by Lael Littke
Bryan and I waited until everybody was more or less in a cake-overload coma before we mentioned it. Then we told Grandpa we had something to show him outside.
“What would that be?” he asked, poised in front of an easy chair, ready to sink down and nurse his sore foot.
“Come and see,” I said. “It might be important.”
“Must be, if it can't wait till after all that cake settles,” Grandpa grumbled.
But he came with us. Nobody else had heard what we'd said to him, so nobody followed us as we went outside, although Mom gave us a curious glance. Dad was standing by the refrigerator talking to Tyler, and Keith and Lex were picking the last crumbs from Mom's fancy footed cake plate.
Outside, I took the bottle from among the fern fronds where we'd left it. “Grandpa,” I said, handing it to him, “Bryan found this in the hole in the old box elder tree by the spring. We thought it might be important.”
Grandpa took it, silently turning it over and over in his hands. He peered at the gunk in the bottom, then looked down into the open top, but he made no move to extract the rolled-up paper inside.
“In the tree, you say?” he asked after a few moments. “By the spring?”
Bryan nodded. “Yes, sir. I reached way back in the hole and found an opening that led to a space underneath. The bottle was down there.”
“Oh, my,” Grandpa whispered. “Oh, my.”
Again he silently examined the bottle.
“We thought it might be…” I hesitated to say what it might be. Suddenly it seemed almost a cruel thing to bring it to Grandpa. If it was indeed a note from Selena Marie, that would prove she had run away from him all those years ago. That might be harder for him to face than not knowing what had happened to her.
No, how could it? Wouldn't it be better if she were alive, anywhere, than if she were dead? Wouldn't he be happy to find out she was living somewhere, like the Russos were happy that I was alive even if I was lost to them?
Was I lost to them? Or just temporarily removed?
Was Selena Marie really lost to Grandpa?
“Oh, my,” Grandpa said again, then stuck a finger down inside the bottle to pull out the moldy paper. Its musty odor came out with it, causing a strange feeling of loss within me.
Grandpa fumbled with the paper for a moment. Finally he said, “It's not a-gonna unroll, is it?”
“Not without falling totally to pieces,” Bryan agreed. “Selene and I thought the bottle itself might be some kind of clue.”
“Yuh,” Grandpa said. “Could be. It's an old Alka Seltzer bottle. Used to have a stack of tablets in it. Don't know if they still package them like that. Haven't seen one for a bundle of years.”
Bryan and I waited for him to say more. The mourning doves hoo-hooed from the ash trees, and darkness waited just beyond the edge of the lawn.
“Selena Marie,” Grandpa said. “She used to leave notes for me in Alka Seltzer bottles. Said they were better than envelopes because the notes would stay dry.” He seemed puzzled as he looked at the ruined paper in his hand.
“The top was rusted off,” Bryan said. “That's why it's ruined. It must have been in the tree for a long time.”
“More'n fifty years,” Grandpa said softly.
It seemed as if he'd accepted it as a farewell note from Selena Marie.
“Grandpa,” I said, “did she leave notes in the tree very often?”
He nodded. “Kind of appealed to her. Full of romantic notions, she was. Liked things like candles on the dinner table, and notes left in trees. Sometimes she wrote poetry. Fancy stuff, that busted your brain trying to figger it out. Always trying to get me to like it.”
It wasn't that Grandpa didn't like poetry. Just not “fancy stuff.” I could well imagine how he would react to the romantic poems Bryan had been reciting. I thought of my grandmother. I'd never heard her say a word of poetry except things like, “Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle…”
But she could create red currant jelly that dazzled your eyes, not to mention your taste buds.
“Maybe Selena Marie wrote this note long before she disappeared,” I said. “Maybe you just didn't find it. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with her going away.”
Grandpa shook his head. “She always asked if I got the letters she left. I always did. Except this one. I never heard from her after she disappeared. I did look in the tree. Didn't seem to be anything there. Guess it already fell down farther in the hole.” Carefully he began to unroll the ruined note. “She was from off, you know. Somewhere around Chicago, it was. Prob'ly got tired of a farm boy like me and went back there to find somebody could understand her poetry.”
