I sat down on a stool at a corner table in the kitchen, and he set breakfast in front of me. Phil sat on the other stool, concentrating hard on cutting his food into bite-sized pieces.
“Does she know it’s time for breakfast?” I asked, forgetting to use my fork and picking up the bread as if it were a sandwich.
I expected her to come around the corner at any moment, but realized just then how silly it was of me to think so. She’d be in the bedroom, whichever room that was. I would stand above her until she opened her eyes, and then she would cry—first the joyous tears of our reunion, and then the buildup of tears it would take many more days to cry out, remembering the misery we’d endured by being apart.
“I think we should eat and then we’ll talk,” Dad said after a long pause.
“I can eat
and
talk,” I said.
“Tillie.” He refilled my glass of juice and picked my napkin off the floor. “Your mother will be away for a while.”
“Away
?” I rose to my feet, knocking my stool to the floor. I had waited so long to see her, and she was
away
? I took off, in search of her bedroom.
“Tillie, slow down. You’re not understanding.”
I ran through the first floor, opening doors and calling, “Momma!” The house felt big and spooky—like we’d moved into an empty museum. “Where is she?”
I dodged my father’s arm and climbed the stairs, rushing from one room to the next. “Momma!” A part of me—the strong part, fierce with determination—was sure, absolutely sure, that I would find her. One more door, and we’d have the homecoming I’d been imagining for two weeks. Another part of me, the part that knew I had already opened the room with my parents’ bed in it and found no one sleeping there, had become a dead weight I could barely drag to one more room.
“Momma,” I called. But I could no longer hear my voice.
And finally I could not move, could not take another step
because as I’d searched the house, I’d been listening—not wanting to—to my father. “She’s not here,” he’d said. “Tillie, please stop. She’s not here.”
I stood in the center of a too-big room and sobbed. Dad tried to hold me but I fought him off and, alone with my whole body shuddering, understood that Momma was not there to hold me and welcome me home. She was gone.
I stayed where I was for what felt an eternity, sometimes wailing and rocking back and forth calling her name, sometimes standing stiff and staring at the blank wall. When Dad stepped back into the room, I asked in a hoarse and trembling voice, “Where is she? When is she coming home? Why can’t I see her
right now
?”
He spoke softly. “You know your mother was not well. Right now, it’ll just be the three of us.” Phil stood behind him with his arms folded, not troubling anyone with questions or tears. Dad put his hand on my back, guiding me to the room that would become mine, a room with only a dresser, a small throw rug, and some boxes in it. He told me how much more I’d like it with new carpeting and wallpaper. I cried louder.
“I’ll let you get used to your new room,” he said. “If you want to open that box in the corner, go ahead.”
I stood against the wall, dazed, swaying, not sure if I was hungry or full. I wanted to cry more but wasn’t able to work myself up again. My hands touched the bare walls and the holes where nails had been. I touched the large cardboard boxes, opening the one marked
TILLIE
. There were my toys—stuffed animals, a clown whose arms and legs were elastic bands threaded through flat circles of fabric, my music box with the dancing ballerina, and a hardened chocolate donut I’d hidden inside of it.
A little deeper into the box, I found a photo, only one. We were not a family that took many pictures. Only rarely did we remember the camera. It was always for an event: a parade, a birthday, a day at the museum. And even then, when the event was over, someone would discover the camera in a pocket or sitting on the seat of a chair that was pushed, unused, under the table. Momma always liked to be the photographer, to be sure she wasn’t in any photos. I thought she was so beautiful, but she was shy about how she looked in the bright sun or how she looked after her lipstick had worn off. Most times, if you tried to take her picture, she covered her face.
I was not normally allowed to touch our family pictures—Dad said I got fingerprints all over them and it made the pictures wear away—but this was one that didn’t make the family album. In the photo, I stood in front of an airplane hangar with hair blowing across my face. I remembered my parents arguing about my hair—Dad telling her to wait until I pulled it back, or to wait till the wind died down. Momma didn’t listen and snapped the shot.
