by Kris Radish
“You don’t know? I’m shocked. Stephie has been staying with me all week while Joy and everyone else are at the beach.”
“Joy let Stephie stay with you for a week?”
Stephie cannot move. She watches her favorite aunt take a step forward and the other aunt take a step backward and she secretly wishes she had a video camera. Her two aunts dislike each other so much right now, she suddenly realizes, the storage shed assignment could become deadly.
“Aunt Debra,” she starts to say and her not-so-lovely-this-moment Aunt Debra tells her to be quiet.
“That is not necessary, Debra,” Emma says. “Put down the stupid bat. Stop yelling at us and help us, or get out of here.”
“I’m calling your mother!” Debra shouts, ignoring Emma.
“Why?” Emma demands. “So you can tell her we were cleaning out the reunion shed?”
“You both look crazy.”
“Us? Look at yourself,” Emma tells her sister, gesturing at the raised bat.
“Emma, what is happening to you? One day you tell me you don’t like me, and then I never hear from you, and now you look like a homeless person wandering around our mother’s backyard.”
“I still don’t like you,” Emma says, untying her dress belt and throwing off her blanket.
Emma can hear Stephie letting out a quiet whistle, which Emma takes as a sign of familial support.
“I still don’t like you, either,” Debra spews, throwing down the bat. “This reunion is all yours.”
“Like that’s anything new!” Emma shouts to her sister’s back as Debra turns on her heel and power-walks out of the yard.
And Stephie says, “Holy shit” and then says she’s glad for the first time ever that she doesn’t have a sister.
The thought of no sisters makes Emma stop as if she’s run into yet another brick wall. No Joy. No Debra. No Erika. She can see two-thirds of that equation, especially now, but she knows that without Joy there would have been no Stephie and without Stephie there would not have been so many things—good and recently bad—it would be impossible to list them all.
And without Debra she would not have those other two terribly unique nieces, Kendall and Chloe, who make her laugh and fill her life in ways that even Stephie cannot.
So she tells this to Stephie. She tells her that this second even as she wants to throw something at Debra’s head, which is apparently a new theme in her life, you should never wish away what you have. And as she says it she tries hard to believe her own words because when she stops, Emma sinks right back to that place of wondering what in the world she is going to do about all her reunion-and family-related problems.
“But Aunt Debra was just, like, totally rude and made assumptions and you were right to walk out of brunch because she was out of her mind,” Stephie reminds her, throwing out her usual dose of reality.
“She’s still my sister.” It’s the only thing Emma can think to say.
“I get it,” Stephie says. “Like when Bo or Riley go into my room and look through my drawers and take stuff and I want to kill them but then I run into Bo at school and he knows I forgot my lunch and he buys me something to eat.”
“Kind of like that,” Emma agrees, smiling.
And then Emma picks up her weeding bucket and Stephie follows her lead because the shed incident coupled with the poetry-bar-night-party-lie and the mostly fabulous week without her real mother, brothers, and her father’s country western music have turned Stephie into a total gardening slave.
Emma wonders as she weeds her way through the flower beds with Stephie if all of that and Stephie’s gregarious aura will still be enough to save her from the wrath of not just one, but now two Gilford sisters from hell. One who is jealous because of her relationship with her daughter, and now angry that she couldn’t control Stephie for a simple week, and another who is dying to kill her with a baseball bat.
The third sister has apparently immersed herself in Emma’s messed-up reunion plans and has still not called back or answered any of Emma’s new phone messages.
And Emma suddenly realizes that she has absolutely no idea what she is going to do about any of her sisters or with the wild feeling that keeps tumbling through her body that is making her say things she has been thinking her entire life but, unlike her niece, has never before been able to speak out loud.
10
THE TENTH QUESTION:
Does anyone know where Grandma went?
MARTHA GRACE OLSSON GILFORD IS really not considered missing in action until the evening Emma bravely pops in at her sister Debra’s house to try and clear the air because her guilt is suffocating her and so there will not be a family murder the next time she meets Debra in public. Kendall walks into the kitchen from her mall-rat job, throws her black and white Coach purse on the counter, says, “Does anyone know where Grandma went?” and two sisters turn to stare at her.
“What?” Debra asks, forgetting Emma’s sudden appearance in her kitchen.
“Grandma seems to be missing,” Kendall announces nonchalantly.
“Missing,” Emma echoes. “What do you mean by missing?”
“I went by her house after work and it was dark. There wasn’t even one of those little automatic lights on. And there were three newspapers on the steps.”
“Well, Jesus, that doesn’t mean she’s missing,” Debra’s husband Kevin decides. “Three newspapers and a dark house don’t mean anything.”
“Are you crazy?” Debra shouts, jumping up as if she has someplace to go. “She must be missing. It’s reunion-planning season and the house is never dark.”
“Hold on, everyone. Didn’t she call anyone today or yesterday or the day before? Wasn’t she over here a day or so ago to talk about the reunion menu?”
The room goes quiet. Everyone shakes their head back and forth simultaneously as if they are Marty’s bobblehead dolls. It is possibly the loudest no ever heard in Debra’s kitchen.
