“It’s cold all the time,” she said.
Always winter, never Christmas. I shivered.
With an open palm Barbara Yearly offered me a chair at the table. I sat. “Well,” she began. “I certainly wasn’t expecting this.”
I searched her face, but I couldn’t see anything of myself in her. “You never knew my father had a child?”
She shook her head. “The last I heard from your father, he was going to marry Jeanette, I think her name was. She’s your mother?”
I nodded. “Janelle.”
The woman shrugged. “I didn’t think much of it. Figured it wouldn’t last. Summer romances seldom do. I know that must sound unfeeling of me, but you might as well learn that now, and spare yourself the trouble.”
I cleared my throat. “Well, I’m sorry to surprise you.” I folded my hands on the tabletop, aware that I was trying to make myself look as innocuous as possible. “I guess I was afraid to call ahead.”
“Afraid? Why?”
I shrugged. “Afraid you wouldn’t want to see me.”
Instead of answering she turned to the faucet, filled two glasses, and set one at my elbow. I thanked her as she sat down across the table, took a delicate sip, and waited, her eyes on the blank Formica between us.
“You’re my dad’s … mom?” I couldn’t bring myself to use the word grandmother. I didn’t have the nerve.
Mrs. Yearly folded her hands and looked me in the eye. “We took him in when he was about six years old.” She noted the look on my face and asked, “Your mother never told you?”
I shook my head.
“Where is your mother? Did she bring you?”
“No.”
“Does she know you’ve come here?”
“Sort of.”
The woman gave me a sharp look. “What does that mean?”
“She’s not here,” I said. “She’s in Pennsylvania.”
“Do you mean to tell me you ran away from home?”
I shook my head. “My mother thinks I’m old enough to live on my own now.”
I could almost hear Barbara Yearly’s jaw creak as it fell open, and I saw the muscles in her throat working as she struggled to come up with an answer. After a moment she collected herself, took another sip of water, and said, “If you’re looking for a home with your father, I’m very sorry to tell you, but that will not be possible. Frank has been institutionalized for some time now.”
Just like that, I lost the way to my castle in the sky. For what felt like a long time I sat staring at my hands in my lap, thinking, Don’t cry don’t cry whatever you do don’t cry.
Then Barbara Yearly cleared her throat and I thought, Maybe he’s not that sick. Maybe when I come to see him he’ll be happy and get better and we can still listen to Revolver while he fries the bacon. I took a deep breath and decided on a new course. “I came for answers,” I said. “That’s all.”
“What did your mother tell you?”
“Nothing, apart from the birth certificate. She … I guess she didn’t like to talk about him.”
I caught a flash of irritation in her eyes. “I never met your mother,” said Barbara Yearly. “Frank sent us a picture and invited us down for the wedding, but we couldn’t attend. My Dan wasn’t well.”
Where was her husband? The house felt so cold and empty, I guess I didn’t have to ask. “Mr. Yearly—is he…”
“He died almost nine years ago. Throat cancer. Your father was already in the home by that point.” She took a deep and quavering breath. “Still, it gives me a great deal of comfort to think that Dan and Tom are together now.”
“Tom?”
“Tom was our little boy.” Barbara pointed to a black-and-white photograph hanging above the light switch. “You can see him there. We took him to the portrait studio on his third birthday.”
The child was perched on a tricycle before a blank background, all rosy cheeks and dimpled wrists. I didn’t dare ask her how he’d died. “You must have been devastated when you lost him.”
“More than you could ever imagine.”
“You adopted my father after Tom…?”
Barbara lifted her chin and nodded. “We knew the boy had been found under mysterious circumstances, but on reflection, I suppose we were too eager to overlook it.”
Suddenly it was cold in here. I felt the gooseflesh rising on my arms. “What do you mean, ‘mysterious circumstances’?”
“There’s no use talking about any of that. No one will ever know what really happened.”
