Indelible

by Adelia Saunders

  “Yes, and she is going with her boyfriend to be sleeping in tents, how do you say?”

  “Camping?”

  “Yes, this. So now her phone is not working anymore.”

  Neil began chewing each bite carefully, fifteen times on one side of his mouth and fifteen times on the other before swallowing, like Nan used to say would save him from developing esophageal problems later in life. He noticed that Dijana was sort of watching him out of the corner of her eye as she said the thing about Magdalena having a boyfriend, and after a moment she jumped up to get the chicken.

  “Your father, you know, he is always speaking about you. You are very famous to him,” Dijana said from the kitchen.

  “That’s nice,” Neil said. He had no idea what he was chewing, but he kept going, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. A boyfriend. Of course.

  “He is always speaking to me about the things you are doing when child, all the things you liked, and how you were so funny child and smart. He will say to me, ‘My son, he knows to read Latin.’ ”

  “Oh, well, yeah,” Neil said. He wondered if his father had told Dijana that Neil chose to live with his mother after the divorce. He tried to swallow, but he’d chewed all the moisture out of whatever it was in his mouth and it wouldn’t go down.

  “He is alonesome, your father I think.”

  “Yeah, that’s true,” Neil said. “But he has his things he does, you know. He has his research.” He washed the mouthful down with some wine. Magdalena hadn’t been dressed like she was going camping when he saw her at the station.

  “Well, but these are not real things,” Dijana said.

  She scooped most of a chicken onto Neil’s plate and added potatoes and another kind of mushroom. As they ate Neil tried to find out more about what had happened to Magdalena. What exactly had she said in her message? Was it like her to keep her phone turned off? But Dijana kept giving him little sympathetic smiles and steering the conversation back to Neil’s father and the old house, and finally Neil got the hint and let it go. Magdalena had a boyfriend. Or something. He let Dijana serve him the rest of the mushrooms.

  “I am really loving this place of your father, is really like something from Hollywood movie, with so much countryside and horses.”

  “Oh, does he have horses out there now?” Neil asked. His father wasn’t much of a rancher. His aunt Pearl always said he was crap at running the place and the land was going to seed.

  “Yah, not horses, but is this kind of thing, you know. Like John’s Vein.”

  “What?” Neil said.

  “Like Hollywood movie. John’s Vein. You know, this country-western man who is shooting?”

  “John Wayne?” Neil said.

  “Yah. I am really liking this, is like John’s Vein movie this house of your father. And so much interesting things inside.” She heaped another helping of potatoes onto Neil’s plate and poured them both more wine.

  “I guess so,” Neil said. When he was a kid he used to have to pull goathead thorns the size of thumbtacks out of his feet when he walked around barefoot in Nan and Pop’s house.

  “Has kitchen like for a restaurant,” Dijana said.

  “Well, it was built to be something like a hotel. Only, you know, it’s so out in the middle of nowhere. I think whoever built it lost a lot of money.”

  “Yah, me and your father, we are finding one machine to mix paste for cooking—so big like for factory and not even used. And such nice thing, when I leave, your father is sending to me for making pizzas,” Dijana said. “Is like real antique but working pretty okay.”

  Neil managed to fit the final potato into his stomach and finished his wine. Dijana cleared the dishes and came back with cake. She got a bottle of cherry brandy down from a shelf filled with little glass animals and photographs in souvenir frames: There was a moon-faced baby Magdalena, a little girl Magdalena, a high school–age Magdalena and another girl posing with purple streaks in their hair. “Cool figurines,” Neil said when Dijana caught him looking at them.

  Dijana poured some brandy into each of their wine glasses and lifted hers a little toward the photos on the shelf. “Actually, it is all because of Magdalena that I am meeting your father.”

  “Oh yeah?” Neil said.

  “Yah, it is because of her I go to Colorado. Your father, he tells you how this is?”

  “I don’t think so,” Neil said.

