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This is a minimum day, no volleyball practice, so I’m home by one in the afternoon.
“Grams?” I yell as I open the back door.
“In here,” she says. “The living room.”
She is stretched out on the couch. Her face is all puffy—like she’s been crying.
“Grams? What’s wrong?”
She shakes her head and looks away. “It’s nothing,” she sighs. “Just the day.”
“The day? What’s wrong with the day?” I ask, then suddenly remember. October 6. The day Marcia died in the explosion.
My grandmother is one of the original positive thinkers. Almost nothing gets her down. If it’s broken, she fixes it. If she can’t fix it, she goes on to the next thing. But October sixth is always a bad day for her. And Christmas, too, sort of.
“I’ll never figure out what went wrong,” she says. “I wasn’t a perfect mother, I know that, but . . .”
She sighs, looking at the faded family picture that still sits on the mantle. Everybody looks happy there, like a TV family.
Marcia is fourteen in the picture, and Aunt Claudia is sixteen. Grams still has brown hair and my grandfather definitely doesn’t look like a man with only five years left to live.
“I just can’t help thinking about her today. My precious daughter.” She looks away, but I know she’s crying. “She was the happiest child and then . . .”
I stand, helpless, not knowing what to say. Then I say what’s in my heart.
“She threw her life away! She got me born addicted. I know the reason math is so hard for me is because she messed up my brain before I was even born. And she treated you like dirt.”
“Still . . .”
“I hate her,” I say.
Grams is quiet for a long time. Then she tells me she used to be very angry with Marcia, too. But she had to get over it to get on with her life. I nod my head, as if I understand. But the truth is, I don’t want to get over it. I hate Marcia and she deserves it. If she’d loved me, I wouldn’t hate her. But she didn’t even love her own daughter.
“It was the drugs,” Grams says. “If she’d stayed away from the drugs . . . Oh, I suppose I made plenty of mistakes. Maybe I didn’t notice until it was too late that things had gone wrong. I didn’t want to believe my own dear daughter could be in such trouble . . .”
It’s really hard for me to see Grams so sad. I hug her and go back to my room. After staring at the bird feeders and watching the squirrel scare birds away, I decide I need a change of scene. I tell Grams that I’m going to Amber’s for a while. It’s just an excuse. Amber’s not even allowed to have friends over except on weekends. To keep from being a total liar, I drive to Amber’s house. I stop “for a while,” like I told Grams I was going to do. But instead of going in I sit in the car at the curb, blocked from view of anyone at Amber’s by the big hedge in front of her house.
After Amber’s, I drive up Garfield, following it all the way to where it ends at the edge of the foothills. I park and start up the trail toward Clark’s Peak. After only about fifteen minutes of walking, I turn and look out over the valley. On some days I can see all the way to the ocean from here, even to the island that sits alone, twenty-six miles from shore. Today, though, I can’t even see the steeple on the big church just a few short miles away. The smog blankets the valley, gray and dense and heavy. It’s one of those days where it’s best for our health if we don’t breathe.
I continue up the trail to the spot where we found Baby Hope. I take my backpack off, get my journal out of it and then sit on the pack. I start writing, anything that comes to my mind—the smell of sage brush, the sounds of rustling leaves, the heavy gray air, the filth of the world, Tyler. Tyler. Real sex or pretend sex. Grams’ sadness. Incomplete sentences. Incomplete thoughts. Marcia, blown to bits twelve years ago. Her own doing.
What was it like to give birth to a baby right here, on this trail, so early in the morning the sun wasn’t up yet? What an airhead prom queen trick that was! Poor Baby Hope. Her first taste of life in the world was being left alone, cold, no one to care for her. Damn Sarah Mabry! Damn Marcia Bailey!
We found her, though. We saved her. I soak up the sense of Hope that surrounds this special place. I think of good people—Grams, Tyler, Amber, Blake, Mr. Harper. I think of Hope out there somewhere, being loved and growing strong. I’ll bet she’s smart. I’ll bet she can already print her name.
Life is better now. Better than it was before I came up here. At least that’s how it seems to me. I write a bit more in my journal, then pack up and walk back down the trail.
––––––––
I go to the library to see if they have another copy of Angela’s Ashes. No luck. I browse around there for a bit, then go to the McDonald’s drive-thru and get hamburgers and soda, then take them to the nursery.
“Hey, Curly. Nice surprise,” he says, glancing at the clock. “Just in time for my break, too.”
We sit on two upside-down pots, eating and talking. When Tyler goes back to work I go home. It is after eight when I get there.
Grams is sitting in her big, purple, overstuffed chair, her legs pulled up underneath her, like a kid. She doesn’t look so sad now.
“Feeling better?” I ask.
She points to Stephen King’s name emblazoned across the front of a book about as thick as my College Dictionary.
“I needed something to take my mind off things. But now I’m afraid this guy’s going to keep me awake and on edge for the next week . . . Want some hot chocolate?” she asks.
I hesitate for a moment. What I really want right now is to be alone with my thoughts. But then I remember how sad Grams looked when I left. I can’t turn her down.
“Hot chocolate would be cool,” I say.