“I would really appreciate it if you could tell me what you do know,” I said. “It matters to me.”
“He was found at a rest stop along Route Thirty-five outside Duluth,” she sighed. “That’s about eighty miles from here. Two witnesses at the gas pump said a man, a strange-looking man, had taken the boy off a Trailways bus and led him around the back of the building. They began to be concerned after a while, and when they unlocked the restroom door they found the child unconscious and covered in blood, and no sign of the man anywhere. The owner of the gas station called the police and they took the boy to the hospital right away, but they never found his parents, nor the man who hurt him.
“The boy remembered nothing before the hospital. When we got the call from the adoption agency we went and visited him there, and asked him if he would like to come home with us and…” Again the woman paused to draw the gray wool collar close around her neck. “And be our little boy from then on. We named him Francis, after Dan’s father. Perhaps…” She sighed. “Perhaps we adopted him against our better judgment. It was just that he looked so much like Tom. As if they truly could have been brothers.” I watched her trace the rim of her water glass, very tenderly, the way she might have fondled the whorl of her baby’s ear. “He would have been forty this year.” She spoke more to herself than to me.
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said again, and tried to think of what I could say to get her to tell me more about my dad. “Frank … what was he like, when he was a boy?”
“How do you mean?”
What do you mean, “How do you mean”? “What did he like to do, and what did you do together? What were his favorite books? Was he a good student?” Did he eat people while he lived here? Did you know what he was?
“No,” said Barbara Yearly. “No, he wasn’t a very good student.”
I waited while she drummed her fingers on the table and looked out the window at a passing ice cream truck. It paused at the far curb as a bunch of kids came tumbling down a lawn, their fists bulging with spare change. Finally I said, “Do you have any pictures of him that I could look at?”
She shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t saved anything.”
“Nothing? Not even a single photograph?”
The woman folded her arms tight across her chest. “Look, I don’t mean to be unkind, so I hope you won’t take it to heart. We may have the same name, but you are a stranger to me. As much a stranger to me as your father ever was.”
“He wasn’t a stranger.” I heard the indignation in my voice but knew that if I let myself get angry it would only drive her to show me the door. “He was your son. You chose him.” In this universe, however—the universe inside this cold and empty house—there wasn’t any such thing as an attachment that had not always been there.
“I did have a son. It was my mistake, thinking I could replace him.” Barbara Yearly glanced at me, then out the window again, where a black cat sat at the foot of a maple tree, eyeing a little gray bird as it hopped along a low branch. The ice cream truck trundled away and the jingle began anew. “There is no one to blame but myself,” she said. “Dan said he would leave it to me, that he’d let me decide for us both. My husband understood that no one feels the loss of a child more than his mother.”
I thought of Mama, and again I found I didn’t care. She didn’t love me, but I didn’t need her. “Would you be able to give me the address of the hospital where my dad lives?”
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Barbara Yearly rose from the table and drew a faded floral-covered address book out of a desk caddy on the counter. On a matching notepad she copied out the address and handed it to me. “I hope you don’t mind my not asking you to stay for dinner,” she said. “I haven’t cooked since I lost my husband.”
She saw me to the door, and this time I noticed more of the living room. Frames of all sizes covered the dark-paneled walls, but there were no seascapes or snowy idylls, no faded Technicolor sunsets, no embroidered proverbs or Raphael Madonna prints. There was only Tom.
The woman shook and released my hand before I could even register that she’d touched me. I should have known, I thought. I should have known I would get much less than I came for. “Good luck,” she said, and I watched her pale face recede into the gloom of the house a moment before the front door swung forward and the lock clicked quietly into place.
* * *
Lee and I had agreed we’d meet up at the Sandhorn Public Library that evening, but he wasn’t there when I arrived. I asked the librarian where I could find the yearbooks from the local high school. Funny how it took me longer to find my dad’s picture than it had Mrs. Yearly’s address.
