Thank You for All Things (38 page)

I can feel my eyes getting warm and wet. “But he looks all better,” I say. “He even sounds all better.”

Oma squeezes my hand. “I know,” she says.

But she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know just how much I need Grandpa Sam to stay, because—as much as I don’t want to admit it—I know now that I’m not going to find my real dad. I can feel that truth sitting deep inside me, in that hollow place that’s filled with nothing but hurt. And I can’t be sure that Mom will let Peter stay in my life either, to fill that space with something happy.

“Lucy?” Aunt Jeana calls from the other room. “Your grandpa’s asking for you again.”

“Sweetie,” Marie says, and I look up at her. “At any time, if this gets to be too much for you, you leave the room, okay? Your grandpa will understand, and he won’t be alone. We’ll all be with him.”

Oma takes my face in her hands and turns it toward her. “Don’t be scared. Death is nothing more than another birth. We have our time with him to say our good-byes. Sad or not, let’s send him off to the other side with love and joy, okay?” She stands up and holds out her hand so I’ll take it. Then she leads me back into Grandpa Sam’s room.

Grandpa is answering questions, and the room is filled with the kind of giggles that happen when tears are interrupted.

Someone asks where Milo is, and Mom says he’s in the study.

“He should come spend this time with his grandpa,” Oma says.

“I’ll get him,” I say, because suddenly I want Grandpa Sam to take memories of both of his grandchildren with him when he leaves.

I find Milo standing in front of his desk, chin up and shoulders back. He has Oma’s round hairbrush held upside down and propped nearly against his chin.

“Hey, Lucy. Can you sit in as a judge? I’m going to do a practice run reciting pi. I’ve been experimenting with two methods. Remembering the digits in groups of ten by pretending they are the phone numbers of my favorite scientists, and converting the numbers into consonants and making words out of them. You’d think that the phone-number method would work best for me since I’m good with numbers, yet I seem to be equally good with the consonant-conversion method. To be honest, I actually find it more fun.”

“I can’t. We’re supposed to—”

“Come on!” Milo whines. “All you have to do is follow along to make sure I don’t screw up and watch the clock because I’m taking a ten-minute break every hour, just like they do in real competitions. I need to get used to the pause. Other than that, you just have to recite my position at the beginning of each hour.”

“Milo, Grandpa Sam is dying. You’re supposed to come and see him.”

Milo blinks at me, his eyes round enough behind his spotty glasses to let me know my words scare him.

“Milo?” Mom is standing in the doorway, her arms still wrapped around her middle. “What are you doing?”

“I was getting ready to start my practice run reciting pi,” he says. “I asked Lucy to pretend to be my judge, but she won’t. She says I have to go by Grandpa … I don’t want to.”

“I’ll do it,” Mom says, flashing him a smile that looks carved from wax. She grabs a metal folding chair that is propped up against the wall and unfolds it. “Just tell me what I have to do.”

Milo grins.

“But Oma says he should be with Grandpa Sam now, to send him off with love and joy,” I say, interrupting Milo’s instructions.

“It’s okay, Lucy. You go sit with him.”

I stand in the doorway for a second and watch as Mom sits with the stopwatch on her lap and Milo stands before his desk, reciting the first few digits of pi into the hairbrush handle. He emphasizes every other digit as though it’s a period: “One, FOUR, one, FIVE, nine, TWO, six, FIVE, three, FIVE …”

I walk out of the room, not bothering to shut the door, because I know that, for both Mom and Milo, the door is already closed.

M
ARIE IS
in the kitchen pouring water into the teapot when I step out of the study.

“Milo is reciting pi,” I say. “And Mom’s sitting in as a judge. I don’t know why they’re doing that now.” I’m scratching my earlobe, which is itching. Maybe because it’s true that cells remember, and even looking at Marie’s big chest and strong arms makes my ear remember being crushed. Or maybe, just maybe, my ear is itching because it
wants
to be crushed again.

Marie smiles a bit. “I don’t even know what that means,” she says, and I tell her that she probably doesn’t want to know, because it’s boring.

“You want to help me make tea?” she asks.

“I should go sit with Grandpa Sam. He wants me to.”

“Sometimes a little break at times like this is good,” she says.

I stand near the sink and reach up into the cupboard for the bin that has our tea. “Back at our house, we had a tea basket. I like baskets for tea better,” I say.

