At the Edge of the Haight

by Katherine Seligman

  .........................

  The older kid slipped off Marva’s lap. “You run and I’ll catch you,” he said.

  “How about you catch your brother?” she said. “But not under the table. Let me go take care of the turkey and then we can play.”

  She looked over at me. “You want to come?”

  From the kitchen, we could hear waves of giggling in the back room. The turkey was brown on the outside and Marva covered it with tinfoil and put it back in the oven above a cookie sheet filled with vegetables. A basket of fresh rolls sat on the counter.

  “I think this is my favorite holiday,” she said. “Or it used to be. You must have a favorite.”

  I was going to say how I didn’t have one, but Marva looked so happy right that minute, focused on the roasting vegetables and the pumpkin and pecan pies that sat cooling. For one second everything was the way it should be.

  “Maybe we could all drive back with you, show the boys San Francisco,” she said. Her face was still flushed and she pushed back her hair. She said she’d already told the boys about the sea lions at the wharf, the penguins at the science museum, and the lake in the park where they could ride in paddleboats while ducks trailed behind them begging for bread.

  “You could be our guide,” said Marva.

  She should hire Hope. I wasn’t a tour guide. All I knew was the park, and not the way they’d want to see it. They didn’t know how I’d marched through every part, looking for Shane. But I let myself think about going with them. I’d sit in the back of the car with the kids pressed up against me. We could go out in a boat and I’d paddle because their legs would be too short. Dave would buy popcorn so we could throw it on the water, let the ducks chase behind. I felt drugged by the smells in the kitchen. Maybe I could be part of all of this, take up some of what Shane left behind. It wasn’t like my mom would even mind.

  I could see Dave outside in the driveway as the car with Marcus and his wife pulled up. He had a hand on Root’s back and seemed to be talking to him. Marcus and his wife, each holding a carton of wood, got out and walked toward the front door. Dave was behind, holding a round package topped with a huge orange bow.

  “I figured you had to have this,” he said, handing it to Marva. “I had it hidden away in the trunk.”

  She sat on the couch and unwrapped the package slowly, unsticking each piece of tape and folding back the paper. She frowned at a life size ceramic turkey.

  “What?” said Dave, watching her expression. “I thought it was festive. It’s like a cousin of the one we have back home.”

  Marva took the turkey and carried it to the back bedroom. “Nothing will ever be the same,” she said. “You can’t try to make it the same.”

  “Hey, it’s Thanksgiving,” said Marcus. “Let’s try.”

  He came over to me and stuck out his hand. “Maddy?”

  Small chips of wood stuck to the front of his sweater. He had the same blond hair as his kids and the same transparent blue eyes as his dad and Shane. I shook his hand, but of course he already knew who I was. I wondered what Marva and Dave had told him. Here’s the homeless girl who saw your brother last.

  It was only the middle of the day when we sat down to eat. Dave pointed to a chair and pulled it out for me. The kids sat on either side of me. Marva put her hands on the table and reached for Dave’s hand. The kids each grabbed one of mine and then we were sitting there at the orange table, connected with the chain of hands.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to find anything to be thankful about,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve had a hard time lately.”

  Her voice got so low it was hard to hear. She said she’d been waking up blaming God for everything, but today it was time to show gratitude. There was some healing power in that.

  “I’ll start,” she said, her voice normal again. “I’m grateful that we have Maddy here to share our beautiful feast.” She reached over and patted my hand.

  Dave said he was grateful for Marva who cooked all the food. I didn’t catch what Marcus or his wife said because I kept thinking about what I’d do when it was my turn. The older kid said he was grateful for his soccer team that was going to kick butt.

  “That’s stupid,” said the younger one.

  “Guys,” said Marcus. “It’s Thanksgiving.” He turned to me. “Maddy?”

  I didn’t say anything. “Can I go? Can I go?” said the littler kid.

  “Can we let our guest speak?” said Marcus.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  I didn’t want to have to say how I was grateful that my mom got us TV dinners so we didn’t have to sit around and think up things to be grateful for. Saying nothing was fine. I was relieved when Dave tapped his knife on a glass and bowed his head. “Bless us, oh Lord, for your gifts which we are about to receive from your bounty,” he said, and then looked up and told us we could start eating.

  Marva and Marcus’s wife brought the food over to the table and we ate like it was a race and someone had just shouted, “Go!” Root had his own plate, on the floor, filled with turkey and potatoes, which he finished in a few gulps. Dave talked about the birds in the lagoon and Marcus said he’d like to go duck hunting there. Marva kept getting up to refill platters, until all the clattering stopped. Everyone said they were full, they thought they’d die if they ate one more thing. Marva said we could take a break and eat the pies later. The kids and their parents went outside for a walk and Dave and Marva lay down on the living room carpet. Dave patted the ground next to him.

  “Come on,” he said. “It’s what we do. Forced digestion and a nap.”

  I sat down next to him, knees to chest. “Are you going to tell her?” said Marva, like I wasn’t there in the room.

  “I was going to wait,” said Dave. “Until we’d finished dessert. But, well . . .” He breathed in sharply and let out the air in small spurts. “Marva and I drove down to Los Angeles last week. We met your dad.”

