Keepsake

by Kristina Riggle

  By the end, our mother no longer could distinguish between good and bad food. It was one of the lowest moments. Until the fire, of course.

  “Oh, I know,” I said, lying badly. “But, um, the fridge did smell. Just a bit. A little.”

  Trish scowled, digging a plastic knife and plates out of yet another bag. “Well, I’m sure there are things I haven’t gotten to back there that should be thrown away, but in case you haven’t noticed, my son had to be rushed to urgent care and I’m a single parent and I do work full-time, so you’ll excuse me if I’m a little distracted.”

  This time it was me looking at Seth. I wanted backup. All my life I’ve needed backup. It used to be my parents who would take up for me, mostly Dad toward the end of the time I lived at home, but even Mom would say, “Oh, Trish, leave her alone.” Even though I knew it made Trish hate me a little more, I needed it. God, how I needed someone on my side.

  Seth shook his head so gently I might have imagined it. I slumped, but I knew he was right. He wasn’t going to be some shrink referee in our sister fights. Not fair to even ask him.

  So we ate our sandwiches standing in the kitchen, wordlessly, taking turns reaching into an open bag of chips on the counter. All last week, I’d been counting the hours until I could leave my silent home. Now I found myself counting the hours until I could retreat to the camper outside.

  When we’d dusted chip crumbs off our hands, we confronted the kitchen table.

  It was mounded with a pile of papers. Trish reached out to pick one up and caused an avalanche down the side. This made her curse and stare at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.

  “What can we help with?” I asked, quite sure she didn’t want us to just sweep the whole mess into a garbage bag, though I sorely wanted to.

  “I don’t know. I mean . . . These could all be important. I have to sort through them one by one, myself.”

  “Oh, Trish, that’ll take too long. And what will we do while we wait for that?”

  “Straighten the garage piles?”

  “We did that. They’re straight.”

  “I don’t know how else to do it.”

  “Why don’t you let us help? Just tell us in general what you’re looking to keep and what you’re looking to recycle?”

  I’d been watching those hoarding documentaries on TV and read a self-help book from the library. Some experts said the hoarder should set ground rules so other people could help.

  Trish sighed. “I guess we can recycle old newspapers. And junk mail. But open it and look, don’t just throw away the whole thing unopened. One time I thought a piece of mail from my bank was a life insurance offer or something and it turned out to be my escrow statement and I paid my next mortgage bill wrong and it was a huge nightmare. So look at every piece. Every single one.”

  She grimaced at the memory of that bank envelope going awry.

  “But what about Jack’s school stuff? A lot of this looks like school stuff.”

  “I’ll do the school stuff myself.”

  She’d never accept otherwise. I was only glad she agreed to let the newspapers go. I was tempted to call the Journal and cancel her subscription. There was a new paper on the doorstep I saw when we came in.

  Seth and I got to work on the papers. We dutifully opened envelopes and looked inside. We took to ripping them in half, the credit card offers. There were so many! Most people got a bunch, but she seemed to have an enormous amount. I began to wonder how many cards were in her wallet. How many times she’d looked at one of these offers and thought that low, low APR sounded like a brilliant idea.

  I noticed Seth watching Trish when he thought I wasn’t looking.

  We observed the agony on her face as she confronted each piece of schoolwork. It was like someone was digging a sliver out of her toe. A huge stack was growing next to her.

  “Trish,” I said, trying to sound gentle. “You can’t keep them all, can you?”

  “But Jack did these. Some of these are from kindergarten, and I just loved them. Look at this, it’s a self-portrait. How cute is that?”

  “Where are you going to put them?”

  “I’ll store them.”

  “Where will you store them?”

  “Dammit, Mary! You don’t understand! You don’t have kids, so you couldn’t possibly.”

  “I understand,” Seth interjected, softly, calmly.

  Trish and I froze in our sorting and fighting.

