The Broken String (2 page)

“But Daddy, I’m scared!” I couldn’t believe he was changing the rules so abruptly.

“Shh.” Daddy got out of bed and put on his slippers. He took my hand and led me back into the hall, shutting their bedroom door behind him. I thought he might walk me back to my room and stay with me there, but no. He let go of my hand and looked down at me, his face hard to see in the dark hallway. “You’re six years old now, Riley,” he said. “A big girl. In a couple of months you’ll graduate from kindergarten. It’s time you got over being afraid of storms. We’re not doing you any favors, letting you stay with us. Now go back to your room.”

I didn’t budge. I held Teddy tightly against my chest as I looked up at my father, trying to make out his features in the darkness. He seemed so much bigger than me at that moment, and I needed that protective bigness. He reached down and took me by the shoulder, turning me in the direction of my room.

“Go on, Riley,” he said, as I took one baby step into the dark hallway. “That’s a good brave girl,” he added, and when I turned to look at him, he’d stepped back into the bedroom and shut the door behind him.

I had taken one more small step when a clap of thunder suddenly shook the house. I froze, paralyzed, in the hallway, Teddy clutched in my arms.

“Riley?”

I jumped at the sound of my name and turned to see Danny standing in the doorway to his room. He looked ghostly, his white-blond hair and fair skin standing out in the darkness of the hall, but I was thrilled to see him.

“I’m scared,” I said.

“You can stay with me.” He held his hand out to me and I grabbed it as if he were saving me from drowning. We walked together into his dark room and my bare feet seemed to find every Lego and Matchbox car scattered on his floor, but I didn’t care. I climbed onto his bed as a bolt of lightning lit up the sky outside his window, and I buried my head in his pillow.

“Pull the shade!” I shouted.

“Shh!” he said. “They’ll hear you.”

“Pull it,” I whispered, and he got into bed beside me and pulled the shade closed.

“I like to watch the storms,” he said.

He was so brave! I couldn’t imagine watching those streaks of lightning on purpose. I wondered if I’d miraculously become brave when I was ten, too.

“It’s too dark in here,” I said, my voice muffled by his pillow.

He reached behind the bed and turned on his reading lamp. I saw his Game Boy on his night table. His prize possession.

“Check this out,” he said. He lay down next to me, holding his hands in the air above us.

I rolled onto my back. “What are you doing?” I asked.

He nodded toward the animal-shaped shadow he’d formed on the wall. “What is it?” he asked.

“A dog?” I guessed.

“No, stupid. Look how long its head is.”

“A horse!”

“Right! Want me to show you how to make one?”

For the next half hour, we made shadow puppets on the wall. Horses, ducks, dogs. We made them talk to each other. Danny’s horse told a lot of stupid ten-year-old-boy fart jokes, and mine told insipid knock-knock jokes, which were the only jokes I knew. Before long, the storm was over, and I was asleep with a smile on my face, breathing in my big brother’s scent from his pillow.

I yawned my way through kindergarten the next day after talking and laughing with Danny for so much of the night. When I got home that afternoon, I found my mother sitting on the sofa in front of the TV, a cup of coffee in her hand and her brown hair sticking up every which way all around her head. I smelled dinner cooking in the Crock-Pot. Our house always smelled like a Crock-Pot meal. Every morning, Mom would toss a chicken or a hunk of meat into the pot, along with vegetables and a can of cream of mushroom soup. She loved the easiness of it. She had no energy for cooking.

One of her soap operas was on the TV, and I knew she was still down, but she smiled at me.

“Hi, baby,” she said. “Did you have good day?”

“Yes.” I climbed onto the couch to sit next to her and rested my head on her arm.

“Be careful,” she said. “You’ll make me spill.”

I backed away a little. Then I touched her thumbnail. “Your nail polish is coming off,” I said.

She examined her nails. “So it is,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t really care.”

“Can we paint my nails today?” I asked. It had been a long time since she painted my nails.

“How about when summer comes?” she suggested. “We could paint your toenails then, too, since you’ll be wearing sandals.”

“That’s so far away.”

“It’s right around the corner.” She sounded sad when she said that, and she let out a long sigh. “Could you do me a big favor, honey?” she asked.

