by Rae Meadows
“What’s up?” Theo answered.
“I found this letter to Grandmother Olsen in the box. From 1910.”
“And?”
“I can’t figure it out. The woman mentions the Aid Society. And there was a Bible in the box with the address of the Children’s Aid Society in it. Is there any way Grandmother could have been an orphan? In New York City?”
“All I know about her is that she grew up in Ohio or somewhere before Minnesota.”
“Wisconsin.”
“Whatever. The Midwest. And that she knit. A lot. And made a kickass butterscotch pudding. The letter was in Mom’s stuff. Don’t you think she would have told us if her mother had been an orphan in New York? That’s a pretty big detail.”
“It was in with recipes Mom probably never even looked through. Maybe Grandmother never told her.”
* * *
Iris had gotten tickets to a concert to be held at the Presbyterian church, a performance by the Ying Quartet, precocious Chinese-American siblings from Iowa, and despite her inability to walk, her morphine flooded nod-offs, and her shallow, wheezy breaths, she had been insistent that she and Sam attend. Sam blow-dried her mother’s hair, helped apply mascara, blush, and lipstick to her hollow, gray-skinned face, and dressed her in a navy silk caftan that swathed her ravaged body.
“Are you sure you want to go?” Sam asked again.
“I want to go out with Tchaikovsky in my head,” she said.
The wheelchair was heavier than Iris was to load into the car.
The church had a dated island feel, the stained glass panels too modern and bright, the pew cushions, like everything in Florida, sea-foam green. Sam rolled Iris up to the front row, the wheelchair parked on the end of the pew.
“Let’s move back some,” Iris said. “I’d like to be able to see everyone.”
It was a strange request, given that Iris always wanted to sit close—for movies, for weddings even—but Sam complied.
Iris hungrily watched the arriving audience walk up the aisle and fill the seats, her eyes hot and foggy. She was not here for the music after all. She was looking for someone. In her periphery, Sam watched her mother’s eyes roam and seek.
“Are you okay?” Sam whispered as the church quieted.
“Ha ha,” Iris rasped, her feathery hands momentarily aloft.
As the four young musicians took to the stage wielding their stringed instruments behind the pulpit, an older couple hustled up the center aisle. The man was tall and white-haired and wore horn-rimmed glasses and a well-tailored gray pinstripe suit—he was the only man there so dressed—and the woman wore a crisp white shirt and black trousers, a blond chignon at the nape of her neck. Iris lifted her chin and dropped her shoulders. Her gaze softened. The music began—Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 3 in E-flat minor, Sam read in the program—and then Iris dozed off, her head cocked awkwardly toward her shoulder. Sam allowed her mind to wander. She and Jack had had a mild argument on the phone the night before over baby names; she liked Charlotte, Helen, and Louise, while Jack was pushing for Flannery.
“It’s too literary,” she said.
“Why is that bad?” he asked.
“Because she’s a baby. Not a footnote on your CV.”
She had said this in jest, and he had chuckled—“at least I’m not proposing Salman”—but she had the unsettling realization that Jack’s career would always mean more to him than she’d like it to.
At intermission, roused by the applause, Iris tried to adjust herself in the wheelchair. She swallowed, an effort, and pressed her lips together to even her lipstick.
“How do I look?” she said.
Sam smiled and wiped a fleck of mascara from her mother’s cheek.
As the distinguished couple passed by on the way to the lobby, the man glanced at Iris with the slightest shift of his eyes. His face tightened on sight, his mouth a grim line. Sam tried to look elsewhere, to afford her mother the privacy of the moment. A minute later the man returned alone.
“Hello, Iris,” he said, crouching down beside her.
“Hello, Henry.”
“How are you?” His voice was quiet and grave.
“This is my daughter, Samantha.”
Sam shook his soft hand and smiled, and he squeezed hers in return.
“It is wonderful to meet you,” he said. “Tchaikovsky,” he said to Iris.
“Tchaikovsky,” she replied.
