Just after eight the next morning, Finn tromps down the stairs, already half dressed and carrying his acoustic guitar, the outside of its black case covered over with travel stickers from places he’s never been. I’ve downed two glasses of orange juice and made the hole in my T-shirt even bigger, all in fifteen minutes. Go me.
“You coming with me?” he asks, leaning the guitar in the corner, looking bleary-eyed from the big clean-up of the sanding experiment. No stain yet.
“Not this morning, I don’t think.” I’m sipping juice and thinking about all that needs to be done with the house. So much potential = so much work, and don’t let anybody tell you differently.
He’s driving up to Timonium today, to our old church, where he still plays in the band despite having cut all his other ties. The Community, as it’s called, is a big suburban megachurch now housed within a former manufacturing park, the miles of parking lot all around packed full every Sunday by affluent suburbanites. Finn has a love/hate relationship with the place. On the highway map of divine history, The Community and churches like it represent for Finn a tragic wrong turn, so shallow and superficial, all the ancient power of the faith hollowed out, leaving behind just a glitzy, entertaining husk with glorified babysitting.
They tried to teach me a little more about what God is like, but at the end of the day, I never fit in. God can be a little more friendly-like, but if his people are busy trying to fill up your schedule and make you feel like you’re a second-class woman if you haven’t opted for motherhood, you still have to wonder about him.
At the same time, Finn grew up there. It’s home. It’s where the Drexels are married and if not buried, well, they will be someday. So far he hasn’t made it an issue if I don’t go. So I’m not going to. Plus, it was Pastor Rick at The Community, Finn’s former men’s pastor, who passed along to him his Big Idea.
“What about tonight?” Finn asks. “You’re not bailing?”
“I don’t know yet. My mother’s dropping Aunt Bel off sometime today.”
“Has she called yet?” There’s hope in his voice, like maybe she won’t.
“Not yet. Give her time.”
While he finishes dressing and carries his guitar out to his truck, I make breakfast and try to ignore the frenetic energy that follows him room to room. After yesterday’s outburst on my part, I realize I have to come to grips with the kid issue. I just . . . can’t. Not today. Not yet. Aunt Bel is coming; I’ve got things to do.
I’ve made the bed in the spare room, put new towels and a spare set of sheets on the dresser, and dug a ceramic-shade lamp for the nightstand out of the attic, trying to make Aunt Bel’s space appealing. I even rolled up the rug from the living room and carried it upstairs to cover the grooves left by Finn’s sanding, but I was hoping to run down to Grove Street and get some of Madge’s finer offerings for dessert tonight.
He kisses me on the forehead before leaving. “What’s wrong?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”
“I’m nervous. I haven’t seen her in twenty-some years. I have no idea what’s going to happen. I have no idea what she will think.” The panic in my voice surprises me.
“Who cares what she thinks? Come on, Sara. Don’t get worked up over this.”
“But what if she hates me?”
Finn screws up his face. “Hates you? For what?”
I blink. “Well, I don’t know. I mean. No. I don’t know why I even said that.”
“You’re just nervous, babe. Everything’s gonna be just fine. You’ll see. You’ll do great with her even if she is as nuts as your dad says she is.”
“Well, compared to who I work with . . .”
“See? Now I gotta run.”
One of the great things about Finn—and I mean this sincerely—is that no matter how much a situation bothers him, when he realizes that I’m bothered too, he calms down. He soothes and comforts me, and really means it. No one has ever believed in me the way he does. As a designer, an artist, and even a human being. The whole course of my life changed when he entered it, because he never thought that any of the things I was afraid of doing were impossible for me. Whatever the challenge, in his open-eyed, insistent way, he puts his hand on my shoulder and he says, “Of course you can.” And he’s usually right.
Mom calls just before eleven. She’s frazzled, I can tell.
Driving a car, oh dear. Dad’s cell phone, oh man.
But first and foremost: estranged sister. Oh great.
“Where do you people even park here? I’ve been circling your block for ten minutes!”
My mom using the term you people is like Catherine of Siena yelling a string of epithets.
“I’ll come outside,” I say, hanging up the phone. It’s cool and sunny outside, a gentle breeze stirring the leaves of the tree outside our house, its roots forcing squares of sidewalk to slope upward.
She’s right, the streets are packed even more so than usual, cars parallel-parked bumper-to-bumper in a way that incoming suburbanites can hardly fathom, accustomed as they are to sprawling parking lots and two-car garages. A woman fresh off the farm? Doubly daunting.
A blue Camry hums down the street, pausing before me. My mother’s window whirs down. She’s looking frantic, woodland animal frantic.
“What should I do, baby?” she says.
Next to her in the passenger seat, a woman’s silhouette blocks the light. I glimpse the shape of her head, a short and angular bob, and then the Camry lurches forward. Another car rides my mother’s tail, the driver urging her forward with none-too-friendly gestures. Resisting the urge to yell at him, I jog down the sidewalk to keep pace with her, but she freaks a little and guns the engine, making another circuit around the block. When she comes back around, I motion her to stop.
