Child of a Rainless Year

by Lindskold, Jane

  “Are you staying here tonight?” Betty asked as she was heading out the door.

  “No. I’ll go home. Too many ghosts here. I’ll be back tomorrow though.”

  “Call me,” Betty said. “Especially if you get lonely. Remember, the only ghosts here are memories, and with Stan and May, they’ll be good memories.”

  I smiled weakly. “I know. That’s what keeps undoing me.”

  I left a few minutes later, taking with me the box containing Aunt May’s journals. I didn’t want to read them just yet, but I felt responsible for them. It wouldn’t do to have her private thoughts sitting around out and available to any of the friends and neighbors I knew would be helping me over the next few days. What if the box was bundled off to some charity by accident? I shivered a little at the thought.

  I met with the estate’s executors a few days later. After they finished running over what had been done, what still needed to be done, and the like, Mr. Patterson, the lawyer, cleared his throat.

  “There’s only one thing left, Mira. We found out something rather surprising when we were going through Stan’s papers. It seems that your trust from your mother contained one item he chose not to let you know about.”

  “What?”

  I meant this as an expression of surprise, but Mr. Patterson took it as a request for information.

  “It seems that your mother owned a house and some property in New Mexico. This came to you along with her other assets.”

  I blinked, remembering the tall, Victorian house on the treelined street.

  “It must be a ruin, by now,” I said, “if it wasn’t sold for taxes long ago.”

  “Actually not,” replied Mr. O’Neill, the accountant. “It seems that although Stan didn’t want you to know about the house, he took care to make certain it remained your own. He established an escrow account that covered taxes and repairs. Then, for reasons that I cannot fathom, he chose not to note the existence of this account in the otherwise meticulous documentation of your trust. The annual review of your trust also never mentions this, making me believe that someone at that time must have agreed to this connivance.”

  Mr. Patterson nodded, “Agreed to it—maybe even suggested it.”

  “Whatever the reason,” Mr. O’Neill said, “the house not only still exists, but remains yours. We have made several phone calls and ascertained that the property is in good condition. A photo was e-mailed to us at our request.”

  He pushed a glossy printout over to me, and I fumbled for it, not really seeing what was there for a long moment. Then I focused and saw a multi-storied Victorian standing behind a wrought-iron fence. It was painted pale grey with subdued rose-colored trim on the closed shutters.

  “It should be white,” I said, not aware I was speaking aloud until I did so. “And the shutters should also be white.”

  “You remember it then?” Mr. O’Neill asked, interested.

  “I do,” I said. I pointed to one of the windows on the ground floor. “That was the front parlor. The library was directly behind it. My room was on the second floor, around the back, where it overlooked the garden.”

  I had been sitting in the front parlor the day my last tutor had walked by without seeing me. I had often sat there to do my homework, preferring the comfort of the deep window seat to the formality of a desk.

  “I still own it?” I asked, hardly believing it. “Is it still furnished?”

  “As far as we can tell,” Mr. Patterson said, shuffling papers uncomfortably, “it should be so. There is no record of a sale of the furnishings. Of course, a house vacant for so long …”

  I nodded.

  “Of course. Doubtless there has been some theft. Well, this is certainly interesting. Will the escrow account continue now that Uncle Stan is gone?”

  Mr. O’Neill replied, “It should. After all, the estate has been wholly in your name for thirty years now. You will want to notify various parties that you will be administering it instead of Stanley Fenn, that’s all.”

  I noticed that he did not volunteer to take over, nor did Mr. Patterson. I thought there was a reason beyond neither of them particularly wanting to come out of retirement. The appearance of the old house after all these years as part of an estate they had thought they understood had unsettled them both far more than they cared to admit.

  Why had Uncle Stan never told me? Had he been kept from the subject by my reluctance to have anything to do with my mother’s estate? Had he been afraid I’d run off and live in New Mexico? I didn’t know and now I couldn’t ask, but between Aunt May’s journals with whatever secrets they contained, and this, I was feeling rather like I had never known either of the Fenns at all. It was not a good feeling on top of my grief and bereavement. I wanted to keep them green in memory, just as I had always known them, not to feel them transforming—and in that transformation growing more distant.

  4

  Almost any Spanish-American will take time to tell you how a resident of Ledoux, near Mora, turned into a frog overnight, that a Frenchman, loaded with gold, lost his way near the same and buried it there; or of the Spanish explorers trapped and starved to death on Starvation Peak just seventeen miles south of Las Vegas; and the miracles of the Hermit of El Porvenir.

  —Milton W. Callon,

  Las Vegas, New Mexico .