Funny, too, how he didn’t look any different from any of the other boys in his class—he wore a necktie and his hair was shaggy, and he had the same surprised eyebrows and slightly embarrassed smile as his classmates. But I saw every point of difference between my mother and me—my eyes pale where hers were dark, my face round though hers was long—resolved in that photograph.
I ran my fingertip over the words beneath the portrait, Francis Yearly, as if the name were new to me. This boy would become my dad, and yet he looked like an ordinary eighteen-year-old, ready to go out into the world and make something of himself. Get real, Maren. What are the odds he’ll ever paint your room and cook you breakfast?
The trouble with questions is that one always leads to another. Where would I be in twenty years? Would I always have to live in other people’s homes, pretending they were mine? Who would I travel with—or what if I had to travel alone—or what if I couldn’t travel?
Would I ever be at peace with who I was and what I’d done? How could I be?
It was exhausting just thinking about it—living it was unthinkable. I replaced the yearbooks on the shelf, took out my notebook, and began to write.
It was a quarter to eight by the time Lee showed up. “How did it go?” he asked.
I looked at him.
“That bad?”
I nodded.
“Did she give you his address?”
I drew the notepaper out of my pocket and slid it across the table. Francis Yearly (as if I could ever forget his name), Bridewell Hospital, 19046 Co. Hwy F, Tarbridge, WI.
Lee frowned. “He’s in the hospital?”
“It’s a mental home.”
He gave me a look: sad, and not at all surprised. “Oh, Maren. I’m really sorry.”
I just looked at him and shrugged a little. I felt old and tired, like I’d lived twenty years inside an hour.
The librarian came on the loudspeaker. Ten minutes ’til closing.
“Do you still want to see him?”
I nodded.
“So it’s back to Wisconsin,” Lee said. “At least it’s not too far.” He pointed to the stack of photocopies on the table in front of me. “What’s that?”
I handed him one of the pages and he looked it over. My name is Maren Yearly and I am sixteen years old. I understand that what I am going to tell you sounds like a sick joke, but when you see that the names and dates I have given you below correspond to missing persons reports, you will understand that I am not someone with a poor sense of humor and too much time on my hands.
“No way,” he said. “You’re not seriously going to send this to anyone.”
“Why not?” The truth will set you free.
“Nobody will believe you.”
I was going to tell him it didn’t matter whether or not anybody believed me, but then I thought maybe he wouldn’t understand. Instead I said, “Maybe they will.” While I’d been waiting for Lee I’d gone on the computer and looked up the addresses of all the police stations in the towns where I had done the bad thing. I had written out my confession in my notebook and made nine photocopies. I wasn’t sure where I should wait for the police, but I could figure that out later and add a postscript.
Part of me felt better for having done all this. The other part was still running in the dark.
“Come on,” he said. “You don’t have to send it tonight. I want to get to Tarbridge as quick as we can and find a safe place to sleep.”
We crossed back into Wisconsin, rolling fields on either side. The light was fading when a shape darted down the hill to our left. I’d seen plenty of deer since I started traveling with Lee, but only on the cabin walls, or lying (whole, but just as lifeless) in a heap on the shoulder. “Wait,” I said. Lee braked to a stop. The deer leapt across the road and ran along the grassy fringe beside a barbed-wire fence.
There it was, poised in the air above the barbed wire, cottontail bright in the dusk. It was like the world stopped, just for a moment. Then its hind legs cleared the wire—like it took no effort at all—and in a blink it disappeared over the crest of another hill. I’d never seen anything so graceful in all my life.
* * *
It was well after eleven when we got to Tarbridge, passing through the town and the turnoff to Bridewell Hospital on our way to Otsinuwako State Park. With no warning, Lee made a quick U-turn, and everything in the truck lurched from one side to the other. “Did you see that sign back there?”
“What sign?”
“For that new development. ‘Designers’ Showcase.’ That means the model home is furnished.” A real bed for the second night in a row, if we could figure out a way in.
