Keepsake

by Kristina Riggle

  Drew sighed and sounded like a tire letting out air. “But you’ll never be able to do it.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “I just mean that real life will get in the way, and it will get harder and harder, and we won’t be able to be here all the time.”

  “We’ll just close the door and leave it for now. All the public spaces are cleaned up well enough to please Ayana, and today we’ll finish your room,” I told Drew. “It’s time you moved back in.”

  He worked his jaw, wanting to bark at me, holding it back. I allowed myself a speck of relief he was trying to hold back, that he thought I was worth the effort.

  “And you’ll do that other room when, exactly?” Drew cocked his eyebrow at me again.

  “You guys can’t just force it. I know it doesn’t make sense to you and I hate it, too. Don’t you think that I wish I could just clean it all up like that, like magic?” I snapped my fingers.

  “Ayana said that,” Jack interjected. “She asked me what I would do if I had a magic wand and could fix anything. I said I’d magic my dad and Drew back in the house and clean it up, too.”

  Jack looked from his father to his brother, and to the cleaned-up living room. “Hey, maybe it worked!”

  I kissed the top of his head. “No, pal. It ain’t magic. Whatever it is, though, I’ll take it.”

  “So I did OK talking to Miss Ayana?”

  “Of course, sweetheart. Of course you did.”

  We all let the moment be, until Drew’s phone went off. He replied with some quick clicking, then said, “That was Miranda. They’re coming back early because her brother is sick. I have to go make sure their dog has everything it needs.” He stood up and stretched, and I thought, Here it goes. He’s leaving me again.

  “I told her I had to get back, and that I’d be having dinner here. Should we get some pizza or something?”

  I regarded him with wonder. “Sure, hon. Pizza sounds good to me.”

  “Hey, Pop,” Drew said, and I saw Ron startle at being called that now, something Drew hadn’t done since the divorce. He hadn’t called him “Ron,” but just hadn’t really called him anything, starting conversations with a generic Hey, what’s up? “You know there’s a hockey game on tonight. Maybe we could watch it after dinner. If you’ll still be here.”

  “Yeah. Sure. I’ll stick around a bit.”

  Drew waved at his grandpa, ruffled Jack’s hair, and said “G’bye, squirt, see you later”; then he was out the door with something that was almost a smile on his face.

  “Glad to see him stepping up,” my dad commented.

  “Drew is just a kid, despite the fact he’s six feet tall. He’s been stepping up just fine I’d say.”

  “I just meant that he shouldn’t have moved out; he is your child.”

  “He made the decision you and Mary made. To get the heck out.”

  “I’m an adult. It was different.”

  “Mary wasn’t an adult. She was fifteen.”

  “She was different. She was . . . delicate. She couldn’t have stood it any longer.” Dad looked down at the floor between his feet. “The way you could stand it.”

  I considered teenage Mary, thin and awkward, trying so hard to stand like a sentry at the door to her room, keeping it pristine. The invading junk creeping in, relentless.

  Chapter 44

  As Seth backed his Lexus down the driveway, he reached one hand up and toward me. I froze, but he was just bracing himself against the back of my seat to turn around and look out the back. His intention wasn’t to stroke my cheek or squeeze my shoulder to give comfort.

  “I’m sorry I told Trish when I did,” Seth said. “I could have picked a better time. But she called me out on my psychologist jargon. I never was good at that, dropping the job at the office. It’s not just a job, you know; it’s a whole way of thinking. It changes everything about how you look at people. I wonder if MDs have the same thing, if they see people as a collection of symptoms all the time.”

  “Is that what we are to you?” I asked, as I stared at the trees whipping past the window outside. “Symptoms?”

  “That’s not what I meant. I try, you know, because it used to make my wife crazy. She’d go, ‘Just be human!’ and I’d say ‘I still am!’ But I knew what she meant.”

  “You are human,” I said. “I shouldn’t have asked you to lie.”

  The growly sound of tires over gravel was replaced by the hypnotic smooth rumbling over pavement. “Where are we going anyway?” I asked. “Anywhere?”

  “I want to see the ledges. It’s Grand Ledge after all, right?”

  “I’ve seen them,” I replied. “School field trip.” Nature never was my thing. I’m easily chilled or overheated, and I hate bugs. I toyed with a brochure I’d found on the dashboard, smoothing the existing creases and skimming cheerful descriptions of events like the Island Art Fair and Yankee Doodle Days.

  Seth pulled up to a parking space in Fitzgerald Park. Through the windshield I could see a wide, grassy expanse, a playground, a large red building, and a paved path that led off through some scattered maple trees. Other than a father and his young daughter on the swings, this park was deserted on a chilly early April day. Seth got out first and led the way walking down the path. Sun spilled down onto the trail, impeded only slightly by the still-bare trees.

  Seth wasted this walk on me. We could have gone to the mall or just sat in the driveway.

  “What happened when you found Trish today?” Seth asked, as we approached a set of wooden stairs and railing winding down a steep embankment.

  I steadied myself on the rail. Debated what to tell him. Decided it didn’t matter what I told him. It wasn’t my secret to tell, nor was it mine to keep.

