by Ann Hood
CHAPTER FIVE
EVEN THOUGH MACKENZIE KNEW people had rented the house, when she drove up she expected to find it abandoned. Instead, Christmas lights blazed and laughter came from inside. Cars lined the sidewalk in front and she had to double park the rented Buick.
“Well,” she said. “Home.”
She looked at Sam. He sat beside her, his seat belt fastened across his chest.
Blinking multicolored lights bordered the windows and all the lines of the house.
“Grandma Cal would never have stood for this,” she said. “We used to have make-believe candles in the windows with little white lights for flames. That’s all.”
Sam craned his neck. The lights blinked on and his eyes reflected their flash of color. He leaned back again.
“Do you remember those make-believe candles?” Mackenzie asked him. She felt the desperation in her voice. “And on the lawn over there was a plastic snowman with a white light in his belly. I mean, you couldn’t see that the light was there. It spread a glow all through the snowman so he looked bright and jolly.”
The front door swung open. A woman’s voice floated out. “I don’t think you drunks should drive.” Mackenzie wondered if she was the woman renting the house. Two men staggered out, arms thrown sloppily around each other’s shoulders. One sang the drumming part of “The Little Drummer Boy.” He wore a stocking cap with reindeer and evergreens on it. The other man had on a baseball cap with red antlers sticking out on each side. He was doing a drunken imitation of Bing Crosby.
“I’m dreaming,” he crooned, “of a white Christmas…”
They stumbled down the front steps and onto the sidewalk.
Sam sat straight up and watched the men.
“You can unfasten your seat belt,” Mackenzie told him. She watched the men too.
“Where the treetops glisten, and children whistle—”
The man in the stocking cap stopped rat-a-tat-tatting.
“Those aren’t the words,” he said.
“What?”
“Children don’t whistle. They listen.”
“Where treetops glisten, and children whistle—”
“That doesn’t even rhyme.”
The door flew open again and a woman in a black fur coat came out laughing. She held a big square box wrapped in red foil. Mackenzie wanted to scream at all these people to leave, to get away from her house.
“Sing ‘White Christmas,’” the man with the antlers said to the woman.
“I’m not sure I know that one,” she said. “I mean, I know the movie, with Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney and all that. And I know there’s a song. A theme, or whatever, to the movie. But I don’t know the words.”
Mackenzie rolled down the car window.
“Where treetops glisten, and children listen,” she shouted.
The people on the sidewalk stopped talking and looked at her.
“See,” the man in the stocking cap said. “I told you.”
Mackenzie rolled up the car window and leaned forward. Her head rested on the steering wheel. She wished she were a magician, that she could wave a wand and make herself vanish, make everything vanish and reappear the way it used to be.
“God,” she said.
Sam sat back in his seat. She heard his seat belt click into place. And from the outside she heard the woman laugh and the two men sing the last bars of “White Christmas.”
For as long as Mackenzie could remember, Aunt Hope and John-Glenn had lived in the basement apartment in the old house. But when the house was rented, they had to move too. Their new apartment was in a Spanish-style complex, with papery stucco walls and imitation wood beams. Aunt Hope had taken a lot of furniture from the old house and crowded it into her new apartment.
The heavy mahogany mantel at home had always held photographs of people Mackenzie didn’t know. As a child, she thought it must be a great honor to get your picture up there. When she grew older, she realized all the people in the pictures, great-uncles and grandparents, were dead.
And now, above Hope’s small white gas fireplace, pictures of Alexander stared back at her. To see him there, tanned and alive, made Mackenzie weak. “You see all those people?” he used to whisper to her when they were children. “They were dying to get up there.” And now there he was.
All the pictures seemed out of place here. They belonged, Mackenzie thought, over the fireplace in her childhood home. She wondered briefly what was there now. It too was probably lined with blinking Christmas lights. Or a vase with artificial flowers. Or a pair of brass baby shoes. She winced.
“Ah,” Aunt Hope said, “it’s a shame. All of them gone. And your father. Locked away like that.”
Mackenzie clutched the edge of the mantel. It tipped slightly. For an instant she expected all the pictures to smash to the floor. But she steadied the shelf in time.
