Chapter Eight

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Tuesday, September 26, 1995

 

“And you know something, Emma.” Aunt Pam turned toward her niece and grinned. “I hate flapjacks to this very day. Can’t stand the sight of them.”

“Not me.” Calvin licked the corners of his mouth. “I still love ‘em smothered in maple syrup. But I can do without the dirt and pebbles. And Lord knows what else was in ‘em.”

“You’ll eat anything.” His sister fondly patted his arm. “I often wondered what happened to Flora. She whipped Cal here so often he turned into a dark rainbow. Green and blue, red and black.”

“She was training me up for life with Grandmaw. Talk about a mean old bitch.” He laughed, pushing the empty plate to the side of his tray.

Lillianna and Pam spent a few minutes catching up on their lives and the most recent news from Doctor Willingham. He’d been in earlier to check the leg and said he’d keep Calvin on antibiotics for another week or so, pray the aneurysm didn’t blow, then start the donor search. If all went well, he’d perform surgery early the following week.

When they finished, Aunt Pam pulled something else from her canvas bag. “I swung by Cal’s place and picked this up. I thought you might want to see it again.” She handed Lillianna an old leather-bound scrapbook her mother had pieced together.

“Thanks. You must be psychic. I planned to ask Greg if he knew how I could get my hands on some old photos.” Lillianna stacked her journal on top of the album and nudged them under her chair.

“I guess I’ll call the others when I get home,” Aunt Pam announced. “They want to be here when he has the operation.”

“All of them?”

“You know how we are. If one of us needs help, we’re all there.” She searched Lillianna’s face. “You seem awful tired, honey. I’ll tend to him until they kick me out. I know it’s hard... spending the whole day here. Maybe even harder on the visitor than the patient.”

Pam tidied up his bedside table and settled back into the chair closest to his bed. Lillianna knew she wouldn’t take no for an answer.

“Your uncle Joel will be here around seven-thirty. We’ll keep him company. Don’t worry, honey. He’s in good hands.”

“I know that, Aunt Pam. Thanks. Maybe I will go back to my room.” Lillianna kissed her aunt goodnight, picked up her journal, album, and purse, then turned to her father. “Thanks for the entertainment today. You tell a good story.” She brushed her hand across his sheet-covered foot. “See you in the morning. Try to stay out of trouble.”

“I’ll do my best,” he grinned. “But you can’t go holding me responsible for those horny nurses.”

She rolled her eyes at Aunt Pam and left. Not wanting to sit alone in the hotel restaurant, Lillianna bought a sandwich in the hospital cafeteria and darted outside. Instantly, the air shifted, and she welcomed the sense of dampness and dark.

Seeing the lights from her hotel in the distance, she decided it was stupid to wait for the shuttle. The walk would do her good, clear her mind. She stepped across the brick entry and toward the construction area between the hospital and the hotel.

Under one of the dim streetlights a stocky, young black man grinned and started toward her. Recognizing his predatory strut, Lillianna braced herself for an ugly comment, a reference to her female anatomy, some claim to her womanhood. But he halted before she did and the smile faded, widened into an amazed laugh. He pivoted, then sashayed back to the friends he’d left leaning against the site’s security wall. “She’s fucking old, for Christ’s sake. What’s wrong wid you dickheads? You going blind or somethin’?”

A light rain pattered on the asphalt parking lot in front of her and Lillianna lifted her flushed face to catch the drops as she hurried away from the snickers toward the lighted doors of the hotel lobby. She bought a soda from the machine in the hallway, shuffled past the lobby bar, its scent of beer and popcorn wafting around her, and headed straight to her room. The words she’s fucking old resounded in her ears.

She sat at the round table in front of the window, pushed her computer aside and held her head in her hands for a few moments, then brushed her fingers across the smooth leather surface of the album. She thought about her mother and the evenings she’d spent seated at their kitchen table pasting photographs while Emma kneeled on the chair next to her, doing math homework.

As she opened the cover, a hope rose she’d find something of her mother’s spirit captured in her careful placement of the pictures on the page or the things she wrote beneath them. It was strange and somehow sad to see her handwriting again after all those years, her words living longer than she did.

Lillianna studied a small photograph of her father, pasted inside the album’s cover. While she’d visited this book often as a child, it was a picture she’d never seen before. Her mother must have snapped it before the grenade. Perhaps Aunt Pam had inserted it. In the photo, her father, serene and handsome, leaned against the porch railing of a gracious old Victorian house. Lillianna surmised from the things her mother had told her the house belonged to their landlady, Mrs. Carmichael. The house sat on a tree-lined street in Charlotte, South Carolina.

For the first time, Lillianna encountered her father, not as she remembered him, but as he must have appeared to her mother when they fell in love.

He was dressed in his army uniform, his hands folded in front of him, fingers long and thin like her own. But it was his face she studied—realizing how you can stare at a photograph of someone you know and see the old man already living there inside the younger one.

Lillianna carefully removed the picture. One of the black, stick-on corners came unglued and dropped onto the orange carpet. She searched for a resemblance, something in his features that looked like her. Holding it next to her face in front of the mirror, Lillianna explored it again and again. His curly hair. The way the light reflected in his eyes. The bump in the center of his nose. His small mouth and chin. That tiny gap between his front teeth. She was nearly twice as old as her father in that photograph. Fucking old.

The snapshot haunted her, and she longed for something to connect them to each other now. But he remained distant, and she remained herself.

