by T. Greenwood
I know you got a little girl.
Suddenly the sun plummeted, taking its sepia haze with it. The sky above me was black. And the house loomed before me, empty and ominous. And even when she began to scream, my legs remained fixed in that spot. My limbs like roots, my arms only branches reaching for the sky.
I woke bathed in sweat. At some point Avery had crawled into bed with me, but I had no recollection of her doing so. Her skin startled me. She was flat on her back, her arms splayed over her head in a surrender to sleep. I slowly climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of yoga pants, wool socks, and my favorite ratty sweater before tiptoeing to the bathroom to pee, closing the lid rather than flushing and risking waking her up. I glanced at my watch. It was only 3 A.M. I thought about crawling back into bed, curling around Avery’s little body. But I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep, and so I quietly descended that treacherous staircase, making a mental note to talk to Pilar about getting someone to come in to take care of it.
I made a pot of coffee in the dark kitchen, and as it brewed, I went to the dining room, where the birches stared at me, their thin white trunks looking like prison bars until I clicked the light on.
Because it was a dining room, the central light was a chandelier, which hung low. I had already whacked my head on it several times, sending it swinging, plaster from the ceiling crumbling down like snow. I was careful this time as I made my way to my easel. To the birches.
Furiously, automatically, I painted. And as the benevolent forest emerged on the canvas, I imagined it hanging in that ski lodge in Aspen. I imagined Ginger Hardy and her rich friends sipping hot toddies by the fire, my painting looking down at them. This painting, this shitty painting, neither imploring nor accusing. Only sitting obediently on the wall, demanding nothing.
By the time I heard Avery coming down the stairs, the sun had crested the horizon, and my hand and back ached. I had no idea how much time had passed. I had been so lost inside the margins of the canvas.
“Mama,” she said.
“Yes, baby,” I answered, as though she were calling me out of a dream, pulling me from a rare slumber.
“I wet my bed again.”
Upset Down
Over the next two weeks, I avoided the birches in favor of readying the house for Pilar. I spent most days cleaning, making meals for Avery, and finding things for her to do to keep her occupied while I scrubbed and dusted and procrastinated.
Gus called Avery every night before bedtime, and like a tiny teenager, she’d take the phone and close herself off in her room, in the bathroom, in the downstairs closet. For privacy, she said. I tried not to eavesdrop, but I longed to hear their conversations. And when they were done, I took the phone from her and either translated what she’d told him or filled in the gaps for Gus.
“She said you painted her room upside down?” he asked.
“Upset down,” I corrected, laughing, and explained.
He asked when we’d be able to come home for a visit, and with a sinking heart, I’d told him how much the car ferry cost (nearly eighty dollars round trip), never mind the cost of gas to get back down to the city, never mind the fact that the Honda needed new tires and there was a clunking sound somewhere deep in its bowels I hadn’t noticed before.
“This isn’t what we agreed on, Wynnie,” he said.
“I know. I’m sorry. We can try to FaceTime again.” The times we’d tried to FaceTime, the signal was so weak one of them invariably disappeared halfway through the conversation, sending Avery into a fit of gulping sobs.
“It’s not fair to Av,” he persisted.
I didn’t tell him about her wetting the bed. I didn’t tell him I’d starting having the dreams again, the ones that made me thrash in my sheets, lash out, cry out, awake drenched in sweat and breathless. I didn’t tell him about the phone call, the e-mail.
“Maybe you could come for Thanksgiving,” I tried. “It would be so nice for all of us to be together. Pilar will be here by then.”
“I already told you I have to work that Wednesday and Friday.”
“But where will you go for Thanksgiving?” I asked.
Gus and I had always hosted Thanksgiving at our house, no matter where we lived. When we were in school, we’d invite all of our friends who couldn’t afford to go home, charge the food on our credit card, and feed everyone. The year in Colorado when we lived in the teepee, we’d had a friend bring a wild turkey over and cooked it over a spit in our “yard.” And all the years in the duplex, we’d had our friends over, spent the day cooking and drinking and eating.
