Authors: Renee Manfredi
“Oh,” Greta said, looking past Anna to the street.
Anna hugged her. “It will be okay. Call or just stop in at any hour. Last night I was up till four.”
“Okay. Thanks for hanging out.”
“Thanks for calling off the surprise party.” Anna went inside to get her jacket and bag.
“Oh, hey,” Greta called.
Anna turned.
“You dropped this.” Greta handed the hairpin to her.
“This again,” she said, and felt the hole in the lining of her coat pocket.
She sat in the dark when she got home, not tired enough for bed but not sharp enough to practice or to read through two dozen quizzes on
viral pathogens. She kicked off her shoes and headed to her bedroom where she saw the message light on her machine blinking. Greta, probably, it was only ever Greta these days. She pressed the
PLAY
button.
“Mother, it’s Poppy.” There was a pause. “I hope you’ll call me back, it’s kind of important.” Anna heard a child’s voice in the background, a girl who must be Flynn, the granddaughter she’d never met. Somewhere she had photographs of Flynn as an infant. She must be about ten now. Anna braced herself. Poppy gave her number, an area code of 907. What state was that? The second message was also from Poppy: “Hi, it’s me again. Well, I suppose I can just ask this on the machine. If I don’t hear back from you in the next few days, I’ll assume the answer is no. Marvin and Flynn and I would like to visit. This summer. In a few weeks. Hope to talk to you soon.”
Anna sat down on the bed, and felt all the evening’s earlier dread gather into a sickness in her stomach. She hadn’t seen her daughter in twelve years. There were occasional postcards, but in the past five years Anna hadn’t heard anything at all from her. And after Hugh died it as if her daughter were dead, too.
Poppy left home at eighteen, with Marvin, the nut who called in response to the newspaper ad Hugh placed to sell the old VW bus that had been languishing in their backyard for a decade. Anna recalled exactly the day Marvin Blender came into their lives. It was October, and Hugh was sick. Poppy had just come back from Europe with a heroin habit. It was the worst time in their lives. A month after Anna and Hugh returned from their summer home in Maine, they learned that his extreme fatigue and headaches—he’d been complaining all summer but insisted it was from overwork and stress—was sarcoma. Anna herself drew his blood. His white count was so high that the slide looked like something by Monet, the cells like a covering of water lilies.
It was with this news that she and Hugh went to pick up Poppy at the airport. Anna watched the passengers disembarking, but not until Poppy walked right up to her did Anna recognize her daughter; Poppy was like a torn page from a favorite book, familiar but unidentifiable without the whole. She was so thin Anna could see her kneecaps jutting up against her jeans when she walked. Her hair, shoulder-length when she left six months ago, was now so short her scalp showed through. Anna knew right away, knew from her mask-like expression, the dullness in her eyes. Hugh refused
to believe it at first, saw Poppy through the eyes of a loving father rather than the physician he was.
Anna went through Poppy’s things, searched every inch of her room but found nothing. It was the cleaning lady who finally solved the mystery; Poppy had hidden everything in
their
bedroom. The heroin was in one of Anna’s seldom-used jewelry boxes, the syringes in the bottom bureau drawer with the gift-wrap and ribbons. There was a note from Maria on the kitchen table on top of two tiny packages.
I knocked over the Mrs jewelry case when I dusted. These bags fell out.
Poppy was in and out of the hospital, jaundiced, and then with hepatitis so severe that it left her with only sixty per cent liver function. She was in an on-site rehab program for two months before they released her to her parents.
By Christmas she was improved, had gained weight and was attending college classes part-time. She had a new boyfriend whom Anna and Hugh liked very much. There was talk of a wedding in a year or two, but Anna and Hugh both treated Charlie as if he was already part of their family. He came to the house every night and sat with Poppy in front of the television or with Hugh and Anna on the patio after Poppy went to bed. He was good-natured and patient, one of the producers of nature shows at WGBH, and most importantly, was crazy about their daughter. He’d been as tender with her as Hugh was.
Anna poured herself a double sherry now and took it into the bathroom to run a hot bath. No. She didn’t want her daughter to visit. She slipped out of her clothes, into the hot freesia-scented water, and let her mind drift.
