by E. L. Carter
“What do you think now?” I ask her out loud. “Was it worth it?” I’m mad at her for refusing to control fate. For polishing silver while the world crumbled. For giving birth.
Under her nose, and the nose of the Civil War veteran—and the one for whose sake Mom is a Daughter of the American Revolution—I hold up Kris’s envelope, turn it over in my lap. It’s an industrial-grade #10, the kind you have to lick to close, and ragged across the top where Mom has slit it with her letter knife. I know the police have fondled it, read it, fingerprinted it, put a copy in their file. Twice violated already. I peel open the ragged edges and pull it out, then hold it up to my nose to see if it smells like him, or them, or something else.
It just smells like paper, a little musty. Then I open my eyes and look. The actual print has been laid down with great care—I know because Kris usually writes like a doctor. The ink is strong, each line distinct. There aren’t many words.
Maddy,
Do you dare?
I lost the most precious thing. And now it is yours. A patrin to us both.
She is real.
I dare you.
I read it again.
“For God’s sake,” I say to it. We disbanded the Junior Detective Society twenty years ago.
It still says the same thing.
A patrin? Kris thought being part Gypsy was a strong attribute for a Junior Detective, and left patrins all around the woods behind our house about twenty years ago. A stick set just so at the trail junction, a leaf poised at an angle, a little red ribbon. We spent a lot of time getting lost out there just so we could let the patrin save us.
Maybe he uses the word now because he knows I’m lost. Maybe he has explained everything, or maybe he just expects me to understand. He always hated repeating himself.
I look up at the ancestors again. The bulbs under heavy fabric shades create just enough light to imagine their expressions. Off in the half-shadow, under a mediocre landscape that some relative painted, is a pair of hands in someone’s lap. I remember it from when I was little, the strangeness of it alongside all those serious faces. It’s done with thick oil paint, but from this distance I can make out the impression perfectly. I look down.
They’re my hands.
Someone painted the hands I would grow into, the hands I couldn’t have recognized twenty years ago. I can’t sit on them, or slice them with razor blades, or take the blade to the painting. It wouldn’t change what I know, the inevitability of time, of loss, the things we inherit without ever asking for them.
Kris wants me to make something better. I have to be worth it, worth his death, and all the mistakes I’ve made. I will take my little scrap of paper, sneak back up the stairs (they will creak and Mom will open her eyes in bed, listening) and then I will lie down between the sheets we have made up, in the bed my great-grandparents once owned, and I will hold the note in my hands. Despite themselves, they may just help me find my gift.
BAGHDAD—AUGUST 2005
The airplane came out of its spiral just in time to land, somehow miraculously touching down pointed forward, rolling on solid ground, the way airplanes are supposed to do. And now I stand under the dizzy array of glowing metal arches that dwarf the signs in English and Arabic, the white benches, the glossy floor, and the corridors. The ceilings seem to send sound everywhere, to shatter the sound of Arabic and clicking shoes and loudspeaker announcements all around me and throw it against the walls like something hot and sharp. I weave through the people and the shards of sound, already careful to stay alive.
Out by the baggage carousels, where the ceiling returns to normal, I find a man watching for me, tall and thin with a dark beard and eyes that could be saying anything. He steps forward and raises his eyebrows slightly in my direction, to see if I will come closer. I have no baggage to claim so I walk over to him.
He says, “Madeline?”
“You must be Raed.”
“Let me take your bag.” He pulls my backpack off my shoulder and begins to walk toward the exit. We head out to the parkade and his car, a white Toyota sedan. The tiered cement structure stands hollow and empty, hushed by war. The car is hot inside from the sun and has a medallion with tassels on it hanging from the rearview mirror. I climb in next to him. He looks at my hands, for the first time acknowledging the plastic butterfly clutched there. “What’s that?”
“Oh, just a toy.” I hold it up.
