Could I wear the peach blouse with a pair of jeans to go shopping? It’s clean, but I don’t want her to think I only have one nice shirt. What does one wear for a day of shopping? Sweats and a T-shirt would be the most practical. It’s supposed to be cold out today. Maybe a sweater? I pushed my few decent outfits around the closet when the doorbell rang. At first, I thought the hollow ding was the text message tone on the new smartphone Frank Mariano gave me. He said he wanted to be able to reach me whenever he needed to talk to me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be available day and night.
The bell rang several more times, in quick succession, before I connected the sound to the front door.
Geez Jane, break the doorbell why don’t you?
I shook the towel off my wet hair, pulled a bathrobe on, and ran down the stairs to ask Jane to wait in the car for a few minutes. I didn’t want Jane to see my empty apartment. A cobweb stuck to my thigh as I wrenched open the stiff dead bolt. When I swung the door open, instead of Jane impatiently tapping her toe in the frigid air, the monster from my nightmares glared at me through the screen door.
“About time!” Dale bellowed. I screamed, slammed the heavy steel door, and threw the bolt home. “Open the door, girl.”
Suddenly, I was sixteen again, hiding in my closet. “Go away!” I yelled.
Dale rattled the lock on the screen door handle. It provided flimsy protection, but I appreciated each thread on the screws holding it in place.
“Larissa, honey.” That name, oozing from between his lips, made me cringe. “We need to talk.”
I crouched behind the door and screamed, “Leave me alone!”
He kicked the doorframe and pounded on the screen. “Open the door, Larissa.”
“Go away!”
I had been preparing for this day for eleven years. I had a plan. Everything I needed for a quick getaway was packed in Ruby’s trunk. I should have run to the car, crashed through the garage door, and disappeared in a cloud of fiberglass and blue smoke. Preparations forgotten, I cowered in the corner like an animal.
Dale’s heavy boots thumped in time with the blood pounding in my ears as he paced past the door. I squeezed my knees to my chest and tried to think. I need to go. Is there still a hole in the fence out back? It’s a Saturday. Is the little girl there? I can’t risk Dale seeing that little girl.
I need to run. It’s taken him this long to find me; I could hide again. I’ll do a better job this time. Go overseas. Change my name more. I stood up and stepped away from the door.
But, what about Jane? And Vanessa? I don’t want to leave them behind.
The pacing stopped. Dale’s red nose pressed up against the picture window. He shielded his eyes with one spotted hand to peer into the dark condo. I realized that, from where I was standing, I could see him but he couldn’t see me. Over the last eleven years, Dale had become the beast in my nightmares. Time had been hard on the very real man peering in the window. He was hunched and worn. His hair was reduced to wisps hanging over his ears and collar. His once hawk-like eyes were now milky with cataracts. A tattered flannel shirt hung off his once broad shoulders. He was no more than a used up old man holding a wrinkled paper grocery bag.
“What do you want?” I yelled through the door.
Dale craned his neck in my direction. The old predatory smirk spread across his face. I could feel his eyes on me even if he couldn’t actually see me standing behind the door in a flimsy flannel robe. I would have preferred a set of armor.
“You know why I’m here. You owe me,” he spat. “You and me’ve got a score to settle.” He banged on the door again. “Come on girl, I drove a long way to see you.”
“How did you find me? Did the hospital tell you where I was?”
“That bunch of vultures? They don’t tell me nothing. They just want to get every damn penny out of me.”
I quietly slid over to the window frame.
“Open the door, girl,” he cooed. “We need to talk about your mama.” He leaned into the glass and licked his lips like a fox eying a hen house. I slapped the glass in front of his face.
“What the hell!” he yelped.
“What do you want?” I wished my hand had gone right through the glass and cut his face to ribbons. Dale recovered his balance and returned to the window to leer in at me. I was very aware of my bare legs sticking out below the robe.
“I need to talk to you about your mama,” he keened. “She’s dead, Larissa.”
I reeled back from the window. “What? When?” The words caught in my throat. Mama can’t be dead. She’s like a cockroach. She could survive nuclear winter.
“She passed away three weeks ago.” Dale wiped at his eye as if he were actually weeping.
Mama is dead?
I stood in front of the glass. “She died?”
“I scattered her ashes up on your grandparent’s property yesterday.”
“Why are you really here?” I knew not to believe anything Dale said. There had to be money involved. Dale would never drive all the way from New Hampshire to North Carolina just to scatter Mama’s ashes. He’d ship them UPS or dump them in the woods beyond the back pasture. “What do you want?”
