Authors: Renee Manfredi
Flynn shrugged. “Alaska is hell. It’s cold as hell. It’s dark as hell. Hoover McPaws frostbit the end of his tail and his ears. That’s why he looks so hip-hop.” Hip-hop was something the DJ said this morning. A kind of music. A song called “The Midnight Train to Georgia” was playing in her head.
“It’s too cold for kitties to be out, probably.” Greta took a large helping of couscous and ate very fast. Flynn wondered about the baby inside Greta. If it died would it go to heaven or hell? It wasn’t true, as her mother told her, that all babies go to heaven. Some were punished and then forced to come back as new souls on earth. Her mother was one of them. Flynn knew Poppy had been to hell and back, and Flynn had followed her. And Flynn’s father had followed
her
. The heart was a wheel. And here she was again.
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Flynn asked.
“No,” Greta said. “Do you?”
“You and I were great friends in the Second World War. We were Japanese. You were small then. I was a general, and I played the bassoon. When I died, you held my head. You wrote a letter to my wife and daughters.” Flynn’s heart was pounding. Her palms got sweaty just thinking about the pain of this.
“Interesting.” Greta took a sip of her coffee. “Do you think that means we’ll be good friends now?”
Flynn said that she did think so, and poured herself a glass of Tang, a drink she didn’t like so much, but, as the jar said, it was the drink of the astronauts. Flynn thought she might want to be an astronaut someday, if she lived that long. “Have you considered adoption? Of a girl?”
“What?” Greta said. “How did you know that?”
“It’s true, then?” So, her father hadn’t been lying. Greta was to be her new mother while her old mother got better and Anna would be around to love them both. Her grandmother, Flynn knew, was someone who would listen. Anna would believe her. She wouldn’t get mad or make her change the subject when Flynn talked about building the Great Wall of China and what it was like to work in such heat with cut up feet and hands.
“Yes,” Greta said, and smiled. “We’re adopting a special little girl. As a matter of fact, we’re going to have
two
children. I have a baby growing inside me. Did your grandma tell you?”
“No, not yet. My mother is ill. She’s mentally ill. Did she seem mentally ill to you?” Flynn reached for the optometrist’s goggles and set the meter to 20/20. This helped her stay in the ordinary world. If she was feeling just a little visionary, she adjusted the lenses to 20/40. Right now, Flynn didn’t want to know too much. Just to be safe, she turned the settings to 20/200, the numbers of blindness.
“I never met your mother, dear. But she’s probably fine. Do you think you and your father will visit with your grandma for a while?”
“I believe they’re discussing that topic even as we speak,” Flynn said, cocking her head to one side as though she could hear them. A radio somewhere played “The Ink Is Black.”
“So, tell me what you like to do for fun, Flynn. What you and your friends do in Alaska.”
“Oh, I don’t have friends. I’m a freak show. I’m freaky Flynnie, the mental case. Freaky Flynn with the head of a pin, that’s me.”
“You must have
some
friends.”
Flynn shrugged. “Spirit friends. I’m well-known and greatly admired in the spirit world.”
Greta sipped her coffee, but didn’t look mad the way Flynn’s mother got mad when she spoke of these things. Greta was going to be an ideal adopted mother and her grandma, Anna, was going to help her make sense of the spirit world. Her grandmother knew things, Flynn believed, because there was light all around her. Spirit light, the light of six angels, maybe more.
“But you must have at least
one
friend who isn’t imaginary.”
“I do,” Flynn said.
Greta smiled. “See? I thought so. What’s her name?”
Flynn cleared the setting on the heavy glasses and looked at Greta with normal sight. “Greta. Her name is Greta.”
Greta filled Flynn’s glass with milk and didn’t speak for so long that Flynn began to worry. She knew she confused people. Made people afraid. Not scary-movie afraid, but the way you drive around a cardboard box on the highway because it might have glass or sharp things inside. “Well, you have a good imagination. Maybe you’ll be an artist.”
Flynn shrugged. “My father’s an artist. I’ve been an artist in other lifetimes. In my next life, I’m scheduled to be an artist who makes things in blue glass.” She took a sip of the milk and asked if she could have more Tang.
Greta mixed up a new batch and Flynn watched as the orange crystals swirled around in the cloudy water like tiny astronauts trying to get to the moon. “My father is probably also mentally ill. My mother is definitely mentally ill.”
