“What’s wrong with your toes?” asked Jeremy, who was behind me in line for the diving board.
I curled my toes and turned my head. “Nothing.”
“I saw them. They’re stuck together. Like a duck’s.”
The boys behind him laughed, which egged Jeremy on and he turned up the teasing a notch.
“Quack! Quack! Quack!” he shouted, flapping his arms as if they were wings.
My face got pizza-oven hot and it wasn’t from the scorching sun. Tears pooled in my eyes and I tried to be brave and hold them back but I couldn’t. I decided that I didn’t want to go off the diving board anymore. Instead, I found Grandma and stayed on my beach towel – legs crossed Indian-style so I could hide my feet – until she was ready to go home.
I became good at hiding things I didn’t want other people to know. It’s one of the reasons no one knew I was pregnant – not even Grandma. Course, by then she was so sick it took all of her energy to get through the day.
“Were those boys giving you trouble, Libby?” Tom asks the girls as they join him at the end of the block before going on to the next street.
“They were going to take all of the candy but Libby stopped them,” Emma says.
“Did you know the boys?”
“The one sounded familiar, but he was hiding behind that scary mask so I’m not sure,” Olivia says. “But if I hear his voice again, without the mask, I’ll remember.”
Matt was like Scary Mask. I was terrified of him and what he could do if he wanted. After he agreed to let Grandma adopt me, I wasn’t as afraid.
“Matt, you smell like rotten garbage and look just as bad,” Grandma said one night when Matt stopped by while on one of his binges.
“Give me some money, old woman, and don’t worry about the smell.”
“I’m not giving you another dime. I’ve given you enough.”
I heard the yelling and scrambled out of bed and stood behind Grandma, clutching her robe.
Matt looks at me. “What about her? You gonna give her all your money?”
“I’ll make a deal with you, Matt. You give me Sarah. Sign those papers I gave you a while back and I’ll write you a check.”
“How much?”
“As much as I can afford. Maybe a thousand.”
“You really want her that bad?”
“Yes,” Grandma said. “I think Sarah would be better with me.”
He sliced the air with his hand. “You can have her.”
He looked at me. “That what you want?”
I nodded. It was the only time he had asked me what I wanted.
Matt turned and staggered to the door. “I’ll sign those damn papers as soon as I get home. A thousand sounds good.”
Chapter 13
Olivia walks into her bedroom and tosses her ballet bag on her bed. I see Oscar is dead before she does. I know the blue betta fish sleeps a lot, but he’s definitely not sleeping now. Olivia walks over to feed him.
“You sleep too much, Oscar,” she says.
She taps her finger on the side of the glass fish bowl but Oscar doesn’t respond. She picks up the bowl and jiggles it. Still, no movement.
“Mom,” Olivia yells. “Something’s wrong with Oscar.”
Elizabeth walks in carrying a basket of laundry. “Maybe he’s sleeping.”
“He won’t wake up when I tap the bowl, and he usually always wakes up when I tap.”
Elizabeth sets the wash basket down and walks over and taps on the bowl, too. She picks up the bowl to get a closer look. “I’m sorry, Libby. But I think Oscar’s dead.”
Olivia’s eyes turn glassy and her lips tremble as she tries to be a big girl and keep her eight-year-old self from crying. But she loses the battle and bursts into tears. “I killed him. It’s my fault. I’m a bad fish mommy.”
Elizabeth wraps her arms around the heaving Olivia. “It’s not your fault Oscar died, Libby. Fish don’t live forever.”
“Maybe I didn’t change his water enough or feed him enough.”
“It wasn’t either of those things. You couldn’t have been a better fish mommy. Fish get old and die. Just like people. It’s a part of the circle of life.”
“Will you and Daddy die?”
Elizabeth nods. “But hopefully not for a very long time.”
