Blue Moon Bay (25 page)

Pressing three fingers to her lips, Ruth leaned forward to look at the drawing of her sister. “My mother and the baby died when cholera came. My father was weak, especially after the illness. The Second World War had begun by then, and I was just beginning to become a woman. There was even less food than before. The Russians prevented us from travel, so it became more difficult to go begging in the villages. My father admonished us to have faith through all of this. He told us that the Germans were drawing closer and when they came, because of our German heritage, we would fare better.”

Leaning forward, Ruth pointed to one of the girls playing in the grass at the horse's feet. “My sister Naomi clung to my father's faith. But Lydia grew tired of it. She was sixteen then, prideful, beautiful in a way that was noticed, that was rewarded by the few men and boys remaining in the villages when we could go begging. There was a bit of extra bread here, a cup of milk there. Lydia turned against my father. She was not modest. She uncovered her hair. She said, if she were not to do it, we would all starve to death. ‘Who is going to feed us?' she asked my father as he lay in his bed, too weak to punish her. ‘You? Naomi? You only lie there. You only lie there, waiting on the Lord while we go hungry. If this is what the Lord asks of His people, then I do not want it.'”

Ruth turned to look at me then, moving her gaze slowly away from the contrasting images of Naomi and Lydia on the paper. “You may wonder which of my sisters was right—the one who honored my father's instruction, or the one who turned away. Terrible things had happened to us, after all—death, disease, hunger, our family torn asunder, abuses I cannot even speak of. How could a God who loves us allow such things, you might wonder?”

She seemed to be waiting for an answer, but I didn't have one. A log popped in the fireplace, a spit of flame tearing away and floating upward.
I have wondered. I've needed that answer all these years, but there is no answer.

Ruth shifted in her chair, her breath coming in labored grunts as she tried to reposition the bed pillow tucked behind her back. “I cannot tell you the answer. There is none on this side of heaven, on the dark side of the glass, I think. The Germans came, and there were rewards for those who would help them in their battle. The Mennonites would not agree to fight, of course, but some were forced and some gave information. Some told who in the Russian villages had helped the Russians, who might be helping them still.

“Lydia told what she knew. The Russians were, after all, the very people at whose hands we had suffered. ‘It is only justice,' she said. I have wondered if she was aware that those people would be walked up the hill, like the woman in the blue dress, and positioned at the edge, so as to fall into a grave with so many others. I sometimes think Lydia must have been unaware. It is easier to believe that.”

My stomach roiled at the thought of mass graves and people being walked up a hill, knowing they were walking into death. Looking at Ruth, it was hard to imagine that she had seen these things, that to her these were not just pieces of history, images from some sad newsreel. This was her past. She'd lived it. “Did Lydia report the woman in the blue dress? Was it your sister who told?”

Ruth answered with a long, sad look. “I have never known. I don't want to. Naomi told me never to ask, and I didn't. But Lydia was not the same after the killings. She lost her laughter. Even when we followed the German army in its retreat from Russian soil, she was hollow and angry. Her revenge had fed her for a day, but it was a meal that emptied her afterward, and there seemed to be nothing that could fill her again. She married a German man as the war was ending, but her life was never happy. Naomi and I came here to America. Naomi had seven children and lived well all the rest of her life until the Lord called her home. But that story is for another day.”

“I'd love to hear it,” I said, but I could tell Ruth was wearing down, getting tired. She'd sagged against the pillow, her body cocked to one side in a way that looked uncomfortable. Once again, we hadn't gotten to the story about my grandfather.

“You come back again tomorrow.” She smiled at me, her withered fingers patting the arm of the sofa as if she were patting my hand.

“I will.”

“Which of my sisters did the right thing?” Ruth stared into the fire again, her head drooping forward. “The one who fed our stomachs but was faithless, or the one who kept our faith but let us go hungry?”

“I don't know,” I admitted, though I suspected that wasn't the answer she wanted.

“I sometimes think both of my sisters are inside us.” Her eyelids were sinking now, silver lashes brushing her cheeks. “I have always thanked God that I was younger. It did not fall on me to make the choice between the two paths.”

She sighed, her eyes closing, her breaths lengthening. I tiptoed away quietly, leaving her there to rest. Lunch was ready in the kitchen, and I stayed to share the meal at a long table with Mary, Emily, John, and various members of Ruth's family. The prayers settled over me as grace was offered, and for the first time in a long time, I felt grace. I'd always thought of my life as irreparably marred by tragedy, but now I could see that we all have marks of some kind, scars we'd rather not live with. It's what we do in spite of them that matters.

After the meal, Mary and Emily walked me out, and we visited the puppies in the barn. I watched the girls take them to the barnyard and try to corral them against the wall.

“You shoulda brought Roger,” Mary pointed out, running after a chubby puppy to put it back in the puppy containment area.

