The Story of You and Me

by DuMond, Pamela

  He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. When he re-opened them, he appeared sane.

  “Okay,” he said. “If you recall, I had a rotator cuff injury on that arm you’re yanking on and I’d really appreciate it if you stopped doing that.”

  “Sorry.” I patted his shoulder.

  “Much better.”

  The man regarded us. “I didn’t come here for a fight, sir. I spotted your daughter and, well, I have a teenager. Stuff happens. I just wanted to make sure she was okay.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” Dad replied. “I apologize.”

  “No worries.” The man turned and continued down the ramp.

  Dad wrapped his arms around me and squeezed so hard I coughed. “You’re catching a cold! You shouldn’t have come here.” He wiped a tear from his eye. “Darn, now I’m catching that cold.”

  I hugged him back. Was this the first time we really connected since Mama disappeared? Dad smoothed my hair, over and over. It felt strange coming from him. But it also felt really good. “What were you thinking?” he asked.

  “I thought if I came back here, talked to Mama... Maybe I could find a way to remember?”

  “You don’t need to remember,” he said. “I’m glad you don’t remember. I can’t lose anyone else right now.” He pulled off his jean jacket and handed it to me. “Put this on before you catch pneumonia.”

  “You will never lose me,” I said. “As long as we can order Joey’s Pizza Super Combo Deluxe for dinner. Extra large so Sophie and Jane can have some.”

  He frowned. “Ack, Joey’s! White flour carbohydrates topped with decrepit vegetables with zero nutritional value and do you even remember what I told you about how they kill cows?” We walked the few feet to his car and he opened the passenger door. “Jane has a sleepover and Sophie’s leaving for a business trip.”

  “Again?” I asked.

  “Yes. But we decided. You’re getting your big present tonight.” Dad pulled his cell out of his pocket and made a call. “Pick-up. I want the insecticide pizza deluxe. Yes, I meant the super deluxe combo.” He pointed to me. “Happy? Get in.”

  Four

  I slumped in a spindly antique hand-carved wooden chair in my parents’ study. I managed to catch Sophie before she headed out on yet another business trip. She gave me a big hug and a smooch on my cheek. She was more affectionate toward me right now than she was toward my dad.

  They were going through a rough patch. Arguing about how much time Sophie was out of town for work. Dad was a chiropractor and his business, like many small businesses, was a little slow right now. Sophie took every gig that would pay overtime.

  I felt awful, completely wiped out from today’s events. “I’m not hungry. Can I go? Can we do this tomorrow night?” I asked.

  “You will eat some pizza, absorb whatever nutrition can be garnered from that slop and be happy about it.” Dad kneeled on the floor, his head all the way under an antique desk. “Besides I am retrieving your present. And it’s a big one.”

  “I can stay ten more minutes.”

  “You’ll stay until I hand you your present.”

  I gnawed on a slice of pizza and looked around the room. It was pretty small, dusty and from what I remembered, used to be magical. That was when it was Mama’s office.

  As a kid I’d sit on the floor with a puzzle or a coloring book while she hunched over her desk, eyeglasses perched halfway down her nose squinting at her computer, shuffling through papers on her desk and writing on them. She’d get up and draw lines in different colors on huge white boards that leaned against the walls. Then she’d lean in and scribble words next to the lines.

  The last time I hung out in her office was when I was six. She was working away while I sprawled on a little throw carpet on the floor reading a new book.

  Dad hollered from down the hall, “Rebecca! Need some help for a second, please?”

  Mama looked up from the papers she was working on and headed toward the door. I hated for our time together to be over. “Are the lines for a new puzzle, Mama?”

  “Good question.” She hugged me. That felt so great I decided to ask good questions more often.

  “Rebecca!” Dad yelled.

  “Coming, Ray!” Mama smiled at me while I pouted. “I’m hoping all the lines I’m drawing will help me solve a very big puzzle. And soon, my gifted daughter Madeline, I will teach you what your piece of that puzzle is.” She caressed my hair, leaned in and kissed me on my forehead. Then she walked out of the room.