At eight, it’s Olivia’s first experience with death, and I know that the realization of not having her parents forever has hit her like an unexpected summer storm. She never saw the darkness that lurked behind that beautiful robin-egg sky. Just naturally took for granted that her parents would always be with her.
The first dead thing I ever saw was Matt. I had just turned thirteen.
I’ll never forget the morning Grandma got the call. I was still in bed and she flew into my room as if the apartment were on fire.
“Sarah,” Grandma said, shaking my shoulder. “You gotta get up. We gotta get to the hospital. Your dad’s been in an accident.”
Grandma rushed to her room to get dressed and I tumbled out of bed and threw on some sweats and a T-shirt.
By the time we got to the hospital, it was too late. Matt was dead. The police said he had been riding his motorcycle without a helmet and turned left in front of a truck. The trucker tried to swerve to miss Matt, but he couldn’t swerve fast enough. Matt slammed into the truck so hard that his bike slid under it.
Grandma cried. I didn’t shed one tear.
A nice lady at the hospital escorted Grandma and me to a quiet room at the end of a long hallway. It contained a blue vinyl sofa and a couple of matching chairs. She asked if Grandma needed anything or wanted her to stay until the doctor arrived, but Grandma told her to go but that she’d appreciate a box of tissues. The woman returned almost immediately and placed the tissues on the wooden coffee table.
I sat beside Grandma on the couch, resting my head on her shoulder. She wrapped her arm around me and pulled me close, kissing the top of my head.
“You OK?” Grandma asked.
“Yeah. Are you?”
“I just wish I could have helped your dad.”
“You tried,” I said.
“Maybe I should have tried harder.”
She sniffed. “I found the Cheerio.”
I sat up and looked at Grandma. “What are you talking about? What Cheerio?”
Grandma stared at the wall, as if she was trying to remember every detail of the story she wanted to share. “You were little. Just a baby, sitting in your high chair eating Cheerios one morning. Matt walked in and you said ‘Da. Da. Da.’ And you picked up a Cheerio and offered it to him. He didn’t think I was watching. But I was. He took the Cheerio and put it in his pocket. After I kicked him out, I found the Cheerio in his nightstand drawer, along with a photo of your mother.”
The door opened and the doctor walked in. She had brown hair tied back in a knot. She wore a white coat and a stethoscope circled her narrow neck. “I’m sorry. Your son’s internal injuries were substantial.”
“Anything worth saving for someone else?” Grandma asked.
The doctor nodded.
“Then make sure you take anything out that can help someone else. Maybe they’ll appreciate them. Take care of them. God knows Matt never did.”
Even through her black glasses, I saw the doctor’s eyebrows jump. “Uh. OK. We can do that. Would you like to see him?”
Grandma looked at me. I shook my head no. Grandma looked at the doctor. “Can she wait here?”
“Sure,” the doctor said. “Follow me.”
Grandma left and I sank back into the vinyl couch. I felt a little guilty because I didn’t cry and wasn’t sad that Matt was dead. I figured that as far as he was concerned, the only good thing about me was that he got a thousand bucks to spend on cheap vodka. In the end, I was nothing more than one of his poker chips that he cashed in when he was hard up for cash for booze. But I did wonder about the Cheerio. He didn’t seem like a Cheerio-keeping kind of guy.
It seemed like it took forev
er until Grandma came back. When she did, she didn’t say much and I didn’t ask anything. I figured that if and when Grandma wanted to talk about it she would.
The last time I saw Matt he was lying in a cold silver coffin wearing the white shirt and black pants Grandma bought at the Goodwill store the day after he died. He looked old. I wondered what parts of his body they took out of him and if those who had received the parts knew they came from a drunken bastard.
There were just the flowers that Grandma bought for on top of the casket. Grandma placed a wedding photo of Matt and my mom beside him in the casket. A few of Grandma’s friends came, but that was it.