“Rod-er likes the puppies,” Emily added.

“Yes, he does,” I agreed. Watching Mary and Emily, I couldn't help contrasting their lives with those of the children in Ruth's drawing. They were growing up in completely different worlds. “Maybe I'll bring Roger back next time. You two have fun today.” I hoped Mary and Emily's world would always be this gentle, this welcoming and sweet.

As I walked to my car, I thought about Ruth's story of the two sisters. Ruth had made the choice, whether she realized it or not. She'd witnessed terrible things, suffered hunger, disease, watched her family be torn apart while God seemed to do nothing to stop it. Yet she still believed in love and mercy.

I wanted to believe. I needed to. There was a hunger in me that couldn't be filled by anything I'd achieved or purchased or invested my time in. I was like Lydia. For everything that was beautiful about her on the outside, there was a piece on the inside that was broken, jagged, dangerous. She curled inward, protectively around herself, until finally she bled herself dry.

I was living Lydia's life, but I wanted Naomi's. I wanted peace. I wanted hope. I wanted the joy of those two little girls playing in the grass.

Low clouds gathered overhead, and the scent of freshly baked bread hung heavy in the air as I left the dairy and drove through Gnadenfeld. My mouth watered, drawing me toward one of the bakeries, my justification being that I'd just take a few things home as a treat . . . for the uncs, of course. A little comfort food.

I needed some comfort at the moment, and even though I fully understood the wisdom of not having Mennonite baked goods around the house—I'd gained ten pounds my senior year in high school and gone from stick-thin to curvy—I went into the remodeled Texaco station, anyway.

The interior smelled like heaven. Behind the counter, a teenage girl in a soft mauve dress with a mesh prayer covering pinned over her bun was working on math homework. She set her pencil down and looked up at me. She had beautiful eyes. I thought of Lydia in the drawing. Lydia as drawn by Ruth probably wasn't any older than this girl, yet she had seen unspeakable things, experienced horrors of a sort I couldn't even imagine.

A lump swelled in my throat and I swallowed hard, then ordered some treats, feeling foolish. The girl behind the counter probably thought I was off in the head.

Leaving the bakery, I stood on the curb a moment, took in a long, slow breath, and smelled the faint scent of emissions from the Proxica plant, held low over the ground by the cloud cover today. Something familiar on the street caught my eye. An old white Toyota pickup. The Ladybug. It turned just past the building across the street and disappeared into an alley. I walked down the curb a few steps to catch sight of it again.

Clay was parked in the alleyway. I started to call to him as he got out of the truck, but something in his movements stopped me. He was looking around, checking over his shoulder to make sure no one was watching. A man came out the back door of the building, handed something to Clay in a brown paper sack. My brother tucked it under his jacket, hurried back to his truck, and was gone.

My stomach rolled as I stood on the sidewalk, watching his taillights disappear around the back of the building. Suddenly the smell of the baked goods in my arms seemed off-putting. Despite everyone's assurances that my brother was fine, the body language of that alley meeting was impossible to misread. I knew what kinds of packages had to be picked up via the alley doors of buildings, in secret.

Siddhartha looked into the river

and saw many pictures in the flowing water.

—Herman Hesse
(Left by an artist, who painted the day away by the shore)

W
hen I returned to Uncle Herbert's place, Mom and the uncs were down by the old barn, where Clay's collection of partially-repainted canoes still languished on the lawn. Uncle Herbert, Uncle Charley, and Mom were walking around the barn, pointing and talking. Perhaps they were making plans for future hoedowns to entertain the throngs of bed-and-breakfast customers looking to stay in a former funeral home? Whatever was going on, they seemed to be deeply engaged in it, the three of them looking up at the roof while Uncle Herbert pointed and talked, and Uncle Charley shook his head, disagreeing. They didn't notice me driving in, so I closed the car door quietly and went into the house, my mind still on Clay.

Inside, a laptop computer sat idling on the kitchen counter. I bumped it accidentally-on-purpose while setting down my supply of bakery goods, and the screen came on. Two windows popped up side by side, and I paused to look at them. One appeared to be an email containing a series of instructions for a graduate student or fellow professor who was covering Mom's classes. She'd asked him to give her freshman composition students an assignment—the dreaded term paper, a social criticism of
Sonny's Blues
by James Baldwin. Scanning down the page, I read the last line, a final note to her colleague.

Thank you for your understanding, Andrew. I could be gone on family leave for a couple weeks yet but should return well before finals. Sorry to miss Valentine's Day, but we'll make it up in style—dinner and a theater night, perhaps? You pick . . .