  “I’m a puzzle piece, Mama?” I yelled. “For real?” But she was gone.

  Ten years later, I picked on a piece of pizza in her former office. It was lined with bookshelves packed with books, papers, notebooks, boxes and a few framed photos covered in dust. Unlike the rest of our free-for-all aging hippie house, the door to this room was always locked. Being invited in here meant that it was a special occasion or a scary one. I was hoping for the former but after today, couldn’t rule out the latter.

  Dad knelt on the floor next to Mama’s old wooden desk that had too many drawers to count. A Joey’s pizza box rested next to it on a cheap card table specially set up for this event. A greasy pizza box would not be allowed to lie on Mama’s antique desk.

  I heard scrapes and scratches and a few cuss words as Dad fiddled with something. “Darn! It’s been so long since we last unlocked this thing. Sorry. It’s just not opening,” he said and jammed something that sounded metallic into the desk’s underbelly.

  “I think you need pizza. Sustenance.” I tore off a piece from the pie, put it on a paper towel and waved it around near the bottom of the desk.

  He twisted half his body around, poked his arm out and handed me an ancient, worn skeleton key. “Put that in the front desk drawer next to the paperclips.” He took the pizza and munched. “Thanks for the dreck. I’m starving.”

  He pulled a Swiss Army Knife out from his rear jeans pocket, flipped open one of those weird attachments and finagled it into the lock that lay underneath the desk.

  “Hello,” Dad said in a deep voice. “My name’s Dr Raymond Blackford, Chiropractor. Just like you, I bought every gadget imaginable. When I could have skipped all those useless tools and purchased the amazing Swiss Army Knife.”

  “We’ll Google Swiss Army Knives tomorrow and see if they’re looking for a new spokesman. I need to go work on my history assignment.” I bit my lip. “Stanley Preston’s threatening me.”

  “Stanley’s a bottom-feeder who’s a necessary evil for you to endure while attending Preston,” Dad said. “Try and stay on his good side. Sophie’s gone and she’s much better at dealing with that tool than I ever will be.”

  Wow, hell had frozen over because I think he got it. “So, I’m going to go and we’ll finish this gift giving thing tomorrow.” I stood up.

  “Park it.”

  I did. “If I don’t get my history thing done you get to tell Stanley Preston why,” I said. “I do not want to lose my grades, my scholarship or screw up college applications.”

  “Stanley Preston and his teeth scare me, sweetie. Besides it’s Friday. You have the entire weekend to do Piranha Man’s homework. Sophie and I debated whether if it was the right time to give this to you. Your mama wanted you to have this when you turned eighteen.”

  He pulled something rectangular and bulky covered in silks and other exotic fabrics out from under the desk and cradled it. “You were born a month premature.”

  I knew this story. I’d heard it a hundred times. It was like the retelling of Mary and Joseph’s trip to Bethlehem. “I know, Dad.”

  “Your mama was on bed rest for months, but that didn’t stop you from entering this world when you wanted to. I held you in the palm of my hand. You were tiny and so beautiful I was almost scared that you were not of this world.” He looked up at the ceiling and blinked back some tears. “My allergies again. This room is so dusty.”

  I offered him a napkin but he wouldn’t take it and wiped his eyes with his hand
. I stared at my gift. It was wrapped in crimson, purple, gold and silver fabrics.

  “I didn’t think you were ready for this but Sophie said you needed it now. So you decide, Maddie. Give me your gut answer. You’re good when you go with your gut.” He held this mysterious object in front of me. “Yes, or no?”

  There were words painted on the fabrics. Some I recognized but most were in different languages. Now I was more curious than tired. “I’m ready.” I held out my arms toward him, toward my present.

  “Ta-da!” He gingerly placed the gift into my arms.

  I placed it on my lap. The fabrics covering my present were amazing. Some of the silks were smooth as ice, others rough to the touch. Some of the cottons were fuzzy like they’d just been picked from a bush. What languages were all these words in? French, Italian, Aramaic?

