Girl in Reverse (9781442497368) (18 page)

My father bites his lip.

“This
rubble
is mine,” I repeat. “It's from my life before the sisters. Did the nuns tell you that the regular protocol was to bring it home and hide it from me? Or did they advise you to tell me I had no belongings from my past even though I did?”

Dad chimes in. “Lily! It would have only confused you. We were so ecstatic to have you, to move forward and start a family. What would have been the point?”

“But you said it didn't exist when you knew that it did. I believed you, even the other night when you said everything was gotten rid of. Why live in reverse?”

I wave my hand at Mother's fancy cabinet of crystal glasses. “You inherited all this stuff from
your
mother. What if somebody had lied and told you it didn't exist or had just hidden it under a dirty old tarp or had even thrown it away?”

The misery on my mother's face stops me cold. She looks shrunk into a little girl.

Ralph digs furiously into his pudding.

“It's my fault,” says Dad in a raspy, tired voice. “I thought it was best for everyone.”

My mother straightens her back, picks up the jade, puts it down, and waves her hand. “Well, I can't make heads or tails of it.” She picks up a paintbrush, drops it back in the
box. Rage flashes in me. It takes everything I have not to blurt out about Gone Mom and the art museum. I sweep my things back into my box. I don't want her to touch any of it, to spout her puny two-cents'-worth assessment of things that are priceless to me. This was an awful idea, putting my heart on the dissecting table. They won't see it again. But now I know one important fact—it was Dad who hid it from Mother and me.

“Were you crawling in the attic, Lily?” Dad asks.

Ralph chimes in. “
I
was, you know, in the attic because I am doing the Pigeon Raising merit badge.” Mother looks repulsed. Ralph looks pleased. He's chosen to hit them while they're down, a one-two punch. “It seemed easy to raise pigeons if they are already on the premises and don't actually need
raising
, so . . .” Ralph takes a breath. “I found this box that we figured out belongs to Lily and—”

Mother slices through Ralph's explanation. “
Pigeons?
Where are your birds now?”

“In the attic,” Ralph answers, “like I said.” He and I turn to our father.

“About those birds . . . ,” my father says, shooting his wife a look. “We need to talk, son. They carry disease.”

“They're supposed to carry
messages
, but they're not speedy learners.”

“We need a screen on that window,” Mother says as she stands and heads up to her room with Joy in her arms.

Minutes later Ralph and I do the dishes. “Wow! Teamwork!” Ralph gives me a Scout salute.

Twirling the dishrag, I figure out why Mother wasn't more upset, why she didn't seem threatened by these parts of my broken past—one, because my things looked like random bits of
heathen
nothing, and two, they are contained
inside
our family. This has not become a public embarrassment like my detention, so it doesn't count. It's just
me
. So what? Sure enough, Dad pops through the kitchen door and says, “Hey, Lily and Ralph, let's just keep this box business in the family.” He tilts his head in the direction of the stairs. “Easier for everyone that way.”

“Dad?” I say.

“Not all memories are good ones. Dredging up bits and pieces of a person's . . .”

“Past?”

“Yes. Parts of a person's past can be difficult,” he says.

“Don't you think I know that already? Plus, I'm not ‘a person,' I'm
me.
You act like we're talking about somebody else.”

My father doesn't say it, but his look does—
we are. . . .

The door swings shut. I squeeze the dishrag and listen to bubbles popping in the sink. Funny how the fact that they hid my Gone Mom things makes the things more important. Pushing her away makes her closer.

*  *  *

On Wednesday after school, my purse and I enter the museum. “Are the Chinese experts here today?” I ask, sounding nonchalant in a panicked sort of way. The woman at the information desk looks at me funny. Maybe she can tell I need her to hold my hand. She tells me to check upstairs.

I pass the Scholar's Studio. The wrist rest still sits on the desk. It's good to see it there, doing its job of doing nothing. I clutch my purse and head around the corner to the Main Chinese Gallery. No ginger and scallion steam, no whining zither today, just Dr. Benton by a display case with its wide glass front swung open. He wears white gloves and is examining what looks to be a collection of tiny tea sets.

