Sylvia spread the letters out one by one, in order, on the table. There were ten. No dates and no postmarks, just hand-delivered envelopes with letters inside. Ten letters exactly, and ten photographs. Two paintings on paper, of airplanes. The last photo showed a boy of about nine or ten years old, dressed up in a military uniform. He was cute, debonair, his skin not dark but a pale caramel, similar to Grace’s coloring. Jacqueline’s son? But Jacqueline didn’t have a son, Sylvia was positive, only daughters. Her nephew?
Sylvia picked up the very last letter in the pile. Beside it was a Polaroid, faded, the colors muted like a watercolor. The picture was of a young black woman holding a baby. She was pretty, with large brown eyes and a wide smile. The baby was wearing a little red cap.
Dear Mister Wilbur,
Please forgive me for not telling you before. I was fritened. I was scared that someone mite take my baby way from me. So I didn’t say nuthing not to you not to nobody. I herd that you got marreed to Miss Debra and I send you my congratulatons. I did not plan for things to work out this way. I was hoping that I could mannage myself. I sure would be gratefull if you could help me money wise. I have a job but I need money for the baby. I promisse I wont say nuthing to nobody not Miss Debra not nobody. But pleeze help me. His name is Leroy.
Loretta
Not say anything?
Oh my God!
Sylvia picked up the last letter in the sequence, which had the photo of the little boy in the soldier uniform attached to it with a paperclip.
Dear Mr. Mason,
You can see from the photograph what a handsome and strong little man LeRoy has become. This photo was taken on his tenth birthday! I am very proud of him. One day, he wants to be a soldier. I hope knowing he’s your son too, makes you just as proud as me.
God bless you and your family.
Loretta
Leroy—or LeRoy—belonged to her father? Her dad
fathered
a little boy? Impossible. She would have known! That wasn’t his style at all. He was so conservative. But then this obviously happened before he married her mother. How did he and Loretta meet? Sylvia held the two letters side by side. Ten years must have passed (one photo for every year?) and each one had its distinctive style of writing, the first of an uneducated teenager, the final one as if the writer was a completely different person. Yet both from this woman called Loretta. How could she have never heard about this woman? She, Sylvia, was now thirty-six years old!
How,
in all those thirty-six years, had this been held as a secret from her?
Did her
mother
know? God forbid, she didn’t think so. She would be rolling in her grave now. Her upstanding husband, father of an African American child? No, her mother wouldn’t have borne that for a second, nor the ladies at the country club.
Where had this box been all this time?
Sylvia had never seen it before, yet as a girl she’d sneaked into her parents’ closets on a regular basis, rootling around for Santa’s Christmas gifts, catching any loose change from her dad’s suit pockets. Could this box have spent its life in the attic? Or the garage? Her mother didn’t like the garage—at least she never spent time there. Her father did have his little workshop going on.
How could someone keep a secret for her entire life—for thirty-six goddamn years?
Sylvia scanned the letters, running her eyes along them, the white paper framed against the dark of the French-polished mahogany table. When did the writing style start to change? She noticed one which was typed: letter number seven with its photo. This photo was the one with Leroy in a tree.
Dear Mr. Mason,
College is great. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for giving me this opportunity. I am learning a lot but it is tough! When I come out I will have the skills to get a very good paid job.
Leroy is doing good. His grades are pretty okay at school and he has lots of nice friends.
I still have not had the heart to tell him bout you cos I want him to be happy with what he got. If he sees your fancy house and fancy car he could feel bad about himself. He still thinks his Daddy died in ‘Nam an that’s what I tell his teachers at school. I think it best to keep to that old story.
Loretta
A frisson of both excitement and worry shot through the back of Sylvia’s neck, the pale hairs on her arms erect. She had a half-brother who maybe still lived somewhere in Saginaw, at the other side of the river, perhaps, who had been told that his father had died in the Vietnam War. He must be about thirty-eight or forty by now. Her parents had been married a few years before she was born. Did anybody else know? Did Jacqueline know this Loretta lady? Was Loretta even still alive? Why did the letter stop at number ten, and the photo too? Why wasn’t Leroy (or LeRoy as it was spelled in the most recent letter) provided for in her father’s will? Where was he now?
