by Margo Catts
“Pleased to meet you, too,” I said. “Looks like you were busy. I’m sorry we interrupted you.”
He nodded, chin high. “I was helping my dad in the shop,” he said, leaning on the word dad. He withdrew his hand and pushed it into his pocket. “School’s out, now.”
“Paul will be right in,” Tuah explained. “Have you two eaten lunch?”
Kevin and Sarah glanced at each other, then both nodded.
“Yes, ma’am,” Kevin added.
I heard a door slam shut. Clearly the hallway led to more than bedrooms. A man entered, wiping his hands on a blue rag. He wore a chambray shirt, untucked in the back, with the edge of that identifying birthmark showing below his ear. I saw the connection to the children right away—a certain pulling at the corners of the eyes, a point to the chin. Mimicking his son, he held out his hand.
“Paul Kofford,” he said. “Pleased to meet you. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you coming.”
“Of course.” I avoided Tuah’s eyes. “It was a good time for me to be here.”
He looked away. “I’ll show you around,” he said. He turned and started toward the kitchen, stepping over a cushion Sarah hadn’t needed and must have tossed aside. Apparently she hadn’t broken any rules in making her tumbling mat. She sprang off the corner of the sofa to attach herself to her father’s hip. Kevin trailed behind us. Tuah started putting the sofa cushions back.
“So tell me—” I started.
“You have to watch out when you open the oven,” he said, bending to demonstrate, thumb over the handle, fingers splayed across the panel to support it. “I need to get a new screw to hold the front panel on, but you know how it goes …” He shrugged without looking at me and didn’t wait for a response. He closed the oven and stuffed the blue rag into his back pocket. “You get used to it, don’t think about it anymore. It’s just a plain metal screw … I probably have something the right size in the shop …” He flipped on the faucet, inexplicably. “Just don’t think about it when I’m out there.” Shut off the faucet. “If I’d think about it for once while I’m in here, then just go out there and look around, pick up some things, bring a few different ones back in, I’m sure I could find something …”
He moved on to the refrigerator, opened it as he was talking, waved vaguely at the contents, and closed it again. A pantry door next to it swung open under his hand as well, the boxed and canned goods inside acknowledged with another wave before he closed it.
“… nothing much right now, but you should feel free to get whatever you want. The kids will tell you what they like. I’m still figuring it all out myself. I’ll just leave some money in the jar”—he lifted the head off a fat porcelain cat near the sink to reveal a dark cavity—“for the groceries or anything else you need. Cleaning stuff …” He glanced down at his daughter, then away again. “Hair stuff. Soap. All that.”
Tuah had described him as quiet, a responsible man who’d be grateful for whatever I did but never directly ask me for anything. I’d pictured an already taciturn cowboy, now silenced by grief—far from the rambling reality I now followed through the kitchen and into a utility room. The flow of words felt like water filling a closed chamber, steadily rising around me.
“… and the laundry soap is in here”—he opened a cupboard, waved in front of it, and closed it again—“and you have to watch out for the washer getting unbalanced. It’ll start banging. You just need to open the lid and move things around.”
I wondered how long it took him to figure that out. I doubted he had known a great deal about doing the laundry while his wife was alive. Maybe one of the neighbors had shown him. Maybe Tuah had. I glanced back through a slice of the kitchen. Tuah nodded at me from the living room, waved me on with a little sweeping gesture, then sank onto the sofa.
From the utility room, we passed through a bathroom that served as an odd connection to the bedroom hallway. A door at the end of the hallway led outside and would explain the comings and goings from what I’d thought were only bedrooms. But the door had three narrow windows, hashed like bars at eye level, which did little to illuminate the hallway and only intensified the prison-like atmosphere.
“This is Sarah’s room. You’ll have to get on her pretty hard to keep it clean.”
I stood at the door and stared. The floor was covered with the ordinary detritus of a girl child—scattered paper, crayons, dolls, socks, stuffed animals—but it was the walls that arrested me. From the baseboard to as high as I imagined Sarah could reach while standing on the bed or a chair, the wall was papered with drawings. I turned to look down at her, just behind her father’s hip.
“Are these all yours? You did them all yourself?”
She nodded, looking up at me.
“Is drawing your favorite thing to do?”
She squinched her faced together and looked sideways, thinking. After a moment, she shook her head.
“What do you like better?”
“Parties,” she said.
“Parties are stupid,” I heard from the hallway. I’d almost forgotten Kevin was there, but even if I’d been aware of him I wouldn’t have known that was a wrong thing to say.
“That’s enough,” Paul said. “This way.”
I followed him down the hallway, stealing a glance at Kevin as I did, but he was looking down and fiddling with something in his pocket.
“This is Kevin’s room,” Paul said, opening the next door. “He needs to work on keeping it clean, too.”
I looked inside. Clothes were on the floor, but in piles that at least suggested some sort of order. The bed was unmade, and gum wrappers, scraps of paper, buttons, and baseball cards covered the top of a dresser against one wall. The room smelled like cat litter.
“What’s your favorite thing to do, Kevin?” I asked, leaning back from the doorway.
He took no time to think about it. “Working in the workshop,” he said, tapping his hat against his knee.
