“Like the fish?!”
It took me several hours to take her seriously. I gave in much faster than her parents, who persisted in calling her Gerry for months. People took her new name with good graces, figuring someone so ugly needed extra concession. And then, ever so gradually, somewhere around fourth grade, Cleo turned dead average. Her lank hair decided that it was a dark, ashy brown that shone with a strange, silvery luster. In sixth grade braces eradicated her overbite, leaving her tiny white teeth in a pearly row. By seventh grade an eye surgery eliminated the hideous glasses that dominated her face and left behind two huge green eyes framed in inky lashes. No one in Countryside elementary noticed. We grew so accustomed to the ugliness that our eyes kept seeing it long after it disappeared. The boys in Meadow Heights Junior High, however, sat up and took notice.
Only then did we recognize that our ugly little Cleo was ugly no longer. The women at Christ’s Church who spent many years praying for the unfortunate, little Douglas child suddenly looked up to heaven in confusion. They were hoping to comfort her soul and God had taken the short cut and given her a full-blown makeover. They eventually forgave Him after seeing that she took no more notice of her beauty than she did of her ugliness. The meddling women sighed in relief that Cleo had escaped the dreaded sin of pride and turned their prayers to more pressing matters.
As I rounded the corner past the dancing frog statue (we named him Gilfred) Cleo’s beige home came into view. A skinny rabbit jerked its head out of the grass and ran a chaotic path before disappearing beneath my favorite lilac bush.
You are scared of people. You are a brown rabbit. I’m running away, too. I’m just walking slower.
I stopped walking altogether when my feet drew level with Cleo’s yard.
Something restrained me from going forward and it wasn’t just my ignorance of how to replay the disturbing scene at my house. I felt contaminated by the memory, inadvertently rubbing my arms as if the lie had turned to dirt and stuck to me. I pulled my Aunt Sarah’s photo out of my pocket, my hands growing shakier with each breath.
If I say it out loud, this will all be real
.
Sarah’s smile didn’t break in the late evening sun, but her squinting eyes looked more thoughtful.
I am real, Jennifer,
she answered. I turned my head, frightened to hold her stare. The colors made me too responsible for her.
Cleo’s front door is burgundy. I am not going to cry. I pledge allegiance….
The door to Cleo’s house sprang open, interrupting my thoughts, and to my relief Cleo hopped onto her front porch. “Come to beg for help?” she asked. The words shocked me so much that I flinched. She registered my confusion and quickly mirrored it. “Hanshaw… the assignment,” she prodded, “Are you stuck?”
Understanding flooded me with relief. She was referring to the three page assignment for World Literature that Mrs. Hanshaw had sprung on us four hours ago. An assignment that four hours ago seemed like an actual problem.
“No. Yes. Yes and no.” I took a steadying breath, still not approaching her open door. “We need to walk. Or at least be alone.”
“Be right back,” she promised and disappeared inside. I could always count on Cleo for instant action. Her steely mind snapped at decisions with blinding speed. Within moments she was beside me holding out an extra pair of brown, plastic flip flops.
I looked down at my feet. “I forgot I was barefoot.”
“Did something happen?” she asked, taking me in from my toes to my face.
“Yeah.” Even that small admission crashed through me, dropping from my lips through the middle of my chest and landing with a sick thud in my stomach. I couldn’t find the words yet. Cleo started walking while pulling her shining hair into a rubber band. “Do you want to go to the graveyard?”
“Yes.” I couldn’t imagine telling this story on the sidewalk, or flopped across her bed. I needed somewhere gentle, wild, solitary. A place where the wind would eavesdrop and then carry the difficult words far away.
“Are you okay?” she asked softly.
“Sort of.” My chin shook and I pressed my lips together, trying to master the muscles that wanted to open my mouth in a childish wail. Cleo looked at me quickly in curious sympathy and then set her eyes forward, leading the way past our streets to the wheat field.
Technically, going to the Cowling Family Cemetery is trespassing since it is in the middle of a farmer’s private wheat field, but no one ever stopped us. Years ago, after we first discovered it playing with binoculars, the farmer caught us sitting among the headstones when he passed by on his tractor. From his high perch in the saddle seat his fierce glare looked terrifying, but after a good search of our frightened faces, his expression smoothed and his mouth straightened to a calm line. “Be careful,” he growled over the noise of the motor before he touched the brim of his shapeless canvas hat and moved on. We took that as permission.