  I could feel blood rush to my head. I swallowed hard. I hadn’t seen my father in more than fifteen years. It was easier to think he was dead. I had started believing that.

  “If you were our daughter we’d want to know where you were,” said Marva.

  “Why would you go see my dad?” I said.

  “I thought he’d want to know where you are,” said Dave.

  He told me how it had been easy to find him, even with his primitive computer skills. They had looked up my birth records in Los Angeles, then searched online for his address. You had to work hard if you wanted to hide. George Donaldo lived in Culver City, on the west side of Los Angeles.

  I was thinking about how I’d busted in on Jeremiah’s wife, which was different. She didn’t want to be found, but Jeremiah had killed someone. My dad was only guilty of not wanting his kid. He hadn’t killed anyone. “What makes you think I’d want to know about him?”

  Marva pulled her sweater tighter. She looked thinner than a few weeks ago. She was a small woman and she was disappearing more every day.

  “What did he say, when you told him why you were there?” I said. Dave had probably already arranged for me to go down there and live with my dad. I tried to think where Culver City was, but I could only see the place where we used to live, the pullout couch and yellow tile counters in the kitchen.

  Dave said my dad had seemed confused at first. He looked at the ceiling like he was trying to pick out how he might have a kid. Maybe he thought he could lie about it. But then he’d opened the door for them. The inside was a wreck. The paint was peeling and there was hardly any furniture. He looked as if he spent a lot of his time drinking. His face was puffy and his gut hung out.

  “But I could see you in him,” said Dave. “The eyes, the shape of your face.”

  “I bet he was dying to know about me,” I said. “If he even remembers me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Dave. “I wasn’t even going to tell you, but Marva insisted. She said it wasn’t right to keep it from you. But now I’m not so sure.�
�

  Dave said my father had had a rough time. He had diabetes and was sick from alcohol and hadn’t worked as a truck driver in a long time. My dad figured I’d be better off with my mother even though she had fits. But then she’d kicked him out. He never saw that coming.

  “He left us,” I said. And fits?” I said. “That’s what he called it?”

  “He wanted to know how you’d turned out,” Dave said. “We told him you were living in San Francisco, homeless, but that you were a remarkable, intelligent young woman.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he believed that,” I said.

  “He said he didn’t have any control of you,” said Dave. “There was nothing he could do. He didn’t have anything when you were born, and he still didn’t have anything. He wanted to know what exactly we wanted out of him. Half of zero is zero. Then he walked over and stood too close, like he was fixing to clock me in the face. Were we going to try and blackmail him? He’d heard of cases like that. I told him we wanted nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was a piece of the puzzle we had to know.”

  “My puzzle,” I said.

  “I wish I had more to tell you, but he threw us out,” said Dave. “Physically pushed me out the door.”

  “He doesn’t deserve to know you,” said Marva. “There is no excuse for him.”

  Dave said that before they drove away, they folded up a poster with Shane’s picture and wrote, “This is our son” on it and then shoved it under his door.

  “This is your kid? Killed in the park up there?” my dad had shouted out the window, as they walked to their car. “Like you know anything about raising up kids. If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black.”

  “We should make him pay,” said Marva, “for all those years he wasn’t there. For all he did to your family.”

  “I don’t think anyone can make him pay,” said Dave.

  “Not with money,” said Marva. “But your dad owes you.” I put my face into Root’s fur so I didn’t have to look at her. She wasn’t really talking about my dad. It was all about Shane. She would never know what she owed.

  chapter 23

  “Snap,” Ash said, and we clinked our bottles together.

  He patted his pocket and I could hear the pipe rattling in there. I should’ve brought more from Dave’s house, but all I had was a bottle of wine from the kitchen counter. The pumpkin pie, its shiny hard crust decorated along the edges with pricks from a fork, I threw in the trees on my way out. Let the birds get it. “Remember the pies,” Marva had said before she and Dave fell asleep on the living room floor. “We always eat in two parts. I forgot to tell you that.”

  Ash didn’t seem surprised when Root and I showed up, even though I must have looked wiped out. It had taken me two rides and a walk all the way from the bridge to get back. I reached for a torn bedspread that had been looped around a tree and spread it on the ground. Ash put the soggy pink monkey in the middle. It kept falling over so he propped it against his pack. Fleet’s rabbit was leashed to the bottom of the tree, curled in a ball, nose quivering. Root flopped on an opposite corner of the bedspread with his head on his paws and stared at the rabbit. Ash said Fleet was off dumpster diving at a grocery store a few blocks away. I wondered if Fleet would score anything on Thanksgiving when a lot more people would be there. Even on normal days you had to go early, ready to push people out of the way to get at what was on top. I was relieved to see her walk back with a full pack. She turned it over and dumped out bruised apples and bananas, a package of sweet rolls, and two cans of pinto beans onto the bedspread. Ash took out his knife and started jabbing the top of a can. I closed my eyes and held its edges.

