“Wait.” I hold up my hand to stop her talking.
I take a minute to let her words sink in—the words about Hank coming because Grandpa Henry left him nothing, the words that tell me why. I hear a buzzing and bat at my ear. There’s nothing to bat. It feels like a bee’s climbed right inside my head and is knocking around in there like it’s confused or drunk. “Hank came with his gun because Grandpa Henry didn’t leave him any money?”
“I think so,” Margie says, but her voice is far away now.
“What did Grandpa Henry do with his money?”
Margie shakes her head. “That’s enough for now, kiddo. You’re pale as a ghost.” She puts one hand to my cheek. Does she feel me buzzing? All these bees under my skin, thrumming inside my head, filling me up with nothing.
I disappear for a little while. I go where it’s quiet.
Seven
“Lily?”
I blink hard and look around the hotel room, then back to Margie. “Yes?”
“Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere.”
There’s fear in Margie’s eyes. “I’ve been calling you. You checked out.”
I look at the clock sitting on the crammed-in-the-corner desk. I don’t know what time it was before, so it doesn’t help. “How long?”
“Oh, not long—a minute or two.”
“Did I fall asleep?”
Margie shakes her head and squeezes my hand. “No, kiddo. Your eyes were open.”
“Okay.”
“Do you remember anything?”
“Just talking about Grandpa Henry’s money is all. And the bees.”
“Bees?”
“Like in a hive. I thought we had one in here.”
“You heard or saw them?”
“Heard. The buzzing was soft for a little while and then it got loud and then it was quiet.”
“All right. Do you hear them now?”
“No.”
We look at each other. Margie’s eyes tell me she’s scared of what happened. I don’t remember. I can’t help her not be afraid.
Eight
We’re sitting, not eating dinner at the hotel restaurant—grilled cheese for me, salmon for Margie. My bread is white, the cheese is yellow. The yellow reminds me of the daisies Mom used to bring home sometimes. Daisies sitting in a vase like there was no awful coming. Just sitting, sucking up water, waiting until the little life left in their stems and petals petered out. Daisies and melted cheese, both dead and waiting. My focus: the bread.
I think it’s been three days, maybe three weeks. I’m not sure.
“I need my books, Mom’s sweater, my rug,” I say.
Margie pulls out her cell phone, presses a few buttons and talks for a minute.
“Officer Archie says it’s okay. He’ll meet us there.”
“Okay.”
I reach inside my pocket. Empty. It’s where I keep my house key. I try to remember these aren’t my normal clothes. I try to remember this isn’t my normal life.
I check my pocket again.
* * *
We drive to the west side of Salt Lake City. The dog food factory is going, spewing white steam and thick stink into the sky. I sniff my new T-shirt. No dog food smell. It’ll be there by the time we leave.
Margie drives a rental car up to the curb out front. Mom’s car is in the driveway. I’m sitting with my hand half-raised toward the door handle and trying to remember she won’t be taking her car to work anymore or the bus when the old heap breaks down. She won’t be walking during good weather or having coffee breaks with her friends at the newspaper. She won’t be anything anymore.
“You sure you want to do this, Lil?” Margie says. “Because I could just run in and grab up anything you need.”
The house looks sad, like with Mom gone it doesn’t know how to be a house anymore. The drapes are drawn and yellow crime scene tape crisscrosses the red door. Mom likes everything open.
“So we can play with the sunshine, Lilybeans, and have the outdoors right inside with us.”
Hank’s rage keeps everything closed, locked up tight. A rage mausoleum.
I pull on the door handle, send out a little hope that I keep it together, forget to answer Margie.
We walk up the front sidewalk—chipped concrete with old drawings, painted pictographs to tell us about the kids who lived here before. Mom never wanted to scrub them off.
“Those kids put their whole hearts into their sidewalk art. We’ll enjoy it and imagine what they were like. What do you think? I’m guessing that pony with the pink mane was painted by a little girl who loves horses.”
“That’s a pretty good guess, Mom.”
