by Aimee Bender
* * *
—
Forty-five minutes later, upon arrival, while the steward handled my black rolly bag and I wore my purple knapsack, him herding us in the right direction, I kept my eyes on the ground, looking for what might be considered ticket stubs as possibly used by the man in the suit. I checked on the windows, sidewalk, and stairs. As we walked beneath the high ceilings of Union Station, through the shining brown galleries and pews, the intricate tiled floors and geometric paneling, I saw a pigeon trying to peck at a scrap of paper that looked like it might have once had part of my drawing on it. I thought I recognized the orange lines of a half-hearted one-color rainbow. People sped by in whispery flutters of clothing and the pigeon, gray, dull, hungry, looking exactly like every other pigeon I’d ever seen, abandoned the paper on the ground and went off to investigate a more promising bit of potato chip. I did not point out the scrap to the steward, who was trying to find my uncle’s information in all his various papers, and the wind from the movement of people’s quickening feet blew the orange scraps away, anyway, toward the open side doors, leading to the Metro. The steward and I walked side by side toward the line of taxis together, to Uncle Stan, who was waiting for me as promised in his Orioles cap. The sky of the city of Los Angeles was bigger and wider and a faint purpled-gray color, even at night. The invisible baton reached from the steward’s hand to my uncle’s and I stood at his side as they shook hands and completed the pass. The steward turned to me and bent down and reached out a hand to clasp mine, to look me in the eye and wish me well, and then he pivoted on his heel and disappeared behind us into the flow of walkers.
55
“How was the trip?” asked Uncle Stan, taking my hand as we walked toward the parking lot.
“Fine.”
“Did you see amazing sights?”
“Just what was out the window.”
“I’m so excited for you to meet Vicky,” he said. “She’s tiny! She’s this tiny thing!”
We found his car in the parking lot—blue, small, shiny—and he popped the trunk and put my rolly bag inside. I kept ahold of my purple knapsack.
Once we were settled into the seats, me on a booster next to a giant plaid car seat facing backward, him at the wheel, he turned to face me. “Welcome, Francie,” he said, and his eyes grew wet. “We are very glad you are here.” He started the car. We drove on the freeways to his home, the red and yellow lights stretching and shortening as I slivered my eyes. I remember picturing the apartment in Portland right then, on the drive, the five rooms with no one in them. I knew I would not be returning, and it would take weeks for it all to be cleaned out and ready to rent to someone new. Where would my toys and schoolwork go? To Goodwill, I thought. Around the corner. Had anyone told Alberta not to pick me up? They had my booster in their car. Who would handle my mother’s clothes and perfumes? It was all spread in bits, like the trash we had left in Salinas, this life rubble. Someone would clean up my toys and another girl would buy my dolls and love them, likely more than I had. Another might trim the plants in the front of the building and find a kabob skewer, use it on a grill. Once it was all cleaned up, and sorted, and sold, and rerouted, the entire history of the life with my mother would be undocumented except on some old cassette tapes that would soon crumble to dust.
56
At the door of their house, before I began my new life, I realized that the beetle and the butterfly had likely been the tickets. Which would mean that I was also a ticket, because one of those was inside me. I had the thought, and then I forgot it.
Behind me, Uncle Stan popped the trunk. He pulled out my bag. “Here we are!” he said. “Your new home!” He fumbled with his keys.
The air was lighter here, hotter, even at night. All the colors different. Lawns of clipped grass blades. The tire swing across the street. I heard footsteps moving down a staircase indoors.
“Francie,” I said, pointing to myself, when Aunt Minn opened the door, the baby in her arms.
PART FIVE
Rose
57
The morning after the sleepover, Vicky and I go to brunch down the street, at a large windowed diner with cutouts of movie scenes under the glass on the tabletops. Seemingly overnight, the weather shifted to a real Southern Californian fall, the dry, crisping heat of October over. There’s a fresh streak of cold in the air, and we’re wearing our sweatshirts and socks.
In the very early morning, Vicky woke up with the sun as I have no curtains, skipped into my room, and found me there, in bed, awake. I had slept a little, in the late hours, after the long visit to the tent, after the return to my bed, and some tears. “You did it!” she crowed. “Francie! You did it!” She crawled into bed with me, knocked again on her skull.
“I’m alive!” she called out, hooting.
She got up to dance around the room, and I watched her, smiling, laughing as she kicked and spun, as she raised my arm high like a welterweight champ, but the memories in the tent had been so concentrated that I had nearly forgotten the original purpose of the visit. Vicky was marching through the hall, singing, and said we had to go celebrate, so we threw on layers and headed out to walk to the diner down the street. She linked her arm in mine. I could feel, on my arm, the full breathing warmth of her.
