by Lisa Wingate
In my mind, the fabric became new, soft, comforting. I smelled washing soap, the fresh air of the clothesline, saw the way light passed through the weave. I was hiding underneath the quilt. A man thundered past in the hallway, his voice rising, a wire rug beater striking his pants leg and scraping the wall, the sound echoing through the house.
“J. Norm? Are you okay? What’s wrong?” Epiphany’s fingers touched my arm, and I jerked away.
“No . . . no . . . I only . . . I remember this blanket.” Never, under any circumstances, would my father, a dignified, self-controlled person who put most of his efforts into his business, have behaved in such a manner. Never would my mother have left me in a house in which I was not safe—even under the care of a neighbor, a friend, or a relative. A mother who wouldn’t even allow her child down to the corner for a sidewalk game of marbles would never do that.
She wouldn’t have left me in the house with the seven chairs. Nor would she have abided the ranting and threatening, the drunken slurs of a man. My mother was a formidable woman, tall, rawboned, stately, direct, not to be trifled with.
She loved me to distraction.
Would she have kept some part of my history secreted away all my life?
Would she have crafted falsehoods, convinced me to believe things about myself that weren’t true? Would she have lied about who I was? Could there have been a time when I wasn’t with her? Could there have been a life before?
But what could account for the baby pictures hanging in the hallway of our home when I was young? There were black-and-white photographs of her holding a chubby-cheeked cherub in a long white christening gown. I knew all the details of our life in Houston, before my father had moved his offices to Dallas. Mother spoke often of our home there, of the magnolia trees and how I loved to play under them, of our little summerhouse by the seashore where I ran about in the waves. I remembered those places. I knew exactly how they looked. I remembered the towering palms in front of the original beach house, the one that had been swept away by a hurricane when I was young.
“What is it, J. Norm?” Epiphany squeezed my arm, her voice laced with intrigue. “What do you remember?”
“I . . . don’t know.” Lifting the quilt, I fingered the fabric. The memory of the quilt was different from those bits of early family history my mother so often told me about. The quilt was unlike the beach house or our home in Houston. The memory of the quilt was full, and real, tactile. I knew not only the sight of it, but also the feel, the touch, the scent, the sound. The memory surrounded me, wound through me, transported me, so that I was once again in the body of a young boy, wrapped beneath that quilt. I was cuddling it under my chin this time, ready for bed in the house with the seven chairs. The night was peaceful, but still I was afraid.
A hand stroked my hair; a smooth, dark arm grazed my forehead. Soft lips kissed the skin there. “Don’ worry, Willie-boy,” she whispered, her voice melodious and low, as if she caressed the words in her throat before releasing them. “Cecile gon’ watch over. I gon’ be right here.” She moved then to a fainting couch in the corner of the room and hummed a hymn. “Children Go Where I Send Thee.” I let my eyes fall closed, fingered the edge of the blanket, touched something I knew would be there.
Children, go where I send thee,
How shall I send thee?
I’m gonna send thee one-by-one,
One for the little baby boy . . .
Now I unfolded the blanket on Roy’s floor, searched the corner, found the threads my fingers had stroked in the memory—an embroidered heart, red at one time, outlined in blue, now faded to gray and lavender.
Inside the heart lay the name of the maker who had so painstakingly created the patchwork of plaid terrier pups. Cecile. The letters were a clumsy block, part capital, part small, but the name inside the heart was unmistakable. Cecile was real, and she’d sewn this quilt and put me to bed in it, and watched over me as I slept.
“My mother didn’t have a black maid when I was a boy,” I said, and Epiphany leaned away from me.
“What?”
“She couldn’t abide the rules of it. There were rules in those days—ordinances, segregation laws, social conventions. My mother was from Boston, and she couldn’t abide the rules for having colored help in the South. There was a Polish woman who cooked for us, and Mother took in young single women—girls who came to attend secretarial school or college. They lived with us and helped with the domestic work, and Mother mentored them. Mother believed that a young woman should be capable of making her own way.”