Walking home afterward, Dad said, “You won’t even be able to tell who it is.”
But Momma laughed, saying, “Oh, yes, you will.”
When that roll of film was developed and Momma had already studied and then disposed of all the photos she was in, I heard a roar of laughter and ran to see the photo of me with my face completely hidden behind my hair. I stood there with my hands in fists, arms out behind me like I was holding ski poles.
“Is that how I stand?” I asked Dad.
“I’m afraid so,” he said, and though he laughed, it was also clear that he was not pleased with this thing about me that the camera had captured.
I set the photo against the baseboard of my new room, where I’d lined up all of my toys, startled by how few there were. In my mind, I tried to walk through my old room to remember what was missing. Where was my Drowsy Doll? Where were the drawings I kept on the shelf beside my bed? I opened the box marked PHIL and began digging through frantically, but found no doll. And where was my ruby cup?
When I heard Dad come up the stairs and knock on my door, I started to cry again, though it gave me a headache.
He gently pushed the door open and asked, “Would you like to see the yard?”
I shook my head, and he did not return again until dinnertime, when he sat beside me on the floor while I ate a tuna fish sandwich and pickle. Afterward, he walked me to the bathroom, where I stood on a stool to brush my teeth. My face had swollen so much from a day of crying that I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror; there were only red slits where my eyes would normally be and I looked like I’d been punched in the mouth.
I felt exhausted, quiet, as Dad walked me back to the room, where Phil had brought our sleeping bags. He unrolled them side by side on the floor, pausing at the odor of mine, then continuing to unroll it.
“Phil said he’ll sleep in here until the rooms are set up,” Dad said, tossing two pillows into the room.
I stood before him, hands at my side and asked him again, “Where’s Momma?”
He sighed, kneeling in front of me and gripping my shoulders. “I answered that already, Tillie. The move really tired her out. She’ll be away for a while.” He tousled my hair and added, “You’re going to be just fine.”
I shook my head hard, but had such a headache I had to stop. He stayed in the doorway as I crawled into my sleeping bag, which was cold and damp. I thought of the questions I knew he would not answer:
Where did she go? When will we visit her? She’s coming back, isn’t she?
“Tomorrow I’ll show you around outside,” he said as he clicked off the light. “Night, Pest.” He saluted Phil from the doorway and then we heard him head downstairs.
I lay there, aching in a way that felt as if I might not live through the night. “Phil? Please tell me where she is.”
“Dad says she’s gone away for a while.”
“I know what Dad said.”
“That’s all I know.”
“Tell me!”
He sat up in the dark. “Okay. She was a mess. After you left, she was on her hands and knees on our lawn, and we had to get her inside because she was making a spectacle of herself.”
“Was she okay?”
“You’ve seen her like that before,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do. So Dad just went and got the U-Haul and we packed everything without her help.”
He picked at the zipper of his sleeping bag. “I was packing as fast as I could, and Dad was carrying the boxes out to the trucks, but he was mad the whole time. I couldn’t get them packed fast enough for him, so he just started taking handfuls of stuff and throwing it by the curb so the garbage truck would collect it.”
“I’ll be so mad if he threw out my toys.”
Phil ignored me and continued his story. “When it was time to go, she didn’t want to get in the car.”
“You didn’t leave Momma at the old house, did you?”
“I wanted to. I was that mad. So was Dad. He had to beg her to leave her room and get in the car. And once she was in her seat, she just put her face against the window, and didn’t move.”
“But you brought her here, right?”
“Yeah. I didn’t actually see her get out of the car because Dad took me up to this room and told me to stay here. But I could hear them fighting downstairs. The whole house echoed because there was no furniture in it.”
“What did they fight about?”
“I could only hear Dad. He said, ‘Get in the house. What’s wrong with you?’ And other stuff. Stuff you’ve heard him say before.”
“So they
didn’t
fight. You mean Dad yelled at her.”
“Never mind. You’re not listening.”
“I want to know where she
is
. Dad says she’s away for a while, but where?”
“Maybe she’s in the hospital. I don’t know.”
“Is she sick?”
