Thank You for All Things (26 page)

“He’s got his ways,” Nordine says.

“My grandpa had his ways too,” I say.

Nordine looks confused, but I’m not sure if it’s confusion about what I just told her or the Alzheimer’s coming back to cloud her brain.

“Sam and I are going to get married,” she states, and my question is answered.

I sigh. “Um, you can’t do that, Mrs. Bickett. You’re already married. To Henry.”

Nordine gets up without saying anything and walks to the house like a sleepwalker, leaving me sitting in the metal lawn chair, wondering if she’s coming back.

I wait for what seems a good ten or fifteen minutes, and just as I’m about to get up and follow her inside, she comes out the door. She has a box that says
Sorel Boots
cradled in her arms and a photograph pinched between her knobby knuckles. “What do you have there?” I ask. “May I?” I set the glass of sour lemonade on the grass, making sure to tip it a bit first so some spills out, then I slip the picture from
her fingers. It is black and white, worn at the scalloped edges, and creased down the center. In the photograph is my grandpa and Nordine, both of them young. Grandpa is good-looking, I suppose, his grin stretched across his face, his arm wrapped around Nordine, who stands as small as a child under his arm, her hair frizzed around her upturned, heart-shaped face.

“He’s a handsome man,” she says. That comment alone tells me that Nordine has no recollection of the broken garage door or the man in diapers who clunked into it.

I hand her back the picture, and she holds it with both hands, as though it is just as heavy in weight as it is in memory.

“Mrs. Bickett,” I say bravely. “I know that you and my grandpa Sam were, well, close over the years. So that means you might know something about my mom, Tess, and my real father. Do you remember Sam talking about his daughter, Tess? Did he tell you anything about her after she came back from California?”

Her eyes glaze over. “Sam’s in California?”

“No. His daughter went there. About fifteen years ago.”

“I don’t have a daughter,” she says. “I have a boy.” She’s obviously struggling to recall his name.

I take the photo from her hands again and point to Grandpa Sam. “No.
Him. He
had—he has—a daughter. Her name is Tess. She left Timber Falls to go away to college. And she came back pregnant with me and my twin. Did my … did Sam … tell you anything about that? Did he tell you about the father of her babies?”

Nordine’s face is blank in the shade of her hat’s wide brim, her eyes shadowed by her disease.

I sigh, knowing that I’ve lost her. “What do you have in the shoe box?” I finally ask her.

She looks down at her lap as though she only now realizes that there’s a box resting on her legs. “Oh, let’s see, shall we?” she says.

When she makes no move to do it herself, I reach over to lift the lid from the box. Whatever is inside is wrapped in grayed tissue paper. The kind that is dotted with colored glitter. The glittery specks cling to my fingers when I peel the paper back.

“It’s a marionette puppet!” I say.

I pull the puppet from the box and it clanks like wooden wind chimes. The puppet is a boy, his head large and full of wooden curls, his body thin and gangly and dressed in homemade pants and a button-up shirt. He is about a foot tall and carved from pale wood that is scarred with nicks and gouges from the point of a knife. His wooden head is lolled to his chest, and when I pick it up and see his big, sad eyes—a sharp contrast to his full, smiling lips—I say, “Ohhh,” out loud.

“Did Sam carve this?” I already know the answer. Even though it’s carved crudely, unlike his birds, I can feel the same thing in it that I felt from them, only there’s more sadness seeped into this wood, along with a whole lot more anger. So much so that I’m convinced that even Milo could feel it if he held it.

“It’s him,” she says. “His name is Sammy.” And then she makes her voice deeper, rougher, and she says, “Always a puppet. Always a puppet.”

Nordine Bickett gets up again, the photo floating to the ground as she wanders to the center of the yard, her head tilted back. She moves in slow circles, her face searching. I get up, the puppet in my arm, and hurry to rescue the photograph from the grass. I hand it to her and she stares down
at it as though she doesn’t know what it is. “I know my school is around here,” she says.