  “Well it is one funny thing. When Magdalena is child she will like to do this thing, she will, how do you say? Tickle with fingers like this to my feet, to make me laugh, and she will say this funny word. Puebolo, something like this. She says, ‘Yah, mamyte, your feet will take you there.’ This is like some big joke between us. And when I first come to U.S. I am living—you know New Jersey? Well, this is not so nice, and my friend, one Polish lady what I meet, she tells there is some place where is job like in casino. With Indian people. And she tells me name to this place and it is just like that: Puebolo.”

  “Pueblo?” Neil asked.

  “She tells me this is real country-western town.”

  “Well, sort of,” Neil said.

  Dijana was pouring them each another glass. “So I am like, wow, I will tell Magdute this funny story how I go to this town name of Puebolo! And actually this casino, this is not happening, but okay, I am there already, I must to find some job, so I clean houses—this I always know for doing. And so I meet your father, and when he’s driving me one time for work he asks to me to tell him how do I come there. Because, really, in this place there are not so many Europeans. So I tell him this long story, and he listens and he is so nice, he says like, ‘Someday I will meet this daughter and I will tell her big thanks you are here!’ And I tell him, ‘Okay, for this you must to come to Lithuania!’ ”

  “Well, I’m sure he’d really love to visit,” Neil said. “It’s just, you know. He’s not much of a traveler.”

  “Yah, this is true,” Dijana said.

  She started telling Neil more about her time in America, and about the pizza restaurant, which wasn’t doing as well as it might because construction on the big shopping center across the street had been postponed. But, Dijana said, there were rumors that a group of German investors was taking over the project, and as soon as the shops opened her pizza place would be able to double its output with help from the old dough machine.

  After another cherry brandy she started looking sad. She put her hand on Neil’s and her eyes got wet. “Your father is some great man,” she said.

  “Yeah, that’s pretty cool of him to send the mixer,” Neil said. Actually, he thought it was a little weird that his father had given away part of Nan’s kitchen like that. And it must have cost a fortune to ship something so heavy halfway across the world.

  “And for so much other things also.” Dijana told Neil how his father had helped her wire money home, he’d helped her with dentist bills, he’d even driven her all the way to the immigration office in Denver to see if they could get her a proper work permit.

  “And you know, while I am in U.S. there is one really terrible thing happening. This daughter to my friend, she died, but out of country, yah? And your father, he is helping me so much to find where is my friend because actually she is very sick, in hospital, but I am not even knowing which one.” Neil’s father had called up somebody at the Lithuanian consulate in Washington and got them to track down the girl’s mother. “When it is happening Magdalena is calling me and crying, telling me her friend is died, and me I know I must find the mother and tell her, so horrible, you know? But I have no number for her. And your father he was coming to drive me for cleaning, and he sees me like this, so crying everywhere, and he finds for me how to call her. She is in really bad place this friend, in hospital for crazy people. But I make them let me talk to her—she’s not so crazy, just all the time drinking—and better it is me who tells her this thing, not people of hospital.”

  It must have been the girl in the box, Neil thought, and his toes curled under at
the memory of the puff of white dust as the ashes poured onto the floor of Gare du Nord.

  Dijana refilled her glass and added to Neil’s too, though it wasn’t empty. The things she was saying didn’t sound at all like Neil’s father, who was always so caught up in the past that he was barely able to navigate the present, who had forgotten Neil’s birthday, and who hadn’t gotten around to changing the answering machine message with Nan’s voice on it in the five years she’d been dead. Neil could hardly imagine him on the phone with foreign bureaucrats, tracking a dead girl’s mother through a warren of Lithuanian mental institutions. He wondered through a haze of wine and cherry brandy if it really was his father they were talking about, or if Dijana had gotten confused and was telling him about some other man she’d met in America.

  “So do you and my dad still talk much?” Neil asked, then realized that maybe he shouldn’t have. It might hurt her feelings that his father hadn’t mentioned her more. “I mean, it’s been a while since I’ve spoken to him.”

