“Yeah, I figured.”
I hung up and heard the first crash. Broken glass. I ran to the kitchen door and listened, my heart pounding in my throat. Another crash. I told Brandy to stay in and I cautiously walked up to the road toward the sound. I heard a gasp like someone was about to start screaming or sobbing. Preston. Then another crash. The Volare came into view, parked as usual in front of the carport. Preston was standing in front of it, a big rock from the woods over his head. He whipped it hard with both hands just as I came around the corner and it smashed into the windshield. Glass flew. The windshield was shattered in two places. I watched. My brother had tears streaming down his wet face. The sky over him was clear blue. The trees were towering and fully green, leaves shining in the sunlight. “Why Live In God’s Country Without God?” I thought to myself. My brother’s hands were meant for writing. He had slender fine-boned fingers. His hand gestures were expressive and intelligent. He was no football player, even though he’d been a good one. He was no fighter. The heavy rocks in his hands, the shattering of glass. His face was full of tenderhearted pain over love for his father. I knew Preston loved Dad a lot. Honestly, Preston loved Mom a lot too. Preston loved them both, and understood them both, and was hurt by them so much more than I was.
“Come on Sid, get a rock.” Preston smiled through his tear-stained anguish.
I smiled. I went to the edge of the woods and saw that back when the road was made bigger they’d left small piles of rocks along the edge. I picked up a rock and threw it toward the car but it didn’t even reach the car much less damage it.
“Oh my God, Sidney. That’s pathetic. Get your arm into it.”
I smiled again. I picked a smaller rock that was more comfortable for throwing. I hurled it. It landed on the front hood with a thud.
“Come on kid sis! I’ll show you how it’s done.”
My brother chose a rock the size of a softball and pitched it hard. Glass flew everywhere.
“Geez Preston, I’m gonna have to drive this thing to the airport you know!”
He moved around to the back, picked up more rocks and pulverized the rearview mirror on the passenger side. I was sort of laughing. He was crying and laughing.
I went back inside because I didn’t want Brandy to be scared. Brandy sat on my lap in the big chair with the duck-print fabric. I patted his big head and he licked my hand. We listened to the sound of glass breaking and metal getting pounded and every so often, a sob.
That night Jay showed up in his trusty pickup truck. He came down to the cabin door with astonishment on his face.
“What the hell happened? Are you guys nuts?”
Preston just looked at Jay and shrugged. I said nothing.
Preston rode with me and we followed Jay in his truck all the way to the Hibbing airport about fifty miles away. Preston helped me brush the broken glass off the front seat and the dashboard, but once we got going, little bits of glass kept hitting us in our faces as we drove. Good thing it was summer, but it was still pretty chilly with the wind right in our faces. I kept slowing down and Jay was patient and went slow too. A few times we hit a cloud of tiny bugs and we both held our breath and squinted so we wouldn’t get them up our noses or in our mouths or eyes. The drive took forever because I was afraid to go any faster than about thirty-five miles an hour.
When we finally made it to the airport, we chose a spot for the Volare pretty far away from the front entrance, hoping no one would notice what shape the car was in. I went inside and asked the night clerk if he knew I was dropping off a car. He said he did so I gave him the keys and told him it was parked out front. That went better than I expected.
I came back out and Preston and Jay were just looking at the car and laughing. I felt bad. I didn’t want to even look at the car.
“Let’s go, you guys.”
Two days later our dad called and I answered.
He was really mad. He immediately asked, “Do you know anything about how that car got vandalized? Where did you park it? Was it okay when you dropped it off?”
“What? Yeah. What are you talking about?”
“The people from the rental agency went to get the car and found it smashed. The stereo ripped out, the leather seats all slashed. Would your stupid hick friends do something like that?”
“No Dad. I don’t know what happened. I guess we shouldn’t have left it there.”
“God damn it.”
When Preston got back from raking the resort beach that morning, I told him about the additional damage. He was almost disappointed, “Geez. That’s pretty funny. So what we did looked like nothing compared to what somebody else did.”
“Do you think Dad will have to pay for it?”
“What? No way. He doesn’t even care. The car company has to take it on the chin because we dropped it off just like we were supposed to.”
“Okay.”
“God, Sid. It’s not exactly a good time to start feeling sorry for Dad. Have you heard from Mom since she got down there?”
“No.”
Later that day I went down to the dock to swim before I had to go back to the lodge. I had the old red truck to drive so I went back and forth easily, not having to walk the three miles, not having to wait for Mom to pick me up. From down on the dock I heard the phone ringing. It hung up and started up again. There it was again. Someone was trying to get us to answer. I ran up the old stone steps, ran up through the grassy path in the yard and slapped open the screen door. I ran to the phone and answered a breathless, “Hello?”
“Sidney, it’s Mother.”
“Hi Mom! How’s it going?”
Soft crying on the other end.
“Mom? What’s happening?”
“I went to the house. It was all locked up. The locks weren’t the same. My key didn’t work in the front door. I tried to look in the front window. There were price tags on everything. Oh God. Oh God. It’s so terrible. Oh God … ”
“Mom, what are you saying? Who did that?”
