Some Things That Stay Page 18

  Rusty nods, like now I’m making sense. “Yeah, he’s a pretty old guy. I thought he was your grandpa or something. But still—Well, I guess he missed out. But I’m not gonna. I got to get out of here. I got to get away. I want to see places. I want to see Hawaii, and Africa, and shit, the whole world. I tell you, I’m gonna be a pilot. You’ll see.” He jumps down off the log he’s standing on and then jumps right back up. “I’ll come back and visit my parents, it’s not like I’m never coming back, it’s not like I hate this place. I just ain’t gonna get stuck here.” He looks up at the sky, for his plane. “The sky gets yellow before a tornado. My dad told me about that, and when I saw it really happen that day, I yelled for him, and he made us get in the basement. He’s pretty smart. It’s a good thing he told me. It sure is a strange color. A yellow sky.” He’s still looking up, and now I know he’s trying to imagine the sky that way, kind of hoping it might happen again.

  “So,” he says. “You want to go to the fort?”

  I think about it. I don’t want to be in the fort now. Talking feels good. I’m glad he’s telling me what he wants to do, even though I don’t want him to go. “Not now,” I say.

  “Yeah, okay.” He snaps a long twig off a limb and waves it around like a sword. I get this tight feeling, right in my throat, and it’s because Rusty is just like me. We think we’re so grownup, but I bet he’d be scared if he were in a war right now, just like I’m scared trying to be my mother.

  “I could show you a beaver pond,” he says.

  “Okay.”

  Rusty leads me away from the fallen trees, through more brambles, then down a hill. Trees are gnawed off knee-high into sharp points. The land becomes swampy and we have to curve around the side of the hill. Rusty tells me to take off my shoes: if we want to see the beavers we have to walk like Indians and not talk at all. It’s fine with me. I’m busy thinking. My mother would love to see the trees chewed off like that. I wonder if she ever hated trees because of her mother driving into one. I wonder if living surrounded by trees is a test of her strength. I wonder what it would be like to believe in God and then stop believing, rather than not to believe and then to believe. Do you ever really get rid of the not believing or the believing? I believed I could fly. Then I tried to fly, and I couldn’t. Maybe I just didn’t believe enough. Maybe I have to give Him another chance, even though I don’t want to anymore, because it hurts when He doesn’t show up, just as much as falling down Valley View Hill.

  Suddenly, we are there, on the edge of the pond. I can see the dam, built from logs and twigs, so tightly woven together it holds in all the water. There is a mound of more twigs and logs, the beavers’ den, with grass growing right on the top. The swampy pond is huge, a whole acre or more. We can’t see any beavers. They must be hiding. Rusty straddles a log and there is enough room for me to sit right in front of him. He wraps his arms around my waist and I lean back against his warm body. We sit quietly, waiting to spot a beaver. They never come out, but it’s so nice to be held, I don’t care.

  After we come back from the walk, I go over to our house to get some clothes for tomorrow. Robert’s there. He glares at me from behind his comic. Just as I’m going up the stairs, the phone rings. Robert picks it up.

  “Hello,” Robert says, without any of that wavering his voice has been doing for the past year, that jumping around from squeaky to hoarse, even inside a word, as if the word had an extra syllable. “Yeah, hi, Dad,” he says. He nods, pressing his lips together, listening carefully to what my father is saying.

  “Okay,” Robert says. “Yeah, that’s okay. We’ll be fine.” I can imagine what he’s agreeing to. My father isn’t coming home tomorrow.

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” Robert says. “I got to light the bonfire.” A pause. “Yeah, pretty good. Okay. See you when you get home.” He holds the phone out to me. “He wants to talk to you.”

  I walk over slowly. “Hi, Dad,” I say, trying to sound very casual.

  “Hi, honey,” he says. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine,” I say. “When are you coming home?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Wednesday.” He pauses. “Today’s Monday, right?” he says, obviously not so sure.

