Lark and Termite (22 page)

Now I can start. There’s wind from the open window, cool stirred air that prickles my skin. He’s asleep, deep asleep the way he gets when too much has happened. I can be naked, opening the boxes. I don’t care if they’re dirty with old mud. The tape on the boxes rips like brittle ribbon against the open scissors, and the glow of the lamps leaps and wobbles. Here’s the felt-lined wooden chest and the Lenox silver service. Dishes, white plates with gold edges, stored professionally in cardboard sleeves. Two boxes of linens: tablecloths and napkins, pink sateen sheets, lace-edged pillow slips. Like someone’s hope chest got used, washed, packed away. Four boxes, five, six. But it’s just a house someone emptied in her absence, with no thought but to send what seemed worth money. No ribbons or knickknacks, no junk like people keep in drawers, like I find at Topsy Turvy full of facts about who people were. No shoes or lingerie or everyday clothes that would say what she wore, how she really looked. One box, stored too close to the crack in the floor, is tinged pink inside: faded dye from a pile of beaded dresses, like costumes, discolored and rotten from the damp. Other boxes stayed dry. There’s a dress, folded like padding under a layer of wrapped goblets, a white dress or a nightgown. Fitted in the shoulders and bust, tucked in at the waist, loose in the skirt. Proper. Saved because it’s silk. I put it on, to feel how it felt to her and know it fits. And there’s a robe, Japanese, with huge sleeves, red silk with dragons in blue and orange and white. I wear that too, and keep looking. No books, no records, no framed photographs, nothing personal, until I find the notebook. An artist’s sketchbook, no name, but it must be hers: hardbound, not like mine, and the pages don’t tear out. I start at the back, turn toward the front. Her drawings are shadows on walls, edges, shaded corners. A hand holding a bottle beaded with cold. A man’s hand and wrist. His torso. No faces, nothing to recognize. But she drew the sign that hangs across Barker Secretarial:
MURPHY’S FIVE AND TEN CENT STORE.
And she drew the tunnel, the railroad bridge by the river. She remembered it exactly, the way the stones and mortar curve at the top.

I forget the flood. I keep looking, unpacking the boxes and repacking them, like puzzles, so I have room to spread things out. I go through cut-glass punch cups and dismantled glass lamps. No letters, no photograph albums, no bills or account statements, nothing I can use to find out where she was or what happened to her. Why her own sister won’t talk about her, why no one will. Here’s a cardboard box printed with an old-fashioned illustration of the planets:
FABERGé’S HEAVEN SCENTS.
A silk-lined perfume set from a fancy drugstore. Inside, a molded velveteen inset for little porcelain bottles and stoppers, labeled with stickers I can still read:
VENUS, SATURN, MARS, MORNING STAR,
C
ASSIOPEIA, THE MOON.
The bottles are all here except the last: Termite’s moon man. They’re all tiny pitchers with molded faces. Maybe they’re better than photographs: they’re empty pictures that smell of scent when I pull out the stoppers. Whatever was in them evaporated. Each cork nub is topped with a plastic star. There’s a card like someone might send with flowers:
Reach for the stars!! Love from your girls.
Hearts under the exclamation marks. Who were her girls? But I know what happened. She let Termite hold the moon bottle and he liked it, he went on at her if she tried to take it away. He liked the smell when it was her smell, and the shape of the bumpy face, so small and fat: he liked her. He was hers, and I was. I was hers.

I pull the silk robe closer around me and go to the window. It’s near dawn. The rain has stopped, but the fog in the damp air is heavy. Cold, clammy. The water is higher still, angry looking, windblown, and moving. Solly will be coming for us. There’s one box left. Right on top, there’s a folded receipt from Bekins Van Lines made out to Gladys Fitzgibbon, 40 Beech Road, Coral Gables, Florida. A secretarial error. Gladdy talks about her place on Beach Road, how she can see the ocean from her little porch, across the narrow sand road. I don’t know why she’d have my mother’s things, or pay to send them, but I know why so much isn’t here. Gladdy threw it all away, all the personal things, the photographs and letters, all the things that told secrets or stated facts, and she paid someone to pack the rest. I wanted wedding pictures, something to say who. Lola probably wasn’t married to my father, but she married Termite’s. He was a soldier and he died, but none of that is here. There’s only a folded American flag in a tight triangle, inside a plastic sleeve, and the hard lump under the fabric is a little gun with a curved pearl handle. It could be a toy, but it has weight and it’s real. I know the army sends a flag to every soldier’s grave, but they never found him and he didn’t have a grave. This flag is all there is, and I put the gun back inside it. There’s a trumpet in a hard, heavy case, packed with a silk handkerchief under the mouthpiece. Tucked inside is a snapshot: twenty or so enlisted men, soldiers in uniform, sitting in a bandbox emblazoned with a script marquee:
THE MATCH BOX.
They’re not holding instruments, so no clues there. Anonymous faces. Gladdy didn’t throw it away because she never bothered to open the case.