“And now here you are,” Aunt Hope said. “With the boy, no less.”
Sam stood, fascinated by the butterflies on the wall. There were hundreds of them, their wings pinned to white boards, the boards covered by glass, the glass framed and then hung on the walls. The colors gave the room its only source of life.
“You like the butterflies?” Aunt Hope asked.
Sam frowned.
“They are lovely,” she said. “So majestic. We must have three or four hundred. John-Glenn knows exactly. He catches them and catalogues them. He has an entire file cabinet full of information about his butterflies.”
Mackenzie pictured John-Glenn as a boy, overweight and sloppily dressed, chasing butterflies, pushing his tongue through the gap where his front teeth should be.
“He’s a little slow,” Cal always explained. “It’s probably something in the Havana blood,” Grammie would say as she watched him. “No,” Aunt Hope told her. “Since Ricardo left, we both just suffer from broken hearts.”
“We went to the old house,” Mackenzie said.
“Ah.”
“You should see the Christmas decorations they have up. Garish lights flashing. Like it’s a truck stop or something with neon lights.”
“A pity,” Aunt Hope said.
“Remember the snowman we used to have? We used to put it on the lawn. His shovel said ‘Happy Holidays’ on it.”
Aunt Hope shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t remember any snowman.”
“Sure you do. A plastic one with a light in its belly. Alexander used to say it must have eaten a flashlight.”
“Well,” Aunt Hope said. “Alexander. Maybe he had that in Georgetown.”
Mackenzie swallowed hard. Sometimes, like now, she felt as if she had made all these people up. No one remembered them the way she did. She watched Sam. He reached up and tapped on one of the panes over a butterfly. With his pinky he traced the shape of a small yellow and black one.
“Oh, now, Sam,” Aunt Hope said, “don’t do that. Don’t bang on the glass like that.”
Once, Mackenzie had mentioned to Daisy that when Sam got mad, he looked just like Alexander. His eyebrows tightened and his eyes darkened, from a clear blue to the color of a muddy lake. I just don’t see the resemblance, Daisy had said. “Sam looks like my sister Iris. Eyes and all. Mad or happy.” But Mackenzie had insisted. Didn’t anyone, she had wondered, remember Alexander’s eyes?
“Now, honey, Sam, don’t bang like that.” Aunt Hope led him away from the butterflies and sat him down on the couch, the crushed blue velvet one that used to be in the Porters’ parlor. When they sat, a lace doily slipped from the arm.
“There,” she said. “John-Glenn is so particular about his butterflies.” She fluffed her hair, a habit carried over from long ago when she wore a blonde poodle cut. Now her hair had grown flat and thin on top.
“Do you see,” Mackenzie said, “that he has Alexander’s eyes?”
Sam swung his tiny sneakered feet back and forth.
“Mackenzie,” Aunt Hope said gently, “I really don’t.”
“Everything is upsid
e down,” Mackenzie said.
She thought she was going to cry. She focused on an orange spotted butterfly on the wall across from her. Don’t, she told herself. Don’t cry. Her mother had a trick. When you’re going to cry, she used to say, stare hard at something pleasant. Mackenzie stared hard at that butterfly, stared away the tears and blocked out an image—a constant one—of her mother on the beach at Cape Cod, staring at the ocean.
“We lived in that little apartment for so long,” Aunt Hope was saying. “John-Glenn just can’t get used to this place. Even with some of the old furniture here. I thought that would help him adjust.”
Mackenzie nodded. The butterfly’s spots danced in front of her eyes.
Aunt Hope hesitated. “I got another postcard.”
Mackenzie watched her aunt walk out of the room to get it. She was a pear-shaped woman, a shape John-Glenn had inherited. Since her husband had left, she always wore sleeveless cotton housedresses and backless slippers. Mules, she called them. Tonight, her dress was blue and white checked with violets on the big square front pockets. Her slippers were pink. One had a safety pin hanging from the toe.
“Where’s it from?” Mackenzie called to her aunt.
Aunt Hope came back, dusting the postcard with the hem of her dress.
“Where’s it from?” Mackenzie asked again.
“That’s a good question,” Aunt Hope said. “She’s trying to confuse us.”
