“The next thing I saw from the kitchen window was Leslie running and Bartholomew racing by her. He hit the end of the chain and it snapped against Leslie’s legs. She went straight into the air and came down head first onto the flagstone.”
“Oh my God!” Annie dragged him to a stop but he wouldn’t look at her.
“She . . .” His voice hitched and for several seconds he said nothing. “She was in a coma for better than two months. When she woke up she didn’t know who anyone was; she didn’t know anything. When I came home from the hospital that first night that it happened, when they said they didn’t know . . .” his voice broke and his chest heaved.
Annie died to hold him, to tell him it was okay to say it, that he didn’t have to say it, though she had no idea what it was. She rubbed his arm.
“When they said they didn’t know if she would ever wake up at all, I got out my baseball bat and beat Bartholomew to death.”
And then he lost it and Annie didn’t know what to do because she too was crying, could hardly see anything through her tears. She pulled on him and he folded into her. She held onto him as hard as she could because she was scared to do anything else.
For a full minute they stood still, crying, before he said, “I’m sorry.” He pulled away and turned his body toward the river and began wiping his face with his T-shirt. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t expect to tell you all that.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t know what happened.” He drew in a deep breath. “I didn’t expect to break down like this. I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t be sorry. You’re just human.”
“I’ve never told anyone about Bartholomew.”
“Your parents didn’t know?”
“Of course they did; at least dad did. Mom may not have realized he was gone for a long time being so wrapped up and distressed over Leslie. Dad quietly buried him in the corner of the yard. We’ve never talked about it.” He took a deep breath. “Bartholomew didn’t deserve it. He was being a dog, happy to be playing with Leslie. It should have been me.”
Annie took his hand and guided him to sit down with her in a grassy spot, and for a time they sat side-by-side staring off across the passing river. “So what was Leslie like when she woke up?”
Patrick wiped at his face again. “Mom was at the hospital. She had pretty much moved in there. When dad and I got the call from mom, it was like we had won the lottery, but when we got there the picture was quite different. Leslie was only semi-responsive for a while, taking better than a week to become alert enough that we realized that our worst fears were real. Well, not our worst fears, because she could have died or been in a coma or catatonic forever, but the fact that she seemed to not know us was bad enough. And then we discovered she didn’t know anything.
“It was like she was just born. She had to be taught everything; walking, talking, dressing herself, even how to go to the bathroom. She was a clean slate. Except for a permanent dent right here,” he pointed to his head, “she seemed to heal well.”
“I’d ask how long it took her to get back to normal, but I guess she didn’t,” Annie said.
“We thought she did by the time she turned six. It was almost like the accident never happened. She was always a year behind the other kids, though, a year older than her classmates. Her reading was slow, but it was there. It was numbers that made no sense to her; still don’t. I don’t mean addition and multiplication; I mean numbers. You hold up two fingers and tell her it is two, she’ll have it for about thirty seconds before she starts calling it eight. Everything is eight. Give her five cookies and she’ll tell you eight. There’s a short circuit in her head that sends anything with numbers to ground, or into a ‘everything is eight’ file.”
“But she is reading.”
“I exaggerated a bit. She likes the girl on the cover of Anne of Green Gables. It’s her favorite book, but we have to read it to her. She can struggle through a paragraph on occasion, but she has never developed much past third grade, which for her was about nine years old. She’ll be nine forever.”
Annie’s fingers were entwined with his. She squeezed his hand. “So tell me about the private versus public school thing.”
“It’s a fight mom and dad have been having lately. Dad thinks Leslie should be put into a private school just for children like her. Mom wants to keep her mainstreamed in public school.”
“You support your mom?”
He took another deep breath. “Yes, but our reasons are different. Mom has not accepted that Leslie is stuck at nine. She has convinced herself that she is nothing more than a little bit slow and if the teachers would just give her a little help she’d catch right up.”
“What grade is she in; eighth?”
“Going into eighth because she started a year behind. She’ll be fourteen in August. Despite everything she’s never been held back. They just carry her along, which probably doesn’t help my mom any.”
“Wouldn’t private school, a little more one-on-one, be better for her?”
He let loose of her hand, and she wondered if he had become angry with her.
“Maybe. It’s just that they can’t afford it. They’re still in debt from all Leslie’s medical bills, topped off by breast cancer Mom went through five years ago. Until the job dad has now, they’ve never had medical insurance.”
“Oh.” And now it all made sense to her. In an effort to keep his parents out of the poor house he supports his mom, when in fact, he doesn’t disagree with his dad. Like his dad, Patrick sees Leslie for what she really is. “You still live at home, don’t you?”
He snorted a laugh. “The relationship dagger of death. Keeps all the girls at bay.”
“But you’re a good son who loves his parents, loves his sister. You’d rather give rent money to them than to someone else.”
“My dad is a good man, a really good father, but he dropped out of high school when he was sixteen and never got his GED.” Patrick shook his head. “He’s a low-paid foreman for a housing contractor who seems to get a lot fewer bids than he should. He doesn’t make all that much more than I do. Mom had a decent job until Leslie’s accident. She quit working until Leslie started school, and then a couple of years later got hit with breast cancer. Now when she does work, it’s only part time because Leslie cannot be left alone.”