Underneath is something else, folded, big and bulky, wrapped in paper taped layer on layer, as though to waterproof the package. I have to use the scissors to get it open. It’s heavy: a military jacket, a uniform jacket with brass buttons and a name tag:
LEAV-ITT.
He wore this. I unfold it to see the size of his shoulders, his arms. Strong, like he’s standing here in the shape Termite might have grown into. There’s a small tin box folded inside the pocket. It has a metal clasp and a key taped on the bottom. It’s here because Gladdy didn’t know: she didn’t open the package my mother sealed and taped. My heart is hammering, but the box has only a few papers. On top is a business-sized envelope, opened, bound with a rubber band that snaps when I try to remove it. Inside, typed on onionskin paper with a bad ribbon and an
h
that jumps, a letter to Lola Leavitt from Sergeant Ervin Tompkins, postmarked April 10, 1951, Belle Glade, Florida.

Dear Lola. I was in Japan and Korea with your husband, injured bad the day he went missing. I am sorry to take so long to find you but I was in hospital and then rehab in the States. I had your Louisville info and Mr. Onslow gave me your Florida address. Somehow your photo Bobby carried everywhere was in my gear. I want to return it and give you a letter he wrote you. I am in Belle Glade. My wife and me would like to come and see you.

Then his name:
Sergeant Ervin Tompkins.

There’s no phone number. But I can call information, see if he’s still listed. Let him tell me what happened, tell Termite. Underneath is a flattened cigarette pack, Lucky Strikes, still cellophaned. When I turn it over, I see the photograph, small, cut to fit into the pack. I look hard and it’s her, grown up, propped on pillows in a hammock, one arm behind her head. Smiling, happy. Long, light hair, not dark like mine, a hand on her stomach. On the back, her handwriting:
Seven months along.
I see now, she’s pregnant. It’s a photograph she sent, that he carried in the war, in Korea.

There are no other letters. Just one snapshot of Nonie and her, children, the same one Nonie kept. And four school pictures of me, small ones, paper-clipped together, inscribed on the back in Nonie’s hand: my name, the year, the grade. First grade through fourth. Then I was nine. She died. Termite came here. There should be a death certificate, a funeral notice, something to say how or when. But it’s not here. Our birth certificates are: two half-sheet squares just the dimensions of the box itself. Both from Central Baptist Hospital, Louisville, Kentucky. Termite’s name is Robert Onslow Leavitt. July 28, 1950. On mine, my name and birthday. Her name. And my father’s name, in my hands, in black and white: Charles Fitzgibbon.

At first I think it’s a mistake, some confusion. He was there with Nonie, and my father wasn’t. Or they didn’t know who my father was, and Charlie volunteered his name. But that’s not how it works. If the father is unknown, that’s what it says:
unknown.
No lies. The room wavers and then swims back. I think the motor sound of the boat is a low buzzing in my ears, that I’m hearing my own name in my head, over and over. Termite is saying it too, my name as a sound, in the same loud tone. Then Solly cuts the motor on the boat, and I can hear him yelling my name.

T
he air is white with cloud, and the sun is a flat, bright blade at the horizon, like a slit under a door. All else is drifty, misted. The warmth in the ground rises in a fog over the cold water, stirring in slow patches over a dark, swift weight. The boat, an aluminum rowboat with an outboard motor, bobs and moves. When I look straight down from the open window, the water is five or six feet from the sill, lapping the wall of the house with the slow wash of the wake Solly has made, angling so close. Solly lifts his relieved face to me and I see Stamble sitting opposite him in the boat, very still, no glasses, no hat, no suit coat or rain gear, just his white long-sleeved shirt, dark trousers, businessmen’s shoes. He could be sitting behind a desk, hiding in plain sight, his shoulders drawn in, knees drawn up. He gazes up at the window into us, his white hair blown back from his face, looking toward us with those weak blue eyes as though he senses where to find us.