  So as we picked our careful way down, I told him about our mother’s secret baby, Trish’s pained reaction as if she’d felt it herself, echoing her own, different, loss. How Aunt Margaret, our grandparents, hid this from us all these years.

  “Are you all right? Finding this out?”

  “I guess so. My life is still the same.” As I said it, a stair seemed to dip away below my feet and I stumbled. Seth seized my elbow from just behind me as a gasp escaped before I could help it.

  “Is it?” he asked, releasing my elbow as I straightened up and brushed off my clothes, though I hadn’t actually fallen.

  I stared at the faulty stair, meeting Seth’s eyes and looking down at it again so he’d see that it was angled wrong, that it was just a faulty step, not some deep subconscious freak-out. “I don’t know,” I said, continuing to walk. “Knowing the ‘why’ doesn’t change the facts of the matter.”

  “You have a half sister out there.”

  “A stranger to me, though. We have some genes in common, but so do Trish and I, and look how we get along.”

  At the bottom of the staircase, he turned right, and we followed a dirt path along the riverbank for a few yards. I stopped short at a bridge over a branch of river. The concrete surface was bordered on either side with rusty pipe railings, which seemed too low to be useful. They were only hip height, and the bridge was narrow enough I could easily touch each railing without even straightening my arms. Across the bridge I could see a densely wooded path.

  I said, “Why are we here again?”

  “I thought you needed a break, and Trish needed some privacy.”

  “We could have just sat in the yard.”

  “I wanted to talk to you. When you weren’t hauling boxes or preparing to dash into the trailer and hide.”

  “I don’t hide in there,” I answered, too quickly.

  “I didn’t want you to go into your trailer last night. I wanted to keep talking to you. And I was thinking about you the whole way home. And when I went to sleep. And this morning.”

  “I must be quite a complicated puzzle then
.”

  I started to recognize how stupid I looked, standing there at the edge of this bridge and not moving. I crossed quickly, chin high, straight ahead. The river was glassy with stillness. Ahead of me was one of the sandstone rock formations, soaring high above my head, crowding the narrow trail. Moss, lichen, and even trees grew impossibly out of chinks in the stone. There was a narrow crevasse in the rock that looked small enough for a child, or thin adult, to slip through.

  Seth had caught up to me and we resumed walking. “Well, maybe you are, but I wasn’t trying to solve you. We’ve hardly said two words that weren’t about Trish’s house, or boxes, or cleaning products. I just wanted to talk.”

  “You’re talking to me now.” The sun was behind the rocks, and I wanted my warm coat.

  “Even you aren’t that literal, Mary.”

  I didn’t reply. For a time we walked in silence, the path occasionally narrowed by a rock formation jutting out over the path, forcing us to walk single file. Once, Seth extended his hand behind him, and I stared briefly at his open palm before I took it, only long enough that we passed the rocks. On the river side of the trail, there were often steep drops right down to the brown water. Seth stopped to look at a maple tree, whose winding roots tumbled, naked to the air, down the rocky side of the embankment.

  “This is like something out of Middle Earth,” I said.

  “I thought you’d seen it before?”

  “I thought I had. I don’t remember it being so . . . impossible. How is that tree even still there? Barely hanging on?”

  Seth took a step closer to me, and I straightened up, tensed.

  “Why are you doing that?” he asked. In the silence after his question I heard the clear twittering of birdsong. “Why do you always do that?”

  “Is it Dr. Seth asking, or just you?”

  “Just me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  I moved on before he could ask me something else. He followed me down the path until we came to a railroad trestle soaring above us. The spindly structure of the trestle looked hardly strong enough to hold up a train, though I understood it obviously must. I hoped a train wouldn’t rumble over, even so. Seth teetered his way down a slight rocky slope, toward the river.

  “Come on,” he said, holding his hand out again. I looked down at the stones, which did not seem to be meant for human travel. “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  I almost laughed at his question. With my mother dead in an inferno and his own daughter struck with autism, he should know better than to ask.

  I shrugged to fake a normal person’s casual attitude. With my hand in his, I picked my way down, feeling the muscles in his palm tensing to keep me balanced, until I reached a small level spot of rocky shore next to the sleepy, still river.

  He did not let go despite my gentle tug back. He looked away from me, smiling at the scenery, still keeping my hand. It wasn’t a fierce grip, nor was it light. “Isn’t it pretty?”

  “It looks like decay to me.” Dead trees leaned over in the water like fallen men.

  “Why are you so nervous?” he asked.

  “I’m not nervous.” I raised my eyes from the muddy water to meet his.

  “What would happen if you let me get closer?” He stepped closer. “What do you think is so terrible about being close?”

  He smelled good. Musky and spicy. I could feel his warmth, or maybe I just imagined it.

  But as he closed the space between us again, my heartbeat felt labored, my breathing shallowed.

  I jumped back, stumbling on a root or stone. “It’s . . . too much.”

  “Too much what?”

  “I don’t know.” I felt as if I’d just stepped back from a precipice. I scrambled back up the rocks, having to use my hands like a child climbing on a playground. Stones and pebbles slid away under my feet.

  “Mary!” Seth called, his voice sharp with warning, or maybe reprimand.

