Above The Thunder

by Renee Manfredi

  “No. Don’t. I want to be alone.”

  “Let me help you,” Anna said. “Let me be with you.”

  “You can’t help me. You can’t possibly understand.”

  “I’m a mother, too.”

  “You’re a mother who never wanted her child. I want my child. Dead or alive, she’s my daughter.” Greta hung up.

  Anna took a deep breath. She was so ready for this day to be over. She dialed Greta’s home number and left an updated message for Mike on their machine. The bastard. Greta would be better off without him.

  She crept back into Flynn’s room. The girl hadn’t stirred. Anna sat and watched her as she slept, the soft light of the Christmas candles spilling over Flynn’s gorgeous face. Anna imagined that Flynn must have been a beautiful baby, a Botticelli angel with her dark curls, round, dimpled face, and deeply pigmented bow lips. Only Poppy had those lips; probably a recessive gene. Every now and then Anna caught a glimpse of her father’s family arranging themselves in Flynn’s expressions. A certain intensity in her look, a pursed half-smile that Anna was sure belonged to her great-grandfather, a tailor in Poland, though she had never seen more than a blurry photo of the man. One of these days she’d go through her things—assuming she still had all those old boxes—and kick up the dust on the family relics, talk to Flynn about her Jewish heritage, her Ashkenazi bloodlines. Though what did she know of it? Her father, the Jewish Buddhist, had responded to Anna’s adolescent questioning: “We are of the Ashkenazi strain, the tribe of rabbis and scholars. The Sephardic Jews are rug sellers and general nose-pickers. That’s all I know, that’s all you need to know.” Maybe she would enroll Flynn in Hebrew classes at a synagogue. The dear doomed child, Anna thought, then alarmed herself by wondering why that phrase popped in her head.

  Flynn’s costume had dirt all along the hem. Her shoes were caked with mud, as were her fingernails, Anna saw now. She’d wake her when Marvin got back, fix dinner and run her a hot bath. She bent down to look at the old crèche. Flynn had put one of her CDs under the kneeling figures of Mary and Joseph, the wise men behind them. Anna stared at the scene. There was a calf in the manger where the baby Jesus was supposed to be. The light hit the wise men in a peculiar way, making their faces look black, their teeth too white. Then Anna saw that the wise men were black and they were grinning from ear to ear. She picked one of them up. Flynn had cut out the faces of the Pips from the liner notes on the Gladys Knight CD and taped them onto the faces of the magi. Gladys Knight’s face, also grinning, shone down on the holy family, recast as the Angel of the Lord.

  Anna touched Flynn’s back. She stirred and turned over but didn’t wake. Anna would let her sleep until dinner, though it was already nearing eight o’clock. She should have asked Marvin to pick up a pizza on his way back.

  Anna poured herself a brandy, walked into her bedroom and flipped on the Bose radio she and Flynn had bought together last week, along with two dozen or more CDs from the ’70s. Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” played quietly now. Anna didn’t much care for Greenbaum, didn’t like his heavily synthesized sound, but it was one of Flynn’s favorites, and because Flynn slept with Anna most nights, this was the song that awoke them in the morning. Anna hit the skip button, loaded up the compilation CD, the one with Frankie Vallee’s “You’re Just Too Good to be True,” her own favorite, the one she sang to Flynn sometimes to lull her to sleep. She turned back the bedcovers, saw something centered on her pillow. A clod of dirt and a tiny shoe, the silver shoe from the Monopoly game—where in the world did Flynn find that? Anna hadn’t played the game in twenty years or more. The last time was in Maine, where she and Hugh used to play occasionally with the radiologist and his wife who came up for weekends. Hugh had always chosen the shoe as his piece. But it wasn’t the Monopoly shoe at all, she saw now, peering closer. It was a wadded-up gum wrapper. And the clods of dirt were twigs arranged as stick figures. Anna’s scalp began to crawl. She picked up one of the little sticks, knotty, peeled, cold as a kneecap, and before she knew why or what drove her to it, she was downstairs and in the backyard, moving across the lawn with a flashlight. The same shallow holes Flynn had been digging for nearly two months. But there was something eerily unnatural out here. Feverish chills moved through her, a heat pouring in from the top, a cold pressing in from the sides. She shone the light on the bistro table. The beam caught Flynn’s optometrist’s goggles and glinted off the lenses. Underneath the table was a blue tarp, covered by branches. Anna moved everything aside and nearly fell in what was surely a hole deep enough for a coffin. She sat at the edge of it, pointed her light at the depths. There was a CD case all the way at the bottom. This was one of those moments when she needed her husband, needed him to tell her what to do, to help her figure all this out. What was wrong with this girl? What was Anna supposed to do with a child like this?

