by Deb Caletti
“Is that Frances Lee?” I asked.
“Who?” Grandma said.
“Dad’s daughter, you know, with his first wife.”
“Could be,” she said. But she wasn’t paying attention. It reminded me of the times she’d madly hunt through her recipe box when she had a serious craving for something chocolate.
“She looks like me,” Sprout said, looking down at Frances Lee.
I took the picture from her. “Her face is a lot rounder,” I said.
We sifted through a few more—unidentifiable babies and Christmas photo cards of people we didn’t know we knew. Oceans and sunsets from some beach on some evening, something someone thought was beautiful for a moment but that was now only a mystery in a box.
“Ha-ha, two heads,” Sprout said. It was me at Snoqualmie Falls, standing on the path that led down to the water, and some bald tourist just behind me. By the magic of Mom’s photography skills, we looked surgically connected, his chin to the top of my head.
“Siamese twins not separated at birth,” I said. “Why do I get all the ugly pictures?”
“Not all,” Sprout said.
“Have you ever thought about all the photos you’re in around the world?” I said.
“I went to Mexico once,” Grandma said. “Puerto Vallarta. With Otto.”
“No, I mean in other people’s pictures. Like, we’ve got this bald guy in our box, and he’s probably living in Maryland with his wife and out-of-control kid. And our elbows and heads and coat sleeves are in albums all over the world, probably.”
“My elbow’s been more places than me,” Sprout said. “Speaking of going places. Guess who was home all day.”
“You,” I said. I thought this was a complaint because I’d gone out and left her alone.
“Besides me. Besides Gram. And not Auntie.”
“That leaves Ivar.”
“Bingo.”
“Weird.” Ivar heard his name. His ears perked up into two triangles. He got up and sniffed around the table. If you said his name, Ivar thought that meant he was getting food. Daniel used to have a friend like that.
“He’s been home every day since school’s been out,” Sprout said.
“Maybe Ivar’s in junior high,” I said.
Sprout petted Ivar’s head. He shook it when she stopped, his ears making their flapflapflap sound. I set the bald guy from Chicago back in the box. I’d just about had enough of disjointed life flashes, when one more photo caught my eye. Mom, in a cap and gown. College graduation, I guess. Some guy, also in cap and gown, had just scooped her up it seemed—her arm was around his neck, her legs dangled over his arm, one high heel nearly lost but hanging from her toes. In her hand she was gripping a box, I noticed. It was the box that caught my eye, even more than my happy mother held by this young man on a day of celebration. It was an enamel box with a design on it, too small to see. But the colors were familiar. I knew that box. A music box, I’d bet. With Renoir ballerinas dressed in frothy white.
“Grandma?” I said.
“Some dead relative,” she said, without looking up.
“No.” I put it under her nose, made her look.
“That’s your mom and Irving. What a nice boy. She dated him all through her senior year of college.”
“Let me see,” Sprout said. “Irving. I’m going to give Mom a bad time about dating someone named Irving.”
“Nice boy,” Grandma said. “Oh, he was crazy about Mary Louise.”
“What’s she holding?” I asked.
“A present,” Grandma said. She was done with the conversation, but I wasn’t.
“From you?”
“No,” she said. “Maybe from Irving? Maybe from her dance teacher. It had dancers on it, I think.”
That box—I knew it was that box—sat on a table in my father’s living room. When you lifted the lid, a song played. My mother’s box. She, too, had something that needed to be returned to her.
“Irving.” Sprout chuckled.
Chapter Nine
Mom’s tan arms, her hands on the steering wheel, her yellow sundress—they all gave me a wrench of guilt as she drove us to the train station. A wrench of guilt that collided with nerves and energy and excitement. I’d barely ever lied to Mom, and even then, I’d eventually confessed. The time I went to Paul Sanders’s party instead of to a sleepover at Liv’s, like I’d first told her. Second grade, when I lost my lunchbox and said Zachary Judd had taken it. Halloween, third grade. Ate a bunch of my candy when I was supposed to only have two pieces at lunch. My conscience has always been very responsible.
