There are truths, unbelievable truths, truths so terrifying that we hide from them. Perhaps this is wrong. Perhaps we should force ourselves to say these true and terrible things every day.
Someday, my mother will die.
Someday, my father will die.
Someday, my husband will die.
Someday, my children will die.
It is sure. These things are sure.
But who could do this? Who could subject one’s own heart to so much truth without turning it to stone? Who can believe in death and still live?
Viney’s firstborn, Wally Jr., was killed. His helicopter was shot down in South Vietnam. He was nineteen years old.
There are no words for this.
Chapter 18
Secret Santas
“LOOK AT ME, EVERYBODY! I’M A VOLCANO! BOOM! BOOM! LOOK OUT FOR THE LAVA!”
“LOOK AT ME! LOOKIE! I’M A HER CANE! HERE COMES THE SUE MOMMY!”
Viney’s two youngest grandchildren, Dylan, age three, and Zeke, age five, are entertaining themselves with the refuse of Christmas morning. Zeke repeatedly immerses himself in a large cardboard box filled with Styrofoam peanuts and then springs out like a Vegas showgirl emerging from a giant cake; Dylan bounds through fields of crumpled wrapping paper and bows, swirling his arms and scattering debris with the force of a Dust Bowl windstorm. In spite of the unvoiced hopes of the six adults assembled in the room (Viney, Viney’s youngest daughter, Haley, and her estranged husband, Randy, Larken, Gaelan, and Bonnie), neither child shows any sign of winding down or developing laryngitis.
According to their mother, Dylan and Zeke were up at six A.M. They finished opening Santa’s presents by 6:30 and had emptied and eaten the sugary contents of their stockings by 7:00. They got to Viney’s around ten o’clock and for the first hour or so, their antics were encouraged. It’s Christmas, after all. Most of the adults even took turns contributing to the chaos. But it’s almost noon now. As if they could inspire by example, the adults have started making themselves as small and quiet and polite and inconspicuous as possible. With the exception of Dylan and Zeke’s father—who has fallen asleep—they sit up straight with their feet close together and their elbows fastened to their sides. They sip coffee and nibble crumbly squares of cake. Viney usually makes Teisen Ffrwythau Landudno from scratch, but this year she’s serving store-bought fruit cake. They don’t speak unless spoken to.
Larken unwraps the last present. It’s from Viney.
“They’re MBTs,” Viney says brightly after Larken has withdrawn her gift from its box.
“Thanks, Viney,” Larken says, feigning delight. “These are great!”
“You don’t already have a pair, do you?”
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Oh, good. I was afraid you might.”
“OOOOOO!” Zeke says, snatching up the shoe box bottom and shoving it onto his head. “LOOK, MOM! I’M DARTH VADAR!” He starts stalking his brother and intoning in the deepest voice a five-year-old can muster, “I AM YOUR FATHER LUKE. I AM YOUR FATHER LUKE. I AM YOUR FATHER LUKE …”
“STOP THAT!” Dylan says. He extracts a long cardboard tube from the landfill of wrapping paper and starts whacking his brother on the head.
“MBT stands for Masai Barefoot Technology,” Viney continues
“Ah.” Larken thought it might stand for Most Butt-ugly Tennies.
“I’m surprised you don’t know about them.”
“I’ve heard of them,” Gaelan says. “They’re physiologically designed. They make you walk the way we’re all supposed to walk.”
“That’s right,” Viney says. “Like you’re barefoot.”
“Let me look at those,” Bonnie says. “Gosh, Lark,” she says, holding the sole of one shoe against the bottom of her foot. “I always forget how little your feet are.”
Viney continues. “Anyway, you’re so hard to buy for, and I figured you’d be doing a lot of walking while you’re in Europe, and … Oh, honey,” she says, her voice suddenly tearful. “If you don’t like them you can certainly take them back and get something else.”
“No, Viney!” Larken reaches an arm around her shoulders and hugs her. There’s an odd, cushiony feel to Viney’s flesh, as if she’s put on weight. “I love them. And you’re right: These will be perfect for London.”
