One night just before the start of the school year, Cyndra had found a movie on cable about young women competing in roller derby. She used her own money to buy a digital copy that same night and pasted her nose to the screen, watching the film six more times before Monday rolled around.
Within a week her skateboard had given way to quad-wheel boots. Cyndra would have worn the skates to bed if Addy had allowed it. They found a junior league team called the Screaming Mimis. When I arrived at Addy’s on Sunday morning to pick up Cyn for practice, she was already outside in the cold, gear bag over her shoulder for added weight as she did calf raises on the porch step. She heard my car pulling up and sprinted to meet it.
The Mimis’ derby league was flat-track, meaning the skaters competed on smooth concrete. Parents had arranged a fund drive to have a new floor poured in an old cinder-block warehouse near Northgate. I’d handed Addy a short stack of cash to donate. She knew better than to ask where the money had come from.
At fourteen and undernourished much of her childhood, Cyndra weighed about as much as a loaded sack of groceries. But what she lacked in size she made up for with speed. She was a favorite jammer among the newer players, the fresh meat. Jammers scored points by making it past the opposing team’s blockers, who did their level best to knock the jammers on their asses. Sportingly.
I sat against the sage green blocks of the warehouse wall, watching Cyn lean into the curve, picking up velocity, angling for the inside, and then suddenly juking right to find daylight between two blockers who hadn’t linked arms. She whooped elatedly. A fraction too early, as her skate caught another player’s and she fell, skidding two yards, her plastic kneepads and wrist guards rasping harshly on the concrete. I winced. But Cyndra popped back up as if the impact had been a cool breeze.
Speed, and guts.
The instructor, a slim woman with a dark braid and a band of tattoos spiraling up her right arm, blew her whistle to bring the girls in for a lesson. They gathered with a clomping of wheels like pony hooves on hard dirt.
I turned my attention to the stack of mail Addy had given me. My old house, the home I’d shared with my grandfather Dono as a boy, had been up the block from Addy’s. Mail still trickled in at that address. The family that had bought the property and built their own house on the land left anything sent to the Shaws under Addy’s welcome mat.
Grocery fliers and tool catalogs made up most of the stack. One expiration notice of union membership for nonpayment of dues, forwarded by a mailing service to Dono—or, more accurately, one of Dono’s aliases. My grandfather had always maintained a couple of identities. Handy for emergencies, and for purchasing items unavailable to people with felony rap sheets.
I nearly missed the last envelope, which had been tucked into a bulk-mail magazine of coupons. I glanced at the handwritten address. And then stared at the name.
Moira Shaw, it read.
My mother.
My mother had died when I was six years old. A distracted driver tapped the wrong pedal at the wrong moment and jumped the curb in downtown Seattle. I wasn’t there. My daycare worker brought me to the hospital. No one had really told me what was going on. Not until Dono arrived. He took me to his home that same night, and there I stayed.
Moira Shaw. I barely remembered her. Dono hadn’t kept pictures. Hardly ever spoke of his only child. Seeing her name again, for the first time in I couldn’t remember, felt like I’d swallowed a small but very sharp icicle.
I headed outside, ducking under the rolling door the Mimis kept partway open to allow some ventilation in the airless warehouse. Drizzling rain, a near-constant in December Seattle, coated my face and hair. I opened my car to sit in the driver’s seat.
The return address at the top corner of the envelope was a stick-on label with a Christmas theme, green holly and candy canes. From a John and Josephine Mixon in Redmond. Our house address had been handwritten on the envelope in purple ballpoint.
I opened the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper. Only the salutation and a phone number at the bottom had been written with the same purple pen. The rest of the text was a typed copy.
Dear Moira,
I hope this note finds you! We are just starting to plan the Emmett Watson High 30th Reunion (WOW!) for sometime next summer, and would love to include you. Please call me at the number below to let us know!
Go Paladins!
Sincerely,
Jo Mixon (Gerrold!)
Just a form letter, sent by someone so far out of the alumni loop that she hadn’t even heard Moira Shaw had died almost a quarter of a century before.
I had only a few sparse facts about Moira’s life. Her own mother, Dono’s wife, Finnoula, had also died while Moira was still young. The Shaw women traveled tough, short roads. Moira had gotten pregnant and left Dono’s house a few years after that.
So far as I knew, she’d never spoken a word about who had knocked her up. Out of shame, or maybe to keep Dono from murdering the guy. Probably the latter. That secrecy had driven a wedge between father and daughter.
