My voice was rising. There was nothing calm or detached about it. Annabelle Lee shook her head.
“The house,” I said. “Our house. Who would do that, Annabelle? Tell me, what kind of person does that?”
She was still shaking her head. Then she turned and lowered herself off the porch, one step at a time. Bracelets jangled on her wrists. Rhinestones shone on her loafers, rhinestones she had no doubt glued on herself. There could not be two more different friends than my mother and Annabelle Lee, the choir director.
“Call me when you grow up,” she said. “Call me when you want to talk.”
She opened the passenger door and slid back across the seat to the driver’s side and coaxed the engine to life again. Then she rolled down the window. Her white face loomed in the darkness, a pale moon. “It’s a two-way street, Clara.”
* * *
“Ma, I saw Annabelle Lee last night.”
Across the polished floor beyond the Plant Room doorway, Sylvia raised her head and smiled at me. She loved Annabelle Lee, who visited once a week, before choir practice. Everyone at the place where my mother lived now loved Annabelle Lee. They thought she was great. So funny, so in-your-face, so stalwart and strong. My mother tilted her head at me.
“Where?” She looked around, as if Annabelle Lee might be hiding somewhere in the Plant Room.
“In Old Forge. At the cabin.”
My mother looked confused. Old Forge? The cabin? I plowed on anyway.
“Ma, can I ask you something? Why did you never sing in the choir?”
Sylvia was looking at me again, wary now. No, I will not meet your eyes, Sylvia. I’m talking with my mother. Yes, there’s a weird tone in my voice. The force of Sylvia’s gaze was strong. She was impelling me to look at her, doing everything in her power to drag my eyes to hers, but I would not. My mother shook her head. She held both hands up in front of her, as if to stop me.
“I never asked you that question and I figured I should,” I said. “There are a bunch of things I never asked you.”
Sylvia’s powers were too strong. I had to look at her. There was a warning in her eyes, a Don’t upset the patient kind of warning, not that she would have put it that way. You were the one who told me to say what I had to say now. I beamed that sentence to her telepathically, but the warning in her eyes stayed. How should I do this, then, Sylvia? How should I ask my mother the questions I never asked her? My mother held aloft the book I had brought her that week—Heidi—as if it were a remote, and aimed it at the Plant Room television.
“I’m sorry, Ma,” I said. “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to answer.” From the corner of my eye I saw Sylvia relax and turn back to the desk. “Let’s watch our show.”
She nodded and I pressed the orange on button on the remote. It was time for the Jeopardy! contestant interview, an excruciating segment in which Trebek pried a little background information out of each one. The contestants must have been coached to act peppy and interesting, which made them the opposite: dull and stiff. An optometrist began with a story about his daughter’s birthday and how, instead of whacking a piñata with a baseball bat, she whacked him on the butt.
“Oh, my,” Trebek said. “Well!”
That was the Trebek method. He ever so slightly cut off each contestant with that abrupt Well! and moved on to the next. The second contestant, a former-teacher-now-stay-at-home-mother-of-seven, told the tale of how she once accidentally locked herself into a bathroom stall overnight. The third contestant, a man who wrote a “Single Dad Cooks” column in his local newspaper, told how he once rode a horse blindfolded and facing backward in order to impress a date.
“Oh, my!” Trebek said, and “Oh, my!” Tamar said, in exact imitation.
“This is the painful part of the show,” I said.
“This is the insufferable part of the show,” she said, and she aimed Heidi at the television again. She sounded exactly like the old Tamar, back when she lived full-time in the same world as I did, the Tamar who would correct me, who would speak her mind. I turned to her—what could I say, quick quick quick, to keep her here with me?—but just like that, she was gone again.
Jeopardy! was not a game of chance. It was a game of knowledge and skill and quickness, of how fast could you press the buzzer, and how fast could your mind whisk through possibilities to settle on the right answer, and how fast could you calculate a bet? When it came to the Daily Double, and again in Final Jeopardy!, contestants had a choice. Bet small and safe or bet it all. Most didn’t bet it all. Betting it all was risky. Bet it all and there was a chance you would lose it all.
But there was a chance you would win it all too.
If we were the Daily Double, my mother and I, what might we lose, and what might we win, either of us, both of us, if we talked, if we really talked? If we un-ambered ourselves, un-armored ourselves, and hashed it all out, with it being our life together? It was late in the day for that, but was it too late? Behold the baffled kings, side by side on the green couch, remote control pointed at the television, composing nothing.
* * *
Brown’s legal name was Court Brown—Court Jefferson Brown, to be precise. We were up late, drinking gin with apple cider and talking, when I learned that fact. We were in the college-freshmen-trade-secrets-late-at-night phase of our lives.
“Samantha Lacey Rourke,” Sunshine said. “Irish on my father’s side, German on my mother’s.”
“Clara Winter,” I said. “No middle name. British and French Basque on my mother’s side. Not sure of the other side.”
Saying “the other side” meant I could avoid saying the word “father” or “dad.”
“Court Jefferson Brown,” Brown said. “No clue on either side.”
Sunshine looked from him to me and back again. “Ask your parents,” she said. “It’s a simple question.”