“MOM!” Zeke shouts. “DYLAN WON’T DIE AND I JUST CUT HIS ARM OFF WITH MY LASER!”
“DID NOT! DID NOT!” Dylan says, starting to cry. “I GREW A NEW ONE!”
“Viney doesn’t seem right, does she?” Gaelan asks.
“How do you mean?” Larken replies, somewhat breathlessly. Between Bonnie’s brisk pace and the irregular, snowy terrain, she’s struggling to keep up.
After everyone said their good-byes to Haley, Randy, Dylan, and Zeke, and then helped clean up the house, Viney excused herself upstairs for a nap and Bonnie announced that she had a surprise for her siblings, one that would require them to bundle up and follow her outside. Larken doesn’t know where their sister is leading them or what she’s so eager to show, but they’re headed in the direction of downtown—a prospect so depressing as to impede Larken’s progress even further.
Gaelan slows his steps and takes Larken’s arm. “She’s just … off somehow,” he says, frowning. His voice has an imploded, held quality; his words are carried on expulsed breaths so miserly that there’s barely a trace of them in the freezing air. “She doesn’t have her usual … glow. And she was so … I don’t know, distant with Haley’s kids, didn’t you think?”
“Well, holidays and all. December without Dad. It’s got to be hard.” Bonnie scampers along with the animal grace she’s had since childhood, giving the impression of having four hooved feet instead of two shod ones.
“Jesus,” Larken gripes. “Do you have any idea what this is about?”
Gaelan shrugs, noncommittal.
Bonnie turns and shouts: “Come on, you guys! Why are you so slow?”
Being in her sister’s presence when she’s vibrating with this kind of energy makes Larken feel ancient. “Why couldn’t we have driven?” she mutters.
“I wish you didn’t have to go,” Gaelan says, his voice so somber and mournful that she has to look at him to make sure he’s not crying.
“Me, too,” Larken answers. “But I’ve got to get back tonight. I’ve still got so much to do and I have to get up tomorrow at an ungodly hour …”
“No,” Gaelan cuts in. “I meant, to England.”
“Why?”
“When’s your flight?”
“Early. We leave Lincoln at six-fifteen.”
“How’re you getting to the airport?”
“Cab, probably.”
“Six-fifteen,” Gaelan repeats, with strange solemnity. “I’ll remember.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
He’s never this closemouthed. Something must be up. “Did you get to talk to anybody at church last night? Bethan was asking about you.”
“I was late, remember?” he replies, his voice uncharacteristically edgy. “I missed everything.”
“Hurry up!” Bonnie yells with glee. “We’re almost there!” They’ve arrived in the mostly boarded-up area of Emlyn Springs that is still euphemistically referred to as “downtown.” Larken can’t imagine where there might be.
The two of them pause and watch Bonnie pause briefly to look both ways before rushing across the wide empty street. When they were kids, Larken and Gaelan had to constantly remind their sister to stop, look, and listen when crossing Main. They trained her well. There was need for that vigilance then, but no more.
To Larken’s dismay, Bonnie is making her way toward one of Emlyn Springs’ oldest and shabbiest structures: the Tinkham Building. Once housing a single prosperous enterprise, it suffered the fate of many downtown structures and was bifurcated years ago. At present, one half serves as the place of business for Blind Tom’s Piano Repair; the other half has been vacant and in disrepair f
or decades, its door scarred and padlocked, its windows opaqued with grimy swirls of soap.
And yet it is here that Bonnie stops and pulls a set of keys out of her coat pocket.
“We’re here!” she cries as she flings the door open; within, there surely awaits an angelic choir singing “Jubilate Deo.” “Come on, you guys! Come in and see!”
Gaelan takes Larken’s arm again and they approach the intersection of Bridge and Main. For whatever reason—out of long habit, out of respect for their dead town’s former glory, or as a way of sheltering their baby sister from the truth (that her hopes are in vain and her faith will never be rewarded)—they still look both ways before they cross.
