I was back in the world and it was no different from before. Tiny streams of water trickled across my face, trailing from strands of hair. I looked myself over. I was clean, at least on the outside.
I toweled off, then realized I had no clothes to change into. I cracked the door partway. My wet hair was dripping down my shoulders. Water was pooling on the floorboards. My mother was busy ringing out my skirt in the sink. Martin was at the table with one of his schoolbooks.
“Martin,” I whispered. He didn’t hear me. “Martin.”
My mother turned. The one time I didn’t want her to hear me, she did.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I don’t have anything to put on.”
“Get your sister her nightdress.”
Martin sprang from his seat and rushed the dress to me. He clamped his eyes shut and pushed the nightdress at me through the slit in the door.
“Don’t come out if you don’t have to,” he whispered. “Stay in there as long as you can. Something’s wrong,” he said, then hurried back to his seat.
Through the crack in the door, all I could see was my mother’s back. Then I heard it, a noise mingling with the water running in the sink. My mother was humming. The sound was high-pitched and glassy, so sweet it seemed unreal. Martin nodded at me from his chair, urging me to return to the washroom. I tried to pull myself away, but it was as if the tune she was humming was warming the air and wicking the chill from my skin.
I shut the door and the spell was broken. I could no longer hear her. A shiver rattled through my body, shaking me back to reality. I pulled on my nightdress and patted my hair dry, wondering what to do with myself. There was nowhere to sit except the edge of the bathtub, which was dirty again. I filled a few minutes by cleaning it for the second time that day, Martin’s comment clinking in my ears all the while.
“You’re good at cleaning. Like her.”
How could you be good at cleaning and at making a mess of everything at the same time?
After I finished the bathtub, I had nothing to do, then I remembered the quarters. I squatted under the sink and slid them out from the ledge where Martin had hidden them. I couldn’t cup them in my palms because of the blisters, which had formed a line of fierce red bumps across the inside of my hands. Instead, I held the quarters lightly between my fingers, tipping them so they would catch the light and glint at me, a secret wink.
The slamming of the front door signaled my father’s arrival. I returned the quarters to their spot and went for the door, knowing my father would want to get into the washroom to shave before his shift. We both grabbed for the handle at the same time. My father got to it first. Discovering me in the doorway gave him a start and he snorted angrily.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, scooting past him. My time for hiding was over.
DURING SUPPER, my father seemed to be in an unusually good mood. That meant he actually spoke at the table. He was describing what he’d heard people saying about Swatka Pani.
“Seems no one cares much that she’s dead. But they do care about knowing who done it to her.” He exhaled a spurt of smoke, punctuating his statement. “Word is, that retard she kept around for handy work’s gone missing. People are saying it must’ve been him. Police’ve been looking for him high and low, and ain’t nobody seen him for days. Hasn’t been back to the Slipper neither. And that’s the only place he’s got to sleep. I say, could’ve been him. Strong as an ox. Dumb as one too. I seen him carry beer barrels half his weight like they were sacks of sawdust. He could’ve pushed the old bitch down those stairs as easy as breathin’.”
Martin wanted to interject and was pursing his lips to keep the words from springing out.
“Swatka Pani wasn’t no saint,” my father said, stuffing a few forkfuls of food into his mouth. “But that don’t give that retard the right or reason to kill her.”
Martin finally let loose. “Leonard was here that night.”
My mother’s eyes darted toward Martin, then I heard myself screaming inside my head, Don’t tell him that. It was too late.
My father’s head snapped up from his plate. “What?”
“He came over, knocked on the door, then left,” Martin recounted. “I forgot about it. I forgot to tell that to the policeman.”
“Leonard was here? That night Swatka Pani died? Damn it, why didn’t you tell me that?” He threw a ferocious glance at my mother. “What else did he do?”
“Nothing,” Martin said, sad that he didn’t have more to offer. “That’s it.”
My mind was sputtering. “He only came by looking for food,” I said.
“Food? Why the hell would he do that?” my father demanded.
“Because sometimes, sometimes I’d give him one of our apples. Just the littlest one. He never has any food, so I thought…”
I was afraid of what my father would say, but was even more afraid to look at my mother, to read the reproach in her eyes.
“Don’t give that retard our food,” my father ordered. “Don’t ever do that again. Do you hear me?”
As I lowered my head to hide from my father’s glare, I caught a glimpse of my mother’s expression. Instead of drilling me with angry eyes, she was searching my face.
She sees me.
My father shoved away his plate and stabbed out his cigarette. “You thank God your brother said something,” my father told me, already halfway out the door.
“What about your lunch?” Martin called, running to retrieve his lunch tin from the icebox for him. The door was closed by the time Martin had it in his hand.
Martin returned to the table and slumped down on his elbows. “I didn’t think it was so important. If I knew it was, I would have told him sooner, I swear,” he said. “Did you know that Leonard coming here was important?” he asked my mother.
“No,” she answered hollowly.
“It’s not important,” I found myself shouting. “It doesn’t matter. Leonard didn’t do it. So it doesn’t matter.”
“How do you know?” Martin asked.
