I dashed out the door and ran all the way (not actually that far, since the mailbox sat where our street met the road, only four duplexes down from Mrs. Delavecchio’s house). I needed my letter to get to Lem as soon as possible, and I couldn’t trust that an ambitious postal worker wouldn’t decide to make her rounds early today. Even a delay of one day was too long to postpone Mrs. Delavecchio’s and Lem’s reconciliation.
Panting (I really needed to work on my endurance), I pushed the letter into the mailbox. It slid so seamlessly into the slot that I would have guessed something had pulled it from the inside. I flipped open the slot’s metal tongue with my finger and peered in. The inside was dark and motionless.
“You’re just overexcited,” I told myself. “You’re imagining things. Did you think you’d peer in and see a disembodied hand grabbing the mail?”
I let the tongue fall with a metal clank, but kept staring warily at the mailbox. Obviously, the only way to be certain the box contained nothing untoward was to wait for the truck to come and collect the mail. Nine o’clock, the schedule on the box said.
“No,” I told myself. To spend the next seventy-five minutes waiting for the mail pickup would be thinking only of my own needs, and I’d promised myself I was going to spend the day with Mrs. Delavecchio to make up for the day before. I’d help her with some chores, we’d bake something tasty together, maybe do some gardening, watch some television. Add that to my reuniting Mrs. Delavecchio and her son and I’d be making a good start at refuting her claim that I was too busy to notice the needs of people around me.
“Godspeed, letter,” I whispered to the mailbox. “Godspeed.”
As I walked by my house, our porch light flicked from on to off. My mother must have come home. But after the previous day’s strange conversations and the discovery of my mauled notebook, my mother was the last person I felt like interacting with before eight in the morning. So I went back to Mrs. Delavecchio.
“Why are you back here?” she asked as soon as I came in.
“I thought we’d spend the day together. The school is still closed.” I added the lie quickly. “I could help you with some chores, if you’d like.”
“But why? Your mother is home.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. A light bulb turning off didn’t necessarily mean someone had turned it off. The bulb could have burned out. There might be a localized power failure. Faeries. Any old reason.
“I see her inside your house. So you go.”
“She’s probably just picking up something between shifts. I don’t want to bother her.”
“She’s your mother. To say hello, you won’t be bothering her.”
“But I can come back once I do?” I couldn’t keep the whine out of my voice.
Mrs. Delavecchio mumbled something under her breath in Italian. Her dismissal hurt more than I thought it would have.
“That’s okay, Mrs. Delavecchio,” I said, trying to sound mature, trying to hide my feelings. “I understand you need some space right now and my mother needs to see me before she goes back to work. I wouldn’t want to ignore other people’s needs.”
The reply to this was some more Italian mumbling.
“Well, see you soon!” I said with forced cheer.
And so I returned involuntarily to my house. A brief stop. I’d be out of there within seconds and then off to do something with my day.
“Enid?” my mother inquired as I unlocked the door and let myself in.
“It’s not like anyone else has a key.”
“Maybe you should wait before coming into the dining room.”
“I have to say hello to you in person,” I shouted back as I stomped into the dining room. It was my house too. I should be allowed to go into whatever common area I felt like.
But then I could see why my mother had wanted me to stay out: she and Dr. Holden were drinking coffee at the table, and they weren’t drinking the homemade, caffeine-free, lukewarm paste my mother usually made for guests in an attempt to get them to leave. They were both sipping from waxed paper cups with cardboard sleeves you only get at nice coffee places. There wasn’t a nice coffee place in town. They would have had to drive a few towns over to get nice coffee. Dr. Holden would have had to have driven them a few towns over. They would have been in the car together.
“Good morning, Dr. Holden,” I said coldly. Then “Hello” to my mother. “Mrs. Delavecchio wanted me to check in with you.”
“Is that all?” my mother asked.
It didn’t have to be, but I refused to bring up my mother’s lies and defacement of my notebook in front of Dr. Holden. That was a private family issue. “Are you working today?” I muttered. After I showed this bare minimum of interest, I promised myself I could leave.
“I’m on the roster again tomorrow.” My mother answered with the same level of enthusiasm with which she’d been asked.
“I’m thinking that I should go,” Dr. Holden said, looking annoyed that my mother’s attention was no longer focused solely on him. It was an empty threat, since he neither stood nor took a long sip to finish his cup. But now I didn’t know how to leave without also including Dr. Holden in my departure.
The silence grew awkward.
“I’m not sure this is a suitable time,” Dr. Holden whispered to my mother, purposefully loud to make sure that I could hear.
“There’s never going to be a suitable time.” My mother’s voice sounded annoyed but not overtly angry. I was intimately familiar with that type of voice. “Enid,” she said, flattening her hands on the table. “You might be interested in knowing that Dr. Holden is your biological father.”
waited for the ominous organ chords to sound.
“Shouldn’t you have told me to sit down first?” I said, when it became apparent that organ chords were not forthcoming. “You’re a nurse. You should be used to giving people bad news.”
“The doctors tell the patients the bad news, not the nurses,” my mother replied.
