A piece of glass struck Katherine’s ankle, leaving two glistening dark commas of blood, but he pushed past her without noticing.
* * *
In September, Daniel’s merchandise began to get more expensive, its palette more subdued—gray or dun-colored. His new customers didn’t need pastels or stars or Hello Kitty faces.
Katherine didn’t, either.
* * *
In October, Daniel began welcoming a new type of houseguest. Kids who hunched over spoons and slept next to needles. Katherine didn’t bother to learn names anymore, people came and went so frequently.
The picnic table sat empty.
Katherine watched the aspen tree out her window change from emerald to moss green to yellow. Then to a gold so unearthly it seemed to be on fire. One afternoon, her mind thick from a new pill, she imagined it was trying to warm her as she lay curled on her bed in the chilly house. The heat had been cut off.
* * *
All winter, Daniel grew thinner. His guitar lay untouched under his window. He slept all day and gradually stopped opening the bathroom doors for her at night.
Something had happened to his feet. They’d flattened so it was difficult to walk, and someone whispered that he was probably using too much, that the changes in his body were from the new drugs.
Katherine’s body changed, too.
It wasn’t just that she was lethargic and weak, that every day she woke a little hungrier for the pale brown tabs Daniel hid, carelessly, under his mattress.
Her breasts felt tender, she couldn’t remember her last period.
Her mother had been a nurse, so she knew what was happening, though she didn’t tell anyone.
She wondered if her mother was still in Idaho. She imagined her living on a flat, endless farm. She couldn’t picture her mother’s face anymore; she saw only a stranger in a bonnet, her face hidden.
She wondered if her mother was happy, and if she would return if she knew.
But the thought, or maybe it was a wish, was too painful. Katherine swallowed whatever anyone would give her to keep the thought from coming back.
51
Treasure
2016
Sunday evening
J.B. drove us to the address on the postcard at sunset.
I held the purple goody bag. We’d had a hard time squeezing everything in, but by stacking the pictures in one corner and bending the mermaid over double we’d managed.
A little before eight we turned onto a long dirt road and pulled into the driveway of a shabby white house with a tilting for-sale placard out front. No sign of Alex, or anyone else. The lawn was all weeds and the place had obviously been broken into at least once; two smashed downstairs windows had been sloppily boarded up.
“Is she inside?” I asked.
“You’re supposed to wait out back,” J.B. said. “Under the tree.” He gave my hand a reassuring touch.
Casey and I looked at each other. She raised one eyebrow a fraction of a centimeter and we agreed, silently; we’d been obedient children long enough.
We scrambled out of the truck and ran up the porch steps.
“Guys, it looks pretty rickety, I don’t think you should—”
“We’ll be careful,” I yelled back. I was already at the door, shaking the rusty Realtors’ lockbox. It was ancient, but held fast to the key rattling inside.
“Over here,” Casey said.
She was around the corner trying to wiggle into a window. “Give me a boost.”
“Maybe I should be the one who—”
“Don’t.” Don’t treat me like an invalid.
“Got it. Here.” I clasped my hands to make a stirrup and she stepped into it so she could shimmy through the window.
“What do you see?” I called.
“I’m in the kitchen. I don’t see anything. I smell plenty, though. This place needs some serious potpourri action. I’ll try the back door.”
A minute later she unbolted the wooden door and unlatched the rusty screen.
I glanced over my shoulder at our designated meeting spot—a picnic table under a single aspen tree. The leaves were green now but would turn gold-red by October.
No Alex yet.
I stepped inside and tried to breathe through my mouth, but the sharp scent of animal urine, and something humid and cloying, maybe rotting wood, was impossible to avoid. “You’re right about the smell.”
We walked through the empty rooms, staying close.
“What’s she up to?” I whispered.
“Don’t whisper. It freaks me out.” Casey crooked a finger into my belt loop as we edged down the dark hallway.
“What are you up to, Alex?” I yelled.
“Mom! We’ve had enough of your juvenile horseshit!”
“You okay?” J.B. called from the porch. He was at the window, trying to peer in through the boards.
“We’re fine,” Casey called back.
Kitchen, den, front room, bath, dining room. The toilet had been stolen; all that was left was a filthy, gummy circle in the bathroom floor. In the dining room, the floral wallpaper had been ripped off in great, triangular strips. Except for a few mounds of crumpled newspaper pages, the rooms were empty.
I started to walk up the narrow staircase but Casey held me back by my belt loop.
“There could be rats,” she said. “Waiting at the picnic table wouldn’t kill us.”
“Rats won’t kill us. Stay here if you want. I’ll check.”
She followed me.
The upstairs was smellier and stuffier than downstairs, the floors covered in carpet that might have been blue once; it was so faded and stained it was hard to be sure.
Upstairs was empty, too. Just two bedrooms, a small, pink-tiled Jack-and-Jill bath between them.
I shoved a window open in the larger bedroom to let in some air, and spread my jacket on the floor so we could sit while we waited. We stared out back at the empty picnic table, just visible under the canopy of the big aspen.