He looks at it for a while, then reaches over and touches it with one finger. I flinch. A sequin drops onto my abaya, bright red against the black. “Okay?” I ask.
“Okay.”
We exit the parkade, out into the sun, the sky hazy down low and then directly above us a crystal blue color—a sky of peace, an unconcerned sky. The airport drive circles us around past randomly placed cement barricades and out through a security checkpoint, past the statue of a man with wings, one leg behind the other as if he is about to leap into the air and take flight. And then Raed says, “We’ll be speeding now.” He guns the motor. I look at the speedometer: 120 KPH—140—160—180—and the land begins to whiz by at impossible speed, fragmented images of date palms like feather dusters alongside us. He drives down the middle of the white line between the lanes, swerves toward the median when we pass an exit ramp, and swerves back into the middle of the road. I drop the butterfly into my lap, grab the door handle with my right hand, and put my left hand out toward the dashboard to steady myself.
“Keep your abaya around your face. Look down. People are waiting on the ramps to car-bomb foreigners,” Raed says, his focus steady on his race-car driving. “They plant bombs on the medians. To drive fast is the safest way.”
“Okay,” I say, gripping the handle hard enough to hurt, just for comfort.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “This road is the worst one.”
NEW JERSEY—MARCH 2005
It’s the kind of day when the proverbial lamb is nowhere in sight and the wind begins stalking you as soon as you open the door. The gravel between the house and the garage sounds like ice cracking even though it’s almost spring, and when I fire up the blue Jeep I turn on the heat. I turn onto the road, the route that leads to the interstate that I’ve taken so many times, east or west, but mostly west. Even though I could exit and go, I don’t. I cross it, then drive by the post office and minimall, and keep going farther across riveted metal bridges and the stretch where farmland on one side is mirrored by a subdivision on the other—past that to where it’s only rows of fields, big grass lawns, and the kind of old houses that get torn down out west, and then still farther to where the pavement ends.
The funeral reception the day before yesterday was out this way, at Dad’s aunt’s estate. We looked out the bay windows into the garden, the row of clipped hedges, and the rolling hills behind. The guests stood at odd angles around the room, well-trained in the art of talking about nothing. I shut out the words and listened into the din for semitones, harmonies, maybe even a funny riff, the kind you play over 7/4 time.
In the old church that morning, the windows had brought sunlight all over us in rainbows. Mom had been on the renovation committee for those windows. So that people like us who had just lost the one we love and wanted to throw up at the sight of beauty could silently curse the colors that rested on our laps in the pews.
From the VIP seats in the front row you couldn’t see people coming in, but the floor and the pews had betrayed them, the floor groaning and the pews cackling. The musty smell of the wood polish and the old fabric took me back to when my legs had swung far above the floor and I had used the back of the donation envelope to doodle my way through the sermon. Kris used to kick me and elbow me, trying to get me to laugh or snap and get in trouble. I would glare at him, the model of propriety, then look up at the minister in the pulpit, pretending to listen but really letting the words wash over me in a jumble, the way you can in countries where you don’t speak the language. Like this time too: odd, familiar sounds like “duty” and “courage�
�� filtering through, and the absence of Kris next to me mixing up the words, even the familiar ones, so they came out in disorder—brave—listen—God—death—go—love—fearsome—
As if they liked how things went, as if by some sleight of hand they could turn Kris back into a hero, Mom and Dad chose a military burial. A nervous teenager pretended at taps on a digital bugle, almost enough to make me cry—and then the soldiers folded the flag and handed it to Mom so that it sat in her lap spattered with sun. Kris’s body, disrobed inside the coffin, lay naked in front of us, palpable even through solid wood.
I no longer believe in heroes. On behalf of a warmongering colonialist nation.
Then Dad was sloppy and laughing about a joke from a party here years ago. Mom kept her face smooth and safe—protecting the guests. I fumbled Kris’s note around in my hand, not daring to open it. Instead I compared it to the window frames, to the way my second cousin jutted out her elbows when she talked. Anything could be a clue.
