by Jael McHenry
She can’t be. Can’t be, but is.
“You are surprise?” says Nonna. “But you bring me here.”
Her rough English. Her salt-and-pepper hair, the pattern of it along the hairline, unchanged. Same sweater pushed up to her elbows, each row of yellow stitches tight and even like corn kernels on the cob. Same once-white Keds. She looks as she should. Except that she shouldn’t, at all.
“Don’t be afraid,” she says, and I wasn’t until she says it but then I am, and I would flee except that the only way out is through a crowd of strangers who want to put their swarming, sweating hands on me and given that, there is really no escape.
I back against the glass cabinets and say, “Nonna, what’s going on? Why are you here?”
Nonna says, “You bring me with the smell of ribollita, and I bring the message. I come to tell you. Do no let her.”
“Her? Who?”
The folding doors swing open. Cooler, fresher air pours in, bringing the murmuring sound of the invaders, which fades as the doors swing shut. I hear one shoe strike the squares of the kitchen tile, then another. I can’t close my ears so I close my eyes.
“What smells so good?”
Silence.
“Ginny, what are you doing? Are you cooking something, what for? Are you okay?”
I open my eyes just a sliver. Nonna is gone. I see Auntie Connie’s yeast-colored shoes. I smell her beerlike smell. Then too late I see her fingers, reaching.
Contact.
When someone touches me wrong it isn’t a feeling. It isn’t hate or fear or pain. It is just blackness and a chant in me: get/out/get/out/get/out.
I push past Connie, I can feel bone under the flesh of her shoulder like the shank end of a ham, and I nearly trip on the step down into the next room and everyone is there, not just shoes but knees and elbows and torsos and open mouths. I have to get out, but they’re all in my way. I shove through. I feel oven-hot skin, clammy fish-flesh skin, damp chicken-liver skin, they’re all around me. My heart beats faster, the chant matching, get/out/get/out/get. Out of the question to go all the way upstairs. Need whatever’s right here.
I duck into the coat closet and pull the closet door shut fast fast fast and turn away from the sliver of light under the door. I reach for Dad’s rain boots. They squeak against each other like cheese curds. I kneel down, pull them up into my lap, and shove my hands inside. Leather would be better but this particular old rubber-boot smell is still a Dad smell.
The onions, I need the idea of the onions, I soothe myself with it. Slowly growing golden. Giving off that scent, the last of the raw bite mixed with the hint of the sweetness to come. I press my forehead down against my knees, crushing the boots between my chest and thighs. My forehead is hot. My knees are hot. Thin, long strands shaved on a mandoline start as solid half-moons and melt away over time. More salt? No, just patience. Stir. Wait. Adjust the heat. Wait. Stir.
Light floods in. Real light.
“Oh, Ginny, please.” It’s Amanda’s voice. She has a voice like orange juice, sweet but sharp. Right now it’s watery and harsh with tears. I look down and see her shoes, glossy and black as trash bags. The pointed toes make triangles against the floor.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. I reach out to pull the door shut but with my booted hand I can’t do it. The wide round toe of the boot thuds uselessly against the door.
She bends down to me, speaking softly. “You can do this,” she says. “You were doing fine before. You were just fine.”
I shake my head no, no, no. I wasn’t fine. She can’t tell that. She only sees the outside, which isn’t how I feel at all.
She puts one hand on the toe of a boot. She says, “Can’t you come out? It isn’t for much longer, I promise.”
I say, “No.”
She puts her other hand on the other boot. But my hands are protected. I can’t feel anything.
“It’s hard enough without this,” she says. “I’m barely holding it together, and I can’t have you melting down on top of everything else right now. Don’t you understand? Don’t you realize how this looks?”
I open my mouth to apologize again when a high-pitched siren drowns everything out. Amanda’s hands vanish first and then her toes. I hate noise but I know what this one is, and she can handle it. By twisting my wrist and using the heel of the boot to catch the edge I manage to pull the door shut again, and although I close my eyes against the light I can smell the smoke in my nose, a charred, acrid smell. Vegetal, not chemical. Angry voices. Amanda shouting, “Don’t worry, it’s just in the kitchen, everyone, it’s okay.”