“And I wouldn’t say it’s bad news,” Dr. Holden interjected, as if either of us cared about his opinion. “I know this must seem sudden to you, but I can assure you that your mother and I love you very —”
“Stop.” My mother held a hand up to Dr. Holden’s face, her interest in listening to him as non-existent as my own. “Enid.” Her attention turned to me. “There is no need for histrionics. At some level you must have already known. Otherwise you’d be more upset than you are. I am not expecting dramatics in response to this.”
I didn’t care that my mother was not expecting dramatics. If this didn’t merit some dramatics, then what did? Shouting would be good, as loudly as I could get away with. I took a deep breath before screeching, “Then why don’t you enlighten me and tell me exactly what level I knew this on? Because if feels pretty unknown on all levels to me!”
“Known unknowns versus unknown unknowns,” Dr. Holden said, in another attempt to insert himself into my mother’s and my conversation. We, the we that counted, flinched. My mother dropped her chin and shook her head ever so slightly and obviously at Dr. Holden, not at me.
“Does he have to be here?” I asked, hands on hips and scowl on face.
“I thought you’d be more satisfied in having this great mystery of your life solved,” my mother said.
“Except I already knew, so it was hardly a mystery then, was it?” I shot back at her. “And having survived the past eleven years without knowing, I’m sure the rest of my life would have gone along marvelously not knowing as well.” Then: “Wait.” I had just realized an unfortunate, awful, life-changing consequence of this revelation. “Amber Holden is my sister?” I moaned.
“Half-sister,” Dr. Holden said. “But I think, as we go forward in this blended family, it would be best to not worry so much about half-siblings and stepsiblings and really consider them just as your brothers and sist
er.”
“What’s he going on about?” I asked my mother. “Blended family?”
“Enid, Dr. Holden and I …” my mother began. Just the way she said it, the intimation of a new we that wasn’t the old us. Oh my goodness no. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth, and my body shook. There was nowhere to escape to but the kitchen, where I grabbed a drinking glass from the counter and filled it to the brim with tap water. Unfortunately, this failed to distract my mouth, which kept talking as if to suggest that I was interested in continuing the conversation.
“How long has this been going on?” I yelled back into the dining room. “My whole life?”
“I was separated from my wife at the time of our initial meeting,” Dr. Holden said.
“A brief dalliance while Dr. Holden interviewed for his current position,” my mother clarified.
Ugggh. “Hopefully you weren’t pawing each other during the actual physical interview.”
“Amber and the boys were the same way at this age,” Dr. Holden reassured my mother. “She’ll grow out of it.”
“Says you,” I muttered.
My mother pretended not to hear either of us. “However, since Dr. Holden was hired,” she continued, “our conduct has been nothing short of impeccable. We were simply professional colleagues.”
“And obviously Dr. Sivaloganathan and I reconciled, and your mother felt it better if I remained in the background. That is, until now.” Dr. Holden put his hand on my mother’s.
I took a gulp of water so I couldn’t ask anything else and find out more information that I most definitely did not want to know. The future lay itself out in front of me: spending holidays with Dr. Holden, perhaps acknowledging Father’s Day for the first time in my life, and there was probably a Sister’s Day now too where I’d be forced to have brunch and flavored coffee with Amber Holden and exchange pewter picture frames with cute phrases etched into them like, “Sisters doing it for themselves.” I gagged, even my sense of taste rebelling against all these revelations. “Can we stop?” I asked, after another swig of water. “Please?”
“No,” my mother informed me. “We cannot.”
I gave a burp the smell of rancid butter. I looked, really looked, at the glass I’d been drinking from: the water was white, not clear, and with flecks. A thick layer of dried milk had caked to the bottom. That explained the taste. My stomach lurched. “I don’t feel well,” I said to my audience; my mother and Dr. Holden had finally followed me into the kitchen.
“That is not a very adult response, Enid,” my mother said.
“Let me talk to her,” Dr. Holden said, like I wasn’t in the room. He rested his chin in his hand. “Enid, I know this may not be what you were hoping for, but life rarely hands us exactly what we want, and what your mother and I have is exactly what I want and exactly what she wants. We don’t want you to be someone who spoils other people’s happiness. Are we clear?”
I saw no need to answer that question. Dr. Holden disagreed.
“Enid, your response?” Dr. Holden tilted his head in what some parenting book must have told him was a position that encouraged familial intimacy.
“Fine, excuse me,” I said. Definitely not the answer Dr. Holden was looking for. I pushed past the two love-birds into the bathroom, and hung my head over the toilet. When my stomach finally settled, I lay on my side, tears suctioning my cheek to the cool tile of the floor. I hated myself for crying over this. But what else to do other than cry?
No. There was something else I could do: I could end this pairing-up of Dr. Holden and my mother.
I sat back up and patted down my hair, salty from my tears and sticking straight up like I’d been struck by lightning. Heroes with Master Plans never had bad hair days. And I had a Master Plan: I was going to get my mother’s and my life back to normal.
I left the bathroom and went to rejoin society.
Society, such that it was, was in the kitchen. My time-out in the bathroom didn’t appear to have worried either my mother or Dr. Holden. He flitted about like he already knew where each cup, plate, and pot could be found in the cupboards. She stood a full head taller and twice as wide, frying onions in a pan. I must have moved or made a noise, because both my mother and Dr. Holden turned to find me assessing them for weaknesses.
