by Susan Patron
11. a prickly tree
On a large sheet of paper, Lucky penciled a spiky Joshua tree with a trunk that divided into two branches. Those in turn split into four branches, and then into eight, pointing in all directions and covered with sharp spines. It was neither pretty nor friendly-looking, so since she was having such a prickly time trying to get close to her ancestors, Lucky considered the Joshua an ideal choice for her family tree.
The scent of simmering red wine filled the kitchen trailer—Brigitte was making a stew of chicken in wine sauce—as Lucky reflected that Ms. Baum-Izzart had been right. There are consequences to every action, including the very fact of having talked the principal into giving her this family tree assignment. Half of her wanted badly to fill in the names and dates of her biological family on the thistly branches, but the other half dreaded it. Because the first dismal consequence was that Lucky was going to have to ask for answers from the one person in the world she couldn’t talk to. She was going to have to ask her father.
“Do you think it’s educational,” Lucky demanded, turning around to watch Brigitte drop a bundle of fresh herbs into the pot, “or even very polite, for students to have to dig and dig and dig around to find out about ancient relatives? I say it’s not, and it’s a violation of dead people’s privacy, and what good is it? Zero! When you could be doing something interesting and useful, like collecting owl pellets! And what does it have to do with—”
“Wait,” Brigitte said, and reminded Lucky, with a long level look, that she had heard these complaints before. She lowered the heat under the burner. “I know. The true dilemma is your father.”
Lucky added more spiky thorns to her tree, pressing down hard with the pencil. It now looked to her like a cross between a porcupine and a bunch of sledgehammers. Brigitte continued, “But no matter what the dilemma, Lucky, you must do this work and you must do it correctly. You know very well that it is because you were fighting at school.”
“Yes, but—”
Brigitte interrupted, “So now maybe I should not, but I tell you something new. There is an older sister, or maybe she is a half sister. She is in, perhaps, Oregon. Your father, he one day gives me her number in case there is an emergency—if he is to die. He tells me they argue long ago; for many years they are not speaking.” She paused, clamped a heavy lid over the pot, and headed toward her bedroom trailer. “Even though he has not died, it is now une urgence, a case of urgency. I am going to give you the number of this sister.”
Lucky dropped her pencil on the Joshua tree drawing and sat very still. She thought, Another aunt! One minute she had two French aunts, Brigitte’s sisters, who were called Tante Celeste and Tante Liliane; the next minute she had a whole new aunt in Oregon, a living relative she’d never known about.
Her father had a sister! The wish to have a sister of her own sometimes gripped Lucky like hunger pangs. But her father, who did have one, wasn’t speaking to her. Lucky would never understand him.
Brigitte returned with an old-fashioned adding machine and her small suitcase, the one she had brought to America. The suitcase always reminded Lucky of the time of sadness, when she was eight and her mother Lucille was killed by stepping on a fallen power line after a storm. Lucky’s father (who did not want to take care of his only child) thought of something no one else would have dreamed up in a million years, and he called up his first wife in France. He asked her if she would come to California—he would pay for her airline ticket—to help out, just for a little while.
As Brigitte opened the suitcase, Lucky replayed in her mind the next scene of the story deliciously—she had heard it told over and over—because it was the miracle part. So that first wife, who was impulsive and loved children and had always wanted to see California, instead of hanging up on her ex-husband, listened with her heart. That’s the way she told it, and it made Lucky imagine her putting the phone to her chest as if her heart had its own tiny ears to hear his words. Then, just like that, she said yes. And she turned out, of course, to be Brigitte.
Now Brigitte used the little suitcase for keeping important things, like her certificate of American citizenship and Lucky’s adoption papers. She flipped through a small green worn-out book with CARNET D’ADRESSES on its cover. “I file her under Trimble because I know I will forget her married name. Here—Siobhan Kelly in Portland, Oregon. I think she has the same father as Tag, and a different mother. You need to call her, Lucky.”
12. elder futhark
Lucky worried about having a conversation with this stranger-aunt. What if she was like Lucky’s father, unwilling to talk? And what if she hadn’t ever heard of Lucky, so that the whole complicated story of her two mothers would have to be explained? Lucky wanted more information before getting immersed in these problems.
She flipped open the Dell. “If we find her on Facebook, maybe we could get her e-mail. Then I could write her instead of talking.”
“Okay, but only to search for her e-mail, Lucky,” Brigitte said, and leaned over to log in to her Facebook account. Then she slid into the opposite side of the banquette, plugged in the adding machine, and reached for her folder of unpaid bills.
Lucky entered “Siobhan Kelly” in the Facebook search box, got a list of 392 possibles, and groaned. She began scrolling down, looking for a hometown of Portland. No luck. “Drat,” she said to HMS Beagle, who was lying on the floor, giving her paw pads a thorough grooming.
Lucky decided to try Siobhan Trimble Kelly and was rewarded with fewer hits, and one of those listed Portland as the hometown. “I think I found her!” Lucky said.
“You cannot be sure.” Brigitte leaned over and peered around at the screen. “She gives contact information, an e-mail address. I want you to get off Facebook and just send her an e-mail. Then, if she is not the right person, she will not have my full name.”
