Thank You for All Things (16 page)

I flopped down on my bed and endured a forty-five-minute lecture on the topic, thinking that Mom, deficient in the trust hormone as she is, probably needed a little extra time. At first I tried to feign interest, but then I remembered it was Milo and he wouldn’t notice the difference. I let my mind drift aimlessly, studying his nostrils and wondering if mine were shaped like two puny peanut shells too and what that shape might mean in Chinese face reading.

Apparently, I suffered through Milo’s lecture for naught, though, because after I thanked him for enlightening me, I headed into the front room and found Peter standing by the door. “A good-night hug?” he asked me. As I hugged him, I peeked under his arm at Mom, who was staring down at her laptop screen.

“Why are you leaving so early?”

“I have an early meeting tomorrow, kiddo.”

Mom didn’t even look up when she said, “Bye, Peter.”

Even Mom’s farewell to him upset me, because Oma says that people should say, “See you later,” or something like that when they part from people they love, knowing they’ll see them again (even if it’s in the afterlife). Otherwise it can be like a bad omen.

I look back down at my almost-finished book report on the book that
did
turn out to be depressing enough that it made
me
want to swallow Paxil and slit my wrists with a butter knife. I jot a note at the bottom of my page, asking
Mom to please let me pick out my own books from now on because I’m sick of reading sad stories about girls with dead or dying parents.

When I finish, I scoot the report over to Mom, who takes it and stuffs it into the folder sitting beside her laptop. I see Oma out of the corner of my eye, suspiciously watching Mom. She goes off to her room, and when she comes back, she’s got a conch shell filled with dried sage. Mom’s head is down, but I know it’s not going to stay that way long. Oma strikes a match and touches it to the clump of herbs. She gently blows into the shell to get the sage burning, then she starts fanning the thin ribbons of smoke into the air, right over Mom’s head. Mom bats at it and cusses, which only makes Oma fan more smoke at her. “You need to be smudged, dear, like it or not. It will help rid you of negativity.”

Mom cusses and coughs dramatically.

Oma squeezes between the table and counter, heading into the other room. She fans smoke over Grandpa Sam, who’s blankly staring at the TV, then she heads toward the study. “Hey, where you going with that?” Mom shouts. “Oh, she’s not taking that in …” Mom leaps from her chair. “Not in there, for God’s sakes!”

When I get to the study, Mom is chasing Oma around the room, hopping behind and reaching around her like the boys who play basketball at the dangerous park do when they’re trying to steal the ball. Oma manages to smudge the long shelf that is filled with books, fossils, arrowheads, and minerals before Mom yanks the shell out of her hand. Milo, working at the desk, barely even notices that he is no longer alone.

“What are you trying to do? Give him an asthma attack
that sends him to the hospital? Geez, Mother, he’s doing better now. Leave it that way, will you?”

“Nonsense,” Oma says as she follows Mom back into the kitchen. I tag after them both while Milo gripes behind us that we left his door open and he can hear the TV.

“Sage is healing, Tess. Sacred. It won’t hurt him, it will help him. Tess, what are you doing? Tess, don’t! Dried sage is expensive!”

Mom has the shell in the sink and she’s dousing the smoldering sage with water. “Lucy, will you sit down and work already?”

As Oma tries to squeeze the water out of her soggy clump of sage, Mom leans her rear against the counter and rubs the sides of her head. That’s when Grandpa Sam shuffles into the kitchen, his jogging pants sagging so that you can see a patch of gray pubic hair between the elastic waist-band and his T-shirt. “Oh, for God’s sakes. I’m in an asylum!”

That’s when the phone rings.

“Lucy, can you get that while I help your grandpa to his chair?” Oma says this as she tugs up his britches and turns him around. “You have to use your walker, Sam, remember?”

I pick up the phone while Mom reaches for her purse strap, strung over the back of the chair by her laptop. “I have to get the hell out of here for a little while,” she says.

“Lucy, is that you?”

“Peter!” I shout into the phone. “I was just thinking about you! Only a half an hour ago, at the most!”

Mom’s hand freezes, her purse swaying from it like a hypnotist’s pendulum.

“Lucy, I’m so relieved that I found you. I’ve been trying
to locate you guys since the fire. It’s been a nightmare trying to get information, but I finally found someone in your grandmother’s building who knew where she was. I figured you were all together. I’ve been worried sick. Are you all okay?” Peter is practically shrieking.