I was expecting Hell Ride, one of those awful times in the car when it’s dead silent, the silence loud with all that’s not being said. When you feel trapped by vinyl seats and glass windows, when you stare at that little handle no one uses above the door, or at the cigarette lighter that also no one uses. You stare, and wish on that object for the miserable car ride to be over, but of course it goes on for thousands of miles, even when you’re just going around the block.
But the ride wasn’t like that, not really. Mom did her usual mini-freak-out routine of asking us again and again if we had things we didn’t even really need (Pepto Bismol, for example, which I probably hadn’t used since I was six), and then suddenly panicked because she hadn’t reminded us to put on sunblock before we went outside, and to reapply after we went swimming. She placed our itinerary by the telephone, the one I’d typed up on our computer after researching flights and a great motel for us to stay in right by Disneyland (I’d gotten us a pool and an in-room coffeemaker). Mom stuffed Sprout’s old bathing suit in her bag as a spare at the last minute, the one with rainbows on it that Sprout wouldn’t be caught dead in, even if she could get it to fit.
But when we got in the car, Mom didn’t have that tight forehead, the stressed eyes, the constant temple rubbing that I would have expected. Strangely, she seemed light, that’s the only way to explain it. Yellow dress, maybe, but also she just seemed easy—one arm out the window, hair blowing in the wind, a small smile at the corners of her mouth. She wasn’t the Mom I was used to. I thought about Mom in that picture, with that guy Irving holding her. I thought about that other picture, too, of Mom doing the cartwheel, her feet off the ground. It wasn’t a Mom we knew, but that I could see a tiny glimpse of now. That little smile. Maybe we should have gone on vacation more often.
I started to relax. This was all going to be okay after all.
Sprout had brought a little patchwork purse of hers, and it was over her shoulder in a serious manner when we got out of the car. Her braids looked determined, if braids can look determined. Mom took our bags out of the trunk. We were only going to be gone for five days, but we had an extra bag each, to hold the cold medicine and spare underwear and Kleenex and fruit snacks that we never needed at home and wouldn’t need now.
Mom folded her arms and looked at us. “Well, look at you two,” she said. She smiled. This was a different good-bye. It wasn’t the rushed, hurry-hurry-hurry of our usual trips, of the almost forgotten backpack, the quick kiss. This was one of those mom-moments, where they suddenly remember the passage of time. Time was always a sudden remembering for moms, it seemed.
She hugged us long and hard, kissed our heads. When we hugged, she smelled like shampoo and the clean perfume she wore. I thought about that music box, her music box, in the photograph. It was a good, pure thing, there, that day. You could feel that goodness in the way she held it, a treasured gift, a loved possession, a happy present at a happy time. Given and gotten with the right kind of intentions. And now it sat on a table in my father’s house, and the words around it were bad ones: snitched and stolen, forgotten; anger, maybe. Retribution, heartbreak. I thought about tears and struggle, the road to now, as Mom stood here with her small smile and yellow dress. And I felt something else then about this trip, other than guilt about lying to her. I felt a sense of right, of doing right, of putting things back where they belonged. There aren’t too many ti
mes, I’ve realized, when you have that feeling that something is happening that’s supposed to happen, even if you don’t understand it completely. And I had that then, as we said good-bye to Mom and watched the back of her yellow dress as she returned to her car, and I had it still as Sprout and I walked into the train station and headed into a something unknown but a something true.
ABIGAIL RENFREW:
That song, by the Eurythmics. It also says that love is “a dangerous drug.” It can seem “like religion.” You can “stumble in the debris” of it. Love is many fine things, too, of course. Go to a hundred other songs to hear about that. But what I should speak to is the fact that a bad relationship is a powerful thing; yes, a dangerous drug. It can hook all the better parts of our nature until our own good can turn into a terrible and unfortunate quality. We want to be nice people. We do not want to judge unfairly. We want to work hard for the right outcome. We want to be kind to someone who might be hurting. We do not want to be quitters.