  “It’s so pretty. I almost hate to…” Suddenly I felt like an archeologist who wanted to explore the outside before discovering the inside of a mysterious site. But I couldn’t wait one second longer and started to unwind the fabrics and tossed them to the side.

  “Careful Maddie,” Dad said. “Your mama collected those fabrics from all over the globe, different artists, time periods. They’re most likely priceless at this point and worth more than your present, so don’t discard them. You can make some cash selling them on eBay some day.”

  The present sat half unwrapped in my lap, the fabrics spilling toward the floor. I could see something underneath with pictures, foreign words, painted symbols, and decoupaged photos. I tried my best to carefully unwrap the rest of the fabrics. And revealed a big beautiful handmade leather bound scrapbook.

  It was thick. I opened the cover. The pages didn’t lie flat. I turned them carefully. They were filled with memorabilia, trinkets and notations in English as well as foreign languages. What was this? It was wild.

  “Your mama worked on that book for years. Even before you were born. It was her obsession,” Dad said. “When we looked for houses to buy, she had a couple of non-negotiables: One, a decent neighborhood, not too far from Preston Academy. Two, a small room with windows and great light to be her study so she could finish her project. It’s the history of your people from Rebecca’s side of our family. What do you think? It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

  I sat on the floor of Mama’s study with this beautiful book on my lap. I knew I was supposed to feel joy. Pride. Family love. But I still felt heartsick and a little angry.

  “I feel… I feel lucky. So lucky that—” I pushed myself to standing, cradled my present. “I’m going to go check out the best present in the world in my room. Thanks, Dad.” I stretched up on my tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek.

  I sat in my bed with the covers pulled up to my chin and paged through the book. This is what Mama had been working on before she disappeared. This is what the huge white boards were for, the hours on the computer, all the hand written pages. This was the puzzle she was working on when I was still her puzzle piece.

  I had already flipped through it but now turned back and examined the first page. Mama had penned in her perfect cursive and underlined our immediate family’s names. She had clipped snippets of family photos and glued them next to her recent entries. A cheesy photo booth pic of she and Dad when they were in their twenties and probably on a date. Me at age four in a ballerina tutu, smiling, arms overhead. Dad, when he was younger, looking over his shoulder, love burning through his eyes directed at Mama who took the photo. Dad’s parents standing in front of their farmhouse in Wisconsin.

  And all those notes and words. I’d have to spend some time trying to figure out what languages they were written in as well as what they said.

  Unlike other ancestry charts which I had seen online and in TV shows, Mama’s book was different. She included tiny pieces of memorabilia scattered throughout the lineage charts outlined in the book. There were pieces of dried plants, tombstone etchings, old photographs, pressed flowers, pictures of jewelry, snippets of newspaper articles, even a bead or tiny crystals glued onto a page.

  There were links to newspaper articles and websites that were ten plus years old and might not even exist anymore. She must have spent hundreds of hours on this book that would only mean something to people in our family. I was exhausted, but had to check out just a few more pages. I laid my head back on my pillow and propped the book on my knees.

  The nightmares always started the same way. I smelled burnt sage, lavender, and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Mama hunched over the steering wheel of our small car, sprigs of lavender and dried sage hanging from the rearview mirror, and drove up a ramp through a garage with a low claustrophobic ceiling.

  There was no outer wall to the garage, just a skinny metal chain that separated the concrete ramp from the air and whatever existed beyond that. I was a tiny kid and so was still strapped in a booster seat in the back of our clunker, munching on a cookie while driving in circles up this garage.

  Suddenly we accelerated like crazy and I was sucked back into that seat while we sped up an endless spiral ramp past other cars that were parked. I wanted to be in one of those parked cars ’cause I was getting dizzy and felt scared.

  “Mama, slow down!” I said.