  “Is it such a huge strain to let me stand near you?” he asked breathlessly, scrambling back up the riverbank to join me where I stood on the path, arms folded tightly. “Why would that be?”

  “I thought you were trying to be human,” I retorted, walking briskly away from him.

  He caught up to me with his long, quick strides. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “We should be getting back.”

  I led the way back to the car, and he walked just behind. Now and then I’d look back, making sure he was still there.

  Seth and I returned to find the occupants of the house quiet and separate, like a tableau.

  Ron and Jack were watching cartoons on the couch, nestled together. My father was repairing some piece of trim in Trish’s dining room. Drew was nowhere.

  Seth offered to help my dad, and I went off to find my sister.

  I discovered her in the hall, stacking the things our father had torn down earlier.

  I bent down to help her, and for a few moments we just stacked in silence.

  “Where is the diary?” she asked.

  “In my purse. It’s safe.”

  She pushed some rows of things back into the room. “We’ll have to move this before tonight. Ayana’s coming back and she wants to see ‘total freedom of movement.’ ”

  “What is it, anyway? All this?”

  “Right here, it’s art supplies,” Trish answered through a sigh. “Remember when I used to be an artist?”

  I almost replied automatically she still was, but I caught myself in a rare moment of clarity about how that would sound to her: condescending, false.

  I glanced into the room. It had big windows. With all the things gone, it would probably have nice light. “What if this became your studio?”

  “One thing at a time.”

  “Seth thinks you could use some help. Not from him, that wouldn’t be appropriate—”

  Trish snorted. “I should say not.”

  “—but he can refer you to somebody.”

  Trish sat back from her crouched position, settling on the floor. “I’m already getting ‘help.’ Some state-contracted shrink. I had to sit through three hours of stupid tests and quizzes and analyzing chitchat last week.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know.”

  “You didn’t need to. It’s embarrassing enough as it is, being forced into this. You know if they decide I need drugs, they will make me take them? Or refer my case to a judge? What kind of world is this?”

  “Is it possible meds would help? I mean, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad . . .”

  “God, just shut up, Mary.”

  I let it go and switched to our other, newer problem.

  “What are we going to do about . . . Laura?”

  “What about her?”

  “Should we . . . try to find her? Or something?”

  Trish tipped her head to the side and rolled her eyes at me. “And tell her what. Hey, guess what, we found you! Only your mother died in a fire and was a lifelong hoarder because of the pain of giving you up. Welcome to the family!” she finished with exaggerated, mean-spirited cheer.

  “I hate it when you do that. When you take what I say and exaggerate it to extremes to make me sound stupid.”

  “I made my point, didn’t I?”

  “I’m going to call Aunt Margaret. I want to hear what she has to say about it.”

  Trish rolled her eyes again, and I wanted to kick her. “Yeah, good luck with that. I’m sure she’ll pour her heart out to you and give you every detail.”

  “I’m surprised you aren’t curious.”

  Trish groaned. “Mary, I’ve got all I can handle right here. OK, so now we know. Leave it alone.”

  “Because that strategy has worked out so brilliantly already.”

  Trish jerked her head at me, and before I walked away I caught a
glimpse of her openmouthed shock.

  No wonder Trish was so fond of sarcasm. It brought a type of spiteful pleasure, akin to kicking a broken appliance.

  I emerged into the living room to hear my phone ringing in my purse. I fished for it and looked at the caller ID. My apartment complex manager?

  “Hello?” I said, wary and worried.

  “Mary, I’m glad I could reach you. I’m afraid there’s been a break-in.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve been away for a while it seems, and . . . Well, someone broke in. We need you to come back and assess what’s missing for the police.”

  My stomach began churning. “When did it happen?”

  “Not sure. Your neighbor noticed your door ajar and contacted us.”

  I agreed to come back and hung up, then called to the first person who sprang to mind. “Seth!”

  Chapter 45

  I let Ron tuck in Jack. Listening to him read a story to his son made me want to cry and slap him at the same time. The sweetness of it made me want to cry, but then again he’s the one who abandoned us. He’s the reason I never got to hear him read to our boy anymore.

  After Mary and Seth fled to inspect the damage to her town house, and Dad was convinced—with great reluctance on his part—to return home instead of trailing them to Ypsilanti to hover over the local cops, I collapsed on my couch and grabbed the remote, trying to sink into television.

  Instead I shut it off and listened to Ron’s voice with that rural twang trip over the funny names in a Harry Potter book. I kept murmuring the correct pronunciations to myself, which I knew because Jack and I had started watching the movies together.

  So far Jack was not objecting to sleeping in there alone. Ron reported that when Jack stayed with him he had his own room, so maybe having his father tuck him in was the trick. Not that he could do this every night. Perhaps I shouldn’t have let Ron do it at all; perhaps Jack will be confused now, thinking his dad is coming home. Life is confusing enough for the grown-ups who supposedly understand these things.

  And speaking of confusion, it seemed we had a half sister now, out there somewhere. I’d believed all along that diary would reveal something I’d rather not know. But know it I did, and in reflecting on mother’s pain in this, an old memory rose up out of the mists.