Thank You for All Things (5 page)

I’m excited as we weave through the busy lanes. It’s been ages since I’ve ridden in a car. I wait for cars to coast parallel to us, and watch the people inside. In many of them there are whole families: a mother, a father, kids, and sometimes a dog. I watch a green Toyota pull up beside us. The mother is dozing, her auburn head pressed against the glass. In the backseat, a boy and girl, younger than Milo and me, are slapping at each other’s hands in some sort of game and laughing when their hands miss each other. I glance over at Milo, who is staring out the window, seeing nothing but his thoughts, and I wish he wasn’t the stereotypical genius: serious, frail. An old man in a boy’s body.

“Oh!” Oma says to Mom, once we are out of Chicago and traffic lets up some. “I’ve got to tell you what Marie said when I talked to her last night. Oh, how that woman makes me laugh!” Oma pauses to giggle. “I don’t know how, but somehow we got on the topic of finding a bra that supports but is comfortable. And Marie told me that when her daughter, Sue, was visiting over Labor Day weekend, she took her to Victoria’s Secret to buy her a good bra for her birthday.” Oma laughs again, and, surprisingly, so does Mom.

“She took her to
Victoria’s Secret
?”

“Yes! Can you imagine that? Marie said the bras these days look like body casts for boobs. She said … oh, land’s sake, I can’t even spit it out …” Oma’s laughter is so hearty that her whole body shakes. She swallows her giggles enough to say, “She said that at our ages, filling these new-fandangled bras is like filling a Jell-O mold. You just pour them in and wait for them to set.” Oma’s hoot fills the whole car.

“You should call Mitzy when we get to Timber Falls,” Oma says once she settles down and gets done dabbing her eyes.

“Who’s Mitzy?” I ask.

Oma glances over her left shoulder to look at me. “Your mother’s best friend throughout childhood.” Oma looks over at Mom. “You even kept in touch through most of college, didn’t you?”

“I haven’t spoken to her in years, Ma,” Mom says, her voice reserved again.

“Well, you should. Old friends are such a blessing. Marie started to tell me something about her, but the battery on her phone was dying, so I told her I’d call her when I get settled in and we’ll catch up.”

“Ma, I won’t be there long enough to see anybody. I plan to just drop you off and turn around.”

“Oh, Tess, don’t be silly now. A round trip in one day is too much.”

“We’re going and coming back in one day?” Milo asks, his skin tone already looking a little green from his queasiness.

“If I get too tired, I’ll stop and get us a room on the way back.”

“You don’t have money to throw away on a motel room, and besides, even if you did, do you know how many dead skin cells and traces of bodily fluids are soaked into those mattresses? It’s unsanitary!”

Mom sighs but says nothing.

Oma has a Dasani water bottle that she filled with water run through a Brita pitcher, and Mom has a travel mug filled with coffee. They both take a sip of their drinks, and for a time there’s no sound but for the hum of the tires on the road and the scratching of Milo’s pencil.

I’ve never been able to talk openly about the grandfather I never knew, but I feel it must be okay now since we’re on our way to see him. “Is Grandpa Sam paralyzed on
the left side? Is he going to speak with his words all jumbled?” I’d done research online to learn about strokes so I’d know what to expect.

“Actually, no,” Oma says. “Neither of his strokes were the usual kind. They were in his frontal lobe, Aunt Jeana said.”

“I know about strokes in the frontal lobe!” I say, too loudly, judging by the way Milo flinches. “That part of the brain serves as the doorway to our emotions. Our social conscience is located there, and that portion of the brain also tells us when to stop doing an activity.” And maybe just to be a little mean—or because I’m still annoyed that Milo won’t play in the car with me like a normal sibling—I add, “Gee, Milo. Maybe you had a stroke. Mom should mention your symptoms to the doc on your next visit.”

“Lucy,” Mom warns, and Oma (who obviously absorbed only the first part of what I said or she’d have snapped my name too) says, “Well, isn’t that interesting. It shouldn’t surprise me, though.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“Well, your grandfather spent his entire life trying to shut the door on his emotions. I guess he finally succeeded. So sad.” Oma turns her head to look at Mom. “And isn’t it ironic, Tess, that he should lose his social conscience too, when once that’s all he had? You remember how he fretted about what others thought of him?” Mom gives a little grunt, then sips her coffee.

“Do I look like him?” I ask.