“My mom.” Casey sighed. “She drives me nuts. But she gets things done. Anyone else would’ve just called you. Told you I was sick, invited you for brunch.”
“I would’ve come.”
“Because you felt sorry for me. Like those Make-a-Wish people. This was better.”
I nodded.
“But don’t ever tell her I admitted it.”
“You really don’t know what the prize is?” I said.
“No. Unless she says, ‘Ta-da, this is the prize.’ This. Us. Being friends again.”
“I thought that, too. Friday. But now I think there’s more.”
“You think she’s giving us this house so we can be roomies at last?” Casey raked her fingers through the frayed carpet, tilted her head to inspect the brown bloom of a water stain on the ceiling. “It’s kind of a dump.”
“It’s more.”
“Why’re you so sure?”
“Case. The reason I stayed away so long. The real reason. I made a mistake about something.”
“What?”
I shook my head, looked outside. Still no Alex.
“What do you mean, mistake?”
“I heard your mom and J.B. talking. After my dad’s funeral. They were talking about keeping a secret so I thought they were sleeping together.”
“What the—”
I looked her in the eyes. “It’s not true. They were talking about your gene.”
“I don’t get it. J.B. knew I’d get sick? She told him?”
“Yes. And there’s more.”
We sat facing each other by the window, our plastic bag of treasures between us.
“My sweet girls. There is more.”
* * *
I stood and Alex hugged me, breathing out my name in one lon
g, musical note. “Laura.”
She kissed the top of Casey’s head but Casey wouldn’t stand. She kept her arms tight at her sides. “Where’s Elle?”
“J.B. took her for a root beer float so we could talk.”
“So start talking, fast,” Casey said.
I handed Alex the purple goody bag. “We only got nine. Doctor Mona’s closed.”
“That’s okay, sweetie. Nine is wonderful.” She handed me a small white box.
I removed the lid and saw familiar silvery-gray; touched the soft, ridged texture of driftwood.
“Your mother made it for me,” Alex said. “I know it can’t replace the one you lost.”
It was different from mine. Slightly bigger, the case more of a triangle than an oval. But the two stiff silver hinges holding the hollowed-out halves together were the same, and so was the cheap music box mechanism snugged inside.
“It used to play ‘Greensleeves’ but it doesn’t work anymore, honey. I had it hidden away too long.”
There was a photo taped to the inside cover. Small and faded, cut from a larger picture. Two girls in jeans sitting on a couch: one with long red hair, one with long brown hair. They weren’t smiling or looking at the camera, and someone’s elbow was marring the shot, floating above their heads.
“Mom, what is this? We’ve had enough games. Tell us what the hell’s going on.”
“Laura, look at me. Your mother’s name was Katherine. I met her when we were thirteen, in 1979. We ran away and ended up in this house. Your father. Laura. He was here. He was...” She shook her head.
“Katherine had green eyes and brown hair, just like you. She liked strawberries. She didn’t laugh much, but when she did it was the most gorgeous sound in the world.
“I wish I had a better picture for you. A diary. But this is all I have. Except memories of her. Stories.”
She took a deep breath, shaking her head rapidly in frustration. “I’m screwing this up. I wanted to explain the right way, the perfect way.”
I stared at the photo. “Just tell us, Alex.”
52
The Visitor
April 1981
Katherine and Alexandra were sleeping upstairs when the visitor arrived. A tidy, silver-haired woman in a pale blue suit.
She knocked and knocked and finally pushed the front door open. She found strangers in the house. Filth. Daniel wasting away, curled up on the stained mattress in his bedroom.
And in the room attached to his, two young girls, pregnant with her grandchildren.
They had both been Daniel’s special girls.
“He didn’t,” she said, sinking against the doorjamb and closing her eyes. Shaking her head, at what her son had done. “You poor children.”
* * *
For months Katherine had kept to herself, sleeping, staring out the window, spending long hours in the bathroom monitoring the changes to her body. Her stomach was fuller, jutting forward between her hip bones. She was tired all the time, but she didn’t get sick like the women did in movies. She didn’t tell anyone. She wore her loosest shirts.
Not that anybody would have noticed. Something had broken down in the house, and Alexandra rarely slept in their bedroom now.
But one day in early March, Katherine had heard retching behind the bathroom door.
She’d peeked in, and learned that Alexandra’s body had changed, too.
Together, they’d stopped using. And they tried to plan their next escape. Alexandra had heard of a clinic in San Francisco, if they could find bus money to get there. One night they spoke of hitchhiking to Sacramento, where the perfect family in Eight is Enough lived. There would be clinics there.
But the house was too chaotic for plans; it was a jumble of immediate, individual wants.
Daniel stayed in his room all the time, listless and unreachable.
One afternoon when Katherine tiptoed in for the Gunsmoke thermos, she found only a crumpled five-dollar bill. It smelled, faintly, like sour milk, and she had known then for sure that Daniel couldn’t help.
But the visitor said she would help. She seemed sure of what was best.