“I know,” Lucky said distractedly, thinking of what she could write. She copied the e-mail address, logged off Face-book, and pasted the address into her “Send To” e-mail box. She typed:
If you are related to Tag Trimble
[Lucky decided not to say “if he is your brother” as a way of testing, later, should Siobhan Kelly reply, whether she was really her aunt and not just someone fooling around]
then I hope you won’t mind if I ask you some questions.
She signed it “A Friend You Have Never Met from the Past.”
Lucky envisioned this cyber-aunt looking at her e-mail address, which was [email protected]. She would not know Lucky’s name, or anything about her. She clicked send.
Lucky stared at her e-mail in-box. Empty. She willed a message to appear. Nothing. Well, so the maybe-aunt wasn’t online. Lucky gave up and got out her social studies homework. The problem with social studies was that it took up valuable time and normally was of quite limited interest. Right now Lucky’s class was studying the Vikings. The Vikings used written symbols called runes, and they had an alphabet called Futhark. Okay, this was a little bit interesting, but it wasn’t useful, the way studying about, for instance, animal adaptation was useful. Why Ms. Grundy wanted her students to learn about Futhark was beyond Lucky.
She looked up Futhark in Wikipedia and discovered that there was an Elder Futhark and a Younger Futhark. Great.
Lucky switched to e-mail and checked her in-box. Empty.
She pressed on with Futhark. The knowledge of how to read Elder Futhark had been forgotten (this was no surprise to Lucky) for centuries. Then someone figured it out at about the time of the Civil War. Wikipedia had a chart of runes with their equivalent English alphabet letters, but when Lucky decided to write her name in Elder Futhark, she discovered the Vikings had no C. How weird was that? A whole language with no C!
Searching further, she found a website with an alphabet converter: You could type a name in English and get the equivalent in runes. So she typed “Trimble,” and then copied the letters onto her paper:
Even though the Vikings could fool you with their E, which really l
ooked a lot like an M, this was quite cool.
Her e-mail in-box was still empty.
Lucky copied : Taggart. She wrote : Theodore. She wrote : Triple T.
She decided to decorate the entire border of her page with her father’s name written in runes. Lucky worked on this carefully and methodically, the way a scientist would do it. After a while, she realized that just drawing the very same runes that the Vikings had drawn before the eighth century gave her a distinct link to those people. Could an ancient Viking have ever imagined a girl in the twenty-first century, seated at a Formica table in a little trailer in the Mojave Desert, writing her father’s name in Elder Futhark on a piece of paper with a ballpoint pen, while waiting for an e-mail? No, there were too many undiscovered and not-yet-invented things to ask those poor old Vikings to envision, and anyway, they had probably been too busy with their own lives to dream up such a weird future scene. Thinking about this, Lucky switched once again to e-mail.
Finally, a message in her in-box! It read:
What do you have to do with Taggart T. Trimble?
Lucky sucked in her breath. It was almost magical—she’d connected with the ancient Vikings, kind of, by drawing runes, and now her father’s sister was connecting with her! Because the very words of that message were proof that this was her aunt, since otherwise she wouldn’t have known his full name was Taggart; she wouldn’t have known his middle initial! Lucky wrote YAY in Elder Futhark—and was sure she could hear a whole bunch of ancient Vikings cheering in the background.
13. evidence of your credentials
Taggart Trimble is my relative.
[Lucky wrote to Siobhan Trimble Kelly]
I need to know the names of his parents
and where they were born for an important
genealogical project. Can you help?
Lucky read it over and decided it struck just the right note: professional and mature.
Almost immediately, she had an answer.
If you can provide evidence of your
credentials, I will discuss this.—STK
Lucky rocked back in her seat, thinking, Man, what does she want, my birth certificate?! And then she thought of a fact that would prove her credentials.
He was married to Lucille P. She was my mother.
Then Lucky worried that she was revealing too much, in case this STK (or Stick, as Lucky thought of her) was some sleazy con artist, besides being her aunt. So she added:
BTW, provide evidence of YOUR credentials!
She clicked send and waited, regretting how that final sentence seemed rude, unprofessional, and immature. She could at least have said “please.” Because she really, really wanted Stick to be the link to her grandparents and some great-grands, give her the names and dates, and maybe allow her to learn something about Triple T without having to interview him.
A few minutes passed, during which Lucky was pretty sure Stick was plotting her next move. Lucky wrote “Trimble” in runes under her porcupine-sledgehammer family tree, hoping it would impress Dr. Strictmund and Ms. Baum-Izzart. She glanced at Brigitte, who was concentrating on her stack of bills, punching the keys of the adding machine as if she wanted to teach them a lesson. Then, a message in her in-box:
You sound just like him. How old are you?
Feeling insulted (she did not want to sound, in any way whatsoever, like her father) but at the same time hopeful, Lucky immediately typed:
Eleven.
In seconds, a reply:
Regarding my credentials, I assume, since
you found me, that you already know Tag is
my half brother. Why is an eleven-year-old
doing genealogical research? BTW, why don’t
you ask Tag what you need to know?