My mouth tastes like metal. I cannot just walk over and interrupt him. My mind sparks a million warnings, especially this one:
You are about to make misery.
So I fiddle around pretending to be interested in this and that and check my watch. One hour until closing. I stare into a case full of ancient jade pieces. Prongs hold them up at a viewing angle—part of a crouched tiger, a broken knife hilt as big as my hand, and the flat carved disk Dr. Benton showed us, the exact same greenish-tan color as the broken lizard tail in my purse. The label says the disk is called a
bi,
and that it represents the universe with two dragons dancing on the edge. A
bi
was buried with the emperor because jade ensured immortality.

I slip past the gates into the Buddhist temple and sit on a bench, my heart a hummingbird. I swear the bodhisattva
has grown. They have added a display of fragile silk prayer scrolls and bits of broken mirror found inside cavities in the head and back, left by devotees a thousand years ago.

Showing Dr. Benton my jade will be an easier place to start than the photographs. I take a breath and begin the impossible trek back over to him in the Main Chinese Gallery. He is crouched on one knee, angling his huge camera lens at miniature teaspoons made of clay.

“Sir?” He turns. Light bounces off his horn-rimmed glasses. “Excuse me,” I croak.

He sighs, lowers his camera. He looks windswept, sculpted, Hollywood handsome with thick coppery hair.

“I've got something here. . . .” I fumble my purse open and lift out a folded Kleenex. He glances at it and gives me a questioning once-over. My nerves leap and scream, reminding the rest of me that my next move can never be reversed. I hold up the jade.

He sets his camera on the floor, stands up. His fingers clench and stretch as if he's lost his pockets. I see his reflection in the display case glass. An odd thought comes to me—Elliot would have an easy time drawing a caricature of him, with his strong jaw, straight nose, and wavy hair.

“May I?” He turns the piece to catch the light. He clears his throat, gives me a look of immense puzzlement, or maybe it's immense wonderment. “Where did you get this, miss?” he whispers.

I look through the opening into the temple. The bodhisattva looks back. “From a relative of mine, a person who was a part of your team in China.”

He gives the piece back to me. His hand trembles a bit, or maybe I'm trembling. I
know
I'm trembling. He takes off his gloves.

There's noise in the hall—museum visitors. They walk past the door. Dr. Benton pauses a moment, then motions me into the temple. “Do you have anything else from your relative?”

“I do.”

He does not ask my relative's name. He is clearly more interested in art than people. I remove the red lacquer box. “Ming Dynasty,” he says, turning it in his hand. He points to an animal carved on the lid. “This is a
qilin
. It has the scales of a dragon and hooves of a deer. The peony symbolizes that one's sons have great character and success. It is the wish for the birth of sons.”

It didn't work,
I think. Gone Mom didn't give birth to sons, at least as far as I know. “I . . . I also have pictures.”

“Would you mind my seeing them?” he asks. His eyes are pale blue, deep set, and nervous. I would be too if I were him, wondering how he'd been so careless as to leave these things behind. Of course, he lost track of a whole person, Gone Mom, so who knows?

He takes a long breath and sorts through my pictures. He
drops one and snatches it off the floor. He drops another one. “Sorry, miss.” I point to the group picture. “Although it's hard to see her in my photo, that young lady is Lien Loo,” I say, pointing. “You talked about her . . . saying she didn't come to America.”

He nods.

“But she
did
.”

He folds his arms across his chest, steps back. He's obviously not used to being corrected. “Excuse me?”

“Lien Loo. I stood in this room with her before the bodhisattva was in here and after
she came to America
.”

His face is impossible to read. “When exactly was that?”

“I was born on December twentieth, 1934, in San Francisco. It was a few years after that.” He says nothing. I glance around the room thinking he must not believe me. “Would one of the other experts know more about her?”

