I got out of bed, grabbed the small notebook I’d started carrying around with me, and began writing down the things I needed her help with. I wouldn’t call her until I was certain my list was complete, although I knew I was kidding myself. That was just a way to put off the phone call. The thought of it turned my stomach upside down. I would be asking her for a great deal to help me stay in 2013, when I was afraid she’d refuse to help me stay here at all.
That morning, I received my first paycheck from Winnie. What taxes could do to a four-hundred-dollar check was a shock, but it still left me with more money than I’d made for a week’s work as a physical therapist in 1970 and I was grateful to have it. I opened a savings account, planning to sock away every penny of it except for what I needed for food and some thrift shop clothes.
Over the next few days, I walked Poppy every afternoon, but there was never a sign of life at Joanna’s house. I thought of texting her, but Michelle had mentioned that they’d somehow arranged for Joanna’s texts to go to Brandon’s email account. “That was our agreement when we began letting her text,” she’d told me. I didn’t want Brandon seeing my texts to her. The idea of texting her felt a little creepy, anyway. A little stalkerish. If texting her felt inappropriate to me, I was certain Brandon would find it doubly so.
* * *
I babysat again for Joanna that Tuesday night while Michelle and Brandon went to the movies for their date night. Michelle was racing to get ready to meet Brandon at a restaurant when I arrived.
“Date night keeps a marriage healthy,” she said as she applied lipstick in the foyer mirror. I saw her face quickly pale in the reflection. “I’m so sorry,” she said, turning to me, touching my wrist. “I keep forgetting about your husband.”
“It’s all right,” I reassured her.
“You seem so strong and independent and happy that I forget about … I forget what you’ve gone through.”
“It’s all right,” I said again, thinking she couldn’t begin to imagine what I’d been through. “And date night sounds like a great idea.”
Especially if they called on me to babysit every time they went out, I thought.
Joanna came running into the foyer. “I have a surprise for you!” she said.
“You do?” I asked, delighted.
“She does.” Michelle gave me a surreptitious wink. “You two have fun.” She gave Joanna a kiss on the temple, then headed for the door.
“Come on,” Joanna said, tugging my arm toward the stairs. “I’ll show you the surprise.”
The dogs had been rambunctious when I first arrived so we’d put them in the yard. Now I peeked out there to be sure they were all right before following Joanna up the stairs. She again wore what I guessed were pajamas, only this set had long pink pants and a short-sleeved pink and white polka-dotted top.
“Sit down,” she commanded when we reached her room. She motioned toward her neatly made bed and I sat on the edge of it. With her back to me, she moved things around on her dresser top, then handed me one of those rubber-band bracelets. “I made this for you,” she said.
This one was different from the others she’d shown me the week before, the bands almost disguised in a tight blue and green pattern.
“It’s called the snake-belly pattern,” she said. “It took me forever because the stupid bands kept breaking. Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said, a little overwhelmed. My daughter had made me a friendship bracelet. “I love it.” I slipped it over my wrist.
“It goes with your shirt,” she said.
She was right. The blue was a perfect match to my T-shirt.
“Can you do a French braid on my hair?” she asked.
“I don’t know what that is.”
She proceeded to show me an elaborate hairstyle on some “beauty and hair” site on the internet. “Could you do this to my hair?” she asked. “It has directions.”
I laughed. I was never any good with my own hair. In my teens in the late fifties and early sixties, I struggled to get my fine hair into a beehive and then a few years later, into a flip that always flopped within hours. I was so happy when the style changed to long straight hair. That I could manage.
“I can’t promise anything,” I said, studying the picture, “but let’s give it a try.”
I sat on her vanity bench and she dragged a beanbag chair across the room, sitting down on it in front of me. I spent the next half hour with my fingers in her hair, loving the intimacy of it, smiling every time I glimpsed my new friendship bracelet.
“You have lovely hair,” I said. “It’s perfect for this.”
I laughed with her when I screwed up and cheered with her when I finally got it right. We both agreed the braid looked beautiful.
“Take my picture,” she said, handing me her phone. I snapped a couple of shots of the back of her head and she texted one of them to her parents.
“Can you text it to me, too?” I asked. She did, and I heard the chirping sound on my phone where it rested in my jeans pocket.
“Let’s do a selfie with both of us,” she said, squeezing next to me on the vanity bench. We tipped our heads together as she held her arm out in front of us and snapped the picture.
“Awesome,” she said, checking it out. She handed the camera to me to see.
Beyond awesome, I thought, looking at the screen. How could anyone look at this picture and not realize Joanna and I were related? The blond hair. The dark eyes. The pointed chins. It was so obvious to me.
“Want me to text it to you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “That’s a great picture.”
She hit a few keys on her phone. “Done,” she said. “Let’s see how it looks on your phone.”
I pulled my prepaid cell phone from my pocket and she wrinkled her nose at the picture. “You need to get an iPhone.” She spoke like a child who didn’t know the meaning of the term “money problems.”