The clanking of Henry’s hammer against metal stops, and I don’t know what to do, because I don’t want Nordine’s husband coming and seeing the picture or the puppet. Nordine lets the picture slip from her hand again, then she wanders back inside, leaving me standing there when Henry Bickett appears from the side of the shed. I have a split second to react before he looks up, so I slide the photograph into my pocket as I’m turning away from him and I stuff the puppet up my windbreaker.

Henry glances at the empty lawn chairs, the shoe box alongside one and the glass tipped on its side alongside the other, then he looks at me suspiciously. He goes over and picks up the box, peering inside, rustling the tissue paper, then carries it back to me. “What’s this?”

“A shoe box,” I say. “Your wife brought it out.”

“What was in it?” he asks.

“Nothing.” I don’t even feel bad lying to him, even if it means a little bit of bad karma later.

“She’s tetched,” he says, tossing the box back on the ground. “You get out of here now. No relative of Sam’s is welcome here.”

“I want to say good-bye to Mrs. Bickett first,” I say.

“Never mind that. She wouldn’t know you said goodbye anyhow. Now, beat it.”

I pull the drawstring on my jacket and tie it tight to keep the puppet secure, then head to my bike. “And don’t come back. You hear me?”

As I pedal home, I think about Alzheimer’s disease and how god-awful it is and how I hope Oma doesn’t get it. And I wonder if I shouldn’t go into medical research and try to
find a cure, since it would be work dealing with the brain at least.

When I reach our place, I want to ride right past it because I’m still upset with Mom. But I can’t. I have to pee, and besides, Mom is still in the trees and she rises when she sees me.

I pull into the yard, toss my bike down, then dart for the house even though Mom’s yelling my name. I race up the stairs to the bathroom, but not before tucking the puppet and the photograph under my pillow.

While I’m peeing, the door downstairs opens and shuts, and I know Mom has come inside to yell at me. I just step into the hall when I hear Oma say to her, “No, Tess. Leave her be. She’s at that age now where she’s going to have some outbursts. And this is really difficult for her. She was very attached to Peter, and you know how much she longs for a father figure in her life. Just let her be for now. Please?”

“Let her be? I should be grounding her for a month for that little stunt.” My mouth turns as sour as if Nordine’s lemonade is still in it. I stomp into my room and slam the door. Then I open my laptop and click on one of Mom’s journal entries at random.

I hate this house the most late at night, when Ma and the kids are sleeping and I can’t. I hate the sounds of Dad’s labored breaths and the eerie echoes from the past. The sights, the sounds, the smells—all of it—are enough to make me want to bolt out of here. But there’s nowhere to run but the trees, and it’s raining.

I can’t believe I’m back here. I thought I’d left it for good.

On what I was sure would be the last day I ever set foot in this house again, Mitzy drove me home so I could pack my things. It was raining then too.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to stay and help you pack?” Mitzy asked, her face tight with guilt when I opened
the car door and the interior light clicked on. I reminded her that I was only packing one bag for now and tossing the few things I planned to take with me in boxes for when I knew where I was going. I assured her that her helping wouldn’t get the job done any faster, since I’d have to keep pausing to tell her what I wanted packed and what I didn’t. “Just for moral support?” she said.

The truth was, I
did
want Mitzy to stay for moral support, but how could I ask her to? She was one month away from getting married and starting tech school to become an X-ray technician. It was Brian’s birthday, and she had two bags stuffed with ingredients for spaghetti and meatballs and the lopsided chocolate cake she’d baked earlier sitting on the backseat. She was so wired with the anticipation of cooking him their first dinner together in their new home that she couldn’t keep her mind on much of anything else. So I told her to go. That I’d be fine. I reminded her that Marie was picking me up in two hours and that she’d come sooner if I needed her to.

“Are you sure they’re keeping your dad overnight?” she yelled as we ran the empty boxes across the darkened yard, squealing because we were getting wet. Once we reached the shelter of the porch, I assured her that they were and told her to stop worrying. “Just go. I’ll be fine. Have fun. Screw your brains out.”

“God, you’re awful!” she said, and I told her that apparently I am. Her face fell and she hugged me, telling me that I was the best.