She held the postcard tightly, as if it were a valuable prize, not even allowing Mackenzie to glimpse it.
“Now this one here,” Aunt Hope said, “has a picture of a desert.”
She reached into one of the big square pockets on her dress and pulled out a pair of oversized glasses. A wadded old Kleenex was tangled in the glasses and Mackenzie fought back an impulse to grab the postcard out of her aunt’s hand. It was, after all, her mother off in that desert.
“Is she in a desert?” Mackenzie asked. Her mind ran through all the deserts she knew of—Mojave, Gobi, Sahara. “Which desert is it?”
“Well, that’s the funny thing.”
Aunt Hope bent to pick up a bobby pin that had fallen from her pocket. Then she put her glasses on and read from the back of the postcard.
“‘Giant cactus in Arizona.’ That’s what’s printed on the card. And sure enough, that’s what the picture is on the front.”
Aunt Hope held up the postcard for Mackenzie to see. A huge cactus was in the foreground with a few smaller ones behind it. Sam came over and looked at the picture. Gingerly, he touched the big cactus, then pulled his hand away quickly, as if he’d been pricked.
“Is there a message this time?” Mackenzie asked impatiently. She was tired. And tired of her aunt’s slowness.
Aunt Hope shook her head.
“Just her initials on the bottom, like always. CP. Now the funny thing is this is a desert in Arizona somewhere and this postmark says Seattle. I said to John-Glenn, now I may not be a geography whiz but am I right when I say Seattle is not in Arizona? Is nowhere near Arizona? And of course John-Glenn has to show me in the atlas. He points out Arizona and then Washington. Washington state. Not DC. And they’re this far apart.” Aunt Hope holds her hands out to demonstrate. The postcard dangled from the Seattle hand. “Nowhere near each other.”
Mackenzie snatched the postcard from her aunt’s hand. She studied it for some clue about her mother. Years ago, her parents had gone to Montreal for a few days. They had sent Mackenzie and Alexander a postcard of their hotel. A window high in the hotel had been circled in black magic marker, OUR ROOM, their mother had written in the sky above an arrow pointing to the circle. But this postcard had no such intimacies. Just the initials CP.
“Nothing,” Mackenzie said.
“The last one was postmarked Denver,” Aunt Hope said. “It had a picture of the Jefferson Memorial. At night.”
“You told me.”
“And the initials CP on the bottom. What would it take for her to sign her name at least. Just sign her full name instead of the initials.”
Mackenzie sighed and laid the postcard on the coffee table. Sam picked it up and traced each of the cacti.
“It’s from Grandma,” Mackenzie said.
Sam nodded.
Mackenzie touched the top of Sam’s head, ran a few strands of his fine blonde hair through her fingers. She thought of her brother. Alexander’s hair had been just this fine and this blonde when he was a child. Later, it had darkened to the color of straw.
The door burst open then and John-Glenn stood there, surrounded by cold air and snow flurries, his bulky body framed by the dark night. He was wearing a bright red down coat. Lime green mittens hung from a hook on each sleeve. On top of his head sat a pointed brown and yellow striped hat with golden arches embossed on the front.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Company.”
“This is not company,” Aunt Hope said. “It’s Mackenzie. And Sam. Look at Alexander’s boy.”
John-Glenn stamped the snow off his feet.
“Company is company,” he said.
“Close that door now,” Aunt Hope said. “You’re letting all the cold in. And snow. Look at the carpet.”
He walked in and slammed the door behind him.
“Aren’t you going to kiss your cousin Mackenzie?”
“No.”
“Let me get you a cherry Coke,” Aunt Hope said. “You sit down here and talk.”
John-Glenn took off his coat and dropped it on the floor.
“Why are you here?” he said to Mackenzie.
“What kind of a question is that?” Aunt Hope called from the kitchen.
“We’re visiting,” Mackenzie said. “I wanted Sam to see the old house.”
“Is his crazy mother around here somewhere?”
“No. She’s back in Maryland.”
“Daisy,” he muttered. “And her crazy sister with the purple hair. The dyed purple hair.”
“Most purple hair is dyed,” Mackenzie said.