  Anna went back in the house and shook Flynn gently until she opened her eyes.

  “Gladys?” Flynn said, then more alertly, “Oh, it’s you. My cherished grandma.”

  Anna cut her eyes to the crèche beside Flynn, saw dirt all over the figures that she hadn’t noticed before. “I have an answer for you. From the which-would-you-rather game.”

  “Okay,” Flynn said, wide-awake now.

  “It is always better to tell the truth. Regardless of how it appears to anyone else or worrying about what they’ll think of you. You should never hide. Never hide the things that make you who you are.”

  “Okay,” Flynn said.

  “Promise me, Flynn,” Anna said, but the minute Flynn said the words Anna’s sense of dread grew stronger instead of dissipating and she wondered if it was a mistake, a terrible error to extract such a promise from a child like Flynn. She had overreacted, only wanted her granddaughter to tell her why she was digging a hiding place for herself in the backyard. The truth—whatever Anna meant by it, and she didn’t quite know now—was likely to deliver her granddaughter into the hands of the enemy.

  “Did Greta’s baby die?” Flynn said, looking off into space.

  “Yes,” Anna said.

  “Was it a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  Flynn nodded, watched the fear move like a storm across her grandmother’s face and didn’t say anything else. She watched Anna walk out of the room then looked at the Pips in the little house barn beside her. They had been singing to her sweetly all day, in the sad echoes of Pips without their Gladys. Deep down in the hole, just a minute or two it seemed after she left Greta, who was on the couch eating Lu’s Little Schoolboy cookies and watching reruns of “Unsolved Mysteries,” the awful boy Jeremy with his greasy boy-madness and corn chip smell was telling her to get out of there, come inside because he was supposed to babysit her. Greta was having her baby too soon, did she understand that? Of course she understood. She climbed out, the Pips’ voices in her head, telling her to help Greta’s baby, help herself, to look in her grandmother’s hall closet. That was where she found Joseph and Mary and the others, and the Pips told her to put them in the holy place of the house barn. Her grandmother woke her up from a dream of them, where they no longer had to be poor Pips, always singing backup, but now sang right along with Gladys, all of them singing every word to “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” In Flynn’s dream they were life-size, and growing, no longer miniature underground creatures lost since the 1970s, but big happy men with beautiful robes. Now, they told her, grinning, we’re Pips and we’re Wise Men. Do you know how special that makes us? Flynn said she didn’t. Do you know what you get when you cross a Pip with a Wise Man? They lifted her up to sit in one of their giant palms. Their eyes were the size of Alaska lakes. “We, young lady, are Whips. We three thank you. We three praise you.” Then they looked up at the sky and said, “We together are three. Together three are ye. Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy. Gladys have mercy.”

  Flynn put her shoes on and went out to Anna in the living room. “My mother called,” Flynn said.

  “What?” Anna said.<
br />
  “My mother. Poppy. She called me.”

  Anna put her cello down. “You’re sure you weren’t just dreaming?”

  “No. She called from Nevada. She won’t be coming here.” Flynn stared straight ahead.

  “Did she leave a number?”

  Flynn shook her head. Anna checked the caller ID printout on the phone. There was a number with a 702 prefix, possibly Nevada. She hit the DIAL/SEND button and was connected to the Rippling Sands Hotel. “Does your mother use her maiden name or her married one?”

  Flynn frowned. “She was never a maid. The awfulest job she had was working at Kmart.”

  Anna asked for Poppy Blender’s room. Anna’s heart leapt in her throat when her daughter picked up. “What are you doing in Nevada?” Anna said.

  “Mother?” Poppy said.

  “Yes,” Anna said. “Are you planning to come to Boston anytime soon?”

  “I miss Flynn.”