I kept thinking Matt would wake up. I didn’t want him to wake up. I felt horrible thinking that, but it meant I didn’t have to worry that he might change his mind and want me back. I didn’t have one good memory of Matt. Not one. There was no life to celebrate and remember, only joy that the drunken bastard was gone for good.
“Can we bury him in the backyard?” Olivia asks Elizabeth.
“Sure. Let me see if I can find a box.”
Elizabeth returns with a white jewelry box. “We can put him in here.”
Elizabeth scoops out Oscar and places him on top of the cotton lining. Olivia’s hand trembles as she puts on the lid.
“Will he go to Heaven?” asks Olivia, sniffling.
Elizabeth nods. “Of course he will. So don’t be sad. He’s in heaven having a great time with all of his other fish friends.”
“And people, too, right?”
“And people, too.”
I thought that when Matt died, he probably went straight to Hell and that my mom was probably sad that he wasn’t good enough to make it into Heaven.
We buried Matt beside my mom in the old, overgrown Lutheran cemetery on the edge of town. I had come to this cemetery many times with Grandma to place flowers on my mom’s grave. There was no stone on her grave until a few years ago. Grandma had an envelope that she saved money in over the years to pay for a grave marker. It wasn’t anything fancy. A few flowers etched in a small gray granite marker, but it was at least something.
My mom didn’t have any life insurance, so Grandma worked out a deal with the undertaker. There was a little insurance on Matt, enough to pay for the casket and some other things. But Grandma skipped the obituary in the paper. She thought it was one cost she could eliminate. Maybe she figured the news story about the crash was enough to tell people he was dead. And, besides, most of the obituaries were filled with flowery stuff about how great the person was. There wasn’t anything even remotely great about Matt.
Olivia helps Elizabeth dig a hole beside the towering snowball bush in the corner of the yard. The shrub, with its big white snowball-like flower clusters, has always been Olivia’s favorite plant.
Olivia puts the box into the hole and scoops the dirt on top of it. She pats the ground. “Now we need a grave marker. Can I use one of the extra landscaping stones Daddy has in the garage?”
“Sure,” Elizabeth says. “I’ll get the stone and you get a marker.”
Elizabeth returns with a flat stone and places it on top of the fresh grave. “You can do the rest.”
Olivia takes the lid off of her black permanent marker and writes on the stone: Oscar the fish.
There was room left on my mom’s marker for Matt’s name. I think Grandma had planned it like that. Smart move on her part because it saved money. Didn’t have to squirrel away money for another ten years.
“How many spots are there here?” I asked Grandma when we went to the cemetery to see the tombstone after Matt’s name had been added.
“Your grandpa bought a lot for six. So there’s plenty of room here for me when I go.”
“That better not be for a really long time,” I said.
“I don’t plan on it, Sarah. But life has a way of dealing us stuff we don’t plan on.”
“But who would take care of me?”
I really didn’t want to know the answer to that and I don’t think Grandma really wanted to answer the question. Truth was I’d end up in foster care like my mom. We had no family, no relatives, no one who would take me in. If something happened to Grandma, I might as well die myself.
Chapter 14
Olivia sits Indian style on the living-room floor in front of the eight-foot Fraser fir decorated with white lilies and crystal spheres. Cousins, some older and others younger, surround her. They laugh, unable to sit still. One male cousin rubs his hands and another bites her fingernails.
Tom whistles to quiet the crowded room. “I want to thank everyone for celebrating Christmas with us once again. Liz, Libby and I always look forward to what’s become a holiday tradition.”
Tom looks at Elizabeth. “How long have we been doing this now?”
“Since Libby’s first Christmas and she’s nine,” Elizabeth answers.
All eyes find Olivia and her face pops like a firework – green eyes sparkling, smile bursting, face as red as the roses her dad gave her mom that morning.
“That’s right. Since Libby’s first Christmas. We’ve welcomed a couple babies into the family since then and some of our loved ones are no longer with us and we should remember them tonight.”
Heads nod and whispers of “yes” fill the great room.