Henry leaned in to Iris and said hoarsely, “I have missed you, dear.”
There was something in Iris’s face then, a spark of heat, a knowingness, and it seemed that whatever it was she had been after, she’d found it.
“I will miss you,” she said to him with a faint smile, and it seemed he understood the finality.
He cleared his throat and straightened up just as his wife appeared, a lovely woman with slim hands and regal cheekbones. The lights flickered, signaling the end of intermission, and he placed his hand on his wife’s back and led her to their seats without turning around.
Sam felt a dart of sorrow for her mother then, for the banality of having loved a married man, for the affair that had happened or had not, for Iris wanting to see him, or to be seen by him, one last time.
“Now we can go,” Iris had said. Inside the car, she didn’t volunteer anything further.
“Mom?”
She didn’t respond.
“Did you love him?”
Iris waved her hand dismissively, as if in the face of death, there wasn’t any point in discussing it.
“I’m thankful to have known him,” she said, closing her eyes.
You’re not going to tell me anything? You’re going to die and I won’t know you at all, Sam said to herself. She drove slowly under a heavy moon that paled the sky, her hands clenching the top of the steering wheel. Frantic bugs danced in the headlights.
“He didn’t choose you,” Sam said softly, her anger honed to a fine, sharp point.
Iris’s head lolled against the seat belt. She was asleep.
The following day, at her weekly hospital visit, Iris, dehydrated, her weight plummeting, her heart skittish, had been outfitted with a feeding tube. She refused hospice. Sam fed her with nutrition shakes and crushed pills every four hours, a varying mix of Roxanol, Ketamine, Clodronate, Colace, Haldol, and Ambien.
“Bottoms up,” Sam would say, her mother most of the time too sick to smile.
Iris had amassed the morphine pills to kill herself, but she needed Sam to administer them.
“I won’t,” Sam said again and again, but she knew she would do what her mother asked of her. She would be the approval-seeking daughter to the end.
In the evening, the smell of hibiscus and orange trees mixed with the sea air. Sam parked Iris’s wheelchair in front of the open French doors so she could watch the colors of the sky change; she said it was one of the things she loved about her life in Sanibel. Sam sat next to her and placed her mother’s hand on her belly to feel the baby’s quick pitter-patter of hiccups.
“How much do I give you?” Sam asked.
“I have a pill box in my nightstand.”
“What will happen?”
“I’ll fall asleep. And then you’ll call Dr. Jones.”
“He’ll know.”
“I was supposed to die three weeks ago, honey.”
Sam spoke to Jack each night after Iris went down for the night. But she hadn’t told him of her mother’s request. Somehow it felt like her burden, her responsibility, and she didn’t want to talk it out, didn’t want to hear his level-headed wisdom, didn’t want to share it. He was her husband, but Iris was her mother.
“Mom, please. Can’t you just wait?” Sam asked, fear and frustration leaking into her voice.
The bougainvillea that wrapped around the edge of the balcony rustled quietly in the breeze.
“Samantha. I have lived a life. Two days or two weeks more in this ruined body won’t matter much to anyone. I’m still an atheist, you know. I
haven’t had one of those last-minute conversions.” She shrugged. “Death is death. I’m ready.”
Who was this woman? She was her mother, who’d driven her to and from ballet and tennis, never made a cake from a box, always driven the speed limit, bargained hawkishly with antique dealers, been cool with her maternal affection, stayed in an unfulfilling marriage for a lifetime, and, in the end, moved away to be alone. And yet here Sam was. Part of her was glad she’d been chosen. She would take what she could get.
It would be tomorrow, then, in the morning. Sam felt there was everything to say and nothing. She had been a little relieved. She had wanted to go home, to hear the baby’s heartbeat, to let her mother go.
* * *
The TV was on in Ted’s house—Oprah—but he wasn’t in the front room. Sam knocked, holding the pound cake like a football, the letter in her back pocket.
Ted came bouncing out from the kitchen in an apron with a giant lobster on it.
“Hiya, Sam. Come on in.”
