Like Family (35 page)

Still, astonishing things happened.

1. One Saturday morning at the hospital, Teresa and I were in Cordelia Danke’s room flipping rubber bands at each other and
watching a
Berenstain Bears
episode on her TV. It was a slow, warm day, with ribs of sun on the blinds, and I felt like singing something. Nothing but
“La Cucaracha” came to mind, so I sang that quietly as I made Cordelia’s bed. Teresa began to sing too and kicked up the volume.
Walking over to where Cordelia sat like a stone in her wheelchair, Teresa took her hands and serenaded her, filling in the
parts she didn’t know with rousing da-dah’s.

Cordelia was one of our favorites, though she didn’t speak, walk or feed herself. Senile dementia was her diagnosis, but that
was a catchall on three-fourths of the patients’ charts; it didn’t mean anything. No one really knew why Cordelia stopped
functioning. She was old, but so were lots of people out in the world, driving cars, baby-sitting their grandchildren. Cordelia
was old, but that day, Teresa was singing vibrantly to her about cockroaches, and her face woke up. She began to sing back,
mumbling at first. Teresa and I were shocked into silence, but Cordelia went on without us, her voice louder and clearer by
the second. She knew the words Teresa didn’t. Her song grew so passionate, some of the other nursing assistants came in, and
the shift RN and the director. The family was called. Within two weeks, Cordelia was up and walking the halls, going into
the dining hall for her dinner, choosing her own clothes. After that, no one could tell us that music was not a powerful thing.

2. On another day, Teresa and I took separate cars to work because she had to meet Marcus right after. We left at the same
time, but I made a light she didn’t and lost her. Halfway through passing out the breakfast trays, I realized I hadn’t seen
her yet and hurried to the time clock to see if she’d punched in. Nope. Something had happened to her, I was sure of it; it
was the only explanation. I went to the shift supervisor, a bitter pill of a nurse named Catherine Birch, and asked her if
I could leave for half an hour to go out looking for my sister. She couldn’t spare me, she said, and besides, Teresa was likely
just blowing off the shift. It happened all the time; I should just go back to work. When I insisted I had to leave, she insisted
I had to stay, and finally I ran out in tears. So what if I lost my skanky job? This was my sister.

Before I’d even driven a mile up the road, I saw Teresa walking against traffic, her white jumper spotted with blood. Her
tights were ripped, and her knees and legs looked banged up. She’d totaled her car not five minutes from home and had been
hobbling to get to me ever since. We hugged like people who had saved each other, which was true. Had always been true.

3. Spring found us in lawn chairs, working on tans in our ratty backyard. You only had to say the word
sun
around Teresa and she was brown as a berry, but I had only two shades — pink and red. It wasn’t fair. REO Speedwagon rattled
from our cheap boom box:
Heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another you been messin’ around.
When it came time to flip the tape, I flipped over too, to burn my top half.

“I don’t suppose you’d go get me a glass of water?” Teresa whined. “Please, please, please, my darlingest most wonderful sibling.”
Her hands clasped, she swooned.

I got up, play grumbling, and when I came back out with the water, fully intending to dump it on her, she sat holding a blow
flower, examining it gently.

“Oh my God,” she said, looking at the globe of fine spires like it was a halo around the Virgin. She reached over to pick
one of the dandelions near her chair, held it in her other hand and said, “Dandelions are blow flowers, and blow flowers are
dandelions.”

This should have been funny, but it wasn’t; it was a revelation. We’d ’both lived a score of years without knowing the stages
of this flower or weed, without knowing that things can change into other lovely things and stay rooted. We laughed and looked
at each other in amazement; then she offered the flower up to me: make a wish.

4. Our mother came back.

W
HEN FRIENDS ASKED ABOUT
the business with our mother, I tended to use forms of the word
meet,
as if for the first time. I called her by her first name, Jackie, and said we were meeting her for dinner when she arrived
in town. She might come by the apartment. She might stay a few days. We were playing it by ear. Frankly, I thought the whole
reunion thing was bizarre. My sisters and I were finally adults, finally to the place where we didn’t need a mother, real
or otherwise, and there she was. Talk about bad timing.

A lengthy letter explained why Jackie chose to reach out to us after so much time. Her mother had died recently of emphysema,
leaving her money expressly for the trip to California to visit us. She was coming with two friends from Michigan, where she
now lived with her husband, Mike. Her girlfriends had never been to the West Coast before; after Fresno they would drive out
to LA to see the ocean and Disneyland. I looked but found no clear clues to her in the letter: she seemed polite, not too
eager or sobby, and her handwriting was neat and even. It occurred to me that since I remembered so little of her, pretty
much any woman of a certain age could show up at the restaurant saying she was our mother and I would have to believe her.
In that way, it was like a game show: Name That Mother, Tic Tac Mother.

In the weeks that preceded her visit, my sisters and I talked at length and declared it would be okay. A-OK, in fact. She
would come, we’d show her our photo albums and track awards, the litter of kittens we had named after brands of perfume. We
would introduce her to our friends and boyfriends, and she’d see how fine we were doing, how very well off we were, considering,
and leave feeling less guilty or whatever. Our life together would go on as usual.

At the time, the three of us were living in a townhouse in Ashland. We had only been there for two months, but things were
going smoothly. Teresa and I lost the College Street house right as Penny graduated from Ashland High, so we all joined up
together, naturally. There was no real adjustment to be made; in fact, we found living together as adults even easier than
as children. Without parents to try and wrangle love or attention from (or ignore or hide from), without fear, uncertainty
and obligation, days were distilled, simple. It was just us, and us we knew like breathing.