“And this is my room,” Paul said, crossing the hall.
I took in the unmade bed, the clothes heaped on a chair, the cluttered dresser top, a folded hide-a-bed against the wall, and a stiff family portrait from Sears or JC Penney looming over all of it.
It was too much. Too much. The weight of suffering in this place squeezed against my lungs. The children of all this deserved better than me.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about where you could sleep,” Paul said, swallowing so that I saw the birthmark swell outward and lie down again, “since I don’t have an extra bedroom. You could’ve had Sarah’s room, but when they share Sarah won’t settle down, and then Kevin gets mad at her, and that can go on for hours, so I thought I’d better leave them where they are. But the sofa isn’t comfortable in the living room, and people don’t like to sleep in other people’s beds, no matter what, but then I remembered that Carrie’s mom has this hide-a-bed for when her sister came to stay, so I asked and she said it would be a good idea for me to have it for a while, so I’ve got it in here just so it’s out of the way, not because you’d have to sleep in here—you could put it wherever you want. You can sleep in here if you want to have a door you can close, but don’t feel like you have to, because we can just roll it down the hallway and set it up in the living room, and then you could have the TV, too, and get to the kitchen better, and the bathroom is kinda in the middle anyway …”
I couldn’t stop him. I nodded and made occasional hums of agreement while his eyes flitted to the hide-a-bed, the hallway, the floor, the children. I felt acutely aware of being a strange female intended to sleep in the house his wife had abandoned, and felt the pull of the open door behind me.
He eventually paused and looked toward the toe of his boot.
“I’ll use the living room,” I blurted into his hesitation. “What time do you want me here?”
He finally met my eyes. “About seven,” he said.
5
Much as Tuah loved the cabin, my grandfather’s pride had always been
the house in town. It was to serve as my home base when I wasn’t staying with the Koffords, and it was where Tuah dropped me off after we left their house, telling me to settle in while she went to the market.
Narrow and Victorian as the cabin was squat and plain, the house had a place for every twentieth-century luxury. Those white folks who thought he wasn’t good enough to marry one of their own? Mi abuelo had shown them, all right. The bathroom, once a butler’s pantry, included both the original oak cabinetry as well as a tub and shower, a porcelain sink with chrome legs, and a toilet with an overhead tank and a pull chain. The kitchen wall had a pass-through with a tin door on each side where the milkman could leave his deliveries, so Tuah didn’t have to walk outside or do so much as bend over to get fresh milk. A coal-fired furnace had been converted to gas, with scrolled iron grates in each room so the entire house was comfortable, without extraordinary effort, on even the coldest nights of the year. Refrigerator, electric stove, washer, dryer. Wallpaper. Carpet. Neighbors on every side. It was hard to believe this belonged to the same woman who happily hauled water at the cabin.
My room, the spare bedroom beside the kitchen, must have been meant as a sickroom when the house was built. Now, with its wallpaper of tiny violets, the carved cherubs at the corners of the headboard, the mounded quilts and extra pillows, the room felt grandmotherly in a completely different way than Tuah did in person. Old family photos in scrolled frames, under domed glass, fanned above a bureau. A stiff wedding portrait of Tuah and my grandfather. Tuah as a girl with her older sisters, all of them wearing petticoated dresses and gigantic bows in their hair. My father, in short pants and curls and ankle boots, sitting on a mule with its ears turned sideways, looking grim. And the only two pictures I’d ever seen of Benencia, my father’s older sister, who died while he was still a child.
For some reason I had grown up thinking benencia was the Spanish word for blessing. I had thought it the most beautiful name in the world to give to a child. Blessing. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I learned the Spanish word for blessing is bendición. Or gracia. Or beneficio. Not benencia.
“So what does benencia mean?” I had asked my Spanish teacher, feeling stunned and cheated and somehow wronged. I was far from his first student with a Hispanic surname that didn’t know the language.
He’d brushed chalk from his hands. “Nada. Just a name somebody made up, I guess.”
I set my duffel on the floor and bent to peer at the pictures. In the first Benencia and Tuah stood in front of the Hat Creek cabin, before the porch was added, before the deforested hillsides grew up to be as I now knew them. Benencia looked like a little girl from a pioneer story in button-up boots and a full skirt and a sunbonnet, maybe five or six years old, holding her mother’s hand, head turned to look over her shoulder. The rim of her bonnet hid her face completely. The other picture must have been taken not long before she died. She was a teenager, long-limbed and athletic, caught midstride, walking uphill but looking back. She wore a midcalf skirt, ankle boots, and a short-sleeved blouse. One hand atop her head held her hat in place, while the other trailed behind her. The sun was before her, and the long shadows suggested it was morning or late afternoon. As in the first picture, her face was turned away. Her profile was strikingly similar to Tuah’s. In neither picture was she looking at the camera; there was no way to see the emptiness in her eyes, the mental handicap I always assumed to be just one symptom of the problems that must have made her life so short.
What were those problems, anyway? I had never asked. Growing up, grains of family history dissolved into my pool of knowledge without me noticing, the same way salt dissolves in water, the same way you can’t remember anyone ever telling you that school starts in the fall. Benencia was disabled, somehow, and she had died, somehow. Was her condition genetic? Did I carry the gene? Would I pass it on?
