How many times in my life had something like this happened? More than I would have realized, now that I thought about it. A drunk driver nearly ramming my car head on, a fall that would have split my skull if it weren’t for a scrunchy, a gunman in a convenience store, a lightning strike, the Vo sliding nearly over a cliff on a snowy road … I had always felt safe and secure to the point of being boring, yet the way life was, hadn’t I always been living with a ghost?
That evening Cassie somehow (I don’t understand these things) sent her photos of the possum monument from her cell phone to my laptop computer, then showed me how to access them. Not trusting myself to remember all this technology until the next week, I printed them out, just in case I really did want to show them to the judge.
Emerging from my office/junk cave, I found Cassie in the guest bedroom with her luggage lying open on the bed; apparently, she was trying to get packed for her flight. I say ‘apparently’ because all I actually saw her doing was pacing and looking grim. I knew she was worried about the court hearing; I was tired of reassuring her about it while concealing the fact that I was worried myself, and I hoped she was not trying to decide to stay with me longer. I loved her dearly and enjoyed her company, but, apologies to Einstein, there can be such a thing as too much relativity, even in difficult times. Perhaps especially in difficult times.
Bracing myself for more advice about getting a good lawyer, I asked, ‘Sweetie, what’s the matter?’
To my surprise, she answered. ‘Maurie!’ Fists clenched, she glowered, although not at me. ‘I’d like to hang her by her lovely superior ears!’
Was that all? I smiled, almost laughed, which I suppose would have been dreadfully inappropriate. Teasing, I said, ‘And here I thought it was all about me, me, me and my questionable brainpower and my dubious paranormal visitor and my psychological balance being under investigation. But it’s just sibling rivalry?’
By now Cassie had transferred her glower to me. ‘Mom, it is about you! What’s going to happen to you because Maurie—’
‘Honey,’ I interrupted, ‘you’re forgetting your name is not Cassandra.’ She still hated the occasional times people had mistakenly made that guess at her full name, and hearing it coming from me, she looked angry and hurt, but I was trying to tell her something. ‘You are not a seeress or a prophet of doom. You cannot predict what is going to happen. Right now you think Maurie did something, but in fact you don’t actually know. Remember the magnificent survivor of the marsupial family?’
Even when Cassie had been a baby, the best way to calm her down had been to change stimuli. Necessarily, she stopped clenching her jaw, because it dropped. ‘What are you talking about? That wacko monument we saw today?’
‘Yes, that wacko monument. It failed to list all the virtues of the splendid opossum. Or spell out its correct name.’
‘Mother, sometimes I think you are crazy.’
‘It helps,’ I acknowledged. ‘Honey, a person can be clueless and a mastodon, yet still have some faith that life will go on. Don’t jump to confusions about your sister, please?’
I spoke to her with my eyes while talking, and her eyes answered; I saw beginning in them a glimmer of a smile.
I said, ‘Another virtue of the splendid opossum is knowing when to just play possum.’
Cassie rolled her eyes hugely, turned her back on me to resume her packing and firmly changed the subject. ‘Mom, do you want to package that portrait for me to take with me? I could have it archivally matted and framed and on display within a week.’
‘Good idea,’ I said slowly. It would be a heck of a lot easier, and safer, to sandwich the portrait in tissue paper between two cardboards and send it with Cassie, than it would be to mail it. And much more quickly than I had thought, I could have a career again.
In the eyes of the people who counted – the critics and connoisseurs and doyens in the Big Apple – I could be an artist again.
So what was slowing me down, not just my speech but my entire inert body?
‘Right,’ I muttered, and once I got myself moving, I strode more than soodled into the front room where the child’s portrait remained lightly taped to the wall. As this was not good for it, I took it down and removed the tape with extra care before I took it into the studio and placed it on the easel. I needed to sign it. With a tiny brush, somewhere inconspicuous, at the bottom. In indigo?
I stood there.
