Stones for Bread (31 page)

“Just sugar is fine.” I add a teaspoon. He adds three and then splashes the suspect milk into his cup anyway. He stirs the coffee, spoon chattering against the porcelain. Sips.

“We never meant to keep it from you.”

I wait. His glasses come off again and he rubs his eyes until they redden. “How did you . . . I mean, what—”

“I got a call today from . . . a woman who said she was my half sister. I didn’t get everything she was saying. It was kind of a . . . shock and I, well, I hung up on her.”

“She saw you on television?”

“Yes. I think so. How did you—”

“You look so much like her. Mary, I mean.”

“You know her, then.”

He grabs the skin of his cheek and pulls at it absently, releases and repeats, making a wet, sucking sound. “Where to start.”

“The beginning?”

He sighs again. “Your mother loved you more than anything, you know? She loved you so much, even before she knew you, that she wouldn’t do anything to harm you. And that meant, to her, giving birth to you. She wouldn’t allow even the possibility her . . . illness would be passed on to her child.

“We were married, oh, eighteen months or so when it started. The sadness. The odd behavior. I didn’t know who I was living with, this stranger who sometimes went days without leaving the bedroom closet, or days without coming home. I was ready to give up on her, and then she . . . well, she bought bottles of pills from the pharmacy and took them all. Someone found her in a movie theater, unconscious, and called for an ambulance. It was in the hospital they gave it a name. Manic depression.

“It took another couple of years to truly get her back to being my Claudia. By then she wanted a child, and so did I, but we waited. We wanted to be certain she was truly stable. So nearly ten years after we were married we adopted you.”

My father—yes, still my father; I won’t let my world tilt so far as to shake him from this position yet—swallows some more coffee. I take a sip too, and it’s like drinking sweetened smoke, the taste in my mouth that comes when I smell a wood burning stove on a frigid day.

“Things were different when you were born. Now, people get married all the time and don’t have kids. Then it was assumed we were trying and couldn’t get pregnant, and we let everyone believe that. Your mother’s doctor had no problem deeming us infertile after
ten years of marriage and no babies. We used that on the adoption application. We also, for wrong or right, didn’t disclose Claudia’s condition. We were afraid no woman would give her baby to a couple with such a family secret.

“It didn’t take long for the call to come. A young woman picked us to adopt her baby. Mary Lombardi. We met her once, before you were born, at the agency office. She was seventeen and scared but also determined. She left the meeting and we were there, oh, I don’t know, several more hours filling out paperwork and making arrangements, and all that time she waited for us in the parking lot, and when we got back to our car she gave Claudia a little square of paper and said she had no right to ask, but would we consider letting her know how you were doing from time to time? Your mother hugged her and said she would. And she did. Every year around your birthday she sent a photo and letter. After she died, I didn’t think about it until I found Mary’s address in some of Claudia’s papers. It was a PO box. You were about twenty, I think. I scribbled a quick note about Claudia’s passing and let her know you were well and in college, and that I wouldn’t be sending any more correspondence now that you were an adult. I don’t know if Mary received it or not.”

Finishing his coffee, Alistair pushes back from the table and pours a refill. He opens the small cabinet above the stove hood, reaches back, and removes a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream. “I knew I was saving this for something,” he says, shuffling back to me. He spills some liqueur into his cup, drinks deeply.

“You said you were going to tell me.”

“We were, your mother and I. We discussed it until we turned blue and croaky. We went back and forth on when the right time was. Eventually we settled on you being twelve or thirteen, somewhere in there. Claudia wanted you to be able to understand the reason for it, all of it. She didn’t want to scare you with details of her illness too soon. She thought you’d be able to handle it then.”

“But she died.”

Alistair nodded. “She died. And I chose not to say anything because I didn’t want you to lose her twice.”

We’re silent. My father fiddles with the Baileys cap; if he had coffee left in his cup, I’m certain he’d add more alcohol. I feel like I’ve had a few too many drinks, all woozy-headed and working too hard to put all I’ve heard in tidy order. It’s nearly eleven. “I think I’ll crash here tonight,” I say.

“I’ll get some sheets.”

“No,” I tell him, sharp little teeth in my voice. I take a deep breath. “No. It’s okay. I’ll get them.”

He closes his eyes. “Don’t hate us.”

I nod, knowing I should hug him, a quick squeeze around his shoulders, but I have no comfort to offer.

I’ll find that bottle empty in the morning.

Upstairs, I open the linen closet, a narrow door between the bathroom and my bedroom, painted white and raised-paneled. It was my favorite door as a child because the knob is violet glass, faceted until it sparkles. The others in the house are white or brown, ceramic-like, cool, smooth eggs in my hand. I would pretend the special knob was put there by a fairy, and if I opened the door at the right time, I’d find passage to her magical land. I decided the time would be the stroke of midnight, and I would stare at the ceiling, chanting, “Stay awake, stay awake,” eventually hearing my parents turn off the television, brush their teeth, flush the toilet, and close their bedroom door. “Stay awake, stay awake.” But I couldn’t. And by the time I was old enough to make it to midnight, I didn’t believe in fairy stories anymore.

The sheets aren’t folded, but balled and shoved onto the shelves. I find a fitted and flat one for the twin bed in my old room; they don’t match but it doesn’t matter. In my room, I move the plastic totes of Christmas tree lights and Alistair’s old sweaters from the bed to the
floor and make up the bare mattress. Switching on the ceiling fan, removing my skirt and sandals, I climb under the thin sheet. I shiver, but don’t get up to lower the fan speed, and fall asleep listening to the rattle of the pull chain against the light globe.

Seventeen

I want you to come to church with me
, my father says.