Greta said softly, “Do you think you are?”
Flynn smiled but didn’t answer. How could she answer? She explained to Greta about how in a previous life she and Marvin were husband and wife, and Poppy, her mother in this life, had been a blind cowherd named Ahmed who Marvin got jealous of. “He killed both of us in that life.” Flynn stopped. This was what people didn’t like to hear. This was why they called her freak show and mental case. She saw things. She knew things. But it wasn’t her fault. Just before her mother disappeared from the International House of Pancakes in Pennsylvania, she got mad at Flynn because her father asked her to tell him a story to pass the time and Flynn told him about when he was Sarti, her husband. Poppy had turned around then and said, “Why can’t you just pretend you were once Cleopatra or Queen Elizabeth? If you’re going to believe in other lifetimes why do you invent such poor and unhappy ones? Huh? Why do you turn me into a blind cowherd?” Flynn remembered her mother asking.
“I don’t make them up. I see them. I see things,” Flynn had told Poppy.
“No, Flynn, you don’t. You invent. Do you understand the difference between imagination and fact?” Poppy had asked.
“Yes, I do. And the fact is I’ve been Japanese and I’ve been Hindu. I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. I was a famous horse veterinarian in England and a witch in America. Right now, I’m not even a person. I’m not even
human. I am distance.”
“What?” her father had said. “What, sweetheart?”
“I am not a person. I am the distance between New York and California. I am every one of those miles.”
“That’s interesting,” Marvin had said, taking a little notebook from his shirt pocket and writing something down.
“Christ,” Poppy said. “Don’t encourage her, Marvin. It’s not interesting. It’s not normal. Why can’t we be normal?”
“Because you’re a drug addict,” Flynn had said. “The next time around I’m not coming back to help you. You have done wrong.”
“Okay, Flynn, that’s enough,” Marvin had said.
Her mother was crying and wouldn’t stop and that was the last thing Flynn remembered before Poppy had disappeared for good.
“May I be excused?” Flynn asked Greta. She put the goggles back on.
“Sure,” Greta said. “What would you like to do now? There might be some cartoons on.”
“No, thank you. I don’t like cartoons. Can I go to my grandmother’s backyard? I told her I would dig her yard.” Flynn was lying, which she didn’t like to do, but she had a project she needed to start.
“Well, I guess that would be all right, if you promise to stay just in the yard. It’ll be dark soon.”
“I promise. Can I borrow your radio?”
“You sure can.” Greta unplugged it—at least that’s what Flynn thought she was doing; she’d moved down to 20/600, the setting that made the world easy: everything was just a shape that was either moving or not moving.
In her grandmother’s yard, Flynn put the radio on the picnic table and got a shovel from the shed. She began to dig. Hopefully her grandmother wouldn’t be too upset. According to the DJ this morning, there were underground musical stars who had been there for over thirty years. It would make her grandmother’s yard ugly, but if she could find the Bay City Rollers it would be worth it.
After an hour of steady digging she pressed her ear against the hole. She thought she heard something very, very faintly way down in there. The kind of muffled noise Hoover McPaws made when he purred from beneath layers of clothes in a laundry basket. She couldn’t be sure, though. It
might be something or it might not. She would be happy to find anything. Really, she didn’t care all that much about finding the Bay City Rollers or Gladys Knight; what Flynn wanted was a pip. One pip would be worth a thousand knights.
“Where’s your car?” Anna asked, as they walked out of Davidé’s.
“I took the bus in. So I’ll have to ride with you if you let me.”
Anna drove through Boston then headed north on the highway. She had no destination in mind, but it felt comforting to be pointed toward Maine. How many times did she and Hugh make this drive in the course of their marriage? Fifty? A hundred? An image of the house was forever lodged in her mind. The living room blazing with firelight, the sharp scent of birch and the dormant scents reawakened from the heat: dusty old carpets, the lemon and pine polish on the furniture and brass, and, Anna’s favorite, a faint beachy smell that seemed to rise up from every nook and tucked-away blanket.
“Where are we going?” Marvin asked.
“I don’t know. I don’t have the foggiest idea.” Anna took the next exit, drove down a side road and pulled into a closed Texaco station. She rolled down the window, reached for her cigarettes and stared into the fading twilight. The tree frogs and crickets called.