I needed to choose the brush and the paint.
But I stood there staring at the child, who glared back at me, and in his glare I felt the force of my responsibility for his flimsy existence. I know it’s not about me, I had told him. I had thought of myself as his grandmother and his rescuer. If I now chose to sign off on him and sent him away, then what was I? Compared to, say, Judas?
‘An artist,’ I muttered, defiant.
Still, I didn’t touch the brushes or the paint. But I wanted to. I did. I so terribly wanted to be a capital-A Artist again.
‘Dammit,’ I said, turning away from the child so he wouldn’t think I meant him. ‘Damn everything,’ I said, huffing, but then I sighed and slogged back to Cassie’s room. ‘The kid’s not finished with me,’ I told her.
‘Huh?’ Suddenly upright, she spun to look at me.
‘What I mean is I might need the portrait in case anybody answers my ad. Or in case I want to show it to the judge. I’ll send it to you later, honey.’
She did not actually roll her eyes, but she might as well have. ‘What-ever,’ she said, turning back to her suitcase.
THIRTEEN
The next morning, Wednesday, I needed to get Cassie to the airport. I drove the old Volvo, and we set out early, both of us still sleepy and sipping on second cups of coffee. Once south of Cooter Spring, we drove past nothing much except pine forest and cypress swamp and shallow pools quilted with water lilies. Human interruptions were sparse: occasional houses, one with a fire tower in the front yard; a rustic bait shop/raw oyster bar; a welder’s shop displaying tacky lawn ornaments; a completely isolated dog racing track. The Vo was just about the only car on the road. After the first half hour, I had processed things enough and felt sufficiently awake to remark, ‘Wednesday. It’s been exactly a week since I found the skeleton.’
Cassie bolted upright in the passenger seat. ‘Oh my God, Mom, I forgot about the newspaper coming out today, with your ad in it!’
‘Right. Note to self: pick up a copy on my way home.’
‘But what’s going to happen now? I mean, are you going to be OK?’
I gave her the best amused glance I could while keeping my attention on the road. ‘OK compared with what?’
Silence. Without looking, I could tell I had embarrassed her, and I hated my smart mouth. As gently as possible, I said, ‘I know when you and Maurie came down, you were worried about my marbles, and the reason I knew was because I was getting worried myself whether I had one oar out of the water, cheese sliding off my cracker, wheel still going but the hamster dead, a couple fries short of a Happy Meal—’
Cassie protested like a teenager. ‘Mom, stop.’
‘Porch light on but nobody home,’ I concluded. ‘And what’s happened since hasn’t exactly been reassuring, has it?’
‘Understatement of the century.’
‘Yet I don’t worry about bats in my belfry anymore. Some might say I’m too far gone. What’s been happening frightened me at first, but now it—’
I stopped to edit myself. No way would I ever tell either of my daughters that I had longed for grandchildren and that this was my reason for starting to paint the portrait. The truth was I felt as if I actually had a grandchild now, one who needed my care, and if that made me crazy, so be it.
‘But now …’ Cassie prompted.
‘Now, legal papers and shrinks and judges be damned, the question of my marbles is moot. Things are not all about me anymore. Since the child came, he – I mean she – just totally overrides worrying about myself. I feel as if I’ve become
part of something way bigger than I am.’
Silence. I got the feeling Cassie was mulling this over.
Then she blindsided me. ‘Did you check your studio this morning?’
I gasped. ‘Summonabinch, no, I didn’t! We were in such a hurry … Did you look?’
Instead of answering, Cassie teased, ‘So this kid that goes bump in the night is your new reality, isn’t she? Practically routine.’
‘Almost but not quite. Did. You. Look?’
‘I took a quick peek. She sorted your paints by color and put them in kind of a wheel, a circle, on the floor. Unless you did that.’
‘Sure, I do that all the time.’ Meaning no, not likely.
