by White, Gwynn
I started paying attention to subtle clues about customers: a furrowed brow, facial lines, agitation, expressions of specific emotions like happiness or sadness. Also, things they said. For instance, if they said, “What’s good about it?” after I’d said, “Have a good day!”
Somewhere along the way, I’d moved beyond that. A person’s thoughts simply spoke to me. I didn’t need to analyze anything at all about their physical appearance.
Thinking I’d cheer them up when it was my turn to make the drinks, I started creating personalized designs in the creamy froth on top. A picture of a cat with the words: Never as bad as you think. A picture of a steam train with the words: Keep moving forward. A sun and the message: Today will be better.
Lots of people liked these. They’d peer at the designs and say how cool they were. Then they’d slurp down their coffees, my frothy messages coating their lips and fortifying them for the rest of the day.
But then I went too far.
My mother had died of ovarian cancer the year before. I was devastated and lonely and depressed. I focused on other people’s problems in order to forget about my own, even if only for brief moments at a time.
A woman in her early twenties came into the coffee shop. She had dark lines under her eyes and an expression of deep and abiding sadness. She was dressed all in black, and wearing dark purple eye shadow and matching nail polish.
I carefully crafted a picture of a tree with birds flying out from the branches. I wrote: On wings of hope.
She had ordered a mocha latte. Before leaving the shop, she carried her cup over to the counter near the back door with the sugars and pitchers of cream and took off the lid. I assumed she’d decided to add extra sweetener. Her eyes grew larger as she studied the message I’d created for her. Storming up to the counter, she demanded to know if all the coffees came with the same design.
I told my co-worker at the register, “I’ll handle this.”
Pushing open the swinging door that led to the main shop, I called the woman over. I already knew her name from needing to write it on the outside of the cup.
I raised my hand and called, “Elise!” over the noise of conversation in the coffee shop. I was trying to bring her over to a private spot to ask about her concerns.
She marched over and let me have it. All of it. She threw her latte at me, then tossed the cup on the floor, splashing my shoes with the remaining liquid. I thanked my lucky stars the coffee had started to cool and I was wearing a thick canvas apron. Her face screwed up in rage, Elise shouted, On wings of hope? On wings of hope? That was the name of my boyfriend’s band! This is what I get for coming to an elitist coffee shop! People who think they’re so cool, they can taunt the more lowly among us! It’s all over the newspapers that my boyfriend died of a heroin overdose last week! I know I’m a suspect! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!
On her way out the back door, she took her arm and swept all the metal pitchers and containers off the cream-and-sweeteners counter. They went bouncing off the glass wall and floor tiles, splashing cream and packets over customers’ feet and the side of a bin filled with coffee bags. Screams and gasps filled the shop, followed by silence. After the whoooosh sound of the door closing behind her, discussion erupted from the crowd like the buzzing of bees.
A few people left through the back door, several more through the front.
My boss was off that day, but of course he was informed about the incident. I was fired immediately. No questions asked, no being called into his office, no chance to explain. Just an email saying I was fired.
Maybe it was better that way. Perhaps Empaths didn’t belong behind coffee shop counters.
It was hard to get by financially without a job. After college, I’d returned home to live at my parents’ house. I kept referring to it that way: as “home” and “my parents’ house.” It really wasn’t anymore. My mother had died earlier that year. It was my father’s house now. He shared it with the ghost of my mother, and it no longer felt entirely like home.
I was devastated the day I lost my job. I decided not to fight back because I’d come to the conclusion I’d never fit in there anyway, better for me to go find something else.
I came home before my father got off work. I felt relieved because he’d never listen to me anyway. He’d just say things like, “Keep your chin up, little girl,” before escaping into the fog he’d created around him since my mother’s death. It was impenetrable. I desperately wanted to talk to him about our loss, but it was a subject he did everything to avoid. He’d say things like, “She was so brave at the end. It’s a lesson for all of us.” He wanted me to be brave, not incapacitated by grief. He didn’t realize that his refusal to talk about it kept grief growing inside me, like a malignant beast.