“My lawyer says this is what he was afraid of. Don has either put the house up for sale and is selling everything in it, or the bank has taken it and they are doing this. I don’t know. The lawyer can’t get a hold of your father. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if he’s living at the house.”
“Okay, well what should we do?”
“You? You are not having to deal with this. You’re up there at that beautiful cabin. What are you saying, you? You aren’t down here having to sneak around your own home. You have no idea what I’m going through, no idea … ”
“Mom, okay. Okay Mom. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t know what I’ve been through the past few days! I thought I’d be able to get in the house and that I was to sleep there to reclaim my half-ownership. But with the doors all locked I didn’t know what to do. I took the city bus out from Aunt Evie’s apartment. I walked over to the park and just sat on a bench and cried. I didn’t know what to do. Then I thought, ‘no this is foolish. This is my home! I’ve lived there for ten years!’
“I walked back and I took one of those nice white stones we have that lines the landscaping in the front, remember what they’re like? They’re pretty big. I picked one up and I smashed through one side of the picture window! I couldn’t believe what I was doing! It was so awful. The glass flew everywhere inside onto the carpet. I climbed through and I saw that the carpet was ruined anyway. Everything looked terrible. There are price tags on all the furniture and the paintings … my paintings I chose so lovingly for my beautiful home! Oh, it’s a nightmare!”
I listened to my mother sobbing her innocent girlish sob. I was broken-hearted for her and myself. Everything inside me hurt for us. I wanted to turn off and disconnect and be completely done with my parents and their tugging on my heart. Why was I always feeling for them, thinking of their plight, considering their circumstances? When had the tables turned? When did they stop doing that for me? Had they ever done that for me?
She was still talking, “And poor Aunt Evelyn has had such a terrible time. I don’t know if she can take this at her age. I’ve been sleeping on the floor, and you know how tiny her apartment is. She answered the phone one night and it was Don. You know she always liked him so much, even when we were dating she always liked him. And he started yelling at her on the phone and she just couldn’t take it. She broke down in tears. Her health isn’t good and she shouldn’t have to be going through this. She is worried Preston won’t be able to finish college.”
“Yeah, well he says he can get loans since it’s only for the one last year. Tell Aunt Evie that, Mom.”
My mother and I somehow wrapped up the conversation and she said she’d call again when she knew more about the house.
I came in the cabin one morning after my early shift. It was Saturday so I had peeled the potatoes at six and then cleaned with Jeannie until ten. I was planning to take off my denim skirt, T-shirt and running shoes uniform and put on my bikini for a swim in the lake. When I got to the bathroom, it was occupied. “Preston, how long you gonna be in there?”
“What? All day it looks like.”
“What? Why?”
“I got a problem with my butt and Mom says I have to soak in a tub of Epsom salts.”
“How am I supposed to go to the bathroom?”
“I don’t care. Go outside.”
“Outside? What if somebody comes?”
“Just go outside. Nobody’s coming. My asshole is falling out and I gotta sit here in privacy. I got like a serious plumbing problem. Mom says it’s stress related. God is testing us sister Sid.”
“God, Preston.”
“What? This is a fucking disaster! I can hardly walk, much less do all the stuff they want me to do down there. Those people are crazy. They want me to do the work of like five guys every day. They’re killing me.”
“Did you tell them you can’t do that much? Tell them you’re getting sick from it?”
“I can’t tell them that. They think we’re spoiled kids. I think they’re making me work extra hard. I swear to God they have something against us. Maybe it’s from the years when Dad came up here with his Jaguar and his big cigars.”
“Probably.”
“Yeah, probably.”
I went outside and peed around the back of the woodpile where Brandy liked to poop so nobody could watch him.
THE UNRAVELING
Another phone call from Mom. “Oh Sidney, I’m afraid it’s all bad news. The lawyers told me I had to get over to the house myself with papers that proved that they could not go ahead with the bank’s liquidation of our property. There was an estate sale going on. Our home! Everything in it! There was a rude woman at a table in the front, on the driveway and our own neighbors, those people! How could they do it? They were buying our things! Carrying things out and walking right past me! They wouldn’t even talk to me. I was pleading, begging them, ‘please, they don’t have a right to do this, please stop.’ They walked right past me with my beautiful paintings, the horse sculpture, the lamps from the family room. I remember when we bought those brass lamps and how your father thought they were so terrific. How could he let this happen to his family? I told him! I told him! I was begging! Oh God, I shook the papers in front of that woman’s face and she said she didn’t know anything about it and I ran into the house. I got on our phone, as people were just swarming the place looking at all our things. I called the police and told them they had to help me. They came and stopped the sale but by then so much had been taken already. I just collapsed in the driveway and cried. Oh Sidney, your toys, your beautiful doll from Italy that your grandmother brought back for you.”
“Did they take my bike?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see that. Is that all you care about? Your bike? Your mother is telling you of this ordeal I’ve just been through and all you can think of is your bicycle?”
“Do you think we’ll get the house back?”
