The last of the passengers boarded the plane. The stairs were rolled away and the door sealed tight. A thought occurred to me. What if Andy didn’t come to his senses after all? What if he never understood what he had done, never took the first step toward reconciliation? How could I talk to him then? I couldn’t. I couldn’t have anything to do with him. I closed my eyes, trying to shut out that unimaginable possibility. It terrified me. But the seconds kept going by, and I couldn’t forgive what had happened between us on my own.
I watched the plane bearing my brother roll away, slowly moving out of sight. Min pointed out the window, uttering an unintelligible comment. “Yes, that was your Uncle Andy,” I told her, combing my fingers through her thick black hair. “I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again for a long time.” A tear fell on her hair, and I combed it in. What would happen if Min and I ever fought like this, when she was older? Andy would have said I could never be certain that some day she wouldn’t walk away forever, because I wasn’t her first mother, her real mother.
But he had walked away from me. So what did that prove about the bonds of blood?
Outside, the runway was empty. The sky was empty too, a flat gray. I watched for a long time. I held Min against me, breathing in her sweet baby smell.
CHAPTER 2
Catherine
Summer 1968
SOMETHING WAS WRONG WITH ME. I felt it as soon as Jonathan slowed the rental car and turned left into my parents’ driveway, the twin beams of the headlights making a slow sweep in front of us. My parents had left the front door light on, and in its feeble glow the house loomed up large and solid and unchanged. The sight of it like that enraged me. It should have been burned to the ground or wiped out by a tornado. But the house stood as it always had, as if everything was still the same as it had been when I was a child. I wanted to put my fist through the windshield. Frightened, I clamped my hands together between my legs. I turned around to check on Min in the back seat. She was still asleep, curled up, her head resting on her polka-dotted plastic raincoat.
“She’s okay,” I said to Jonathan.
He glanced at me but said nothing as he inched the car over the crunching gravel and parked by the garage. In the suddenly silent darkness we opened our doors and stood, stretching.
“I’ll carry her in,” he offered.
“No,” I said quickly, “I will.” I knew it was ridiculous, but I was afraid Jonathan might drop her.
The next morning, the call of crows dragged me out of a restless sleep. Sunlight lay hot on my back. The side of my face was pressed into the pillow. I felt paralyzed, unable even to open my eyes. I was still half in my dream: completely alone, treading water in the darkness, afraid of touching something I couldn’t see. I could feel the cold of the water, the fear of slithery seaweed wrapping around my legs.
Wanting reassurance, I reached out my hand and discovered that I was alone in the bed. Jonathan had already gotten up. I opened my eyes and stared at the space in the sheets where he had been. Why hadn’t he woken me? He knew how anxious I was about visiting my parents after all this time. I needed him. Why hadn’t he stayed close by this first morning? Where had he gone?
I rolled over on my back and lay looking at the room I had grown up in: the water stains on the floral wallpaper, the ornate, hand-carved bureau, the holes in the back of the door where my shoe rack had been screwed in. In the far corner, my old Raggedy Ann doll sat propped up on a three-legged stool. Without my glasses, I saw her face as a pale circle, unable to distinguish her eyes or mouth. I had loved that doll when I was very young, dragging her with me everywhere until Andy had come along, better than any doll to hold and then to play with.
Andy. I squinted, trying to make Raggedy Ann’s face come into focus. I knew exactly how long it had been. Four years and eight days. Four goddamn years since you went out sailing knowing a storm was coming in. And before that, almost five months of silence. Not even a letter. And then you died. What was wrong with you? How could you have been so stupid?
Suddenly I was exhausted, flattened by inertia. There was no point in questioning Andy. He couldn’t answer me, no matter how many times I asked him. I closed my eyes, too tired to keep them open. The air in the room was stifling. After his death I had decided not to dwell on the subject of my brother. I lay weighed down in the bed, defeated by gravity.