  Anna looked at Flynn, who stared straight ahead, with her arms crossed. “Do you want to talk to her?” Anna said to Poppy.

  “She won’t talk to me. I tried earlier.”

  “Flynn, do you want to speak to your mother?”

  “No, thank you,” the girl said, and walked back to her room.

  “She’s sleepy, I guess. I woke her when I got home.” Anna listened to Poppy’s heavy breathing, a labored asthmatic wheeze. “Well, then. What are your plans? For reclaiming your family, I mean.”

  Anna positioned her cello, cradled the phone between her chin and neck, and fingered the first two bars of Haydn’s D Major Concerto, as physically strenuous as the Rachmaninoff.

  “I’m still trying to get my head straight.”

  Anna snorted. “In the meantime, everything else is spinning and up in the air.”

  “As far as what?”

  “As far as what. Your daughter is obsessed with death. Marvin walks around here like he’s in a fugue state.” She picked up her bow and began playing softly to give herself something to listen to besides Poppy’s crying. She always did know how to turn on the waterworks. It had worked with her father, but never with Anna; genuine emotion rarely traveled through the tear ducts, in Anna’s estimation. “You should call again after Flynn has settled in fully. She and Marvin will probably be here for a few more weeks. And, meanwhile, if Flynn wants to talk to you, how can she get hold of you?”

  Poppy gave her a cell phone number. Anna scribbled it at the top of the Haydn.

  Anna hung up, went to Flynn, who was face down on her bed, still in her costume. The dress was too small; the wings met at the center of her back and were straining inward with the pull of the seams. She untied Flynn’s red hightops and eased them off, thought about carrying Flynn into her bedroom for the night, but decided not to disturb her. She’d wake and drift in sometime during the night on her own. Anna rubbed Flynn’s back gently. Maybe she did want to wake her. Maybe she wanted Flynn in bed beside her, as was becoming their custom, especially after this hellish day. As soon as Marvin came home she’d have him carry Flynn in to her.

  In the living room, Anna sat in the dark and played Brahms’ lullaby from memory. The soothing coil of eighth-notes was like a silk robe that barely skimmed the body. The feeling of being wrapped and enclosed without tactile pressure. An amniotic floating.

  She stopped when she heard a car slow outside. She looked. Her car, Marvin finally pulling into the driveway. Anna turned on the lights.

  “Where did that boy live, Rhode Island?” Anna said, when Marvin walked in. She meant it to be light and teasing, but her voice sounded even to her own ears shrill and schoolmarmish.

  He sighed, then, perhaps in response to something in her face or as an acknowledgment of her difficult day, bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Thank you. I probably needed that.”

  “How’s Greta?” He sat on the couch opposite her.

  “She’s devastated. The baby died.” Anna rosined her bow. “Your wife called.”

  He looked over at her, then away, down at the covers of the magazines on the coffee table.

  “Poppy called.”

  He picked up one of the magazines. “I heard you.”

  She positioned her cello, pretended to study the Rachmaninoff in front of her. “She was pretty upset.”

  “Anna,” he said, then let out a nervous laugh.

  She looked up.

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  Anna began to bow through the opening bars of the fifth symphony in earnest. “I’m not mad. But I also had a lot to deal with here while you disappeared for three hours.”

  “You asked me to. You asked me to drive the boy home.”

  Anna let the bow drop, her cello collapse against her. “I happen to know Jeremy lives on West Canton. A five-minute drive. I know where you were. I know what you were doing.”

  “Oh, you think?”

  “You were flirting with that girl all through the meeting. Which would have been inappropriate even if you weren’t still married, since she was distracted from what she was supposed to be doing.”

  “Anna,” he said quietly. “There’s nothing going on. I met her for coffee. That’s all.”

  “That’s your business, I suppose. Anyway, I’ve had enough confrontation for one day.”

  “I know. I’m sorry your day was so rough.” He pulled an envelope out of his jacket and handed it to her.

  “What’s this?”

  “A gift certificate to a day spa. I figured you could use a little pampering.”

  “Marvin, sometimes you leave me dumbstruck,” Anna said, and paused. “This is unexpected and lovely. Thank you.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Out of the corner of her eye Anna saw Flynn leave her room and stumble sleepily toward Anna’s bedroom. Anna’s world righted itself once again. Her muscles unclenched, loosened their tight bands of tension.

