by Beth Kephart
“Just the person I was looking for,” Granddad said when he saw me, folding a page down in his magazine and setting the whole thing aside. Slowly. “Vietnam and Cambodia along the Mekong River.”
I looked around the room, and there was Riot. There was the basket of In Trusts, the basket of D.L., no basket of Toss. On the floor was the Sansui, and beside that the record stash. Not everything had changed. A hot slick of sweat took the short road from the indent of my neck to the indent of my navel, leaving a stripe of dark on my lavender T-shirt. Teresa was standing against the far wall. I lifted my eyes, at last, to Granddad’s.
“Hello,” he said, because I hadn’t.
“Hello,” I said.
“Good to see you,” he said. “Rosie.” Putting my name out into the silence.
I didn’t answer. I heard Teresa, who must have gone back into the kitchen. Teresa picking up dishes, rinsing things. The sound of spraying water. The tinkle of glass against glass. Teresa now humming.
“Cat must have your tongue,” Granddad said.
“Cat’s got her own tongue,” I mumbled, looking now at Riot, who had begun to give herself a fancy spa treatment. Her two back legs were stuck out at a ninety-degree angle. Her two front paws dabbed this way and that, maintaining her balance. “Where did you get Riot, anyway?” I asked finally, for the sake of saying something.
“Your mom gave her to me,” he said, “when your grandmother passed. She was the runt of a litter. Needed some taking care of.”
“Mom showed up with a cat one day?”
“Cat in a basket,” he said. “If I remember. Your mother was pregnant with you at the time, so I guess that means you showed up too. She said, ‘We’ll both have our things now to be taking care of.’ She said taking care was a cure, I remember.” His eyes got misty at the end of his tale.
“Makes Riot a pretty old cat,” I said, to distract him.
Riot went on bathing, oblivious. We watched her antics as if she were some kind of show, I standing with my arms tied tightly across my chest, Granddad in his metal bed, his face so pale in the shaft of sun that had worked its way inside. Teresa had turned the water off. There was stillness now on her side of the wall. Stillness everywhere.
“You got a new bed,” I said.
“Feel like a Jetson,” he said.
“It shines,” I told him, because who knows what a Jetson is, “when the sun hits it.”
“Yes, and there’s quite a bit of sun.”
“Next time I’m bringing shades,” I said.
“I’m not going to stop you.” Granddad said that part with a smile, and that felt good—warm in the way that warm is good—and suddenly that was all I wanted: to make my granddad happy again, to stop feeling so frightened and angry about his getting sicker. Taking care is a cure, my mother had said. Back when she was smart.
“I see the old Sansui hasn’t been budged,” I said.
“After all you did to fix it up, Teresa and I weren’t going to risk it.”
“You in the mood for music?”
“Music would be fine.”
“Anything in particular?”
“How about my old friend Ella?” He waved his hand toward the stack of records. I crossed the floor and started sorting.
“She have a last name?” I asked.
“Fitzgerald,” he said.
“A rapper, right?” I asked him. I turned and saw him shake his head.
“She came from nothing to become something,” he said. “A schoolgirl dreaming of becoming a dancer who became a singer almost by accident. Aideen adored her. I’d come home from the refinery, and I’d find her here, in this room, the furniture all shoved aside and Fitzgerald on the radio, live from Birdland or the Apollo or someplace. Aideen would be dancing with the moon. Whole moon or quarter. Never mattered. She’d have the music dialed up so loud that she wouldn’t have heard me come in. I’d stand where Teresa is standing, watching.”
Teresa, I remembered, and turned and saw that some runaway hair had fallen down into her face. She must have slipped back into the room like a shadow, and she was doing nothing but standing there, out of sight, almost. “Didn’t you want to dance too?” I asked Granddad.
“Watching was sweeter.”
“Didn’t she mind being spied upon?”
“Don’t think she did.” He got a funny look on his face, the kind that Mom used to get when a new sprout of basil would push out of the glass or the fireflies would light up a room.
“What kind of dancer was she?”