Neither Bryan nor I said anything. I was thinking that maybe the Russos, in their big city of St. Paul, would get tired of a naive farm girl like me and send me back home in a few days. I could hope, couldn't I?
Pieces of the mildewed paper tore off as Grandpa continued to unroll it. Bryan gathered up the tiny scraps and sat down at the rough wooden table Mom kept there on the front porch. Carefully he began to fit them together.
“There was writing on this at one time,” he said, then laughed. “Duh. Of course there was. She wouldn't leave a blank note.”
Grandpa laid down some more scraps, peering anxiously at what Bryan had put together.
“Make anything out, son?”
Bryan shook his head.
“Maybe I was supposed to answer it,” Grandpa said. “Maybe I was supposed to meet her somewhere, and when I didn't, she left. Maybe she thought I didn't care.”
I put my arm around him. Together we looked at what Bryan was putting together.
“I can make out a letter or two,” he said, pointing at the faint remains of an r and a g in another place. But the rest was gone.
“Guess I'll never know,” Grandpa said.
“But maybe you can find her now,” I said. “She has to be somewhere.”
He gave me a glum look. “She's prob'ly in the cemetery. Like your grandma. It's been a long time.”
The screen door opened and Tyler came out, followed by Mom, Dad, and Keith. Lex was there too, but he stayed just inside, looking out through the screen. It was as if he were separating himself from the rest of us.
Maybe he was just separating himself from me and Bryan.
“What have you got there?” Tyler asked, looking down at the rotted scraps of paper in front of Bryan.
I told them all about Bryan finding the bottle and what we'd found inside. Grandpa stood silent, gazing off toward the darkening mountains.
“Well,” Dad said when I finished the telling. “Now you can put Selena Marie behind you, Dad, and just remember what a great wife and mother Mom was.”
Dad was a practical man and had always considered combing the mountains for clues of Selena Marie as foolishness.
“Reckon so,” Grandpa said.
From the tall trees the mourning doves called their sad tidings, and night came.
• • •
I didn't tell my family about my decision until the next morning. I wanted to be alone, just us, without Bryan and Lex looking on.
Bryan had asked, when he left the night before, if I would go have lunch with him somewhere after the rehearsal. Much to my own surprise, and his too, I'm sure, I said no, that I had to come right on home afterwards.
I wasn't sure why I said no, since there was no longer any urgency about getting back home to go riding in the mountains looking for clues with Grandpa and Lex.
But I just felt that I needed to be home, with my family. The family that wasn't really my family. I might not be living with them much longer.
I told them at breakfast that I had decided to go visit the Russos. Mom had made our traditional breakfast of pancakes, but this time instead of gooseberry jam she gave us wild chokecherry jelly from the trees that grew along the creek banks. It was Tyler's favorite.
Nobody seemed particularly surprised about my decision.
“It's a t
hing you have to do,” Dad said. “I'm proud of you, Selene, for taking it into your own hands.”
Mom hugged me and cried a little, but she agreed with Dad.
Grandpa, who'd ridden Vinegar up the hill as he usually did on Saturday mornings, expressed his approval by nods of his head. He seemed somehow older that day. Whether it was because of what we'd found or because of his obviously increasingly painful foot, I didn't know.
I expected Tyler to make some corny comment to make us all laugh, but he just looked across the table and said, “I love you, little sis.”
Keith was the only one who objected to my decision. “Do you have to go, Selene? I don't want you to go away.”
“I do have to, Keithie,” I said. “I'm their child. They lost me a long time ago, and now they want to see me.”
I realized as I said it that this was the first time I had thought about it this way. Always before I had looked at only my side of the equation. Their side had been the unknown, the dark and frightening, the threatening.
Maybe it had been the discoveries of the day before that had shifted my focus a little. Certainly finding the bottle and the decayed note had brought Selena Marie closer to being a real person. It had made me want to know her side of whatever had gone on. After all, there are two sides to every equation.