Epiphany craned to see the embroidered letters inside the heart. “Okay . . . so what’s that got to do with this blanket? Who’s Cecile?”
“The woman who took care of me. A black woman. I remember her from when I was young. She was in the house with the seven chairs, but I don’t remember her anywhere else. I don’t remember her in our home in Houston, or my parents’ vacation cottage at the beach. If Cecile looked after my care, why wouldn’t I remember her in those places, too?”
Epiphany scratched her head, smoothing dark curls away from her face. “People don’t remember everything from when they were young, J. Norm. Sometimes there’s stuff you don’t want to remember.” Her gaze sought mine, and I wondered what things she was trying to forget.
“This is different,” I said. “It’s as if there are two sets of memories, and one doesn’t match the other. Both can’t be valid. It is impossible for a person to be in two places at once.”
“Well . . .” Epiphany knelt beside the trunk as if she intended to be there awhile. “Guess there’s only one way we’re gonna find that out. Let’s see what else is in this trunk.”
Chapter 12
Epiphany Jones
It wasn’t long before J. Norm and me figured out that finding clues wouldn’t be easy. The trunk was full of all kinds of stuff from J. Norm’s mother. There were photo albums with crispy sheets of black paper crammed full of pictures from school plays and high school dances, Christmases and birthday parties. There were scrapbooks from trips to Europe, Egypt, Asia, a tiny pair of white leather toddler shoes, coloring books he’d colored in, a chart of stars and a book on astronomy some teacher gave him, a stack of his mother’s ledgers about household accounts, a tattered book of Bible stories, some baby clothes his mama had saved, a long, white christening gown. We separated everything into stacks, and then looked at photo books until our eyes were crossed. Finally, we took a break for lunch. J. Norm fell asleep in his chair, and I left him there and went back upstairs.
I started in on some old scrapbooks and ledgers that had been his mama’s. That woman must’ve written down everything she ever spent money on and every place she went. It was weird to think about that being somebody’s life—paying housekeepers and gardeners, and spending your time going to things like Ladies’ Tea, and the Christian Aid Society. J. Norm’s people were rich, like you saw in the movies.
He came back up after his nap, and we found what we figured must’ve been the mother’s helper he remembered from when they came to Dallas. She was in a couple pictures with him at his birthday party, all of them smiling on the front lawn. She got paid every week out of the household account, but only the first name was in there—Frances, like her last name didn’t matter. She was there working for a couple years, according to the checks.
After Frances, there was another young girl, Lydia, and all the while there was a Polish lady, Irenka, getting paid for cooking and housekeeping. The weird thing was that J. Norm’s mama was also writing housekeeping checks to a third person the whole time she had Irenka and one of the younger girls there. The third housekeeper’s name wasn’t even in the book—just her initials, T.C., and the word housekeeping in the notations column. J. Norm didn’t remember a third person ever being there, but T.C. got paid for years and years, until J. Norm was grown and married. The money went out twice a month, right on schedule.
I laid the picture book with Frances in it open by my knee, loo
ked down into her face, and wondered what she was thinking the minute someone snapped that photo. She was young, maybe even younger than me, already off in the world. “So why did they have to come work here instead of living with their own families?” I asked. “Frances and Lydia, and the other mother’s helpers, I mean?”
J. Norm kept flipping through the ledgers, reading his mama’s handwriting. “It was a different time. Young women didn’t have so many options open to them. Families often had more children than they could afford, or sometimes the parents died and the children had to go to work. Frances was a distant cousin of some sort. A poor relation sent to my mother for an education. She had an older sister who stayed with us for a short while, too. Possibly they’d lost their parents or some such. My mother helped a number of young women through the years. I don’t know if Frances was with our family before my parents moved to Dallas. I don’t remember much of life in Houston.”