“Just double park. They can still get around you.”
The driver behind jams on his brakes and throws up his hands.
She throws the car into park and gets out. “Good idea. Wow. What a downer that was.”
I wave Mr. Merry Sunshine around.
Mom opens the trunk and pauses. After about two seconds of glassy-eyed staring, she shakes herself a little and turns to me with a sunny smile. Which is very sunny because the white hair surrounding her face sifts the rays spilling through the tree nearby. My mother is beautiful. Clueless, but beautiful.
I stand on the curb, waiting expectantly. Do I go to her and help, or welcome my aunt—who doesn’t seem to be leaving the car?
I lean through the open driver’s door.
“Hello,” I say.
Aunt Bel blinks as if noticing me for the first time. “Hello.”
She doesn’t seem to hate me.
The photograph that once sat on my grandparents’ mantel did her no justice. My aunt, like my mother, is physically beautiful. But where my mother is soft, with the faintly sculpted lines and rounded symmetry of a pre-Raphaelite model, soft and hard all at once, Aunt Bel has had the softness sanded down by what I can only guess was a spare existence in Godforsakenstan. She is thinner, leaner than in the photo, which lends her face and throat and arms a delicate impression, as if they might break with use and are best admired behind glass. She looks at me with wide and innocent eyes, the golden brown of a panther’s, and seems as entranced by my sudden appearance as I am by hers.
“Bel, come get your bag,” Mom calls.
My aunt’s mouth curls at the corner—the smile from the photo. Before moving, she glances at her seat belt buckle and at the door handle, as if plotting her course, deciding in advance how to navigate unfamiliar devices. She loosens the seat belt and lets the tensioner pull it clear before laying her hand on the door latch, which releases with a click. Aunt Bel turns to me, eyes sparkling, as if to say, See, it works.
Aunt Bel walks around one side of the car and I go round the other, meeting Mom at the trunk. My aunt’s blond hair is cut quite short in back, down to her chin on one side and barely lower than the ear on the other. Her bangs are cut short too, awkwardly so, as if she might have done it herself. She’s the same height as my mother, just shy of my five foot five, but her body is all angles—hips and elbows and shoulders—making her seem rather taller. She wears a navy flower print dress that stops short of the knee and a mossy cardigan with the sleeves pushed up her forearms.
“Thrift store chic,” I say. “Not bad for a missionary. On me it would look ridiculous—but on you . . . And you have the figure to carry it off.”
I only realize I’m babbling when she fails to respond.
“There’s just one bag,” Mom says, indicating a green nylon duffel with bellows pockets on the side. Aunt Bel lifts it by the shoulder strap, her body arching under the weight. When I go to take it from her, she shakes her head.
“Is that everything? Let’s go inside.”
She follows me onto the curb, but the sound of the slamming trunk breaks our stride.
“Aren’t you coming?” I ask Mom.
“I’d better not block traffic,” she says with an apologetic laugh, though there aren’t any cars behind her. “I’ll let you two get reacquainted. If you need anything, leave me a message at the farm.”
Despite my pleading looks, my mother gets in the car and pulls the door shut. She smiles back at me and then frantically pulls away.
When I turn to Aunt Bel, she is staring up into the tree, as if she hasn’t seen one before.
“Want to come in?” I ask.
She smiles at me—a wide, almost grinning smile, not the Mona Lisa side curl.
What you would never guess from a photograph is how expressive she is, her whole face—no, her whole body—contorting itself to convey her meaning. The sort of skill a woman might pick up if she found herself alone in a foreign country, unable to communicate via words. Come to think of it, she’s only uttered a single word in my presence, when she said hello.
“Can I please take that for you? It looks heavy.”
Aunt Bel regards the bag, her eyes following the line of the shoulder strap—again, as if my saying something has called her attention to a previously unremarked object. She shrugs the strap off, testing the duffel’s weight in her hand, then passes it to me, radiating gratitude the whole time. Does she not talk? I feel a sudden panic. Maybe in all those years overseas, she’s lost her ability to speak English.
“Aunt Bel, is everything all right?”
She looks herself over, as if checking. Then nods.
“You’re sure?” I ask, willing her to speak.
She nods again, then adds a single word: “Yes.”
Relieved, I escort her inside—even though a confirmed vocabulary consisting only of hello and yes is not much to be relieved over. No wonder Daddy wanted her out of his cottage. It must have been like trying to entertain a rock. My voice blathers on autopilot, down the “welcome to your new home” highway, ushering us all the way to the stairs before I realize she’s not with me. Aunt Bel stands just inside the threshold, taking in the house: ceiling, woodwork, floors, furniture, everything waiting its turn to be noticed.
“You can come in,” I tell her.
She takes a step or two, then stops. “Lovely.”
“You have to use your imagination. I know it’s a bit of a dump right now, but we have big plans, and I think the fundamentals are good, the bones of the structure—”
“Lovely,” she says again, meaning it, and suddenly I feel ashamed for making excuses for the place, for deflecting a heartfelt compliment and revealing my insecurity in the process.