I had to stop myself from saying what I always did, that I just knew. But that was truer than ever before. I felt it. I felt it the same way I could feel the floor under my feet. The feeling was so strong it had to be fact.
“Enough,” my mother said. “The dishes need doing.”
“But I’m not done with—”
My mother and I simultaneously shot him a glance, then Martin set to gobbling down what was left on his plate before I whisked it out from under him and took it to the sink.
Our bed felt especially cold that night, as though the blankets had gotten thinner during the day. Martin shivered and snuggled close to me. I pulled the blankets up over our heads so our breath could warm us. We would stay under until the air ran out, then I’d lift the edge of the blanket enough for us to breathe.
“I saw your hands,” Martin said. “You burned them on the pot, right?” I nodded. “Do they hurt bad?”
I nodded again. I didn’t want him to feel guilty. The mistake was mine and I was paying for it. Worse yet, I couldn’t bandage my hands for fear of my mother noticing. Every movement pulled at the blisters. I laid my hands out along my sides, palms sideways to keep the skin from coming into contact with anything.
Martin fidgeted with the tip of the sheet. “I have to ask you a question, but I don’t want you to get mad.”
“Ask.”
“How did you know?”
“About Leonard?”
He nodded and dug his hands under his armpits to warm them.
“Does it matter? You know what I’m going to say.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re going to say. You just do. But how? I never just know. Never.”
“I’m not sure. It’s like a feeling. But it feels real. And I believe it.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“You don’t get scared that your feelings aren’t telling you the truth? What if they’re lying?”
The awful possibility that I was deceiving myself terrified me. If I’d let myself believe that could be, I would have been inconsolable.
“You can lie to other people, but you can’t lie to yourself,” I replied, hoping to convince both of us.
“Why?”
“We’re just made that way.”
That was enough to satisfy Martin. He blew on his hands one last time, huddled next to me, and closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry I told about Leonard.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“But I am. I want God to know I’m sorry. And you.”
“He knows.”
Sleep came quickly, then I awoke in the night to a shuffling sound. At first, I thought it was the wind against the rear wall of the apartment, though that was such a familiar noise it shouldn’t have woken me. A new thought arose, replacing reason. I pictured the laundry on the lines out back scraping at the wall, trying to get in and clawing to get at me as it had done before. I clenched my eyes to cast off the image.
The blanket was still covering my head, creating a tent and muffling the sound. The air inside was congested, nearly unbreathable. I tipped up the blanket’s edge to vent it and discovered that the sound that had woken me was coming from inside the apartment.
I didn’t dare move. I balanced the blanket on the tips of my fingers and peeked through a gap in the covers where Martin’s shoulder had raised them. The room was too dark to discern anything other than sound, the noise of cloth sliding over cloth, the thump of treading feet, then the crisp click of the front door unlocking.
The door opened little more than a sliver, but in the half-light I could make out a figure, shoulders hunched, head wrapped in a scarf. It was the unmistakable silhouette of my mother. She slipped into the night and disappeared.
My father was at the mill finishing his shift, so she wasn’t going to the Slipper in search of him. Then where? To find Leonard? I wondered. She had kept his visit a secret, just as I had. Would she know where to find him if no one else did? What if she was going to see another man, the lover I had imagined before?
The idea of that didn’t ring true, but it clanged in my head nonetheless. Faces of men I had seen in the street or at church or coming out of the salt plant swam before me, features blending. If she had taken a lover, that would mean she’d found someone to show love to, a person rather than her lost painting. That would also mean there was hope, a hope of that love spreading. That possibility could have kept me warm all night. I would have torn off the blankets, even my nightdress, if I thought the chance existed, and let it wrap me in its heat.
I MUST HAVE LAIN THERE for hours that night, waiting up, trying to talk myself into believing that my mother was with a lover. Sleep overtook me and I woke with a start the next morning to the same shuffling sound. It was my mother, fully dressed, busy at the sink, sunlight streaming in from the window beyond her.
I grabbed the blanket to push it aside, forgetting the blisters, and the pain in my palms made me cringe. My mother turned. I feigned a yawn as cover, stretching out my arms, hands down to hide the burns.
“Wake your brother. I need to be at the church early today.”
Her coat and scarf were hung in their usual place, her shoes right where they always were.
I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed her late-night departure.
“Wake up, Marty,” I said, prodding him with my elbow.
Martin sat up and let out an exaggerated yawn as fake as mine. He’d only been pretending to be asleep and had heard what my mother said.
“All right, I’m awake,” he said, affecting a groggy voice.
“You can have the washroom first,” I told him. I always let him go ahead of me, that way he could get into his clothes and stand by the stove to warm himself while we waited for breakfast.
“No, you go first,” Martin said. “I’ll wait.”
My mother, who usually noticed everything, seemed oblivious to the change. She was at the table making sandwiches for our lunch.
“All right,” I agreed, unsure as to what Martin was up to. He got out of bed so I wouldn’t have to crawl over him and I went to the closet for my clothes, then recalled that my mother had washed them the night before to rid them of the mud.
