As if the sickly man in the room above the stairs was making the light sickly, too.
She noted that the meager light never moved toward the front door only a few feet across from the stairs—through which her mother had made her escape. The dark wood of the front door remained an enigma without the rays of the light, like a slab of cold granite.
A painting grew in Abigail’s mind, perhaps an Edward Hopper.
But the vision also reminded Abigail that the old woman wasn’t good with stairs anymore which was why she’d been given the little room Abigail wanted for her artist’s studio. Nana’s hips were bad.
And the vision reminded her she needed to remember to give her father his meds at eight o’clock. Only forty-five minutes from now.
And Skywalker wasn’t online. No one was. She was bored with World of Warcraft, anyway.
Chapter 13
Abigail sighed and left her computer and walked toward the sun porch off the side of their condo. She deliberately bypassed the dinner dishes that still needed her attention. The sun porch served as a small den, and also as her painting room.
The den was a good room to paint in, plenty of light in the daytime with all the windows, but the kitchen was often noisy and she had trouble concentrating. And at night it could grow cold. Not good for her fingers.
It would have been a better room to paint in if it had doors to close. The double wide entrance connected directly with the family’s other living spaces, which meant she had to paint while they talked and argued, and listened to the other small television in their condo.
That was what she and her mother had fought about this night. She wanted double doors installed so she could close them out. She’d found some French doors at Home Depot that she wanted to use her allowance to help pay for.
How could she concentrate on her paintings with all the noise only a few feet away.
Anger rose in her child’s breast again.
Her mother said she couldn’t shut herself away from her dad. She needed to be able to hear him call if he needed anything.
It wasn’t fair. Her whole life wasn’t fair.
And from the disappointing discussion of the doors they had moved as usual to her repeated desire to join the other neighborhood girls at the elementary school just around the corner.
Nana should get the hip surgery so she could go live by herself. Then they’d have more room.
Using both hands, she pulled her skimpy dishwater blond hair behind to the nape of her neck and secured it with the hair band on her wrist.
She threw the wall switch and a bank of lights her mother had recently installed bathed the den in a smooth glow. As if the lights had infused it with life, her partially completed painting jumped out of the darkness at her. Whites and lavenders and greens danced on the canvas in excitement like little puppies happy to see their mistress. She smiled.
She would finish the lily tonight.
She didn’t want to be Georgia O’Keeffe, but she knew she could learn much from the female American artist’s style of painting. So she was reproducing another of O’Keeffe’s most famous works, using different colors and a coarser brush, even a palette knife in some places to smooth the background. An O’Keeffe knockoff, but with Abigail Pustovoytenko-Beardsley twists.
What she loved most about the American artist was her abstract representations of flowers. O’Keeffe managed to paint flowers as if they were music for the eyes. Abigail reached for her headphones and secured them to her ears. Tonight she would paint lilies like Mozart.
The Mozart’s baroque fugue flowed into her ears, trying to still her angry thoughts. Only occasionally did her mind return to the evening’s argument.
Nana liked to remind Abigail that life was never fair. That Abigail had the best childhood in the world. That she was born in America, the greatest country in the world. Homeschooling was the price Abigail paid to be an American to Nana’s way of thinking.
But how was she an American if she wasn’t allowed to attend American schools?
Abigail suddenly realized she’d made the stamen too orange. Now she had two reasons to be angry.
She sat back on her stool and breathed deeply, listening to Mozart’s reasoned rhythm. Then she scraped her mistake off the canvas with her palette knife so she could begin again. But her mind took her elsewhere.
Gloria thought public schools were incubators to raise the devil’s spawn. Nana had said something in her backwards words that Abigail didn’t catch, but to which Gloria nodded her head in agreement. It only made Abigail angrier.
They didn’t trust anything American. Shopping malls. Public parks. Libraries, for crying out loud.
Her mother Gloria hadn’t arrived in America until she was almost an adult, so she was as foreign in her thinking as Nana, who’d lived her first sixty years in the old country.
She picked up her paintbrush again, softened the orange paint, took another deep breath and finally slipped into the Elysium that only creative people could enter while here on earth.
Hours later, she placed her brush down. She was never completely happy with her work. It should be better. It should be more, more…Georgia.
But it wasn’t bad.
Her mother had forbid her to throw any of her works away, threatening to take her headset away if she did, threatening to ban television entirely from the house, threatening…well, everything that made life worth living. So she accepted the level of work she was doing, and began to clean up, piling things up neatly into a pyramid. With stairs.
Stairs.
She looked at her watch, her heart leaping into her throat. Ten! She was two hours late with his medicine!
She raced from the den, scampered through the kitchen and passed her grandmother’s now closed bedroom door. She took the stairs two at a time.
“Dad! I’m here dad!” Oh no, she’d forgotten the meds, they were still downstairs.
But the thought was driven forcefully from her mind by the hideous view before her. Sprawled on the floor on his back, her father was motionless, his eyes half open, his face blue.