God. A child. Some unformed creature receiving all nutrients, light, sound, and experience through me. What a terrible situation for a kid to be in. And now Kevin and Sarah, entrusted to my care. Actual people, rather than the abstractions they’d been in my grandmother’s letter. What was their father thinking? Me, them, this fetus. How could so many desperate creatures wind up in the same place together?
I sat on the bed facing the window, then leaned to my side, then pulled my knees to my chest and stared out. Aspen leaves rustled against each other and a pair of girls with legs like colts revolved back and forth across my framed view, practicing cartwheels on a neighbor’s lawn. I closed my eyes. My head hurt, and the relentless motion made it worse.
I’d made a colossal mistake. All I’d wanted from life was to be left alone, sitting in a laboratory every day working through calculations that had defined, knowable answers. So now, to put off facing the reality of a baby, I’d taken on responsibility for two children? Damaged children needing unknown amounts of unspecified care? At what point had this idea ever made sense to me? Why did it make sense to anyone else?
When I heard the back door squeal, the girls were gone. I blinked once or twice before realizing I must’ve dozed off. I sat up and scratched at the roots of my hair, heard the door again, then went into the kitchen. The truck door slammed. With yet another squeal from the back door Tuah came in, looking down and wiping her feet on the rag rug. Mac stepped around her and shook, then went to his dish and started drinking.
“I found some cherries,” she said. “Early this year. We can have them with dinner.”
“Okay.”
A lawn mower hummed from somewhere out of sight.
She set down the bags she’d been carrying and looked at me. “Sleeping again?”
“I guess.”
“Those kids won’t take care of you, you know.”
“I know.” I cleared my throat. “Is there more outside?”
“Just one. On the seat.”
By the time I got back, she had fruits and greens and vegetables queued up by the sink like cars at a car wash. It seemed like a lot. She had no refrigeration at the cabin and couldn’t keep things cold for more than a couple of days in the ice chest she took with her.
“How are you going to keep all that fresh?” I asked.
“What?”
“At the cabin. Isn’t that a lot for you? You’re not just going to leave it all here, are you?”
“No, I’m not going up tomorrow. I’ll stay here for your first week, in case you need anything. Oh—” She put a hand in the pocket of her pants and got out a folded piece of paper. “I ran into a friend at the market. She lives over by the Koffords and wanted you to have her number. Said to call anytime you need help. She knows the kids real well.”
She pushed the paper toward me and turned back to the sink. I felt a stray pang of hope. Tuah would be nearby. Other neighbors wanted to help. This would’ve been a good moment to believe in God, to believe that some force in the universe had a compelling interest in protecting those children, to think I could stay and this could really work. But then that would mean it had also let their mother die. And that it had let me kill three other people before deciding I could use a little help. Too late. “Thanks,” I said, stuffing the paper into my pocket.
Tuah twisted the knob and started filling the sink, then tore the stems off a bunch of spinach and dropped the leaves into the water.
“Would you get a towel out of the bottom drawer so I can lay out this spinach?” She twisted the faucet off.
I spread the towel across the counter while she swirled her hand through the water so that the leaves seemed to move like a school of fish. I smoothed the towel more than it needed and spoke without looking up.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“Do what?”
“Take care of those kids. I don’t know anything about kids.”
“You didn’t get through college thinking you can’t do things you haven’t done before.”
“But I did do science before. I like it. Everything works in science.”
“D
on’t be so afraid of everything, Elena. You’re braver than you think. You weren’t doing science when you found your first apartment by yourself.”
“Yeah—by myself. That’s the point—I’m fine by myself. This has nothing to do with being afraid. I just know what I can and can’t do.”
“Oh, good heavens. That’s what fear is.”
“God, Tuah. It’s reality. I’m great by myself but I know I get in trouble with people. I should be living like you. Off alone somewhere. You could drop me in the middle of Africa and I’d be fine. I’m not afraid of anything, but I’ll be a disaster with those kids.”
Tuah stared at me for a long moment without speaking, then her eyes narrowed. She turned back to the sink, took the spinach out by handfuls, and laid the leaves on the towel. She pulled the plug from the drain and set it on the counter. As the water swirled and gurgled, she turned the faucet back on and caught water in her cupped hand to rinse away the lines of sand left behind. Only then did she shut off the water and turn to face me.
“Elena, I don’t go to the cabin to be by myself. I’m not getting away from people. I’m going because of people.”
“Right. Because they drive you crazy.”
“No.” She took a deep breath. “What do you know about Benencia?”
I must have looked as startled as I felt.
“You know who she is, don’t you?” Tuah asked.
“Yes—it’s just—I was wondering about her, just now, from the—” I gestured toward the bedroom with my thumb. “Pictures, you know.”
“All right, then. What exactly do you know?”
I wasn’t quite sure how to put it. “She was … handicapped, somehow. She died when she was a teenager.”
“Do you know how she died?”
“I just thought—it had something to do with the handicap, right?”
“Do you know where she’s buried?”