Just when I thought I had blended into the cream-colored curtains, an old family friend named Mrs. Bird crept out from behind an easy chair and began to stalk me. I shuffled toward the bar like I had the shakes. She met me halfway, where the sun came in from the window and covered our skin and hair like gilt, and stood in my way. She laid her hand on my forearm. So quietly that I had no choice but to lean toward her, she said, “Why don’t you come visit me sometime?”
Mrs. Bird has come to all our parties and every funeral. I don’t exactly know whose friend she is. By the time I was eight, she had ceased to seem big to me, and by the time I was a teenager, I had looked down at her. The time Kris and I were planets, she had helped us arrange the furniture for a smooth orbit. When we had been explorers, she showed us the deep dark basement crawl space at Aunt Ade’s house. She sent me birthday cards until I left home, and the little straw woman with a broom who hung on our Christmas tree came from her. The day before yesterday she wore a silken tunic and pants set, her long hair pulled back into a bun, the kind of woman who looks old but is still aware of her beauty. She wouldn’t let go with her gaze like she was supposed to, wouldn’t cut the cord of energy binding us, and withdraw into the weather, someone else’s conversation, or a scotch on the rocks.
I jerked my arm back and searched with my hands for pockets. No pockets in the borrowed dress. Why don’t they put pockets in dresses? I clutched the note tighter. When I looked up, her eyes were shiny. Just old age?
People didn’t open up in this room. They said their condolences, then went on about the business of eating, drinking, and discussing Republican policy while the bereaved wandered dazed from conversation to conversation in the rubber suit of grief. Mrs. Bird was breaking the rules.
She spoke again. “We all love you, Madeline. We want to help.”
She was even smaller than I remembered. I had the sudden sense that she was a child, a wizened child with green eyes. It almost made me laugh.
“He doesn’t belong underneath some Jersey cemetery,” I blurted out. “He belongs up high somewhere.”
Mrs. Bird nodded. Then she said, “You could still give him that. Who knows, he might follow you there.”
I still didn’t know what to do with my hands. I gave in and hugged myself. Mrs. Bird smiled and reached for my arm again with her wrinkled, diamond-encrusted hand. She squeezed it. “I can help you. Come visit.” With that, she moved away into a group of people by the bar, and left me alone, frozen in the current of conversations, in the bright, blinding sun.
Now the car dips into a pothole and resurfaces, built with the right suspension for the moon. These aren’t ordinary potholes, the kind that people put up with because the county is short on funds or backed up on project bids. These potholes are as deliberate a barrier as the gates with the gargoyles on them, as the high iron fences hidden beneath vines and the hanging branches of trees. The car rattles and shudders, arrhythmic, out of tune. It’s hard to hold a melody when you feel unwelcome. I pass a browned pasture with the first green starting to creep across. Cold-looking horses graze, their heads jerking as they pull up on the new grass. Soon this will be in bloom, the horses will shed, and the mud will dry. Unwelcome, out of tune, I know the landscape, can see its future and its past. The pasture fences are wood slat, always freshly whitewashed. I can see the forget-me-nots getting ready to bloom in the shade of the ditches.
They were fresh blue the last time I sat in that very ditch on my way from Mrs. Bird’s house, my destination the first time I ran away, not for any reason I can remember other than the intuition that she would feed me and not scold. That time when she welcomed me, I stood looking up at her with my hobo stick—the genuine article, a handkerchief on a fallen branch handpicked from the woods—slung across my shoulder. I felt silly as soon as she looked at me, silly and sweaty and dirty, even though as I knocked, even as the door swung open, it was a grave business, this wandering. Mrs. Bird smiled, and whether she thought I was silly or not she let me in, and whether I tracked mud on her carpet or not she sat me on a nice soft couch and offered me a blueberry scone, which was just what I wanted, and I ate the whole thing and another one after that. That time, I sat in the ditch after leaving her, not in a hurry to go home, my belly full and the midspring sun sending me toward sleep. The ditch smelled sweet, not from the flowers but from new grass and mud. That smell comes back to me now even through the Jeep’s window, even in its prespring dormant state, waiting to wake up with the budding of flowers.