“Larissa. Honey.” Dale’s voice was like sulfured molasses. Broken blood vessels covered his nose from years of hard drinking and he was missing some of his teeth. “Won’t you let your old step-daddy in for a cup of coffee? Talk about old times?” I could think of nothing I would like less than to talk about “old times” with Dale. I tightened the belt around my waist and tried to breathe under the suffocating weight of memory.
“Why. Are. You. Here?”
Dale glared at me for a moment then looked down at the paper bag in his hand. A greasy smile spread across his stubble-strewn face. “I’ve got a present for you. Now why don’t you open up and I’ll tell you all about your mother’s sad final days? You and me are the only family she had left. Even if you did run off.”
“Fuck you!”
Dale dropped the amiable mask and snarled, “Shut your mouth and let me in!”
“I am never letting you in. This is my place. Mine!”
“Then come out here.” He slapped the paper grocery sack in his hand. “All you’ve got to do is sign a few papers and I’ll be on my way. I’ll never bother you again. Promise.”
I was considering whether or not my reflexes were fast enough to unlock the screen and safely grab the bag out of his hand, when I heard a voice growl. “Don’t do it, Lara! You stay right there.”
The color drained from Dale’s face as he looked cautiously over his shoulder. Jane stood in the driveway beside her shiny little sports car. It may as well have been a coach and four. Dale stepped away from the door and retreated to the edge of the small front porch. He was trembling. “Just having a friendly conversation with my stepdaughter.” He turned back to the window and hissed, “Why did you call the lawyers?” I had no idea what he was talking about but liked that he looked scared.
“Lara?” Jane called. “Is this man bothering you?” She paced slowly up the overgrown walkway. If I didn’t know she walked so slowly because she was ill, I would have found Jane in her full length black coat and dark glasses intimidating, too.
“Yes! Yes, he is.”
Jane calmly pulled her cell phone from her pocket. “I am calling the police. I suggest you leave. Now.”
Dale scowled at me through the window. “You need to sign these papers, girl.”
Jane started dialing numbers. “Then leave the papers and go.” She turned away and spoke quietly into the phone. When she turned back, she made a show of being surprised that Dale was still there. “It should only take the police a few minutes to get here, so be quick about it.” Jane stepped a few paces away as if he were already gone. She kicked at the weeds in the neglected flowerbeds. The only flowers growing there were some overgrown chrysanthemums planted by the builder.
Dale seemed to vacillate between leaving and staying to get what he came for. He kept one eye on Jane and dropped the wrinkled paper bag on the stoop. “You sign these papers and mail them in, or I’ll come back to make you sign them. You hear me, girl?” He winked at me through the window. “You know, you can change your name and act as high fallutin’ as you like, but I know who you are. You’re still nothing more than a little tramp from the trailer park.”
My stomach dropped as Jane spun around. I was sure she would never speak to me again after she heard what Dale had just said. I certainly didn’t expect Jane to poke Dale between the shoulder blades and seethe, “I think you have said just about all you are going to say today. If you have any more information for Ms. Blaine, I suggest you contact her by post.”
Jane stared at Dale until he shuffled back to his truck and drove away like the coward he was. She walked up the steps and picked up the bag before I opened the door. “You all right?” she asked. I didn’t know if I was. I felt numb. All I could think was that I needed to call the landlord to get the cracks in the front walkway fixed.
My hands shook as I bolted the door behind us. “What am I going to tell the police when they get here?”
“I didn’t actually call them, Lara. I called Tom and told him to stand by the phone if I needed him to come over. I know guys like that. They’re all bark and no bite.”
“Thank you,” I whispered. “That was my mother’s husband.” I was trying to act calm but my heart felt like a little bird flying against the bars of its cage. “She’s dead. My mother is dead,” I said again, letting the words sink in.
It felt good.
Jane turned back toward the door. “I’m sorry. Do you need to be alone? I can go.”
“Could you stick around for a bit?” I felt lightheaded. Everything seemed to be out of focus, as if I were looking through a dirty camera lens. Jane put the grocery bag down inside the doorway and enveloped me in her spindly arms. That hug was wonderful. I had not been properly hugged in so long it was overwhelming.
“I just can’t believe my mother is dead.”