I’m sixteen, angry, ignoring his words and Christmas Eve, the fourth since she’s been gone. The first since his new best friend is Jesus. I watch a Lifetime movie about finding the perfect man for the holidays, even if he happens to be a former convict in a Santa hat. My father stands in front of the television, wearing galoshes with his only suit, his parka, and a woolen hat with ear flaps. He holds my own peacoat out, an offering.

Liesl
.

I heard you
.

Get your coat on
.

I’m not going
.

He drapes the coat over the arm of the sofa and leaves the room. The kitchen door hinges squeak. I hear the garage open, the car start—a Taurus, purchased the month after my mother died, her Buick traded to a dealership without its history disclosed; does the new owner sense what took place where she sits?—and the garage door once more, closing now.

I’ve defeated him. Again.

The battles give me purpose. How many ways am I able to pierce him? How many times will he struggle to his feet after I strike? This is my crusade, declared against him because he dares move on with his life. And he must turn the other cheek. His God commands it of him.

The front door opens and my father is back. He gropes the length of the television set, touching buttons until the screen goes black, the picture sucked into the center before it disappears.
I don’t ask much. I don’t know that I ask anything. This once, please, come to church with me
.

I snuggle into the leather sofa, my head on the wide, puffed arm, and, tugging my coat over my body, close my eyes.

If you don’t come, you won’t get your driver’s license
.

His words electrocute me, and in a surge of defiance I’m standing before him, almost as tall as he is, my pupils dilating with venom.
You can’t do that
.

It’s done
.

In one strike he has amputated my limbs. All of them. I can remain here, at home, and bleed to death. Or for the sake of my teenaged social life, I can allow the stretcher to carry me from the field of battle, have my own gushing wounds dressed, grow stronger, and devise a new strategy with which to crush him.

This is not for you
, I say.

I turn, walk into my own rubber boots waiting near the door, cross the snow-covered lawn, and slip into the car. It’s frigid outside; my nostrils freeze and my throat tastes of metal in the few moments I’m exposed to the air. I wear thin Tweety Bird pajama pants and a sweatshirt. My father brings my coat but I won’t use it. When he covers my lap with it, I ball it up and heave it into the backseat.

I remain silent. My father introduces me to people before the service. I ignore them and their
I’ve heard so much about you’s
, crossing my arms over my chest—I’m also braless—and staring at some invisible point above their heads and to the left. I see Sara Kempf standing not
far from us. She nods to me. I turn my head. During the worship time, I slump in the chair. I don’t stand. I don’t sing. I don’t open any hymnal to page two hundred and whatever-whatever. I don’t light a candle and hold it toward the ceiling as far as my arm will stretch, at the end of “Silent Night” in representation of the Light of the World.

I seethe.

Two old women serve birthday cake for Jesus in the lobby. The children clamor around first, frosting on their fingers and in their hair. We don’t stay, and this time the car is freezing when we get into it.

Only a fifteen-minute drive home.

My father turns the radio on and scans, choosing a station playing instrumental renditions of holiday songs. “Joy to the World” ends, and then another arrangement I recognize but can’t name until the announcer identifies it as “Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

And then—

No
, I breathe.

“Es ist ein Ros entsprungen.”
My mother’s most beloved Christmas carol.

I clench my teeth so I won’t sob, but my tears flow without sound. My father sniffs, and I roll my eyes toward him as far as possible, until they throb, and in the headlights of the oncoming vehicles, see him crying as well.

I haven’t stopped missing her
, he says.
I never will
.

He feels around for my hand—I sit on them for warmth—and I bite my lip as his fingers dig it out from beneath my bruised thigh. But I let him. And when he squeezes it, I squeeze back.

I wake in a tight ball beneath the sheet, head tucked between my knees, toes as cold as timid souls. Out of bed, I throw on my skirt and dig a sweater from the castoffs, an ecru cotton button-up without its buttons. Another clear tote holds boxer shorts and sport socks. I snag
a pair for my feet and carry my shoes downstairs. I hear my father’s snores, loud and full of gravel, from the bedroom down the hall.

In the kitchen, I check the refrigerator for something to drink before I go. A plastic bottle of Tropicana, expired two months ago. The milk from last night, stuck back on the top shelf rather than dumped down the sink. A couple of apple juice boxes, and why he has these I can’t imagine. I take one anyway, tapping the straw on my leg to remove the wrapper and then popping it through the foil hole. I’m so dry my saliva is sticky, bitter, and I suck down the entire box, squeezing the cardboard to get the final mouthful. I drink the second one too and toss both empties in the garbage can. The Baileys bottle is at the bottom, half-covered with a paper towel.

I want to leave before my father wakes. There’s no way I can stand with him in the kitchen and make small talk while the coffee percolates. Or, even worse, discuss the things revealed last night. But he’ll sleep until noon, at least, and I think I should make him bread so he will know I still love him. I can’t bring myself to stay any longer, though. I leave a note—
Be in touch soon. Love you. Liesl—
and tape it to the can of Maxwell House on the counter.

I drive back to Vermont and the trip is hard because I don’t want to think about anything. I try counting barns and admiring the old farmhouses. I stop for gasoline and another apple juice. Finally, I force the picture behind my eyes to become a sheet of clean white paper. Whenever a word drifts onto it, I erase it. This works, for a while, but the words come faster and faster, and like playing Missile Command on my father’s Atari, eventually I can’t keep up. I know this; as a child I would imagine all sorts of scenarios, from decorating elaborate cakes to simply pulling up a zipper, and the more I tried to control the daydreams, the more independent they became, spinning in a reality all their own. Now all the words begin piling in the center—
adoption, illness, suicide, secret, Mary Lombardi
—each one larger and darker than the previous. I imagine the corners folding in, covering all the
accumulated words, but the other side of the page is gridded and filled already too, in handwriting I recognize as my mother’s, a single, neat, accusing letter in every box.