“Pia, I’m fine,” I say, but I caught a whiff of unsurprised affirmation in her voice: here it is at last, just as she’d feared. “I just wanted to see you and Henry.”
She doesn’t move for a moment—she doesn’t quite believe me. Then she turns to Keller and says in a familiar, exasperated way, “I would’ve made lunch!” She pats her chest and says, “Well, my gracious, what are you standing in the cold for? Please come in, come in!”
Keller swipes his feet on the doormat, which I know will please Pia. Charlie used to kick the doorjamb to knock the snow off. Pia removes Keller’s scarf and coat, asking, “Now, who have we here? Who have you brought us, Lena?” She hangs his coat in the hall closet and hands me a hanger. I finally have a moment to make introductions. I say simply that he’s “my friend from work.”
“My goodness, what a lovely, unusual name—Keller!” Pia says. “Is that an old family name? It is, isn’t it? Is it very Irish? There are several Pias in my own family—lots of Pias and Catherines.”
“Are there Lenas?” Keller asks politely.
“Oh my goodness.” Pia laughs as if he’d made a joke, then glances at me and lowers her voice. “Not really. I just wanted something unique for my girl.”
The living room holds the scent of my childhood, only intensified, as if Pia and Henry had stopped opening the windows—hair oil, crocheted afghans, and the peculiar scent of singed dust on a TV screen (though the TV is shut up, as usual, in its carved cabinet, as Pia often found the programming “unsettling”). Even though Henry gave up cigars ten years ago, the residue of all that ancient smoke has somehow distilled itself, gotten concentrated. On one wall, above Henry’s armchair, there is actually a penumbra of yellow discoloration around the outline of a head, where the cigar residue must’ve settled as Henry sat in his chair, smoking and studying engine schematics.
Pia switches on the living room lights, muttering about these gray, horrid, horrid winters. And while the morning sun has gone dim already under the cloud cover, I realize that the windows are all framed with velvet curtains, the panes overlaid with panels of gauze, as if Pia and Henry are protecting themselves from brilliant sunshine.
Pia fluffs at the window sheers and veins of swimming pool light slither over Henry’s face. She whispers to us, “Your father’s having one of his not-as-good days.” When he looks at me, I realize that there’s another reason I’ve allowed so much time to pass between us. Henry’s stroke has diminished him dramatically. Since I last saw him in the hospital, he’s lost half or more of his body weight, his face like that of a man struck by lightning. When I put my arms around him, he feels frailer even than Pia, and his hands tremble as he clings to mine. His gaze on me is enormous and devouring.
“Oh, Dad,” I say, my voice like a scrape. “I’ve missed you.”
He nods and opens his mouth and there is only a transparent vibration: his smile is distorted, twisted off at the end, like he’d broken it.
“Come on, Henry, why don’t you try and speak for Leelee?” Pia says. She perches at the end of the couch beside his armchair and takes his hand in both of hers. She looks at me and Keller. “He’s supposed to practice talking. Dr. Morton said so. He said lots of stroke victims regain the ability. But your father’s just so darn stubborn! It’s like if it’s something that I ask him to do, he’s allergic to it. Isn’t that right, Henry?” she asks with a menacing smile. But I sense how frightened she is, how she keeps touching her hair, pushing it behind her ears.
Keller sits in one of the matching wingback armchairs facing the couch. He balances one ankle on one knee, puts his hand on his other knee, and looks around. He says, “You’ve got a lovely home here, Mrs. Dawson.”
“Oh no, I don’t,” Pia says crisply, missing just the right note of humor. She catches herself and softens her voice, trying to compensate. “No, I really don’t. This place is awful, and it’s just getting worse. It needs a good scrubbing from top to bottom, and new furniture and carpets, and—I don’t know what it needs!” Her voice goes ragged; she grins miserably, jumps up from the couch, and hurries to the kitchen, saying, “What am I doing? I’ve lost my mind. I’ve got to fix you some food.”
“No, please, Pia,” I say. “Mom? We’re not hungry?”
“Nonsense!” she snaps.
