“I should explain why I came here today,” Sylvia said, her spoon poised above the rice pudding. “You deserve that, at least. It goes back to an old family story, something I’d beg my parents to trot out whenever I could.”
I was being dismissed. I looked down, forked a corner of my own dessert, and said nothing in return.
“My grandfather was a magician. He worked out-of-the-way towns, set up a small tent, did the usual tricks. Except for one big drawing card. He’d bury an assistant alive in a coffin and charge good money for a peek down the periscope. One summer, he took my mom along on the tour.”
Sylvia paused, letting her words sink in.
“The first time he buried her, Mom cried so much she ruined the act. But without this big draw, Grampire—that’s how I think of him, Grampire—had no show. He needed extra help, so in the next town he hired a local, and this is where my dad comes in. He got the job to bury her.”
“Sylvia, this sounds much stranger than my ideas about the horoscope.”
“It’s as true as any story that your parents tell you can be. Who knows, maybe they made it up,” she said, as if considering this for the first time, “a family myth to entertain their daughter. I wouldn’t put it past them. Anyway, I’ve believed it since I was a kid, so it’s a part of me now.”
I nodded. “I have some experience in that area.”
Again Sylvia paused, almost replying, but then continued. “Grampire plied my mom with liquor to calm her down, while Dad had to dig the hole, check the periscope, air hole pipe, and the string of light bulbs that lit up her face. Dad always said that the first time he looked through the periscope at her, something happened to him. But I could never get him to tell me what he saw.”
My mother’s face in the coffin suddenly appeared before me. If any of us had managed to really see her, to see through her disguises during those last terrible months, would anything have changed?
Sensing my distraction, Sylvia said, “I’m talking too much.”
“Not at all,” I said, offering a cautious smile.
“Really, I can’t believe I’m telling you this.”
“That’s a phrase I’ve heard more than a few times before.”
“Oh?”
I shrugged. She was near the end of her story, and then we’d never see each other again.
“So,” she continued, frowning. “That night my mom and dad whispered for hours, though they have different memories of what they talked about.” Sylvia laughed, “When I was a kid that was the source of some of their more amusing disputes. But they both agree that’s when they fell in love. While Grampire was sleeping they stole his car, and my mother never saw him again.”
“I hadn’t thought of this before,” I murmured, the words surprising me as I said them, “but my parents never once said anything about when they met.”
“Well, the point of my story is this: I’ve always tried to imagine my father’s face when first he looked down that peephole. Impossible, I know, especially if this was a story he and my mother made up. But I wondered, was he just curious, like the customers who’d soon be lining up? Did horror cross his face, or anger—at Grampire, or at himself for agreeing to dig that hole? Sadness? The expression I’ve always wanted to be true was a certain kind of attention, a recognition in his eyes that showed he got her, even if he didn’t know her yet.”
Sylvia looked out the window. Her story wasn’t over, but I wasn’t sure she was willing to tell me the rest. She turned back to me, her skeptical regard, I thought, a kind of armor, protecting her from whatever words she’d decided to say. “Back at the park, just for a moment, I thought you … looked at me that way. I had a hunch about you. Maybe I was wrong.”