  “My daughter is ten and, believe me, they create a tidal wave of paper. And it all seems really crucial, doesn’t it? Aurora went through an artist phase where every day it seemed like she scribbled something on a piece of paper and presented it to us like it was the Mona Lisa. And we praised her like crazy, we were so proud to see her showing an interest in something.”

  Trish was glowing, listening to him. She smiled, eyes bright. She nodded along rapidly.

  “And for a while we had stacks and stacks of it everywhere in the house, and she just kept making more. It got to be where me and my wife, we almost dreaded her getting out the art supplies.”

  Trish now appeared on the brink of tears. Her eyes shone, and she bit her lip.

  Seth continued, “But then you know what? We realized something. Aurora is not ‘in’ the artwork. If we discard a piece, we’re not discarding ‘her’ or her effort. Her enthusiasm for art is still there, Aurora herself is still there.” He chuckled to himself, smiling. “So we saved the best ones in a scrapbook. We got some mattes and some inexpensive frames and we hung others, and we rotated the freshest drawings into the display. We dedicated part of our dining room wall to her gallery. My wife even made a sign that said ‘Aurora’s Gallery.’ And the rest, we just recycled. We felt lighter, I tell you. And we stopped dreading the art supplies. We could enjoy her art again.”

  Trish was holding a piece of finger painting, from the look of it. “But Jack would be upset. I know he would be. I mean, what did Aurora say?”

  Seth shifted, turning his attention back to the papers. “Well. She’s not very verbal.”

  “You must have known how she felt about it, though. She must have said something.”

  “Aurora has autism.”

  Trish gasped and held her hands to her face, and I felt my own eyes widen. “Oh!” Trish said. “I’m sorry. I mean, maybe sorry isn’t the word, I’m just . . . Oh, no.”

  Seth shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. She was diagnosed a long time ago. We cope.”

  “We can’t keep you away from your family all week!” Trish exclaimed.

  Seth shook his head. “You’re not. It’s my ex-wife’s time with her.”

  I blinked hard and looked down at the papers in my lap to mask my surprise. The “ex” part of ex-wife was new to me, too. I started to ask myself why Seth had never told me about his daughter’s diagnosis in all those phone calls, why I didn’t know he’d gotten divorced. Then I answered my own question. Those calls must have been just a silly tradition. Lightweight and meaningless. To him, anyway.

  For his part, Seth reached into the paper pile, took out an envelope, and opened it calmly as if he’d said nothing at all.

  Trish stared at the pile of artwork for long moments, then got up and trotted down the hall to her room. I heard the door slam.

  “Seth,” I ventured. “Thanks for that. And I’m . . . I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I’m just really grateful that you . . .”

  “It’s fine, Mary. Do you have another bag? Mine’s full.”

  I handed over another bag and watched him continue to inspect papers, noticing a wavy furrow deepen across his forehead.

  I’d seen that before.

  Once, in college, Seth’s father had a heart attack. He’d been in California and Seth couldn’t get there quickly; his mother had told him to stay put and wait for new
s. Rebecca was on a weekend trip with her parents. Seth called me—this was before the drunken kiss—and came to the dorm room sober, but wrecked and worried. I sat next to him and let him wring his hands and fret. I told him several logical things about how he shouldn’t borrow trouble, and his dad was at a great hospital and plenty of heart attacks turned out fine. Seth had that same furrow then that he has now. Back then, I’d given in to the temptation to brush my hand across his brow, trying to smooth it out. I was briefly tempted again. Instead I ripped open an envelope, the sharp edge of the paper slicing my finger.

  “Damn,” I muttered, sticking my finger in my mouth.

  “Are you OK?” Seth asked.

  No, I thought, but answered, “Yes. Just fine.”

  Chapter 27

  I tried to imagine this Seth fellow, his autistic daughter handing him paper after paper of her scribbles. I tried to imagine his joy at cracking her shell. The hope he must have felt that she found a new way to reach out to them.

  And he could just . . . toss that away?

  Not all of it. He kept the best, the most special pieces. He gave her art a place of honor in the home.