“Do you think Frances liked it here?” She was smiling in the pictures, but she had a worried look in her eyes. What was behind that look?
There was a line across her cheek, a shadow, I thought at first, but when I picked up the book and looked again, I could see that the line had bled through from behind. Sliding a finger over the picture, I lifted the corner as far as it would go before the glue clung to the black paper. Then I held the book up so that I could see the back of the photo.
“J. Norm, there’s writing on the backs of these,” I said, and he looked down at me from the chair we’d wheeled into the room.
“Writing?”
“Yeah.” I lifted a little more, heard just the tiniest bit of ripping, then yanked my fingernail away.
He leaned forward in his seat, flipping a hand at me. “Well, go on. Tear it off. Let’s see if it’s anything useful.”
I stuck a fingernail under the corner, and the same creepy feeling I’d had in the attic crawled over my skin again—like someone was standing right over my shoulder, breathing on my neck. My shoulders did a shimmy, and I handed the book up to J. Norm. “You do it. It’ll mess up the book. I don’t want anyone mad at me.” If J. Norm’s mama was a ghost in this house, I sure didn’t want her coming after me.
A bushy eyebrow went low over one of his eyes. “I assure you that I have absolutely no plans for these old things, and Deborah isn’t the type for sentimental study of family history. The minute I’m gone, she’ll have a moving company in here to empty out that attic. She was after Annalee to do it for years.”
I held my hands up, away from the photo book. “I’m not doing it.” I wondered what Deborah would really say if she could see all the books. If I had a whole trunk full of stuff about my family, it’d mean something to me. All I had was a shoe box, and almost everything in there seemed important. When you’ve only got a little of the puzzle, every piece matters.
J. Norm tore the pictures off the page in one quick sweep, and about a half second later, we knew the name of the girl in the picture. Frances Gibbs. After that, we hunted up all the pictures of other hired help and tore them off the pages, too. We also found the photos of some of J. Norm’s mama’s neighbors and friends, and a few photos of neighbors’ kids he’d played with. We made a list of names of people who were there when he was little, people who might’ve known something or heard something.
I told him we could try looking up the names on the Internet, if we had some way to get to the Internet. “You can find people’s addresses, and stuff like newspaper articles they’ve been in, or sometimes their obituaries, or if somebody put them on a family tree when they were looking up their ancestors, or if they’re on Facebook. We used to do it in classes at my old school—look up famous people in history and stuff.” Now, with all those names on J. Norm’s list, I thought about my daddy. His name was on my birth certificate. I wondered if I could find out anything about him or his family on the Internet. “I could probably do it at school, if I could get one of the teachers to let me on a computer. They’re picky about it here, because the kids at this school will wreck it or look up porn.”
J. Norm blinked, surprised. Guess he didn’t have a clue what kids did with computers these days. “No doubt those computers are for schoolwork. I had a computer here for e-mail and whatnot, but it was old and slow. Deborah took it home so that Lloyd could rehab it, and he pronounced it a lost cause. They’re busy salvaging Annalee’s photos off of it now, I think. I don’t want you getting into trouble trying to use the one at school on my account.”
“I won’t,” I said, and started gathering the pictures. “I don’t know if I’ll find anything, anyway. Most of these people are probably dead by now. They’d be, like, even older than—” I bit off the last word of that sentence just in time.
“Me,” J. Norm finished.
“I was gonna say dirt,” I told him, and he smiled—a real smile, not the kind that looked like it was painful to make.
We slipped the photos into an envelope, then headed downstairs to do a little work on my research report before I had to go catch the bus home.
“That hoodlum DeRon did return your backpack, at least,” he said to me when we got downstairs. He grabbed it and handed it to me in the entryway. “Or rather, he threw it at Deborah.”
I let out a breath when I felt the weight of the backpack. DeRon couldn’t be too mad at me. The backpack was still heavy, so everything must be in there—some math homework, a couple books, J. Norm’s old magazines. The night I took the magazines home, I’d started reading the articles about the Apollo launches, and there was plenty of stuff in there to make a report and do the talk in history class. It wouldn’t matter much what I said, anyway. Nobody would be listening.
