When we return to our room at the Thunderbird, I take the shoe box into the bathroom and lock the door. I turn the exhaust fan on so no one can hear the sound of me tearing into the packing tape that seals the box, the rustle of the bubble wrap in my hands as I free the butter dish from its protective cocoon. Someone wrapped the item with extreme care, making me wonder if Ella herself prepared this gift for me, her old hands delicately handling the same materials I’m touching now.
It occurs to me that I didn’t even ask Dana how Ella died. Was she active until the end, riding her bicycle every day, or did she lie in a hospital bed for weeks, even months, with a terminal illness? Maybe she had dementia and didn’t even know what was happening. Maybe she was prepared for death, getting her affairs in order, visiting her son one last time. Or maybe something stopped her heart unexpectedly, turning her lifeless in an instance. I don’t even know whether she was cremated or buried somewhere. All I know is that she’s dead, and so is my grandfather, and so is my aunt Ruth. All I know is that my father is the only living member of that family, if you can even call him living.
I unwrap and unwrap until I reach the final layer of plastic bubbles. I can begin to see the dish now through the bubble wrap, the cream porcelain, the octagon shape of the plate, the rounded dome lid. I can begin to see the design painted in the center of the lid, a bird perched on a cherry blossom branch, its feathers long, plumage like a peacock’s tail at rest—my view slightly distorted through the air in the bubbles. Finally, the dish is resting on my lap, the packaging scattered all over the hard, white bathroom floor, material a real bird might break apart with her beak, stealing a scrap for her nest.
Light catches the gold accents on the dish, making them shimmer. The drawing is so detailed, that it must have been hand painted. I can see the weight of the brush strokes, some thin, as if the artist’s brush barely grazed the porcelain at times. Other strokes are thicker. The bird’s tail flows down like a waterfall, feathers that look fuzzy, fluffy as down or the fur of your childhood monster, the one living under your bed. You fear it will grab your ankle if you dare to dangle your bare foot off the side of the bed for too long.
When I was younger, my monster was Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street. My mother and Shea had to go somewhere one summer day, somewhere I wasn’t allowed to be. So they sent me to a house down the street for the day, where a woman just added me to the crew of children in her charge. There were five of us altogether, two boys, a little girl, and a baby named Jo whose gender wasn’t clear to me. Jo had no hair, no obvious markers of girlhood or boyhood. Jo played with blocks and dolls and a little wooden hammer and nail set painted in primary colors. Jo wore white onesies that snapped between Jo’s chubby thighs, always playing happily and smiling, not weighed down by the expectations of being a girl or a boy. Just being a child.
Just after lunch that day, the woman, whose name I can’t recall now, had an emergency and had to leave for a while. Since I was the oldest, she left me in charge. She said she’d be gone only a short while, and she took Jo with her. I watched from the screen door as she strapped Jo into the baby seat in the back of her Toyota, the other children peeking through the living room window to see what was happening. I think it had something to do with a boyfriend, as there had been an intense phone conversation that suggested something or someone needed to be picked up immediately or else.
After I watched the Toyota pull away down the street, I closed the door and locked it and suggested that we watch a movie. I thought that was the best way to keep everyone from fooling around and hurting themselves or catching something on fire, one of the things I still fear might happen when there are no adults around. I’m certain that fire knows when children are alone and most vulnerable. I’m certain that fire is a villain that wishes to consume us, taking pleasure in eating us like candy, like the old woman in the Hansel and Gretel story. Fire is blind, just like the old woman. That’s why it searches and searches, running down hallways and staircases in houses until it finds its prey.
My movie idea would have been a good one except one of the boys found A Nightmare on Elm Street on one of the cable channels, and suddenly all the curtains were drawn in the sunken living room and all the children were watching teenagers afraid to go to sleep because Freddy Krueger was killing people in their dreams. It’s scary enough to die in a dream, but in these movies, if you die in your dream, you die in reality. We only watched it for about an hour, until the babysitter came home with smiling baby Jo on her hip and a bag of ice cream sandwiches to buy our silence, but I never forgot Freddy, the villain, with his melted skin and bladed glove, five knives instead of five fingers.
Perhaps my father is someone’s Freddy Krueger now, the murderer whose face continues to haunt even after death. He’s the villain who does things no one can comprehend, although they try and try. They manipulate the puzzle pieces desperately, arranging pieces in every combination, every direction, turn, turn, turning the jigsaw shapes, but the picture will never be complete. There will always be something that doesn’t make sense—a bridge that leads nowhere, a missing section of sky.
I turn the dish over, and on the back is a small piece of white tape. It looks like medical tape, the kind you would use to secure gauze on a wound. Someone has written on the tape with a blue ballpoint pen, chubby capital letters that say BIRD-OF-PARADISE.