Hyacinth Girls (7 page)

“You didn't tell her you were sending her home?” I asked, after hearing the bedroom door slam.

“I told her,” Bea said.

“Well, she didn't seem to know.” I felt a nastiness rising inside me. “How much money do you have left?” I'd given Bea an envelope of cash to pay for Callie that week, and if she was sending her home, she could just give it back.

“It's gone,” she said sourly.

I left without saying good-bye. When Callie dragged herself outside, I put an arm around her.

“You okay, Callie?”

She didn't answer.

“I know this is hard, but you shouldn't take it personally.” I mustered up as much charity as I could. “You know she's in pain and she's not a happy person.”

Callie blinked at me in the sunshine and then shook her head as if it wasn't worth talking about.

 

All My Interactions with Robyn Doblak, #4

For Rebecca/From Callie

Rebecca, remember when I was five and I stopped sleeping for a while? I was staying with Grandma Susanna and Grandpa Pat, and at night I waited for Mom. I would listen for the sound of her key, then the bedroom door would open and I'd see her in the dark. Her jacket smelled like cold air, and she'd whisper, “You still awake?”

Sometimes she'd let me sit up in bed, and I'd show her how Grandpa Pat taught me to whistle through my teeth or I'd show her a scab I was growing on my hand. Other times, she'd tell me what it was like. She told me about the beetles and worms and the tunnels underground and it didn't scare me. I wanted her to know it didn't scare me. I waited every night and squinted into the darkness until I heard her key and then I could relax. I wanted to go with her.

Grandma and Grandpa heard me through the walls. They heard me talking and asked me what was going on. Then they said I was making it up and playing a joke. I screamed and they sent me to my room. I thought Mom wouldn't come anymore. But that night I waited and waited and finally she came. Then Grandma Susanna got sick and you came to stay.

Remember when you heard about Mom's visits, and you wanted to talk to me? You looked me right in the eyes and asked what Mom had said and how she looked. I could tell you
were trying not to get too excited, and I decided I wouldn't tell you that Mom was just in her regular jacket. I said she wore a long sparkly dress with silver shoes and a veil. Then you asked if you could sleep in my room that night.

I remember you flossing my teeth and reading my favorite story about rabbits, then you lay down on the flip bed on the floor of my room. Sometimes when we lived in the old place and Mom was taking her classes at night, you would sit in my room if I had a bad dream. I could hear you breathing like then, and I started getting confused about where I was. I thought if I looked over one way there would be the blue bookshelf with stickers on it and if I looked next to that there would be the dresser with the painted yellow dog. But when I looked over, they weren't there and I remembered I was in a different room and even the window was in the wrong place. I wriggled around and heard someone turning over.

“Are you okay?”

I sat up. “Mom?”

“It's Rebecca.”

I lay back down and the mattress creaked. I looked at the little cracks of light under the door and waited to hear her footsteps and the sound of her key. I knew you were waiting too.

“Sometimes she's late,” I said.

“When you see her, is she happy?”

“Yeah. She goes ‘hee hee hee.' ”

“Sometimes I like to imagine, too,” you said. Then you started telling me how if it was another year and you and my mom were still in high school you'd be in this same exact room listening to music. Mom would be where I was and you'd be on the flip bed, and when Mom fell asleep you'd look out the window at the same piece of sky.

“I miss her,” you said.

“You have to listen for the sound of her key,” I said.

“Okay.”

I remember looking at the window and starting to feel sticky. I pulled on the neck of my pajamas and then my blanket slipped to the floor. Mom still hadn't come. I knew how much you wanted to see her and I could feel how hard you were trying. You were the one who believed me, and when you asked me those questions about Mom it seemed like you believed I was older and smarter than anyone you'd ever met. I'd felt how important my answers were, but now Mom wasn't here and I had the same feeling I always got when I'd lied or was trying to trick someone. Sticky icky. I wanted to shove you out of my room like it was your fault Mom wasn't here. I reached for the light switch, and the lampshade rattled.

“What's wrong?” You were blinking.

“She's not coming.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” You breathed in and out for a long time. When you spoke, your voice was clammy. “Maybe if we go to
sleep, she'll visit us in our dreams. In the morning, we can tell each other everything she said to us.”

I think it was then, when I was five years old, that I realized I couldn't do what you wanted. You wanted us to lie and you wanted to pretend. That was when I understood that what I'd felt before had been a trick—a trick I was playing on myself. Mom couldn't come now because she hadn't come before. Dead was dead and dead was gone. That was what everyone kept saying. I didn't turn the light off for a long time and you didn't tell me that I had to. I decided I'd never fool myself again or anybody else.

But then I changed my mind last Christmas, after I got this message from Robyn:

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: RE: RE: You asleep?