“Smart Alec.”
“Seriously. Your mental skills are staggering. I never would’ve guessed that.”
“You know what this means.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“You asked for it, kid. Tickle time.”
Officer Archie stands on the porch guarding the empty house. His hair is dull brown, like he hasn’t washed it in a week. Even the sun can’t make it shine. I don’t remember his dull hair. I remember his soft eyes, his Mack-Hank warning tone, his understanding.
“Hello again, ladies,” he says. He reaches for one corner of the crisscrossed tape. “Please take what you want from your room, Lily, but don’t touch anything else. Understand?”
“Okay.”
I walk across the threshold first. Margie and Officer Archie come behind. To my right I see the empty place where plaster was. I see the window—a mosaic of splintered glass, grains of used-to-be sand still clinging to the sill and frame, still hoping for wholeness.
To my left is the transformed living room. There’s plastic everywhere. Plastic covering Mom’s red halo, covering the pot of gold between the couch cushions.
The walls are bare, the shrine gone, pictures and paintings and little metal sculptures all vanished into the ether. “Where is everything?”
Officer Archie disappears behind the breakfast bar, then comes out with a big box in his arms. “We thought you might like to take them. I hope it’s okay we packed them for you.”
“It’s okay,” Margie says. “Thank you for gathering these up.” She plucks something out of the box, studies it closely and looks up at me, her eyes surprised. “Did your dad make this?” She holds out the tiny silver cat.
“Hank,” I say. “Yes.”
She wraps her hand around it tight, tight, tight until her knuckles turn white. Then she relaxes her fist and puts the cat back in the box Officer Archie’s still holding.
I know Hank’s cat has made my aunt mad, but I don’t have the curiosity in me to ask why. I slip my feet out of the flip flops Margie bought me and walk barefoot toward the stairs.
“There’s broken glass—”
“Not here.” Broken glass over there by the mantel. Facedown frames removed, put in a box, gathered up like they don’t hold fifteen years of everything that was my life.
One step, another. Two steps, another.
I stop behind the couch and touch its rough fabric.
“Look at this couch, Lily! It’s not too bad. Maybe we can reupholster it someday. I’ll take a picture, see if the color works in our new living room.” Click. Snap.
Margie’s breathing gets noisy. She’s seen Mom’s red halo through cloudy plastic, an arc of dried blood that says she used to be here, but now she isn’t.
My focus: the couch because Mom’s dead blood starts the bees up again.
But pretty soon there’s paint and mint and whiskey. Pretty soon I see Hank sitting on the hearth, his back to the fireplace, his hand waving a tin gun. Then a paintbrush. Gun. Paintbrush.
Gun. “One year into two, two years into nothing.”
Paintbrush. “Hold still, kid. Noses are the hardest to get down.”
Gun. “Lily, what did I do? Where’s your mother?”
Paintbrush. “Lift your chin just a touch, Lilybeans. And for god’s sake, smile. Sitting for
a portrait isn’t any worse than eating your mom’s burnt pot roast, ya Gloomy Gus.”
I’m eight. My prize for sitting for Dad’s painting is a visit to Lagoon, where we’ll ride the roller coaster and the Log Flume, the Sky Ride and the Tidal Wave. We’ll eat churros and ice cream. And later we’ll pose for a picture. Mom’ll be a saloon girl in a frilly dress and Dad’ll be the sheriff, holding a tin gun, wearing a tin badge. I’ll be their daughter. When I’m eight I don’t want to be anyone else.
I smile at Dad painting my face on his blank canvas.
He smiles back. “Not so bad, huh?”
“Not so bad,” I agree.
I watch the way Dad brushes and dabs and sometimes smudges. “Where did you learn to paint?” I’ve asked before and he always waves my question away, like it’s not important. Today he feels like talking.