Lucky pounded the Formica table with her clenched fist, causing Brigitte to glance at her and ask, “Problems, Lucky?”
“No, it’s fine.” Stick, just give me a break, she thought. Then, like peeling off a sticky bandage fast to get it over with, she typed:
This is my penalty for fighting
Lucky deleted that and wrote instead:
This is a school assignment. Taggart Theodore
Trimble pays for my upkeep like when you board
a dog at a kennel with automatic deposits so that
way he doesn’t have to think about me because
the bank does it for him. Would YOU want to talk
to a person like that? I don’t think so. Thus
[Lucky liked the way “thus” sounded very mature]
I am asking for your help. He gave your phone
number to his ex-wife, who gave it to me in
case of emergency, like if he dies. He has not
died that I know of but it is kind of an emergency
if you see what I mean because of
school.
She added:
P.S. My name is Lucky.
She hit send and immediately began to worry that Stick might misinterpret the way she compared herself to a dog being boarded in a kennel. Oh, how she hoped that this new aunt would listen with her heart!
14. a lonely little boy
“You have to give her some time, Lucky,” Brigitte said. “She is not all day sitting in front of her computer. Show me this design you make on your homework.”
They had finished dinner, Lucky gnawing clean the bone of her chicken leg and sopping up the deep purple sauce with a piece of bread. She saved a piece of chicken skin on the side of her plate for HMS Beagle. The Beag was allowed have a little leftover human food, but not handed to her while they were still at the table. Brigitte was very strict about that; it was a law of the house. Lucky got up to clear the plates, her dog standing at the exact same time. The Beag knew she would get a piece of chicken skin. She always had and she always would; it was another law of the house.
“It’s not really a design; it’s Elder Futhark.” She reached across Brigitte for her homework at the end of the table. “But it’s been hours since I wrote to ‘Aunt STK.’ That’s like years in e-mail.”
“Hmmm. Well, if she has still not answered in one or two days, we will call her. This is beautiful, ma puce, the markings. They make me think of secret buried treasure.”
Lucky laughed. “I’m not your flea,” she said as she always did, automatically, even though she loved being called ma puce. HMS Beagle went to the screen door, so Lucky opened it and then followed her outside. The Beag investigated the new kitchen foundation next to Brigitte’s Westcraft trailer, a steel frame made from old rails that were once tracks for a train, cut to fit the cabin exactly. It was about the size of two king-size beds, a gigantic space compared with the trailer kitchen they were used to.
Lucky stood on the porch steps and gazed toward the Coso Range, behind which the sun would soon set. “A few days are too long to wait for an e-mail,” she said to Brigitte through the screen. “People shouldn’t take ages to answer; it’s not polite.”
Brigitte’s yawn turned into a laugh. She slipped outside and hugged Lucky from behind. “The mountains are changing all the time, every minute,” she said. “Have you noticed that? But always they are the same.”
Lucky leaned back into the parsley smell of Brigitte. “I wonder if the ancient Vikings knew how to cook chicken like that,” she said. “The Beag and I really hope so.”
“Ah, non! They have not at all the correct recipe and they have not the ingredients, non.” Brigitte clicked her tongue at the preposterousness of ancient Vikings making coq au vin rouge. Lucky smiled at the mountains. Too bad, Vikings.
When she made a final check of e-mail before bed, there was a message:
Tag is my half brother.
[Stick wrote]
My father, Sean Trimble, was married to my
mother for ten years. After my parents divorced, Sean married again—an Irishwoman. They had one child, your father Taggart.
A long time ago I did a family chart. I’ll try to find it and will scan and attach
it in another e-mail. But it doesn’t have much information on Tag’s mother, Fiona (my stepmother and your grandmother), or her family, other than her own birth and death dates. I believe she was from Dublin.
Lucky felt a little thrill of triumph like when you finally press into place a piece in a gigantic difficult puzzle in which a large portion is the same color. The family tree was connecting her to people whose eyes and skin and hair and stomachs and toes and hearts were now, in some way, contained in her.
She continued reading:
You probably want to know more about your father.
Yes! Lucky thought.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell you much. When Tag was twenty-one and I was thirty-two, our father Sean died. Tag and I became involved in a lengthy legal contest over the estate, which is still not resolved. We speak to each other through our lawyers.
But I can tell you that I remember when he was born. I was exactly your age, eleven. His mother was unstable. I believe the term used now is bipolar. She had great difficulty and was institutionalized. Tag was sent to boarding schools in Europe from the age of seven. I think he was a lonely little boy. He received an excellent education and learned to speak several languages fluently, but I don’t know that he was ever truly happy while he was growing up.
I did not know your mother, Lucille, but I am writing to you now because of her. When she married Tag, even though he and I were estranged, she sent me a sweet note and a beautiful miniature watercolor painting, a desert scene. I am looking at it now—it has given me a sense of peace many times over the years. I know from it that your mother was both a gifted artist and very kind.
[The message was signed]
—Siobhan Trimble Kelly
[and there was a P.S. It read]