After we sat down and the waiter took our order, I filled her in a little bit about some of what I remembered—about her father picking me up, about the drive from Union Station to their house, our house. About the steward disappearing into the masses of people, never to be seen again. The details are sad, but she says she can still see that something was helpful over the course of the night, can locate a slightly different look on my face, what she calls a washed-out look, but good washed-out, not like old washed-out. Washed clear, she says. Over her stack of blueberry pancakes, she asks if I had had any desire to hurt her, and I say no, it had been different than I’d expected. “See? See?” she says, waving a forkful of pancake in the air. She asks if I’m done with Jose now, and I laugh and tell her no, of course not. Though I keep to myself how something hard to identify about his purpose may have shifted a little in my mind. I don’t tell her much else about what I remembered—just that there was a man in a suit and a woman in a suit looking for things, and they seemed like they came from another place, or were speaking in another language that was still pretending to be our language, and I hadn’t recalled some of the key details about them until last night with her there, nearby, asleep, and that in some tenuous way they were important to me. “I’ll tell you more later,” I say. “I’m still figuring it out.” She nods, finishes her orange juice. “I slept weirdly well,” she says. “On that brick of a couch.” She beams at me, with her golden-fringed eyes. Her face ready, and happy. Everything about her is a radiant portrait of health, but she is almost the age that can begin to be fragile, the time to watch carefully for those with the genetic load of mental fragility, the heightened era. College. She seems like she will be just fine. I have never allowed myself to worry. I sip my coffee and look out the window.
* * *
—
Once she’s home and settled, and I’ve reinstalled the lock on my bedroom door and chatted with Jose in the hallway about the enjoyment of the morning off, but how we will resume as usual, I go on the computer and for the first time decide to do a search for the name of the babysitter. Not to go see her. Just to consider contacting her. To see if she might remember me. Possibly to thank her. I never ended up visiting her on any of my trips to Portland—her loft was not near my mother’s facility, and I avoided the elementary school entirely because I did not feel like returning. My elementary school class did send me one card/note covered with stickers and balloon drawings, which I looked at for about five minutes over a bag of corn chips in the Burbank kitchen before tossing it into the trash. While online, I also try to locate the steward, but the identifying information I have on him is scarce, and possibly he is St
uart, but that reveals little, and Uncle Stan and his cousin Tony are still not speaking, twenty years later, and I don’t want to get in the middle of any of that. The steward, for the moment, falls into the map and disappears, and from what I can tell, the possible babysitter’s social media identities look to be on private or locked settings.
Only a few objects need wrapping or packing since Vicky helped so much the day before, so with the extra time, I put in a quick call to my mother and ask her how the oldies-but-goodies sing-along went, “well, extremely well!” and hear about her weekend plans with Edward, and how they plan to go early together to the annual Veterans Day parade to cheer on two of the older residents who are walking. When we’re off the phone, I do a bit of online responding to interested buyers and future customers who want to double-check item dimensions and color fidelity. The evening is quiet, including a bowl of pasta and the light cleaning of countertops and windowpanes.
But on Monday morning, early, instead of the tent time, for a change, I put in a call to the elementary school. It is listed under the same name, with the same address, and it is, amazingly, the same head secretary, Mrs. Washington, still pert and warm-voiced, who picks up the phone and does a fairly believable job of claiming she remembers me. I ask if her brother is still driving the train in Atlanta, and she said he retired, but her nephew now paints trains and builds them out of found wood and has an exciting exhibit upcoming in New Orleans. We talk about that for a little while, and then when there’s a pause I explain to her that the reason I’m calling is that I’m doing a small personal history project, a kind of non-family family tree, and does she happen to have any information about a former babysitter of mine named Shrina who had also worked there at the school as a teacher’s aide for some time? I unfortunately do not know her last name. Mrs. Washington, call me Angie, she says, says she might, give her a few minutes and she’ll get back to me shortly, and in an hour returns my call with a list of possible emails. “One of these ought to work,” she says, laughing at my sounds of surprise, “and please, will you send along a hello from me, too? Wasn’t she just terrific?” Then she tells me how I might not even recognize the school now; they painted it a putty color that nobody likes, and revitalized the climbing structures, and the principal is encouraging a new approach to math, which has all the grown-ups scrambling to keep up. “The kids, of course, are fine,” she laughs, again. “But I’ll just be keeping with my columns, thank you very much.”
After we hang up, I stay sitting on the floor for a little while. The carpet is warm from a stretched morning sunspot. Flies buzz against the balcony’s screen.
58
Dear Shrina,
Hello. I don’t know if you remember me, but many years ago you were very helpful at a difficult point in my life. I wanted to thank you for your kindness and help at such a complicated transition. Even though I was having trouble grasping what was going on, I have been thinking a lot about it, and I have these clear memories of your loft, and the vanilla soy milk, and the fringy scarf. You could not have known how comforting it was to me that you had such a clean and functional kitchen sink drying rack. Are you still a teacher? A babysitter? Do you still have Hattie? I hope so, even though I know that’s probably impossible. Maybe Hattie 2? I got your email from Mrs. Washington from the front office, who also sends along a hello. I would love to hear from you if you ever feel comfortable writing back. Thank you again.
Sincerely,
Francie M
59
In those very early morning hours of the sleepover, Vicky came into my room, hooting and laughing.
“You did it!” she crowed, dancing around the room. “I’m alive!”
It is only later, alone, screwing the bolts back into the door, that it occurs to me that the real reason I lock the door might just be because then someone else needs to unlock it.