His eyes go far away, a little squinty—his seeing-into-the-past look. “I used to doodle in notebooks, sometimes in the margins of novels. My mother saw something in those drawings and bought me my first sketchpad when I was six. For years after that, she would sneak me charcoal, pencils, markers, you name it. Eventually, we figured out I was best at this.” He points with his brush at the painting I can’t see. “While my father was at work, I would paint.”
“Grandpa Henry didn’t like you painting?” At eight I only know a little about Grandpa Henry—that he’s not welcome in our house, that he’s mean.
Dad gives me a funny look, like he’s searching for the answer in my eyes. “Grandpa Henry believed there was a right way and a wrong way.”
“To what?”
Dad rubs the hand holding his brush across his forehead, leaving a streak of red there. “To everything,” he says softly.
Dad rubbing his head tells me to stop asking questions. Pretty soon he’ll start swallowing a lot and wiping his mouth. He’ll say he’s thirsty, but not for water. After a few beers, he’ll sit in his recliner and maybe nod off, maybe tell me I need to be stronger than I am. Stronger and smarter and not so gloomy. He won’t be kidding like when he said Gloomy Gus. He’ll be serious and his eyes will glint like two black stones and he’ll look different.
I don’t ask any more questions and hope I stopped before the big thirst comes on.
Hank disappears when Margie tugs on my hand. “Lilybeans?”
“All set.” I turn my back on the not-shrine and the not-Hank. I step up and toward the hollow-sounding switchback—one-hundred eighty degrees from one set of steps to the next. About face. Hollow thump underfoot. Like a drum. Like a heartbeat.
I’m in the hall that connects our rooms. I glance toward hers. Folded clothes are heaped on her bed, the laundry basket almost empty. A few towels left. Unfinished laundry, frozen in a gone-forever moment. I go there first.
There’s just one thing. Only one. I touch the stuff on the bed and run my fingers along the soft bedspread she found on sale last year, then go to the picture on her nightstand. It’s one of me and her at the park. A rare one because she didn’t like giving up her camera. Another gone-forever moment. I take me and Mom at the park, wrap us up in one of the frayed towels and hold us against my chest. A shield to keep it all inside.
“Okay,” I say.
Margie and Officer Archie step aside. I follow my feet down the hall. One step. Two. Three steps. Four. There’s mud on the daisy rug Mom made me, an evidence bag on my bed.
“I’m sorry about the mud,” Officer Archie says. He grabs up the evidence bag and tucks it away.
One step. Two. Three steps. Closet. I pull down two duffle bags. Margie disappears, comes back with three big suitcases that roll around on wheels. I don’t remember them.
I have a lot of books. We pack them up. They fit. I take clothes, my journals, my wannabe iPod and an old laptop Mom bought last year. I leave Tiananmen Square and the brave tank man behind.
There’s only one book left—the paperback I’m rereading for the third time—The Stand by Stephen King.
“How can you stomach all that horror stuff, Lilybeans?”
“It’s about more than that.”
“But everyone dies.”
“Not everyone. There’s Stu and Larry and Joe and Mother Abigail and Tom Cullen and Nick and Frannie. Tons of people left. M-O-O-N, that spells starting over.”
The phone in Mom’s room rings. Hank. Must be Hank. I hear bees buzzing again, loud in my ears, taking over everything. Then peace.
* * *
“Lily?” Margie’s saying. She’s at my side now. I don’t know when she crossed the room. One minute she was at the closet, the next, she’s right next to me, like I blinked and she teleported. I’m still holding my book.
“Just about done,” I say.
“Where’d you go, kiddo?”
“Again?”
Margie nods. “A few minutes this time. Couldn’t move ya, kid.” She’s trying to make light, but it’s no good. The fear is huge in her eyes and her cell phone’s clutched tight in her hand.
“Was it like before?” Margie asks. Her voice is feathery in this silent mausoleum, a wisp of sound the dead house won’t echo. Nothing is like what it was before, but that's not what she’s asking.
“I guess so.”
“Do you remember anything?”
I lift The Stand to show Margie. “I was having memories about this book.”
She nods. “All that time?”
“No, a few seconds I think.”