Sam had never been inside his house. It was dark but not unpleasant. A stack of logs near the fireplace. An old plaid couch. A burnished tree-stump coffee table. A carved wooden cuckoo clock on the wall.
“Nice apron.”
“I just put a meat loaf in for supper.” He rubbed his hands together. “What brings you over?”
“I made you a pound cake,” she said, handing it to him.
“Really?”
“Yeah. I wanted to make it, to see if a pound each of butter, sugar, flour, and eggs would actually work.”
“Did it?” He unpeeled a corner.
“You tell me.”
“Oh, this smells wonderful. We’ll have some now.”
“No, no.”
“I insist. The baker has to sample her work.”
He bounded into the kitchen and came back with a knife, forks, and plates.
“That reminds me, I need to give you guys some eggs. The girls are on a roll. A man can only eat so many omelets.”
The cake was divine. Sam ate it fast and took a second slab.
“How’s it going over there with your mother’s things?”
Sam raised her hands and let them fall.
“I know, I know,” he said.
“I did find something intriguing, though. A letter.”
“Yeah?”
“Would you mind taking a look?”
She smoothed the letter against the coffee table in front of him. He pulled off his thick plastic glasses and rubbed his eyes—bare-faced, his eyes looked smaller and younger—before replacing them and fixing his gaze on the thin, pale paper.
“Mrs. Olsen is your mother’s mother?”
Sam nodded.
Ted looked again at the letter and scrunched his face. “How old would she have been in 1910?” he asked.
“Twenty-one. I don’t know a lot about her, but I thought she grew up here.”
“She probably did,” Ted said, rubbing his chin. “After age eleven. But I’m afraid I’m a little stumped by the rest of it.”
“No one’s alive who would know anything about it,” she said.
He glanced over at the clock on the wall. “It’s too late tonight, but I bet they could help you out at the Historical Society. They’re real detectives over there. I found an eighty-year-old postcard behind my refrigerator once. They told me everything about it. Written to the original owner of my house, a doctor of dubious reputation. He supposedly kept the Eastside in liquor during Prohibition.”
“What was on the postcard?” Sam asked.
“A painted scene of New Orleans. The sender’s name was illegible. But it said in part, Happy days. I’ll be home soon.
“Do you still have it?”
“I sent it to one of the doctor’s great-grandchildren. A guy just over here on Morrison.”
“Sorry I ate half the cake I made for you,” she said.
“Nonsense! Everything is better with company.”
* * *
She and Iris had spent the early morning side by side in the rising sun, Sam on a chaise, Iris wrapped in a comforter in her wheelchair, the seagulls’ piercing cries overhead as they flew from one side of the island to the other. Between dread and the baby kicking, Sam hadn’t slept. She nursed her cup of coffee as Iris drifted in and out of a stupor, her breathing irregular and sharp. A neighbor dumped a bag of bottles into a recycling bin, and the clanging finally roused her.
“Happy Birthday, Mom,” Sam said.
Iris rolled her head toward Sam and smiled with the corner of her mouth.
“I’m glad you’ll get to go home,” she said, her tongue thick.
Sam looked away then, without any idea how to talk on this last day of her mother’s life. Everything seemed trifling or melodramatic or false.
“You make beautiful things, Samantha. I don’t know if I have told you that.”
“Thank you,” Sam said, willing the rawness from her voice. She fretted, picking at her fingernails.
“You will never know how I love you until you have your baby.” Iris dozed again, her face in drugged serenity.
Sam touched her mother’s limp hand and thought, I have waited for that my whole life. She let out a whispered “no”—a useless protest.
The appointed hour was noon. At 11:30, Sam pulled the box of pills out of her mother’s nightstand and placed it on the kitchen table. And then she threw up in the kitchen sink. Her hands shook as she crushed the pills with her usual implement, a stainless steel cup measure, and brushed the white dust into a glass, careful to wash her hands afterward, lest her unborn child be delivered a dose of morphine.
When Theo called, she tried to sound normal.
