House Arrest (13 page)

Outside the window, fog wrapped around stunted evergreens.

“She’ll be over any minute with her folks. The rest still live here. They’ll all be glad to see you, you know.”

“I’ve tried to forget this place, these people. Now I have to make conversation?”

Anna just looked at me.

“Do you keep in touch with them?” I asked.

“Sure, especially Laura,” Anna said. “She was my best friend when we were kids. When Zoe was born, when Sam was useless, Laura saved my sanity. She’s a physical therapist, so she knew about spina bifida. She took two weeks vacation and stayed with us.” Anna stepped closer to the bed and gripped both my hands.

“First,” she said, pulling me to stand. “First, we make a salad to feed twenty-five people. Then you can worry about what to say to them.”

The large country kitchen was warmed by the wood cook stove. Aunt Ruth leaned over the open oven, basting three dozen cod fillets arranged in crowded rows on foil-lined cookie sheets. Her upper arms hung slack, with empty sleeves of skin.

“Welcome home.” Carla’s hug was a cloud of garlic and dill.

“About time, Stranger.” Marilyn turned from stirring a steaming pot on the stove and opened her arms. I wished I could hide in her soft shoulder for hours, to avoid looking at Carla’s freckled face, so much like Momma’s.

Aunt Ruth handed me a plastic sack of romaine lettuce. “Start the salad?”

Washing lettuce leaves, remembering to tear them into the bite-sized pieces Aunt Ruth insisted on, felt utterly familiar. When the back door opened, I had no trouble recognizing Laura and her parents.

“Too bad it takes a death to get us together.” Laura hugged me hard, and then leaned back and looked into my face. “Here’s the plan. A cousins’ get-together tomorrow afternoon at my folks’ house. If the island gods listened to the Weather Channel, it’ll be a nice day and we’ll hike to Fox Rocks. Wear boots, okay?”

I nodded. What could we possibly have to say to each other after so many years?

“It’ll be great.” Laura put her arms around me for another hug. “Our own reunion.”

•

Lying in bed that night in the back room I had once shared with Momma, I couldn’t sleep. My nerves felt taut, zingy. I tried to match my breathing to Anna’s soft snoring. Sleep never came easy, but my usual methods of tricking my brain into slumber mode failed. Nothing worked, not even the guided self-imagery Chad taught me. He had helped me choose a photo from a travel magazine—a small thatched hut in a seaside Mexican village—the perfect fantasy location, he said, empty of any messy real-life memories. Perfect, except I was still awake.

I might have dozed off for a few hours, but awoke with the weak morning light. I eased the kitchen door closed behind me and walked into the misty yard. The ghost of the early ferry passed and turned into the channel, sounding its forlorn greeting.

Just beyond the garden now desiccated by frost, at the cusp of the rocky slope to the water, stood the old swamp maple tree. The step boards had broken away, leaving rusty nails sticking out from the trunk. Didn’t any of Ruth’s grandchildren love the tree house? Or was it off limits? I pulled the wheelbarrow to the tree. By climbing on its upturned belly I could reach the thick bottom branch. I put my arms around the old tree, my cheek damp against the bumpy bark, then climbed to the walled wooden platform, wedged firmly in the embrace of the thick branches.

My cousin Marilyn had built the tree house. When I arrived on the island in early spring, the middle-school students were registering for the next year’s classes. In her enthusiasm to be a carpenter, Marilyn announced at the dinner table that she had signed up for wood shop instead of home arts. Uncle Mitch lectured her about appropriate activities for a twelve-year-old lady. When Marilyn insisted, her father had the last word. “You want to end up a damn commie like your Uncle Arnie?”

Marilyn abandoned wood shop to the boys and the tree house to me.

The branches now barren, I had to imagine the thick walls of leaves that first summer, followed by the smoldering autumn colors that made my chest swell and burst at the same time. The week my father went to prison, I stared at the rocky coastline and harbor through the bare branches, bereft of all but a few brittle leaves. I had just turned eleven, but I promised myself I would take the ferry off the island for good, the minute I was old enough.