“Nothing was more sensational than Aideen when she was dancing,” he said. I tried to picture this, but it was hard. I pictured the candy-haired dancer on skyscraper heels instead. Pictured a peony on a wrist. Pictured a man, young, and a woman, young, but no matter how hard I strained to imagine, I couldn’t make the man in my imagination look like Granddad, couldn’t imagine my grandmother from the old, fuzzy photographs.
Outside, two drivers were blowing their horns at each other and a train was sailing into the station. A conversation shuffled by. I waited. “Somewhere in there,” he finally said, looking toward the stacked records,” is the song ‘How High the Moon.’”
“I’m on it,” I told him, but it took me a while. It took me sifting through and sorting the faded album covers until I found not just Ella but the right Ella, the right track on the right piece of vinyl, though Granddad didn’t mind, he said, listening to “Old Mother Hubbard” first, or “Flying Home” or “Back in Your Own Backyard.” He didn’t mind whatever picture of Ella I found on the covers either, the one with her looking up at someone past the camera, the one with her wearing a white feather hat, the one with some guy looking mesmerized in the background. Anything Ella was good by my granddad. Anything Ella that day.
Finally I found it—“How High the Moon”—pulled it from its cover, got the Sansui whirling, laid the record on, and put the needle down on the right track. Granddad closed his eyes to listen. Out of respect I closed mine, too. Ella was singing. She sang raspy and demanding, giving the song speed. She held some notes forever and chopped others into bits, turned syllables into a million words. She was hard to keep up with, my granddad’s Ella Fitzgerald, but still his eyes were closed, and he was smiling, and Riot’s tail was going around; the little triangles of her ears were twitching. Then the needle came up, because the record was done, and I could hear the crows outside, as if they had been waiting around for me. I could look into Granddad’s face and know that he was sleeping. I listened for some sound from Teresa in the kitchen, but I heard nothing.
There are one hundred million different ways of feeling you’re alone, I once wrote in a paper for Mr. Marinari. There’s the alone of no one home but you. There’s the alone of losing friends. There’s the alone of not fitting in with others. There’s the alone of being unfathered. But then there’s also the alone of a summer day, just after noon, when there’s stillness all around and someone you love nearby, asleep. I sat where I was, didn’t budge one inch, and watched my granddad dreaming.
“What did you do today?” my mom asked me when I got home under the wing wind of crows, when the sun was the only color in the sky, after I’d taken my lesson with Max, after I’d found no cool in the tunnel shadows. My sneakers had hissed, but in that hiss I heard the scat of Ella Fitzgerald. There was no sound of Mr. Paul, not coming from the kitchen, not coming from upstairs. My mom was home early, alone.
“Ella Fitzgerald,” I called to her, because her voice came from her bedroom, and her bedroom door was closed.
“Ella what?” she called back. She opened the door now, came out to the upstairs landing, and stood looking down at me, a river of navy-blue carpet between us. Her black hair was half up in a ponytail, half streaming messily down. She was wearing an old cotton dress, not overalls, as if she’d never been to work at all. Her face was puffy.
“Fitzgerald,” I answered, not moving up the stairs, but not moving out of sight either.
“The singer?�
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“Yeah.”
A funny expression crossed her face. “He’s got the record player working?”
“I got the record player working.”
“Well,” she said after a pause, “you’re really something.”
I didn’t want her asking more. I didn’t want to have to explain about the bed with the guardrails, the chair with the wheels, the air with the smell of lemons, acids, bleach. I didn’t want to have to say how tired he was or tell her what Teresa had told me when I was leaving, how much sadder sadness sounds in Spanish. I didn’t want to admit that there might not be time for me to give Granddad the present I was planning. “You know what I learned today?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
“That I kind of like Granddad’s music.”
“Well, that’s a good thing. I guess.”
“Of course it is.”
“Me and him, Mom. Me and him. We’re family.” You could have confused my mom for a kid, I swear. She looked that small, that fragile.
“How is he?” she asked.
“He sleeps a lot,” I said.
“I was guessing he would.
“He doesn’t complain.”
“I’m glad for that.”