  “No,” Dijana said. “I think he is so sad when Walter have died, he isn’t calling me anymore and now I have left America. But I have always telled him please to visit me some day.”

  “Well, the ranch, you know, it’s a lot for him,” Neil said. “But I think it’s great he had you to help with the house. I mean, the place is a mess.”

  “Yah, this is for sure,” she said. “You know I have found also one entire—how do you say? For making alcohols like they do in country? I have found this too not even used and I am remembering when I am little girl in country and my uncles are making schnapps, you know? From apples. So much old things in this house. But with really good quality, and I am telling your father he must sell, not just give away.” She leaned in, as if she were going to tell Neil a secret. “Actually, Ni-yell, pizza, this is not my greatest dream. What I am really loving is having someday one shop where is filled with old beautiful things, all very fashion and antique. So I am all the time looking for old things with big value. Like these things what I’m wearing. Such beautiful belt, yah? Is all silver. And for shoes, these I’m finding in back of aunt’s closets and I can see she is not wearing for so long time. They are all the time folded in newspapers, like so old I have never seen.”

  “How old?” Neil asked. The thing for making alcohol must have been some kind of still. He tried to remember if the dude ranch had been built during Prohibition—that would be interesting—and he wondered why his father had never mentioned he was cleaning out the place.

  “Well, this is how I know they are really big value,” she said. “These shoes are in newspapers all from before even I am born. And I am some old lady, so, you know, they are for real antique! I am thinking I could sell them, but see, they are, how do you say? With repairs.”

  Dijana hefted her foot up for Neil to see the restitching along the sole of one shoe, nearly spilling her wine and giggling “oh-pah!” when she flashed Neil a bit of veiny thigh. “And when I am thinking it is your father coming tonight, I’m glad I haven’t selled, so he can see these things what I find, how it looks. He is always saying to me, so many old things, they are too long going not used.”

  Neil had clearly had more to drink than he’d realized, because as soon as he saw the shoe up close, he started giggling too. It all seemed very funny, though when he tried to share the joke with Dijana, his tongue was a little too thick and his thoughts were a little too slow to make much sense. “Double stitch below the anklebone. Straps cross left over right on the right foot, right over left on the other.” He’d heard his father say it a million times.

  “Yah!” Dijana said. “Exactly. The working is so nice.”

  “Does my dad know?” Neil asked.

  “What?” Dijana said.

  “Does he know you have these? Does he know where you found them?”

  “He is telling me I can take all what I like,” she said.

  “No, totally, I didn’t mean—”

  “He is all the time saying this.”

  “Of course,” Neil said. “I just meant, did you show them to him or anything?”

  “I am telling you I wear only tonight like for surprise.”

  “Wow, this is crazy,” Neil said. His father really had remembered them. The shoes on Dijana’s feet looked exactly like the ones his father always talked about. Neil was surprised at how well he knew them himself, just from his father’s description.

  “Oh man,” Neil said. “My dad is going to have a fit.”

  “He won’t like?” Dijana said, and suddenly Neil forgot what was funny. The room, which had begun to tilt a little from the brandy, righted itself. Inga Beart’s red shoes had been lost in Paris—it was one thing Neil’s father and all the historians agreed on. So how was it possible they’d ended up at Nan and Pop’s ranch?

  “They must have been Nan’s,” Neil said.

  “What?” Dijana asked, but this time Neil didn’t even try to explain. The red high heels with the crisscross straps that his father remembered seeing—there was no other way. They’d probably been there for years, wrapped up in newspapers at the back of Nan’s closet, a place Neil’s father never would have thought of looking, because he knew that Inga Beart had left her red shoes in France. These red shoes, which Dijana had now taken off and was holding up to the light, and which Neil could see really did have creases on the straps just like his father remembered, couldn’t have been Inga Beart’s. They must have been Nan’s all along.

  “Neil? Is okay?”

  “Yeah,” Neil said. He looked for a tissue in his pocket. “I think I have allergies.”