“Emily?” Anna stood at the base of the tree, wrapped in the blanket from her bed. Her swan neck curved back, her face open and sunny in the gray light. “Can I come up?”

“If you dare. I’m not in a cheerful mood.”

“Big surprise.” Anna struggled a little climbing the tree. But then, she hadn’t had my years of practice.

We sat facing each other, our feet propped against the opposite wall and the blanket tenting across both our bodies.

“You thinking about Ivan?” Anna asked.

“Him and everything else.” I shifted my bottom carefully on the splintery wood. “The tree house shrunk.”

Anna smiled. “This always was your favorite place, wasn’t it?”

I nodded.

“I remember you as a kid, squirreled up here in the dying maple leaves,” Anna said. “What was so special about this place?”

I couldn’t explain it.

But Anna seemed to know. “I think everyone has a place like this. A home place.”

“What’s yours?”

Anna didn’t hesitate. “Wherever Zoe is.”

“Let’s call, see how she is.” I shivered and pulled the blanket higher around my shoulders.

“Later. After the service, after the hike with Laura. Uncle Mitch said today will be warmer, before a storm blows in this evening.”

•

I stood with Anna and Laura among granite gravestones on the sunny slope, swaying back and forth in time to the chanting of the rabbi from Rockland. Islanders usually went to the mainland for services, but Ivan was the last of his generation and everyone agreed he had to be buried on his island. Aunt Ruth wept into her handkerchief and fingered the torn black ribbon pinned to her coat. Grandpa Ivan had two children—Aunt Ruth and my Momma, Jemma. But his three brothers had been more prolific and most of their offspring stayed on the island to populate Saperstein Neck. My Portland friends hadn’t believed that Jews lived on the island.

“How did a clan of eastern European Jews end up on a rocky spit on an island in Maine?” Chad once asked me.

I answered him in an unconscious mimic of Grandpa Ivan’s accent. “Better we should stay in Poland?”

I couldn’t concentrate on the service. As predicted, it was twenty degrees warmer than the day before and I unbuttoned my jacket. My eyes felt scratchy and restless. My gaze jumped back and forth—from the distant view of the bay over the tips of evergreen trees to the small cluster of relatives gathered around the gravesite. To my parents’ graves, just a few yards up the hillside.

Then the mourners’ Kaddish was over and I took my turn shoveling a small mound of earth onto the pine coffin. Why did tossing some dirt into a hole relieve some of the pressure in my throat? Why should the ritual be comforting, when I never went to synagogue and wasn’t sure if I believed any of it?

I did remember the customs. Next we would all walk back to Ruth’s house, where the mirrors had been covered with cloth. I would help serve the chicken and lentil soup and dark bread. Ruth and Mitchell would sit shiva for the rest of the week. Family would come every day and visit with them around the long-burning candle, telling stories about Ivan and his brothers and their wives and how life used to be. I could picture their comfort with each other and the easy conversation.

But I wanted to get home, to Zoe and Pippa. The next day was Thanksgiving.

“Emily?” Anna held out her hand. Several round gray pebbles balanced on the palm. “For your parents?”

I had never performed the ritual of placing pebbles on their tombstones. I had never come back to visit their graves. Anna took my hand in hers, cupping my palm into a cradle for the stones, urging my fingers to curl around them.

“They’re lucky stones,” she said.

I jerked my hand away from hers and stared at the pebbles. When we were kids we all collected lucky stones, each encircled with a perfect ring of a different color embedded in the substance of the rock. These were a light gray with charcoal bands separating each stone into two perfect halves. I rubbed my finger around the ridge of charcoal, a coarse vein of rougher mineral.

“No thanks.” I turned away from Anna and walked down the hill alone. I let the pebbles drop into my jacket pocket.

•

It was mid-afternoon by the time Anna and I finished helping Carla and Marilyn clear and wash the dishes and squeeze leftovers into the refrigerator. The four of us walked down the road to Laura’s parents’ house. The other cousins were waiting in the kitchen, watching a pot of mulled cider simmering on the stove.