As a child, she’d wished she could have known him before the accident and asked her mother a hundred questions about that time in their lives, about what her father had been like when they met. She dreamed about knowing the man who first emerged from the grenade. What he was like before it exploded. Anything that was authentically her father. In the dream, Lillianna invented and reinvented him, chose what she wanted, rather than accepted what she’d been given. She never thought what she created in her fantasy might have chiseled away at the good parts of her real father, like erosion.

Systematically, her father had cut himself out of any other pictures of himself before the explosion. As a teenager, leafing through the albums, Emma noticed all the early photos of her mother were half gone. Someone who once stood next to her had been neatly severed away.

 

New Castle, Delaware

Spring 1960

 

“Hey, Mom. How come there aren’t any pictures of Dad when you guys were young? Before his accident?”

Her mother winced. “He cut them up, Emma.”

“Why? Why would he do a thing like that?”

“I’m not sure, honey.” She stood in front of the knotty-pine paneled wall to their kitchen, her hands covered with flour. “It was right after his release from Valley Forge Hospital. I woke up in the middle of the night, and he wasn’t there. Light was coming from the living room, so I tiptoed down the hall and watched him. With the album and my sewing scissors.”

“Why didn’t you stop him?” Emma asked as she closed the album and stacked it under the coffee table.

“I don’t know. When I asked him what he was doing, he pulled up his pant leg and held out what remained of his right hand.” Her mother paused, stared down at her shoes. “He said, ‘This is who I am now, Cassandra. I don’t wanna remember being a whole man. It won’t help me to remember. And it won’t help you and the kids either.’”

Emma thought about her father’s words a lot in those days. They seemed important, a clue of some sort, a hint about the man and his determination to go on and accept what had happened to him. What went wrong? Why wasn’t that determination enough? Why did he turn so bitter and angry?

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Tuesday, September 26, 1995

 

When the phone rang, Lillianna carried the photograph across the hotel room, still focused on her father’s face, the laughter her mother caught in the light in his eyes.

She filled Greg in on the status of the donor search and the planned surgery.

“That’s great, I can barely believe it. Do you realize what a break this is?” Greg’s voice rose with excitement.

“Yeah. Dad’s lucky you found this doctor.” She glanced again at the young face suspended forever in the photograph, tried to connect it with the man they discussed.

“So how are you getting along with the old man?”

“You probably won’t believe this, but we’re doing fine.” She updated her brother on how their father spent a good deal of his time telling her the story of his life and how she’d begun to be interested in hearing it.

“I’m glad for both of you, Em. I mean Lillianna.”

“Did he ever tell you about his childhood and all?”

“Yeah. Sure. Lots of times. He loves to tell those old stories.”

“Was it hard for you to believe his family mattered so much to him? After the way he treated us as kids?”

“Not really.” Greg’s voice deepened. “All I had to do was think about how I felt like a little kid, about you and Mom. And if I’m honest... even about him.”

Unexpectedly, Lillianna thought again of her father’s childhood, a bleak and dangerous time. Intuitively she realized if she could uncover her father as a boy, she might begin to comprehend the man. Her father, the throwaway child, the survivor of a grenade. The child who became an old man trapped by an aneurysm, a thinness in the wall of his artery.

Just as unexpectedly, her heart pounded. Did she fear those thoughts about her father’s younger selves? Fear that through them, she’d finally discover the resemblance for which she searched and not know what to do with it.

“How’s your work coming?” Greg’s question startled her back to the present.

“I’m... well, the truth is, I’m not working on the edits for the mystery.” She paused. “I... ah... I can’t focus on anything except him right now. So I’m writing about the things he tells me. It’s helping me to... well, you know... sort things out.”

“No kidding. I’ll be doggone. That’s great. Does he know you’re doing it?”

“Yeah.” Lillianna paced a few steps, then sat on the edge of the bed. “He tells the nurses we’re writing a book. Like I’m Hemingway and he’s Faulkner.”

“I can just hear him.” Greg laughed. “Listen, Sarah, and I will be there Friday—depending on traffic we may be there before visiting hours are over. So, if you need a break, we’ll give it to you.”

After they hung up, she sat on the orange shag carpet in her nightgown with her knees pulled in toward her chest, head bowed. She dug her bare feet into the rug’s nap, the long strands of carpet fibers wedged between her toes.

An underlying restlessness, like birds gathering before a storm, moved inside her. She went about the business of her days, but in the pit of her stomach, something fearful lay coiled and ready to strike.

What if her father died on the operating table? What if, after all this, he didn’t survive the surgery? They were hollow questions in that empty hotel room, and for once the words Lillianna used to phrase them didn’t matter. Didn’t count. Only the fear behind them mattered. Goose bumps scurried up her spine like tiny feet.

She’d pretended he was dead for years. What was the big deal now? Did she fear losing something she’d never had in the first place? Ridiculous.

After her mother’s death, she’d never felt so alone and didn’t think her life could move forward. Without her, Lillianna believed she no longer had the luxury of being a child. Uncertain how to define herself without her mother, she floundered around, piled up some regrets.

She stood and paced the floor along the wall next to the window. The moon hung like a crescent pearl in the inky night. After flipping on her computer, she pulled out the chair and sat, very still for a few moments, her hand pressed to her chest—to the strange pulsing that was her heart. She flattened her fingers as if to restrain it, to hold it in its place, to keep it from swelling. With the beat steady and regular again, Lillianna positioned her hands on the keyboard, pulled up the document she’d named “Father” and began with the story he’d told her about his life at Grandpaw Miller’s.