“We’re fine. We were here in Timber Falls when it happened. But everything is gone. Our books, our computers, everything! Did people die, Peter? Any kids or old people? And did they find out if it was arson? I haven’t heard any updates, because Mom says I don’t need to know.” The minute I say this, I know I’ve just screwed my chances for learning a thing. And sure enough, he changes the subject abruptly, saying the one thing he knows will distract me. “I miss you, kiddo.” He says this as sweetly as Scotty Hamilton ever could.

“I miss you too, Peter,” I say. “I wish you were here, so you could ask me a question.” Peter says he wishes that too, and Mom motions for me to give her the phone. He suggests that we improvise with another game, by him giving me a quote and me telling him who said it.

Mom tosses her purse on the table and puts her hand in my face, her fingers snapping. “Just wait! Peter is going to give me a quote!”

Mom’s hand is as quick as a pickpocket’s, so I crouch down and clamp the phone tighter to my ear, wrapping my arm up over my head like a seat belt. “Go ahead, Peter,” I say.

He pauses for a bit while he thinks, then he says, “A friend who is far away is sometimes much nearer than one who is at hand. Is not the mountain far more awe-inspiring and more clearly visible to one passing through the valley than to those who inhabit the mountain?”

“I know that one! I know it!” I shout while hopping in
place. “Kahlil Gibran said that!” Then I stop hopping, because I know why he chose this particular quote.

I want to talk to Peter longer, but Mom’s fingers are biting into my shoulder like talons. She snatches the phone from me, then jabs her index finger toward my school books. “Hello?” she says, as though she’s answering a telemarketer’s call.

“Who’s on the phone?” Oma asks as she passes through the kitchen with a rolled Depends diaper that smells so acidic that my eyes begin to water.

“Peter,” I say, and Oma’s face brightens. She pauses and Mom waves her away, so she hurries the soiled diaper outside to the garbage can—removing shar from Mom’s space, no doubt, because it’s not like she doesn’t have enough negativity to deal with already. I open my book and pretend I’m reading, even though I’m sure Mom knows I’m not.

“I’m sorry, Peter. I didn’t think of it,” she says. She pauses while Peter talks and I strain to make out his tinny words.

“Frankly, no,” Mom says. “I actually
didn’t
think you’d be worried.” Once Milo was watching a special on PBS about Stephen Hawking—one of his favorites—at Oma’s. Hawking has a muscular disease and uses one of those devices that pick up the vibrations of the vocal cords so he can speak. Even though the device made him sound oddly mechanical when he spoke, his voice still had more life in it than Mom’s voice has at this moment. I think of how alarmed Peter must have been and wish that Mom would use the same tone she used with Mitzy yesterday, to make him feel better.

“No, I couldn’t. My cell phone was dead. My charger quit,” Mom says, as though her cell was dead this whole time and she had no land line to use. “I ordered a new one and just set it up five minutes ago.”

All of a sudden, I hear a loud thump in Grandpa Sam’s room. I whiz past Mom and rush to his door. “Mom … Oma … Grandpa Sam fell!”

“I have to go. We have a situation here,” Mom says, and she hangs up. Oma comes running from the bathroom, her hands red and wet from the scrubbing she was giving them.

“Oh, my!” Oma says when she sees Grandpa sprawled out on the floor, his head butted up against the box spring.

Oma gets down on her knees and asks Grandpa if he’s all right. He’s panting and looks stunned, and he doesn’t answer. “Give me a hand, Tess.”

Mom helps Oma lift Grandpa, and they get him up onto his bed. For a split second there is pity in Mom’s eyes. That is, until Grandpa Sam gets tetchy. “I want to watch TV,” he says. “I want to get up.” His mouth doesn’t close all the way when he talks lying down, so his enunciation is poor, but we all understand him.

Oma takes his quilt and covers him. “In just a minute, Sam. Let’s make sure you’re okay first.”

“Where’s my keys? Where’d you put my goddamn keys?” he asks, as if he’s already forgotten that he was getting out of bed to watch TV. His face is purpled from the effort of raising his voice, but still he manages to muster up enough energy to grab Oma’s wrist. He clutches it so hard that the skin whitens around his fingers.