If things were once happy in the beginning of a relationship, we will do a lot to get that to return; we will go miles for a bread crumb, sometimes. We are certain it has got to be there, the good, if it was there once. It can be addicting, the need to get back to that good feeling; and then, like an addiction, the lengths you go destroy you. I’m thinking of Haden’s father here, the man I married. After Michael Banks’s fussiness, Trent seemed strong and masculine and mysterious. But what I wanted back had never really been there. He was a temporary illusion, a mirage of water after walking in the desert. I had made him up. And he could have killed me.
You’ve got to stop the ride sometimes. Stop it and get off.
She had a green truck, a green pickup truck, and that was one of the first things we learned about Frances Lee. She’d met us at the Portland train station, and the truck was parked at the curb, right near where Brie’s used to be. Frances Lee’s truck had a backseat, and stuff was shoved under the front one in what was probably a speedy effort to clean up. I saw the white and yellow of a McDonald’s bag, the fat edge of a textbook, a squashed orange-and-green Jamba Juice cup. She’d flung open both doors, and loud, garage-band music charged out.
“Toss your stuff in here,” she said. This was Frances Lee’s voice I’d known from our phone calls coming out of the real her, which seemed strange. I’d gotten more familiar with that voice, with dealing with her as a Person on the Phone, but now she was here, herself, in physical form. She looked different than I remembered. Every time I had thought of her, I imagined the way she looked that time at the restaurant. I saw the wild black hair and the dark outlined eyes, the braided jute around her wrist. Every time I talked to her, I saw her in that same long coat with the fur all around the collar and down the inside. But now her hair was shorter—shaggy, down to her shoulders—and she wore a white peasant dress with little mirrors on it and blue beads, and the tattoo of the mermaid was still on her ankle. Sprout was staring at it, hard.
We got our bags in the back and then Frances Lee stopped organizing things and looked at us. She put her hands on her hips.
“Well,” she said. It was exactly what Mom had said, but it was a different kind of “well.” Mom’s was a thoughtful well, a pondering well. Frances Lee’s was a “what do we have here” well. A “look what I’ve done now” well. A “I guess I’ll have to make the best of it” well. In the comforting distance of our phone conversations, we’d forgotten that we were strangers, and I could see Frances Lee try to decide who we were to her.
Sprout hadn’t said a word. She’d gotten stone silent and the great feeling of an important mission that I’d had earlier seemed to suddenly zap into nonexistence, filled instead with a sense of things having gone horribly wrong already.
“This is my sister, Sprout,” I said.
“Charlotte,” Sprout said, and held on to her purse primly, like an old lady at a dangerous bus stop.
“Cool,” Frances Lee said. We all stood there for a minute. We were people at a party who all knew the host but didn’t know each other, and in this case, the host was my dad, who was somewhere on the Oregon Coast, boffing some new woman with three kids. My father, who was completely unaware that his own three kids were about to set off on a trip to steal his trophies and meet his lovers. Frances Lee seemed a bit stunned at the reality that she’d created. “So, hey, I guess we’d better get going,” Frances Lee said. She walked around to the other side of the truck and got in. I felt stunned, too. You put things in motion, and then you go, Shit, look what I put in motion.
Sprout got in the back with the bags and I got in the front, and when I slammed the door, the Buddha figure stuck to Frances Lee’s dashboard shimmied and shook. The car rumbled when Frances Lee turned the key. It was a roar, really, some kind of sick exhale that spit out something black and nuclear from the tailpipe.
“You like this?” Frances Lee shouted over the engine and the metal clatter of the music, nodded toward the CD player she had duct taped to the front console.
“It’s great,” I said. I could feel Sprout kick the back of my seat.
“This is my boyfriend Gavin’s brother’s band. I told you about his little brother? Jake Kennedy? He needs to get to Portland same time we’ll be there, so we’ll pick him up at home and he’ll come with us, okay? They’ve got some beginner-band Sunday-night gig, and he wanted to visit his folks on Orcas, yabbedy, yabbedy, ya. Gavin’s paying for gas, is what we need to concern ourselves with, though why those parents just don’t buy him a fucking car with all the money they’ve got, I don’t know. I swear to God, Gavin’s got to be adopted, because he is such a sweet guy and his parents are—” She twirled one finger beside her head.