At first she looks puzzled, then laughs. “Cool—hot chocolate coming up.”
I watch her mix powdered chocolate into a pan of nonfat milk and stir it over the burner ’til it gets tiny sizzle bubbles in it. I get a whiff of the chocolate aroma and the scent reminds me of a long ago time when I was five, and I sat in my grandma’s kitchen feeling lost and scared.
“I’m sorry I was such a grump today,” Grams says. “It’s so predictable—I should simply go hide in a cave every October 6, but I always think this time will be different. And it’s the same, year after year. I remember what a sweet baby your mother was, and her laugh. I remember how she stopped eating meat when she was in the sixth grade, because she didn’t want any animals to be killed for her food. She worried so much about your grandpa’s lungs that he finally quit smoking. Over and over I ask myself, how did it happen? How could someone like my Marcia have turned into such a . . . a lost soul.”
She turns away from me and I see her shoulders tense with the effort to hold back sobs.
I go to her and put my arms around her. She shakes her head.
“Oh, I’m not fit company for anyone on this day. Your mother gave me the greatest gift in the world when she had you. That’s what’s important for me to remember.”
We stand in the kitchen, hugging, for a moment. I feel my gramma catch her breath, still trying not to cry.
“I hate that she still makes you so sad, and that she didn’t take care of me, and that she got me on drugs before I was born. She was a rotten mother and I hate her.”
“She’s to be pitied.”
“Why? She didn’t pity me. She let my head get full of lice and she didn’t feed me right. She let me be born addicted and probably damaged at least the math part of my brain.”
Grams sighs, picks up the wooden spoon and gives the chocolate milk mixture one more stir. She pours a cup of chocolate for each of us.
“Let’s talk,” she says, carrying the steaming cups out to the living room. I follow. Grams takes her place in the purple chair and I sit on the floor in front of the coffee table.
“You have every right to be angry, to hate your mother. Over time, though, the anger and hatred will hurt you more than anything she ever did to you.”
“I can’t help it,” I tell her.
“Lauren, I know you have a loving heart. The creator of the universe gives us all loving hearts. But when love turns to anger and hate, it’s like a cancer in your soul. Don’t let that be you.”
“It’s under control,” I tell her.
“I’m not so sure,” she says. “Sometimes your anger seems to get the best of you.”
“I’m never sure what you mean when you say that,” I tell her. “Remember that time last month, when old Mr. Miles came banging on our door to complain that I parked my car in front of his house too often?”
“That was so stupid though,” I say, embarrassed at the memory of that day.
“Of course it was stupid. But your reaction, yelling and threatening to shove him off the porch, was a bit over the top.”
“But I didn’t touch him.”
“But you were angry out of proportion to the situation. That’s all I’m saying, Lauren. It’s just something for you to think about,” she says, leaning forward and running her hand lightly over my head.
I think about how angry I was with Mr. Swallow. I think about how Blake looked at me when I threw the book on the floor, like I was some kind of weirdo, and how Tyler keeps telling me not to sweat the small stuff.
We sit quietly for a while, then Grams tells me some things I’ve not heard before.
“I don’t like to dwell on the past. What’s done is done and it’s our job to make the best of our lives in the present. But your mother was a delightful child. And your grampa, Ray, was crazy about her. He was crazy about Claudia, too, but Claudia was always a little more reserved. Marcia would crawl up on Ray’s lap and tell him she loved him . . . she had him wrapped around her little finger. But then, sometime around fifteen or sixteen, things changed. Her grades dropped. We started getting calls from the attendance office that she wasn’t in school. She became secretive. Once she put a padlock on her door. Ray went berserk—went to the hardware store and bought a lock cutter. He not only took the lock off the door, he took the door off its hinges.”
I look back at the picture over the mantle, trying to imagine the scene with those people.
“That was the first time she ran away,” Grams says. “We filed a missing person’s report. Then Ray drove to all of her friends’ houses, trying to find her. The trouble was, the ones he knew weren’t her friends any more. They’d been friends from Girl Scouts and soccer and the days before Marcia was lost to us. After two weeks, the police found her and brought her home. She’d lost weight. She was filthy and her hair was so dirty it hung together in clumps. Ray took one look at her and walked back to our bedroom. He lay on the bed and sobbed.
“Marcia yelled that she hated it here—hated us. That she’d just run away again, and she did. We both did all we knew to do to try to get her back, but the Marcia we knew was gone.”
“Was she using drugs then?” I ask.
“I’m sure she was. We didn’t think so at the time—didn’t want to think so. But looking back on it, I can’t imagine what else would have brought such changes. Later, though, in all those letters from prison, she sounded like the old Marcia. You can’t read those letters without feeling her love for you, Lauren.”
“Yes, I can,” I say. “They’re fantasy. She didn’t do one loving thing for me when she got out of prison. She took me away from a safe place with you, to live in some drug lab.”
“She wasn’t all bad, though. It’s best if you can see that. Will you at least try? Try to let go of some of the anger?”
I nod my head, though I’m not sure I can let go of the anger. And besides, if I did, it might ruin my volleyball game.