“What?”

“You know where I keep my pills? That drawer by Daddy’s and my bed?”

“Uh huh.” She had two bottles of pills in that drawer and a few more on the windowsill in the kitchen.

“Could you run upstairs and get them for me?” She brushed my hair off my forehead. “Would you do that for me, please?”

I couldn’t believe she was asking me to get her medicine! Sometimes she asked Danny, but this was a first for me and it made me feel very grown up. It probably had to do with turning six, I thought. “The tall bottle or the short bottle?” I asked as I got down from the couch.

“The tall one,” she said. “Thank you, honey. I’m too tired to move today.”

When I got to the top of the stairs, Daddy walked out of his office. “Hey, Sunshine!” he said. “Come see the new lighter I got today.”

I followed him into his office, which was easily the most interesting room in our house. I wasn’t allowed to be in that room by myself, although I never understood why not. Daddy was a collector, but his collections were locked behind glass doors, so I didn’t see how I could hurt them. On one side of the room he had his cigarette lighter collection, and on the other side, his compasses, which weren’t nearly as interesting. Against the wall he had his violin collection—five violins in cases. They were the least interesting to me because I couldn’t see them. He never took them out of the cases. “They’re too valuable,” he said. I didn’t understand the point of collecting something you couldn’t even look at.

Daddy had taught me to be a collector as well. I’d found a stray dog in the woods behind our house, but my mother was allergic to dogs, so we couldn’t keep it. I was inconsolably upset, so my father bought me a tiny statue of a dog and that was the start of my collection. I kept my little ceramic dogs in a case he built for me. It was much smaller than his cases and lacked a lock, but I loved it anyway.

“Come see,” he said now, as he took his seat behind his desk. I stood at the side of his desk, my hands hooked together behind my back, while he opened a small cardboard box. Boxes arrived for him nearly every day. He pulled out some Bubble Wrap and I leaned forward to see what was beneath it. He lifted a little silver teapot from the box, and I smiled. The teapot was the perfect size for my dolls to use when we played “kitchen,” but I wasn’t allowed to play with any of the things my father collected, especially not the lighters.

“It’s so cute!” I smiled as I touched the teapot’s black handle. “How does it work?”

He pressed the small knob on the lid of the teapot and flame shot from the spout. I laughed. “It’s my favorite one!” I said.

“I thought the fish lighter was your favorite? Or the dragon?”

I looked toward the glass case that nearly covered one whole wall in the room. I did love that dragon lighter. “All three are my favorites,” I said.

“Fair enough.” He smiled as he lowered the teapot back in the box.

“Oh!” I’d almost forgotten why I’d come upstairs. “I have to get Mommy’s pills.”

He lost his smile. “She asked you to do that?”

“Uh huh.”

He moved the box with the teapot in it to the other side of his desk. His lips were pressed together hard and I could tell he didn’t think I was old enough to get my mother’s pills. I thought that’s what he was going to say when he finally opened his mouth, but instead he said, “You know which ones she wants?”

“The tall bottle.”

“Okay,” he said, but I knew he still thought I was too young to be trusted with a task so big.

***

My parents’ room always smelled of my father’s aftershave. It was a woodsy scent that I loved, and I breathed it in as I sat down on my mother’s side of the bed and opened her night table drawer. When I lifted the tall bottle of pills, I saw a photograph beneath it. I rested the bottle in my lap and pulled out the picture. It was small, no bigger than the palm of my hand. In it, my mother stood behind a little girl about my age. The girl held a violin at her side. Her hair was pale blond, like Danny’s, and she looked happy, although her smile wasn’t nearly as big as my mother’s. My mother seemed almost like a stranger in the picture, her smile was so wide. I didn’t think I’d ever seen her look that happy. She was bending over, her arm across the little girl’s chest, and they both looked into the camera. A million questions raced through my mind. Did Daddy take this picture? Who was this girl who could put such a smile on my mother’s face? My mother loved her, I was sure of it. Why didn’t Mom ever hold me that way? Why couldn’t I make her smile like that? Was it the violin? Did Mom love the girl because she could play it? I wondered if I could ask my mother who the girl was, but I looked at the pill bottle in my lap and thought I’d better not. There was something unsafe about asking my mother hard questions.