“I’ve got some plans,” he offered vaguely, and I didn’t persist, though I did wonder why he didn’t just come out and tell me what those plans were.
We had plenty of friends in the city who would make sure he got fed. He was Gus. Sweet, adorable Gus. My heart throbbed in my chest. I was also sure there was no shortage of women ready to cook up a Thanksgiving feast for a poor guy whose wife had taken off with his kid. And if it wasn’t a woman, why didn’t he just come out and say who it was? It’s not like anyone in his world was a stranger to me. He could have said, “Walter and Betsy are having me over,” “Dennis and Pam are deep-frying a turkey,” “I’m just going to get takeout with Topher and watch the games.” But he hadn’t offered up anyone’s names. This nagged at me, like a scab that keeps snagging on a pair of tights. Stinging.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “What about the weekend after, can you come then?”
“Maybe,” he said, sounding defeated. “I’ll check with Joe about getting a few extra days off. I really miss her, Wynnie.” His words stabbed in me in the chest.
* * *
And so a week later, I felt awful dishing out the eighty bucks to take the car ferry to the mainland in order to go to the Walmart in Scarborough. But Pilar was coming, and we needed a turkey for Thanksgiving, paint to finish Avery’s room, as well as some much needed supplies we’d been managing without but I had wanted to make sure Pilar had when she arrived: liquid hand soap, fresh towels, extra shampoo and toothpaste. I had planned to pick up another set of twin sheets too, to help keep the rotation going given Avery’s potty relapse. There was no way we’d be able to carry everything on the pedestrian ferry.
Avery had never been in a Walmart before, and she was mesmerized. As we wandered the brightly lit aisles, her eyes widened at the toys and cookies and cheap clothes as I calculated the total cost of the items in my cart.
After I found the perfect shade of sky blue paint for her floor, we walked past the kids’ clothing area.
“Oh look, Mama!” Avery said, holding out one sparkly thing then the next. It killed me that a seven-dollar shirt was an extravagance I had to deny her. I had left New York with roughly $1,000 in my checking account and a big fat zero in my savings. The balance had, somehow, dwindled down to $600. Gus would be sending a check, but not for another few weeks, and I wanted to give Pilar a proper Thanksgiving—with turkey and sweet potatoes and green bean casserole. Christmas was coming soon too. I needed to finish the commission so I could get paid, but I’d barely been able to look at the birches. I’d tried, of course, gone through the motions of gathering the colors I would need, the brushes. But whenever I got started I felt an inevitable sense of dread and a crushing sort of something I can only describe as guilt. Like I was betraying someone, something.
“Please, Mama, it’s a kitty with glasses!” Avery said. She was holding the pink T-shirt up to herself, twirling around, looking at her reflection in the carefully placed mirror.
“Fine,” I said, trying not to be angry with her for wanting things. It wasn’t her fault I was a financial disaster. What was another seven dollars in the grand scheme of my ominous debt?
We had made our way to the grocery aisles, which proved to be an even worse land mine. Cookies and candy, potato chips and a zillion other bad things screamed to her from their plastic packages. Love me, buy me, eat me! She was grabbing at the packages like a child possessed, and so I fi
nally scooped her up and put her in the front basket of the cart.
I pushed the cart quickly into the freezer aisle, hoisting a generic frozen turkey from the freezer case, and then moved on into the canned goods and produce aisles, loading down the cart with all the other Thanksgiving essentials.
“You don’t need to do anything special,” Pilar had said. “And do they even do turkey in Maine? Don’t they eat lobster three times a day?”
I’d been in Maine for three weeks and had yet to have a lobster. At ten dollars a pound, they were something to be observed in their tanks, not purchased and devoured. Avery and I had been living on PB&J and pasta. We’d made homemade pizza a couple of times, ate scrambled eggs for dinner more nights than not.
I pushed the cart to the checkout lane and loaded up the conveyer belt. As the clerk bagged the items, I felt distinctly nauseated, calculating my account balance had just been depleted by almost 20 percent.