“Ready to hike?” Laura asked.

Sarah looked around. “Where’s everyone else?”

“My gang begged off,” Bea said. “Jet-lagged.”

“I flew in from the west coast too,” Sarah said. “I’m beat. Let’s sit and talk. It’s too cold to hike.”

“That’s what happens when you move to LaLa Land,” Carla said. “You turn into a weather wimp.”

“And you forget how to buy boots.” Marilyn pointed at Sarah’s fashionable suede footwear. “We only have an hour till dusk. Let’s take a quick hike up to Fox Rocks to remind the city folks what splendor they left behind. Then we can come back for that hot cider.”

“Sounds good to me.” I was surprised to hear my voice. Walking sounded better than talking.

It was warm climbing the hill and my brain felt fuzzy with lack of sleep. I unbuttoned my coat. In front of me, Anna took off her jacket and tied the arms around her waist. It swung like a skirt against her legs with every step. Within a few minutes, glimpses of deep blue teased through the bare branches.

I slipped my hand into my pocket. The stones were smooth and hard. As I rubbed them, they grew warm, then inexplicably hot, electric against my fingertips. I wanted to throw them into the bay. Or take them into my mouth. To singe my tongue, to sizzle in saliva. Anything except place them reverently on my parents’ graves.

What would it signify, to place the stones? Would it mean forgiving Daddy for firebombing draft board records to save lives? Forgiving myself for never once visiting him in prison? Forgiving Momma for standing by him so completely she dissolved into a shadow when he went to prison? Forgiving my ten-year-old self for begging her to abandon him during the trial, to stay with me on the island instead?

After the trial, Daddy went to prison. Momma returned to the island to share my small back bedroom at Aunt Ruth’s. Momma was still young, but she smelled old, a stale sour odor under the peach shampoo. On the first Sunday of every month she and Ruth would take the long trip down to the federal prison in Danbury. They always asked me to go, but I refused and they never insisted. My father wrote me letters, every single week.

His first letter from prison came about a month into fifth grade. I hadn’t wanted to go to the dinky island school. I missed my friends in Portland. Aunt Ruth had promised that everyone would’ve forgotten all about my father’s arrest by September. But the postmaster must have said something about the return address to his daughter. She was in my grade. When Carla and I sat down with her at the long table next to the window in the lunchroom that day, the postmaster’s daughter stood up, mumbled something to her friends, and they left.

“Ignore them,” Carla had said. I glanced at her, leading our hike. Even then she was determined. That day, she had continued chatting about the spelling word she missed on the quiz: collateral. The postmaster’s daughter and her friends never taunted me. I almost wished they had. Instead, there was an invisible vacuum around me that no one crossed, except my cousins.

After school that day, when Aunt Ruth handed me my father’s first letter from prison, I did not open it. I never opened any of them. In the odd, self-absorbed way children reason, I believed that by not reading his letters, I could protect my Momma. I never understood why she didn’t go to prison too. Maybe the cops had forgotten about her. If I wasn’t careful, the head cop would smack his head with the back of his hand, in a cartoon gesture of remembering, and stick her in the cell next to Daddy. If I kept silent, if I never opened an envelope, I could keep her safe.

•

Dusk blurred the outlines of the boats and buildings ringing the harbor, erasing the clear line between shore and sky. Back at Laura’s, the cider welcomed us home with the aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg. We lined our boots up along the mud room wall, piled coats onto cast iron hooks, and settled onto the soft cushions of the sofa and easy chairs in the circle of warmth.

Laura looked around the room and raised her cup. “Well, here we are. The clan of the long-necked women.”

“Long necks are graceful and refined, like swans,” Sarah said.

“You’ve been in LaLa land too long, cousin,” Laura said. “Maine swans are mean.”

Carla looked around. “When’s the last time we were all together?”

“Annette and Nathan’s wedding,” Sarah said. “Except you couldn’t come, Emily.”

“I hate it that we never see each other.” Laura jiggled her foot while she talked, just like she did when she was eight. Laura never could sit still.