  He could imagine how it might have happened: his dad as a little kid, so used to seeing his Aunt Cat in farm boots that the one time she got dressed up for a party he got confused and thought she was his mother finally coming home.

  “For this you should take honey,” Dijana was saying. “Honey from farm, this is the best thing. You want some?”

  “No thanks,” Neil said.

  “I have some in kitchen. Really good. Really organic.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” Neil said.

  Dijana cleared the glasses, and Neil dabbed with his napkin at a wine spot he’d made on her tablecloth. This had been some evening for the Beart men, he thought. Magdalena was off camping with her boyfriend, and the shoes Neil’s dad was sure were his mother’s had really belonged to his aunt—however impossible it was to imagine Nan putting her foot into something that did not keep her heel planted firmly on the ground.

  As Neil was leaving, stuffed full of cake and drunker than he’d intended, Dijana said, “So your father, he is not liking these presents I am sending for Christmas?”

  “Oh, gosh, I forgot to tell you. He loved them. Wow, I’m really sorry. He told me to tell you,” Neil said. He wondered if Dijana had somehow sensed that her Christmas presents were right there in Neil’s backpack, still a little damp from the rain.

  But she was smiling. “Yah, your father is telling me he is really needing for socks, and these I have made with hands.”

  “He said they fit great,” Neil said.

  “Well, you must give him thanks for me also. Magdalena tells me the things he sends are very beautiful.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Neil said.

  “She tells that they are Indianish things, but she will not tell me more than this. I must to wait, she says, but now you are here before she is coming home.”

  “Yeah, that’s true. Crazy thing.”

  “She tells me I will be very happy when I see these things. So you must to tell your father thank you very much.”

  “I’ll tell him,” Neil said, but he was pretty sure he never would. He wasn’t thinking all that well as he left Dijana’s building, but his mind was clear enough to recognize something new: a feeling of responsibility, like he was the parent and his dad was the child and it was up to Neil to head off hurtful and unnecessary truths. When his father found out about the shoes in Nan’s closet he would finally have to admit t
o himself that Inga Beart never came back, not even for a visit. And with that thought came a realization, as if Neil had stepped off one of the invisible edges of childhood and found to his surprise that everything was simpler on the other side: His father didn’t have to know.

  It was well past ten o’clock as Neil walked to the tram stop, but the sun had only just then fully set behind the buildings and the sky was turning from pink to red. Neil felt sad and wise and sort of dizzy. He hadn’t been able to stop his mom from running off with the Jazzercize guy, he couldn’t fix his father’s lousy childhood, and he obviously hadn’t been able to keep his dad from getting into trouble with Becca and the school board. Now it was happening again. Life had set his father up for a major disappointment. But this time there was something Neil could do about it. And as he waited in the late-night dusk, hoping the tram was still running, Neil made up his mind not to tell his father about seeing Dijana and her old red shoes.

  The next morning Neil picked up the photocopies of the file for Professor Piot at the Lithuanian archives, then spent the first few hours of the bus ride back to Paris worrying about Magdalena, who, it seemed, was either seriously unreliable or in real trouble, stuck with no money on a broken-down bus or kidnapped by human traffickers who might at that moment be securing her to the wheel well of an airplane bound for Abu Dhabi. At absolute best, the text she’d sent her mother was the truth and she was off toasting marshmallows with some guy who didn’t deserve her. And then there were his father’s Christmas presents, still balled up in their shopping bag at the bottom of his backpack. Neil had been planning to mail them first thing when he got back to Paris, but now that didn’t seem like such a good idea. When his father got the package he would probably call Dijana up right away to say thank you, and when he did, she’d be sure to tell him about how she’d worn the things from Nan’s closet when she thought he was coming to dinner. She’d mention the red shoes, and while a normal person wouldn’t think anything of it, Neil’s dad would be sure to ask, just out of habit, exactly what they looked like, and the whole story would come out. Neil pushed the bag down deeper in his backpack, and felt awful.