“Emma, you usually see her about every twenty seconds. You mean you haven’t gone to see her? Didn’t she leave you a voicemail or anything?”
Already, Emma seethes, this is my fault. Do these people take ownership for anything? Then guilt comes crashing down on her once more because she knows so many other things are her fault right this moment and that the unfulfilled list of reunion chores is still lying on her answering machine like a forensic fingerprint.
“There’s nothing new on my cell phone, I don’t think, and no, I didn’t go see Mom. Stephie and I were busy, as you know, and I had to work the last two days. I took off early on Friday and I didn’t check my messages on the home phone.”
“I bet you watered your damn flowers,” Debra snorts.
“What the hell does that mean?” Emma snarls.
“Debra, that was not nice.” Kevin tries to stifle what is a small explosion headed for a larger one. “Kendall, go ask your sister if Grandma called her or if she went over there.”
The quiet pause that ensues could be used as a military weapon to psychologically torture enemy troops. Emma, Kevin and Debra are averting their eyes as if they might go blind if they look at one another and they are all wondering if Marty is actually missing, or at a very long senior lunch, or a few thousand other possibilities including everything from a tragic fall down the steps to a sudden memory loss that has her wandering around town with her dance shoes tucked under her arm.
Marty, who calls Emma what seems like a dozen times a day and everyone else just about one call less than that.
Marty, who always lets them know she is off to the senior center or shopping or on one of her dates.
Marty, who wants to be informed each time one of her daughters leaves town, changes the oil, or wanders over to talk to a neighbor.
Marty, who has never gone anywhere the precious months before the holy, sacred, and forever Marty-planned, and daughter-executed, reunion.
But lately, each one of them now realizes, Marty has been unusually quiet. The phone calls have
tapered off: They’ve skipped family brunch because Stephie’s family has been out of town, and after the first volley of phone messages to see how Emma and Stephie were getting along there has been no word from Marty the last four days.
“I’m going over there,” Emma decides. “She could be lying on the floor dead or some damn thing.”
“I’m going along,” Debra announces, grabbing her purse, temporarily forgetting she hates Emma, and then yelling at the top of her lungs, “Chloe, did you see Grandma or not?”
“No!” Chloe bellows from the back side of the house.
And Kevin is left standing in the kitchen without having been able to say one more word while the front door slams and Emma backs out of the driveway so fast he can hear her tires screech.
Emma and Debra cannot shut up on the twelve-and-a-half-minute drive to their mother’s house. The two sisters are imagining everything from a massive heart attack, to terrorists, to some escaped sex offender. They ramble on about gas explosions, tripping on one of the rugs Marty has placed at precise intervals on almost every inch of her wooden floors, home invasions, a whacked-up dance partner following their mother home and cracking her head open during a wild tango. Debra speculates about broken hips, a long night of drinking turned deadly while Marty was laboring over how many hot dog buns to order for the reunion.
“There has to be some logical explanation,” Emma insists, trying to remain calm.
“Really, Emma, for crissakes, is there anything really logical about our mother?” Debra shouts.
Oh dammit, Debra, Emma screams internally, I forget that you deal with everything, including a lost mother, with anger and by lashing out. No wonder I dislike you.
“Debra, for once in your life can you not yell just to yell? Can you just shut up for once?”
Emma says these words before she even has time to think about the consequences. She watches her sister turn towards her, sees her take in a huge breath the same way a prizefighter sucks in a wad of air before he or she strikes a blow, and Emma freezes. She dreads what might come next.
“What the hell does that mean, Emma?”
Answer the question, this little voice starts screaming from a ledge inside of Emma’s brain. Tell her the truth, you big baby. Tell her. No one ever tells her when she goes off like this. Emboldened by her last yelling match with Debra, and that undefined, small ribbon of courage that helped her dare to show up at Debra’s house today, Emma lets it rip.
“It means you yell all of the time and there is no reason to yell all of the time and it does not become you,” Emma manages to squeak out.
“I do not yell all of the time,” Debra yells. “Our lovely sister Joy is the one who yells all of the time.”
“So do you.”
“I do not!”
“Debra, you are yelling right now. I know you are frightened, so am I, but yelling doesn’t make it any better. It frightens people. I think your kids and Kevin have been scared half their lives.”
Debra turns away from Emma and slumps furiously into her seat as they pull into Marty’s dark driveway. Emma cannot believe she is still alive or that Debra has not ripped out her throat. Maybe she should have done this ten years ago. Then she realizes no one has heard from Marty in several days and she feels a stab of fear.
The porch light is not on.
Al, the town gossip, probably already has a senior Amber Alert flashing out on the interstate.
Emma and Debra look at each other without saying another word, shelve the shouting discussion, and let themselves in through the side door where they discover Marty’s car parked like a lone soldier standing guard over the empty garage.
The sisters say nothing. Emma peeks into the car to see if Marty’s keys are on the seat where she always keeps them even though Emma has told her a thousand times not to do that because anyone could break in and then steal the car. The keys, of course, are right where they always are. Emma rushes to catch up with Debra, who has walked forward and turned on the lights as she does so.