Mrs. Bird’s house is just as I remembered it, small for the neighborhood, big for anywhere else. The old Tudor sits tucked away behind some walnut trees and past a sweeping driveway. I turn left toward a little England, stones and hedges, a barn with a silo. Behind the house a ploughed-up field lies fallow, waiting to be planted. The driveway follows the row of walnuts, their huge branches stretching across the driveway toward each other and the empty space beyond. As I approach, the contrast of white walls and wooden beams ahead becomes sharper, and there is a tsunami of crocuses breaking across the front yard and rolling down to the drive. You could set sail in all the purple. I step out of the car and into the gravel and the wind, unsure what will bite first, the cold or the wave of flowers. On one hand, things are very careful, and on the other, wild.
Mrs. Bird appears at the door, dwarfed inside the wooden frame. “Come in,” she says, as if she’s been expecting me.
I follow her along the line of a maroon carpet with cream-colored diamonds on it, through the foyer and past a wooden staircase with a white banister, past the formal parlor, which I have never visited but which at a glance contains an upright piano, some uncomfortable-looking upholstered chairs, a fireplace, and a little round table. Then on to her study, which is where she has always seated me, on a couch out of the eighteenth century with wooden trim all across the back and the feet of a lion. She’s reupholstered it since I was young, from a pink and beige stripe to a warmer floral, a splash of pink roses attached to their stems and floating on a dark red background.
I sit and look at her. She’s so small it’s a wonder that gravity works for her. Her shoes are fabric with rubber soles, but still it’s strange that I can’t recall a single sound as she walked ahead of me through the house. She wears a loose-fitting rayon shirt and the kind of pants Mom wears, with the crease down the front. Trousers. I came looking for answers from a woman who wears trousers.
Then she smiles and looks me right in the eye. She seems to have a way of doing that—looking right at me with no hesitation or holding back; some might call it tactless. Her look is curious and bold, a little intimidating, and at the same time almost a relief. Her eyes are not wet. I remember them from the funeral: it wasn’t just old age.
She drops her gaze and busies herself with the silver tea set on the coffee table between us. She must have put the water on as soon as she heard the sound of my car, and now she disappears with the pot, returning moments later, steam rising from the spout. The tea set and tray have a monogram that bel
ongs to some ancestor, just like Mom’s.
As she pours the tea, Mrs. Bird says, “You’re kind to stay. Give your parents some attention.”
I shrug, and she goes on. “I saw your Great-Aunt Ade at the store yesterday. She said they were keeping their heads above water. I bet you’re why.” She must know I’ve come because I want something. That I’m a wildcat clawing on people’s doors and disappearing. That I leave my sign, not soft fur but scratch marks.
I add cream to the tea slid my way, and my first sip is just hot enough, rich but not bitter. When we are both served, Mrs. Bird sits across from me in an easy chair, and her small talk falls away into silence.
“I don’t know how I’m going to find this gift,” I blurt out.
And then there is no sound. Not from her, not from outside the window where the silent waft of flowers and the freshly thawed mud seep in like a drug. No sound from the rest of the house, mysterious behind the long room’s closed door. I want to move, but I’m afraid the couch will squeak and start a melody in my head. When a tune starts, something could be lost. Oh, right. Everything is already lost. “I don’t know why I started that way. I meant to start with—I don’t know. A feeling.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Bird smiles. “I guess you have.”
“Have what?”
“Shame is a feeling, you know.”
I could be insulted. The right comeback trumps shame any day. But her tone holds not a hint of judgment. How does she do that? “Kris left me a note. About some gift he wants me to have. I can’t stop looking at it. The same words over and over.” And what did you mean to say at the funeral?