Outside the window, I see Mitzy’s legs as she sits on the edge of the porch, bobbing them. I contemplate telling her that Mom won’t be back out for hours upon hours.

“Honey?” Marie is saying. Her hand comes down on my shoulder, and I turn and look up at her.

I expect her to say something, but instead, she wraps her arms around me and gives me a hug. Not the kind she gave me that first day—the kind that fit like a straitjacket—but one that fits more like a seat belt, making me feel securely held in place if there should be a crash.

“I know this is hard,” she says, her voice a deep rumble in her chest. “You just remember that you only have to do the best you can do right now. That’s what your mom and your brother are doing. The best they can do.”

She loosens her grip on me and brushes away the clump of hair that is covering my eye. She smiles at me sadly. “It’s going to be okay,” she says.

“The cycle of life,” I say, and she nods.

The teapot whistles, and Marie lets go of me so she can snatch it off the stove. She sets it on a cool burner, then takes down mismatched coffee cups and lines them on the table in case anyone else wants some. Mitzy comes into the kitchen then. “Oh, tea,” she says, as though she’s pleased. “I brought a loaf of pumpkin bread this morning. I’ll slice it.”

While Marie fills our cups, I help Mitzy with the pumpkin bread, lining the slices up on a plate like digits.

“Ray and I picked a wedding date,” she tells Marie, who squeals and gives her the kind of hug that could squish an ear.

“I’m so happy for you, honey!”

“In six weeks. That’s not a lot of time to plan a wedding, but Ray has ten days coming, and he has to take them before the end of the year or he’ll lose them. He wants us to go to Hawaii for our honeymoon.”

“Wonderful!” Marie says, then adds, “I can see you now …” She puts her hands out to the side as though she’s waving and sways her wide hips back and forth to do the hula dance, singing “Ooo La La, Ooo La La,” to a melody that
almost
sounds Hawaiian.

Mitzy and I laugh. A little too hard.

Marie stops her dance and eyes Mitzy carefully. “Honey, you okay with all of this now?”

“Mostly,” she says. “But yesterday I didn’t feel right: I had a backache and I panicked. I left work, without even talking to anybody, and I raced to my doctor’s office and insisted they hurry me in. They asked if I had any spotting, but I didn’t, so they told me to take a seat. I got hysterical and they took me in the back room to wait until the doctor finished up with a patient. Everything was fine, and I felt so stupid afterward.”

“Aw, honey,” Marie says, and she gathers Mitzy in her arms to squish her ear.

Mitzy grabs an empty cup and pours herself tea. “I hope Tess will stay awhile after this—or at least come back for the wedding. I want her to be my maid of honor and Lucy and Milo to be my miniature bride and groom.”

I don’t know exactly what a miniature bride is, or does, but I know it means I’ll be in Mitzy’s wedding, and that makes me happy. “Since I was married before, I’m not going
to go overly fancy,” Mitzy tells Marie. “I’m thinking of a nice fifties style, maybe a three-quarter-length dress. Puffed sleeves, a full skirt, a bow at the back. And pale pink for Tess, and a dress that matches mine in the same pink for Lucy.” She turns to me. “I like pink, do you, Lucy?” I nod, even though it’s not my favorite color.

“You’ll carry a basket of rose petals to toss on the white carpet before I walk down with my dad.”

“Oh, that will be sweet,” Marie says.

I’ve never been to a wedding before, but I saw one on TV once. I’d slipped into Sonya-who-skipped-Barbies-down-the-steps’ apartment one day and there was one on the soap opera her mother was watching. The camera shifted from the bride and groom to a bridesmaid who was trying to avoid the look of one of the groomsmen. But as someone with too much makeup sang, the bridesmaid looked up at him and, probably because she was caught up in the romantic moment, she gave him a look that was as good as saying, “Yes, I want to marry you too.” Just the thought that this could happen at Mitzy’s wedding makes me flood with happy feelings, and I know that if it happens between Mom and Peter, I’d get so happy, I’d probably toss every one of those rose petals straight up into the air as my way of saying, “Amen!”

“There you all are,” Oma says, coming into the kitchen. She looks pale, wounded. She picks up her lighter, and I expect her to grab her cigarettes, but she doesn’t. Instead, she grabs her conch shell and sage. “Lucy?” she says, pausing in the doorway. “Where’s your mother and Milo?”