In the parking lot, I loaded the trunk of the car and pushed the shopping cart back to its receptacle. If I had a shopping cart, I wouldn’t need to take the car onto the ferry the next time. For a split second I wondered if I could somehow fit the shopping cart into my trunk.
Before Avery came along, Gus and I used to do crazy things like that. We’d go out carousing, steal things. Nothing that meant anything to anybody: glasses from bars, street signs, shopping carts. Once, he tore through a grumpy neighbor’s garden and brought me a dozen red tulips, yanked up by the roots. We’d carefully planted them in a big pot we kept on the back porch of our apartment and watched in the morning as the crabby old lady, Mrs. D’Angelo, discovered she’d been robbed. My heart sank a little when she leaned out of her house as if the culprit might still be in sight, but then she started screaming her usual racist epithets, accusing the “motherfucking” n-words of taking her tulips, and we no longer felt so bad.
Thinking about that made my heart ache a little for Gus. Leaving him had left a mark, one that wasn’t fading. A bruise that seemed to keep getting reinjured every time I let myself think about him. I was grateful Pilar would be there to keep my mind off of him. Still, this was better. I had to remind myself, every time I bumped into one of those sharp corners in my memory, we were better off apart.
* * *
After the shopping trip, when we drove off the ferry and back onto the island, Avery said, “Don’t forget we need to mail the postcard to Daddy.”
“That’s right,” I said, trying to smile even as tears threatened to fall. “Did you remember to bring it?”
She reached into the little purple vinyl purse she insisted on carrying everywhere. (Inside she kept her “credit card”—an old grocery store loyalty card—her “ID”—a photo I’d taken of her that Gus laminated at work—as well as a hairbrush, although she never brushed her own hair.) She pulled out one of the postcards we’d picked up in town, and I studied the stick-like letters scratched on the back of the card.
“I didn’t know how to spell all the words,” she said.
“Can you read it to me?” I asked, unable to decipher much beyond “Daddy.”
I carefully translated her phonetic attempts below in my own careful handwriting, my heart aching with her plea: “Dear Daddy. I miss you. Maybe you can come live with us here. Our water smells like farts. But the beach has mermaid tears, and I am sad too. Love, Avery,” she dictated, peering intently over my shoulder.
We parked at the post office, and I helped her drop the letter into the gaping mouth of the post box.
“Can we check our box?” she asked.
“Oh, sure,” I said. We’d been in just once before, and it had been stuffed with circulars. The only people who had the address were Gus, Pilar, and my folks.
I had made the combination Avery’s birthday so I wouldn’t forget it. If anyone wanted to rob me blind (clear out my savings account, charge up my credit cards, steal my identity) they’d only need this set of digits. Of course, the bank account now had only $480, the cards were long ago maxed out, and frankly, my identity wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot these days either. So have at it, I thought as I ticked out the numbers.
I pulled out the wad of circulars, wondering if there was a way to get on a do not send list. I tossed the advertisements into the recycling bin and a blue cardboard card slipped out. It said there was a package, to pick it up at the counter. No return address listed.
My first thought was, Pilar. God, what had she sent? She was famous for packaging up just about anything and putting it in the mail. Once she sent me a hookah when she was backpacking across Turkey. I was relieved to find she hadn’t sent any hashish to go with it. A few years ago she tried to send me some of her mother’s chicken noodle soup when I was sick. From her hometown in Ohio. She froze it, thinking it would somehow survive the journey. Instead it spilled and soaked through the Styrofoam peanuts and newspaper she’d wrapped the Tupperware bowl in. I’d been summoned to the post office and scolded by a very pissed-off postmaster.
But when I handed the card to the woman behind the counter, my thoughts shifted away from Pilar.
No. He didn’t have our address. He didn’t know we were here. However, I felt sick with each passing moment she was gone.
When she finally came back out with two fat orange envelopes tethered together with a rubber band, I caught my breath.
The film! I’d almost forgotten.