A crow called again. I heard the flut-flut of wings outside the near window. I opened my eyes. I was still in the family house, built a century before by my great-grandfather. The desk by the near window was still painted a sober gray. A row of my hardcover books was still lined up along the back, against the wall. Everything in the room was the same, practically untouched since I had left for college almost thirteen years before. Each object was familiar, but they seemed to me to be the props of someone else’s childhood. They had nothing to do with me. Lying in the hot sunlight, I stared at the blur of blue and green beyond the far window. It had been a mistake to come back. I tried hard to remember why we had. Min. Of course. We wanted Min to know she had family besides only Jonathan and me. We also wanted my family to know we had succeeded in all the ways they had expected us to fail.
I wondered if Min would like to have Raggedy Ann to keep her company in her room downstairs. Maybe I could bring the books back to Mill Valley for her to read when she got older. She was starting to be curious about my and Jonathan’s pasts. She might want some memento of my own childhood, a means of putting herself into my history. I pictured her sitting cross-legged in the armchair at home, mesmerized by my old illustrated copies of the Dr. Dolittle books. When I had been given them, I had read them straight through, then immediately started over, reading them aloud to Andy.
No, I thought, rolling onto my side, trying to press out the tightness in my chest. Why would Min want some ratty old books, a second-hand doll? I watched a swirl of dust motes orbit each other in a shaft of sunlight. I could smell them, or maybe that was the musty smell of the rug, or the odor of the house itself as it aged and slowly decayed. The remnants of my past would stay behind, I decided, with this house. Min’s childhood belonged to the West Coast, and I belonged there with her.
Eventually I sat up, swinging my feet down to the floor. The green floorboards were mercifully cool. I had no idea what time it was. My head felt thick, balloony, unattached to my body. I reached for my glasses on the night table, blinking as the room took on edges. I found my nightgown still folded at the bottom of my suitcase and pulled it on over my head. In the hallway, the doors to the bedrooms where Robert and his family were staying were all open. I kept my eyes on the hall carpet until I reached the bathroom and pulled the chain for the light over the sink. I couldn’t look into Andy’s old room, afraid of seeing it stripped bare of all his possessions, devoid of his personality. Yet if it had been kept intact, I couldn’t have borne that either.
Back in my bedroom, I dressed quickly, starting to sweat. Another headache was coming on. I was tired of my headaches. They made me want to cry, and I refused to cry. I remembered I’d had headaches the last couple of trips home too. At Andy’s funeral four years before I had thought I would scream from the pressure inside. The rest of my family seemed controlled and contained, greeting mourners after the service graciously. And at Christmas later that year, the last time we had visited, I had left Min and Jonathan to go upstairs and lie down, trying to shut out the family’s voices singing carols below. How could they sing? When Jonathan had come up to find out what was wrong, I told him I had a splitting headache. He said he did too from hearing Andy this and Andy that ever since we had arrived. I understood then that I was right not to have told him about my quarrel with Andy. I remembered that in the months before Andy’s death, Jonathan had never asked me why I didn’t call my brother anymore. Now I didn’t have the headaches so frequently. Jonathan had suggested that I see a doctor, but I didn’t need to. I was getting them under control.
I rummaged through the shorts and blouses in my suitcase for
my bottle of Excedrin and swallowed three without water. As I brushed my tangled hair, I glimpsed myself in the mirror above the bureau. Dark streaks had formed under my eyes. I looked pale and unhappy. Jetlag, I thought. That’s why I feel so rotten. All I need are a few days by the pool. I tied my hair back with an elastic band and escaped the airless room.
Coming down the creaking, narrow stairs, I breathed in the welcome odor of fresh-ground coffee. The piercing shrieks of children’s voices came from the dining room, making me wince. It seemed to me there had always been children yelling somewhere in the house; admittedly, I had been one of them, though the older I had grown, the more I had wanted to find a quiet place to be alone. I wondered again where Jonathan was. I had wanted to come down to breakfast with him, collecting Min on the way, the three of us entering the dining room together. What could he have thought was more important? In the hall I opened the door to the small room Min was staying in, which my mother still called the maid’s room though it had been a storage closet during my entire lifetime. The bed was empty. The sheet and light blanket were neatly pulled up to cover the pillow. Her book, Harold and the Purple Crayon, was lying open on a chair beside the bed, waiting for her.