“Please, eat up and have fun.”
Sleigh bells ring. The kids stand and jump up and down. They know that Santa has arrived.
Santa, aka Uncle Ned, walks into the room carrying a huge red sack filled with gifts. He takes one gift out of the bag and calls the name on the tag. It’s for Olivia’s cousin, Samantha. Three-year-old Samantha skips to Santa and takes the gift.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa says. “Remember, don’t open your gift until everyone has one. I’ll go fast, I promise.”
Santa calls one name after another and the kids get their gifts and then sit down, legs crossed and the gift on the floor in front of them. Olivia’s fingers are crossed. I know that she’s hoping for a dog. She’s asked over and over for one, promising to take care of it all on her own.
Olivia looks around the room. Everyone has a gift but her. She wonders if Santa forgot her this year.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa says. “I have one gift that wouldn’t fit in my Santa sack.”
Tom hands him a big box with a red bow on top.
Santa reads the tag. “This one’s for Olivia.”
Santa sets the white box in front of Olivia.
“Why don’t we let Olivia open hers first?” Santa says.
The kids gather around Olivia. There’s a “yelp” from inside the box. Olivia tears off the bow, pushes back the flaps and reaches in.
“It’s a puppy! It’s a puppy! I got a puppy.”
She picks up the five-pound Cairn terrier with a pink collar accented with rhinestones. Her dark eyes and black nose take up most of her puppy face. Her little ears fold down in perfect triangles.
Olivia lifts the puppy to her face and rubs her cheek against the puppy’s quivering body. “It’s OK, Daisy. You’re with me now.”
“Can I hold her?”
“I want to hold her.”
“I get her next.”
“Now, kids,” Santa says. “Let’s let Olivia hold her for a while. Then maybe later you can hold her.”
“Uh-oh!” Olivia says.
“What’s wrong?” Tom asks.
“I think Daisy just peed on me.”
Olivia holds out Daisy and there’s a big wet spot on the front of her green velvet dress. Everyone laughs.
“I’m sure it won’t be the last time she pees on you,” Tom says. “Come with me, Lib, and we’ll take her out while the others open their gifts.”
Tom and Olivia take Daisy out and the room erupts in total chaos – kids scream, paper flies every which way and all the adults can do is pray that nothing gets broken and nobody gets hurt.
I love Christmas at Olivia’s house. Each year on Christmas Eve, both sides of the family gather for the biggest party
of the year. The house is wrapped in laughter and love.
Long banquet tables are filled with food. There’s steamed shrimp, pecan-crusted chicken tenders, caramelized onion brie en croute, bacon-wrapped sirloin gorgonzola skewers, artichoke and spinach filo tartlets, edamame dumplings and much more.
The desserts are just as amazing and include everything from red velvet cupcakes to eggnog cheesecake with gingersnap crust and pomegranate glaze. And cookies, lots of cookies, for the kids.
I imagine how everything would taste. Olivia especially likes the pecan-crusted chicken tenders and her favorite cookie is sand tarts. It’s just about the only item on the tables that hasn’t been prepared by a caterer. Grandma Cindy and Olivia always spend a day making sand tarts. Grandma Cindy takes Olivia shopping for special Christmas tins that Olivia puts cookies in to give to her teachers.
The night of the party, kids run from room to room, playing with the toys Santa has brought. The adults are always in good moods. They eat and drink and become kids again. Then the next day, Olivia always finds a mountain of gifts by the tree. While Santa stopped by in person the night before, he always surprises Olivia in the morning with even more things.
I have never seen so many gifts for one person in my life. And they are always wrapped in ballerina-themed paper. No other gifts in the house are wrapped in this paper, a sure sign, according to Tom, that Santa brought them.
Olivia always opens the cerise and pink crochet Christmas stocking Grandma Cindy made her last. It’s always filled with little surprises and usually, at the toe of the stocking, is something extra special, like a birthstone ring.
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