Blind Tom and Sergei are also making their way downtown. They’ve spent the day with Uncle Howie, meeting him at noon in the basement of the community center, where the ladies of the Cly-ta Horticultural Society provide a traditional Welsh-themed Christmas dinner for all of Emlyn Springs’ disenfranchised citizens—mostly solo-dwelling divorced and widowed men possessing neither the skill nor the inclination to cook a holiday meal. Then they moved on to the social hall of St. David’s Home for the Elderly, where—in what’s become a yearly tradition—Blind Tom provides piano accompaniment for the Christmas Carol Sing-Along and Secret Santa Gift Exchange while Uncle Howie and Sergei work the room in their respective capacities as octogenarian bachelor and therapy dog.
As they walk, Blind Tom whistles a call-and-response duet with one of his favorite native birds, the one that sings the first four notes of a Beethoven symphony.
It’s been a fine day—but the best is yet to come.
Reaching inside his overcoat, he lays his palm against his torso in the area of his lower right ribs; it’s silly, he knows, but he seeks reassurance that there’s still a rectangular wafer of ivory pressed snuggled into the pocket of his red vest.
It’s there.
Feeling its unique contours, even through a gloved hand, fills him with a mischievous, ecstatic happiness, as if he’s secretly in possession of a significant relic—which, in a way, he is—and causes him to laugh. Sergei looks up and smiles, happy because his master is happy.
Blind Tom quickens his pace until they are almost jogging. “Come on, Sergei!” he cries, coattails flying. “Let’s hurry!”
Who but a blind piano technician would derive such joy from such a small thing? Who but a confirmed odd duck would absent himself from the warmth and comfort of society (and on Christmas Day no less!) in order to ply his trade in a darkened, ramshackle warehouse, anticipating such occupation as a blessing?
Even Blind Tom knows that his eccentricities put him at the fringes of normalcy.
How lucky that he landed here, in this small, benevolent, provincial place insulated by geography and human will, where such eccentricities are more than accepted: They are ignored.
“Tada!” Bonnie flings her arms out theatrically.
They’re confronted with a mess of scattered boxes—some opened, some still sealed up—as well as tools, bike parts, printouts of bike-building instructions. There’s a single, long, filthy fluorescent light blinking from the ceiling—a kind of tubular crypt, its innards are darkly speckled with generations of dead bugs. It dangles precariously from four chains of unequal length; its spastic glow periodically illuminates a single wheel that is roped to one of the exposed rafters, hung horizontally—like a chandelier—and decorated with tinsel and twinkle lights and garlands of popcorn and cranberries. It’s so cold inside that they can see their breath. The place has that distinctly complex smell of singed wiring, mildew, and mouse turds, which indicates that a building is so structurally diseased that its best hope is to be gutted, if not razed. In one corner, a metal trash can is full to overflowing with beer cans and bottles. All of the walls have been spray-painted with graffiti.
Larken remembers the Midwesterner’s Golden Rule—if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all—and shuts up. She keeps her facial muscles consciously slack.
“Gosh, Bon,” Gaelan offers. He starts strolling around, opening and closing cupboards and doors, examining electrical outlets. “You’ve really done a lot of work here.” His voice is affable, but Larken knows that his building inspector routine is just a way to avoid looking their sister in the eye.
“It’s a mess right now,” Bonnie hastens to say. “Sorry I haven’t had a chance to clean up. I had a lot of orders for Christmas, you know, from parents who didn’t feel comfortable putting bikes together and wanted someone else to do it for them. It was so much fun! I felt like one of Santa’s elves.”
“I hope you let people pay you for doing that,” Larken says. “In money, I mean.” The words are out before she can censor herself.
“Yes,” Bonnie says, only a little testy. “They paid me in money.”
Gaelan speaks up. “This building used to be the variety store.”
“Tinkham’s.” Bonnie starts following Gaelan around. “It was huge. We came here all the time, remember? There’s even some old stock, from when it was a five-and-dime. And funny things keep showing up.”
“Dead rats?” Larken mutters under her breath. “Drunk teenagers? Toxic fungi?”
“I’m always tripping over those little red balls, you know? The really bouncy ones that came with jacks.”
“Huh,” Gaelan says. Larken can tell that he’s every bit as dismayed by all this as she is, but he’s much better at keeping his opinions to himself.