“Enid,” said my mother. “Would you like to join us?”
“Has she told you about the faeries yet?” I asked Dr. Holden, because I knew she hadn’t. “You should know that my mother has done magic all over the house and the yard to deal with the faeries that live here.” I tried not to smile while waiting for the inevitable relationship-ending explosion between the two of them.
“I wouldn’t have taken your mother for a faerie person,” Dr. Holden said to me instead, in a singsong sort of way, a talking-to-children voice. “Quite the imagination. I assume you were humoring her?” he said to the space between my mother and me.
Okay. More ammunition needed. “We’re writing a book,” I said, inflating my mother’s invasion of privacy to co-authorship. “You should read it. Non-fiction. Not imaginary. What she actually believes in,” I clarified of the book’s contents. “Read what she wrote. My notebook is right here.” I motioned towards a cleared countertop; even the layers of caked-on miscellany had been scrubbed off the yellowing Formica. “Where’s my notebook?”
“I didn’t see a notebook when I was picking up,” Dr. Holden said. “What color was it?”
“If you don’t remember seeing one, why would knowing what color it is make a difference?”
“Extra details can activate memory,” Dr. Holden ex-plained, snark ignored. “Besides, I’m interested to hear more about these faeries that live in this house. I assume they’re benign. I wouldn’t want to go to sleep with angry faeries about.” He gave my mother a gaze that could only be described as lovesick.
I glowered. Ending this partnership was not going to be as simple as I’d hoped.
“I suggest checking your room,” said my mother. “Or Mrs. Delavecchio’s.”
“For angry faeries?”
“For your notebook,” my mother said, exasperated.
“I’d remember if I brought it next door,” I said, wondering if maybe I had and had forgotten about it.
“Perhaps you should go to Mrs. Delavecchio’s and investigate,” my mother said.
Leaving my mother and Dr. Holden alone in the house? I didn’t think so.
“He’s the one who’s probably forgotten where he put it,” I said of Dr. Holden.
“I rescind my perhaps,” my mother said. “Go to Mrs. Delavecchio’s house and look for your notebook.”
“I’ll just check upstairs first.”
“Go,” my mother ordered. “Out. You’ve given me a headache.”
“I assume he has to leave then too.” I jerked my head towards Dr. Holden. “For your headache.”
My mother didn’t seem averse to this suggestion (at least, she didn’t disagree with it), but Dr. Holden made no move towards the front door like I was expected to.
“So, we’re leaving then,” I prompted.
“Why don’t you go upstairs,” Dr. Holden said to my mother. “Lay down.”
“Lie down,” I corrected.
Dr. Holden shoved his tongue into the side of his cheek.
“Enid,” my mother said.
“What?”
“You have school. And don’t come home until dinner, please.”
I made certain to slam the door on the way out.
That hadn’t gone well at all.
xiled from my very own home where a usurper was replacing me in my mother’s affections, I had nothing to do but stare around at the sorry state of the yard. The roots of the trees the faeries had knocked over were withered and brittle, and at this point, replanting them would be futile. The patches of lawn those trees had overshadowed,
now bereft of the shade, were starting to burn. Normally my mother was fastidious about basic yard care, but nothing about the past few days could be described as normal. I’d leave the trees for my mother’s muscled arms, but I could turn the sprinkler on for the grass; Dr. Holden’s unwelcome presence in my life wasn’t going to distract me from ensuring our rented house still had some curb appeal.
Of course, around the side of the house, where the outdoor tap poked out, I couldn’t see the sprinkler. I lifted the coiled hose in case it had been tucked underneath. Nope.
Sigh.
My choices were clear: go back inside to inquire of the location of the sprinkler, which would incur my mother’s wrath for ignoring her instructions to stay away until dinner; let the lawn succumb to my mother’s inattention; or become the sprinkler myself.
I would become the sprinkler myself.
I turned the faucet on. The water wound its way through the hose, then spurted out as I dragged the hose to the front yard to stand where I would have put the sprinkler if it hadn’t been missing. I began to oscillate. The morning sunlight, caught in the water, floated rainbows across my lawn.
Then I saw something from the corner of my eye. It was gone before I moved my head.
Then again.
I sat down on the grass, moving slowly so as not to spook whatever was out there.
And waited.
Tried not to look.
Tried not to look like I was looking.
And there.
Where the rainbow met the ground, a mixture of light and lumps, brown, gold, and green. It was hardly attractive, but after witnessing my mother and Dr. Holden’s affections and the aftermath of drinking a glass of sour milk, I’d seen worse that morning alone. The creature moved in the rainbow, like the rainbow, not bathing in the spray from the hose but in all of the colors freed from the light. The pinprick of its mouth opened and shut like laughter. I stared until my eyes begged me to blink, and in that blink, the afterimage that burned in my retinas was one with which I was familiar: a faerie. I recognized the silhouette: the same as the shadow I’d seen two nights ago on my wall before my mother had switched off my light.
Enid Strange Page 6