Annie could only guess at the stress he has had in his life, at the stress it must cause him to go home every night to a situation that he cannot fix, for which he cannot provide anything more than maintenance money, a situation that he’ll never be able to get away from, and one for which he carries tremendous guilt.
Leslie will be nine forever.
“You know what my dream is?” he said.
“What?”
“Actually I have two dreams. One is stupid. The other will take forever.”
“Nothing wrong with stupid dreams. I imagine that Alexander Graham Bell dreamed that he could talk to someone miles away and many thought it was stupid.”
He laughed. “There are stupid dreams and there are stupid dreams. My take forever dream is that I’ll be able to buy my parents and Leslie a nice home and pay off all their bills.
“My stupid dream, my very stupid dream that I can’t seem to shake no matter what I do because I keep waking up in the middle of the night with it running through my head, is that I discover a time machine. I go back to that night in 1998 and instead of walking into the house for a soda, I go out and pick up my little sister, carry her up to the porch, and read her a story.”
Annie took in a breath, blew it out, stood up and walked to the river’s edge. The trees across the river were ablaze with the late afternoon sun. She noticed a small stream breaking free from the trees and dumping into the river, nearly hidden by the grasses growing along its banks. And then in her whisper voice, which would not carry much beyond her lips, let alone to Patrick still sitting on the ground six feet behind her, she said, “That’s not stupid,
Patrick.” She looked north along the river, imaging how much farther it was to where, she was certain, her grandfather and his cronies were camped. “That’s not stupid at all.”
Chapter 36
June 13, 2007
Annie turned to face Patrick. “Take me to meet her.”
“Who?”
“Your sister; Leslie. And your parents, too.”
He thought about it for a few seconds. “Okay. When?”
“Now.”
“Now?”
“Yes. Let’s go, now!”
The house was not what Annie imagined. It was worse. It reminded her of South Boston, or maybe Brockton. There was a single car driveway long enough for the one car parked there. An old beat up truck sat to the right of the car, in the yard. It was hard to tell the difference between the grass and the weeds. Patrick parked on the street where the semblance of lawn that did exist spilled over onto broken asphalt, or where the asphalt spilled over onto the lawn. She climbed out of Patrick’s Blazer and noticed a lime-green and rust Volkswagen Beetle with no wheels sitting on blocks in the weedy dirt yard of the house next door. It brought to mind a poetry reading she attended where a kid recited his poem, Rusty Bones. He said it was about his ’76 Pontiac. Now she got it.
The house needed paint. The roof had been patched with shingles a totally different color than the original. There was a porch stretching to both sides, though the railing was in pieces in the yard. New lumber was stacked next to it. “We’re rebuilding the porch,” Patrick said when he stepped up next to her. “I should have been working on it tonight, but . . .”
Annie didn’t say anything. She studied two beds of flowers, one on each side of the steps. They were the only parts of the yard that looked cared for. Patrick’s mother, Annie assumed, stepped out onto the porch and shaded her eyes against the dropping sun. Annie had insisted that Patrick call the first opportunity he had upon getting a cell signal in Columbia Falls. His mother deserved at least twenty minutes notice. Annie gulped back nervousness, becoming certain that this had not been one of her better ideas. His mother stepped down off the porch and then waited for them to come to her.
“Is this the same house you lived in when Leslie had her accident?” Annie asked Patrick, her voice low.
“Yes,” Patrick said, and then took her hand. Together they walked across the yard, threading between the new and old lumber until they were in front of his mother.
Her eyes went from Patrick to Annie, back to Patrick, and finally settled on Annie. “I’ll probably have gray hairs before I get an introduction.” She took Annie’s hand away from her son. “I’m Patricia O’Reilly. You call me Pat.”
“I’m Annie Caschetta.”
“Do I call you Ann or Annie?”
“Annie.”
“All right, Annie. Come on in.” She turned and started up the porch steps. “Please excuse the mess. Patrick didn’t see fit to give me much notice so we’ll just blame him. Seeing as he never brings any of his girlfriends by, I’ll excuse him this one time.”
“How many girlfriends does he have?” Annie said.
“That’s just it, we don’t know if he’s ever had any. We worried that he was gay, so I have to say you’re arrival is a great relief.”
“Mom!”
She opened the door and after only glancing at her son, gave Annie a smile, and then with a twinkle in her eyes, said, “I’ve waited my whole life to embarrass him in front of a girlfriend. Next are his naked baby pictures.”
“Oh, God!” Patrick said, and Annie laughed, a little embarrassed herself at being labeled as his girlfriend. She felt like she needed to make the correction, started to, then closed her mouth.
The inside of the O’Reilly home was a stark contrast to the outside. Though sparsely furnished, it was clean and neat, and well worn. At the far end of the living room was a young girl. She was stretched out on the floor coloring.
“Leslie,” Pat called.
Leslie did not respond.