  I pictured Jack’s art in a mountain on top of my table. That wasn’t honoring his work, to be sure. And did I ever lovingly admire his efforts? Of course not. If anything, I’d catch a glance of the mountain and feel like I was suffocating. I’d find more in his backpack and feel like Seth must have: Oh no, not more.

  I remember coming across a huge stack of my own childhood artwork during that fateful Florida trip, when Dad whisked Mom away for a sunny vacation, and me, Mary, and the uncles and cousins descended on the house.

  I was in my heavy-metal, skull-and-crossbones phase then. I came across a My Little Pony coloring book that week and I sneered and threw it away. I found stacks of my old artwork in the same box, most of it yellowed with age, some of it dampened by moisture. Some of it was kinda cute, I recognized even then. I was already showing how much I loved color, and where most kids would make their pictures small, using one-quarter of the available space, I would turn every piece of blank paper into a mural of color and design. But I was past all this! Stupid to keep all these dumb projects from first grade when I was making clay sculptures, sketches, acrylic paintings. There wasn’t any room to display my new work because of all this old crap. So I threw it all away. I remember stepping on the art with my foot to crush it into the bag, watching it crinkle up.

  Now my cell phone rang: Ron’s number.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mommy.”

  “Jack, baby! How are you, pal?”

  “Good. Daddy said I could call you anytime I wanted, and I said I was lonely so I called. I used the phone all by myself. Can I have one?”

  “A cell phone?” I asked, laughing. “I don’t think so, buddy. Maybe when you’re in double digits.”

  “Three years? That’s too far!”

  I pulled the phone away from my head and frowned at it. Unlike him to whine for something. “Kiddo, let’s not talk about it now. You can just use my phone, or your dad’s.”

  “Summer said I should have one.”

  My hand tightened on the phone. “I’m sure she was just joking with you. Anyway, it’s not up to her, it’s up to me. And your dad.” I scowled, glad he couldn’t see my face. “Are you having fun? What are you up to?”

  “We took a walk along the lake. And oh! Summer has a dog. He’s really cute. He’s a beagle, and his name is Snoopy.”

  “Real original.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. Did you find any good rocks?”

  “Yeah, but Grandma said I couldn’t keep them because they were just junky old rocks and that you wouldn’t want me bringing back a bunch of junky old rocks.”

  I could hear him trying not to cry. I wondered if he cried when she told him no.

  “Well, we are trying to clean up here.” I clenched my fist, wanting to scream at that stuffy old biddy what harm could come from letting him take home a stupid stone. “We don’t really need more things.”

  He talked a little longer and seemed calmer. He handed the phone back to his dad.

  “Hi, Ron,” I said, and couldn’t stop myself from saying, “So Summer thinks he should have a cell phone?”

  “She wasn’t really thinking. She’s trying to make nice.”

  “Well, now she’s got him whining for one, thanks a lot.”

  “I told you she didn’t mean anything by it. I told him we’d have to talk about it.”

  “Oh, real authoritative, Ron.”

  “I’m doing the best I can here. I’m not perfect either.”

  “Just talk to her, OK? Tell her not to promise my kid the moon.”

  “I will, I will. Would you prefer she didn’t like Jack?”

  “No, of course not.” My voice cracked. Dammit, Trish.

  “Hey, he won’t ever love any girlfriend better than you.”

  “Thanks, Ron. I’ve gotta go.”

  We hung up and I curled over on the bed, trying not to picture the three of them playing fetch with a dog, or playing a board game at the table, or anything else I couldn’t do in my stupid house.

  When I emerged from the bedroom, I gasped.

  My dining room table. Clear! I stepped forward slowly and ran my fingers along its surface.

  The table itself was nothing special. Some cheap thing that came in a flat box from Target and we’d had to screw its legs on. Ron had been promising me he’d build a table for me and stain it beautifully. Then I buried the old one in paper, and the subject was never raised again. The last time we’d had a meal around this table, Ron was still living here and Jack was using a booster in his chair to reach his plate. Drew was still Andy and his voice was cracking.