As she drove away in her five-year-old Grand Am, I envied her. Not because I wanted the life she was etching out for herself (marriage, a dozen babies, meat loaf once a week), but because she had a place to be, and a plan.

It was strange walking into my house that night to gather my things. It was the house I’d grown up in. I knew every crack, every scuff, and every stain on the walls, and once I had even loved it. When I was very young, that is. Way back before I realized it was such a dump. Before Dad got mean, and Ma started drinking, and Clay walked out. Even after those things happened—even after I stopped loving it—it still felt like home. But not that night, as I stood in the doorway with my empty boxes and flicked on the kitchen light.

The chair was still lying helplessly on its side, and the table was cocked so that one corner was butted against the counter.

Without a thought, I picked a dirty plate off the table to carry it to the sink. I stopped in the middle of the room, then turned and set the plate back down where it was. Maybe it was time to stop trying to clean up the family’s messes, like Marie said. I headed up the stairs, my boxes scraping against the stairwell walls.

My room was just as I’d left it one hour before my graduation ceremony: the torn plastic bag from my robe and cap on the floor, my bed scattered with skirts and dresses I had tried on, then discarded, as I searched for something pale enough not to show through my flimsy white gown.

I didn’t know how to start packing any more than I knew how to start a new life. I’d slept in this room since I was born, and everything I had ever owned was in it, from my stuffed toys and books to my stacks of journals.

I packed in a rush, not bothering to sort the things I wanted to take once I had a place to bring them—my favorite pens, my clothes, a few books, candles, odds and ends. I left the journals behind, as if by doing so I could leave the memories behind, and I scooted the boxes alongside the wall. Then I
packed my duffel bag with the things I’d need immediately—a couple of changes of clothes, my toiletries, the book I was partway through reading—and I carried the bag downstairs to leave at the back door. I went back for my word processor, still in its box.

As I carried the heavy box down, I kept my shoulder propped against the wall to keep my balance, my side brushing against the darkened smears on the paint where my fingers had trailed each time I went up or down the stairs. Stains Ma tried to cover with fresh paint every couple of years, but they always bled through, just like Clay’s handprints that were smudged above the door frame where he leapt to see how high he could reach.

I waited at the back door for Marie, the porch light on, watching the rain glint as it fell in dotted lines from the eaves. When the wind kicked up, the rain bobbed the fronds of the spindly fern Ma had set at the edge of the porch a few days before and blew the drops through the mesh of the screen to spatter on my face.

I closed the door and there they were, the half inch horizontal lines Ma etched in pen, an
A
or a
T
next to each of them, along with the date. Lines Mom used to mark our height from the time we could stand up, no matter how much we protested once we’d grown past the age of caring about “getting big.” I reached out and touched the marks near the height of my shoulders. About there, I decided, was when I first moved out of this house; I just hadn’t packed yet.

I stood looking at the closed door for a time—at the hinges, the worn rim around the doorknob, at anything “safe”—as if in doing so I could keep the ugly, random slidelike images that had been pelting my brain for two days from connecting, from speeding up, from turning into a horror movie that I didn’t want to see. But staring at the door didn’t help.

It’s strange, the way you can enter a house and feel down to your bones that something is terribly wrong, even before you see anything amiss.

The minute I stepped inside the house that morning after graduation—just two days before Mitzy brought me back to pack—I knew something was dangerously wrong. I felt it in my skin at the nape of my neck, which had gone as taut as my breath, and in the sudden buzzing in my ears.

I pitched my cap and gown on the kitchen counter, my gaze fixed on the table, sitting at such an odd angle. There was an empty space where the chair that normally sits at the end should have been. My sudden fear made me call out Ma’s name, even though moments ago my intent was to make it to my room without being seen or heard, so I could pretend that I hadn’t stayed out all night at Settler’s Hill.

That’s when I saw Ma sprawled on the floor on the other side of the table, her sleeveless nightgown twisted around her hips, one bruised leg draped over the other.

“Ma!” I stepped over her and knelt down, rolling her onto her back.