“I’m mad at you,” John-Glenn said. “I’m mad at your whole family. Making us leave our home like that. It isn’t fair.”
“You stop talking like that,” Aunt Hope yelled.
Despite the cold air he’d brought into the room, John-Glenn was sweating. He stood in front of Mackenzie with his red coat at his feet, dressed in his brown striped McDonald’s uniform, jumping up and down slightly.
“One time,” he said, pointing his finger at her, “Alexander said to me, ‘Does your face hurt?’ and I said, ‘No. No, why?’ and he said ‘Because it’s killing me.’ And then he fell on the floor laughing. But Alexander’s the one killed, right? He’s the dead one. Not me.”
Sam’s mouth opened and closed quickly. He clutched the postcard to his chest.
“That was our real home,” John-Glenn said. “Alexander went and died and ruined everything.”
Aunt Hope came into the room carrying a silver tray with a liter of cherry Coke, four glasses full of ice, and a Waterford crystal bowl of corn curls in it.
“I don’t like this kind of talk,” she said. “You’re getting everyone upset. Just sit down now and have your snack. And you should apologize to your cousin.”
John-Glenn looked at Mackenzie.
“I don’t care what anyone says,” he told her. “Aliens killed Alexander. And they shut Sam up too. For good.”
“That’s always been his theory,” Aunt Hope said. “Aliens. I showed him the article in the Globe. He just can’t believe it was the telephone that killed Alexander.”
“People talk on the telephone every day,” John-Glenn said. “Every day. Nobody dies from it. These aliens took Sam’s voice and now everybody on their planet talks like a little boy. They reproduced it up there—”
“Please,” Mackenzie said. “Stop.”
Sam folded the postcard into tiny accordion pleats.
Mackenzie leaned her head back. She closed her eyes. Aliens, she thought.
CHAPTER SIX
MACKE
NZIE COULD REMEMBER WHEN Aunt Hope was young and single. She used to drive a white convertible and wear big dark sunglasses and brightly colored kerchiefs to protect her hair from the wind. Looking down at her now, asleep in the bed that had been Hope’s her entire life, Mackenzie had trouble reconciling that twenty-one-year-old Aunt Hope with the middle-aged woman she saw now. This Aunt Hope’s face was covered with a thick, lumpy masque—honey and almond, she had explained as Mackenzie watched her slather it on her face—and her hair was wound around pink rubber curlers with bobby pins stuck through them. On the bureau was her wedding picture in a gilt frame, Aunt Hope, her hair like a Barbie-doll’s, being carried away in the arms of her husband, Ricardo. He wore a canary yellow suit. His hair was jet black and so heavily lacquered that it shone like chrome. It rose high and stiff above his head, the front a mass of perfect curls. He had a mustache, a thin black slash between his nose and lips. A short cigar stuck out of his mouth. Mackenzie knew that if she looked very close at the photograph she would be able to make out a thin stream of gray smoke floating above them. Aunt Hope clutched a bouquet of spring flowers, tulips and irises and daffodils. Those flowers were pressed, and used to be in the dictionary in the living room, under the letter L, dried and cracked, their colors faded to the faintest shade, a blotted red, a grayish purple, a yellow that had turned almost white. Once Mackenzie picked up one of them, a shriveled, pale tulip, and it disintegrated in her fingers like a trapped ghost. She wondered if they were still in that book, the light blue bouquet streamer hanging out like an old banner.
Ricardo had been the lead singer in a group called Ricardo Havana and his Havana Hoochie-Coo’s. The group played at an old ballroom, left over from the forties Swing Era, where Aunt Hope and her friends went dancing on Friday nights. The group played Caribbean music under imitation palm trees and a blue paper moon. Sometimes, as an encore song, Ricardo sang “Say, it’s only a paper moon, sailing over a cardboard sea. But it wouldn’t be make-believe if you believed in me.” Sometimes Mackenzie would watch as Aunt Hope and her friends practiced their dancing. They taught her to cha-cha. “One, two, cha-cha-cha,” she would repeat with them, and their full pastel skirts would lift and balloon around them like parachutes. Aunt Hope would lean in the doorway and imitate Ricardo Havana singing “Paper Moon,” her voice sultry and heavily accented.