Amanda always takes care of things, whatever happens. She’s like Ma that way. Trusting her is like relaxing into a hot bath. Or, like it used to feel when I took baths. I don’t anymore because steeping in hot water makes me feel like an ingredient. An egg, a noodle, a lobster. Now I take showers.
I press myself tight against the closet wall and take deep breaths. The siren stops and the only sound is chattering voices. I fade the noise away. I focus on the feeling of my hands in the rain boots, the warm closeness around me. The feeling of Dad nearby. A reassuring presence. But then when I think of Dad, I think of Nonna’s ghost, in the kitchen with me. So real.
Her warning.
Do no let her.
I push my body against the back of the closet but there’s nowhere further or darker to go. I stretch my fingers all the way down into the toes of Dad’s boots. I close my eyes and think of onions, how over time they change in predictable and expected ways, if you handle them correctly. If you do it right, there are no surprises. Ma said You can’t get honey from an onion but it turns out that, in a way, you can.
In my life I’ve had good days and bad days. Miserable days. Painful days. And no matter how bad the bad ones get, there’s a mercy in them. Every single one of them ends.
This one, thank goodness, does too.
CHAPTER TWO
Shortbread
When I wake up, I move as if through water. My body is heavy, my brain is slow. My attic bedroom is a big room full of small corners. There are windows in some of its nooks, but not the one with the bed. I roll over and find the clock. Ten already. There is something heavy and warm on one of my feet. I squint. Midnight. I’m sure she’s just as happy as I am to have yesterday over, to have the invaders gone. She doesn’t like crowds either. She’s not a people cat. I ease my foot out from under her long-haired white form, inch by inch. Although sleeping, she complains with a half-swallowed meow.
The image of Nonna in the kitchen comes back to me, and I wish it hadn’t. There’s already more than I can handle. Now do I have to worry about dead relatives ambushing me here and there? Grandpa Damson on the front porch, under the portico? Dad’s second cousin Olivia, the rumored suicide, waiting for me when I step out of the shower? Ma in the hall in the middle of the night, scolding me back to bed? I can’t worry about it. I have to assume Nonna was a hallucination. But her warning tickles the back of my brain, and I have to chase it out somehow.
Listening, I tune in to the faint noises. Scratching and swishing and knocks. The acoustics of this old house make it sound like even the sidewalk is only a few steps down the hall. So it takes a while to figure out whether or not these sounds are coming from inside the house. In the end, I think they are.
The stairs creak under my feet, but Gert is busy wiping down the mantel and doesn’t look up at the sound. I watch her lean into the motion, pushing hard in long strokes to strip the dust off instead of just moving it around. Her long black ponytail sways. Gert has always had waist-length hair, the longest I’ve ever seen.
Gert has cleaned the house once a week ever since I can remember. Over the years I learned her story. Her parents, both Jewish, fled Romania for Cuba during the Holocaust. Then during the revolution it was her turn to flee. She changed her language but kept her religion, and brought us sweets from both traditions. Gert has a voice like the poppy seed filling of hamantaschen, inky and sweet, but it
’s her Cuban pastries I really remember. Even now, remembering, the taste of her coconut turnovers fills my mouth. Creamy, papery white filling. Rich yellow pastry falling apart in flakes.
Gert leans back and shakes the cloth out, whipping it hard from the corners so it snaps. She lifts the bucket of water from the tile of the fireplace and turns toward me.
“Ginny,” she says. “Hope I did not wake you.”
“No,” I say.
She approaches me the only way I can stand, straight on, in plain sight. When I look down, she places the heel of her hand on my forehead and presses against it, like a blessing.
“I am sorry,” she says.
“Thank you.”