Cyndra’s practice was about to end. I tossed the letter from Jo Mixon on the passenger’s seat and stepped out into the cold mist.
Granddad knelt to wrestle the heavy bench grinder free from the other tools crowded under his worktable. He muttered curse words with every tug. My homeroom teacher, Ms. Heffler, had put the word involuntary on last week’s spelling assignment, and Granddad’s swearing was the first example that came to my mind. I didn’t write that down for my practice sentence, though. I wasn’t that dumb.
While Granddad set up the grinder, I opened the cardboard box of papers he’d told me to sort. We were making space. We called the little room carved into the hill below our house the garage, but only about half of Granddad’s truck would have fit inside. Mostly the garage was his workshop and a storage place for whatever he didn’t want in the house. The box of papers he’d given me was so full, it bulged at the sides. The cardboard was soft to the touch and smelled like rags left out in the rain.
Make three piles, he’d said. One for records from his contracting business, one for home stuff, and one for instruction manuals or anything else that didn’t fit the other two piles. I pulled out a handful of papers and started looking through them.
“Finish that fast,” Granddad said as he tightened bolts through the worktable to hold the grinder in place, “and I’ll teach you to use this. About time you worked with something other than hand tools.”
“What are you making?” I said. He had brought a sack of metal rods from the hardware store.
“Some disposable punches. For knocking out hinges and locks and the like.”
“What locks?”
“Never mind that. Get to it.”
I turned back to the papers. It wasn’t tough to sort them. Usually the first page of each bunch told me what pile the papers belonged to.
Then I found one lone page, stuck in the middle of a manual for a power wrench. A lined sheet of notebook paper, with a girl’s handwriting.
Moira Shaw
Ms. Cullen, Room 17
Native American Tribes of the Northwest
Mom?
I stared at the loops and slants of the letters. This had been hers. She had written it, touched the paper with her own hand.
Paragraphs in the same writing covered both sides. She’d gotten an A on the paper. If there had been more pages to it, they were missing. The top corner of the paper was torn, probably where a staple used to be.
I knew Ms. Cullen. She taught fifth grade at Bertha Landes Elementary. My school.
“Did Mom go to Landes?” I said.
“Eh?” Granddad looked up. “What’s that?”
“It’s Mom’s. Was Mom’s.” I showed him. He took the page from me. “Did she go to my school?”
“She did.” Granddad’s eye moved over the paper.
“You never said.”
He didn’t answer. Just held the page by his fingertips, like it would rip if he pressed any harder. Granddad had big hands, even for somebody as tall as he was, and I was suddenly worried he would decide to crumple the fragile page to dust.
“Was she at Hovick Middle School too?” I said quickly. “That’s where I’ll be going.”
“Next year. I’m aware.” Granddad set the homework sheet on the upper shelf with his router set.
“Because maybe some of the teachers remember her—”
“You’ve work to do.”
I knew better than to keep talking. I went back to the box, rummaging through the stack even faster than before, hoping to discover more of Mom’s stuff. Our house didn’t have anything of hers inside, not even a photo of Mom as a kid.
But I reached the bottom of the box without finding anything else of hers. The realization made a lump in my chest. I looked around the garage. Maybe there was another pile of old papers. Or books or toys or anything that might have been hers. All I saw was more of Granddad’s tools and a lot of paint and varnish cans.
“How come we don’t have any pictures?” I said. “Of Mom, or Grandma Fi? Or anybody?”
“Because I don’t want them around.”
“Why not?”
“Pictures are false. Better my haziest memory than the clearest photograph.” He hadn’t turned away from his task of putting a new wheel on the grinder.
Weird. But then a lot of things Granddad did were strange. Or scary. My friends from school didn’t like to come to our house. Only Davey Tolan was brave enough, and that’s because his home wasn’t much better.
Later, when Granddad went up the stone steps to the house to grab us coffee and a Coke, I stood on a stepladder to reach the upper shelf and Mom’s school paper. I folded the page into a square and slipped it into my back pocket.
When kids at school talked about their parents, I avoided the subject. If they didn’t get the hint or a teacher asked me a direct question, I just told them my mom and dad were dead and that usually shut them up fast. At least half of that answer was true, anyway. Maybe all of it.
Granddad wasn’t going to say any more. But Ms. Cullen or some of the other teachers might. They’d met her. Mom. I wanted to learn whatever they could tell me.
Anything would be more than I knew now.
