Mrs. Wilson laughed, then coughed like she was choking on air. Her granddaughter took a tissue and wiped her chin. “Gram, did you want to tell Norman something?”
“Not old.” Smiling again, Mrs. Wilson let her eyes fall closed. “Just a spring . . . chick . . . chicken.”
Holding her hand between both of his, J. Norm pressed her fingers against his chest. “I need to ask a question of you. About my mother. About what happened.”
“Of course . . .” Mrs. Wilson let out a long, slow sigh, her body seeming to dissolve into the sheets.
From across the bed, Kelly gave a sad look and shook her head. I knew her grandma was fading again.
Norman leaned closer to the bed, his chin almost on the railing. “What was my mother hiding from me?”
“I give you . . . some . . . thing?” Mrs. Wilson whispered, the words growing softer and softer, fading along with her. “. . . from the bl . . . blue . . .” She took another breath, her fingers slack in Norman’s hand. One more word came when she breathed out the air. “. . . dresser?”
She closed her eyes and Kelly gave us a sad frown, then mouthed,
I’m sorry
. She said we could wait if we wanted, but she doubted that her grandma would wake up again that afternoon, and maybe not at all. J. Norm brought Frances’s hand to his lips and kissed it, then lowered it gently to the bed. He stood looking at her a minute longer before we left, remembering the past, I guessed.
We didn’t talk until we were back in the car, and J. Norm was looking at the map, trying to figure out how to get us out of McKinney and back on the highway.
“Turn left,” he said when we got to the street. Easy for him to say. Left was across three lanes of traffic. I’d never turned across three lanes of traffic in my life.
I held my breath and hit the gas and hoped I didn’t take anybody’s bumper off. The car lurched out of the parking lot, and J. Norm’s head snapped. “Slowly!” he barked.
“I can’t go slow! There’s cars everywhere!” All of a sudden there was traffic all around, everybody whizzing along faster than we were, turning off in all directions.
J. Norm pointed his finger toward the window and swung it sideways. “Right at the next corner. Right. Right!”
I looked over my shoulder at all those cars coming a million miles an hour, and sweat started dripping down my back. “I’m
not
turning right. It’s too hard.”
He pointed again, his hand wagging like one of those dashboard dogs on a spring. “That way to the highway entrance. That way!”
“I don’t want to go that way.”
Breathe, breathe, just keep breathing. The left lane has to go someplace.
“You’re taking us into town!”
Every muscle in my body went stiff, and my stomach wriggled and twisted. A gap opened up to the right of us, and I whipped across two lanes, into the parking lot of a used-furniture store. I hit the brakes so fast that both of us swung forward, then back. “Do
you
want to drive, because I . . .”
J. Norm wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at some junky scratched-up furniture in the store window. Someone’d painted it bright red and electric blue and glued Power Ranger pictures all over it. J. Norm’s head tipped to one side, and he rolled down his window to get a closer look.
“What’re you doing?” I leaned across the console to see if there was anything interesting in that window.
He pointed toward the furniture. “What color was the furniture in the nursing home? In Frances’s room. Did you see the dresser?”
My mind zipped through a half dozen tunnels, like a mouse slipping through the walls of Mama’s house. “Blue.” J. Norm turned to look at me, and both at the same time, we said, “The blue dresser.”
Sliding back into my seat, I gripped the steering wheel. “How do we get back to that nursing home?”
His mouth worked into a grin. “Turn left.”
“Yeah, see, I was right all along,” I said. “I knew you’d figure it out about the blue dresser here in a minute. I was just trying to make you feel good about yourself.”
He shook his head, but he was trying not to smile, I could tell.
I pulled out, and we headed back to the nursing home. On the way around the block, we came up with a plan. I’d go into Mrs. Wilson’s old room and push the door shut where people wouldn’t see me snooping around, and J. Norm would hang around down the hall. If any of the workers came by, he’d stop them and ask them questions to keep them distracted, and if he had to, he’d even slip and fall down or something.
It was a good plan, and when we got to the nursing home, it went just like we’d pictured. There was a lady making her way down the hall with a laundry cart, but she was three rooms away from Mrs. Wilson’s, and I figured I’d have enough time to case the joint before she got there. She went into another room, and I ducked into Mrs. Wilson’s. There were actually two beds in there, and a lady was asleep in the other one, but she didn’t look like she knew a thing. I checked out the blue dresser on Mrs. Wilson’s side, but the drawers were empty. Somebody’d already started cleaning the place out.
The old lady in the next bed moaned and stuck her hand up when I moved to the closet. “Ssshhh,” I whispered. “It’s okay. Mrs. Wilson wants her stuff from the blue dresser.”
The lady moaned louder, and I stopped where I was. Should I try to get her to quiet down, or check the closet real quick and scoot on out the door? Finally I went for the closet, and sure enough, there were boxes in the bottom, and they had Frances Wilson’s name on them.
The lady in the bed kept moaning and moaning.
I popped opened a box. Clothes. I checked the other one. Clothes. I opened the third, and it was mostly empty—a few old pictures in picture frames, some printed pages from the Web site about St. Clare’s school. Some greeting cards, a couple of pretty bows that must’ve come on flower arrangements, a lace thing like you’d put on the top of a dresser, some loose stationery for writing letters, another box of greeting cards.
I heard J. Norm in the hall, talking to someone. Hooking a finger under the lid of the greeting card box, I pulled it up, looked inside, and there it was—an envelope with
Norman
written on it.
There were voices right outside the door now. J. Norm was talking loud, asking the laundry lady how often the sheets were changed here and whether the food was good, like he was either thinking of moving in or doing an inspection of the place.