By the time I started painting messages on the frothy tops of coffee concoctions, I’d been experiencing intermittent stabbing pain on the right lower side of my abdomen for quite some time. I waffled back and forth from worrying it was a tumor to treating it like a new friend. I started imagining it was a benign tumor and the source of my blossoming empathy skills. I pictured it flooding my body with new hormones that eventually bathed my brain in the potential for new abilities.
Whether or not this was true didn’t matter. Our family’s health insurance didn’t cover much and I couldn’t afford specialists. I figured I’d ask my dad to pay for a checkup if the pain became too severe.
I suppose in some illogical, self-destructive way I also felt that the pain connected me to my mother. She’d had pain in the same place long before she ever got diagnosed.
I would have been more worried if I could have inherited cancer from her, but that wasn’t possible. My parents had adopted me.
The more I experienced the pain, the more I started thinking about my biological mother. Who was she? Why did she give me up? Could she help me now?
I went into my parents’ bedroom. I lifted the lid on my mom’s jewelry box, still sitting on her dresser, and watched the tiny ballerina in her pink skirt twirl round and round to the music. I remembered back to a time when I was four years old and had fallen off my bike. After cleaning and bandaging my bloody knees and elbows, my mom had taken me into her room and showed me the ballerina. Sunlight streamed in through the window and bounced off the mirror behind the miniature dancer. She came alive as she practiced her pirouettes. The sunbeams appeared to come from her hands, as though she was holding a magic wand. The little ballerina cast a spell on me. My pain disappeared.
Clutching the edge of my parents’ quilt, I lay down on the bed and sobbed. I’d experienced too much loss that day.
6
My new job at Archer-Knight involved two weeks of training and two weeks of following a Senior Social Worker into the field before I could visit homes on my own.
I was assigned to Andy Wheeler. He emailed me the name of the first client we’d be visiting together and told me to read up on the file.
It amazed me that records were still kept on paper, placed in manila file folders, and housed on metal shelves. I wanted to tear the whole system down and computerize it. Instead, I walked down a series of hallways from my office to the front desk and requested the folder on Max Davenport.
The secretary, a young woman with blonde hair swept up into a ponytail and a faerie tattoo on her upper arm, pulled the file from the series of metal shelves behind her. When she turned around, I noticed that the hair under her ponytail had been dyed into rainbow-colored stripes. Returning, she slapped a notepad down on the counter, plopped a pen down on top of it and said, “Just sign the file out here. Every time you take or return a file, you mark it down here. By the way, my name’s Aubrey. You’re the new girl, right?”
Yup. That was me.
She extended her hand and we shook. Then she smiled and said, “Good luck with Mr. Davenport.”
Andy drove us out to Max’s place in his cramped Volkswagen Beetle. It was blue with rust spots, the floor covered in papers and discarded wrappers. I was thinking
he should really clean that up if he hoped to convince clients that hoarding wasn’t in their best interest.
When we pulled into Max’s driveway, a somewhat emaciated dog with matted fur lumbered over to greet us.
Andy rubbed his hand back and forth over his own shaved head as though for good luck. He said, “Don’t mind him. He’s friendly enough. I’m going to give you some advice you might find useful when you’re out on your own. These clients don’t know how to take care of themselves, never mind the animals they keep. If you think the animals could use food, bring some with you. That way, they’ll consider you a friend, rather than an intruder.”
I said, “The clients?”
Andy laughed. “No. The animals. Just feed them. Sometimes you have to do it when the clients aren’t looking. I have one client, Frieda Knapp…I’ll try to arrange for you to go out to visit her with me…she’s convinced people are trying to poison her and her animals. It’s a sad case, actually. She’ll only eat food from one particular store and, even then, she questions who their suppliers are and throws out a whole lot of their stuff. She’s gotten very thin, as have her cats.”
Unlocking the car door, Andy hopped out. Reaching into the back, he grabbed a bunch of dog biscuits out of a bag.