“You'll come back?” Keith asked. “For sure?”
“For sure,” I said. Certainly, I would come back. This would be just a visit. It was what might happen later that worried me. After all, Mr. Russo was a lawyer.
“I thought I would call them this morning,” I said, “before Lex comes to pick me up for rehearsal. We'll decide when would be best for me to go. Probably after the melodrama is over.”
“July?” Mom said.
Her tone implied that she didn't think they would want to wait that long.
“That's the way it's going to be,” I said.
It wasn't until I was punching in their phone number that I remembered I'd mailed them a picture of Naomi, pretending it was of me. So the first thing I said when Mrs. Russo answered was, “I'm sorry about that photo.”
“We understand,” Mrs. Russo said. “We knew it wasn't of you.”
“It was a cruel thing to do.” I liked her better for not being offended.
“Being kidnapped was a cruel thing. Having your whole life disrupted now is cruel.”
I wanted to cry. Her being so understanding made mush of me.
“I want to come visit you,” I blurted.
“I'll order airline tickets today.” Mrs. Russo voice shook a little, as if she was going to cry too. “Can you come tomorrow?”
“Monday,” I said. “I'll come on Monday. I want to be here for Sunday.”
The day was full of surprises. This latest one was that I couldn't wait until July either.
I handed the phone to Mom. I knew she would want to double-check all the arrangements, and besides, she needed to get better acquainted with Mrs. Russo. While they spoke, I went upstairs to pull out a box from the farthest corner of my closet. The little china doll was in it. I hadn't looked at her since I'd come here, thirteen years before.
I remembered putting her in that box, but I didn't remember why. That information was buried somewhere in my mind along with the memory fragment of the Woman with the Big Black Hat.
Chapter 11
The melodrama rehearsal that day was a disaster. So much so that Mr. Duvall wondered loudly if I'd left my alternate personality at home.
“You're all Zorina today, Selene,” he said. “What happened to sweet little Astrid? She's mean enough to bite snakes, the way you're playing her.”
“Give her a break,” Lex told him. “Selene's got a lot going on in her life right now.”
Mr. Duvall didn't ask what, for which I was grateful. “Okay,” he said. “But nobody's going to believe Gilbert Gladhill would fall in love with a mean machine like you're playing Astrid today. The audience will throw rotten tomatoes. Work at it this week, Selene.”
“I'm going to be away this week,” I blurted.
Mr. Duvall raised his eyebrows. “Oh? And will you be back to grace our stage for next Saturday's rehearsal?”
I started to say yes, but did I know for sure? What if the Russos did make me stay, as Keith feared?
I hesitated too long.
“Selene,” Mr. Duvall said. “The show goes on in six weeks. If you're not going to be here, we'll reassign your parts right now. What's so important that you have to be away? Eh?”
“I'll be back for next Saturday,” I said.
Mr. Duvall scowled. “Not good enough. You can't miss a whole week of working on your part.”
“I'll work on my part,” I said. “I'll have Astrid aced by Saturday.” It was important to have something waiting for me to do when I came home. Otherwise, how was I going to settle back into being me after returning to a previous life for a few days?
“I'll be prepared,” I insisted.
Mr. Duvall looked doubtful.
I changed tactics, falling suddenly to my knees and clasping my hands in front of Mr. Duvall. “Oh, please, kind sir, I implore you. I'm just a simple country girl, but I'll do my best to perform my duties and live up to your expectations.”
Mr. Duvall sighed. Then he put out a hand. “Rise, foolish maiden. The part is yours.”
He helped me to my feet, and I curtsied humbly as the rest of the cast clapped.
• • •
I started packing my suitcase that night, carefully wrapping the little china doll in a soft sock and putting it inside one of the shoes I would take with me. It could be a clue.