I heard the squeal of another set of shoes coming up the hall. “You’d better check on her,” the person talking with J. Norm said, and I figured that in about two and a half seconds, the moaning lady and I were gonna have company. Grabbing the envelope and one of the greeting cards, I pushed the closet door shut right as a nurse walked into the room. She didn’t notice me at first. I took a step toward the door, and she saw me, and I glanced at J. Norm, who was wide-eyed outside with the laundry lady.
I held up the greeting card I’d lifted from Mrs. Wilson’s box. “I don’t know what’s the matter. I just came in here to bring a card, but I think that lady needs something.” Before the nurse could ask me who I was, I set the card on the blue dresser and scooted out the door with J. Norm’s envelope in my hand. I didn’t even look at him. I just kept going until I was out the front of the building and in the car.
J. Norm must’ve found the switch for old-guy hyperdrive, because he wasn’t far behind me. I was still trying to get my breath when he slid into his seat. “What did you find?”
I held up the envelope. “Home run.”
Taking it from my hand, he touched the place where his name was written and said, “Drive.”
Chapter 15
J. Norman Alvord
I left the envelope unopened until we reached home. I wasn’t certain why, other than the knowledge that the mere act of traveling across town with Epiphany at the wheel was excitement enough. I had the sense that the envelope contained something of significance—a life-altering bit of history that shouldn’t be discovered while clinging to the seat by my fingernails as the car threaded through rush-hour traffic. Epiphany didn’t argue the matter greatly. She was busy trying to deliver us home in one piece.
At slightly after five thirty we reached my house, having both perhaps sacrificed a year or more of life span. I was never so relieved to be pulling into my own driveway.
Safely back in the house, I sank into my chair, sliding my fingers along the crease of the plain brown envelope. The paper was crisp, somewhat aged in feel. The envelope had a pliability to the edges and a stiffness farther in, indicating that whatever was inside hadn’t been intended for this particular package.
“Open it!” Dropping to her knees, Epiphany squirmed into the narrow space beside my chair. “I risked my life for that thing. It better not be last year’s Christmas card.”
I examined the crease again, partially just to torment her, but there was also a sense of foreboding in me. If my mother had chosen to hide whatever knowledge this envelope contained, perhaps there was a good reason. “Now, that would make both of us look foolish, wouldn’t it? All this running around for a Christmas card.”
“Well, hey, at least I know how to drive in rush-hour traffic now, right?” Epiphany’s hands flipped through the air, mobile exclamation points.
“I presume you’re using that term loosely.”
She blew a raspberry at me. “I got us back here. Open the stupid envelope.”
I slid a finger under the flap, and the glue popped free quickly. Inside was a single sheet of floral stationery folded around a newspaper clipping.
“What is it?” Epiphany leaned close, her chin touching my arm. “What’s it say?”
My hands shook as I unfolded the paper. At the top, my name had been written in shaky cursive, and beneath that, the single paragraph of writing ran downhill, the scrawl labored, crooked, almost illegible. I lifted it closer to my face, trying to make out the words. In my mind, I heard the voice from my childhood, Frances’s voice.
Norman, I fear I cannot take this secret to my grave. Please know that I believe your mother had your best interests at heart. I suspect that to her dying breath she would have told you that you were always hers, but you came to her at five years old, following a trauma of some sort. You dreamed often of a house fire. I believe you had or may yet have siblings. A woman who helped with parties in your mother’s Houston circle, Aldamae, may have known something of this. She was a colored woman from Groveland. She came to the back door late one night and spoke privately with your mother. Shortly afterward, you were brought into the family. Aldamae knew your history, I am certain. I overheard things later on. There were secrets which your mother never confided to me, but . . .
The words became indiscernible then, except for the final few . . .
from Groveland, I think . . .
The letter ended abruptly, unsigned.
“Whoa,” Epiphany breathed, leaning away to look at me, her eyes wide circles of tarnished silver. “That’s like something out of a movie.”
“Except that it isn’t a movie.” Everything I had suspected was true. The christening pictures that my mother had placed in my baby book, the grainy photographs of her building sand castles with a toddler at the beach house, were bits of someone else’s history. My hair had not darkened from sandy blond to red, as she had always asserted when she’d shown those pictures of a towheaded child. In reality, I was not the child in those photographs.
I was another child. Someone
else’s
child.
Epiphany squeezed out of the corner and stood up. “You think we can get Terrence’s computer again today?”
I glanced toward the door. “He’s out of town. When I spoke with him this morning, he said he was leaving for an art show in Oklahoma, and then he’d be spending a couple days with his daughter, Dell. She’s expecting his first grandchild.” Epiphany’s look of consternation took me aback slightly. “Why did you want the computer again?”
She paced to the entry doorway and back, her fingertips drumming together. “The library’s closed by now. We need to get to a computer. . . .”
“For what purpose, exactly?” Clearly I’d been left in the dust of a speedy, youthful mind.
Her face was alive with possibilities I hadn’t yet seen. “To look it up, J. Norm—just like that stuff we found about Frances and the school. I mean, a big house burns down and there’s kids in the house, and some people must’ve died, or you wouldn’t have been up for adoption. A fire like that would’ve been a big deal, right? Even though it was a long time ago, it would’ve been a big story. We think it might’ve happened in Groveland. Maybe it made the papers, or got on some history site—like the one we looked at about St. Clare’s school. We know
what
happened, and we sort of know
when
it happened—I mean, you know about how old you were when you were in the house with the seven chairs, so we can figure out what year the house might’ve burned down, right? You said you remembered four other kids and you, all redheaded. It’s not every day five redheaded kids are in a house that burns down. You’d be surprised what’s on the Internet—all kinds of memories people have written about, old newspaper articles, lots of history. It’s worth a shot.”