In the warehouse, the whole derby squad was on the track, doing laps. Their trainer with the thick dark braid of hair stood in the center, shouting out the elapsed time from a stopwatch. Two minutes. Two-thirty. The skaters pushed harder, racing to achieve some goal unknown to me. The older teens skated in a line, with long fluid strides that ate up the track, weaving like a Chinese parade dragon around kids like Cyndra, who doggedly ground out their own laps in disorganized and gasping clumps.
Impossible to say who tripped first. One girl went down on the far side of the track, and then three and four, most of them just tapping the concrete with their kneepads before bouncing right back up.
Cyndra stayed down, cradling her arm. In an instant I was running the length of the hangar.
The trainer reached her first. Two members of the squad around Cyndra’s age hovered anxiously as the woman helped Cyndra stand and roll to the outside of the track.
“I’m sorry,” one of the girls kept saying.
“Not your fault, Jaycie,” the trainer said. “Take my stopwatch and call out when they hit five minutes.” The girls reluctantly skated back to the track. The woman held out her hand to Cyndra. “Let me see.”
Cyndra uncurled her arm. Her fingers were bright pink, the same color as her face, and scraped raw. “I’m fine,” she said. The reflexive answer of any kid embarrassed by sudden attention.
“Uh huh. Make a fist.” Cyndra did, carefully. “Good. Wiggle your fingers.”
“What happened?” I said.
“Somebody ran over it,” Cyn said. “It’s okay.” She used her other hand to quickly wipe her eyes.
“It is,” the trainer agreed, “though you need some antibiotic. C’mere.” She led us over to the bench, the two of them floating on wheels, me thudding behind. When the woman knelt to fish an equipment bag from under the bench, her black-coffee braid fell to one side, revealing her derby name stenciled in block white letters on the back of her ebony tank top: pain austen.
“What do we always say, Mortal Cyn?” she asked.
“Fall small,” Cyndra answered, giggling despite herself.
“Got that. Best way to protect your extremities.” The trainer sprayed Neosporin on Cyndra’s knuckles. “I haven’t seen you here before,” she said to me.
Cyn remembered the manners Addy had been working so hard to instill. “This is Van. He’s . . .” She hesitated. What was I, exactly?
“Family,” I said.
Cyndra nodded vigorously. “Yeah. An’ this is Pain.”
It was the trainer’s turn to grin. It was a good grin. A little crooked, a little self-mocking. She was long of leg and strong-looking in the way naturally slender athletes develop over time, as much sinew as muscle fiber. Kneeling with one leg up and balanced on her skate’s toe-stop seemed to be no effort for her at all.
This close, the spiral of tattoos on her arm and shoulder was identifiable as a loose line of small birds in flight. Each bird varied slightly in size and radically in style, from photorealistic black and gray to eye-poppingly bright cartoon. The flock winged its way from her wrist all the way up and under the strap of her tight tank top. Her skin beneath the ink was tan, whether by genes or the sun. Not every part of her figure was slim.
She caught me looking. “My name’s Wren,” she said, nodding at the bird tattoos before turning back to Cyndra. “Teddy bears or pop art?”
“Art,” Cyndra said. Wren took two bandages with Warhol soup cans and Elvises printed on them and applied them to Cyn’s ointment-covered knuckles. “There. Better than new.”
“Can I finish?” Cyndra said, looking at the track. The other skaters had collected by the aluminum bleachers to stretch and rehydrate.
“You better. You owe me laps.”
Cyn dashed away, injury forgotten.
“She’s fast,” Wren said as we watched her bank hard into the curve, “for being so new to it.”
“Making up time,” I said.
“You’re her stepbrother or something?” said Wren, eyeing me. I knew what she meant: that Cyndra and I looked nothing alike. Cyn was small and blue-eyed and fair, at least when her hair wasn’t dyed. I was none of those things. I’d inherited Dono’s Black Irish looks through Moira.
“It’s an unusual situation,” I said. “You’ve met Addy? Cyndra’s guardian?”
“Talk about unusual. She’s amazing. She told me she had a tryout with the Bay Bombers back in like nineteen-sixty-something.”
I hadn’t known that but didn’t doubt it. Addy seemed to have lived enough lives for a dozen octogenarians.
“None of us have other relatives,” I said, “except for Cyndra’s dad, who’s down in California. Addy was a neighbor of my grandfather’s. We all sort of adopted each other.”
“Chosen families can be the best. If you want to help out Mortal Cyn, she could use some resistance training. You look like you’ve seen the inside of a gym.”
“Once or twice.”
“Show her how to use the weights. Nothing too heavy. Just build up the endurance in her back and legs.”