I had never thought of it that way before. Obviously I had never wanted to consider clues. I hadn't even thought of the doll for at least five or six years. It made me uneasy. Surely it was just a simple toy that I'd liked as a child. But who had given it to me? And why had I clung to that particular thing when I came to live with my present parents, especially when I immediately hid it away? Why hadn't I picked a more cuddly and comforting toy to take with me to yet another new home?
Closing my suitcase, I sat down and removed my stick-on nails, the ones I'd put on for the prom. I didn't want to head off to see my other family with dagger fingernails. They made my blunt fingers look longer, more like Naomi's and Tyler's and Keith's. When they were all off and I'd filed my uneven nails, I wished I'd left them on. Very likely my hands without them were Russo hands.
I went downstairs. Grandpa was asleep in Dad's reclining chair, and Dad was working at his desk in the family room. I knew Tyler had gone off to tell some of his friends about his mission call. Mom and Keith were in the kitchen, talking.
The kitchen was the place we talked, there around the big round oak table, scarred from having heavy things dropped and hot things set on it. In one spot Tyler had carved his initials when he was nine. Mom had never sanded them out. She'd also never painted over the place on the door frame where our heights through the years had been marked. She said these things were part of the decor in a house where a family had grown up. They were important things, she said.
What would the Russos’ kitchen be like?
I slid onto my chair. My place at the table was where the two halves could be pulled apart to add a leaf when we had company. I'd always liked sitting there at the dividing line. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe it was because it reminded me of my two lives, which came together at that loved old table.
Mom reached out a hand to touch mine, and Keith slid his chair a little closer to me.
“Are you scared, Selene?” Keith asked. “Do you want me to go with you to Minnesota?”
I smiled at him. “That would be great, Keith. But you'd better stay here with Mom and Dad. Tyler will be going back to Provo until his farewell, and they'd get lonesome with nobody here. Besides, who'd feed the new calves if you left too?”
“Okay,” Keith said. “But if you need me, I'll come.”
“He's worried that the Russos will m
ake you stay when you get there,” Mom said.
“They can't,” I said. “I'll be back before you know it.”
But how did I know what they would do? What did I know about legal procedures? I was their child. Wouldn't they try to keep me?
I hung an arm around Keith's shoulders and gave him a little hug. “It'll be okay. Really, Keith.” Turning to Mom, I said, “You showed me some old letters a long time ago from, uh, your sister and, uh, her husband when they first adopted me.” My tongue stumbled over the words because I couldn't think of them as my parents even though that's what they'd been for several months before they were killed. “The letters told about when I first came to live with them. Do you still have them?”
“Of course,” Mom said. “I would never throw them away.”
“Old letters?” Keith said. “What do they say?” I could almost see his ears perk up at this hint of a mystery. He reminded me of Bryan.
I ruffled his hair. “They talk about me, Keith,” I said. “They even mention you.” Turning again to Mom, I said, “Could we look at them?”
“Sure,” Mom said.
So the three of us went to her bedroom, where she reached up to a high shelf in her closet and brought down the blue-flowered baby shoe box that I remembered. Inside was the stack of letters written by her sister. My intermediate mom. There were several pictures, too, of me as a solemn just-turned-four-year-old, sitting at a table with a birthday cake, splashing in a child's plastic pool, standing beside a pretty woman who was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that proclaimed, “World's Proudest Mom.”
I had faint memories of her as a warm presence who sang to me at night. I wished I could remember more.
Examining the snapshots, I looked for the small doll. Perhaps it would be clutched in my hand. Perhaps it would be among the birthday presents around the cake.
It wasn't in any of the pictures.
But it was mentioned in one of the letters, the first one after I'd been adopted.
“We've named our little girl Selene,” the letter said. “I always liked the name of Grandpa's lost love, but Selena Marie seems kind of heavy so we changed it to just Selene. I called Grandma to ask if she minds, since she wasn't exactly fond of Selena Marie. She said Selene is a nice name and if it makes us happy, it's okay with her. Selene fits our little girl better than Jean Ellen, which is what is on the birth certificate we got from the agency. She insists her name is Mickey, or something like that, but she's getting used to Selene.”