  “I can’t believe I’m crying over a stupid table.” My hands shook as I wiped my face. Mary approached, sidelong. Cautious. I reached over and threw an arm around her shoulders and laughed. Seth stepped back to the periphery so I couldn’t see him even from the corner of my eye.

  “Where did it all go?” I asked.

  Mary pointed to six large bags behind us in the living room. “That’s all recyclable stuff.” She also pointed to a stack of papers along the wall. “Those are school papers. Seth and I put the nicest stuff on top but I know you wanted to look through it all. Anything that looked important we put here.” She pointed to the kitchen counter. “The papers from . . . well, the state, I guess. They’re on top.”

  I felt a plummeting sensation, like on an elevator when your stomach drops. CPS, threatening to take my kid away. Good thing I’d put the shrink’s card in my wallet. No one needed to know about that particular humiliation.

  Mary squeezed me around the waist. “Hey, we’ve made great progress, and we’ve still got most of the week. We can do this. He’ll be fine.”

  I nodded, not sure I believed it. And anyway, even if Ayana was appeased, our father could swoop in at any time and demand Jack for another “visit.”

  “I’ve been meaning to ask,” Mary said, stepping away from me and fussing with her headband. “Have you read any more of Mom’s diary?”

  I shook my head. “I wanted to wait for you. Didn’t seem right to read it without you.”

  “Weren’t you terribly curious?”

  I shook my head again. That diary filled me with dread. I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d meant to give it to me. Though it was buried in old clothes so that it seemed accidental, maybe it wasn’t. Perhaps she wanted me to uncover it, but couldn’t bring herself to just hand it over. And if that was the case, what did she need me to know?

  “I think we should read some now,” Mary said. “As a prize for clearing the table. In fact, we should read at the table.”

  I went to fetch the diary, which I’d placed on top of the cleared entertainment center for safek
eeping, while Mary explained about its discovery to Seth.

  “I’ll take these bags out to the recycle bin,” he offered, then paused. “If that’s okay with you, Trish.”

  I sucked in a deep breath and stared at my clear table. I’d seen them. They really had been opening all the envelopes. They didn’t even fight with me about it.

  “Yes. Yes, it’s okay.”

  Seth nodded and grabbed two bags.

  “OK,” Mary said. “Should I read it out loud?”

  April 16, 1961

  I visited the camp with Mom and it was amazing! I’ve never heard so much Spanish in my whole life. I already picked up a few phrases just in being there a few hours. They seem to get a kick out of trying to teach Doc and me and my mom how to speak it, and they giggle at our accents, but not in a mean way.

  A few of them spoke English, though, and that was a big help. One girl was named Inez, and I think she’s in her twenties. Not much older than me but already so capable and grown up. It was very impressive the way she came in with her baby sister. The poor little baby was so sick with fever.

  I got to talk to Inez a little bit while she held the baby and Doc and my mom saw to another child with an infected sliver in his finger. She said they live in Texas some of the year but come up north to make money in the spring, plus it’s cooler up here. I wanted to ask if she was illegal but didn’t want to be rude. Her accent was lovely, like music. I could have listened to her talk all day.

  When it was Inez’s baby sister’s turn, I held her tiny hands while Doc took her temperature in her little bottom, poor thing, and Inez cooed and made sweet noises in Spanish to distract her. We were quite a team, and it made me feel very proud and mature. Doc gave her some antibiotics, just for free, handed them over, and said to bring her back next week and to call him if she got worse.

  Inez smiled at me when she left and told me she’d see me next week. In that few minutes I felt more warmth from her than I’ve gotten from my own sister in a year. Margaret is so prissy all the time, so competitive. She tries to set the table better than me, she points out every mistake I make, and she’s always brushing that soft blond hair she inherited from our mother while I’m stuck with this kinky brown mess.