They start in the kitchen. They move towards the back of the house, through the dining room, into the living room and through their old bedrooms as if they are detectives looking for clues. The spare bed in Emma’s old room is made. The hall bathroom off the kitchen is immaculate. Nothing is out of place in the hall or in the other two bedrooms. The two sisters walk together, lest they find something or someone, or in case they discover a bogeyman, which both of them silently believe may be totally possible.
“This is so weird,” Debra finally admits as they get to the door of Marty’s bedroom. “I don’t think I’ve ever been over here like this when Mom isn’t here. It’s spooky, isn’t it?”
“The house is never this quiet. There are either twenty people running around or Mom is yapping about something and it’s—Well, it’s never quiet. Especially this time of the year with all the crap she has to do for the reunion.”
The idea of that—of the quiet without Marty—paralyzes both of them. Emma suddenly realizes she’s going to cry. A long stream of emotion rides itself up past her heart. And when she looks at Debra she sees that she too is about to cry.
“What would it be like if she never came home?” Emma’s voice quivers. “Oh, Deb, I would die, wouldn’t you? I don’t know what I would do.”
“She is such a pain in my ass most of the time, but do you think we could even go on without her constant set of instructions?” Debra sniffs. “The idea of it all is too much, just too much.”
Before moving towards Marty’s bedroom Emma cannot stop herself from reaching for Debra. They embrace for just a few seconds in a way that seems to erase the snarly conversation in the car and maybe every nasty thing either one of them has said about each other for the past fifteen years.
Or so Emma thinks.
The room is as silent as the rest of the house and they search again for clues, for anything—a ransom note, a message written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror, an SOS scrawled with soap inside the shower door.
The clues come in unexpected places.
“Do you recognize these slippers?” Debra asks as she crawls on her knees to grab at something she notices under the bed.
“Well, those are clearly men’s slippers. I’ve never seen them before.”
Emma and Debra look at each other and both raise their eyebrows.
“Shit,” Debra says first and then quickly adds, “Go look in the bathroom again. There’s so much stuff in there we probably missed something.”
Emma spins around and almost trips as she lunges towards the very room she thought she had just examined.
“Good Lord!” she yells out to Debra in less than a minute.
“What?”
“Come look at this.”
This is a terribly sexy black and yellow tiger-striped nightgown hooked behind the bathroom door. And hooked behind that, like a seductive calling card, is a matching male thong.
A very large matching male thong.
“Whoever wears this must be huge,” Debra squeals. “Jesus.
“Keep going,” she demands. “Holy shit, sister.”
“I don’t want to keep looking, Debra. I’m not sure I want to know what’s behind this … this stuff,” Emma stammers as she gingerly rehangs the nightie.
“What could it be, for crying out loud?”
“Well, whips and chains, handcuffs, leather straps. At this point … anything.”
“How do you know about that stuff?”
“It’s my part-time job as a dominatrix, what do you think? I’m forty-three, do you think I live in a cave?”
Debra has this sudden image of half her family in red stilettos, whipping naked men in tight thongs who are begging to be hurt.
She laughs. Not just a little laugh but a very loud snort that makes Emma snap.
“You’re laughing and our mother is missing?”
“My God, Emma, look what we just found. Come on, I’m dying to keep looking. Can you imagine what’s in the
dresser drawers?”
“We are not going through Mom’s drawers. This is an invasion of privacy, for God’s sake. I can’t do it. And I sure as heck wouldn’t want anyone to do it to me.”
“She’s missing,” Debra fires back, wondering what could possibly be in Emma’s drawers that she doesn’t want anyone to find. “We’re looking for clues, remember?”
“There’s a difference between looking for clues and just being darn nosy.
“No,” Emma says, hastily putting the skimpy nightie back on top of the thong and then washing her hands as she yells at Debra to stop looking.
“This doesn’t locate our missing mother,” Debra whines.
“Maybe she doesn’t want to be found.”
“It’s just not like her,” her sister persists. “She’s never done this before.”
“Maybe we don’t really know everything about her. I mean, really, look what we just found, for crying out loud.”
Debra stops, waves her hand back and forth in front of her face as if she is fanning herself or trying to shoo a bug away from her mouth, then tells Emma that if she thinks any more about sexy nightwear or chains and whips or whether or not they actually know their mother, she will have a nervous breakdown.
Great, Emma wants to say. Then I can take care of you and your entire family while I also search for Mother.
Emma and Debra stand at the edge of their mother’s bed in silence for a long time, trying not to think. Averting her eyes from the bed, from the bathroom door and from the unopened dresser drawers, Emma decides they should go to her house and see if maybe Marty has left her a note like she often does on the kitchen counter. There is simply nothing else to do. Plan B will be designed on the way to Emma’s house, which is about the same twelve-and-a-half-minute drive in the opposite direction.
The drive is a blur of conversation that neither of them could remember if they were ever to testify in court. The Gilford sisters’ brains have suddenly turned into a wild pinball machine game where the balls seem to have developed minds of their own.