She’d killed him! Her painting had killed him! She raced to his side, now terrified.
“Daddy! Daddy!” She lifted his wrist and took his pulse as her nurse mother had taught her. She couldn’t find it!
But he was still warm and she leaned forward and felt for his breath with her cheek. A pale breeze stirred the small hairs on her face.
“I’ll get your meds!”
But how would she get the insulin pill down his throat?
“Yakyy ye tse?”
What is it?
Abigail screamed at her grandmother as she raced back down the stairs for his medicine.
“Call her. Call mom! He’s dying.”
She found them and started back up the stairs.
Her Nana might not understand her!
Completely panicked now, Abigail began to wail as she knelt beside him and forced the small pill between his clenched jaws.
It wasn’t going down, it wasn’t going down.
She’d killed him!
Finally, she remembered what her mother had taught her about CPR, and she began pounding on his chest and breathing for him--his fetid breath a poisonous accusation of her crime.
It took forever for the ambulance to arrive. It took forever for them to finish what she had started and reclaim her father from the terrible grip of Death.
It would take years for little Abigail to make peace with her terrible mistake.
Chapter 14
Wisdom stood attentively listening to his brothers the wolves. They were telling him to liberate himself, give up the soft life, roam wild and free over the hills.
He was giving the idea his full consideration.
I was feeling sad, for the wolves who no longer roamed freely and for Wisdom whose ancestors had joined us in the cave long ago. My German shepherd Wisdom wasn’t healthy.
He was on the back deck of our Escondido home watching the e
astern darkness swallow the western twilight. I stood a few feet behind him, observing his deliberations--waiting for him to make his choice, and sipping a hot cup of tea. I knew whatever he decided, I’d go with it. He was my beloved pet but his life was his own, especially now.
My Wisdom-watching had been tinged with melancholy for close to a year. Our beloved pet now carried his death on his nose, a growing lump of bone cancer just beneath his left eye, which was wedging itself further into his nasal passages with every passing day.
We’d seen the vet; the choices were ugly.
Wisdom was ten years old and we couldn’t bear to see him suffer through human medical care for cancer. Our choice was to make his final months the best we could. We take him out for an ice cream cone a couple of times a week and continue his daily walks. I’ve always spoiled my dog with fresh protein with every meal, but now I was probably overdoing it. Why not?
He stopped his deliberations to briefly scratch at his ear. He glanced back at me long enough to tell me he knew I was there then returned to his vigil.
I guess he’d decided to stay with us. Besides, the wolves were in the San Diego Wild Animal Park around the corner, not exactly free.
A cool breeze hurried the change from light to dark, moving a couple of clouds over the setting sun.
Matt and I had purchased our Escondido upside-down, two-story house back in ‘eighty-three, when he did a three-year stint at Camp Pendleton Marine Base. I say upside down because our house is built into a hill and the main living areas are upstairs. The downstairs, a walkout basement, holds an extra bedroom and a large game room our three boys used to play in.
Back when we first bought the house, then Major Matthew Lyons had worked in the First Marine Division Headquarters. Our three boys were young then, attending elementary school. Thankfully we’d kept the house when we were sent off to another duty station. We knew we would miss Southern California when we left and that this was where we wanted to end up after he retired.
Now our sons are married and have children of their own and their families are scattered across America living in three different states.
I wished my grandchildren lived two houses over, but we visit them every chance we get, and they return to the California of their childhoods whenever they can.
The best part of our eighties-style hillside home is that it sits on an acre of precious California land and is pretty much surrounded by redwood decks.
My dog and I often listened to the wild conversations from the Park while waiting for Matt. Just last night we’d heard the zebras having a quarrel with the giraffes--probably over territory.
Wasn’t it always over territory?
“Hi. How’s our boy doing?”
I turned and kissed my man and said, “How was your day?”
Wisdom rushed to greet his master. It was a guy thing. Well, come to think of it, it was a gal thing, too. We both cheered up when Matt arrived.
“Good. What’s for dinner?”
I smiled. “I thought Chateaubriand would be nice, with a side of radicchio-pasta salad served with mustard dressing and topped with fresh ground black pepper. And I thought we could finish off last night’s bottle of D’Alessadro Syrah, you know the Italian red?”
“We didn’t have an Italian red last night. We had a fine Two Buck Chuck cab, as usual. But tell me we’re having the Chateaubriand and radicchio-pasta salad and I’ll settle.”
“How about a juicy steak, salad-in-a-bag and a baked potato for you?”
“Sounds more like something I can afford. Anymore sneezes?”
“No, but he hasn’t eaten his dinner yet. I think it’s hurting him. He doesn’t howl as much anymore either.”
He nodded his head. Wisdom had returned to his vigil. “But he’s still listening.”
Matt and I moved toward the open sliding door arm in arm.
“Start the grill while I take a quick shower.”
“Sure.”