Gert has always been easy for me to get along with. Maybe I would get along with everyone if I only saw them for three hours once a week. My mother, my sister, they were always around too much. There were too many opportunities for me to screw things up. Dad I saw less, and he liked me more. There could be a connection.
“Your sister is in the kitchen,” she says, gesturing, and I realize there are more sounds from that direction. A series of thuds, some metallic, some not. I go to see.
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” says Amanda, from her high perch. She’s standing on top of the step stool, pulling items from the kitchen cabinets and letting them fall into a large black plastic bag spread out on the floor.
“Why are you still here?” I ask.
“I said, good morning.”
“Good morning,” I echo.
“It didn’t make sense to go all the way back out to New Jersey,” she says. “The girls were so tired and it was so late. You just missed them, actually. Brennan took them out on a duck tour, you know, Liberty Bell, Penn’s Landing, the whole nine yards.”
When she says it I realize I overheard them talking about duck last night, after the house was dark and I took my hands out of Dad’s rain boots and went upstairs to my room. It got me started thinking about what flavors go with duck: orange, cherry, star anise. They also talked about home and safe and burgers. The house carries sounds everywhere.
Amanda drops a box of cereal into the trash bag.
I ask, “What are you doing?”
“I can’t stand it,” she says. “Eating their food. What they left behind. I … I couldn’t eat … knowing they …”
Some of that was my food, not theirs. She might know it, she might not. It doesn’t matter. “Okay, but we’re going to have to buy more.”
“I’ll figure it out,” she says. “Remind me, I need to trim your bangs, they’re completely out of control. How can you even see?”
“I can see fine.”
“No, no, let’s just go take care of this now while I’m thinking about it,” she says, climbing down. Behind us in the dining room I can hear Gert lifting and setting down the picture frames, dusting in between.
I sit on the edge of the bathtub. Amanda holds the comb out toward me and I grab the other end. I let her closer than anyone else, but she knows my limits. While I’m combing out the tangles, she says, “I should take you shopping. How long have you had that sweater?”
“I don’t know.”
“You need some new clothes, Ginny.”
“I don’t need them.”
“You could diversify, though. Wear something besides black.”
“I wear things besides black.” I hand the comb back to her and tug down the sleeve of my sweater, which doesn’t quite cover my wrist. It shrank. My fault. I should have left it for Gert to wash.
“Besides navy and black and brown. Do you own anything red?”
“I don’t know.”
“Red would look gorgeous on you. Hold still. You ready?”
“Yes.” I close my eyes tight and she starts to snip. I don’t like the sound, but I know how to keep still around sharp things. I examine a single cornflake in my mind. Not its taste, just its shape, uneven and pockmarked. A mountainous landscape the size of a fingernail.
Amanda works for a while in silence, then says, “You’re going to love this. Shorter bangs will frame your face better. We both have the same problem, wide face, tiny chin. If you don’t break the line it’s a giant triangle. When I was in Lorna’s wedding she made us pull our hair back and the makeup gave me a monster breakout so I looked exactly like a freaking Dorito. Cool Ranch. Ah, I wish I had your skin.”
I picture her slipping my skin off my skeleton and climbing into it like a jumpsuit, and say, “That’s really gross.”
“I meant you’re lucky,” she says, and just goes on snipping. “Pale skin with dark hair, the contrast thing is all the rage. I just look washed out if I don’t tan, which was a lot easier when Brennan and I were in L.A. I’d love to show you what looks nice on you. Makeup too. Emphasize the blue eyes, maybe a nice red lip, like a little china doll. You could look so pretty if you tried. We should definitely go shopping this week.”