The disdain in his normally complacent face first appears to scare Mom, then it infuriates her. She slaps at his hand until he lets go of Oma. “You don’t have a job anymore!” she shouts. “Which is a good thing, considering you’re in diapers! Diapers this woman is good enough to change, I might add, even though she doesn’t owe you one goddamn thing and never did. So don’t you go disrespecting her by raising your voice to her or laying a hand on her. You hear
me? Or I’ll see to it that your pissy ass gets flung into a nursing home.”

Shock blasts Oma’s eyes and mouth open. “Tess!” she says. “He’s not well. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

Mom is breathing so hard that I instinctively count the probable steps to Milo’s inhaler, just in case she needs it. “Oh, yeah? Did he not know what he was doing back then either?” Mom bolts from the room and out the door.

I help Oma get Grandpa Sam up and walk in front of him while Oma follows us into the living room. She hurries to get him his pills, saying, “I hope your mom’s all right,” as she goes.

I watch Mom from the bay window. She heads to the clump of trees I’ve seen her at before, and she stands for a moment, bent forward, her hands braced against her thighs like a long-distance runner who just made it across the finish line.

I
’
M SITTING
on the ground, my arms wrapped around my knees. Oma told me that in the old days, in the Sioux tribe, after a baby was born, the mother would place the baby on the ground and tell her that she was lying on the lap of her mother. I think of this every time I come out here and sit down, only I tell myself that I’m sitting on the lap of my father.

I’m looking at the trees, and wondering when they’ll shed in mounds, and hoping we’re still here when that happens so I can rake them into a heap and cover myself with them like a blanket. And I’m thinking of how I wish that
I had been here in the summertime, so I could have spread a sleeping bag on my daddy’s lap and slept under the stars.

“I’m fine!” I hear Mom shout, then the slamming of the front door and the sound of an engine starting. I move to my hands and knees and creep far enough forward so I can see around the side of the house. Mom is backing out of the drive. She reaches the end and jerks the car to a stop, then backs out so sharply that the rear tires of Roger’s Mustang almost hit the culvert. I look up at the sky and wish an eagle would come. Then I’d run inside and beg Oma for some tobacco.

I take a deep breath, like Oma takes, and I lie down on my back, the ground pleasantly cool under me, and watch the clouds tumble by. I love the sky here, clear and sharp and filled with bright stars after dark. Last night I watched them out the window, instead of diving into Mom’s notebooks as I had planned, and each one sparkled like glitter, every single speck brilliant.

The screen door opens and Feynman leaps off the porch, Milo behind him. Feynman races to me and slobbers on my face, then runs off to water a tree. Milo comes to me, and, surprisingly, sits down at my side.

“Oma says Peter called.” I feel sorry for Milo when I realize that he didn’t get to talk to him, because Milo likes Peter as much as I do.

“You would have gotten to talk to him, Milo, if Grandpa Sam hadn’t fallen. I only got to because I’m the one who answered the phone. I would have handed it to you next.”

Feynman brings Milo a stick, and Milo takes it but doesn’t throw it. Instead, he picks at the bark.

“Do you like it here?” I ask him. He shrugs.

“I do.” We sit quietly for a moment, and with no book
before him and a bit of sadness in his eyes, it’s easy to think of us sharing the same womb.

“Milo, can you keep a secret?” I say in a rush. “I mean
really
keep a secret? Like, if the CIA had you in a torture chamber and was trying to beat the secret out of you, you still wouldn’t tell?”

“That’s an irrelevant question,” he says. “Why would the CIA have an interest in anything you have to tell me?”

I punch him in the arm and he flinches. “Stop being so literal! I’m serious, Milo. I have something I’ve got to tell somebody, and, unfortunately, you’re my only option.”

I take a deep breath before spitting it out in a rush. “I’m reading Mom’s old journals that are upstairs in her closet. They’re full of things that happened back when she was a kid.”

Milo’s face screws up. “Did Mom say you could read them?”

I roll my eyes and groan. “Of course not, you idiot. If she did, I’d be discussing this with her, not you. Anyway, one Christmas, Grandpa Sam made them a toboggan, but—”

“Well, you shouldn’t read them, then.”

“Milo! Aren’t you even a little curious about their lives back then? About learning why Mom hates Grandpa Sam so much and why Oma divorced him?”

“Not especially,” he says, and I gasp in exasperation. “Milo, think of it like the big bang … It’s the beginning of us. Our origin. That from which all of our family life force comes.”