  The Town That Wouldn’t Gamble

  INSIDE THE LINES

  Aunt May and Uncle Stan had been popular members of our community, nor was I without a wealth of friends and acquaintances of my own. In a remarkably short time, I had my parents’ personal items cleared from the house. Mr. Patterson and Mr. O’Neill had dealt with the estate—an easy enough task as Uncle Stan had not believed in carrying debt. The house was paid for long ago, and his retirement had been generous enough that they had not been forced to take a reverse mortgage. Had they lived long enough that nursing care or other medical necessity had entered the picture, doubtless it would have been otherwise.

  As it was, a month after my parents’ deaths, the bulk of the problems were resolved, and I found myself sitting in the kitchen with Betty Boswell sharing a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of her excellent vanilla wafers.

  “Have you decided what you’re going to do with this place, Mira?” she asked.

  “You mean sell it or not?” I said.

  She nodded. “We have a nephew who is thinking of moving into the area, and, well …”

  “I don’t know,” I replied honestly. “I have my own house, and it’s closer to the schools where I work, but it’s not like anything is exactly far in this town. This place is bigger, however, and in good condition—and it would be a wrench to sell it.”

  “Ah,” Betty said. She didn’t look at all disappointed, and I made a mental note to see if this nephew really materialized, or if this had just been a polite way to fish for information.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m thinking about running away from all of this for a while.”

  “Oh?” Betty didn’t look at all surprised. If anything, she looked pleased. I wondered if she had something she wanted to run away from.

  “School’s out for another couple of months,” I went on, “and I’m not teaching in any of the summer programs. I’d planned on it, but Aunt May and Uncle Stan died right about when I’d have had to start. I just didn’t have the energy.”

  Betty knew this. She’d actually been among those who had advised me to take time off, but she nodded as if this was the first she’d heard of it.

  “I was thinking about a long trip,” I said. “I don’t have any pets right now. My two old guys died this spring, as you know, and I’d been planning on getting a couple kittens or a puppy this summer, when I’d have time to settle them in. Now, though …”

  I stopped, swallowed hard, and dashed almost irritably at the tears running down my cheeks.

  “Betty, I’m tired. Everything here is too full of memories and my life is too empty. I don’t have anyone now—I mean, I have friends, lots of fri
ends, good friends, but there isn’t anyone I can’t leave for a few months. Heck, with e-mail it won’t even be like I’m gone. I want to get away. Then when everything doesn’t hurt so much, then I can make some decisions.”

  “Where are you thinking of going?” Betty asked. “Back to Europe?”

  I’d been on a Rhine cruise the summer before, me and Aunt May and Uncle Stan.

  “No. Too soon. I want to go somewhere I haven’t been for a long, long time. I’m thinking of going to New Mexico.”

  “New Mexico?” Betty tilted her head to one side in thoughtful surprise. “Didn’t May tell me that was where you were born?”

  “That’s right. I haven’t been back since I was nine. I was thinking about it the other night, and I realized that I haven’t even been much west of the Mississippi. Uncle Stan took us to California a few times, and once to Oregon, but never the Southwest. It’s a great place for an art teacher to go—I’m sure I’ll come back full of new ideas and projects.”

  Betty wasn’t fooled. “You’ve lost your parents and now you’re looking for your roots, aren’t you?”

  “Maybe,” I admitted. “You know I’m their adopted daughter, but did they ever tell you why I was available for adoption?”

  “No, just that you were an answer to their prayers—a girl needing a home when they’d accepted they were unlikely to have children of their own.”

  I smiled at the familiar words, then sobered.

  “My biological mother vanished when I was nine. I never knew who my father was. I still don’t know whether either of them are alive. Maybe it’s not so much that I’m looking for my roots—Aunt May and Uncle Stan gave me lots of good soil for settling those—I’m looking for an answer or two.”

  Betty’s next words seemed like she was changing the subject.

  “Have you read May’s journals?”

  “I looked at the most recent one,” I hedged, “but I think I’ll need to start at the beginning. She made some references to things she wrote earlier.”

  Actually, it was because I couldn’t even look at that familiar handwriting without tearing up that I hadn’t read further, but I couldn’t make myself admit my weakness.

  “Take them with you,” Betty urged, and I saw she hadn’t been changing the subject at all. “If you’re looking for answers, maybe May had some of them, and didn’t—or couldn’t—tell you.”

  I frowned at her. “Did she tell you that?”

  “Not precisely, but once she did say that Stan wanted to focus on the present with you—not on the past. She didn’t precisely agree, but as you seemed so happy, she had decided to respect his wishes.”

  I thought about the house I hadn’t known I owned, the escrow account, and slowly nodded. “Yes. I can see that. I’ll take the journals with me, then.”

  “Good,” Betty said. “Don’t forget, even grandmothers have e-mail these days. Keep in touch.”

  I smiled at her. “I will.”

  I decided to drive to New Mexico. Freedom to go where I wished and move at my own pace was only part of the reason. I have a not-so-secret vice. I’m a scrounger.