“No it’s not,” Brown and I said, exactly at the same time. Something passed between us, a flash of understanding. There is more to the story, was what the look he gave me said, even though neither of us knew what the more to the other’s story was.
Sunshine saw the look and tried to catch up. “Why not?”
Brown shrugged. So did I. Her eyes went from him to me. She knew she was missing out, but on what? Many people in that situation would withdraw. They would feel shunned and turn bristly, peeved at the silence. I sensed her wavering. Should she press on? Should she drop the matter and know that already an invisible wall was up that wasn’t going to come down from here on in? We were three days into our first year of college. I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs. Something flickered across Sunshine’s face. She had made her decision.
“You guys are telepathically saying something important to each other right now. I can feel it. So fill me in. Both of you.”
I laughed. It was the kind of laugh that was about surprise. And relief. It was the no-bullshit-ness of her statement. In the three seconds that it took Sunshine to articulate what she saw happening between Brown and me—to decide that she would press on instead of retreat—I saw the kind of person she was. She would not take it personally, she would not feel left out, and she was intent on finding out the whole story. She wanted to know me, and she wanted to know Brown. She was not a surface person. From that moment on, I trusted her.
Brown must have trusted her too, because I still remember how he looked down at his knees—we were all sitting on a braided rug that I had bought for eight dollars at a garage sale—but he spoke.
“I’m a foundling.”
Foundling. Found. Ling. A beautiful and terrible word. A baby in a blanket, left on the steps. A baby in a basket, floating down the river. A baby with dark, unblinking eyes.
“A foundling?” Sunshine said, and the way she said it was just like the way it was scrolling across the bottom of my brain. “Like an orphan? That kind of foundling?”
“Yeah. I was found on the steps of the courthouse in Jefferson Cit
y, Missouri, when I was a baby. Maybe a day old. My foster parents ended up adopting me.”
“And they never found your”—I could tell she was about to say “real” but stopped herself—“birth parents?”
“No.”
We sat for a minute, absorbing. It was like the beginning of a fairy tale, except that this wasn’t the Middle Ages and foundling was a rare and seldom-used word. It was hard to imagine a baby left on the steps of a building. But there was Brown, Court Jefferson Brown, alive and breathing and sitting on a braided rug in a dorm room in New Hampshire.
“So you could be, like, anything?” Sunshine said.
“Or nothing.”
“Everyone’s something.”
“Yeah, but what? A mix of brown, I guess. Brownish.”
That was the moment when his nickname was born. Brown was brownish. His eyes were brown and almondish, his hair was dark and curly, his skin was golden brown. He was beautiful in that muscled way that some boys are. Most lose it by their late twenties, but Brown hadn’t. He was still beautiful at thirty-two, not that he seemed to know it, or had ever known it.
Then it was my turn.
* * *
“Okay, so your mom is French Basque and British. What about your dad?”
I remembered thinking that Sunshine must have a father who loved her with that easy kind of love you saw sometimes. The kind of love where, when she was little, he must have picked her up and put her on his shoulders and carried her around that way. Where he taught her how to play catch, tossing a tennis ball back and forth until she graduated to a mitt and a softball. Where he used to sing “You Are My Sunshine” to her, until she was known as Sunshine instead of Samantha. Where he went to all her recitals and games and cheered her on. Where he cried when he dropped her off at college. Kids who grew up that way called their fathers “Dad.”
“I don’t have a dad,” I said. “Some guy raped my mother at a party and I’m the result.”
I had not ever told anyone that. I had never said those words aloud. The words came out as if that was the way I thought of myself, a product of something bad, something evil. Some guy. Rape. Result. They were harsh words and they hung ugly in the air of the small room. Just the sound of them made me close my eyes, as if somehow that would make them less harsh. My mother at my age, at a party like the kind I was going to all the time, back in those days. It wasn’t something I could bear to think about, the thought of something that awful happening to her. But the minute I said the words and they were out there, and my new friends were absorbing them into themselves, something in me eased.
“It wasn’t just me either,” I said. “I had this twin sister, and she died when we were born. It’s a bad story.”
I wanted to apologize. It was a bad story. It took the light out of the conversation. When I opened my eyes Sunshine and Brown were both looking at me, sadness in their eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?”
“Being a downer.”
“Well,” Sunshine said, and I could tell she was searching for words. “It’s not all bad. I mean, she got you out of the deal, right?”
Brown clapped his hands. “Yes! She did! And you’re awesome!” he said, in that way he had back then, when suddenly something struck him as full of happiness and he lit up with the joy of it and said words like awesome and fantastic and cool and they all ended with exclamation marks. ! ! ! In those moments Brown was like a trick birthday candle, the kind that relit themselves by magic even after you blew them out. He could still be that way. Just not as often.
It had been fourteen years since that night, when we were all eighteen and we used to go to parties together and drink spiked Kool-Aid out of plastic-bag-lined garbage cans with enormous straws poking out of them. We used to dance together at The Excuse, the three of us holding hands and hopping around the tiny dance floor. We used to go on long bike rides to celebrate the end of exams, bought tubes of cookie dough at the grocery store and baked them late at night in the disgusting basement dorm kitchen, backpacked part of the Appalachian Trail for a few weeks each summer with the goal of finishing the whole thing eventually, a goal that had not yet been reached.
