on my side with my arms crossed tightly over my chest. Holding myself like that, I rocked. “Done, done, done,” I whispered as the cold damp mist swirled around me in the dark. “Done, done, done, Heidi. Shh…”