Henry gives me a comradely old smile—our commiseration against Pia—what can we do about her? I lean over and take his hand and he squeezes, leaning toward me. There seem to be tiny seeds of tears at the corners of his eyes, and I am both so happy and so sad to see him. I can’t imagine how I will ask what I’ve come to ask—but Henry is holding my hand, a fine streak shining on his face.
“Huh,” he says. “Uh, uhh.”
“So Dad, Pia says you’re refusing to speak,” I say brightly. He is nodding, smiling broadly with his twisted mouth; perhaps he’s also remembering that this was Pia’s number one complaint about me when I was a child.
“Oh, he can make himself perfectly understood if he wants to,” Pia says, emerging from the kitchen with a tray of cheese and crackers. “Don’t underestimate Henry. Now, this isn’t lunch. This is just bites, so don’t fill up.” She moves a basket of silk flowers and a pad of paper to the floor and places the tray on the glass coffee table. Then she settles herself next to me on the couch. “Now, Lena, I know how fussy you are about food and this is a special port wine cheese, so you might not like it. But you can’t blame me, you know, you didn’t give me any warning, sweetheart!” she says, but her bird-bright eyes are still distant, as if she weren’t even in the same room as the rest of us. I realize that I’d counted on my customary resentment—now more tangible with Keller as audience—to give me the wherewithal to ask my question. But I just feel grief trickling through the air. Pia does this to me. I recall how much she hated to be alone. How she’d invent excuses, small emergencies, to come into my room and ask if I had a fever, or if I thought a recipe in a magazine had incorrect measurements. Once, she stood up from the dinner table, while Henry and I had been looking over the instructions for building a radio (in our defense, we’d already cleared the dishes away), and said, “Well, I don’t see why I would’ve taken a child in the first place if I just wanted to be ignored.”
Henry’s jaw lengthened, his eyes turning hard, and he snapped, “Pia!” She walked out of the room as he shouted after her, “Get back here and apologize to Lena!”
And now all I can think of is how debilitating, how draining it must be, to be that afraid of solitude. How very angry she must be with Henry, for sidling away from her like this.
“Pia,” I say, “really, we didn’t come over to eat.” (Though Keller is eyeing the cheese and crackers.) “I just—I really wanted to see you and Dad, talk a little bit. It’s been a while.”
“Four and a half years!” she says. “Almost five.” She looks at Keller, who’s picked up the pad of paper and is idly turning the pages as he eats. “Can you imagine that? Five years without seeing her parents. Well. Imagine that.” Her voice edges between wonder and anger, then veers away, as if she’s too tired for any of it. “Well, I really don’t know what you want to talk about,” she says at last, her hands pressed between her knees. She gazes at the painting hanging over the TV of a mill by a stream.
For a moment, no one speaks. I glance at Keller, about to say, Okay, let’s all do this again sometime (never), and get on out of there. Instead, he smiles at Pia and lifts the pad, saying, “Who’s the artist here?”
I reach for the pad. Every page is covered in colored crayon—random lines, geometric shapes that melt into swoops and whirls, off-balanced spirals, mazes that bend and slope and break open. Some pages just have rudimentary pieces of lines and squiggles, tiny fragments, other pages are more densely covered, shaded in pale blues and greens, and look hallucinatory. One page in particular catches my attention and I turn it at different angles, the complicated, broken shape
s shifting together and apart, reminding me of . . . an engine schematic. I look at Henry. He’s staring at me, brows lifted, lips curled under, as if holding in a laugh.
“Oh my gracious,” Pia says. “No, Keller, it’s not art—how could you think that? Those are Henry’s ‘writings.’ Well, that’s what I call them. We started out trying to get him to write words. This was all the way back when Henry was first in the hospital—you remember, Lena?”
I nod, still gazing at Henry.
“Dr. Morton said he could learn how to write again, if he kept practicing. And for a while it looked as if he might get it—remember, Henry? But then . . . I don’t know.” Her voice tips off into mournful disappointment. “He stopped trying. He lost his focus, I think. And his writings started to look worse and worse the more he did.” She laughs again, sounding tight and rigid. “More and more like those. They’re frightening, anyway, don’t you think? Those drawings. They’re so odd. Sometimes I try to hide the paper from him, but then he just gets so agitated. I don’t know.”