  “Anna, I just wanted to say, Christine and I just went to Starbucks and talked, that’s all.”

  “Okay.”

  “There’s nothing going on.”

  “I heard you,” she said, and squared her sheet music. “I heard you twice the first time.”

  NINE

  HEAVENLY BODIES

  Anna awoke early on Thanksgiving morning to the first snowfall of the season. Flynn, in bed beside her, had had a nightmare that kept the two of them up for hours. Marvin had slept through the 3:00 A.M. chaos, of course. Flynn never asked for him anyway when she woke up screaming and terrified. Anna felt partly responsible for Flynn’s haunted nights, which had intensified since Anna, a month ago, insisted that her granddaughter attend school.

  Marvin and Poppy had home-schooled their daughter in Alaska, but it was apparent that neither one of them paid much attention to whether or not the child was actually learning anything. When Anna discovered Flynn’s bizarre sense of distance and geography—she knew Mars was a planet, for instance, but thought it was part of Minneapolis—she was furious at Marvin for his negligence.

  When Anna had asked Flynn to name the nine planets, Flynn said, “Earth. India. Asia. Indiana, Mars, Venus. California, the moon, and the space shuttle.” Anna had taken Flynn to the elementary school the next day for a meeting with the principal and to talk about grade placement. At ten, Flynn should have been in the fifth grade, but given Flynn’s lack of formal schooling, Anna hoped for a remedial fourth-grade placement. To Anna’s astonishment, the test results that came back from the Educational Testing Services ten days later showed that Flynn was indeed lacking in basic knowledge, but she read at the ninth-grade level, and had an advanced grasp of mathematics, “consistent with what a bright high-schooler would know.”

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like this,” the young female principal had said going over Flynn’s results with Anna. “Total population of the United States, according to Flynn, is two thousand.” She chuckled. “But she’s in the ninety-ninth percentile for math and reading comprehension, and she appears to be gift
ed musically.”

  “Oh,” Anna had said. “Really?”

  The principal nodded. “On a hunch, I had the music teacher talk to her and test her musical aptitude. What instrument does Flynn play?”

  Anna shook her head. “I don’t think she plays anything.”

  “Well, she should. She has perfect pitch.”

  All this had baffled Anna. Neither Poppy nor Marvin had ever given her music lessons.

  “How do you know all this, Flynn?” Anna asked, when they went out for Belgian waffles after Anna’s meeting. “Who taught you to read?”

  “What do you mean?” Flynn heaped her waffle with berries and chocolate and signaled the waiter who was standing at the ready with the can of whipped cream.

  Anna was tickled by this. Flynn took her food seriously, in ways that Poppy—and Anna herself—never had. “How do you know the things you know? How do you know about music?”

  “I was born with it. I just remembered from other times. Other places I’ve been before I was here.”

  Anna dismissed Flynn’s chatter. She was delighted that Flynn tested into her age-appropriate grade, with weekly, remedial classes in geography and American history. Inexplicably, her knowledge of world history was at a very high level.

  Yet, she didn’t like school, she told Anna right from the start. Didn’t like being told what to do and when to do it, and the other kids teased her. She hadn’t made any friends in the month she’d been enrolled.

  A few nights earlier, when Anna was getting ready for bed she found a note on her bathroom mirror in what was clearly an intentional childish scrawl: “No buddy likes me.” Anna took it down and wrote at the bottom: “Some buddy does” and tucked it into Flynn’s lunch bag the next day.

  Anna looked over at Flynn now, finally asleep at four in the morning after being up most of the night. She left the bedroom and tiptoed out into the hallway. There were noises coming from Marvin’s room, low murmuring voices, the unmistakable sounds of lovers trying to be quiet. Her heart started to pound. For a minute she believed it was Poppy. Wanted to believe, anyway, that her daughter had sneaked home in the middle of the night to surprise her. But she saw the jacket on the back of the chair and she knew whose it was. Marvin claimed not to have seen Christine since the night they’d met for coffee, but she’d overheard him on the phone a time or two, caught snippets of conversation that indicated he was seeing her. And Anna had specifically requested that Marvin not invite overnight female guests.