I found my daughter sitting quietly at the dining room table with her three noisy cousins and Nora, my sister-in-law. Through the French doors behind her I could see the gnarled, bushy trees in the orchard spaced evenly up the slope of the field. Min’s juice glass was almost empty, perched on the tablecloth in front of her. I knew she wanted more but was too shy to ask. As soon as she saw me, she slipped down from her chair and came over, putting her hand in mine and turning back to the table with a look of satisfaction. She’s on equal footing with her cousins now, I thought; her mother is here too. Nora’s three weren’t paying much attention. The youngest, Gerard, was kicking his sister under the table, and she was in turn hitting him on the arm with her fist. “You’re a pest,” she informed him.
I felt a tug on my hand. I looked down at Min’s upturned face. Her hair stuck out on one side instead of falling neatly in straight bangs and past her ears as it usually did. She had put her red- and yellow-striped shorts on backwards, but otherwise she had managed to dress herself in the clothes I had laid out the night before. I let go of her hand and crouched down in front of her. Wetting my fingertips on my tongue, I started to smooth down the strands of her hair. Immediately she grabbed my hand away from her head. “Mommy,” she said sternly.
“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up in the air to show I was giving up.
I heard my name being called. At the table, Nora and I exchanged kisses, smiling the wide smiles of in-laws who have a vague fondness for each other. She asked her children if they remembered me. Only Trish, who must have been almost ten, managed a doubtful yes. Min had sidled up behind me and stood close by, near Trish’s chair. She seemed fascinated by the older girl’s long blonde braid.
Trish twisted around, her hands clutching the back of her chair. “My mother says you came from Korea. That’s next to China. People talk funny there.”
“Why?” Min asked.
“I don’t know,” Trish shrugged. “Say something in your language.”
“English is Min’s language,” I snapped. I was seething. “She’s as American as you are. She’s my daughter.” You’re wrong, Andy, I added in my head, Min is as much my child as Nora’s kids are hers. I was afraid Trish would contradict me, or worse, her mother would, but instead they stared at me, a little stunned, it seemed, by my vehemence.
“No one said she wasn’t American,” Nora told me.
You have to accept her, I thought. But the argument wasn’t over. How could it be?
I said, “Trish seems to believe that my daughter is foreign.”
“Oh, Catherine, Trish is only ten years old, she doesn’t understand that you adopted Min before she learned to talk.”
“Maybe you should have told her.”
I turned back to my daughter. The two girls were exchanging a long stare. I took her hand again. “Let’s go get more orange juice,” I said gently, reaching for her glass on the table. My fury had passed. Min’s gaze lingered on Trish as we moved away.
My mother was in the kitchen standing at the stove, her apron tied over her cotton skirt. She poured beaten eggs into a pan. Bacon sizzled and popped in another. The anticipation of its salty chewiness made my mouth water. In the strong summer light, I could see the gray sprinkled in her short, wavy brown hair. The skin on her face was beginning to sag around her pale blue eyes and her chin. I felt as though I had never stood this close to my mother before; in the three and a half years I had been away, she had grown old, and I couldn’t remember what she had looked like young.
She glanced down at Min, then up at me standing beside her. “Min was up early,” she said, sliding her spatula through the liquid eggs. My daughter was peering up at the collection of antique kitchen utensils hanging from pegs on the wall above the stove. “When I came down, she was outside on the patio studying the insect population between the flagstones.”
“Weren’t you sleepy this morning?” I asked Min. She looked up at me, her large black eyes very solemn, and shook her head. She didn’t like to speak around people she didn’t know. I hoped that within five days, by the end of our trip, she would be as voluble as she usually was at home. I wanted her to like my side of the family, even if I had my own mixed feelings about them. I wanted her to enjoy this visit, even if I couldn’t.