Throwing them up into the air, he yelled in an encouraging voice, “C’mon, Lucky, catch it!”
Lucky looked exhausted. He waited until the biscuits hit the ground, then hobbled over to one and started crunching away.
Grabbing his notebooks out of the car, Andy said, “And that, Jade, is how you make friends with the animals.”
Stepping out of the car, I took a moment to study Mr. Davenport’s property. It had a great deal of potential. Although the house was in serious need of a fresh coat of paint and some of the roof tiles were missing, it was a large turquoise-and-lavender Victorian-style house with gingerbread trim. At either end of the house stood a turret and there were a couple of stained glass windows.
Old willow trees with long sweeping branches grew in the front yard. The grass was overgrown, the lawn filled with weeds and patches of dirt here and there. It looked like there had been a garden running the length of the house at one time. Now, the rose bushes had weeds climbing their branches and choking the life out of them.
When we reached the porch, I saw more signs of neglect. A few boards had rotted straight through. As he rang the doorbell, Andy warned me to watch my step.
At that moment, a car drove up the driveway and parked behind Andy’s. A fashionable woman wearing tight jeans, a black-and-white checkered shirt rolled up to the elbows and flat yellow shoes hopped out. She yelled to us, “Hello, there! Are you here to see my father?”
Andy said, “If your father’s Max Davenport, yes, we are.”
As the woman walked toward us, her long black ponytail bounced from side to side. With her red lipstick, matching nail polish and perfectly applied makeup, she looked like a model.
Getting up from his comfortable spot in the shade next to a willow tree, Lucky trundled over to greet her. As soon as she saw him coming, the woman dropped to her knees and yelled, “Lucky!” When he finally reached her, she hugged him and ruffled his hair. He in turn wagged his tail and barked.
Turning her attention back to us, the woman said, “I’m Maggie Davenport, Max’s youngest daughter.”
Andy stepped down from the porch, walked over to Maggie and extended his hand. He said, “Nice to meet you! Thanks for answering our request to meet with family members. You have an older brother and sister, is that right?”
Standing up, Maggie replied, “Yes. Mike and Molly. All our names start with M.” Absentmindedly petting the dog, she added, “My mom’s name is Mary. I think both my parents having names starting with that initial is how the whole thing started…”
Andy asked, “Can you tell us exactly what happened to your mom? Your dad hasn’t been very clear on that.”
I had seen something about that in Mr. Davenport’s file, a paragraph or two saying that his wife was missing, along with her photograph and a brief description. Where she was born, her age: sixty-three years old, her education: high school. She was a thin, taut woman with brown eyes and gray hair. That’s all I remembered. Basically nondescript. I’m not sure I’d recognize her if she walked right past me, even after seeing her picture.
Sadness came over Maggie’s face. She said, “We don’t know. Dad said she left. I worry about her every single day. She’s not well. She has diabetes and we’re pretty sure she’s suffering from an early stage of dementia. The police looked for her for months. Our family organized a search as well. We never found her. We thought we had some great leads, but they went nowhere.”
A question flew out of my mouth before I even knew I had planned to ask it. “How long has she been gone?”
Maggie said, “Over a year now. Last week was the anniversary of the day she went missing.”
I wondered what that was like, when they first discovered she was gone. I had a bazillion questions, but I didn’t know if it was my place to ask them. Maybe Andy already knew from talking to Max. I figured I’d ask him when we got back in the car.
Andy asked, “Will your brother or sister be joining us today?”
Maggie scrunched her face up, as though thinking hard about the question. She said, “No. I’m hoping they’ll come out and meet you another time. They’ve been through this kind of thing before. It never goes anywhere. My dad won’t part with his stuff. I’m hoping you’ll be different. Archer-Knight has a lot of great reviews.”
Ah, yes. Evaluating a mental health center by popular vote on the Internet.
Andy said, “Our center has a lot of success. Is there anything else you’d like us to know before we meet with your dad today?”