During growing season the small plot is obliterated by the tall wheat, and all we can see from our houses are two scrubby oak trees that stand guard over the graves. Those two trees, one twisted by the wind, the other missing half of its branches from rough weather, are the only interruption of the endless horizon. Beyond them the golden fields roll into vivid, green stalks of corn and then into the deep indigo of the sky.
I don’t know if the farmer got sick of us trying to pick our way through his precious field but three years ago he cut a smooth, narrow path from the edge of the street straight to the graveyard. If we knew where he lived we would have thanked him, but something about his somber face didn’t invite gushing. Maybe he figured even the dead need a visitor from time to time.
We ambled along that path through the dry wheat while I tried to think of what to say to Cleo. Halfway through the field, as I picked my way through the stalks, I slid Sarah’s photo from my pocket. “Here,” I said.
Cleo turned her head and looked confused as she took the picture. “What is it?” she asked. I didn’t answer and she stopped walking to study it. Her eyebrows contracted and a thoughtful line burrowed into her forehead. She looked up at me, and then at the picture, squinting in concentration. “I don’t think you’re adopted,” she announced with an air of finality.
“What?” I almost screeched.
“Well, she looks a lot like you. You must be related, but if you’re worried you’re adopted, I don’t think you are.”
“I never thought I was
adopted
,” I said, unable to stop an incredulous scowl. I took the picture back and brushed past her, taking the lead. “It’s my aunt.”
“I thought you didn’t have any relatives.” She took the news so calmly, so characteristically-Cleo.
“Precisely,” I snapped too harshly. “I didn’t think so either. Until tonight.” I spun around, pleading with my eyes, but I don’t know what I was begging for. “They lied to me, Cleo. All this time. Never a word. Never a hint. They both said they were only children.”
“Who’s sister is she? Your mom or your dad’s?”
I knew what she was doing as soon as she asked. She was looking for a place to lay the blame. Not in a mean way. Cleo isn’t mean. Just efficient. She wants to know who’s at fault so a problem doesn’t get weighed down with “nuance” or “complications.” She likes black and white.
“My mother’s sister. Her big sister apparently,” it all came out in one sagging, heavy breath. Then my throat tightened and my lips pressed together in indignation. “Do you know what I would give for a big sister? Any idea? And do you know what I
wouldn’t
do with a big sister?” Cleo’s round eyes waited in green curiosity. “I wouldn’t pretend she didn’t exist!”
“I know you wouldn’t. So start at the beginning. How did this happen?”
I recounted the first part of the evening easily. I told her about working on Hanshaw’s assignment, thumbing through our family’s books in the living room when I pulled down the copy of
The Old Man and the Sea
. I pantomimed opening the battered paperback and flipping to the spot where the photo was stuck tightly between the last page and the back cover.
“I didn’t think anything at first. Just a picture, right? But then I looked closer.” I stopped and stared at the photo in my hand. “It’s the color. The color of her hair. And the freckles.”
Cleo reclined her head against Maeve Cowling's headstone, listening intently. “So what did you do? How did you find out it was your aunt?”
“So I just started the biggest fight in the history of my family,” I said bitterly. “I took the picture to my parents and asked ‘Who’s this?’ That’s it. Just, ‘who’s this?’”
“And?”
“And World War III. My mom said she didn’t know at the same time that my dad said ‘Your Aunt.’” I pulled in a deep breath of evening air, letting it whistle cold across my front teeth as I remembered my mother’s shocked face. Shock. Betrayal. Anger. Above all, anger. No, that wasn’t quite right. There was something else. Something I couldn’t name. Even after she yelled my father’s name, even after she crashed her hands down on her thighs like a conductor bringing a symphony to an indisputable stop, there was still something leaking around the edges of her anger, dripping into her fiery eyes. I had to tell Cleo everything, but the words were sticking like thick honey to my throat, refusing to slide through my lips. “It was bad, Cleo. Worse than I’ve ever seen them. They never fight. They never yell.”