The note stopped there, as if she'd been interrupted before finishing it. In the window beside the email was a drawing—an attachment she'd downloaded, apparently. The sketch was someone's crude attempt to create a 3-D walkthrough of a living room interior, using AutoCAD. Whoever had done it didn't know the software well. The representation was rough, and from the notations, it looked like someone wanted to design a room based on knobby cedar poles, hand-hewn beams that fit together with wooden pegs, and barn wood.

Barn wood . . .

I looked out the window at my mother and the uncs, who were now investigating the framing around the big sliding doors that, when there were farm fields nearby, had been designed to admit wagons mounded with freshly-harvested cotton. Maybe Mom was planning to tear down the barn—sell it off to someone who wanted to use the rustic materials inside a house or cabin. It seemed a shame to do that. The barn was part of the history of this place. Even though it was over a hundred years old and needed some work, it wasn't beyond saving.

Aside from that there was another question, one even more perplexing. Mom had someone back at Berkeley waiting for her to return, planning a belated Valentine's dinner and teaching her classes?
Thank you for understanding . . . gone on family leave for a couple weeks yet . . . Sorry to miss Valentine's Day, but we'll make it up in style . . .

That was even stranger than Clay's text message from the girl with whom he was apparently two-timing Amy. Why would my mother be stringing along some poor guy in California if she intended to move to Moses Lake for good? Why would she lie to him? She had to be lying to someone—she couldn't move to Moses Lake and return to California at the same time. Had she been lying to the uncs? Did she intend to go back to her teaching position? Why come here and build up the uncs' hopes with talk of settling down in the country? To what purpose?

Would she do that so Clay could secure bank loans? Was Mom pretending to be a future partner in Clay's business ventures so she could set him up in Moses Lake, and then leave? It wouldn't be the first time. When Clay was in his last year of high school, she'd accepted a fellowship in Paris without telling anyone. Out of the blue at Thanksgiving, she'd announced that she'd be boarding a plane four months before Clay's graduation, but there was nothing to worry about, because the rent on the house was good until the end of May. She'd asked the neighbors to help Clay out if he needed anything.

I still remembered the wounded, confused expression on Clay's face. He looked like an abandoned house pet that had just been booted from the car on the side of some lonely highway. Surely she wouldn't do that to him again. Maybe she was lying to the guy back at Berkeley—Andrew, whose name had never come up in conversation before, but with whom she was apparently close.

Was she lying to Clay, or were she and Clay lying to me . . . to everyone?

The phone rang just as my thoughts were melting into a slag heap of molten theories too corrosive to handle. A scenario was forming, and I couldn't face thinking about it. The idea clarified and hardened as the phone rang a second time and a third, until finally Uncle Herbert's recorded message echoed from his office. On the message, he was using his funeral voice, smooth, low, and soothing. “Hello, you've reached Harmony Shores Funeral Home. We're no longer offering services, but if you'd like to leave a message . . .”

I listened until the caller began recording a response. “Hi, Dad, this is Donny.” I pictured Uncle Herbert's eldest son, Donny. He and his family had come down for my father's funeral. Even though they were only cousins, Donny reminded me so much of my father that it hurt just to be around him. Same laugh, same eyes, same tall frame and broad shoulders, same receding hairline.

I sidestepped toward the kitchen phone, my ear still cocked toward the message. “So, listen, Dad, I just wanted to check in and see how everything's going. The Craigslist guy should be there to move the stuff out of the basement a week from tomorrow. He says he'll just warehouse all of it until it sells, no problem. Who knows, maybe there'll be a rush of vampires looking for places to sleep, and the display coffins will sell off in a hurry. Anyway, be sure you've got the red tags on anything down there that you don't want him to haul off, okay? All of that stuff is going to do better on Craigslist than in an estate sale, and this way you won't have people tromping all through the place. Remember, the furniture stays unless it's something that's got sentimental value. They want the rest of it left where it is. Anyway, I'll call back later and . . .”

I grabbed the kitchen phone and pushed the button for the funeral home line before Donny could hang up. “Hi, Donny, this is Heather. Your dad is down the hill with Uncle Charley and my mom.”

Donny hesitated long enough that I thought maybe he'd hung up. “Oh . . . Heather,” he said finally. “Well, I didn't know you were down there.”

Why am I not surprised? Wait until I tell you what else you didn't know.
It occurred to me, then, that Donny didn't seem surprised that my mother was at Harmony Shores. Apparently, he already knew. “I've been in town for a few days. Ummm . . . has anyone told you what is going on here?”

“Going on, as in . . .” Donny's lead-in was strangely cautious, as if he were concerned about where I might be headed.