A year after Hugh’s diagnosis, his cancer had gone into and out of remission, but by the following autumn the chemotherapy was working. He was exhausted, but in good spirits. One Sunday the four of them, Anna and Hugh, Poppy and Charlie, sat down to an early supper. Charlie had just returned from a deer-hunting trip with his brother so dinner that night was venison chili and cornbread. It was crisply cool. Hugh and Charlie took their after-dinner Scotches outside. Hugh was bundled up in the white wool cardigan Anna kept and wore for months after he died, convinced that it still held the scents of years of fine and perfect falls: hearty dinners spiced with rosemary and garlic, the tannin and
woodsmoke in the air, the faint scent of wine from a spilled glass of Merlot.
Anna put on Chopin’s nocturnes and watched her husband and future son-in-law bent together in the dusky light, the leaves from the over-hanging oaks casting shadows on the broad, flat stones of the patio. After Hugh died, Anna sat for hours in Hugh’s chair, in the exact tone of late-afternoon light. She watched those same shadows of leaves, the delicate filigree pattern on her skin like cool, finely tatted lace. She felt Hugh everywhere, his memory wrapped around her like an invisible shawl.
That day, Anna wondering if this was Hugh’s final autumn, Poppy had come up beside her, took a step toward her mother as though to put her arms around her, but stopped. Anna and Poppy did not touch, hadn’t since Poppy was a girl. They’d always been wary around each other, and Poppy’s rough adolescence had driven them even farther apart. “It will be all right. It’ll be okay,” Poppy said.
Anna nodded, blew her nose. “Well. It’s getting a little tragic around here. Will you change the music? Chopin is a bit too much right now. Maybe the happy fool,” she said, her pet name for Mozart.
They were just sitting down to dessert and coffee when the phone rang. Hugh answered, and from his end of the conversation Anna knew it was someone calling in response to the ad for the VW. “Sure. That would be fine,” Hugh said into the phone.
“You’re finally selling that old heap, eh?” Charlie said, when Hugh returned.
“Sure. There’s a demand for those old buses. A whole new wave of hippies coming up. Anna and I once drove across the country in that thing. Those were the years Anna wore miniskirts. All the way up to the watermark.”
“What!” Anna said. “I
never wore miniskirts
.”
“My dear, I couldn’t forget something like that.” He said it with such conviction and wistfulness that they all laughed.
Anna remembered Hugh wanted her to wear miniskirts. Maybe he had bought her one or two, she thought now, turning on the hot water tap with her toe, but she certainly hadn’t ever worn short skirts. She balanced her glass of sherry on the edge of the tub, rolled a towel behind her neck.
They had just started eating when Marvin showed up. Hugh had told
him to come at seven-thirty, but he must have driven over the minute he hung up. Charlie spotted him first, a tall man in a long black coat, with straight, shoulder-length dark hair. He walked around the backyard, shielded his hand over his eyes and stared in at the house, directly in front of the dining room window. With that strange coat—Anna remembered it as a military type of thing, double-breasted, with brass buttons—and his hand over his eyes, he looked like some lost member of a battalion, unsure of the friendliness of the territory. He snapped his head this way and that, as though he heard his name in the wind.
“Who is this chucklehead?” Charlie said.
Hugh sighed, pushed his chair back and put his napkin on the table.
Charlie stood. “I’ll take care of it, Dad.”
They all watched as Charlie approached the man, who squared his shoulders, held out his hand. Charlie nodded, gestured toward the house, and the two of them walked to where the VW was parked.
“He must be the one who called,” Hugh said, and looked at his watch. “I told him seven-thirty.”
In a few minutes Charlie came back in. “He’s interested but wants a test drive.”
“The keys are in the junk drawer in the kitchen,” Hugh said.
Anna heard him rummaging around in there, through the heap of old keys and scissors, appointment cards and coupons that Anna clipped but then forgot about. “He’ll never find those keys,” Anna said. “There’s a whole marriage worth of junk in there.”
“I’ll get them. I know what they look like,” Poppy said.
Anna watched the stranger standing in the yard. There was something about him that made her uneasy, a cold spot at the base of her spine and the top of her head.