“Someday,” I said. “Do you know how or where I can get a print of this?” I asked. I missed the disposable camera I’d used in the nursery and wondered if they still made them.
“A print?” She looked at me as though it was a bizarre question. “You can just put it on your computer and … oh, I forgot.” She rolled her eyes at the fact that I had no computer. “Never mind. I’ll just make you a print.” She sat down at her desk and I watched her pull up the picture of both of us on the computer screen, put some special paper in her printer, hit a few buttons. In a few seconds, she handed me a five-by-seven shot of the two of us.
“Thank you!” I said, impressed and, to be honest, thrilled that I now had a picture of us together.
“Oh, here, do you want to see pictures from my sleepover?” Joanna asked, scrolling through other pictures on her computer screen.
“Of course,” I said. I stood behind her as she showed me pictures of the innocent-looking preteen party in the tree house. I asked her to tell me about each of her friends and she seemed to enjoy filling me in on the seventh-grade gossip. Then she showed me pictures of Jobs as a puppy, and finally, a picture of a smiling dark-haired girl from her new school.
“She’s a potential friend,” she said.
“Really!” I said, pleased. “That’s wonderful.”
She turned around from her computer, though it looked as if it took some effort to tear herself away from her photographs.
“What should we do now?” she asked.
“Hmm,” I said, sitting down on the end of her bed. I thought we may have worn out jacks. She hadn’t mentioned them all evening, and the throw rug was back in place on her floor. “Have you ever played Spit?” I asked.
“What’s Spit?”
“You’re going to love it,” I said. “But we need two decks of cards. Where can we find them?”
“Real cards?” She wrinkled her nose in disappointment.
“Real cards.” I suddenly wondered if anyone played cards anymore in 2013. “I promise you. You’ll like it.”
“I think there’s some in the family room,” she said, and I followed her downstairs and into the room I’d come to think of as her Baby Book Room. My gaze instantly went to the bookshelf, where I could see the polka-dotted cover of the book that was filled with so much love for my little girl. Joanna dug around inside the cupboard beneath the bookshelf, finally producing two decks of cards, the packages still covered in plastic wrapping. Clearly, this wasn’t a card-playing family.
“Should we play here?” She pointed to the carpeted family room floor, a distinct lack of enthusiasm in her voice.
“Uh-uh,” I said. “We need a slick surface. How about the dining room table?”
In the dining room, we sat on the very edge of our chairs while I taught her how to play the fastest, liveliest, and most addictive card game I knew. Once Joanna got the hang of it, our cards flew all over the place as we battled each other, and I couldn’t stop laughing at her unexpected enjoyment and killer instinct.
We played until Joanna’s bedtime, which was nine thirty tonight. When we’d finished the last game, I started to gather the deck but she quickly stopped me, her hands on mine.
“No!” she said, a devilish grin on her face. “Wait here. Don’t put them away.”
She disappeared for a moment, then returned with a gold baseball cap, setting it on the table next to the cards. Across the front of the cap, embroidered in brown script, were the words MASSEY’S GOLF PARK.
I looked at the hat, then at her. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“Do you remember when Daddy said he’d eat his hat if I ever played cards with a real deck?”
I laughed. “Maybe you’d better let him off the hook on that one,” I said.
“No way,” she said, checking the arrangement of the cards and hat on the table. Once she was pleased with it, she told me good night and headed up the stairs to her room.
When Brandon and Michelle returned home a short time later, they laughed when I showed them the cards and the hat.
“That’s my clever little girl,” Brandon said with a smile, his arm around Michelle’s shoulders.
I turned away quickly so they didn’t see the tears in my eyes.
53
Wednesday morning, I found only Gary, the Vietnam vet, at the breakfast table when I came downstairs. He was reading the paper and he grunted a hello to me. If Linda had been there, she would have filled the room with her usual chatter—what they’d done the day before, the people they’d seen, the food they’d eaten. I hadn’t heard more than a few words from Gary since their arrival. Yet he fascinated me. He was so connected to Joe in my mind.
I helped myself to a scone from the plate in the middle of the table and poured a glass of juice.
“Is Linda sleeping in this morning?” I asked him.
He glanced up from the paper. “Yeah,” he said. “This is vacation for her and that woman loves some extra shut-eye.”
“She still works?” I asked, then wondered if that was insulting. Maybe they weren’t as old as I thought.
“She’s a nurse,” he said. “Works the night shift in the ER. She needs the time off.”
“Oh, I bet,” I said. He returned his attention to the paper. I wished I could really engage him but it was clear he wasn’t interested, so I focused on eating my scone. I was nearly finished with it when Gary suddenly let out a guttural sound of annoyance.
“Disgusting,” he said.
“What is?” I asked.
“Some asshole threw white paint on the wall.”
“What wall?” I asked.
He frowned at me above the paper. “The wall,” he said. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial?”
“Oh,” I said. “Where is that?”
He set the paper on the table next to his empty plate and stared at me. “Tell me you’re kidding,” he said, and I knew this was definitely something I should know.