“They’re outside on the line,” she said without looking up from the sandwiches. “I’ll go and get them.”
She headed out the door and it dawned on me that she hadn’t put my clothes outside the night before. She’d only left them hanging on the edge of the sink.
Was that where she went? Was that all?
With my mother outside, Martin and I were alone in the apartment. “What are you up to?” I demanded.
“What do you mean?”
“I know you were awake.” Martin’s face revealed his disappointment. He thought he’d fooled us. “Why were you pretending?”
“I wanted to hear what she would say if she thought I was sleeping,” he confessed. “I wanted to see if she’d say she was mad at me for telling about Leonard. I thought maybe she would tell you.”
Such a confidence was beyond my mother. Martin was paying me an undue compliment to suggest that was possible.
“She wouldn’t say anything, least of all to me,” I told him, as I began to make our bed.
“It’s like she’s always thinking about something, but she won’t say what. It kind of scares me,” Martin admitted, standing close. “Does it scare you?”
I shook the blanket out and let it drift down to the mattress to lay flat, erasing any trace that we had slept there and that I had spent most of the night wondering where my mother had gone. “Yes,” I told Martin. “It scares me too.”
“What do you think it is, the thing she’s thinking about?”
“I wouldn’t know.” It was the truth, so my voice did not betray me enough to make Martin doubt me.
“Do you think she’s thinking about Swatka Pani?”
I shrugged. “Help me tuck in the blanket.”
“Maybe she feels bad about her being dead.”
The door opened and my mother entered, my school clothes folded neatly over her arm. “You’re not dressed yet,” she said to Martin.
“He was helping me with the bed.”
“Well, you’re finished now. Go on and change. Both of you.”
I nodded for Martin to go into the washroom first, then I was left alone with my mother. She set my clothes on the table in a tidy stack. She must have stood out in the cold folding them as she took them off the laundry line. Such patience, such care, but for what? For me to unfold them and put them on. Her neatness always seemed like such a waste to me, a useless attempt to make what we had appear better than it was. Hand-me-down clothes were still hand-me-downs no matter how clean they were.
“I got most of the stains out,” my mother said after I picked up the clothes. A night in the cold air left the wool of my sweater brittle. The pleats of the skirt were stiff. “But there was something on your skirt. It looks like dried blood.” She was setting out the bowls for breakfast. Then she looked straight at me and asked, “Where did it come from?”
Until that moment, I’d never noticed how much I had to tilt my head upward to meet her gaze. I had to lift my chin in such a way that it made me aware of just how much taller she was, how small I was compared with her.
“School,” I lied. Even eye to eye with her, the lie was easy, supple on the tongue. The act no longer scared me as it once had. “I cut myself on a desk at school.”
My mother brushed a stray hair out of her eyes as though she wanted to get a full look at me or, perhaps, wanted me to get a full look at her. Then Martin came out of the washroom, dressed and patting down his hair instead of brushing it. “You can go in now.”
I scooped up my clothes, anxious to get away from my mother and from what she’d said. Through my nightdress I could feel frost lingering on the skirt. Had she really taken my clothes out in the night and that was all? The question squirmed in my mind
for the rest of the day as I sat through school barely paying attention to my classes.
After lunch, Sister Bernadette was giving a lecture on church history. Under the fractured sound of her uneven English came a whisper.
“Psst.”
The noise was directed at me. A boy two rows behind me was trying to get my attention. I ignored him and faced front, afraid the sister would notice.
“Psst,” he hissed again. “I heard your brother’s a sissy.”
The insult shot through the air at me like an arrow. All of the children nearby heard it. I folded my arms and clenched my teeth, silently seething. Sister Bernadette prattled on, unable to detect the whispers over the clacking of her chalk against the board.
“I heard he plays with dolls and sews like a little girl.”
My fists curled into balls in spite of the pain in my palms.
“Your brother’s a girl. He’s a girl just like you.”
“Go to hell,” I shouted, whipping around to face the boy head-on.
The words had exploded from my mouth with enough force to send the boy back in his chair and leave him blinking. I should have been shocked too, I thought fleetingly. I should have been stunned at myself. I wasn’t. It was as if those words had been curled up and waiting for their chance to escape.
In the wake of my outburst, the classroom went quiet. It felt as if all of the air had been sucked out of the room, my lungs, everything. Sister Bernadette’s face stiffened, framed in the white wimple of her habit.
“Chodz tutaj!” she commanded.
With a black-winged flourish of her robe, she was ordering me to the front of the room. It was an ominous sign that she had switched to Polish, and it left the other children murmuring.
“Cicho.”
Sister Bernadette demanded silence and the whispering stopped at once.
I walked to the front of the room on unsteady legs and stood next to the sister’s desk as she opened her top drawer, the creak of the wood saying everything. From the drawer, she retrieved a pair of rulers.
Unconsciously, I had slipped my hands from my sides to my back.
“Darzyc mi twoja reka.”
She was ordering me to put out my hands. I raised my arms slightly, then the sister grabbed them, digging her thumbs into the blistered flesh of my palms. I grimaced, stifling a moan.
The Grave of God's Daughter Page 17