Perhaps it was the hug, or the adrenaline associated with seeing Dale, or the news that Mama was dead, or Jane standing up to Dale, or a combination of them all; I started to weep into Jane’s chest. Sob after sob after sob shook my body. Eventually, the sobbing quieted down and Jane said, “Why don’t we get out of the doorway and have a cup of tea? I need to sit down.”
“I have Earl Grey. I bought some the other day,” I said proudly.
Jane glanced around the dusty empty rooms with raised eyebrows on our way to the kitchen but was too polite to ask where all the furniture had gone. She situated me on the couch and pulled the old blanket around my shoulders.
Reality seemed elastic. I could see Jane banging around in my little kitchen looking for something to boil water in and some cups, yet I was also still seeing Dale’s face leering through the window.
How did he find me? He couldn’t have driven all that way just to tell me Mama was dead?
Mama is dead?
For three weeks?
Jane returned and pressed a steaming cup in my hand. She looked around for a place to sit and settled on sitting on the arm of the couch.
“I didn’t realize you recently moved.”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh?” Jane balanced her teacup on the makeshift coffee table.
“I can’t believe my mother died weeks ago and I didn’t know it.”
“Was it sudden? Had she been ill?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to her for eleven years.” I sipped some of the tea. “Well, for all intents and purposes, fifteen years. Since she married Dale.”
“A charming man, I could see.”
“He thought you were my lawyer.”
Jane choked on her tea. It had been remarkably satisfying to see Dale so intimidated by Jane, especially since she was so frail these days. He could have taken her down in one fell swoop if he had tried. Then again, he looked pretty weak, too.
“Speaking of lawyers, what are the papers he wanted you to sign?”
“I don’t know. You showed up before I got a chance to find out.”
Jane got up and retrieved the bag from the front room. She gently put it down in front of me. “Let’s take a look. Maybe it will explain what made him turn up at your door today.” Jane pulled out a battered FedEx envelope addressed to me, a manila folder of crumpled documents, and a painted cigar box.
“Mama’s box,” I murmured. The box sat on the top shelf of her closet hidden under a grey wool blanket in every cockroach-infested apartment and ramshackle trailer we ever lived in. She had been willing to sell our few possessions to put cheap clothes on her back and liquor in her belly, but she hoarded that box like it was filled with gold. When I was little, I imagined it contained a fairy that could whisk me away to a magical world if I would only free her from her confinement. I imagined us living happily ever after in a fairy world where no one was sad or hungry. After we moved to the farm, the box disappeared.
I had been forbidden to touch this box for so long I was afraid to touch it now. I ran a finger over the top of the painted surface. There were pale green leaves painted around the edges and the name “Elise” painted in lavender across the curved lid. Elise was my grandmother’s name. From the crude nature of the lettering, she must have painted it as a child.
Jane picked up the folder and envelope and started to flip through the papers inside them. “Well? Are you going to open it?” she asked. I lifted the hinged top. Inside was a piece of paper ripped from a spiral notebook and crudely folded in quarters. Underneath the paper was a lavender envelope that I recognized as being from my grandmother’s stationary. Under the envelope was a small white leather box. I unfolded the notebook paper, recognized Mama’s childlike handwriting and immediately tossed it back on the coffee table.
I delicately pulled the lavender envelope out and held it to my nose. It smelled like my grandparent’s house: cigarette smoke and Murphy’s Oil Soap. Tears welled up in my eyes. I placed it on the table and lifted the small white leather box out. Inside was a simple gold band with leaves etched around it. I recognized it as my grandmother’s wedding ring. I remembered how the smooth band felt against my young fingers when I held Grammy’s hand as we walked into town or to church. I pushed the small ring on my right ring finger. It fit.
At the bottom of the box was an ornate silver cross. My grandmother had worn it at all times on a long silver chain. I’d asked Grammy about the cross one morning. Even as a little girl, I knew that it was out of place in my grandmother’s restrained wardrobe. She had travelled to Mexico as a young woman on a mission trip. Grammy and her friends had met people who were living in the simplest of houses and had only tortillas and beans to eat yet had a faith that sustained them. She had bought the ornate silver cross in a village market and had worn it as a reminder of her time in Mexico. I pulled the chain over my head. The cold metal against my skin was like my grandmother’s cool kisses on a fevered brow.
I turned to Jane sitting in front of piles of paper. “What are those?”
Jane gestured to the first pile. “This seems to be a copy of the deed to some property in the town of Alders, North Carolina; these are old stock certificates for a bunch of different companies, mostly asbestos mines; and this is a life insurance policy in the name of Larissa Scott.”
