| |
I sit in my car, staring at the front of the house, watching the swing drift in the wind. My stomach churns with the not-knowing. Is it going to be okay? Will Steven come out to tell me that I need to move on? Will he tell me they don’t want to meet me? I have myself worked into a fine frenzy, chewing the skin ringing my fingernails until I finally tear a stretch free and the blood wells. I stare at the red glistening drop until it quivers, threatening to burst its sphere, and I stick the digit in my mouth. I suck, tasting the metal of my blood before taking it out, folding the wound into my fist with my thumb pressing on it.
When I look up again, Steven is halfway across the yard, coming toward me, and I realize I missed the door opening. What will he say? Then my eyes travel past him, and I see them, standing at the top of the steps, her hands drawn up to her mouth, his arm, long and thin, holding her close. My chin puckers, and I feel the tears springing to the surface. Steven’s broad smile tells me everything when he opens my car door, because I have been too transfixed by the sight of them to move. “Come on, Alison. Let’s go meet your grandparents.” The dam bursts, and I cover my face, letting the tears fall, shaking. His hand rests gently on my shoulder, and I feel him kneeling down beside my car, just waiting patiently until I can come to terms with the flood of emotion that is washing over me. I am not alone. My blood sings through my veins, I have people, I have family.
When I’m somewhat composed, I let Steven take my hand and help me out of the car, and I walk with my back as straight as I can to the steps. “Mom, this is Alison.”
She has come down the stairs, and I step forward into her open arms. She is sobbing with the same body-racking quakes that caught me in the car, and soon all four of us are huddled at the base of the steps, encircled and encircling.
When finally the tears begin to slacken, and there is room for words, she pulls back and gazes at me with soft, watery eyes. “You look just like her.” Which sets her to crying again, and sets me to crying again right along with her.
“Come in, let’s get out of this chill,” the old man, my grandfather says, his own eyes watery. We head up the stairs, and I notice the way he places one hand on the small of her back, the way she holds his other hand as they make their way up the steps. Steven comes up beside me, his hand still on my shoulder—as if he is afraid that I, like my mother before me, will disappear.
The front door opens into a living room on one side and a dining room on the other. There are bookcases with glass doors, creating a separation in the rooms. In the cases are encyclopedias, old, black, trimmed in gold. A gold-toned recliner sits just this side of the fireplace, and a gliding rocker sits on the other side of the fireplace, each with a little table and a small reading lamp. To my left, just inside the entry, is a table with a round base for storage and a lamp sitting on a crocheted doily. Beside it, in front of the large front window, is the pinkest floral sofa I have ever seen, and on the other side is a matching table, doily, and lamp. A glass-topped coffee table fronts the sofa, and a TV sits on a stand around the corner, past the window on the facing wall. Just past the TV are stairs. Beside the stairs, in a wall stained all in dark wood, is a deacon’s bench. “You have a deacon’s bench,” I say, random and crazy, but it makes me feel connected because my apartment also has a deacon’s bench.
Steven laughs and some of the tension evaporates. I explain the connection, and the three of them act like they understand, but I’m sure I still sound a little like a lunatic.
“What can I get you?” she asks, “Something to drink? Are you hungry?”
“I’d take some water, thank you.”
She scoots past the chairs and into what must be the kitchen. The old man, Steven, and I go into the dining room and settle around the table. “Alison.” He says my name like he’s tasting it on his tongue.
“Yes sir.”
He chuckles. “No need to call me sir, just call me . . .” There is a pause before he says, “Well, I don’t know what you should call me. Steven’s boys all call me Granddad. Does that seem weird to you?”
“Maybe. A little.” I see the small sadness pass his eyes, and I regret my honesty. “I just never even knew I had grandparents. I’m not sure how it all works. I’m sorry.”
He smiles, putting his warm hand over mine. “You call me Will, and your grandma, she’s Barb, and if ever you feel the urge to call us Grandma or Granddad, you know you can.” I’m crying again, pressing my free hand into my eyes, trying to stem the flow. He pats my hand and squeezes.
His wife comes in from the kitchen, sees me crying, “Well, Will, what did you say to the girl?” She sets the glass on the table and puts her hands on my shoulders, making shh, there there sounds. I laugh and pull myself together. And then we are all laughing, because laughing is better than crying.
“I’m sure you have questions,” I say, opening the door to give them the answers they have looked for at least the last seventeen years.
I tell them the story of my life as best I can. I tell them about what a great mom she was when I was little and how all the other kids wanted to hold her hand as we walked down the hall. I tell them about all the good memories I can find and leave out everything else. They ask me about my daddy, and I have to tell them that I don’t know him and admit that Mom didn’t have much luck with love.
They tell me stories about her from way back, back before the bat costume that took her to the Ripson Bridge. She was a risk taker, they say more than once, and when we have said all there is to say and we’ve had a lunch of grilled cheese and tomato soup and the afternoon is long since falling to dusk, we finally get to the subject of her running away. She was fourteen years old, and they thought she had been kidnapped, and all the police in the state searched for well over a year. There was never a hit on her, no sightings and no tips that ever amounted to anything. She just disappeared. They dredged the lake over by Litchfield because some kids said they had seen her there right before she disappeared, but nothing was ever found. “I always knew she wasn’t dead,” Barb says, looking over at Will, as if to put to rest a long-standing disagreement.
“She was fourteen?” I ask, because if she was fourteen, she didn’t leave because she was pregnant. It wasn’t my fault she ran away.
"Fourteen years and four months, two weeks, one day,” Steven says, his voice quiet, and we all turn to look at him, but nobody says anything at all.
The fact of the matter is that she is dead. Regardless of when she left and when she was pregnant with me, she is now dead. Finally and forever. I give them the same story of a wasting disease and a look passes through them, a knowing, a sad knowing. “Will’s got the cancer,” Barb says, only whispering the word cancer, as older people sometimes do.
My look must have told my horror, because Will quickly put his hand back over mine, and clarified, “I had the cancer,” he says the word loud, without any hesitation, his tone saying for all to hear: I beat cancer’s ass.
“He’s in remission,” Barb adds.
“I beat it. It’s gone,” he says, with a firm squeeze, and I feel his tender soul passing a little warmth into my own. Well, I think, if he can beat the cancer, then surely I can beat whatever is going on with me.