“With the land sale, the estate sale. Everything. The broker offer expires soon. We were supposed to have signed and executed it last week in Seattle, but my mother didn't show up to do the paperwork, so I came down here. What's weird is that no preparations have been made here. Everything, and I mean everything, is just the way it's always been. It doesn't look to me like Uncle Herbert and Uncle Charley are planning on moving anywhere, and all of a sudden my brother is talking about taking over the catfish place, and my mother thinks she's going to open a bed-and-breakfast in the funeral home.”
I know, I know. Go ahead and laugh. It sounds really ludicrous when you say it out loud.

“Hmmm,” Donny muttered. Even for a straight-laced electronics engineer, it was a strangely flat response. He hesitated for a long time afterward. “Well, I'm sure it's fine, Heather. Dad and Uncle Charley just sent their deposit check for the new condo. They're looking forward to living the retirement life with all those hot senior babes. I think most of the furniture stays with the house there at Harmony Shores. Don't worry about it, all right? The moving company will be coming in to pack Dad's personal belongings for him. He's supposed to red tag anything he wants to hang on to. When I took the deposit check to the retirement village last week, I measured his condo, so he could make some more decisions about what furniture to take and what to leave behind.”

My mind tripped and stumbled. An actual check had been sent to Donny? My understanding had been that Herbert and Charley needed the money from the broker offer to pay the thirty-thousand-dollar deposit on their retirement condo, which was why the broker offer was such a godsend.

If Uncle Herbert had sent money to Donny, that meant that actual cash had already changed hands between my mother, my brother, and the uncs. But if Uncle Herbert intended to stay in Moses Lake, then why was he making the down payment on a condo in Oklahoma?

“Donny, listen, I think you'd better come here. We need to all sit down in one room”—
lock the doors
—“and get to the bottom of this before it's too late.”

“Hang on a minute, Heather.” I heard someone talking in the background, and the scratchy sound of Donny putting his hand over the phone.

Donny came back on the line. “Listen, Heather, I'm headed to a meeting. Don't worry about it anymore, all right? Everything's fine. Dad's got it under control. Good talking to you.”

“No . . . wait, but . . .”

He hung up. I held the phone away from my face and looked cross-eyed at it, my mouth hanging open. “He hung up on me. . . .” The words were for no one but the ghosts in the house, and they didn't answer. I quickly pushed *69 to dial back Donny's number. He didn't answer. I tried three more times. No luck.

“Ohhh, that is just . . .” I didn't even have words for it. Finally, I smacked the phone into the cradle and paced the kitchen, thinking,
Apparently his meeting matters more than his family, and . . .

The strangeness of that thought struck me. Talk about the pot and the kettle. Was this not exactly the personality flaw my mother and Clay had accused me of? Their complaint about me? Richard's complaint about me? Even Trish's, when I got right down to it? I was so overburdened with my own issues, I didn't have time for anyone else's.

That's not who I am,
I thought.
It's not. That's not me.

Not this time.

Whether the Proxica deal worked out or fell completely apart, I was going to make sure my family came out of this in one piece, and the basement was as good a place to start as any, whether I wanted to go down there or not. If I could find any evidence of items that had been packed or red tagged for moving, that would at least be proof of something. Proof I could use to confront my mother and force her to tell me the truth.

I was still muttering to myself as I turned the corner to cross through Uncle Herbert's office. The rustling of papers caught me off guard, and I stopped short, slapping a hand to my chest, a breath hitching in my throat.

There was a strange man behind the desk. He was young, maybe in his twenties, dressed in a sport coat and slacks. He seemed to be making calculations, using a graph paper and an antiquated adding machine. Apparently he was unconcerned with my passing.

I had the fleeting thought that he was a ghost. A fully solid ghost whose breath ruffled the adding machine tape, as he peered at the numbers. A ghost who chewed Juicy Fruit. I could smell it.

I stopped just past the desk and turned to look at him. “What are you doing in my uncle's office?”

He glanced up, seeming surprised that I had addressed him, but not alarmed. “I'm with the auction company.”

“For the estate sale?”

“Right.” He turned back to his work, indicating a lack of interest in engaging me. He punched in a few more numbers, studied them.

“You're getting stuff ready for the estate sale?”

“Right.”

“My uncle knows you're here?”

“Right.”

The one-word answers fanned the burn in my stomach. With the exception of the visit to Ruth's, it had been another upside-down and backward, down-the-rabbit-hole day, filled with events that, lumped together, made no sense. “The estate sale, which is . . . when, exactly?”

He punched in more numbers, snorted softly, erased something on his graph paper, rewrote in the spaces. “You'd have to talk to Herbert about that, ma'am.”

“But I'm asking you.” My inner dragon lady, the one who sent interns scurrying against walls, was rapidly coming to the surface. I'd been way too much of a wimp since my bedraggled arrival in Moses Lake.

“I don't have any information. Your uncle would be the one to talk to.” He began furiously punching numbers, muttering, “Mmm-hmm . . . mmm-hmm,” to himself, as if I were no longer in the room.