Solly has the boat within a foot of the house, and he tosses a rope up to me. “Lark? You OK? Didn’t you hear me calling you? The flood crested at midnight. This is as bad as it gets, but the water is fast. They wouldn’t give me a boat until daybreak. Tie up to something braced so we can keep the boat stable. We’ll get him in, here at my feet, then I can lift you down.”

I’m wrapping the rope under and around Termite’s heavy upholstered chair, through the steel bearings of the heavy wheels, knotting it twice and three times. “Give me a minute. I need to get his rain slicker.”

“Yours too,” Solly says. “What are you wearing?”

“Something I found.” I drop the long robe and it swirls, a red trail on the floor. I’ll come back here for it, for the tin box I wedge into the cushions of Termite’s chair, for everything I want to save. I have Termite in my arms, but I only find one rain slicker in the tumbled room, and I pull it on him backward.

I hold him facing the window and talk low, my face on his and my mouth at his ear. “See, Termite? Here’s the boat. Like Noah’s Ark. Two of them, two of us. I’ll lift you down first. We need to leave now, Termite. We’ll ride the flood and come back when the water goes down, after the storm.”

The storm.
He says it once, soft. He can hear the edge in my voice. But he stiffens, arches against me, turning his head, one wrist pulled in close and curled, the other clenched on the arm of the wheelchair he wouldn’t touch. He wants to stay here at the open window, in the sounds and the wind, water beneath us, a layered nest built up around us.

“He doesn’t want to leave,” I tell Solly. “If it won’t get worse, maybe we should stay.”

Solly stands in the boat, his thick hair lank and damp. “You can’t stay. The water will go down now, but there won’t be power, lights, anything. I’m not leaving you.”

We’re leaning down, out of the window, but I can’t move Termite. I look at Stamble and he stands in the boat, easily, naturally, and raises one white arm toward us. His smooth white face seems almost luminous. He can’t reach us, doesn’t need to, but he opens his hand, indicating the way as though we’re walking through a door. Termite relaxes against me and I lift him through the window, down into the cloudy air. Solly’s hands touch mine under the slicker, take him from me. I feel suddenly weightless, punchy with fatigue. I don’t get a sweater, shoes, anything. I only climb backward out of the window, Solly’s hands on my ankles, my legs, hips, until he has me around the waist and lifts me down to him. He puts me to one side in the boat so smoothly that I never have to stand, only balance on the hard metal seat, my back to Stamble, where I can see Termite. Solly has belted a life preserver around Termite and put another under him, in the floor of the boat, so that he can lean back, his head at an angle. He’s close to the flood, so close.

We’re moving. The motor of the boat rumbles and the flat, overcast sunrise can’t seem to lighten. The murky water is brown, thick. Solly looks at me, then switches on the floodlight at the head of the boat, peering into the fog like he’s threading us through it along some narrow watery tread. His dark tan makes his gold-green eyes look lighter. He seems all that’s alive in the beige, washed-out air: his hard shoulders in the black slicker, his full pink mouth, the strong lines of his face. Stubble edges his lips and throat like an animal mask. I want to slip inside him, into his limbs and long muscles. The dank wind smells of soil, and there’s the sound of water rushing, moving, pouring, and the feel of turbulent current under the boat. The flood is full of sounds we can’t see.

Termite listens, head erect, his hands before him, fingers moving, hearing the air.

Solly hasn’t slept. He’s wearing the same clothes as yesterday, a pair of hip waders pulled on over his jeans and a Red Cross shell over his shirt, under the slicker. He reaches a hand toward me, grasps my knee. He can just reach me. I nod back toward Stam-ble. “Where did you find him?”

“Find who?” Solly answers.

He’s looking at me, his hand warm on my cold skin, and a shadow looms up beside us in the clouded air. It’s as though we slam a wall in the fog, but it’s a massive branch or a dead tree the flood has set rolling in the water, flung at us like a battering ram. The hull of the boat shrieks as the tree rolls under us. We’re all thrown up and forward but Solly’s hand keeps me in the boat. I see Stamble arch past me like a white blur, reach Termite before I can, then pitch forward past him, into the water, and disappear.

I hear myself scream and I lunge forward, holding Termite, trying to reach for Stamble. The metal edge of the boat is cold and I can’t see my own arm in the water.