“Just like high school. Hello, 1983.” He laughed.
“What?” Anna said.
“Every empty parking lot is a potential lover’s lane.”
Anna snorted. “You’re drunk.”
“I am, it’s true.” He rolled down the passenger window, reached for one of her cigarettes when he couldn’t get the hand-rolled tobacco to hold its shape.
“I guess I need to say that I don’t want you here. I’d like to get to know Flynn, but I want only limited contact with her if you do decide to move to Boston. I mean, I’ll be the kind of grandma who goes to the school plays, but not the kind who makes the costumes. Do you know what I’m saying? I can’t relive all this again, Marvin. I’m sorry.”
“Relive it?”
“Motherhood, grief, all of it. I don’t want to be attached to anything anymore. I mean, it’s like you’re all back from the dead. All
those years. All those years without a word. Who can live with that kind of worry forever? You have no idea. You have no idea how after a while absence turns into grief. And this sounds terrible, but it was just easier to imagine my daughter, that all of you, were dead. Mourning is easier than worry. Or any of those emotions you feel for the living.” She remembered now how sweet Poppy was as a young girl, so loving and obedient, a near-perfect child. But it was as if Poppy had been the daughter of a close friend instead of her own. Like any mother she was haunted by the idea of losing her child—to death, to strangers, to terrible, irreversible accidents—but that was simply maternal instinct. Motherhood was a different state entirely, one that she never really inhabited. Poppy seemed part of her, certainly, but Anna suspected her attachment differed from other mothers. The child who had been joined to her body once continued to seem like one of the most expendable parts of herself. A growth, a tumor. Well, not that exactly. Nothing so malignant. An extra finger or toe that got in the way and was not useful or needed.
“I’m sorry, Anna,” Marvin said. “I’m sorry for everything.” He covered her hand with his own.
“Well,” she said, and drew away. “That’s that. I wish you well. I’d like updates and calls now and then.” She lit another cigarette, stared at the old soda vending machine against the side of the gas station. It was one of the styles from the ’50s or ’60s that dispensed Coke in bottles. Anna remembered how satisfying it was to drink sodas from a bottle, the icy slush cooling her palm, the cold glass against her lips. What an odd thing to still have around.
She put the car in gear, but stopped. “Actually, before we go, I need to see.” She nodded to the old Coke machine, dug around for some change. “I have to see if it works.”
“No way,” Marvin said. “That thing looks like it’s been there since the Johnson administration.” He took the change from Anna. “I’ll go.” Anna watched him walk away. Marvin did have admirable qualities. He seemed extraordinarily patient—with his unusual daughter, with his flighty wife, and even, Anna had to admit, with her. In all of her tirades against him, he never once lost his temper or yelled back. And most men would have written off the likes of Poppy years ago. There was a real nobility in the way he loved his wife and daughter. Ironclad and without conditions. Even now when he talked about Poppy, there wasn’t any trace of bitterness or resentment
in his voice. Still, there was something about him that made her stop short every time. A darkness, an incomplete telling of the truth, she didn’t know.
Marvin turned back, held up a cold bottle.
Anna got out of the car and walked over. “Amazing,” she said, oddly elated. She found the opener along the side of the machine. The icy sweetness was how she remembered it. The smell of the bottle was the same, too. She passed it to Marvin, who passed it back after a sip, and they finished it this way, taking turns until it was gone.
Flynn was waiting inside her grandmother’s house, watching from the living room window. She could hardly wait to start their new life together. Ever since Greta had let it slip earlier about the adoption, Flynn’s excitement had grown over the afternoon until now, nearing eight o’clock and her bedtime, she was shaking with anticipation. Maybe she and Anna would buy new clothes so she wouldn’t have to always wear things from the second-hand store. She figured that they would move into a big house—Flynn saw it in her head. A huge place with many rooms, but also many spirit people. Flynn didn’t mind living with the dead. She’d always seen them, and they her. There was a murdered woman here in her grandma’s house. She once lived here, but somebody killed her in another country. Flynn had seen her in the bathroom a few times, and occasionally sitting beside her grandmother, especially when Anna did her doctor things. The woman liked Anna’s microscope. Once, the woman touched Flynn awake with cold air. She was sitting right on Flynn’s bed! Flynn held her breath. She didn’t blink.