  “Yeah.” He does this, forgets what day it is. Just now I figure out why, as if someone near whispers it in my ear. It’s because he doesn’t go to work. Or church. All the days are the same to him. It hits me hard just how different he is from other people’s dads. It makes me pretty angry. “How come you can’t come home?” I ask.

  “My show starts tomorrow. Tuesday evening is opening night.” He pauses again. “So, I’ll try to come home Wednesday.” He coughs, a bunch of coughs all together, with different sounds to them.

  “Daddy,” I say, “are you okay?”

  “I was just eating something. Got stuck in my throat. Sorry.”

  It scared me, to hear him cough. I can’t believe he is eating and talking to me, as if they are both just as important, as if he couldn’t have waited to take that bite later, when he is done talking to me. He’s trying to kill two birds with one stone.

  “I’m going to get baptized next Sunday,” I say, not that I am, but now I might.

  “Tamara,” he says wearily, “let’s not do this.”

  “Would you be mad?” I ask.

  “We’ll discuss this later. Let me talk with Megan now.”

  “Oh, so you believe in miracles?”

  “Tamara, please.”

  “Well, you don’t think she’s going to break her vow of silence just to say hi to you on the phone, do you? Jesus, Dad, she hasn’t talked for almost a month. Not one word. Don’t you think that’s strange, even for her?”

  “Just tell her I asked about her, and that I love her, will you?”

  “Sure. Bye.” I slam down the phone.

  “Is Rusty back?” Robert asks me.

  I almost say no. I almost tell him Rusty went to a friend’s house for the rest of the week. But Robert looks so miserable. “He’s back. He wants you to come over.”

  Robert throws his comic up in the air and is out of the house before it hits the ground. I go into the kitchen to get some chips or something. There’s nothing to eat. Just the canned food in the basement. Waiting for the war.

  Twelve

  Tuesday it rains again, a misty rain we can hardly see but that soaks into our clothes just as fast as regular rain. Rusty and Brenda have to clean their rooms and do some wash, and Helen is teaching Megan how to sew, so Robert and I go over to our house for a while. My father has been gone for four days. The house smells empty.

  I go up to my parents’ bedroom and try on some of my mother’s clothes. I like her yellow cashmere sweater best and when I hold it up to my nose it smells like she does when we sit on the couch to listen to the radio. I wonder if people smell different at different times, so I sniff the rest of her shirts. They just smell clean. Wearing my mother’s sweater, her blue cotton skirt, and her black high heels, which fit me perfectly, I wobble over to my father’s bureau. I open the small top drawer on the left and find it crammed full of junk, which surprises me because his paints and art things are so well organized. It’s like finding another part of him, in a little drawer. It smells of leather and paint. Everything of my father’s smells like paint. There are handkerchiefs I’ve never seen him use, and one of them is a lady’s, with pink embroidery on a scalloped edge. I smell it, and my eyes close and something flutters in my stomach. It is my mother’s handkerchief. I lay it on top of the bureau. Next I take out a pipe. My father doesn’t smoke, but in the one picture I have seen of my grandfather, he is holding a pipe. This must be his. Also in the drawer is a folding knife, a fountain pen, a billfold with one dollar, several small round stones, a bunch of loose change, and a picture of Robert and me at some beach, both knee-high in water, squinting at the camera. In the back of the drawer is a stack of letters, the ones my mother has sent him from the sanitarium, and, under them, three letters on yellow legal paper. They are l
etters from my father to my mother. I wonder why he didn’t send these ones. I sit on the bed and read them.

  July 12, 1954

  Liz,

  Love you. I need to say that first, in case I can’t say anything else. I have never written you a letter. I think I sent you a postcard from New York once. It had a picture of Central Park.