Dr. Benton straightens his shoulders. “I can ask,” he says. “Yes. I will surely do that. Consult my colleagues. What year did you say you were here with her? It might clear up a discrepancy.”

Discrepancy?

He is definitely a date person. It goes with being an archaeologist, I guess. “I'm not sure—in 1937, maybe. I was around three.” I half expect him to ask my height and weight, what I'm made of, and how I was created—the facts for my
label
. He'll probably want to take my picture.

“Did you say Lien Loo was your distant relative?”

“Not
distant.
She was my mother.” The syllables vibrate in my ears, my bones.
She was my mother. She
is
my mother. She is
one
of my mothers. She was
once
my mother.

“I see.” He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and fumbles with his handkerchief. “As I said, we lost track of her and her father. It was a great loss. W—where is she now?”

“I thought maybe you would know. You said she didn't come here, but she did. She placed me in the Sisters of Mercy Children's Home when I was three, and after a while I was adopted.” My words sound strong, true, and terrible.

He glances around as if looking for something, maybe the hidden door to disappear through. “So how is it you have these pictures and the jade?”

“She left them for me.”

“Where?”

“At the orphanage.”

“Are there more?”

“. . . yes.”

“I see.” He nods. Works his hands. His cheeks have a shadow of whiskers. It's a strong face, one that could be famous—
is
famous, I guess, in the world of antique art, anyway. “Might you come back with those things? I am most interested. I need to do a bit of research. This is quite a revelation, to say the least. Saturday at ten o'clock?” He looks anxious, ready for me to leave.

“All right. Saturday morning,” I say, as if I'm making plans to sort canned goods for the Future Homemakers of America Club.

He turns and asks, “Your name?”

“Lillian,” I say, and snap my mouth shut before “Firestone” escapes.

Armed with my truth pin, I am about to burst the next Firestone balloon.

While guilt can motivate a person to do many fantastic and insincere things, anger and resolve—maybe even a bit of fiery Gone Mom–ness—can motivate many fantastic and sincere ones. Mr. and Mrs. Donald Firestone hid Gone Mom in the attic. They don't think it's a big deal. Just ho-hum, la-di-da. I know what Mother would do if I tried to tell her that her mother and grandmother, the legendary women who handed down her sacred crystal and currently lost compact, were not real members on her family tree. She'd start growling. Or what if Dad found out that his father—who died in his prime after supposedly handing down his formidable business brains—was really an imposter? No ho-humming that away. No, sir.

The radio is off. Dad is fidgety even while ensconced in “Old Smoky.” My brother acts like he's waiting for a horror movie to start. He has already scarfed half a bowl of popcorn in the living room, a Firestone felony. Mother, outfitted in her house shoes, is not saying a word about the popcorn. She sits in the companion chair to Dad's, looking scared of my box, which is making its second appearance on my lap. She should be.

Joy is on her lap asleep or playing possum. I wish she weighed a thousand pounds so Mother can't get up, something she will do any second now.

My hands are frozen to the lid of my case. My tongue is dry. My heart is turned off. My nerves switched on high.

Outside, snow dusts our lawn—lazy flakes that won't live long. I imagine Ralph's pigeons gathered, eavesdropping at the top of the attic stairs, ready to spread my message around the world.

Dad crosses his legs. He jiggles one loafer off the toes of his right foot. “So, Lily, I see that you've brought
that
out again.”

Ralph stops chomping and fixes me with a look of encouragement. I clear my throat and open my mouth, looking right at Mother. “This box contains some things that the
lady who gave birth to me
wanted me to have.” I inhale so sharply I cough. Joy stretches and repositions herself on Mother.

My mother changes from looking scared to mildly bored—
we already know about this, Lillian.

“Some of these things”—I open the box and hold up the brush and the little metal stake with a string attached—“are left over from an archaeological dig in northern China in 1934.”

Dad stops shaking his foot, leans in for a quick look. “How would you possibly know that, Lily?”