  I saw her in the rearview mirror, her eyebrows pinched together. Then she smiled at me for a heartbeat and her brows relaxed. She put one hand to her mouth and threw me a kiss. “Life goes fast, Madeline. Right now we need to be just like life. We need to go very, very fast.”

  Tires squealed. Something strong and powerful slammed into our car from behind. Our tin can on wheels jolted and we were hit again. I heard a loud metal on metal bang!

  I woke up, startled. This was the first time I’d remembered that moment. Probably because I visited the scene. I clutched her book to my chest. I wondered if there was a mistake or a miracle and maybe she could still be alive. A few tears leaked out but I wiped them away.

  I tossed and turned in the black of night while memories of her flooded my brain. Until I told myself, enough and looked up at the iridescent nighttime stars that Dad had painted on my ceiling and frowned. “Thank you for my beautiful book, Mama. But you shouldn’t have left. I will never forgive you for leaving,” I whispered, closed my eyes and eventually fell asleep.

  Five

  “Now you’re beyond hot,” Chaka said as she leaned back away from my face holding a big blush brush in one hand.

  It was the next day. I looked at my reflection in the huge lit bathroom mirror at Chaka’s parents’ zillionaire condo in Trump Tower. I was dressed in a miniskirt with leggings and skinny leather above the knee boots with sky-high heels. My top was an expensive skanky thing that sunk low on my chest and barely covered my butt. Hookerville, here I come.

  “I know you’re trying to cheer me up, but I don’t think this makeover works for me,” I said.

  Aaron thrust a black leather bomber jacket at me. “Put this on,” he said. “It completes your bad girl look.”

  “I look like a cross between Amanda Seyfried the actress, Amanda Knox who I always believed was innocent, and a Miley Cyrus transvestite,” I said. “I want to go home.”

  “Not until you have some fun.” Chaka squeezed my arm. “My dad’s friend is having an invite-only party for his new art exhibit. His sons are smokin’. They’re twins, seniors at Latin School. I bet they’ll be there.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not feeling the party vibe.”

  “Hot twins and an art exhibit?” Aaron said. “Oh yes, you are.”

  “This is the best idea I’ve had in weeks.” Chaka rubbed her hands together.

  Twenty minutes later Aaron, Chaka and I were on the el train platform waiting on the train to go to a private party that probably had cute smart guys that might change my mood from rotten to okay. I never rode the el; I hated it. The bus with its creepy overpass was bad enough.

  The el platforms towered high above the streets. They were completely fenced in so supposedly, you couldn’t fall off them down onto the s
idewalks and streets below. There were people of all ages and attires waiting to get somewhere. A few peered into the distance looking for their trains. Some sat calmly on the skinny benches under the thin ugly metal overhangs.

  Chaka wore D&G and looked styling as always. Aaron hadn’t changed clothes, just jacked upped his attitude. That seemed to work for him.

  I teetered on the too-tall boots and smelled something sweet that I realized was the makeup slathered on my face. I blinked and tried to see past the false eyelashes Chaka had glued on my lids. There was no way this would be my new standard party look.

  A bunch of gang kids with tats, ratty clothes and too many piercings bolted up the stairs to the platform, punching each other, swearing, talking trash and laughing. I covered my ears with my hands.

  I didn’t make eye contact with them but walked away toward the tracks. Other commuters did the same. Chaka and Aaron were debating something and didn’t even register that I had slipped through the crowd until I was fifteen feet down the platform.

  Two of the gang kids, a girl and a guy, started screaming at each other. A third kid, a tall guy pulled a knife and told them to knock it off and save it for home turf.

  I looked around and saw three suits hitting 911 on their cells. The el train roared toward our station. Jeez, what had I gotten myself into? I should have just gone home.

  “Hey it’s you isn’t it? Dressed a little differently, but it’s still you,” an older guy said. “I think I’d recognize you anywhere.”

  I spotted a glimpse of a man wearing a leather bomber jacket slipping away through the crowds. Right then the gang dispute moved toward me and suddenly; I was in the middle of it.