We share our nightly kitchen chores, but since the kitchen wasn’t spacious we split the workload. I defrosted, Matt cooked, and I cleaned.
After thirty years of cooking for a family dominated by kids’ taste buds I’d lost my sense of chef. And in the end, I’d been reduced to a short order cook.
One night I came home exhausted from my work at the library and took a look at my husband stretched out on the couch--Matt was already retired, the kids out of the house--and I said, “If you want to eat tonight, you can get up and cook.”
Astonishingly, he did. And I took his place on the couch and promptly fell asleep. Thirty minutes later he woke me for a delicious meal and he’s been Chef Matthew ever since.
Who knew?
That had been back in North Carolina, our final duty station. And it had been another of those cataclysmic moments in life where you realize you’ve been living by the wrong rules, someone else’s rules.
And now we were back in California and living in the house we’d bought years ago--on our second tour of duty here--and kept as a rental.
Matt never overcooked the meat, he made the best tossed salads in the world, and he was into presentation, an important skill that cooking for kids on the go didn’t allow me to develop. Most nights now I feel as if I’m eating at a fine restaurant.
He took a sip of fine cab and said, “What happened at the school today?”
I brought him up to speed, including the mess at the park. I let him know the boy at the park was found by the police alive and badly bruised. He was treated at a local clinic and released to his parents.
“They’re probably gang members, too.”
“Who?”
“The parents. Did you attend the memorial service?”
“You mean the Grieving Rally?”
He looked at me questioningly.
“They renamed it a Grieving Rally, I think because the planned pep rally for this weekend’s football game had been canceled and they didn’t know what else to do with all the scantily clad cheerleaders roaming the halls.”
“Isn’t it cold up there by now?”
He was referring to the fact that Cleveland County was a mile high.
“Yes, especially in the late afternoon. I sure didn’t jump around in a bikini when I was a cheerleader in high school.”
He smiled that smile. Really more like a leer. I’d sprouted a vision in his head.
I took a bite of salad, and a sip of red.
“To answer your question, no, I didn’t attend it. After retrieving Abigail I came home and brought us up to speed with some paperwork. Later I listened to the news, and according to channel eight, school authorities decided the word service would have been a violation of the separation of church and state. I can’t tell you if the cheerleaders cheered or prayed.”
He shook his head, a gesture of disgust.
Wisdom nudged my leg, urging me not to eat all my steak. Of course I wouldn’t. I would put some of it on top of his dinner to encourage him to eat.
But Matt was back at the cheerleaders.
“Scantily clad, huh? Maybe we should attend some of the games this year.”
“It’s a long drive.” Cleveland County was east of us. We could see the plateau from our back deck.
“Could be worth it.”
Wisdom slumped to the ground with a disapproving groan. “I concur, Wisdom. He’s a rude lout.”
“So you haven’t heard any more from Gloria.”
“Not yet. But I’m afraid we probably will.”
Which was when the phone rang.
Chapter 15
I swallowed a last bite of salad and reluctantly rose to stifle the mechanical scream in the kitchen. I stepped onto the kitchen porch, holding the phone to my ear.
“Rachel, she’s out of her mind…”
At least I thought that’s what she said. Gloria Pustovoytenko’s accent was as thick as Ukrainian barley pudding. I’d been hoping it was one of my three daughter-in-laws. Or maybe even a son.
“Hello, Glori
a.”
“She won’t listen to reason. She told me she going back to school again Monday. What can we do?”
We? I turned it around. The way it really was.
“What do you think you can do, Gloria? You and Abigail.”
“I don’t know, I don’t…but…she even started talking about how I left Ukraine, ran away when I was young. She’s threatening to run away now? She’s a baby. She’s thirteen! She doesn’t know a thing about the world. Besides, I was almost legal when I found my way to America!”
So my attempt to connect mom and daughter had backfired. Wonderful.
“Did she actually talk about running away, Gloria?”
“No. But she meant that.”
Gloria continued to complain while I tried to get her to focus on why she felt so strongly about public schools.
“They’re violent! The teachers unions have ruined them. Any loser can get a teaching job and keep it forever no matter what they do wrong. The kids are exposed to drugs…sex, you name it. I remember school in Ukraine. I remember the thugs who used to roam our halls. Only they were called party members. Here, they are gang members. There’s no damn difference.
“I’m scared, Rachel, I’m afraid she’ll run off…like I did. But she won’t end up in a beautiful America, she’ll end up in a….”
“She won’t. She won’t leave her art, Gloria. Children who hit the streets are running away from a dangerous situation. Your family is loving….”
I was hoping to calm her using gentle words.
“Yes. But Abigail is even more headstrong than I was.”
Probably not.
“Isn’t it mostly talk, now?” I suggested.
“She wasn’t here again today when I got home. I called Jeannette, the mom she was supposed to be with, and she told me Abigail never made it to her house. What happened? All my mother will say is she was meeting you for the grief…what do they call it? A…grief rally? What is that?”
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