by Lisa Rusczyk
CLEO
My father’s mother was dead before I was born, and my father’s father had Alzheimer’s and was living in a retirement home for people in such a condition. I never met him. My mother thought it would be too upsetting for us children, and my dad said since my grandfather wouldn’t remember us anyway, there wasn’t any point. I never knew where he stayed or even if or when he died. My father had no other family.
My parents also told us that Mother’s parents lived in Alabama, and that was just too far to go back to for a visit. Mother got a letter from her mother once a month, but she would never read us any of it except for the part that said, “Tell your two little girls Cleopatra and Joan that we love them and can’t wait to meet them.” She said it exactly that way every time. What they told us was that Mother’s brother had been a veterinarian, her sister had moved up north, and that her parents had family money, but we didn’t know what that meant.
Out in Nebraska, family money meant having land that was passed down through the generations. Mother had many cousins and all of them were Aunts and Uncles to us who sent us presents at Christmas. My relatives were names with ribbons and bows for faces. Aunt Savannah always sent me my favorite gifts. When I was ten she sent me a box turtle in a glass terrarium, which Mother made me keep in the barn. Then when I was twelve, she sent me a pair of red, sparkling panties, and the next year she gave me a flute. For four months I ran all around outside with my flute in one hand, piping out little trills and screeches, until one day it disappeared as so many things do when you’re on the border of childhood and being an adult. I wondered about my aunt every year, asking Mother what she looked like and how she acted. Mother said Savannah was her sister, and that she had long, blonde hair and big thighs. She said that with a smile as though she meant to say, “Thighs bigger than mine,” and that Savannah could somehow hear her and not be able to lash back at her. This was something Barbie and I appreciated, as we had a way of letting unflattering words fly out when one of us was irritated with the other.
“Barbie, you spend so long in the bathroom. What are you doing, soaking your butt in the toilet water?”
“I’m looking at how straight my hair is. I could do anything with it!”
“Toilet butt! Toilet butt!”
“Girls, knock it off,” from Mother on a Monday morning.
As I was saying, after Dad’s death, I worked all the time, and Cecil joined me after school and on weekends. Barbie did as best she could, but our father’s death changed her and she would cry suddenly, with little warning. Her cheeks would look like they’d just been pinched by a lobster, with little red slashes curving along her cheekbone, and her eyes would gray over. She’d almost always say, “It’s just not fair,” and run into the kennel, or her bedroom when home, crying. Cecil went after her the first couple times it happened at the clinic, and so did Mother when she did it at home. Barbie didn’t want help; she would throw things until everybody was out of her sight. Later, she would apologize as though the world owed it to her instead. She sniffed each time, and said, “Some things can’t be helped, like Dad’s death.”
I thought she was selfish until I heard the news that Patrick had died over seas. It was Cecil who told me when the three of us were closing down the clinic one day during the summer. Barbie was organizing the books as Cecil and I fed two dogs in the kennel. The kennel always had such a specific smell, much like I imagined a jungle or thick forest would have. Cecil asked me to sit with him for a moment out back by the horse stalls, and I had a funny feeling, like he was going to ask me to marry him. Instead, we sat on a bench and Cecil looked me in the eyes with his chin tilted down and said, “Patrick Downes is dead.” He told me that he heard it earlier that morning from one of Patrick’s brothers. “There was an ambush…that’s what he told me.” He took my hands.
“Why are you telling me this?” I didn’t believe him.
He said, “I thought you would want to hear it from someone who knows you.”
It couldn’t be true, I thought. Then Cecil told me Patrick’s older brother had died as well, in the same battle.
For a moment I blamed Cecil for telling me. “Where do you come up with these lies?”
He shook his head and looked at our hands. “I’m sorry, Cleo. I know how you felt…about him.”
When I told Barbie and Mother that night after dinner, of which I did not eat a bite, Barbie cried and ran out of the room. Mother sat quietly, looking at her tea glass, and then she wrapped her thin, pointed fingers around the bottom of the glass. She said, “Cleo, you should go comfort your sister.”
And I wanted to say, “Who’s going to comfort me?”