Mom’s body presses against her seat hard enough to jiggle it. “Let’s change the subject, shall we?”

“Oma started it!” I say.

Milo glances over at me. “No she didn’t. You’re the one who brought up Grandpa first.” I keep my hand low so
Mom can’t see it in her rearview mirror, and I reach across the seat and give Milo’s scrawny leg a hard pinch. “Ouch!” he says, and Mom tells me to keep my hands to myself.

Oma is oblivious to all of this. “Yes, I do believe you resemble him some. Through the eyes.”

“Mine are the same shape as Mom’s, but lighter blue.”

“Yes, and she got the shape of her eyes from her father. Sam’s are lighter than hers, and more gray than blue. He has flecks of yellow in them, though, like your mother has.” I ask Oma to borrow her compact so I can check for yellow flecks in mine. I hope I don’t find any, though, because once I read a book on Chinese face reading, and it said that yellow shards in the iris point to a vengeful temper.

While I’m looking, Mom and Milo get into a debate about the genetic likelihood of children getting one parent’s eye color as opposed to the other’s. I find no flecks of yellow and hand Oma back her mirror. I don’t listen to Milo and Mom but only stare out the window, waiting for another family to pull up alongside us.

After a time, the high-rises give way to suburban clusters and, finally, to open fields. Milo gets excited when he sees three high-tech windmills spinning against the sky, and he starts rattling away about renewable resources versus fossil fuels. He sounds like a PBS program. A dull one, at that. I like facts. I love them, actually. But only if they’re about something interesting. Mom joins in on the debate, but she’s left to discuss it alone once Milo decides he needs to calculate something or other, no doubt it having to do with a windmill’s rotations.

“What’s our new house look like?” I ask.

“What did you say?” Mom asks, her eyes in the rearview mirror scrunching into cat’s eyes. “Why did you call it
our
new house? Who said it’s ours?”

“Oma,” I say defensively.

Mom’s head snaps toward Oma, even though she’s in the middle of changing lanes to pass a semi. “I did not say I was taking that house!”

“And I didn’t tell Lucy that you were,” Oma says calmly.

“Grandpa Sam gave us his house?” Milo asks.

“No, he did not! He wouldn’t give me a damn drink if I was dehydrating on the Sahara and he came by on a camel weighted one inch off the ground with bottled water!”

Oma doesn’t comment. She reaches into the tote bag stuffed with treats for the road and pulls out a box of organic granola bars and asks who would like one. After she hands Milo and me one each, she reaches back in her tote bag and takes out a CD and pops it in, and the whole car fills up with the mournful but soothing calls of humpback whales.

As we cross the border into Wisconsin, Milo checks his calculations and utters a “Yes! Within 3.5 seconds! Right on schedule,” and Mom says, “Oh, goody,” under her breath in a tone that can only be called sarcastic.

“Did you know that every pod of whales has their own song?” I say to no one in particular. “And that even if one gets separated from the pod, they never forget that song, no matter how long they’ve been away from the others or how many miles apart they are?” Nobody says anything until Milo asks if he can listen to his Feynman lectures now. Mom tells him he can.

A
S MUCH
as I’ve always longed to be among trees, I begin to feel smothered the farther up into Wisconsin we get. The trees, already beginning to color, edge closer to the highway, then crowd together so tightly that only slivers of flickering sunlight can squeeze between them.

Mom is unsettled too, but I suspect it has nothing to do with the encroaching forest. The top of her head, visible over the seat, is pressed tightly against it again, as if she’s bracing herself.

Oma does not look unsettled but contemplative. Her head slowly cocks from side to side as we pass houses with
lawns as big as parks. Places she probably remembers passing during her days as Grandpa Sam’s wife.

Oma married my grandpa in 1970. She was twenty-four. He was forty and recently divorced. It’s the kind of “love story,” I overheard Mom say once to Oma, that gets men locked up nowadays and earns them a spot on Wisconsin’s list of sexual predators. Grandpa Sam and Oma met when Oma went to stay at a friend’s cabin in Timber Falls for one week. It was love at first sight, Oma said, and they were married three months later. Right after the wedding, they moved to Chicago so Grandpa could make better money and realize his dream of building the biggest and best sawmill in the Midwest. Oma worked in a factory, and every penny she earned she put into their savings for that sawmill. They stayed in Chicago for four years, then Grandpa decided that city life wasn’t for him. So they headed back and bought the house that Grandpa lives in now. Our house. And a year later, my mom and Uncle Clay were born.