I wanted to open them right away, but Avery was restless and wanted to be carried. She was much too big for this now, but I had a hard time saying no when she held her arms up to me, waiting.
“Come on, monkey,” I said, hoisting her onto my hip. She gripped my neck and my waist with her arms and legs. “Let’s go home.”
When we pulled up to the house, it seemed familiar now. Even welcoming in all its catastrophic glory. The front lights glowed warmly onto the sagging porch, and the twinkle lights I’d strung up instead of curtains in all of the windows seemed to welcome us home.
Avery was hungry, so I heated up some leftover macaroni and cheese for her while I put away all of the groceries for Thanksgiving. It was already Monday, so I figured I’d better start defrosting the turkey in the fridge so it would be thawed out by Thursday morning. Pilar would be here on Tuesday. She had told us not to bother coming to get her, that she’d rent a car and drive onto the ferry. She said she’d be here just after lunch. And once she got here, everything would be just as we’d planned.
It wasn’t until I started digging through my purse for the receipts to tack on the fridge, a monument to my shrinking bank account—and a visual reminder/nudge to get the commission finished—that I remembered the photos.
I got Avery situated with a giant bowl of macaroni and cheese, some sliced apples, and a sippy cup of milk and sat down with her at the table.
“What are those, Mama?” she asked.
“Pictures,” I said.
“Can I see?” she asked. We had a few photo albums, of course, mostly from before she was born. She loved to look at the photos of Gus and me when we were still in college. The ones taken at our wedding and throughout our early years together. My mother had also shown her the albums she had of me when I was little, the ones in which I looked almost exactly like her. But almost all of the photos we had of Avery were digital, conjured with the click of a mouse or trapped inside the screens on our phones, save for a few favorites I had printed and framed.
The first three photos from the first bundle were black. I felt my heart sink. I had spent twenty dollars getting the photos developed; I started to calculate all the things those twenty dollars could have bought me. Mac and cheese, even the organic kind, was only $1.50 a box. The cheap kind was three for a dollar. If necessary, I could have gotten sixty boxes of mac and cheese for what I’d spent on these photos.
I tossed the duds on the kitchen table.
The next picture was taken on some sort of boardwalk, which disappeared into a point at the center of the photograph. Nothing terribly interesting was ha
ppening on the boardwalk itself. The souvenir shops and fried dough stands were all closed. There were puddles suggesting a recent rain. In the distance, you could see the skeletal figure of a roller coaster and Ferris wheel against a cloudy sky.
I flipped through the next several shots. This roll appeared to be a study in light: a series of photos from various angles on this same abandoned boardwalk. I imagined it was early morning. Just after dawn. And indeed, one shot aimed at the beach below the boardwalk showed a white sun rising over the gray horizon.
Time skipped ahead in the next photo, though it was impossible to tell how much. But suddenly the boardwalk was no longer deserted. A hunched-over man pushing an Italian ice cart looked directly at the camera in this one. The lines of his face were deep, his eyes set on whoever had taken this photo. It was an expression not of anger, however, but of mild curiosity. It made me wonder about who might elicit this reaction. Who was the person behind the camera?
There were a few out-of-focus photos after this one. A couple of the vendors and people milling about on the boardwalk. A man wearing silky shorts and tube socks, a wild head of hair, and a parrot perched on his shoulder. Another of a woman in an American flag bikini and roller skates. The roll had said 1976, the bicentennial.
Then time accelerated again. I watched as dusk descended and the lights came on. The crowd on the boardwalk went from families to teenagers to seedier types. And the photos became much, much more alive. Here: a silky shirt unbuttoned, bell-bottom pants. His skinny chest pushed out, a violent clavicle and knobby Adam’s apple. Behind him, a doorway, a pale leg exposed. The rest of the woman was out of the frame. I flipped to the next photo, hoping this time the photographer had captured her.
I held my breath. And there it was, the one photo the photographer had been aiming for all day, the single image—that happy accident of light and timing—the result of both serendipity and patience.