And how on earth—with no last name to go on—was she going to find him?
Grace
G
race was howling, her little body heaving with sobs. Mrs. Paws was dead. The cat lay near the barn, the same barn where the blackbird’s nest was. Poor Mrs. Paws had dried blood and foam in her mouth. Her sharp little pussycat teeth stuck out as if she was crying out in pain, covered with frothy spit. She was all stiff; her pure white fur no longer as soft as snow but matted and cold. Splotched red.
“Mrs. Paws is dead,” wailed Grace. “Miss . . . is Paaw . . . Haws—”
Ruth walked up to Grace and cradled her arms around her shaking little body. She stroked her dark hair. “There you are! I was looking for you. Up so early this morning?”
Grace continued to wail, her breath hitching, swallowing great balloons of air.
“Baby, it’s okay. It’s okay baby, Mrs. Paws has gone to a better place.”
Grace didn’t understand how any place could be better than this. Mrs. Paws had the perfect pussycat life! She was free and everybody loved her! “There is no Better Place for Mrs. Paws,” she wept. “She loved living here. She loved her life!”
“When animals pass they go to a
special
place,” Ruth soothed.
“You mean Heaven?” They’d spoken about Heaven at school and her mom said that Grandpa had gone to Heaven.
“No. Only humans go to Heaven,” Ruth replied quietly. “Animals go to a ‘special’ place. Anyway, now those blackbirds are safe from being killed by that cat. Don’t you see that’s better?”
Grace’s skinny arms clung to Ruth, her hands clutching the material of the flowery dress that was just the same as her mom’s. She gulped another mouthful of air and said, “Maybe Mrs. Paws didn’t like the tonic water. You said you had just the tonic for her.”
“No, baby,” Ruth reasoned in a gentle voice, “I think a coyote killed Mrs. Paws in the night.”
“We need to tell Mrs. Paws’s mommy. She lives over the hill in the big white house.”
“Okay, baby, I’ll call her later.”
“We can give Mrs. Paws a funeral.” Her mom had explained about her grandpa’s funeral.
“No, baby, animals don’t have funerals.”
“Why not?”
“Because a funeral is when you say goodbye to somebody who has passed away, like your grandfather.”
Grace furrowed her brow. That Pass word again. Pass Away. Her mom had taught her how to pass the bread at dinner, or the salt. She said it was Good Manners. Like saying Please or Thank You. What did Pass Away mean?
“Has Mrs. Paws passed away?”
“Yes baby, Mrs. Paws has passed away.”
“Then why don’t we get to give her a funeral, to say goodbye?”
“Like I said, animals don’t have funerals, baby. I’ll just chuck it in the trash.”
Grace’s tiny body began to tremble again and tears gushed from her large eyes. “I want for us to give Mrs. Paws a funeral! I want to say goodbye!”
“Okay, okay, we’ll give it a funeral,” Ruth mumbled. “But we need to hurry.” She drew Grace close to her and kissed her on the head.
GRACE HAD HER knees tucked up under her and she was sitting on her bed thinking about Heaven. She pressed the pocket clip on her magic pen to start recording:
“We buried Mrs. Paws. Auntie Ruth dug a little hole and I said a prayer. Not a real Jesus prayer but a song I made up. We put her under the big oak tree at the end of the garden. I cried a lot.
Auntie Ruth says she’s going to buy me a swimsuit. Maybe a white one, with pink flowers. My favorite color! She says we’ll be going swimming but Mommy didn’t say anything about swimming.
Right now Auntie Ruth is downstairs and very busy. She has made lots of Skype calls on her laptop. She sounded very serious but she was not talking to Mom. She said she had business calls to make and asked me to play in my room. She spent a lot of time looking in Mommy’s filing cabinet. She has everything out on the floor and was putting papers into piles. She told me that she was Orgon Izing as a special surprise for Mommy. Wait. Hold on, Auntie Ruth is calling me.”
Grace clicked the pocket clip back up to stop recording.
“Grace? Grace, baby, who are you talking to?”
Grace heard the footsteps come into the room. She quickly shoved the pen under her bedclothes. The iPad—which she made paintings with—was on the bed, open. She couldn’t decide which she preferred. The iPad was more grown-up but the pen was so secret, she felt like a police detective when she used it.