She points to a glass jar across the room holding a branch of curling crimson leaves, bright as flames. “Your father found that somewhere and had to bring it inside. Oak, I think, though I can’t imagine where he found autumn leaves in the middle of February. He never brought me flowers and now he’s giving me sticks! He’s always bringing things into the house like that. Ever since the stroke. He’s more like a child all the time. I lost one child and now I’m gaining another.” She laughs dismally.
“Mother,” I say—and she looks at me too quickly, her eyes full of a terrified, overbright hope. “Pia, I wanted to tell you . . .” I glance at Keller, unsure if I know him well enough to say this in front of him. “I’ve been working on this case—you might’ve seen something about it in the paper—it’s very—it’s quite sad—it involves a series of infant deaths—very mysterious. . . .”
“Oh yes. I believe I did see something or other about that.” Her gaze moves lightly over the room. “We used to call those crib deaths.”
“Well, yes, it’s something like that. Only there’s been a series of them, all in a short time, and there’s something about them that’s really affected me.”
Now her face is alert. “What is that? I mean, that affected you? I mean, of course it’s very sad.”
I shake my head. “It’s hard to pin down. Beyond, I suppose, a sort of instinctive connection.”
“A connection?” Now she’s drawn up. “What sort of connection would you possibly feel? What does any of this have to do with us?”
Now I feel it all going off-track—the conversation I’d hoped to have—a bit of emotional exploration. “Well, it’s always been sort of difficult to ask certain things.” I can hear my voice climbing childishly; I rub the side of my neck.
“That’s ridiculous, Lena,” she says, her smile forced. “Like what?”
“I’ve been wanting to ask you something. I’ve started wondering again—lately—well, if there’s anything more you could tell me about—you know . . .” I come to a halt. I can’t meet Pia’s eye. “About them.”
“Who, dear?” Pia asks.
“You know.” I wait a second in case that is the start of tears I feel forming. Keller clears his throat and I look at him, allow myself to draw comfort from him. “My biological parents.” I look at Pia.
Her lips tighten. “I see,” she says.
“I—I think I have a right to know,” I say experimentally, clinging to the arms of my chair. “Everyone has a right to know where they’re from, I think.”
She smiles at the ceiling, crosses her arms. “Oh, do they really? I see. Well, that’s good to know. You’ve decided that, have you?”
I feel Keller’s gaze, shifting between Pia and myself. In his chair, Harry sighs.
“So, I see. This is it. Now we’re finally getting down to it. This is the real reason why you came over. After five years. To see if there’s some other, better parents around, is that it? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, Lena. As evidently I have already done so many times already. But no, I do not know a single thing more than I’ve told you and told you. We did not do some sort of free and easy ‘open adoption’ like they all talk about these days. When the biological mothers get to come visit and play with baby and we get to feed and clothe you and wait up worrying all night about you. No, we didn’t do it that way, did we, Henry? You came to us with a closed file. They told us nothing about you, and what’s more—we didn’t want to know. Do you understand that, Lena? We didn’t want to know because you were all that mattered to us. I’d hoped that we would’ve been enough for you, but that was obviously my big mistake.” Her voice trembles.
“But, who? Who told you nothing?” I ask, though my own voice is rocky. Keller cradles his cup and saucer in both hands, eyes lowered. For a moment I feel sorry for him—he’s a stranger here. But his presence makes me braver. I’m not willing to be as easily deflected as I once was.
“Pardon me?”
“You say, they told you nothing—who told you nothing?”
Pia stares at me, arms and legs crossed, wrapped up into herself, alone on the couch. She barely seems to be blinking. Her lips could be hammered out of silver. She finally says, “I don’t know who.” Her voice is barely a scrap of sound.