“Leslie is my artist,” Pat said, “and when she is in her ‘artist zone’ she does not hear anything.” Pat walked over and placed her hand in front of Leslie’s eyes. Movement of the girl’s pencil—Annie noted that it was a colored pencil, not a crayon as she had first assumed—stopped, but she didn’t look up. “Les,” her mother said. Seconds ticked by. “Les.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. O’Reilly,” Annie said.
Like her daughter, Mrs. O’Reilly seemed to be in her own zone. “Les,” she said one more time. Finally the pencil fell and Leslie looked up at her mother.
“Yes, Mommy?”
“We have company.”
Leslie came to her knees, and then stood and turned around. If Patrick hadn’t told her about it, she would have missed the dent in her head, but as Leslie came closer, it was certainly noticeable. If her hair was done just right it would be well covered.
“Leslie, this is Miss Annie Caschetta.”
“Hi,” Leslie said with no apparent shyness.
“You should offer to shake her hand.”
Leslie extended her hand and Annie took it. “It’s very nice to meet you,” Annie said.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Leslie responded.
“Very good, Leslie,” her mother said. “You can go back to work now.”
Leslie returned to her coloring.
“She has always had a hard time understanding social graces.”
Annie stepped closer to Leslie and noticed a rack of colored pencils to one side, and then what the young girl was working on. She immediately chided herself for thinking coloring, as though Leslie was a five-year-old playing with crayons. Based on what Patrick had told her, Annie had formed a number of assumptions and expectations, all of which she was starting to reevaluate. The first one to go was the vision of a nine-year-old, the age at which Patrick said that Leslie had stopped developing. This Leslie was a young teenager.
Annie bent over the sprawled young girl and saw that what she initially took to be a mother’s exaggerated pride in her daughter was no exaggeration at all. The landscape that Leslie was working on was breathtaking. A bubbling brook entered the picture from the bottom left and disappeared into a stand of trees in the middle. Beyond the trees were snow-covered mountain peaks that reminded Annie of Glacier Park. Running to the edge of the canvas from both sides of the brook were fields of wildflowers. A fawn drank from the brook while its mother stood guard, seeming to be sensing a threat in the trees. Leslie was working on a small detail in the foreground, in the grass at the base of a group of red flowers, which Annie had learned from Patrick while in the park was Indian Paintbrush. As Annie watched, the face of a baby rabbit took shape. And then she noticed that the body of the rabbit was already there, cleverly camouflaged in the grasses. She scanned the canvas and spotted other wildlife: three birds, two butterflies, a mouse, another mouse, a ladybug, and something barely perceptible, its eyes looking out from the shadows of the trees. It was the threat that the deer was sensing.
“Wow!” The word escaped from Annie’s lips before she even realized it. What doubly amazed her was that Leslie was not working from a photograph; she was drawing from a vision in her head. “This is awesome, Leslie.” Leslie did not respond.
“Can I get you something to drink, Annie,” Pat asked. “I have cherry coke, ice tea, and of course water.”
“Water please.” When Pat left the room Annie said to Patrick, “You didn’t tell me your sister was an artist.”
“Wanted you to see for yourself.”
Pat poked her head back out. “I’ve got some homemade pie. Blueberry. Would you like a piece?”
“No thank you, Mrs. O’Reilly.”
“I’m not Mrs. O’Reilly to you. I’m Pat. Sure you won’t try a piece of pie?”
“You have to try it,” Patrick said. “She’ll never give up until you do. You won’t be sorry.”
“He’s just saying that because he knows he’ll get a piece, too,” his mother said.
Compared to the front of the house, the back was charming. The yard was deep, running into the woods, broken only by a chest-high board fence. The garden, which itself was protected by a much higher wire fence, took up nearly twenty-five percent of the yard. The porch was sturdy and large enough to accommodate a table and umbrella on one side and three lounge chairs on the other. Patrick’s father, Erik O’Reilly—Annie was introduced—sat in one reading a magazine. When he stood to shake her hand she saw Bowhunter on the front of the magazine. He had immediately sat back down and returned to his reading. Annie took a bite of her pie and glanced over at him. She wondered if Patrick was a bow hunter.
“We’ve lived here for nine years,” Pat said. “Every year when we renew the lease the landlord offers to sell it to us. Would be nice, but not yet I don’t think.”
The yard actually had grass and several small trees. A large tree sat middle-left. Annie looked at the flagstone path leading out to the garden and imagined a little Leslie running back and forth. She also imagined a dog on a chain attached to the tree, chasing after a knotted rope. She imagined Leslie wanting to play with the dog, too, and running to pick up the rope. She saw her flipping in the air, and then . . .
She closed her imagination. “You have a big garden,” she said to Pat.
“Oh yes. Lots of work, but it feeds us halfway into winter, if the deer don’t get to it. We’re hoping the new fence helps. So far, so good.”
Across the yard, in the far left corner, was a mound of dirt and a small wooden cross. The cross appeared to have been freshly painted. Lying next to it was what looked like a knotted rope. Couldn’t be, she thought. It would have rotted after nine years. Could Patrick be keeping the plot up, keeping the weeds pulled? Could he have replaced the rope? Is that his obsession?
Although the yard was fenced there was no sign of another dog. She had questions but chose to wait until she had Patrick alone again.
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