And compared to Kazakhstan? Even in my eyes it looks better.
I set down her bag at the foot of the stairs and walk her around the ground floor. Right away she notices the maple floors with inch-wide strips of inlaid mahogany about eight inches from the baseboards. “They’re my pride and joy,” I tell her.
She runs the tips of her fingers around the swirl at the top of the newel post at the bottom of the steep stairs, which I’m sure aren’t up to code these days. “Oh, Sara.” The light coming through the two windows, tall enough for me to stand on the ledge and still have a good two feet of space above the top of my head, shines in her eyes.
And once again, I see my home in a new light. Not the Sara-you-bit-off-more-than-you-can-chew light, but the one that says, in Aunt Bel’s tone, “Lovely.” Because it is.
“As annoyed as I get at Finn, he’s really the only one who’s trying to love this house like she should be loved, even though he might seem to be the Casanova of renovation.”
Aunt Bel just nods.
Unfortunately we hit the kitchen and I have to bite my tongue. Aunt Bel takes it all in, her eyes darting, and while she says nothing, she gives the impression of barely contained pleasure, as if the stripped-away suspended ceiling and the flicking overhead lights are right up there with the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, the nooks and crannies of our hundred-year-old house a source of limitless wonder.
Is she simple? I find myself wondering. Is that the problem? Has something happened to her, some kind of emotional-growth-stunting trauma? Because she doesn’t just look young for her forty-odd years, she seems childlike.
I’ll ask Finn when he comes home if it seems like she’s been the victim of some past head trauma. He can spot that sort of thing a mile away.
I escort her up the steps and down the hallway to the spare bedroom, pulling the empty dresser drawers out so she can see where her things are meant to go. The conversation is so one-sided I find myself overexplaining things, and using the tone of voice you’d use with a grade-school kid.
“The upstairs bathroom is just across the hall, but you have to be careful just inside the door, because we haven’t quite fixed the tile yet.”
She puts a hand on my wrist, pausing my monologue.
“Sara,” she says, turning her voice up at the end, introducing doubt.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember me?”
Her first complete sentence, pronounced in a tone of great intimacy, as if we’re about to confide our secrets to one another.
“Of course. Aunt Belinda.”
“Do you actually remember? Can you remember anything about me?”
“Yes,” I say, but now I’m turning my words up at the end, making them into questions.
“You remember what I was like?”
“You were . . . nice?”
As she considers this, her whole expression changes. The smile fades and the eyes cast inward, as if she’s gazing into the past and seeing—what? Lines emerge on her placid skin, the crease of etched smile-lines like parentheses around her mouth, deltas opening around her eyes, as if whatever she sees is aging her in real time. As if she’s staring into some kind of black hole, an abyss.
“Aunt Bel, are you okay?”
“I was nice,” she says, the darkness lifting. “Yes, I suppose that is true.”
“I’ll let you settle in,” I tell her, backpedaling toward the door.
Aunt Bel pulls open one of the side pockets of her duffel bag, removing something wrapped in fabric.
“Here,” she says, holding it out. “Because I was never there when this would have made sense to you.”
I take the object and unwrap the folded material. Inside is a doll about the length of my hand, made of porcelain with glistening glass eyes. It has red, curled hair that looks like a young child has brushed it well past its expiration date and cheeks painted hot pink. A coarse lace dress that would serve equally well for communion or burial swaddles around—I lift up the dress—a rudimentarily carved wooden body.
“The woman who gave that to me had carried it with her as a girl, when her family was deported to Kazakhstan. Stalin deported a lot of people there. She was my friend. My only friend for the longest time, the only person I could talk to. You should have it.”
Objections come to mind—it’s too precious, too laden with sentimental value, and way too creepy by half, the kind of doll that watches you when you sleep, the kind you throw away only to wake up and find it perching on your chest.
“Thank you,” I say.
Aunt Bel approaches me and takes me by my forearms. “You know you’re a good person, don’t you, Sara? Did you ever feel like you weren’t?”
I stare into her eyes, and I see in them a brave resolve and acceptance I could only dream of having. I can’t help but say, “Yes. I try not to think about it. But doesn’t everybody feel that way?”
“They do.”
As I descend the stairs, the click of her door shutting hits my eardrums and relief ripples over me. What just happened? I place the doll on the table downstairs in front of the television, then collapse on the couch, exhausted. Being with Aunt Bel is like being in the presence of a light that burns too bright. Something about her makes you put up your guard, and then she finds her way underneath it despite your careful engineering.
I’m not sure I like such intuitive candor around my house. Bare bulbs? Fine. Suspended ceilings? No problem. Soul-probing questions? Sorry. Wrong number. Call again.
But it’s too late now. Aunt Bel is in the house, one more person to worry about. She will not be unobtrusive. Like the rusty hulk at the center of my studio, she will be unavoidable. We will bump into her wherever we try to go. And in my heart, which forms its intuitions without hard evidence and yet is rarely wrong, I am convinced that in giving Aunt Bel shelter, I have made a mistake I might soon regret.