Her mouth tightens even more; it looks as if it must hurt her. I feel an impulse to take her hand—the way I did Henry’s—to rub her fingers and her palm, the way she used to rub mine—and tell her not to worry, to forget the whole thing. But my own numb calm has descended on me. I settle back into the deep wingback chair.
“I’ve forgotten,” Pia says grimly. She looks at Henry as if he were the one asking, then her gaze drifts around the room. “You’re talking about something that happened thirty years ago. You were tiny. Just a little slip. There were some agency people there, a man and a woman. It was, uh—something—House—maybe. Or maybe it was Place?”
It’s the same old stuff that she’s come up with in the past, on the rare occasions when I still felt brave enough to ask her. Words that I’ve done a hundred directory and computer searches on, yielding nothing.
“And they had you in the smallest little coat with a little cloth rosebud right there.” She points to the base of her throat and smiles distantly. “You looked like a sweet baby doll. And I crouched down and made myself very small and held your hands—because they told me you didn’t like to be hugged or touched too much—you never liked it—so I took your little tiny hands and said, ‘Hello, honey, would you like to come and live with me?’ And you whispered it in my ear—do you remember what you whispered to me?” She looks at me, waiting.
I shake my head.
“You said yes.”
IT’S NOT UNTIL we’re at the door, saying our goodbyes, that it occurs to me that we never had lunch. Half of the pink port wine cheese remains on the table beside a pile of gold crackers. Keller kindly hands his card to Henry, saying, “My home number’s there—if you need anything.”
Pia clings to Keller’s hands, telling him how happy, how terribly happy, she is to have met him. How he has to come back right away. I turn and look back into the rooms where I grew up and for an instant the corners shift and elongate, a bit like the tilting mazes in Henry’s drawings, and I seem to see the place again as I did almost thirty years ago, when I was three years old: the forbidding, alien furniture, the clean, blank carpet, the immense spaces floating around everything. And then two white faces—first one, then the other, blocking out the room—both huge and white, drawn back into smiles of enormous teeth. I’d walked out of the rain forest and let the humans take me back. Looking into that house was the first inkling I had of what my life would be like.
Now Pia is agitated, her eyes moving rapidly, as if reading something written over my head. She looks as if she’s forgotten something vital and can’t recall what it wa
s. “It’s too soon for you to leave, isn’t it? You just got here. I’ve barely gotten a chance to look at you or find out anything about your new friend here.” Her hands clutch mine. “Now, now, please, Lena. You aren’t going to just do this again, are you? You won’t just appear and disappear, please, Lena. I won’t have it, you know. It’s horrid. I would almost rather you—I would almost prefer . . . Well, never mind! Nobody cares about what I want, do they? That’s never mattered very much to you, I know. But if not for me, then think of your father. Consider his health, at least. Look how much good it does him to see you.”
Henry is still stationed in his chair, watching in his patient way, his face dim with shadow. I move back to his side and sit directly on the wide, flat arm of the chair. Pia used to scold when I did this as a child, worrying that I’d flatten the nap of the upholstery, but now she doesn’t say anything. “Hey, Dad,” I say. I touch the silvery fringe at the back of his head. “Has this visit done your heart more good than bad?”
His lips curl into something too sneaky to be a smile. He nods, his heavy head bobbing downward; it looks cumbersome on his narrow frame. I stare at him a moment—I have a powerful sense that there’s something about Henry that I’m not getting. He sits back then and slips something to me: a curling page torn from his pad.
“Henry, what’s that? Don’t do that,” Pia snips. The paper feels worn as silk. I fold it and slip it into my pocket. “My gracious, Lena, you’ve certainly been favored, I must say. Usually he won’t let me touch his precious papers. I’ve never seen him tear one out before,” she says.
I stand and kiss Henry on top of his speckled scalp, and just as I’m turning, Pia comes over and puts both her arms around me. For a moment she’s just as wiry and strong as I remember her—though I can recall no full embraces quite like this before. She lets go, lets her arms fall, and says, “I’m sorry,” in her clipped way. Her eyes shine, and I think: She does feel more than she says. There’s a complexity to her gaze, feelings like buried bits of iron filings.
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