“I said, ‘I don’t know.’”
I expected him to say something about the smell of my sleeping bag. I hated when he teased me, but it would mean things were normal and we’d be all right in our new home. Instead he lay back down and didn’t speak again that night, though it was a long time before either of us shut our eyes. I stared at the silhouette of my brother in the bare room and tucked my knees to my chest. When I opened my mouth to cry, there was no sound.
F
ROM THE OUTSIDE, OUR
house was grand, like the others on our street: red brick, white columns, and a long walkway lined with flowers. The houses were not identical as they were when we lived on base, but instead had colorful shutters, sun porches, bay windows, gardens full of roses and fruit trees, and the smell of chlorine coming from the backyard pools. During those first weeks, we’d traded in our station wagon for a Volvo, and soon we looked more like we belonged on our street.
But it was the inside of our house that showed what Dad had made of our lives. To walk through our front door gave the feeling of stepping inside a military bunker. The rooms remained barren and impersonal, only containing furniture that was absolutely necessary. Nothing on the walls, nothing so extravagant as a side table full of scented candles. Dad had painted each room a gray-white he said would be easier to keep clean, but it made our house dingy and cold. It was essentials-only living, with unused rooms locked and vents closed to save on energy bills.
Momma had filled our old house with wonderfully useless things: fruits and vegetables made of painted plaster, vases filled with felt flowers on wire stems. Sometimes she stuffed those flowers inside a drawer and replaced them with real ones—purple sage, red Indian paintbrushes, tall grasses—everything bending and lovely. These decorations were not a part of our new world.
When I was alone, I scoured every bit of the house for the items that had mysteriously disappeared in the move. I opened drawers, cupboards, closets, hoping to find Momma’s sewing kit, her clothes. Where were these things? I stood outside the locked doors, frustrated and jiggling the handles.
I was so desperate to find anything at all that had belonged to her I even opened the basement door and stood at the top of the long flight of wooden stairs with no backs to them. We were not allowed to play there. Dad had warned us that the unfinished floor was full of nails and possibly rats. What frightened me most was the rickety staircase I feared would send me on a long drop to my death. Still, while Dad and Phil were laying down new carpet in our bedrooms, I put one trembling foot on the first step.
There was a strange, ticking quiet.
Maybe the rats
, I thought, and took another step.
Or maybe the sound of the stairs starting to give way.
I continued down, looking out on both sides of the staircase to see nothing more than cinder block walls. It was colder and darker the lower I went, and my footsteps echoed. When I reached the landing, where the staircase turned to the right, I patted the wall for a light switch, but felt so nervous letting go of the rail, I decided I would brave the dark.
As my eyes adjusted, I scanned the enormous, empty space on the right-hand side of the staircase. Nothing but a single
door, painted, it seemed, with only one coat of white, the knot holes showing through. To the left of the staircase, more empty space except for a curious door about three feet above the floor line with a string tied through the hole where there was no handle. I started to take another step when I heard a terrifying rumble, and believing the staircase would collapse and trap me in the basement with no way out, I sprinted back to the top. Only when I was sure I was safe and my panting slowed enough to listen closely, did I recognize the sound of the dehumidifier.
After days and days of searching, one thing was very clear. Momma was not a part of this new house in any way. This was my father’s world, lean and orderly. And he modeled for us his strict routine: He shined his shoes every Monday, shopped for groceries every Thursday, had his hair trimmed at the Pentagon barbershop every other Friday. He might have replaced the metal comb and ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket from time to time, but no one ever noticed the change. Every evening at ten he emptied his coins onto the bedside table before clicking the turn switch on the lamp and going to sleep.
He tried to instill in us this same kind of order, giving us lists of chores to do—not that Dad couldn’t do them quicker and better by himself, but hard work, he promised, would make us responsible, sturdy, and productive. He oversaw our work like a commanding officer:
Pull that sheet tighter. Put more muscle into it. Be proud of your work
. This was fine for Phil, who was quick to say yes to anything Dad ordered, and took great satisfaction in doing things before he was asked.