“I don’t think so, no. Sidney, don’t you think I’d give anything, anything to be back in my beautiful home again?”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I really am. Preston and I have been talking about what we should do and everything. Do you think we can find out what’s still in the house? Preston wants his winter coat. And he told me I can have his down coat and down vest if you can bring them up.”
“Bring them up? What do you think I’m doing down here? I am not going to be back up any time soon. Sidney, you need to get realistic.”
“Realistic? Mom, I’m seventeen years old. You’re telling me we have no home there any more. What am I supposed to do? The summer’s almost over.”
“I don’t know. Aunt Evie is falling apart over this. I’ve been crying in her apartment sleeping on the floor every night. She can’t take this. I have no idea what you’re going to do.”
After that conversation, I saw my future differently. Everything felt strange. Bad strange and, surprisingly, good strange. I felt like everything around me was tingling with possibility. I wasn’t sure where this was all leading but I felt excited. The air was getting cooler. In the mornings, as August progressed, there was a real chill in the air. Some days it stayed very cool and Preston made a fire in the fireplace at the cabin. There was a big woodpile, some of the wood very old, some of it newer from fallen trees that Mom had paid local people to split and stack. The cabin had an old furnace under the floorboards, sitting on cement blocks on the dirt. It had no cellar, and was built on footings on sloping land. At its tallest, the space under the cabin, where I had seen Dad crawl in to fix the pump, was about five feet. That was on the side that faced the lake. On the low side where the cabin faced the road, the floorboards were just about right at the level of the bare ground. The furnace was nestled in there near the lakeside, an old oil-burning thing, with an oil tank. Preston was telling me things about the cabin that we had never thought about before.
“Sid, I’m leaving soon. I got my loan money, you knew that, right? I’m heading back to finish college. I have to. You could maybe come with me and stay in my room. That’d be kind of cool. What a dude you’d be if you were like a stowaway in your big brother’s dorm room at college.”
“Yeah, that’d be cool. But I have to finish high school.”
“Mom says you can take the bus to Chicago and stay with Aunt Evie.”
“What? When did she say that? She didn’t tell me that.”
“Well, she probably thinks you’ll flip out.”
“Yeah well she’s right. Where am I supposed to go to school then?”
“There’s a high school right across the street! Remember?”
“That’s a city school. I’m supposed to go there where I know no one? Those kids will probably hate my guts because I’m from the suburbs. I’d get beaten up for sure. I transfer there and then what? Mom and I both sleeping on the floor in Aunt Evie’s one-bedroom apartment? Forget it.”
“This is why she didn’t tell you. Her other idea is to get an apartment near your school, near our house, well our old house, and the two of you live there and she’d get a job to pay the rent. And you could finish at your same school.”
“I’m not living with her. I hate her. She’s a pathetic whiner. I am not telling people there about this whole thing. They bought our stuff out of our house! They probably know that Dad has screwed us over. I’m not going back there and answering all their nosy questions. And what about this whole Seymour Hoffman thing? Where is he in all this?”
“I don’t know about him. No idea. Maybe Mom’s fucking him. I have no idea. I don’t see why she’d want to, except if he’s got some serious dough holed up someplace. He’s old. He’s like a World War II veteran. He’s fucking old.”
“Gross. I don’t want to see any of them or any of their crap.”
“Wow. Sounds like you’re taking a stand.”
“Yeah. I guess I am. Didn’t Grandpa die up here? I can stay up here until I die too. Grandpa stayed up here all winter, right?”
“Yeah, but he died doing it.”
“No, he lived up here for a few winters, not just the one when he died.”
“True. Three winters. But by the third one, he keeled over in the snow.”
“Okay well I wouldn’t have to stay forever. I could stay this one winter.”
“You could try applying to go to the school in town. There’s a high school. We drive by it. That old brick building. That’s their high school. There’s probably a school bus that comes out to get the kids who live on the lake.”
“You think there are other kids living out here who go to high school there, really?”
“Yeah I’m sure of it. Let’s go to town and see about signing you up. You could graduate with their senior class next spring. That would be a badass move sister Sid. Incredibly badass move.”
Preston rode into town with me and I went into the old high school building. There was a light on in the office. To my surprise there was a cheerful-looking man in a black suit with white shirt and nondescript tie, spectacled and balding, talking to a middle-aged woman in nice office attire, seated at a desk in the center of the room. They looked at me with kindly interest and surprise.
“Hello,” I said, “sorry to interrupt.”
The man spoke, “No, not at all. What can we do for you?”
“I wanted to inquire about attending school here this fall.”
They both raised their eyebrows simultaneously.
“The school year is starting up in about ten days.”
They looked at me with very serious faces. I didn’t flinch. I thought they could see that I was determined.
“You’d have to really get on it. I can give you all the forms to fill out and we’ll have to have your parents’ signatures if you’re under eighteen.”
“I’ll be eighteen in February.”
“So what grade do you think you’d be in?”
“I know for sure I’m starting my senior year. I only have one year to go.”
“We’d have to request your transcripts from your previous school then. If you fill out the forms and everything looks okay, I can get on the phone with your old school and get everything squared away. But you’d have to get right on it.”
A Girl Called Sidney Page 15