She lived in Boston and came to California rarely, though she owned two houses there. This one where her son had gone to waste, and another one nearby on the lake in Coeur-de-Lune, where he had grown up.
In the days to come, in the whirlwind of murmured phone calls and shopping and strangers coming and going, Daniel’s mother explained that Daniel would not come back. He would not get well. He would get hospice care; he had what many in the Collier family had. Two of his siblings, seven cousins, an aunt, probably many more.
They had what ignorant people called a curse.
Daniel’s father had died in the war, so it was impossible to know if he’d had it, too, but the doctors said it was likely.
Daniel had always thought he was the lucky one. He took risks that became increasingly disturbing, she told them. At seventeen, when one of his older brothers was long dead and another was sick, on a feeding tube, he drove his mother to the market in her car so fast, ignoring her pleas to slow down, that he made her weep.
At twenty-three, he skidded his motorcycle on a wet road, dislocating his shoulder, slashing his leg except for where two small metal fragments had already embedded in his flesh. It was a miracle he hadn’t died.
It only made him feel more invincible.
“A way to hide his fear,” she said one night, as Alexandra and Katherine listened, looking out the bedroom window at the rain, the dark silhouette of the aspen tree.
“His demons were his fear and his guilt. I’m his mother. I know. I spoiled him. I bought him this house, to get him out of my sight. And I moved away. I shouldn’t have.
“Of course it does not excuse his unspeakable behavior.”
That’s what she called the acts that led to their canted bellies.
It was too late for a clinic, but she would pay for everything. She would make sure they got help so their babies were born healthy. When she asked if they had family they shook their heads, exchanging a look only after she’d turned her back. She seemed relieved about this.
She was efficient, certain, helping them pack their bags for a home she’d found.
Katherine almost left her music box behind. But at the last minute she slipped it in her bag.
* * *
She kept the music box on her nightstand in the group home in Oakland.
After her baby was born in June, she played the song for her, learned to bottle and bathe her. She went to meetings—Group and One-on-One and Drop-in. She stayed clean.
And it seemed things might turn out all right.
But when the baby was five weeks old she got a package from a charity called Wee Care. Clothes that wouldn’t fit the little girl until she was six and twelve and thirty-six months. The numbers on the tags scared her; they looked like another trap.
Katherine decided to run away with a girl from the house. A hard girl nobody liked.
Alexandra, eight months along, begged her not to go.
But Katherine made Alexandra swear not to wake anyone, saying that it was better this way, the little girl was better off, she couldn’t do it. “I just can’t.”
Her daughter was sleeping on her back, her impossibly small, pearlescent arms flung over her head. Katherine kissed her on the forehead, full of shame at what she was about to do.
She set the music box next to one open pink hand, so it seemed as if the girl was reaching for it.
She whispered, “I love you.”
And then she left.
53
The Prize
2016
Sunday evening
By the time Alex finished talking it was nearly dark. The story was sad, but then I’d always known my mother’s story was sad.
; “I’m sorry, honey,” Alex said, wiping her face. “Sorry I brought her here. Sorry I couldn’t help her. I’ve wanted to say that for so long.”
She paused, but neither Casey nor I spoke so she went on. “Your grandmother. Daniel’s mother. She hadn’t lived around here for years, but her old church friend arranged for you to be adopted by a nice older couple in Coeur-de-Lune. Private, closed adoption.”
Old church friend. Barbara Macon. My stork.
“Your parents didn’t know anything. Your grandmother had given me money over the years and when she died, when Casey was eight, she left me more. And The Shipwreck. For years, I stayed away. But I knew you were there, Laura. So close. I thought, if I could make sure you were happy, if we could make the house our own... And we did make it our own. The three of us. Didn’t we?” Alex’s voice cracked at the end, pleading.
Casey, sitting perfectly still, eyes closed and cheeks wet, didn’t acknowledge Alex.
I was supposed to cry, too. To say something profound, heart-wrenching.
But I couldn’t. I was remembering the strangest thing. “The lavender.”
A word so odd, so apparently random that Alex looked alarmed, and even Casey opened her eyes.
“Lavender?” Alex crept close, cupped her hand around my cheek, clearly worried that her story had pushed me over the edge. “Honey?”
I pulled away from Alex, speaking only to Casey. “I’m not crazy. I was remembering that vase of lavender on the mantel. At The Shipwreck. It was always sliding in front of the picture my dad gave you of the Collier boys on the dock, and I could never figure out why. It was like...like a poltergeist kept moving it.”
Casey nodded slowly, remembering this subtle haunting.
But the ghost was Alex. “You didn’t want to look at the Colliers.” I turned to Alex, challenging her.
Alex took a deep breath. “No. I couldn’t.”
Casey finally spoke. “Was he in the picture?”
“Daniel was the little one in front with the flag,” Alex said. “The two-year-old, the one you thought was so sweet.”
A sweet little boy, who’d grown up and done a monstrous thing to two sweet young girls.
The Summer List Page 31