Barbie threw her hair brush at me when I walked into her room, then as I tried to escape the comb coming after it, she put down her arm and squealed, “Cleo, it’s just not fair,” and she ran to me and all her weight wrapped around my shoulders as her arms latched there. She was as stiff as a dead beetle on a winter sidewalk.
She moaned, “What are we going to do?”
It was a week later that the IRS man came to the clinic. He asked to see my father. I said he was dead. He handed me some papers and said, “Your father has not paid his taxes in seventeen years. This clinic is closed.” He looked to Barbie sitting behind the desk, and said, “Who’s running this place?”
Neither of us said a word.
Mother was instantly concerned when we came home so early from work. It was only two o’clock, and none of us spoke as Cecil drove us home, except when Barbie asked, “What does it mean?”
Mother dropped her tea glass when we told her, but she did not act surprised. She covered her face with her hands and then stuck her arms out like a child wanting to be picked up. “Let them have it all!” She went into the kitchen and we heard her pick up the phone. The two of us stood still as we heard her say, “Daddy? I’m coming home.”
I don’t like talking about money. I never have and I never will. Much legal nonsense happened and we left all our belongings that we couldn’t carry with us behind. Mother took responsibility for everything, as far as I know, and I left with but one phone call goodbye to Cecil a week later. He said he would come visit me, he said a lot of things, but I didn’t listen. Things like, that I could stay there with him if I wanted, and that none of this was my fault.
The day before we left I made one visit, but it wasn’t to say goodbye. I borrowed the car without permission, though I still didn’t have my license, and I drove to the Downes’ little farmhouse. My cheeks were red the whole time, and I intended to blast the wicked man who would send his boys out to war for a few bucks, for that is what I felt was his motivation. I pulled to the end of the drive. Two little boys were playing with toys in the yard, and they looked at me without much interest. I wondered if they were younger brothers of Patrick’s that I had never heard of. Their faces were dirty and the front of the house mirrored them, with white paint that looked as though it had been living in the sewers rather than out in the sun and fields. One of the windows over the garage was broken out.
As I got out of my car and started walking to the front door, one of the boys yelled, “Whatcha want?”
“Where’s Mr. Downes?”
“Mom’s home. Go to the back door.” They looked so somber to me, those little boys, like monks who had never known anything but the monastery. I walked around to the back, sidestepping the bristly weeds and overgrown rose bushes that had gone wild. The back door was only a screen door, with nothing solid to back it up. So, I thought, so what if it’s his mother. Surely she let it happen as much as his father had. She could have saved her two boys’ lives. I knocked to no answer, and I called into the screen, “Hello?”
I heard a throaty woman’s voice, the kind of voice you’d expect from someone in the middle ages whose title was, “Barmaid,” say, “Leave me alone. What do you want?”
I took a step back as the smell of stale popcorn drifted out the door. My voice had weakened, but my anger had not, so I said, “I’m here
about Patrick.”
“Patrick’s dead.” But the voice had softened. I waited a minute, and heard, “Are you still there?”
“Yes.”
I heard the sound of a recliner being set back in to sitting position, and I saw the silhouette of a round woman coming into the kitchen. She opened the screen door and stood with it resting on her hip. Her hair was dyed red and it hung in big, oily, red curls that had obviously been set three days earlier. She lit a cigarette and looked at me, hazel eyes squinting in the sun. I took another step back.
She said, “I didn’t know Pat had any girlfriends. He’s dead, you know.”
“I know.” I took a deep breath, but held it when I saw the woman’s left arm. I could see a perfect hand print of a bruise around her upper arm, just barely disappearing into the sleeve of her old, white blouse.
She said, “We had him buried in Philly, wanted him and his brother’s memories to stay with the family. So there’s no grave for you.”
I shook my head and let out my breath.
“Oh,” she said, “There’s no body though. Not for Patrick. I guess he was blown…” Then she stopped and her face turned stiff like stone and she looked down to my shoes.
I looked at the bruise again and, yes, there were definitely finger marks. She looked back up at me, saw me examining her arm, and she tugged her sleeve down. “Well, go on, then. Say a prayer for our boys, will you?” She let the door drop closed and she left my vision. I could feel her watching me, though, as I made my way back to the car.
One of the little boys called out to me as I opened my driver’s door, “Is she still mad?”
“I don’t know,” I answered them, and I drove off.