I set the tall bottle of pills on the night table and then I turned the picture upside down on the very bottom of the drawer. I covered it over with everything else I could find in the drawer—the other pill bottle, a scarf, some handkerchiefs, some pens. I hoped Mom would forget the picture was there. Whoever that girl was, I didn’t like her. I felt as though she’d stolen my mother.

A couple of hours later, we sat in the dining room eating the chicken and potatoes that had been cooking in the Crock-Pot all day. Daddy cut the skin off my chicken and moved the revolting chunks of mushroom to the side of my plate as he asked Danny and me about our day at school. My mother seemed a thousand miles away from our conversation. Suddenly, though, she came to life.

“Oh, my!” She pointed toward the china cabinet on the other side of the room from where she sat. “Look how the sunlight is filling the china cabinet, showing all the dust on the glass shelves!” she said. “Now how does dust get into a closed china cabinet?”

“Dust gets everywhere,” Daddy said. “It even gets in my locked cabinets upstairs.”

“I’m going to have to take everything out of there and clean those shelves,” Mom said. “And I’m sure the dust is all over the Franciscan Ware, too.” She’d stopped eating, setting down her fork, mesmerized by the cabinet.

Daddy followed her gaze. “I don’t understand why we don’t use those plates for everyday if you love them so much,” he said.

My mother smiled. “This from the man who has three enormous padlocked cabinets full of collectibles,” she said, and Daddy laughed.

“Touché,” he said.

“What does that mean?” Danny asked.

“It means she’s right.” My father looked happy, and I thought it had something to do with my mother’s all-too-rare smile.

“I don’t know what’s so special about them plates,” Danny said.

“ ‘Those plates,’ ” Daddy corrected him.

Mom stood up from the table and walked to the china cabinet. The door creaked as she pulled it open, and she reached inside toward the Franciscan Ware. I hoped she would pick up one of my favorites, and sure enough, she pulled out a crescent-shaped salad bowl and brought it back to the table. The plate was a creamy white color with bold red apples, green leaves, and brown stems painted around the rim. I loved those plates. Even at six years old, I felt something like nostalgia for them. They were as familiar to me as my parents and brother, something that had always been in our house, in that creaky old china cabinet, and I knew they were special.

My mother held the crescent-shaped dish cupped in her hands above the table. “They were a wedding gift for my parents,” she said. “A hundred pieces. Can you imagine that? My mother never broke one in all her years of marriage, and I’ve never broken one either.”

“That’s because they’re always locked up in the cabinet,” Daddy teased.

“Every one of them is hand painted,” my mother said to Danny and me as though she hadn’t heard my father’s comment. “Can you imagine the work that went into them? No one has the patience for that sort of work these days.” She ran her fingers over the rim of the dish. “I have a lot of lovely memories attached to them from when I was a child.” She set the dish down carefully next to her water glass and looked across the table at my father. “But Daddy’s right,” she said. “We should use them every day and enjoy them. We just need to be very careful with them. After dinner, I’ll take them into the kitchen and wash off the dust and they’ll become our everyday dishes, like they were when I was a little girl.” She looked dreamy.

“I’ll help you!” I said. “I can dry!” I liked drying dishes because it usually meant we were together in the kitchen, just the two of us, and sometimes a whole different side of my mother emerged. She’d bend over to kiss my forehead or we’d sing a song together. I didn’t see it often, that happy, peaceful, loving side of her, but even at six, I tried to set the stage for it as often as I could. I craved her smile and her voice lifted in song. I craved that kiss on my forehead.

“Okay,” she said, “you can dry, but you have to do it sitting at the table so you don’t drop any of the plates.”

“Okay,” I agreed, excited.
One hundred pieces
. I would have her all to myself for a very long time.

Daddy helped carry all the dishes into the kitchen, where he and Mom stacked them on the counter. He got a box and put our everyday dishes into it to make room for the Franciscan Ware. “We’ll still keep the serving dishes in the china cabinet,” Mom said as she filled the sink with hot soapy water. “We don’t have enough room for all of them in here.” She spread dish towels on the kitchen table. “When you finish drying each piece, you stack it carefully on the dish towels, all right?” she said to me.