I had one foot on the bottom step by now, was waiting for my mother to come down so I could go up. But she sank to the step, put her elbows on her knees, her face in her hands. I understood that something had shifted.
“It’s getting hot,” I said. “Isn’t it?”
“Have you eaten?”
“I had stuff.” I had climbed a couple of steps up by now, closer to her. There were dark traces of mascara raccooned beneath each eye, a little bruise on the lip that she’d been chewing.
“We’ve got more than saltines and peanut butter in this house,” she said. “I could make you something.”
“I’m okay, Mom. Really.”
“Just offering.”
“Tired,” I said. “Headed for bed.”
“Night, Rosie.”
“Night, Mom.” I slipped past her on the step and then, a few seconds after, came my shadow. I stepped through my bedroom door, closed it behind me, walked to the windows to find the moon. It was round on its way to getting rounder, Ella Fitzgerald style.
I threw open the windows to hear the crows in their trees and the next train coming. I pushed my head out to hear the swish swish thrum from the House of Dance, the music that was spilling through the windows there, fizzing up between downfalling star-dust, knocking hard at my heart. I remembered all of a sudden a time that felt like centuries before, when Dad had come up with one of his crazy Christmas schemes. He’d started taking me to Miss Marie, the local seamstress, sometime just after Thanksgiving. He’d had her make me a dress of purple velvet with a broad white collar onto which she’d threaded hot pink flowers. He’d had her make me a purple hair band too. Then one day we took a snowy walk to Miss Marie’s, and everything was ready. I’d peeled off my everyday clothes, down to my undershirt and panties. I’d stood in the back of that shop with my hands high in the air while Miss Marie pulled the dress into place. I’d waited until she had zippered me up, and then she’d fixed my hair, and then she’d spun me around and called my dad’s name, and he came in to see.
“Do you like it?” he’d ask me.
I nodded.
“Do you think your mommy will?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ll wear it Christmas morning then,” he said, “when I give Mommy her present.”
I remember changing back into my regular clothes. I remember Miss Marie handing my father two long bags. One that was little and mine, with the velvet dress. One that was longer and wide and held inside my mother’s brand-new white wool coat. She’d wanted a coat so badly that winter. Miss Marie had made her one.
“It’s our secret,” Dad had said, and that was such a happiness. That was us, before.
NINETEEN
A LONG TIME AGO, when I was eleven, there was a luscious maple rooted deep in my backyard. It was wider than tall, and some of its limbs were loose, but I liked that tree because I had learned from its branches how to save Nick’s lost planes. I could fish the sturdy balsa woods out from a mess of leaves and make Nick smile. I could dig out parts of planes from the maple’s squirrel-nest hollow. Whatever I’d find, I’d run it straight back to Nick’s place, hollering the news: Smash-faced propeller. Stump of a wing. Splintered fuselage. Crushed cockpit.
But Nick was even better on that tree than I. He would scuttle out to the maple’s farthest, hardest parts, up toward the sky or out toward the place where the limbs got lacy thin. “Checking out the stratosphere,” he’d say. A word that branded him smart. “Testing. Testing.” Like he was some kind of pilot. He’d shimmy up and the tree would shiver. When he stayed up there too long, I’d go get him some lunch, ziplock bags of bologna rolled up to look like logs, squares of cheese, a tall sleeve of saltines. Then I’d climb into the part of the tree that I’d nicknamed The Nest and wait for Nick to tell me something, and once in a while he would, and once in a while I’d go on about my celebrity father.
Then one warmish afternoon, when I was outside doing nothing and Nick was who knows where, Mrs. Robertson’s cat, Claw, got wild for some bird that had built its nest on a thin bough of the maple. The big lug had climbed up that tree but couldn’t get himself down; talk about sissy. “A predicament” is what Mrs. Robertson called it when she stomped over across her yard to ours and stood beneath the branches, looking up. By then Claw was mewing up a storm that the whole world could hear, and he would not stop his crying. “Come on, cat,” Mrs. Robertson stood there saying. “Nice boy, kitty, kitty.” But Claw was having none of her. He bared his teeth and stared, as if everyone and everything but him were to be blamed.