Maggie said, “No, I don’t think so. My dad can be…difficult. It’s worse now that my mom’s gone.”
Pulling a cell phone out of her back jeans pocket and punching in some numbers, she said, “My dad doesn’t like to answer the door, so I call him when I get here.” A few seconds later, she spoke into the phone. “Hey, dad, I’m here with the Social Workers…Oh, come on, Dad…Archer-Knight is one of the best. Please, dad…I drove all the way out here…I had to get a babysitter…”
The front door opened a sliver. A short, thin man with gray hair sticking up in all directions peered out from a darkened space.
Maggie placed one hand on the door and the other on her dad’s shoulder. Bending over to kiss him on the cheek, she said, “It’s good to see you, dad!”
Obviously happy to see his daughter, he let her push the door all the way open. She turned and waved for us to follow.
Andy went first. I came in after him and quietly shut the door.
I couldn’t see anything of the house interior. Our view was completely blocked by stacks of boxes three-quarters of the way up to the ceiling. We stepped into a narrow space facing a wall of boxes.
I screamed as something flew past me and whacked me on the head. Wings! The fluttering sound, and the sensation of being smacked in the head by a flying animal. The first thought that popped into my head was: Bats! I wanted to run from the home, but I had come prepared for anything. I figured there were bound to be mice and rats in some of these houses, considering how much junk and old food were typically stockpiled. I just hadn’t thought about the possibility of bats. I remembered the missing roof tiles. I hoped we wouldn’t need to go up into the attic, but I knew that was wishful thinking. An attic was the perfect spot for both bats and hoarding. Maybe we were all hoarders deep down. Even people with sparsely decorated homes tended to stuff all kinds of memories up in that special place below the roof.
I thought about the attic in my own family’s house. My mom had filled it with lots of memories, mostly of me growing up: Girl Scout uniforms, projects I’d made, baby clothes, early reader books. A thought struck me hard. Had she left records of my adoption up there?
Max shouted, “Squirtle!” pulling me out of my reverie.
I asked, “Squirtle?”
Making her way down a narrow aisle between piles of cardboard boxes, Maggie explained, “It’s a Pokémon.”
Following her, I said, “Oh, I know that. It looks like a little blue turtle. But what was your dad referring to?”
As she ran her hands along the cardboard walls surrounding us, Maggie said, “It’s our parrot. Squirtle. I named him. Parrots live a long time. Squirtle’s twenty years old now. I named him when I was twelve. I thought it was perfect back then—just because he’s blue and I loved everything Pokémon.”
I laughed. “Me, too. I had binders full of cards.”
Maggie stopped and turned around. She smiled. “I did, too.” Rapping on a box with her knuckles, she added, “My collection’s somewhere in here.” Opening her arms wide and reaching upward, she said, “Somewhere in all the piles in this enormous house. If you come across them when I’m not here, please let me know, OK?”
I said, “Sure.”
From somewhere on the other side of the cardboard fort, Maggie’s dad shouted, “Squirtle! Good boy! Now, you have to go back in your cage. You’re scaring our guests.”
Running my hands over sides of boxes, following Maggie’s way of maneuvering the narrow aisle, my hand brushed against something soft and gooey. I stopped and looked. Gah! Bird poop!
Looking at my hand, I tried to decide what to say. Finally, I asked, “Is there a place where I can wash my hands?”
Maggie turned around. “Why?”
I held up my hand and showed her the poop.
Maggie said, “Yeah, that happens. Follow me.”
Andy and Max’s voices rose up loudly from somewhere beyond the cardboard wall. Andy was saying, “I thought you had decided to get rid of these papers. They’re very old. See how they’re yellowing.”
Max started crying. “I don’t care how yellow they are! They’re part of history—my history, my family’s history. Look here…” The sound of paper rustling, pages being flipped. “See this weather report? It snowed that day. It got real deep. I took my kids sledding while Mary made dinner. I can’t throw away that memory.”