  I have started this letter six times. I always get this far and then I find I have stared at the paper for a long time. I see us walking around the pond in Central Park, you taking those big steps and waving your arms, furious with someone you have just had an argument with about minimum wages for women (see, I do remember some details about way back then, even though you think I don’t), and

  I said, “Hold on, let me get you a podium,” and you said, “Screw you,” and I was so afraid I made a big mistake, and you let me think I had until I apologized at least forty times. I’m sorry, again. For everything and for absolutely nothing, because, given the chance, I wouldn’t change a thing, because it would change you, and even a fraction of a difference would be too much. Have I ever told you you’re perfect?

  I wish you could hold

  The letter ends here, with words scratched out after the word hold and I can’t make any of them out. I read the next letter.

  July 22, 1954

  Liz,

  I just mailed you a letter. I said all the right things and I meant them, but now I have to tell you the truth. I’ll save this letter so when you get back you’ll know what it was really like without you. It stinks.

  Megan won’t come out of her room. I don’t know how she does it. I would go insane inside that long. It smells terrible in there, but she looks healthy. I try to talk her into coming out, but she just stares at me. She is so stubborn. What makes the women in this family so stubborn? Robert is miserable and shows it. He’ll burst out in tears at the slightest thing. I would too, but I promised you I wouldn’t cry in front of the children, and I never have. I have begun to paint in the pasture. It gives me some freedom to sulk and weep. I do weep. I am an old man who needs you.

  Tamara has cloaked herself in anger. She sees everything in black and white. I want to tell her to look at the shades between, how they soften the world so we can love it even when it hurts. Sometimes I want to grab her and shake her, tell her no one is to blame, but I am afraid to say the things she needs to hear because she thinks everything I say is wrong. She is like the paintings I wish I could paint but can’t. I am afraid she is beyond my ability to raise. She needs you. You are her reds and yellows and greens, her indigo, emerald, and ultramarine. I am only black.

  Robert will do okay. I suppose they all will, but at least he lets himself feel sorrow, although Tamara still teases him about it and I have to send her to her room. Robert is like a rubber ball. He’s bouncing between places right now, strength and fear, loss and discovery, certainty and confusion. He’ll land in the right place. When you come home. I say that to myself a hundred times a day. When Liz comes home.

  My paintings have changed. I still find the flying girl takes me someplace new, but it’s more than that. Sometimes I look up from the canvas, startled to see the world plain and simple. The paintings are now complex. They speak of loss, and need. They have come alive, as if the trees and hills and sky in my painting want something, lack something, and they don’t know what it might be, only that they need. I actually think as I paint, What? What do you want? My paintings now are like nothing I have ever done before, and I know why. It’s because you eased the demons from me each night just by listening to me talk, by holding me in bed, and now no one listens to me at all and my fears and desires come out through my fingertips, finding their way onto the canvas. I must admit, I love it. I am afraid to tell you, because it means I have profited from your illness, but I suppose I have profited by you in every way, and this is no different. You are my compass. I need you.

  And Love you,

  Stuart

  I read this letter twice without wanting to; my eyes just do it although I can feel my whole body shouting to put it down. When I’m done I breathe through my mouth because my nose is stuffed up. I bet he left this letter for me to find so I will feel sorry for him. I fold it up so I can put all the letters back just as I found them. I’ll never mention them to him. I won’t even read the third one.

  But I have to.

  July 27, 1954

  Liz,

  You have been gone three weeks and I can’t take it. I’m sorry I wrote that last letter telling you I will die without you. It was stupid to mail it. I thought you should know how much I missed you, but you haven’t written for a while and when I called Dr. Henderson, he said you had taken a turn for the worse. I blame myself. I hate myself for what I have let happen to you. I wait each day to hear from you. I wait each day to know it’s a day less before you come back. Please come back. Don’t give up on me.

  This letter is unsigned and crumpled worse than the rest. My hand shakes as I try to fold it. When I put the letters away I am still shaking, so I hit the wall as hard as I can. The plaster beneath the wallpaper dents. It hardly hurts at all. I take off my mother’s sweater and skirt. The shoes have already fallen off my feet. I feel sick knowing I was wearing her clothes as I read those letters. On the way out of the room I slam my fist into the wood around the door, and that hurts. I do it again.