  “That is stupid.” I looked up and Hope was there, in a faded black sweatshirt that said god is busy. Over her shoulder she had a mesh bag full of plastic containers. Jay House had given her a Thanksgiving dinner to take with her after I was a no show and she decided to leave. What was the point of sitting around there with people she didn’t know? Ash said that was how he felt when he was at home with his mom. He held the knife, still attached to the top of the can, liquid oozing out the side. He wiggled it until he had the top partly peeled away.

  “May be stupid, but it worked,” he said.

  Hope high-fived him and took a slug of the wine. “I’ve been too straight too long,” she said. She drank another sip and then said she was heading to Haight Street. Tourists would be out thick on Thanksgiving afternoon, she said, ready to give. Leftovers, socks, change. A last few moments for generosity and redemption.

  “Whatever,” said Ash, sounding hurt. “There will be more for us.”

  “I’ll be back. Keep your pants on,” said Hope.

  Fleet lined up the fruit, from smallest to biggest, and sat cross-legged next to her rabbit. Ash lit his pipe, took a hit, and passed it to her. I shook my head when Fleet handed it to me and she sucked in another deep one. Ash turned his back to me and puffed, like he didn’t want me to see.

  He took his guitar and started playing a riff I didn’t recognize. I leaned against a tree and closed my eyes, listened to how it went along steady and then got faster, on its way to connecting to something before Ash lost control, the way he always did. The sun was almost down but still warmed my lap. Fleet seemed more together than she’d been in a long time. When I opened my eyes she was smiling, scratching Root’s ear with one hand and the rabbit’s head with the other. Root was sleeping and sighing. I put a bruised apple in the blue soap dish I’d taken from the cabin and set it next to the monkey. We had a centerpiece.

  “Sweet,” said Ash. He put down his guitar and sat next to me, trying to get his arm between my back and the tree. I didn’t give him any help. It felt like I’d dreamed about going to Dave and Marva’s. Marcus and his wife, their little blond kids, even the story about my dad, didn’t seem real.

  The trees were covered in shadow by the time Hope reappeared, holding packages of sliced meat and a half-eaten pumpkin pie. “Plus this,” she said, pulling out a small stack of dollar bills, with a ten on top. “I told you. I knew people would be out there and they’d want to give extra. Someone bought me a crepe already, which I had to eat because I didn’t want to look like a douche, taking it to go. I practically got adopted.”

  Root jumped up, alert and smelling the meat, even though he’d already eaten enough at the cabin for a whole week.

  “Are we going to pray or some shit before we eat?” said Ash.

  I thought about last year at the church when we all had to hug and pray, and then about Dave and Marva’s, where we had to say what we were grateful for. They may have felt his absence every single minute, but no one had even mentioned Shane.

  “In Wyoming, we had to say a prayer before we ate. Every time,” said Ash. “It kind of freaked me out because I’d do it, but then I’d be thinking of something else when I said it and then I was sure I’d die, get hit by lightning or fall off the mountain, because God knew I was praying for show.”

  “But if you don’t believe in God, then what’s he going to do?” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “It’s where my head took me. I couldn’t help it.”

  Fleet was still sitting in her corner, petting her rabbit. Hope put her hands together and pressed them high on her chest. “Namaste.” I wondered if she was thinking about her kid, up with her parents, eating little pieces of the pet turkey they cut up for him. She stood in the center of the bedspread, next to the tilting monkey, her hands still against her chest, her eyes closed. “I am so fucking happy I’m here now.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  Ash stood and copied Hope’s arms. He bent a leg and balanced it on his other knee, like people we saw doing yoga in the park. I couldn’t tell if he was serious or showing off, but he held still in the position, his skinny athletic arms flexed under his sweatshirt.

  “I am here now and it’s good, better than,” he said, and at first I thought he lost his footing or was searching for what to say next. I couldn’t see what knocked him
forward, tumbling onto the bedspread.

  When I turned, I saw Jeremiah, his face sunken, his cheeks almost gone. His beard had grown out since I saw him in court. Ash rolled over before Jeremiah could hit him in the back of the head. He took the punch in his chest and then kicked Jeremiah below the waist, but he must have missed because Jeremiah kept coming at him. Ash was younger, could move faster, but he was wrecked. Jeremiah was swinging with his full weight.

  I wanted to kick him from behind, but I couldn’t move, just like the first time I saw him in the park. He had a power to make me freeze up. Any minute he could pull out his knife and turn it on me. Fleet put the rabbit in her lap and held her arms around him like a cage. But Hope’s voice was loosened up.

  “Get the fuck off him,” she yelled.

  Jeremiah turned from Ash and looked at me. “There you are,” he said. “Miss Holier Than Everyone. Right here. But you’re not any different.”

  “He’s out of his head,” said Hope. “Watch out.”

  “You don’t know anything,” Jeremiah said. “And talking to Laurel. My wife.” He said her name like she was the most important person in the world. I wanted to tell him that she wasn’t his wife anymore, that she changed her name so no one would know she’d been his family. No one in this world wanted to be related to him. If he disappeared no one would care.

  “That kid was a real sicko,” Jeremiah said. “He was whacking off in the bushes. Maybe he pulled some girls in there. How do I know? There were little babies on the swings, going down the slide, right next to him. I told him he was going to burn in hell. He had it coming.”