She wrapped herself in a robe. Some part of her knew, understood that this man would not just walk up, drive off with their old bus, and disappear. Maybe it was that she sensed Poppy’s attraction to him. For whatever else he was, he was a gorgeous man: “There’s a textbook specimen,” Hugh had said, looking at him through the window. “A perfect bone structure.” The man turned his head just then as though he heard this, and Anna saw the right angle of his jaw, the elegant slope of his neck. His hair was dark, but with highlights the exact shade of the turning maples. Anna watched
as he held his index finger and thumb the way children do when they make an imaginary gun, and tapped the side of his head. His lips moved slightly, as if he were counting. “You might want to wait until the check clears before turning over the title,” Anna said.
Poppy walked into the dining room, held up the plastic daisy key ring.
“Remember these, miniskirt Mama?” She dangled the keys in front of Anna, did a sexy swing with her hips. Anna laughed.
Charlie held his hand out, smiled.
“You know what, I haven’t been in that thing since I was about five. I’ll take him,” Poppy said.
Charlie and Anna at the same time said, “No.”
Poppy looked from one to the other. “No? And why not? Do you think he’s going to kidnap me?”
Charlie shrugged, sat back down. Anna said, “Let Charlie take him, Poppy.”
“Why?” She gave a surprised laugh.
Anna couldn’t think of a why. She glanced over at Charlie who was taking a second helping of chili. “I don’t know. Do what you want.”
“Don’t go far,” Charlie said.
“Don’t speed,” Hugh said.
“Be right back,” Poppy said.
An hour and a half later the VW pulled into the driveway. Poppy and the man walked up to the house at a languorous, conversational pace. Even from the distance of the living room to the end of the driveway, Anna could see her daughter’s flushed face open with laughter. Poppy threw her head back and crossed her arms tightly as if holding herself together. Charlie glanced over the top of his newspaper. He wasn’t the jealous type, Anna knew: He gave Poppy a wide berth.
“We’re back,” she called, as if this man were a houseguest or a visiting cousin. The man walked in, sat next to Charlie on the loveseat. “I’m Charlie Edwards, Poppy’s fiancé,” he said, and held out his hand.
“Hello again, Charlie Edwards. I’m Marvin Blender.” He turned to Anna. “You must be Poppy’s sister.” Anna smiled tightly to show that she saw right through this; he might be able to fool a young woman like Poppy, but she had his number all right. “Are you interested in the bus?”
“You bet. She’s a beauty. Great body.”
Anna watched his face closely, waited for his eyes to so much as flicker in Poppy’s direction before she threw him out of her house. “I’d like to negotiate an offer,” he said.
Hugh was resting, probably asleep, and she wasn’t about to disturb him for the likes of this man. “We won’t negotiate the price. We’re selling it as quoted in the ad,” Anna said.
He shrugged. “Fair enough. Will you take a personal check?”
“We’d prefer a money order or cash.”
Poppy came in with two glasses of lemonade and handed one to Marvin, who smiled up at her.
“I can do cash. I’ll need to go to the bank, of course. I’ll go first thing Monday. How’s that?”
Anna did not want to see this man ever again. He could drive off with the stupid thing for free as far as she was concerned. “You know, you seem like a trustworthy young man. I’ll take a personal check.” Charlie stared at her like she’d lost her mind. “I’ll tell you what. Write me a check now. I’ll take it to the bank tomorrow morning and once everything is square, I’ll leave the keys in the newspaper box along with the title and registration.”
Poppy and Charlie both looked at her curiously. Marvin said, “Fine. I understand.” He sat back, sipped his lemonade.
Monday afternoon, after Marvin Blender’s check cleared, Anna left the keys and title in the newspaper box as promised, but it was two weeks before he came back to claim the bus and when he did he took her daughter with him. In retrospect, it wasn’t hard to see the course of it: Anna was working full-time and Hugh was at the hospital all day. Poppy was home most of the time, going to a class or two if she felt like it. She must have started seeing him then.
The day Anna came home from work and found the note—
Have decided to do a little traveling with Marvin. Will call from the road.
—she knew two things: One, that this wasn’t just a whimsical road trip on Poppy’s part—flaky as she was, when Poppy made a decision it was with gravity—and two, that they’d lost Poppy in some irretrievable way.
To her astonishment, Hugh and Charlie didn’t treat it as an emergency and dismissed her suggestion to call the police.
“How can you be so cavalier?” Anna asked Charlie. “This is the woman you’re going to marry. The woman you love.”