We turned on to the airport road, driving between acres of slash pines interrupted by swamps and ponds, much as before. This part of Florida was very much of a muchness. Beautiful and lonely. I loved it.
Cassie said, ‘Mom, what if they really do put you away?’
‘They won’t. And even if they did, that wouldn’t be the main problem.’
‘Mom—’
‘And I’m sure I could appeal.’ I stopped the car in one of many available parking spaces. This was not the world’s busiest airport.
‘Mother.’
Cassie’s tone demanded me to face her. I did so.
Very seriously, she said, ‘I want you to call me every day.’
I smiled. I wouldn’t mind that at all. ‘OK.’
In the Skink County Sheriff’s Department’s small building, the new issue of the Observer lay open on the break-room table, competing with Styrofoam cups and coffee spills for space. Usually, somebody would have been reading some news or sports article, but not this time.
Standing over it as he stirred creamer and sugar into his coffee, Nick Crickens eyeballed a sizeable picture on the advertising page. Seemed to be a photo of a painting of a child, and not a very attractive child, either. Kind of scruffy and sour-looking. The whole quarter-page ad consisted of the kid’s unsmiling face plus a caption: If you recognize this child from the 1950s, please call and then a phone number.
He was not the only one staring. Looking over his shoulder, his boss, Chief Pudknucker, growled, ‘I’d love to know what the hell that’s all about.’
Nick felt an uncomfortable inkling that he should have a clue.
‘Probably just somebody doing whatchamacallit, genealogy,’ said another deputy.
‘Pay for an ad like that just to fill in a blank on their family tree? I don’t think so. I feel like calling that there number just to find out who it belongs to.’
Nick said, ‘Nut case is going to get a lot of crank calls,’ but only with the part of his brain that moved his mouth. Other parts of the rumpled lump of gray fat in his head were busy making connections. Nut case: 10-96. He had recently answered one of those – old lady who did painting and drawing, had goofy pictures taped all over her walls. Folded paper stuff hanging from the ceiling. Talkative. Which call …
Right. The 10-54 with a difference. Skeleton in the backyard. A cold, cold case of probable homicide, on which the State Police detectives had made no progress at all, Nick had heard. They had counted on records of who had first built and owned the property, but those hadn’t helped, because those people had leased the house to one renter after another before they sold it. And nobody had kept track of the renters. Why should they?
So that blew the only lead.
Unless this picture in the paper was somehow another lead.
Just before the chief told everybody to get back to work, Nick did. At his desk, he flipped open his notebook and found the right page, then looked at a name, Beverly Vernon, and the phone number he had recorded next to it. Then headed back to the break room and had another look at the phone number appended to the newspaper advertisement.
‘Bingo!’
‘What?’ growled the chief, who had sat down at the table to suck on his coffee.
Deputy Crickens showed him. On Pudknucker’s face the frown lines deepened as he compared the two phone numbers. ‘Are you saying this picture got something to do with that skeleton?’
‘I’m just saying “Bingo.”’
‘Well, bingo on out to your patrol car and get rolling.’
‘Yes, sir.’
But on his way out of the room, he heard his boss mutter, ‘Tadlock is going to love this.’
When I got back from the airport, my house seemed terribly empty, as it always did when my daughters left. Even when Jim was still alive, I’d felt the empty-nest blues whenever Maurie and Cassie had gone away after a visit. And living in such an isolated house now didn’t make it any easier. As always, I drifted from room to room, feeling like a mama cat searching for kittens that had grown up long ago.
I happened into the studio, saw most of my paints set out on the floor in a big, elaborate array, and felt a smile start in my heart and bubble up to ease my face. The house was not empty after all. There was a child in it.
A child who had at first been angry but now made handprints on the ceiling and played with my paints.