Oma rests her head closer to the side window and peers up. Her whole body perks when she sees something. She taps the window glass. “Oh, look, children! An eagle!”

I have to almost lay my head on Milo’s lap to see him, but there he is, soaring above the treetops on Oma’s side of the road, heading in the same direction we are. There is a slight upward curve to the tip of his wings, which are spread wide as though he’s claiming the whole sky. He’s beautiful, with his regal head capped in white feathers. “Wow! He’s gigantic! His wingspan must be a good six feet!” I say.

Milo glances out. “I’d say closer to seven,” he says, then quickly turns his attention back to his notepad.

Not to be outdone by Milo, I add, “The eagle’s scientific
name is
Haliaeetus leucocephalus.”
Milo doesn’t even glance at me when he corrects my pronunciation.

“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” Oma says, her voice all dreamy with wonder. “Did you know, Lucy, that the Ojibwa people believe that if you offer an eagle tobacco, he will carry your prayers to heaven?” Her head is still leaned back, her face bent toward the sky.

“Really?” I ask, scooting forward as far as my seat belt will allow me to.

“Tess, stop the car! Now!”

Mom is mid-sentence, trying to snag Milo into a new discussion. She stops talking and looks over at Oma, who is digging in her purse.

“Just stop the car! Hurry!” Oma says as she pulls a Virginia Slims from its pack.

“Jesus, you can’t wait fifteen minutes to have a smoke? We’re almost there!” Mom steers the car to the gravel along-side the pavement, and Milo groans and grabs his belly when it jostles.

“Come on, Lucy!” Oma says, springing open her door while the car is still rocking from the stop.

“Open your door, Mom!”

“Hurry, Lucy,” Oma says, as she waits outside with one hand on the door.

I don’t wait for Mom to decide to open her door so I can get out. I scoot myself into the front seat and dive out Oma’s door.

Oma and I hurry to stand in the tall grass along the ditch. Oma points to the bird, who has lit at the very tip of what I recall from our early studies of tree species is a northern pine, set off the road some thirty yards behind us. The eagle glances down at us, then turns his curved beak elsewhere.

Oma breaks the cigarette into her palm, then gives me
a pinch of tobacco. She whispers so as not to scare him away—or because this is supposed to be a sacred moment. “Now say a prayer, then toss the tobacco into the air as your offering,” she says.

Oma holds her tobacco up high, closes her eyes, and starts muttering her prayer. I’m not sure if she’s praying to God, though, because she’s calling Him “Creator Spirit,” and about seven other names. I close my eyes too and say my prayer in my mind.
Please, God, if You exist, please help me find my real dad. And if You can’t do that, please bring Peter back to be my dad. And if You can’t do either of those things, then would You at least crack the door to Grandpa’s emotions open a little, so that when he gets to know me he can feel fondness for me? Also, can you make my ankles stronger so I can be a figure skater, even if I don’t have Scott Hamilton’s genes to give me a boost?

When I’m done, I open my eyes and see that Oma is still softly muttering her prayer, both hands lifted toward the eagle. She barely finishes her “We thank you for all things. Amen,” when Mom honks the horn, causing Oma, me, and the bird to startle. The eagle opens his wings and springs from the branch, lifting above the treetops. Quickly, I open my fingers, and the breeze takes the tobacco flakes and scatters them to the ground.

As we hurry back to the car, Mom opens her door and cranks her head around. “Damn it, Mother. What did I tell you about filling Lucy’s head with that crazy hocus pocus, New Age crap?” She opens the door wider and leans her chest against the steering wheel and tells me to get in.

“There’s nothing New Age about it, Miss Smarty Pants,” Oma says, and I giggle. “Native Americans have been sending their prayers up with Eagle for centuries.”

As soon as I get settled in my seat, I look for the eagle. When I spot him, he’s only a speck swirling in the sky.

“Put on your seat belt and find something to read,” Mom tells me.

But I can’t read, of course. I’m too excited. So is Milo, but only because when we come up alongside a wooden sign saying,
Welcome to Timber Falls
, the stopwatch that Peter gave him says he’s only off on his estimated time of arrival by four seconds and who knows how many fractions of a second, even though we made one uncalculated stop to pee, one so Oma could smoke, one so Oma and I could pray, and yet another so Milo could vomit.