“Okay,” I say, because it’s easier to agree, for now. I don’t tell her what happened the last time Ma took me shopping, six months ago. Metal hangers shrieked against metal racks. The salesgirl wore a flesh-colored top with stitching down the middle that looked like sutures. When I tried on a light blue floaty dress it was so thin it didn’t even feel like clothes and the salesgirl said Oh this eight is too big but the length is good here let me show you if we nip it in at the waist like this. She pinched me on both sides and I slapped at her hands but she thought I was joking or something and she pressed with both hands and I squirmed and twisted but couldn’t twist away so I slapped harder and everything blurred and Ma said Quiet, quiet, but I didn’t know I was being loud, and we left without buying anything. I don’t tell Amanda any of that.
The silence between snips grows longer. Amanda says, “We’ll need a break from packing at some point. Maybe we can go later in the week.”
I say, “Packing?”
“All done.” She sets the scissors down on the sink. I stand up and all the wisps of discarded hair fall on the floor. “There, don’t you look so much better?”
“Thank you,” I say, even though it wasn’t exactly a compliment. “You said packing?”
“Yes. I figured we could work together on packing up Mom and Dad’s stuff.”
“Why?”
“Well,” she says, “life is going to intrude at some point. You know how busy I am with the girls. We’re lucky Brennan’s around to help for a while, but at some point his firm is going to send him back out on the road, and then I’m not going to be as available. And it wouldn’t make sense to have this place just sitting here empty.”
“It’s not sitting here empty,” I say. “I’m living in it.”
“Well, but that’s going to change.”
“Why?”
“Ginny, we can’t keep the house. We’ll sell it.”
It’s a horrible thing she’s saying, but I don’t want to jump to conclusions, like with the skin, so carefully I ask, “Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Well, we’re not selling it,” I snap.
She exhales, forcefully, loudly. “I was afraid you were going to have a knee-jerk reaction.”
“My knees aren’t jerking anywhere.”
“I meant you didn’t even think about it.”
“I thought about it. Just now. It’s a terrible idea.”
“Keep your voice down!” says Amanda.
“You keep your voice down!” I reply.
Amanda leans against the sink and crosses her arms. “It’s too much house for one person. Besides, do you know how rare it is for a place like this to go on the market? A Portico Row four-bedroom, going on two hundred years old, with all the original detail? I was telling my friend Angelica about it, she’s a real estate agent, she was practically drooling. Wash West was scary as hell thirty years ago, Mom and Dad picked it up for cheap. And it’s totally paid for. We could make an amazing amount of money.”
I cross my arms too. “We have enough money.”
“Spoken like
someone without her own checkbook,” says Amanda. “It never hurts to have more.”
“It’s home. You’re talking about selling our home.” I stare at a spot on her shoulder, where a tuft of my cut-off hair has caught and settled.
“It’s not really about the money,” she says. “It’s about you, to be honest. Do you think you’d really be okay here? By yourself?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You’ve never lived alone.”
I say, “It’s not fair to assume I can’t do something just because I haven’t.”
“Well, you’ve never … you’re so … okay. Yesterday you started a fire. What if we hadn’t been here?”
“But you were here. And it was only almost a fire.” I can’t tell her the reason I left the pot on the stove and ran away. I can’t tell her about seeing Nonna. I’ve never been institutionalized, but I know I wouldn’t like it.
“And you ran and hid in a closet.”
“And?” I crouch down and start picking up the little black clumps off the featureless white floor.
“Don’t bother with that, come on, leave that for Gert,” says Amanda. She crouches down beside me. “Ginny, baby, are you gonna be okay?”
“Yes. I already said that.”
“No, really, I mean it. Look at me.”
She knows I can’t. She remembers, belatedly.
“Sorry, Ginny, sorry, that’s what I tell the girls.”
“I understand.”
She stands up and puts away the scissors in the top right-hand drawer, which is not where they go, and then says, “Actually, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
“It can wait, I bet.”
“No time like the present,” she says. “I want to talk about your problem.”
I sit on the edge of the tub and look at the little crystal knobs on the vanity drawers. “I don’t have a problem.”
“You do.”
“I have a personality. That’s what I have.”
“Ginny, Ginny, Ginny. Please don’t push me away.”
“Well, please don’t be an asshole,” I mumble at the floor.