“That’s me. I changed my name when I was in college.”
“It looks like Elise Anne and Robert Blaine Elliot left all their property to you upon Robert’s death. Was Robert your father?”
“My grandfather.” The words caught in my throat. “I don’t know who my father is. It was always just Mama and me. Then it was Dale and Mama and me. But I don’t understand. They left their house to me? I was only seven when my grandfather died. Why didn’t they leave it to my mother?”
“I think you need to talk to a lawyer about all that. I wonder why your mother never gave you these papers. They belong to you.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t try to sell the stocks. She sold everything else I ever had.”
Jane sipped her tea. “What’s in the purple envelope?” I turned the envelope over and carefully pulled it open. The rough-cut pages were covered with my grandfather’s compact handwriting—
Little Lara (I refuse to call you Larissa),
I’m getting ready to join my Elise in the hereafter. I fear your mother will continue to refuse to bring you to see me. I have asked her time and time again, but she seems to resent how much we love you. I want you to know that the six years you lived with Elise and me were some of the happiest years we had together. Even though the leukemia was making her feel poorly, you brought sunshine into her last days. After your mother took you away, Elise truly began to wither. But I knew I couldn’t care for you alone with her in failing health. Perhaps I should have tried harder to find a way. Now I, too, am failing. The doctors say it’s my lungs, but I think it’s as much my heart. I miss your grandmother too much. I am looking forward to seeing her waiting for me at the pearly gates.
I have put the property here in trust for you until you are old enough to make your own decisions, and I am leaving you my shares in the mine. They may be quite valuable some day. Perhaps you can use the money to go to college. Your grandmother wanted you to go to Amherst because you reminded her of Emily Dickenson with that serious little frown, but you go wherever you please. I know you will use your sharp mind to do something wonderful. I have read and re-read David Copperfield and Anne of Green Gables in the last year because they remind me of you and the hours we spent reading together. I treasure those memories. You are always in my prayers.
Your loving PawPaw
I read the note several times through with silent tears streaming down my face. My heart was breaking all over again. All these years, I thought my grandparents didn’t want me. My mother had said they couldn’t wait to get rid of me.
That was a lie.
That changed everything.
I remembered my grandmother as being weak, but I never realized how ill she had been. My mother had kept that from me, too. Looking back from the perspective of an adult, I could see that my grandmother was easily tired and had trouble doing the household chores, but the Grammy in my memories was a woman reveling in her flower garden and cooking delicious meals while listening to my stories of school.
Jane wiped my cheeks with her soft linen handkerchief, bringing me back to the present. I turned to Jane with a watery smile and said, “My grandparents wanted to keep me, but my grandmother had cancer. They had to let my mother take me away. They wanted to keep me.”
“You never knew?” Jane got up and returned with a glass of water. “You’ve had an awful shock. Drink some water and let it sink in a bit.” She gestured to the documents strewn across the coffee table. “Do you have a lawyer?”
“No, I’ve never needed one.”
“I’ll call Celeste Brigham and set up an appointment for you. She specializes in real estate law, but I bet she, or one of her associates, could help with these stock certificates.”
The enormity of what was in front of me began to hit me. I’d had property and a stock portfolio. I had a family that loved me, even if they were dead. I didn’t have to be poor and alone all those years. I picked up the note from my mother and balled it up.
“I’m glad she’s dead. I wish she’d died when I was born. Then my grandparents would have found a way to keep me and I never would have met Dale.” I tossed the ball of paper across the room. “I wish he would die, too. And I want it to be slow and painful.”
I started to explain about Dale and Mama but before I could say much of anything, Jane stopped me. “No, no. I don’t want to know the whole sordid story. I’m sure it was awful for you. But it’s over now. In the past.”
I was taken aback. It wasn’t that simple.
“Look he can’t hurt you anymore. Today is a new day. You can’t go back and change it. You have to move forward. Why don’t you go upstairs and get dressed?”
I went upstairs and took another shower. Merely seeing Dale made me feel dirty. I needed to scrub his eyes off me. I felt a little better once I was clean, but also exhausted. The morning had been an emotional roller coaster with the sickening stomach-dropping sensation of Dale knowing where I lived and the heart-in-your-throat thrill of learning Grammy and PawPaw had wanted to keep me. I pulled on some clothes and climbed into my bed intent on closing my eyes for just a moment. I could hear Jane talking on her cell phone.