“I just … I forget exactly where it is.”
He shook his head slowly, his eyes narrowed to slits. “That’s exactly the problem with this country,” he said. “People your age don’t give a shit about the past. About history. About the sacrifices my generation made so you could sit here in this pretty inn and be ignorant.” His nostrils flared. “Do you know anything about the war in Vietnam?” he asked. “Anything at all?”
I was trembling, shaken by his outburst, and trying to hold in what I wanted to say. Yes, I know about the war! I wanted to shout. I know even better than you do what it cost. I was tired of keeping so much of myself hidden. If I stayed in 2013, this would be my life. I’d always be tiptoeing around the truth, unable to be open about who I really was.
“My uncle died in Vietnam,” I said, turning Joe into an uncle I’d never had the chance to know.
The vet’s eyes widened. “Where was he?” he asked. “What year?”
“Pleiku,” I said, wondering if it seemed weird that I didn’t know about “the wall” but I knew exactly where my “uncle” had been struck down. “Nineteen sixty-nine.”
“Damn.” He sat back from the table and studied me. “Then you should know about the wall, little girl,” he said. “Your uncle’s name is on it.”
“His name is…?” I pictured a white wall in a museum covered with small engraved placards bearing the names of fallen soldiers.
“Yes,” he said, and he picked up the paper, folded it in half, and handed it to me. “That picture there at the top,” he said. “The wall. In Washington, D.C.”
It was hard to tell what I was looking at in the black-and-white photograph. I guessed it was a section of the wall he was talking about. It was gray or maybe black, and appeared to be outdoors. It looked as though a bucket of milk had been tossed over it.
“My uncle’s name is on this wall?” I asked.
“If he was killed in Vietnam, yes, ma’am.”
My heart pounded as I got to my feet and handed the paper back to him.
“You’re right,” I said, already halfway out of the room. “I need to learn about the wall.”
* * *
I raced through my work that morning and when I took Winnie’s car to buy groceries, I stopped first at the library. I sat down at one of the computers and typed “The Vietnam Wall” into Google. Hundreds of websites popped up. I read about the wall’s creation. The controversy over the design, which seemed to go on for years. There were photographs of it, and it took me a minute to realize that what I first thought was a design in the glossy stone was actually engraved names. Your uncle’s name is on it, Gary had said.
Oh my God. Joe’s name was on a monument in Washington, D.C.
I folded my hands together. Pressed them to my lips. I needed to see his name. Touch his name.
I read on. People came from all over to make rubbings of their loved one’s name on the wall, the article said. Could I make a rubbing of Joe’s name? Something I could keep with me always?
I pushed away from the computer. Sitting back in my chair, I shut my eyes, not caring if anyone noticed that I had moved far, far away from the library and Summit, New Jersey.
I wanted to see Joe’s name.
I had Monday and Tuesday off. I would go then.
I only wished I could take Joanna with me. I wished I could point to Joe’s name on that glossy black wall and say to her, “This is your father.”
I wished I could tell Joanna everything.
54
Mom says to ask can you come to dinner tonight.
I was walking down the stairs for breakfast the following morning when the text came from Joanna, and I stopped and leaned against the bannister. I read the few words over and over again, loving that she’d written to me, even if it had been at Michelle’s request. And that in and of itself—Michelle asking me to join her family for dinner, as a guest, not as a babysitter or a provider of exercise for their dog—warmed my heart and gave me hope.
Love to, I texted back.
There’s something funny.
What was she talking abou
t? Something funny about me? Were they on to me? But seriously, how could anybody possibly be on to me?
Funny? I texted. It took me so long to text just that one word along with the question mark. I envied Joanna for how her fingers flew over the keys on her phone.
You’ll see.
What time?
Hold on … She says 6:30.
See you then, I wrote, a big smile on my face.
* * *
After work, I walked into town, thinking I’d pick up some candy or something to take to the Van Dykes’ tonight. With Joanna there, a bottle of wine wouldn’t be appropriate. I was stewing over what to get when I noticed a tiny store tucked between a tailor shop and a shoe store. FRESH BARKED BISTRO. I’d seen the shop before and always read the small sign as FRESH BAKED BISTRO. Now I clearly saw that it read BARKED and there was a poster of a dog in the window. On a whim, I went inside, where I discovered a bakery devoted to pets. I couldn’t begin to imagine such a thing in 1970. I spent half an hour admiring all the treats displayed in glass-fronted cases, as if this was a regular bakery. In the end, I bought a pretty display box with four adorable peanut-butter treats shaped and iced like a penguin, a cat, an owl, and a turtle. I hoped it made sense that my hostess gift was for Jobs and that I wasn’t committing some major social faux pas.
With that errand taken care of, I stopped in a drugstore and bought a simple gold frame for the photograph of Joanna and me. I smiled as I imagined slipping the picture into the frame and placing it on the dresser in my little attic room. I’d see it when I woke up every morning.
The Dream Daughter: A Novel Page 32