“You know, Cloris,” said my mother, who had come outside to see about the commotion, “Claw will come down on his own. Give him time.”
But Mrs. Robertson was fretting, and Claw was stubborn. That cat kept himself stuck, and he was clearly getting hungry, braying instead of mewing now, screaming, you might have said. Mrs. Robertson’s face was never very pretty. Now it was scribbled every which way with worry.
Finally there was nothing to do and Nick wasn’t home and my mother, trying to fix things, said: “Rosie, I’ve seen you. You’re a mighty fine tree climber. You can scoot on up and shake that branch and make old Claw come tumbling down.” A frame of reference and a strategy that left Mrs. Robertson staggered.
“Your plan is to shake my cat from your tree?” she said, gasping between the words, from shock.
“Do you have a better plan?” my mother asked.
“No, I do not,” Mrs. Robertson said. “But even so.” She looked from the cat to my mother to me and back up the tree.
“I guess that settles it,” my mother said. “I guess I will go get a blanket.” She went off in her sundress and her red flip-flops back into the house. Mrs. Robertson and I stood there, not talking, just waiting. After a while my mom returned, carrying our worst old plaid rag blanket, all folded up in a square.
“You and I will stand on either side of this,” she said to Mrs. Robertson, snapping the thing out of its creases to its full size. “We’ll catch the poor thing when he falls.”
“Claw is not a circus cat,” Mrs. Robertson said.
“He’s a stuck cat,” my mother replied. “We’ll do what we can.”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Robertson grimly, taking her side of the rag and pacing backward from my mother. “I sure don’t like it.”
“Neither do I,” my mother said, her part of the rag in hand now. “He may be your cat, but this is my tree and also my blanket.”
“Some blanket.”
The maple was mature and secure in the ground. Its branches were messy over the lawn. When I stretched tall, I could grip my one hand around the lowest branch. When I pulled up, I could reach the next branch after that. That day I kicked off my shoes and took the slightest runn
ing start, to make my very best official tree-climbing-with-a-grown-up-audience debut. The branch was smooth and slippery to my touch, but my feet were off the ground.
I climbed. It was a nice-enough day. I got close but not too close to old cantankerous Claw. “Just shake the branch, Rosie,” Mrs. Robertson called up from the ground. “You can do it from where you are.” But as a matter of fact, I couldn’t, because the klutz had got himself perched just out of reach. I had to go forward if I wanted to shake the thing free, but to get closer, I’d be in Nick territory. I let my right hand go, and I stretched, but no, I could not scrabble myself any closer. I tried again, got all trembly inside, hoped that I didn’t show it. I glanced down toward the ground and caught Mrs. Robertson staring straight at me, her eyes like seeds, hard and tiny. I peeked and saw my mother, her eyes wider than normal, which made them rather basketball sized. The rag of a blanket they held between them was turquoise green and Santa red, little stripes running in all directions. The rag was stained and soggy, but it would have done, if only Claw would have jumped or lunged, if only I could have persuaded him to.
“Come on, kitty,” Mrs. Robertson was saying. “Nothing to be afraid of. Jump.”
“Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” my mother said, and started giggling.
“A nicer blanket would have helped,” Mrs. Robertson said. “What kind of right-thinking cat would want to jump into this?”
“What kind of right-thinking cat—?” my mother started to say, then changed her mind, and I could hear all this, and I remember all this, but I remember thinking too that I wasn’t going to be defeated by a one-eyed, overweight cat. That I was going to reach that high branch and jiggle the loser free, for all time and for the record. I shifted my position. Changed my hold on things. Strained my way toward Claw’s hideout branch, and finally I could reach it, finally I was there, and I was pumping it, and Claw was seesawing up and down, holding on for his precious portly life until he could hold on no more.
I watched that cat slip and slide like the slow-motion part of a movie, and finally he leaped from his stuck roost. I saw his overcoat of dark fur getting smaller. I saw my mother and my neighbor tighten their grip on the Santa rag. I heard my mother saying, “Special delivery.”