Frances Lee looked over at me, and I looked at her, and I saw another tattoo, under her wrist. A small butterfly, which was nearly squished against the steering wheel.
“That’s too bad,” I said. I was feeling like I was about ten years old, walking in to a high school classroom. I felt the awkward humiliation you feel when you’re carrying a lunchbox around people who’ve probably smoked joints. Frances Lee looked suddenly tired. She felt around on the seat beside her, then opened her ashtray and pulled out a cellophane package of cigarettes.
“Mind if I smoke?” she shouted. She was already taking a cigarette out of the package with her teeth. We had gotten on the freeway, and the truck was now thundering and shaking with the effort, and the Buddha was having a rubber-toy seizure.
“I’m allergic,” Sprout shouted from the back. “Asthma.” She had no such thing. She just hated the smell of cigarettes. If we were anywhere in public where she smelled smoke, she’d wave her hand in front of her face dramatically.
The cigarette hung dejectedly from Frances Lee’s mouth. “Really?” she said. “Shit.” She plucked it from her lips, held the cigarette and the pack in her hand. She paused, and then suddenly flung it all out the window, the cigarette, the package, all. Sprout kicked my seat again. They’d done litter pickup along the streets of Nine Mile Falls in her third-grade class. For two weeks, you couldn’t drop a bread crumb without getting shit from her.
In the side mirror I could see that cigarette pack getting smaller and smaller in the distance. “I’ve been wanting to quit anyway,” Frances Lee said.
No one said a word. The silence between us jangled and clattered, same as that garage band. I tried to think of something to say, anything, but my mind was a vast wide desert of dry, empty thoughts. Nothing came to me, nothing. Bands, cars, what? School, her boyfriend, Gavin?
“How long have you known Gavin?” I asked.
“Since forever. They’ve been our neighbors since I was, like, five. When I was eighteen, I looked up and he was gorgeous. God. I had an asshole boyfriend at the time. Gavin and me—inseparable ever since.” She smiled at the memory of him.
“That’s great,” I said. Silence again. I was having some kind of conversational drought. Honestly, I was wondering where I was and how I got there. Frances Lee seemed to be wondering
the same thing. She gave her head a little shake, some mental release of disbelief. She reached for the volume knob and turned up the music, maybe trying to fill the huge space of quiet between us.
We rode like that, and I stared at the cigarette lighter that maybe she did actually use, and then I looked out the window, watched the speeding cars and semitrucks, full of people, no doubt, who could actually carry on conversations. My own humiliation and awkwardness shriveled up my insides. We can be so large and then so small, and right then I felt like a tiny little figure sitting on that seat, with a whisper for a voice.
“Where am I going?” Frances Lee shouted. Which was probably a pretty good question.
“Oh, right,” I said. I’d forgotten I was supposed to be leading.
“Exit 33,” Sprout said from the back. “Coming up right after this one.”
We led Frances Lee from the exit and down the winding road to the river, to the houses there. To Dad’s house, with its curves and shingles, a mailbox with colored juggling balls on top.
“It’s on the fucking water,” Frances Lee said. “How nice is that.” She’d turned the key and the engine shut off and there was sudden silence. Just the sound of birds being birds. She reached around on the seat again, realized she’d done in her cigarettes back on the freeway. “Shit,” she said. A crow started to caw from one of the evergreens.
I looked at the house, which felt both full of Dad and empty of him. Three newspapers sat in plastic on his porch, yet a pair of his leather sandals was there too, and the wind chimes he’d hung up chink-chinked in the breeze. His recycling bins were at the side of the house, with the green glass of his Perrier bottles showing from the top. We can’t do this, I thought. I twisted my ring around my finger again. He had given me things, I remembered.