Suddenly more contented, I sat in my Joseph chair and leaned back to study what the child had done with my paints. From Cassie’s description, or perhaps from memories of my own childhood play, I had expected a lovely rainbow color circle blending the primaries, secondaries and tertiaries, hues and tones and … bullshit. This was not an art class or the creation of a little girl who loved beauty; I was seeing my studio as transformed by a combative little boy at play. He had marched my paints into rank and file, reds in one regiment, blues in another, yellows and greens divided into squadrons and platoons or what the hell do I know, with all of the bright colors facing off against an army of gray, brown and black. Every can or tube or jar of paint I owned was on the floor, but the white, off-whites and other soft hues were thrust aside, sprawling.
‘Somebody doesn’t like pink,’ I murmured, still smiling like a proud grandma. The dress I had painted him in was lavender – bad enough from his point of view – but the dress some horrible person had buried him in might have once been pink. At the thought, my smile faded like the posy-print fabric, now bleak.
I muttered to myself, ‘Why did they make him wear a dress?’
The phone rang. Being an old phone, it jangled rather than warbled. Reflexively, my response to that sound being thoroughly conditioned since childhood, I hustled to get it, grabbing a pen and notepaper. Only as I picked up did I notice that my answering machine was flashing like a danger signal.
‘Hello?’
Someone audibly gasped, almost choking.
‘Hello?’ I repeated with some concern.
I heard rapid, ragged breathing, and then someone – maybe a woman, maybe a child – whispered, ‘Sorry,’ and click, the line went dead.
‘Hello? Hello?’ I insisted, irrationally coaxing the silence before I hung up. The aborted phone call gave me the same odd feeling as tiny handprints on my studio wall. I had to pull myself together before I listened to the messages on my answering machine.
Man’s voice: ‘I’m just curious, where’d you get that picture? It looks kind of like one of my cousins, maybe.’
Woman’s voice, querulous: ‘That there picture, is that supposed to be a boy or a girl?’
Woman, plastic professional voice: ‘Are you having difficulty locating a family member or loved one? Let me offer my confidential psychic services …’
I skipped the rest of that one. Then the next two calls were moments of silence after which someone, apparently hesitant, hung up.
The next call advertised the services of a genealogical researcher. The one after that recommended prayer and invited me to a tent revival. Then a stern female voice informed me, ‘I taught school here for sixty years and I never seen no such youngster.’
Very helpful. By then I had started doodling a border of flowers on the notepaper, and I barely blinked when a man’s recorded voice asked me with gratuitous profanity who the bleep I thought I was and what t
he bleep I thought I was doing. Humming to myself as I often do when in abeyance, I found myself drawing children romping among the flowers – happy, androgynous children in T-shirts and shorts.
I listened to another message that was not a message. Someone hesitated, then hung up.
I realized I was humming ‘Sounds of Silence’ by Simon and Garfunkel.
End of messages.
After a lunch of sorts – potato chips dipped in applesauce – I sighed deeply, rolled my eyes and made myself go look for the ambulance chaser’s card. Fortunately, I found it still in a pocket of the shorts I had worn the day before. Scott Clayton, Attorney. On the reverse side, I found a date and time, which I wrote on my calendar with a sense of disbelief: the next Monday I needed to convince a judge I was sane, and how was I supposed to do that? Already the whole psych hold episode seemed like a bad dream, but I could not afford to be an ostrich about it. I marched myself over to the phone and dialed my so-called lawyer.
Instead of saying hello, he said, ‘Scott Clayton, Attorney.’
‘This is Beverly Vernon.’
‘Who?’
‘Psych hold.’
‘Oh! Yes.’
‘You never did tell me what your fee is.’
‘You sound quite sane to me, Mrs Vernon,’ he said coyly, and the conversation went downhill from there. He wanted to meet. I wanted to know how much that would cost. He stressed the need for us to ‘put our heads together,’ telling me all the important things he needed to do to ensure a happy outcome for me. Taking notes, I asked again how much his doing all of those important things would cost. He hedged. I insisted. He divulged. I fired him, partly because I couldn’t afford him but mostly because I didn’t like him.
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