The zipper on the backpack was gummy when I tried to open it. It stuck in one place, and I sat down on the stairs to wiggle it free. “Hang . . . on . . . a . . . sec. It’s hung up or something.”
“We could try a screwdriver or a pair of pliers.” J. Norm actually seemed kind of excited about helping me with the report.
“No . . . I can get . . . There it goes.” The zipper started moving again, but it was still sticky and slow. “I worked on the project a little bit from the articles, and . . .” The zipper turned the second corner, and the flap flopped open, and I felt sick. I yanked my fingers back and they were wet and bloodred. My breath caught, I dropped the backpack, and it rolled down the stairs.
A sharp smell wound up my nose, and I knew what it was on my hand. Not blood. Paint. DeRon and his friends had spray-painted the inside of my backpack. Everything was ruined. “I’m sor . . . sorry,” I whispered. Annalee’s magazines, and the rocket pen . . .
J. Norm opened the backpack, pinched one of the magazines between two fingers, and took it out. I felt my cheeks going hot, the tears spilling over. I didn’t want to be at J. Norm’s house all of a sudden. I didn’t want to be anywhere. I wanted to find DeRon and kill him, or else run away and never come back. I hated DeRon. I hated it here in Dallas. I hated everything about being here.
I didn’t even say anything else to J. Norm. I just got up, ran across the entry hall, opened the door, then took off before he could stop me. I ran across the yard with him yelling after me. I kept running, and running, and running, until finally I caught the bus back to my part of the neighborhood.
Walking home from the bus stop, I wondered if DeRon was still trolling around. I pictured him driving up in his car, and after that, the picture went one of two ways. In one picture, I knocked him out with a right cross to the jaw. In the other picture, he had the rest of his loser friends with him, and they were looking for a party girl, and they didn’t want to take no for an answer.
Russ was out front unhooking his flea market trailer when I got home. For once, I was glad to see him.
“Where you been?” he asked, and gave my borrowed shirt a onceover. I pulled it tighter over the ripped tank top. If Russ or Mama found out what’d happened in DeRon’s car, they’d say it was my fault for being stupid. It probably was.
“
At work,” I said. “I don’t feel so good. I’m gonna shower and go to bed.”
Russ just shrugged and told me to clean up the kitchen first. “Your mama’s ticked.”
What’s new? I thought. Nothing ever changed here. Somebody was always mad.
Today Mama was on the sofa with a headache, trying to sleep off the weekend fun. I started picking up dishes, but she cracked open an eye and yelled at me to quit making noise, so I gave up and hurried to take a shower while Russ was outside. The lock on the bathroom door didn’t work, and if Russ needed to use the toilet, he’d just walk on in whether someone was in the shower or not. He never did anything but come and do his business, but it was creepy knowing he was right on the other side of the curtain, so I tried to get my showering done when he was asleep or when he and Mama were holed up in the bedroom together.
After the shower, I scooted past Mama to the kitchen, grabbed a sandwich and a soda, and headed to my room. Outside, a couple Harleys rumbled up, and I heard Russ shooting the breeze with some friends. The old refrigerator in the carport opened and shut, and Russ and his buddies popped the tops on some brews. They’d be there awhile.
Tiptoeing barefoot out of the room again, I looked down the hall and checked Mama on the sofa. She was out for the count, her mouth hanging open and her hair curling wild on pillows, splayed out like a lion’s mane. She’d probably taken one of the sleeping pills Russ’s VA doctor prescribed, and she’d be there all night.
I decided it was safe enough to go into Mama’s room and get the shoe box. The laundry in the closet was piled so high now, she wouldn’t notice it was gone, even if she did wake up. All this business with J. Norm hunting for his people had me thinking that I wanted to check the backs of my pictures for clues, too.