The restaurant we chose for the meeting was the Acapulco, a pink monstrosity on Blackstone where waiters in sombreros served
gooey platters of California-Mex. When Jackie arrived, there was a round of awkward hugging, stuttered hellos. She looked
nice enough, a lady in her early forties with a poof of dark-brown hair and large, square-rimmed glasses. Her cotton turquoise
pants and matching blouse with sailboats looked out of place in Fresno, but then, she didn’t live in Fresno; she lived in
Michigan, the state that looked, on our Rand-McNally map, like a green mitten sandwiched between two blue snowballs.

We sat down, ordered distractedly, and picked at the shards of tortilla chips in a wooden bowl while Jackie talked. I thought
she might wait until we’d gotten through our first round of frozen margaritas, but no, she launched right into the nostalgia
— how Penny never crawled but scooted around on her backside, rubbing a bald spot on her head; how Teresa was always a little
helper in the kitchen, could do dishes and cook spaghetti at five; how after I was weaned I would steal Penny’s bottle out
of her crib and hide in the closet with it. When she’d find me, I’d deny it, holding the bottle all the while, fat tears dripping
from my fat cheeks.

The food arrived, big, messy plates of it. I dabbed at my puddle of refried pintos with my fork and thought how quickly everything
had become like those beans, a brown, indiscernible ooze.

She was back.

She was back, and that made her leaving absolutely unavoidable. We had to think about it again, all of our earliest questions
crooked like fingers to drag us down the rabbit hole:
Did she leave because of something we did? Were we bad? Did we deserve it? I
didn’t want the rabbit hole. I didn’t want any of it. Memory lane was a sucker punch; I preferred the brain doctor:
Close your eyes and count backward from one hundred. You won’t feel a thing.

Suddenly Jackie was crying, sobbing into her enchiladas, saying how sorry she was. She never wanted to go away, but she had
to. Our dad — she called him Frank — would have killed her. He threatened her, saying just how he’d do it, his hands on her
throat. She didn’t have a choice, did she? He’d have done it too, we had to believe her.

I didn’t know what to think. Did our dad have it in him to kill her or anyone? How was Ito know? I hadn’t seen him since I
was six years old, hadn’t talked to him since I was fifteen and he called us out of the blue at the Lindberghs’. Unfortunately,
I had beat Penny in a race to the phone, and so I was the one to hear his voice — soft, quavering, disturbing — as he talked
about his release from a rehab clinic. “I’m an alcoholic,” he said. “And I’ve made some mistakes. I can admit that now.” He
was married again, to a woman named Zoe, and they were expecting a child. Then, quite abruptly, he said, “You were always
my favorite. I used to call you Bobo. You were my little Bobo… do you remember that?”

I did remember. I hung up the phone.

“Who was that?” Penny asked. She had opened the refrigerator and was swinging her weight against the door in the precise way
that drove Hilde around the bend.

“Wrong number.”

“D
ON’T
GET ME WRONG
,” Jackie said, “I know it’s too late for me to be your mother the way I would have liked. But I really want to get to know
you, be your friend. And I want to help you if you’ll let me.” She paused, took a substantial hit from her margarita, and
then said, “You girls are working so hard to finish school. It might make things easier for you to come to Michigan and stay
with us. All you’d have to pay for is tuition. You could save some money.

The table fell silent. Penny traced wet circles on the side of her water glass. Teresa tore at the cocktail napkin that said
Arriba! Arriba!
in hot-pink cursive. And our mother? I didn’t dare look over to see what expression she wore after making such an offer.
She was either remarkably courageous to open herself this way, knowing we would shut her down and rightly so, or she was completely
clueless and really thought we might say yes. It’s not that it wasn’t a nice thing for her to do. It was, and even slightly
tempting for practical reasons. Teresa and I were both trying to carry fifteen credits at Fresno City College and working
full-time at the nursing home; Penny clerked in a video store and would start classes at Fresno State in the fall. We were
making our bills every month, but barely, and it was exhausting to think about money and just how many things could go wrong
and level us. That said, we would be crazy to leave California to live with an absolute stranger who was arguably the reason
for every bad thing that had ever happened to us. Crazy to uproot ourselves just so she could work out this whole mother-guilt
thing. And if my sisters were speechless, unable to respond, then I would speak for all of us. Wasn’t I the friendly one,
after all? I formed the words
No, thank you,
but before they could leave my mouth, I heard Teresa say, “Wow. What a great idea. I just might take you up on that.”

In the end, money wasn’t the reason Teresa moved to Michigan — a guy was. Her boyfriend, Marcus, had been messing with her
head, making her think she didn’t want to be alive if she couldn’t have him. I never liked Marcus. He drove an aphid-green
Porsche 914 and was always sneering, like a mean dog or a rock star. His face was the kind you look at and know it’s either
stone ugly or devastatingly handsome, not anywhere in between. Marcus worked construction, and before he dumped her, Teresa
would go to his house every day at 6
A.M.
to make his lunch because he told her once that she built a good sandwich. What she had for him was that dreadful kind of
love where you lose yourself absolutely, going all the way in without leaving a bread-crumb trail; where each day brings on
worry like an avalanche because you’re sure he’s going to leave you — why wouldn’t he? Even you have left you.