CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Georgia arrived late the night before the preliminary hearing. I was telling myself I wasn’t apprehensive about the next day, but the knock at the door nearly stopped my heart.

I hurried to open it. A woman who looked very much like Mom gave me a grin, the porch light gilding her features. I hadn’t remembered her being quite so tall or heavyset.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” she said. “I dropped by to see Dad.”

This shouldn’t have surprised me, but I was suddenly full of questions about what she thought about Cindy’s taste in art, Dad’s improvements to his back garden. And how Dad looked to her.

But you don’t hurry Georgia. She told us all about her new pickup, a Ford Ranger. “It’s amazing how they gear trucks so low,” she said, mystifying me. “You go ten miles an hour, you have to shift out of first.” She was wearing a denim skirt and old-fashioned tennis shoes, the canvas kind you can throw into the washing machine. Her top was a plaid lumberjack flannel, Northwoods chic.

Mom made us melted cheese sandwiches, an old family favorite, although Georgia gave me a conspiratorial purse of the lips when Mom wasn’t looking: Who eats these things any more?

She ate every crumb. It was wonderful to have her there. She gave her husband a call, saying she had arrived safely. I couldn’t help overhearing. She called him Sweetie. She was always reminding him to take vitamin E or wear a warmer sweater. Paul was finishing a degree in highway engineering. He worked as a dispatcher for Cal Trans, telling road crews where to find broken branches and washed-out pavement on Highway One.

“Brilliant!” said Georgia, congratulating Myrna on her litter. The cat leaned into Georgia’s legs, purring. Sometimes you think cats must have excellent memories, instant recall of their friends.

It was good to see Georgia, but it also underscored the crisis we were in. It was the sort of overly cheerful mood I associated with my grandparents’ funerals, everyone chattering, afraid to shut up. My sister asked me how my brain was functioning, “after they stuffed it back inside your head.”

I let it stay jokey, how it turned out the human brain wasn’t all that important.

Georgia told us things we already knew, that she was studying manipulatives for children, how play can be the same as learning. She was studying at Humboldt State, learning how to organize activity areas with good sightlines. She said it was definite, she was going to be a kindergarten teacher.

“I’m so glad!” said Mom, in a tone of such feeling, I had to realize once again that Mom wished I had more ordinary goals, swimming instead of diving.

Then, in a low, intent tone, Mom asked, “What did you think of Cindy?”

Georgia gave a little nonlaugh, one of Mom’s.

“Really?” Mom said.

Georgia made no sound.

My mother said, “That’s what I was afraid of.”

I had hoped Georgia and I would talk long into the night. I had even set aside my most recent video, but Georgia said that driving always tired her out, and she would be worthless tomorrow if she didn’t get some sleep.

It was the sort of thing Mom said, that she would be worthless if she didn’t eat soon, or rest for a while. Besides, there was a silence about Georgia, things she didn’t want to say. When I went to bed, I tried to sense my sister’s presence in the house. Was that her, running water in the back bathroom, closing the closet door in her old bedroom?

Maybe I was hoping she would scratch at my door and sneak in, like in the old days, so she could tell me about a book she was reading, a poltergeist in a South Dakota farmhouse, or a region in the Caribbean Sea cruise ships sailed across never to be heard from again.

Before the divorce Dad sometimes read us stories. Georgia came into my bedroom, older, allowed to stay up an hour later. One of our favorite tales was about a rabbit who dressed up in bark and branches to scare the daylights out of a fox. My father imitated the rabbit in a deep, chilling voice: “I am the spirits of all the rabbits you have eaten, Brother Fox!”

A blind pedestrian would have little trouble crossing streets in downtown Oakland. Traveling roughly west to east, when the signal changes to green, an electronic twirp twirp sounds. The signal to cross north to south is the call of a cuckoo. Georgia and I parked her pickup in a pay lot on Alice Street, and passed one of the white Alameda County Sheriff’s buses, a new load of prisoners facing justice. Mom had explained how busy she was, so my sister and I marched up the steps to the courthouse, just the two of us, Georgia keeping up matter-of-fact chatter, lumber mills closing, her septic tank backing up.

The first sign you see is WARNING WEAPONS PROHIBITED. Georgia took one look at this and said, “Damn!” And I couldn’t keep from laughing.