“When Tinkham’s went out of business,” Bonnie goes on, “they closed the building up for a while. And then it got divided in two; this part’s been empty for a long time, but Blind Tom moved into the other half back in the eighties.”
Larken picks up a piece of paper at random. It’s a shipping receipt.
“I mean, I’m not gonna get rich or anything doing this,” Bonnie says, glancing at Larken, “but the rent’s really cheap …”
I’ll bet, Larken thinks.
“… and I’ve gotten a lot of good advice off the Web.”
Larken says continues to study the shipping receipt. It cost a small fortune to get these bikes here.
Gaelan opens a door at the back of the shop. “What are all the piano parts?”
“Blind Tom uses the back for storage. Once the bike business takes off, he’ll move all that out and I’ll take it over for building and repairs, and this front part here will be turned into a showroom. You couldn’t ask for a better location. I’ve got great visibility.”
Gaelan disappears into the back room.
“So,” Larken says, carefully, “does this mean you’re giving up on the juice bar?”
“No. Not at all. This article I read—let me find it for you—said that you shouldn’t expect to make your bike shop provide your main source of income for at least—here it is—a year.” Bonnie hands over some loose pages.
Larken looks down to find a computer printout of an article from Mother Earth News, labeled Issue #26 and dated March–April 1974. “This is what you’re using?”
“Like I said, it’s really useful.”
“Bonnie, are you sure this is still current?”
“The prices are obviously not right, but the basic information is really sound.”
Gaelan emerges. “This all looks … pretty … good, Bon,” he says, “but I’d feel a lot better if the wiring was updated and the back door got repaired.”
“I know. I’ve talked to Tom about that and he’s gonna contact the owner.”
“Who is the owner?” Larken asks.
“Um, not sure. We’ve had a little trouble getting hold of him. He might be dead.”
“I see.”
“But,” Bonnie resumes brightly, “there’s gonna be a real effort to contact all the owners of these downtown buildings and get them spruced up.”
“Why is that?” Larken asks.
“Because of the Welsh delegation. The Sister City project.” Bonnie speaks with the mildly irritated tone of someone who’s thinking, Weren�
�t you listening? “It’s been all over the newspaper for months …” Bonnie has tucked a yearly subscription notice to The Goldenrod Gazette into her siblings’ Christmas stockings every year since they moved away. Larken doesn’t know about Gaelan, but her newspapers usually end up either in the recycling bin or the fireplace.
“Haven’t you guys been reading the minutes from the community council meetings?” Bonnie asks.
“Sorry, no,” Larken says. “Why don’t you just tell us about it?”
“Well,” Bonnie sighs. “There’a lot going on, but I’ll try to give you the short version. After Dad died, Viney was going through his stuff and found out that he’d been corresponding with the monastery in our Sister City. You know about our Sister City, right?”
“Of course,” Larken lies.
“You bet,” Gaelan adds.
“Dad’s idea was that we invite a delegation of monks here, show them around, and see if they’d be interested in opening a second monastery.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Larken asks.
“Because of our connection,” Bonnie replies, as if the answer was obvious. “Because we’re Sister Cities. And for financial reasons, too. These monks are really successful and they might want to grow their market, establish a presence in the States.”
Invoking phrases like grow their market and establish a presence sounds strikingly un-Bonnie-like. Larken wonders if her sister isn’t improvising at all but has been working on this speech with help from members of the Better Business Bureau.
“They’ve got a thriving cottage industry, so they’d be bringing their business to town. Not just that, but tourists, money, jobs … It could be incredible.”
Yeah, Larken thinks, and it would take the length of an Ice Age.
Gaelan breaks in. “It’s a great idea for no other reason than Dad wanting it.”
Bonnie goes on. “So Mr. Humphries contacted the monks and they’re sending a delegation this summer, during Fancy Egg Days.”
Bonnie elaborates on all the ways their town plans to reinvigorate a festival that once included a full week of nonstop, celebratory events, but for decades has consisted of little more than a ragtag parade, a hen-laying contest, and a tractor pull.
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