“How is she?” he asked.
“How do you think she is?” she clipped.
“I know it’s stressful taking care of her, okay?”
“Sorry. She’s really sick. This is it for her, Theo.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“He thought she would die weeks ago.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Should we come down there?”
“Yes.” Her anger was steadying. She felt, at last, that she could do this.
“We’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll call you with our flight stuff. Can I talk to her?”
Sam walked out to the balcony and gently squeezed her mother’s frail shoulder, placed the phone at her ear, and closed the door behind her.
She went into Iris’s bedroom and lay back on the bed, her belly heavy against her back, taking in her mother’s view: a watercolor of sea oats and sand dunes, a beveled mirror above the white wicker dresser, the sky out toward the sea. Next to the bed was To the Lighthouse, which Sam would not bother returning to the library. There were no photographs, no tchotchkes. There would be little to clean out when she was gone.
Sam heaved herself off the bed and went back to her mother, who held the phone on her lap.
“It’s time,” Iris said, almost dreamily.
“Theo will be here tomorrow.”
“I said goodbye.”
“You didn’t tell him.”
“No.”
Iris turned and stared off into the white sky, the wind warm and strong, the sun high and taunting overhead.
“It was beautiful, where I grew up,” she said. “The river was so cold. Even in summer it would numb my feet.” She smiled. “I used to lie in the sun on this one smooth boulder and watch the treetops and the sky. The rushing water blocked out all the other sounds. I’d pretend the earth had dropped away.”
It was as if she were already gone, nostalgic for when she was alive.
“Okay, Samantha,” she said.
Sam did not cry. She wheeled her mother into the house, into the kitchen, and attached the feeding tube. She filled the glass of crushed pills with water and stirred the thick and cloudy poison. It was a series of steps, tasks to complete. She held the funnel and, without waiting for a final signal from her mother, she poured.
Once she got Iris on the
bed, she pulled the covers up and got in with her, spooning the wasted frame, the baby between them. They did not say goodbye. Sam placed her hand on her mother’s and waited. Death was not silent and swift, and in those terrible moments when Iris’s body bucked, unable to get air, Sam held fast and closed her eyes and screamed.
* * *
Outside it was close to dusk, the sky a bruised purple beyond the scuttling clouds, and Sam’s tears began before she could get next door. She cried for her grandmother and for her mother, for their loss, and for all the stories they didn’t tell.
She thought back on the year since her mother’s death. She didn’t like who she had become. The petty grievances against her husband were mere diversions. It was her own shame she couldn’t face and couldn’t share with him.
Her breath eased out of her lungs in one long lugubrious hiss. She’d never told Jack about how Iris died. At the time she’d felt confused, twisted with grief, and she had told herself it was something no one needed to know. She convinced herself that she and Jack didn’t see things, life itself, in the same way—that was the ultimate fear in a marriage, wasn’t it?—and she wanted to let it lie. But the shame for what she had done—the first baby, her mother—had slowly dug a trench around her, cutting herself off from him. She had been hiding alone, deep within the silence. And she was tired of it.
She needed her baby. Sam’s heart lurched at the thought of Ella. And she needed to talk to Jack.
VIOLET
Fairbury didn’t look much different from Sheridan: a small town square, low buildings, empty sidewalks. The sky was swollen with rain, the clouds dense and dark overhead, casting a light that made the fields look an eerily bright shade of green, the buildings like cardboard cutouts. The children were tired and bedraggled. What had been anticipation in Sheridan had turned to toe-dragging defeat as they shuffled over to the meeting hall under the first plump drops of rain.
The proceedings weren’t as heavily attended as they had been in Indiana, and the townspeople who did show up were disgruntled by the lack of selection. The children stood in the center of the room, and viewers circled around them. Some quickly left. Two of the older boys, number twelve included, Violet noticed, were nabbed by a farmer and his son. Elmer went happily with a well-dressed couple—a judge and his wife—and another boy of eight was taken by a kindly looking older widow who waddled in her calico dress.