  It’s actually not a bad trait for an art teacher these days, when budget cuts have reduced the budget for nonessential electives like art. (Though I do wonder that budget can be found for computers costing thousands of dollars, and in-classroom television monitors, but not for drawing pads and colored pencils.) As I’ve mentioned, I teach at three different schools, just a few days a week at each one. Even with the savings that gives the system, I’m continually pinched for supplies. We’re encouraged to tell the students to bring in their own, but that only goes so far.

  So I scrounge. Some of the stuff is fairly usual—milk jugs, cardboard, aluminum cans, newspaper, old magazines. Other is a bit stranger: parts from discarded toys, broken glass, odds and sods of lumber, old clothes. You can find interesting things at Goodwill or the Salvation Army, too. But practicality or potential recyclability isn’t the unifying factor in what catches my eye—I Dumpster dive for color.

  Plastic is about the best—scraps in brilliant, impossible hues, often twisted into very strange shapes. Fuchsia. Screaming green. Neon orange. Magenta. Fabric can be a good source of odd colors, too, as can the glossy paper used in advertisements.

  The current trend in education is toward helping each student feel good about him or herself: validated, empowered, whatever. That means the sort of fussy requirements for perfection that my own art teacher could impose on her better students is not considered acceptable. My own students do a lot of collages, mosaics, papier-mâché figures. I’m also encouraged to assign projects that can serve more than one purpose. Posters or banners to illustrate various issues are always popular with the administration, as is work on stage sets or costumes.

  My scrounging loot comes in handy for all of these. I knew I’d just about go crazy on a long trip where I had to leave goodies behind, so, ignoring the probable cost of gasoline, I had the garage give my two-year-old, fire-engine-red pickup truck a thorough going-over, loaded my bags into the back beneath the camper shell, and hit the road. Almost at the last minute, I added in the metal box containing Aunt May’s journals.

  I didn’t look at the journals the first few nights, but somewhere in Kentucky, I discovered that the novel I’d picked up at a thrift shop had good reason for having been consigned to oblivion. It had one of those annoying plots that wouldn’t work at all if the heroine weren’t both optimistic and dumber than a box of rocks. I chucked it at the wall in annoyance, considered trying the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, then permitted myself to acknowledge the metal box.

  Reluctantly, I heaved myself off the bed, my hand fishing in my pocket for the key I’d carried just about everywhere with me since Mrs. Boswell had given it to me. I slipped it in the lock, and for only the second time since I’d been given the box lifted the lid and looked inside.

  Now, as before, I was struck not by how many journals there were, but how few. There were only twenty or so volumes, none terribly thick. Nor was Aunt May’s handwriting so tiny that she crammed volumes onto each page. Surely if she had been keeping these journals her entire life, as Betty Boswell had seemed to think, then there would be more.

  I’d already identified that the journals were stacked so that the first in the sequence was at the bottom of the left stack. Now I took it out. The cover was puffy, lightly quilted, and covered with a pale pink fabric. The years of storage away from light had preserved its attractive sheen. On the front cover the word “Diary” was printed in gold, in a loopy script. A tiny lock clasped the cover shut, but an equally tiny key attached to the cover with a bit of pink yarn opened it. The volume fell open as I pressed on the minute latch.

  The entry was dated shortly before I had come to live with the Fenns. I stopped before reading, checked other volumes, but this was indeed the first. I frowned. Had Betty misunderstood? Or had Aunt May deliberately misled her? Or was there another box of journals somewhere? I thought I’d gone through every closet, box, and cabinet, even opening trunks in the attic that were so heavily coated in dust that it was clear they hadn’t been opened for decades.

  I continued frowning as I stared down at the slightly yellowed page, and the first words resolved my confusion—even as they added to it.

  “For the first time in my life, I have decided to keep a diary. So much is happening now, so much I need to remember as it happens, not confused by time’s passage. This is where I will begin.”

  I read and reread the words, as if I expected them to change. Then I accepted what I’d known from the start. Even if there had been a journal that started back when Aunt May was a girl, within a volume or two, I would have skipped to this very point—to the point where I entered the story of Aunt May’s life. It was an egotistical admission, but true. In the privacy of that motel room with its generic layout and generic furnishings I felt safe admitting it.

  Yes. I wanted to know about Aunt May, but even more I wanted—ne
eded—to know about myself. Ever since my twenty-first birthday I had felt a niggling suspicion that Uncle Stan had been holding something back. Learning of my continued ownership of the house in New Mexico had confirmed that suspicion without giving me the least reason why he should have done so. These books might hold the answer.

  Even so, I delayed a little more, making coffee in the tiny two-cup pot provided by the motel management, fishing out the bag of dark chocolates I’d bought at a grocery store earlier that day. Then, with a fragrant mug of steaming coffee set on the bedside table and the bag of chocolates near my right hand, I again opened the journal.

  COLORING OUTSIDE THE LINES