“Core strength. To get up every time she falls.”
“You got it.” Wren’s eyes were a lighter shade of brown than her hair, a splash of cream mixed in the coffee. With tiny flecks of gold near the center. “Come to practice again. Let me know how it goes.”
“I’ll do that.”
She glided away to join the girls, who had collected by the aluminum bleachers to shed their gear and goof around, not in that order. One of the older teens handed out popsicles from a cooler. Wren waited until Cyndra had finished her laps, then she had the skaters shout out the team name three times to close practice. Kids or not, they could yell like drill sergeants.
Rain pelted down, bouncing like hail off every hard surface. Cyndra and I ran for the car with me carrying her gear bag. She shook water out of her hair while I turned the defroster on full blast.
“You want food?” I said.
“Uh huh.”
“Dumb question.”
“What’s this?” Cyn said, taking the letter to Moira off the seat.
“Junk mail.” The AC had cleared the fog of condensation from the bottom few inches of windshield. Good enough to see the road. We pulled out of the lot, the Barracuda’s wheels splashing through a newborn river of water in the gutter.
“Are you gonna call this person?” Cyndra pointed at Jo Mixon’s number.
“I’m not going to the reunion.”
“Yeah, but . . . your mom, right? This woman knew her.”
“If she really knew my mom she’d know Moira was dead.”
Cyn frowned. Whatever point she was making, I was obviously too dense to grasp it. “Well, what about your dad? You said you never met him. She could know.”
“Not likely.”
“But there’s a chance. Like, you have to call her.”
I should have expected this. Ever since I’d made the mistake of telling Cyndra about my unknown parentage, she’d romanticized it into thinking I might be the love child of an exiled duke.
“Cyndra,” I said. “Give it a rest.”
“Promise me.”
“Yeah. I’ll call her. But no more about it.”
“And you have to tell me everything she says.”
“You want to walk home?”
She sat back, satisfied.
A gust of wind rocked the car. At the next stoplight I pulled up the NOAA weather streaming app, letting the monotone male voice of the running forecast play while we drove. After a few minutes the looped recording cycled around to report on the coastal stations nearest Puget Sound. Winds up to forty knots with a small craft advisory in effect for everything south of Port Townsend.
“I have to go to the marina,” I said. “Do you want me to drop you off first?”
She looked alarmed. “But food.”
“On it.”
The rain hadn’t discouraged many diners from the eternal line outside Dick’s on Broadway. I left Cyn in the warm car playing on her phone while I snagged us two burger-and-shake combos. Double patties for both of us. Cyn could eat nearly as much as me.
We parked in front of Addy’s quaint yellow house and ate in the car, dumping our fries into a collective pile in the cardboard tray. Cyndra held her Deluxe with one hand and deftly texted with the other.
“Your trainer Wren says I should teach you how to lift weights,” I said. “Cross-training, you know?”
“When?”
“Whenever we want. I can take you to my gym. Once we know what size weights you need, we’ll figure out something to use at home.”
“D’you like Wren?” she said around her next mouthful.
“I just met Wren five minutes ago.”
“But she’s pretty, right?”
“You want to tell me about Elias?” Elias was a name I’d heard Addy mention at Thanksgiving. Mention only once, because the topic had made Cyndra flush bright pink from her hairline to her throat, as she started to now. “Okay, then.”
Détente assured, I told Cyn to give Addy’s dog, Stanley, the last bite of my burger and to tell him it was from me. She hauled her bag out of the back and kicked open the fence gate to run to the front door. Addy, ever prepared, opened it before Cyndra reached the porch. I waved to them and pulled away.
The letter to Moira slipped off the dashboard on the first turn and fell onto the steering column. Refusing to be ignored.
Addy and Cyndra weren’t my relatives, but neither were my brothers in the Rangers. Both were a kind of chosen family. The difference was that Addy and Cyndra and I had chosen each other, and the Army had chosen the guys in the 75th Regiment, after we’d survived the levels of hell that made up the selection process.
Blood, though. Dono had been the only blood relation in my life that I had known, beyond scattered and unreliable impressions of my mother.
Moira had become pregnant at barely sixteen. She hadn’t told Dono about her boyfriend, but it was possible that she’d trusted a friend. And anyone who was that close a friend had probably gone to Watson High with her.
This might be my best shot at ever learning who my father was. If I wanted to know. I’d gone a long time and done just fine without that knowledge.
Air blowing from the car’s vent caught the letter and sent it flying. I snatched it out of the air without thinking. Like I’d been terrified to lose it.