“In the study. Milo’s practicing reciting pi, and Mom’s helping him.”

“What?” she says. “But Sam—”

Marie stops her. “We all handle death in different ways,
Lillian,” she says. “You know that.” And the way she says it stops Oma from addressing me, even though I know that she was about to ask me why I’m not in Grandpa Sam’s room either.

“Of course,” she says, and floats back into Grandpa Sam’s room with her sage. Aunt Jeana is breathing enough negativity in that room to choke them all.

Mitzy slips right back into talking about her wedding plans—where they’ll have their reception, who will supply the food, what kind of music they’ll have.

“I suppose it’s silly to go all out like this for a second wedding,” Mitzy is saying, “but it’s Ray’s first marriage, and—”

“Oh, I think it’s wonderful,” Marie says. “I’m so glad, dear, that you set aside your fear and agreed to marry the man you love.”

“Set aside my fears?” Mitzy gives a nervous twitter. “I’m scared shitless, but I
am
doing it, aren’t I?”

“Yes, you are!”

I’m happy for Mitzy, but I wish it were Mom saying these things instead. If it were, maybe the thought of Grandpa Sam dying wouldn’t hurt quite so badly.

All this wishing makes me think of Peter.

Once, a bird hit our window while Peter was over. I saw it happen and rushed across the room to peer down at the sidewalk, trying to see if he’d fallen or flown off.

When Peter saw that I was upset, he took me downstairs so I could check. The bird was lying near the stoop, his eyes open, but there was no life in them anymore. Two little boys from the second floor were bending over him, one of them poking him with a stick. Peter made him stop, then he picked up the bird.

There was no dirt to bury him in, but we walked down
one block and Peter stepped right over the tape sealing off a new tree that had just been planted to replace the diseased elms, and he dug a grave for the bird, patting a nice little mound over him. Then we walked back to our place, his hand holding mine. He never said a thing the whole time, but I felt better just having him there, knowing what to do.

Marie and Mitzy don’t ask where I’m going when I open the back door and go outside.

The shade to Grandpa’s room is open, the window reflecting the sun so I can’t see inside, and I’m glad for this.

I feel bad, because Grandpa wants me with him, but I can’t seem to make myself go back in there, now that I know he’s still dying. Instead, I sit on the ground, right in my safe spot. A bird squawks and I look up, hoping it will be an eagle. It’s not. It’s a crow.

I settle back to lie in the lap of my father and look up at the clouds rolling by. When Milo and I were little and would get impatient waiting at the bus stop, Mom would have us look at the clouds and find pictures in them. I could never look too long, so Milo saw more pictures than me—usually stupid things, like a science-lab beaker or a telescope. If I looked too long, I’d get scared that maybe I’d fall right into that sky, as though it were the floor and the ground beneath me were the ceiling. I don’t get scared as I look up into it now, though. Not with my father at my back. I tuck my hands under my head and stare above me.

I think Oma believes that heaven is in the sky, because she looks up there when she talks about spirits and the afterlife. Wherever it is—
if
it is—the only thing I know is that I don’t want Grandpa Sam to leave here to go there.

I watch as the wind kneads the clouds into first one shape, then another. Then, suddenly, there he is. The image
of Grandpa Sam himself forming in a cloud! It’s the Grandpa Sam from Nordine’s picture: big, and bulky.

One cumulus cloud makes up his head and torso, and poufs of wispy clouds drift together to give him arms. There’s even a curled tail that forms his left hand. But on the other side, there’s only sky where his right hand should be.

It’s synchronicity. Pure, sweet synchronicity! Before Oma took
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
away, I’d read a section of it while sitting at the table. page 191, third paragraph down. The section on averting death! It said that if you see an image of someone in the sky, and the image is missing a hand, you can keep them from dying by making a peace offering. Specifically, by creating a dough effigy.

It’s like Oma always tells me—there are no coincidences! First I read a portion of Oma’s book, even though she obviously didn’t want me to and even though it seemed like a frivolous distraction at the time. Then I heard the squawk of a bird, coaxing me to look up, and
then
I saw Grandpa Sam’s image in the sky, with the right hand missing. It’s a sign! A sign that I should make Grandpa Sam a dough effigy to keep him alive.