“And then what?”
“Ringing. Mom’s phone ringing?”
Margie’s face creases. “It didn’t ring. What about the bees?”
“They were there. Loud.”
“What do you remember after that?”
“You calling my name.”
“Anything I can do to help?” Officer Archie says. He’s ready for us to go.
Fear dissolves. Margie is Margie again. “Would you help us haul this out?”
“Of course,” he says.
“Shall we?” Margie says. She’s got one arm held out, sweeping me toward the door. Her other hand is holding tight to her cell phone. We’re pretending about the lost minutes. We’re pretending she’s not thinking about Mack and Darcy.
I look around my empty bedroom and take a deep breath of dog food. My last. “I’m ready.”
“We might have to make two trips,” Margie says.
“No, it’ll fit.”
“Your mom always said you knew just how things would fit. Instinctively. Like that dresser.” Margie points at the big vanity Mom and I carried up here ourselves. “You could tell that would fit through the door before you brought it home.”
“Mom told you that?”
She nods and her eyes are bright now. She’s close to saying “Your mom was really proud of you” or something like it.
“I’m ready,” I say again before her mouth opens.
Nine
We wait in the hotel, not eating much, not swimming in the pool, only sometimes sleeping. We wait for Officer Archie to call and tell us they caught Hank. We don’t talk about Grandpa Henry’s money again or anything important. I don’t tell Margie about Hank at the dog food house. I think seeing Hank with his gun and his paintbrush might get me sent someplace besides Seattle, besides Mack and Darcy’s. Maybe the loony bin. We don’t talk about the bees either. We're quiet, me and Margie.
Margie’s cell phone plays a song. It's not about Hank, I see by her face. It's about Mom. When she hangs up she says words I don’t want to hear. “We can lay your mom to rest, Lily.”
She touches my arm, keeping me here. “She wanted to be cremated. Did you know that?”
“No,” I say. “But it makes sense.” Mom didn’t like it when people were tricked out of their money—a funeral, her biggest example.
“It’s ridiculous—an expensive box to rot in the ground. Money should be spent on the living. The dead don’t care.”
We decide to spread Mom’s ashes in a hidden meadow where she and I spent most of every weekend last
summer. Not this summer, though. This summer isn’t quite here. Next weekend was supposed to be our first trip up. Five miles in the car, another two on foot. It’s quiet there. Peaceful.
“When?” I say.
Margie squints at me. I have to ask in more words so she understands. “When can we take Mom up?”
“It’ll be a few days yet. I know you want to get this all put behind you. I know that. I wish I could make it go faster.”
Margie doesn’t understand. When you want to put things behind, you usually have something in front. There is no front for me. No future.
Pretty soon the tears will start. Pretty soon there’ll be a crack and then a flood.
Pretty soon I’ll dissolve, disappear, vanish into the ether like the life we had at the dog food house.
Ten
“Would you like to say a few words?” Margie’s asking. We’re standing in the middle of Mom’s meadow with wildflowers blooming right up around us, going about their business like Mom didn’t die. Purple fades to pink. Yellow into red. Dew on our sneakers. The earth sinking, soft with spring, the sky blue and cloudless.
I’m standing in Mom’s meadow. I’m holding the urn that holds her.
“Lily?”
“I love her,” I say. I look at the urn. “I love you.”
There’s a hot tightness in my stomach. Aching behind my eyes. Hollow in my chest where my heart’s supposed to be. Thump-crack, thump-crack.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I didn’t answer the phone.” It’s all I can say because the heat and the ache and the hollow want to come out, to dissolve me. There are worse places to become nothing, but I’m weak, not brave like Mom. After Hank’s light went out, when he let in Grandpa Henry’s poison, he made sure I knew.
“You're so pathetic, Lily. A weak-willed, mewling little brat.”
Margie says a few words too, letting the heat and ache out. She stays Margie, though, and doesn’t dissolve. She tells Mom she’s sorry for what her brother did, for how things turned out.
Tin Lily Page 3