60
When the roses had arrived under Deena’s curtains, I did not jump right away to remembering the man and the woman in the suits; for whatever reason, they had largely slipped my mind as they’d slipped the train, and I had not been able to picture them clearly again until the arrival of the memory tent and its slow, measured movement through time. Instead, what they had imprinted on my brain was a strong desire to take the train again, and after that appearance of the roses, after Vicky claimed hers, and the trash truck took the rest, I was able to convince my uncle to go with me on a day trip via Amtrak to San Diego via the Surfliner to check out the new chimp exhibit at the famous zoo. My uncle was usually up for adventures and loved the idea, and we had a fine day together at Balboa Park, laughing at the chimps and the bears, riding back with the sunset displaying itself in full magnificence against military beaches and nuclear reactors. Nothing happened on the way there, and as the train moved north, bringing us home, I kept glancing at the separating doors and excusing myself to the bathroom. My uncle asked, joking, if I was expecting anyone, or anything, and I laughed for a second, unsure how to answer. Was I? When we got home, I felt overcome with dissatisfaction and, before bed, went to dig out the purple knapsack from the depths of my closet, pushed to a far corner, full still of word searches and tape recorders. I dug around in the small pocket past the pens and the pen caps to find, once again, the beetle. It was dry, almost calcified. One of its legs had broken off. I slept with it on my nightstand, and in the morning, after breakfast, before Vicky came home from a sleepover, I slipped it into my pocket and walked a few blocks to the corner to take the 183 bus up Magnolia toward the mountains. I rode in the back, and when it seemed like a good moment, dropped the beetle down the side of the seat where it fell, half-hidden by some old paper napkins. No one came by. No suits, no glances. I rode the route for a while until the bus was empty, all the way to the end of the line, and then crossed the street and took another one home.
61
After I send the note to the babysitter, I stay on the computer and make a plan to fly up to see my mother again before the winter holidays. I will be spending the actual break time with Vicky and Aunt Minn and Uncle Stan, but I want to give her that silk scarf I found, and a pair of vintage shell-shaped earrings studded with rhinestones that remind me of the pair she wore long ago at Grandma’s house. I’m on the travel site, booking my reservation, saving my window seat, scheduling the travel back for the same day, as per the usual, when my email application dings. The top line in the inbox lit blue. Reply: Hello! from Shrina L.
I stare at it for a few minutes. Something about it doesn’t look right. I return to the main page, buy the plane ticket, and drag the confirmation email to my “Portland” file.
When I do manage to open the email, the first thing I notice are all the dots from the exclamation marks, like the page is just littered with dots. It is difficult to focus enough to read. She has lived so long and so fully in my memory that it is hard to comprehend that she is also a person in the world, a person capable of receiving an email and replying, ever, not to mention within the hour. She says hello, says she remembers me, of course. That she is so glad to hear from me. She thinks it’s so funny that I remember her fringy scarf. She loved that fringy scarf. She asks me if I stayed in Los Angeles, and how I’m doing, and how my mother is doing, and if I became close to the baby who was born right around that time. It’s too much. I close the computer screen and leave the apartment.
62
Later, in the darkness of the living room, packages mailed, dinner eaten, the rectangular white screen the only light by which to see, I read the rest. The babysitter tells me how she too remembers that weekend so well. That it has had this hold on her memory, too. How I had said I might burn her with a blowtorch, but it was so sad because I was in such a tough situation and I had never been a mean kid. She says she does have a new cat—she’s amazed I remember the name. Hattie died years ago, but he was old and had a happy cat life, and the new one is called Organza and it’s a long story why but it fits her perf
ectly. She says she has often wondered about me and is so very, very glad I wrote. She thanks me many times. She asks me to send on her good wishes to Mrs. Washington, too. She knows everything about that school.
After I read it over a number of times, I press Reply. I type in to Shrina that it is very good to hear from her, too. I tell her that I finished college several years back and am still in Los Angeles, making a living by yard sale purchasing and sending packages through the mail. I tell her my mother is still in a residential facility in Portland, but is doing much better, thank you for asking. I tell her the baby is great, is Vicky, and we get along very well. I compliment her memory. I tell her I too remember saying those frightening things to her, and I apologize. “You apologized at the time!” she writes back, immediately. “You certainly don’t need to apologize now.” Privately, I think that I did not say the blowtorch part, but I don’t add that to the email. We go back and forth a few times, with shorter notes, quicker answers, and then laughing (“haha”), she writes that there is one thing she hasn’t mentioned yet that is important to her, and that I might not believe it but she still has that butterfly lamp for me if I want it—“I don’t know if you’ll remember but you loved this lamp of mine with butterflies all over the shade and we talked about it, and you even asked for it at one point, and I still have it and would be so incredibly pleased if you would accept it as a gift.” I tell her I completely remember, and that is very thoughtful of her, but that I am fine with lamps, that I have a durably well-lit room.
Then, some minutes pass, and I reconsider. “You know, I spoke too soon,” I write her again in the darkness. “I’d love the lamp. Thank you so much for the offer. May I pay you for it?”