A year or so after graduation we started going to the weddings of our college friends. We made toasts and clinked glasses and Sunshine had flings with groomsmen and Brown had flings with bridesmaids and I had flings with no one. We danced and drank and laughed and cheered. We got hotel rooms next to each other and in the mornings we got up and drank pots of coffee, cream for me, sugar for Sunshine, black for Brown.
We were all living in Boston and I was with them the night it finally dawned on them, and me, that they were in love with each other, and we laughed and laughed, in relief and surprise. I was “friend of honor” when they got married on that pretty hill by the orchard north of campus, the orchard where we had picked apples every fall of our four years together. My friend-of-honor toast was structured like Jeopardy!, our favorite game even back then: six categories and five sentences for each. It was long and complicated and everyone loved it and laughed, not because it was funny, even though it was, but because we were all so happy. They had figured it out, Sunshine and Brown, they had figured out something essential about themselves and about each other, which seemed to mean they had figured out something essential about this world, and that meant that the rest of us could too.
We didn’t know that cancer would come to Sunshine so young, that she would lose all those baby-making essentials, as she called them, and that within a few years the two of them would flee Boston for the mountains—right here in Old Forge, where we had all three spent that summer before our junior year working, the summer they had fallen in love with my Adirondacks—to live more deeply, as they told people when asked, because if it worked for Thoreau then maybe it would work for them too. We couldn’t have predicted that the day would come when I, who had not once considered moving back to the land from whence I sprang, would be living in a cabin a mile away from them, here in this tiny town perched on the edge of these old, old mountains.
That’s the thing, though. You think you can predict, but you can’t.
* * *
Sunshine and Brown and I talked about flying once—the topic was the first time each of us had ever been on a plane—in another of those long get-to-know-one-another conversations our first year of college. Sunshine had been seven, an unaccompanied minor going to visit her grandparents in Florida. Brown had been a baby, moving from Missouri to Boston with his parents. I listened to them talk about those first flights and all the myriad flights they had been on since, to the Caribbean, to Europe, Brown to Africa and Sunshine to Japan, which airlines were best, which had direct flights where, which logo looked coolest painted on the side of the plane. How Sunshine always had to remember to book her flights now under her legal name, which was Samantha; otherwise it was no end of trouble at security.
I said nothing.
I had been on one flight in my life at that point, when a college in Ohio that liked my early test scores flew me out to visit in the late spring of my junior year at Sterns High School. Tamar had made me go, despite the fact that I had told her I would not go farther than a half-hour drive from Asa, who had graduated the year before. She drove me to the Syracuse airport and parked in short-term parking and she waited with me at the gate—this was before the Twin Towers—until I was onboard and looking out the tiny oval window, trying but unable to find her through the huge glass window of the concourse. Where was my mother? Had she left the minute I headed down the passenger ramp? Was she already in the station wagon, hauling exact change for the thruway toll out of the glove compartment? Or was she still there, in the terminal, waiting to make sure the plane that I was on took off safely and made it up into the clouds before she relinquished her hold and turned to leave?
I was seventeen years old.
I stared out the tiny oval window and watched the ground crew load the suitcases and duffels into t
he belly of the plane I was sitting in. I fastened my seat belt when the flight attendant told me to. A boy with big orange ear protectors waved the plane away from the terminal. The runway markings rolled beneath my window as we lumbered our way to the line of planes waiting at the end of the runway. It was just like waiting at an intersection for the light to change, I remembered thinking.
Then it was our turn. The engines groaned and roared as they revved up, and the plane rattled and rumbled and then smoothed out as we gathered speed down the runway. At a certain point, when I sensed we were about to leave the earth, the earth that I had never left before, the earth that I had always been firmly attached to, I held my breath for luck. And then the snub nose of the plane pointed skyward and we were borne aloft.
Helpless.
That was how it felt to me. I was a passenger on an airplane made of aluminum and rubber and steel, and the only thing that nonpilot I could do was sit with my seat belt on and look out the window. Everything was out of my hands and nothing, nothing in that world was under my control and because of that, everything felt sacred.
The plastic soda cup, the square of paper napkin that the flight attendant handed me, the barf bag that I saved to bring back to Tamar because it would make her laugh, the button that, when pressed, reclined the seat I sat in, the SkyMall catalog that I read cover to cover as if it were a magazine, every page filled with things I had never known I wanted or needed, things that existed in this world but had been unknown to me until just now: all of it, full of wonder.
I took my eyes away from the window, on that first flight, and searched for someone. Anyone. But they were reading their newspapers, or listening to their headphones, or their heads were tilted back in sleep and snores. The flight attendant was busy at the front of the cabin, her back to me. I turned my head halfway and met a middle-aged man’s eyes. He was two rows behind, sitting on the aisle. I wanted to tell him—what? Something. Something that meant something. Something about this flight, the fact that we were two human beings breathing and thinking and living at this very moment, so high in the sky. I looked at him helplessly.
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