“They were yelling?” her usually dismissive eyes betrayed concern.
“Screaming, really. At least at the end. First I started asking questions. Mostly just “Why?” Why not tell me? Why lie? Why pretend she didn’t exist? I got mad because the answers were ridiculous. Mother was saying that she wouldn’t talk about it. That the conversation was over and she wanted me to forget all about it. Okay, that’s where
I
started the yelling,” I admitted. My indignation flared all over again. I pulled a lock of my hair over my shoulder and studied the color next to the wheat. It was identical. The same strips of brown and gold and white woven into one color that no one ever named. That eased the pain somehow and I kept talking, keeping my eyes on the swaying stalks.
“My dad was trying to calm her down and told her that it was time to tell me and stop lying. Then he said that my Aunt Sarah hadn’t done anything wrong.” I shook my head until the memory of my mother’s white face fractured into a nondescript swirl of color. “She just whispered, ‘didn’t do anything wrong?’ like it was the worst thing anyone ever said to her. And then she screamed. Really screamed.” I stopped there. The tears had found me. No more tricks. No more evasions. They burned like acid across my dry eyes. I could finally place the other emotion on my mother’s face. It seemed as plain as day now. Fear.
“Like just screamed? Like tribal, guttural screams?”
“No,” I whispered. The terrible image was marching through my head. My father’s voice trying to soothe her.
There’s a difference between not telling and lying, Claire. You can talk about this now. Let Jennifer know. Sarah really didn’t do anything wrong.
For one horrible moment his words had hung in the air like grenades with the pins pulled out. And then it was over. The past, red and raw and shattered, exploded around us.
“Didn’t do anything wrong?”
my mother whispered in confusion.
“Nothing wrong?”
Her voice had twisted the words into a dire accusation. Tortured the syllables into a confession. Something snapped in her eyes, like a smoldering fire combusting. “
Maybe you forgot that
s
he killed my mother
!” Her sarcastic yell pitched and broke into a shriek.
“No!”
my father demanded, looking over his shoulder at me.
“No,”
he said softer, and a frantic pleading edged into his voice. “
No, don’t say that.”
My mother pushed hard against my father’s arms, tears spinning down her cheeks, as he pulled her close and held her in something between a hug and a wrestling hold
. “Claire, Claire, it’s okay.”
I looked up at Cleo’s eyes, so round that they looked like green swamps from a fairytale. I’d whispered the entire thing. Every detail that fit into words. It sounded so much more civilized when I whispered it, when I turned down the volume of the fear and disgust. But horrible things whispered are still horrible.
Cleo took a fast breath and pressed her fingers against her open mouth. A tear made a clear track down my chin and left a dark gray stain on top of William Cowling’s weathered tombstone where I sat with my knees pulled tight to my chest. The pulse of cricket song radiated through the air and we listened, lost in the chorus. “Did she really kill her mother?” Cleo sounded like she didn’t want me to answer.
“No,” I sighed, grateful that the truth wasn’t that graphic. “My dad said she didn’t. He said that she wasn’t there when my grandmother had a stroke. That’s another thing. A stroke. My mother always said her parents died in a car crash. Just lies. And lies!”
Cleo threw some more questions at me, but I didn’t have anything else to tell her. “Mother just collapsed in his arms and cried after that. We didn’t say anything else. We all just sat there. In shock.”
“So your aunt is still alive?” Cleo asked.
“Apparently.”
“Can we find her?” I met her unflinching eyes, thankful for the “we.”
“I’ve been wondering the same thing. I don’t see why not. Her name would be Sarah Dyer. That’s my mom’s maiden name. Unless she’s married…” A picture jumped from the dark recesses of my mind of a smiling family, children, a girl my age. Never had I considered that I might have an uncle, cousins, a family.
“So if we find her, then what?” She asked.
Then what indeed? “I don’t know. Nothing? Maybe call her? Write to her?”
“Then let’s find her. You should call her.”
My teeth started chattering like they always do when I am frightened and I pulled my arms around myself. I could almost feel the burden of the phone in my hand. “I can’t. What would I say? What if she hates my mother as much as my mother hates her? What if she hates me because I’m her daughter?” A strong shiver grabbed the back of my stomach and jerked it into my spine.