“Where’s Jonathan?” I asked my mother.
“He went with Robert and your father down to the stream to go over the plans for the new house. Coffee’s ready,” my mother added, nodding her head toward the percolator on a back burner.
“The new house?” I asked, confused. “What do you need—”
“Ask Nora if she’d like a cup, will you?”
“Nora, coffee’s ready,” I called into the dining room.
“Thanks,” she called back.
My mother scowled at me. One of the rules in the house had always been no shouting between rooms. Before she could say anything, I filled Min’s juice glass and gave it back to my daughter. She took it in both hands. I knelt to retie her sneaker, pulling one long lace from under her slight weight. “There. Now I’ll get coffee, and I’ll meet you back at the table.” She nodded. “Min?” I looked into her face, concerned. I hadn’t seen her beautiful smile all morning. “Do you want to smile for your mommy?”
“I don’t feel like it,” she said seriously, lifting her chin a little. I watched her until she shuffled through the kitchen door, taking small sips from her full glass.
Behind me my mother flipped the bacon and put bread in the toaster, brisk and efficient. I stood up, wanting coffee, wanting my headache to go away. Already this day was not going well. My mother moved past me toward the ice box, not looking up as I stepped back out of her way. We were alone together for the first time in almost four years, and neither one of us had anything to say. The odd thing, I realized, was how normal this seemed to me. I took a mug out of the cabinet. It said “LOVE” in big, loopy, brightly colored letters. Above that, a flower bloomed into a woman’s face. I bet Susie gave this to them, I thought, she’s a big Peter Max fan. I couldn’t imagine them choosing it for themselves. The vibrant colors and the exuberance of the lettering reminded me of the crayon drawings and finger paintings that I, and then Andy, and then Susie, had brought home from school. My mother had always reacted the same way, glancing at them once and saying, “Put it away now, it’s time for your nap.”
I poured steaming coffee from the pot and drank it black, holding the mug between both hands the way Min had. As I stood at the counter looking outside over the valley at the distant hills, I remembered Jonathan telling me the night before, as we were undressing for bed, that he and Robert and my father would be getting up early to walk out the boundaries of a second, smaller house my father had gotten it into his head to build. I had been too exhausted to register what he was
saying. I gulped down the coffee and poured some more. I could imagine them down at the stream measuring out their long strides, thrusting sticks into the yielding ground. They would look thoughtful as they stretched a measuring tape along the perimeter, one calling out the numbers, another nodding and jotting them down. Min would have enjoyed the expedition. She might have counted out the lengths of her own feet, putting heel to toe, balancing herself with outstretched arms. She might have learned something about the importance of taking measurements or why it was always men who were expected to do these jobs. Why hadn’t Jonathan insisted Min come along, since she was already up? My father might have listened to Jonathan.
“Where is Susie?” my mother complained. “She promised me she would arrive by breakfast.”
“She probably forgot to set her alarm,” I answered.
My mother frowned at me, as if Susie’s tardiness were my fault, then turned back to the stove. “By the way, your father and I are going on a cruise to the Caribbean this winter.”
“That’ll be nice,” I said. Before I could stop it, the image of Andy’s hand slipping from the capsized sailboat, his head sinking below the choppy ocean waves, was so clear it was as if I had been there witnessing him drown. I blinked, opening my eyes to the scrubbed white walls of my mother’s kitchen. I stared at her lined face, refusing to think about something that wasn’t real. There was no point. I would not think of Andy during this visit, even here where my memories of him were strongest. Turning her back to me, my mother opened the silverware drawer and counted out forks and knives. Without thinking I reached out and rested my hand on her shoulder. She startled at my touch, whirling around.
“Goodness, Catherine. Here, take these out to the table.” She dumped the collection of silver into my hands and went back to her cooking.
Scissors, Paper, Stone Page 3