Ruth entered the bedroom and glanced about. She had foam in her hair, piled high on her head like a lathered-up helmet. “Hi, baby. To whom were you talking?”
“My teddy bears,” Grace lied.
“Okay. Cute. Who is your favorite bear?”
“Pidgey O Dollars,” she lied again. She really wanted to say, “Blueby.” She could wind Blueby up by a key on his heinie and he’d play the tune: “When Teddy Bears Have Their Picnics.” He was her number one teddy since Pidgey’s accident with the Jack Russell. But she owed it to Pidgey O Dollars to love him the most.
“Will you be taking Piggy O Dollars with you to Saginaw?”
She giggled as if Ruth had said the silliest thing in the world. “Not Piggy . . .
Pidgey
.”
“I thought it would be a good idea to get your packing done early. You know, so your dad doesn’t have to worry. Do we need to pack Pidgey?”
“I guess.”
“But I think we should leave Daddy’s iPad home, don’t you, baby? I saw you playing with it earlier.”
“No. I need his iPad because I can do my drawings and paintings and I have 22 storybooks in my library.”
Ruth narrowed her eyes. “But doesn’t it have a Wi-Fi connection?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you connect with the outside world?” asked Ruth. “Can you Skype or phone?”
“No, that part of it’s broken. That’s why Daddy got a new one and gave me this old one. I just use it for painting. Look, do you want to see?” Grace took the iPad from the bed, opened it up and showed her a painting of Mrs. Paws when she was still alive. “See?”
“I do not understand any of it, baby, but you’re quite an artist I can tell.”
“Yes, I am. I love painting. Mommy says it’s not the same as real paint, but I like it.”
Ruth pointed to the set of pictures in Grace’s bedroom: twenty-six individual canvasses with an animal for each letter. “Who did the alphabet paintings on the wall?”
“My Mom.
A
for Aardvark is my favorite. But she cheated with
X
. She didn’t know an animal beginning with
X
so she did an ox, making a big deal of the
X
. See, it says oX.”
“Your mom’s very talented. Did she paint them in oil?”
“Uh-huh, I guess so. Why is your head all foamy?”
“I thought I’d change the color of my hair.”
“What color?”
“A kind of pale blond.”
“Like Mommy’s?”
“Yes, baby. Exactly like your mommy’s.”
Sylvia
K
nowing that Tommy was going to be bringing Grace to Saginaw in a few days gave Sylvia a serene feeling of comfort. Being without her child made her feel the same way she did when she turned up to a party one time without a fancy dress costume. Everyone was dressed up except for her, and she felt lost.
As she brushed her teeth, she shifted her memory back to the stark, motherless days, the Before Grace days, after she and Tommy had decided to start a family but nothing happened. Making love to Tommy with a child as her goal hadn’t done their sex life any favors; the desperation that ensued, the longing and the aching feeling that somehow, she had failed. Becoming pregnant became an obsession, and it took a long time to surrender herself to the fact that it just wasn’t meant to be. The doctors offered no explanation. Technically, everything was in working order for both of them. Tommy’s sperm-count was unusually high.
Yet everything happens for a reason.
Grace was a gift from God and Sylvia thanked Him (Her?) every day that she hadn’t gotten pregnant.
She heard her cell go and raced into the bedroom. It was Tommy.
She heard him suck in a long breath. Uh oh, something was wrong.
“Is everything alright? You’re at home, right?”
“I missed the fucking plane.”
He spent the next five minutes explaining that he’d be arriving late that afternoon, and going into details about the drama of his driving fine, and excusing himself. The shitty policeman and so on, how it was a terrible injustice, blah, blah, blah. As if she hadn’t warned him a zillion times that he must never, ever speak on his cell while driving without his headset.
“I mean what if you’d had an accident and killed someone? Someone like Grace,” Sylvia said, with toothpaste still in her mouth.
“You don’t need to rub it in that I’ve been an idiot,” Tommy replied with a groan. “I always use my Bluetooth headset but it was in my jacket pocket in the trunk. So yes, I fucked up.”
“Ugh,” Sylvia growled, and hung up. She didn’t have time to argue. She called Ruth.