It was a brand-new street, so they hadn’t put any lights in yet. Lee parked the truck in front of an unfinished house—it didn’t have walls, just the timber framework—and we walked back up the unpaved road to the house at the top of the development. It had a perfect green lawn, precisely trimmed shrubbery, and a wreath with pinecones and pink ribbons on the door. Cathedral foyer, two-car garage.
Lee ducked around the side of the house, and I followed him. There was a broad wooden deck overlooking another stretch of green lawn, the property line marked with a picket fence. Lee went up the steps and bent to examine the lock on the sliding-glass door. He pulled something out of his back pocket—a little metal rod—and inserted it into the keyhole.
“Where did you learn how to pick a lock?”
“Shop class.” As he wiggled the rod in the keyhole Lee smiled to himself at the memory. “On days the teacher was out sick some of the guys gave their own lessons.”
I heard a click, and Lee rose and slid the door open. “After you,” he said, and followed me into the kitchen. There was a round dining table and a red ceramic bowl piled high with plastic lemons. I saw an island lined with bar stools on one side, a massive stainless steel refrigerator, and a stove with six burners.
We took off our shoes and began to explore. Inside the fridge I found a half dozen canisters of ready-bake cookie dough. “I bet they bake a batch of cookies right before an open house,” Lee said as he peeped over my shoulder. Then he reached in and took one. “Makes the place smell homey. You hungry?”
I nodded, and he pulled a cookie sheet out of the oven, turned the dial to 350 degrees, and popped open the canister. We washed our hands at the kitchen sink and spent a contented couple of minutes pulling apart slices of dough and laying them on the baking tray.
Once the cookies were in the oven we went into the dining room. The table was set for a dinner party: china dishes with rosebud sprays along the edges, crimson linens tucked through enameled napkin-holders, heavy silverware, crystal wine goblets, and everything.
The living room beyond was even more formal, with two blue velvet sofas with carved-wood armrests, heavy bro
cade curtains trimmed with tassels, and a massive curio cabinet taking up most of one wall. Lee moved past me into the room, picking up a vase and putting it down again. “This place is ridiculous,” he said. “Somebody’s going to buy this house and everything in it, but nobody’s ever going to sit in here. It’s like a museum.”
“Still,” I said, “I like it. My mother never decorated like this. We never stayed anyplace long enough to bother.”
“We always lived in the same place.” Lee bent over a crystal bowl and sniffed the potpourri inside. “What was my mom’s excuse?”
I went into the foyer. The mail table by the door was laid out with all sorts of brochures and business cards in little plastic trays. These were the people who made the house look like a family actually lived here. Funny to think that was somebody’s job.
The scent of baking sugar cookies drifted through the rooms and up the stairs. First we found a spare room—not a Spare Oom, you can’t have a Spare Oom in a spare house—and a children’s room with two twin beds. There was a rocking chair in the corner and a blue lava lamp on the nightstand between the two beds, which were made up in matching comforters dotted with tiny rainbows. Down the hall there was a four-poster bed in the master bedroom, piled high with gold-trimmed throw pillows.
“Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Lee asked as we stood in the doorway.
“Yup,” I said. And we ran across the thick beige carpet and leapt into the air, giggling like little kids as we landed heavily on a comforter made to look like it had been quilted by hand.
The oven timer went off. We went downstairs and had cookies for dinner.
There weren’t any electronics in the house. We discovered this when Lee opened the big cabinet on the “entertainment center” in the family room expecting to find a big-screen television. There were bookshelves on either side of the wide brick fireplace; some of the books were real and some were really long pieces of wood, notched and painted in gold and crimson to look leather bound, like you might find on a movie set. A chessboard waited for players on a table by a window looking over the front lawn and the dusty new street, but neither of us knew how to play, so we made up our own rules. The game pieces were heavy, made of some sort of milk-white stone. I hefted my queen in my palm before I put it back on the board, knocking the black king off his square.
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