  I have to pretend I didn’t read those letters. I have to forget them. I don’t want them inside me.

  I will act as if nothing has happened. My mother says you can trick yourself into being happy by smiling. I grin stupidly and decide I will go paint my nails. The back of my hand is already swelling.

  I paint my nails downstairs in the living room while Robert does his puzzle—which is almost finished. There is a small section of green leaves left to do, and one piece missing on the petal of an orange poppy. The petal looks wounded by that empty space, like a tooth knocked out. We are both quiet but tense, especially Robert, who instead of being excited about finishing his puzzle looks like he might explode. He’s developed a twitch; a blink, blink, blink, then a pause, then it starts again. I grin at him and he sticks his tongue out at me. The phone rings and I flinch, spilling orange nail polish all over my left thumb.

  Robert looks at me but doesn’t move. I stick the brush back in the bottle and answer the phone on the fourth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Mr. Anderson home?” a cool, smooth voice asks.

  “No, he’s not. Can I help you?”

  “When might he be home?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, trying to guess who this is. It wouldn’t be someone from New York, since my father’s there. It could be a doctor from the sanitarium. “He might not be home for a couple days,” I say. “Is this about my mother?”

  “In a way,” he says. “Who am I speaking to?”

  “I’m Tamara Anderson. Who is this please?”

  Robert is looking at me with a worried expression on his face, chewing on a fingernail.

  “My name is Dr. Ostrum. Is there an adult I can speak to?”

  “No, there’s not,” I say. “But you can tell me and I’ll tell my father.”

  “How old are you, Tamara?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Oh.” He pauses and I can almost hear him thinking, wondering if I’m old enough to hear whatever he has to say. I’m holding the phone so tight it hurts my hand.

  “Might your father be home tomorrow?”

  “No, he won’t,” I say. “Maybe not for a week. But I’ll be talking to him.”

  “Can I reach him someplace?”

  “No.” I am close to begging him to tell me what it is all about, how my mother is, but I don’t because I worry he might think me immature. It must work. He clears his throat.

  “Okay, Tamara, here’s why I’m calling. I’m a federal veterinarian and I work with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in the Bureau of Animal Industry. We’ve received a report from the county health commissioner about yo
ur mother’s tuberculosis. They contact us when someone diagnosed with, or testing positive for, tuberculosis has been working with farm animals. We need to come out and test your cows for tuberculosis. Your mother mentioned a milk cow to the Health Department caseworker. A milk cow and several beef cattle. So I need to set up an appointment, the sooner the better. Do you understand?”

  “No,” I say. I don’t understand why he’s calling about the cow. “Why the cow?” I say. Robert comes right up next to me and tries to listen into the phone. I turn my back to him so I can’t see all the questions he’s mouthing.

  “Well, cows can carry tuberculosis. It might be how your mother contracted the disease. Do you drink the milk too?”

  I take a deep breath, getting scared. “We don’t. She did.”

  “Well. You see then. It is possible your cow has tuberculosis.”

  “It’s not our cow,” I say, wanting nothing to do with having a sick cow.

  “Whose cow is it?” He sounds confused.

  “They are the Burns’ cows. We rent their farm.”

  “Oh,” he says. “Can I have their phone number?”

  “Sure.” I give it to him.

  “Thank you, Tamara. You’ve been a big help. I imagine I’ll be coming up there tomorrow. Who milks the cow now that your mother’s not there?”

  “Helen.”

  “Who’s Helen?” the man asks.

  “Our neighbor.”

  “Well, will you tell Helen to wear rubber gloves, and throw away the milk. She’ll need a tuberculosis test too. She should go to her doctor as soon as possible. But, like I said, I’ll be out. We’ll get the milk cow tested. She might be fine. It’s more than likely. Don’t you worry. I’ll talk to Mr. Burns and we’ll get it straightened out. You will tell your father all this when he calls, won’t you?”