Date: Sun, Dec 28 2008, 23:18:02

So I've been lying here in bed for about the last eighteen hours, and my mom's like, WHAT ARE YOU DOING, HAVING A STARING CONTEST WITH THE CEILING? And I'm like, I GIVE UP!!!! I CAN'T FACE THE WORLD!!! Then I remembered about you and the ketchup and I felt the littlest bit better. It's like people look at us and they think they know all our secrets, even before meeting us or anything they've got this whole idea. Blargh. *She vomits* Pooor Robyn. I'd rather be Evil like you were, or maybe a Pit Bull. Anything's better than feeling so pathetic.

I told my mom if we got a dog I wouldn't feel so shitty, and she was like, “Robyn, don't you know? Your dad was just joking.” And I did, but still. My dad had this whole plan. When he was really sick, he decided he'd find a way to come back. He was going to reincarnate as a dog, or haunt one, whatever. He said we'd have to pick him out in a pet store and call him Papa. Feed him lots of steaks, put on the Mets when they were playing. He'd lie around the house all day, protecting the family, and I knew it was a joke, but I swore I was going to do it.

xoRobyn

September 12, 2009

On the ninth anniversary of Joyce's death, a Saturday this year, I packed the rosebush, the hyacinth bulbs, and a small shovel in the car. Then I went inside to make French toast.

French toast was an old favorite, and I fried it in butter the way Joyce had taught me. It smelled of cinnamon and lazy Sunday mornings, Joyce standing next to the stove in a sweatshirt, cutting the cooked bread into pieces that Callie could pick up with her fingers. I still preferred the flat, sweet taste of the cheaper artificial maple syrup, and I squeezed the plastic bottle so that a heavy brown stream covered my slice. But I wasn't really hungry and I managed to swallow only a few small bites.

When I knocked on Callie's door around eight, she was still asleep, nestled deep under the covers. I turned on the light and hesitated in her doorway while she blinked at me with unfocused morning eyes.

“Hey, hon. I made French toast.”

She groaned. “I can't move.”

“You exhausted?”

“I think I'm sick.”

I crossed into her room and lay my hand on her forehead. Her skin was cool and slightly grainy, as if a handful of sand had been rubbed just below the surface.

“What hurts?” I asked.

“Everything. My stomach. I can't get up.”

She bunched up her face and closed her eyes as if she were doing an impression of someone dying from a terrible, agonizing disease. The plague, or maybe smallpox. When Callie was younger, she'd sometimes faked illnesses to get attention. It was her toe, her ear, her elbow. Once, she'd complained that her hair hurt. Joyce always stroked her head and made a fuss, feeding her pieces of candy that she pretended were medicine.

“Gosh,” I said. “Are you in a lot of pain?”

“Mmmm-hmmm.”

“Show me where your stomach hurts.”

Callie waved her hand vaguely over the covers.

“Is it on the lower right-hand side? That could be appendicitis.”

“Nuh.”

“I'll get the thermometer,” I said, rushing out as though every second counted.

While Callie held the thermometer under her tongue, I looked around her room. The shelves above her desk were filled with pinecones, seed pods, and bits of twigs and bark. On the top shelf there was an open canister of banded feathers and then smaller, unidentifiable lumps she'd collected at the nature reserve. Something like honeycomb, something else spiny and gray. She labeled everything, and I knew that each new specimen had been carefully selected and positioned, organized by some complex scientific order that I couldn't understand.

The thermometer beeped and Callie's temperature was normal. “Let me take your pulse,” I said, consolingly.

I held her limp wrist in my hand and counted as I looked at my watch. It was normal.

“Hmmm. A little fast,” I said. “Does it feel fast?”

“Yeah.”

“Just try to relax for a minute. I'll get you a cup of tea to settle your stomach.”

I put together a tray for her with a plate of warm French toast, two Tylenol, and a cup of ginger tea. I wondered whether she'd smile if I brought in some of those white and pink licorice candies that Joyce used to pretend were medicine, but I didn't have any, so I just stirred extra sugar into her drink. I was still hoping that we could be on the road to Cansdown before ten if I gave her enough sympathy.

Callie sat up in bed as I passed her the tray. She was wearing the same wrinkled T-shirt she'd worn the day before. There was a picture on the front of Jimi Hendrix riding a snowboard. She'd bought it used, for three dollars, but then she wouldn't let me wash it. She was in her second week of high school, and was trying to look enigmatic. Too cool or cynical or jaded to wear school colors to her first pep rally. “It's meaningless,” she had told me when I'd mentioned school spirit. “The color I'm wearing won't make any difference.”

Now she glanced down at my French toast and frowned. “I can't eat this.”

“Oh. Then just leave it. Do you think I should call the doctor?”

She shrugged, brought the tea to her lips, slurped.

“How is it?”

“Okay.”

“Did you eat anything strange yesterday? Could you have food poisoning?”

“It's probably a cold,” she said. “I just need sleep.”

“Well, I won't go today if you're sick. If you're too sick to go, then I'll stay home with you.”

“I can stay on my own. I'm fourteen. I stay home all the time.”

“But what if you got worse? I'd need to be around to get you to the doctor…or the hospital,” I said, hamming it up.

“It's not
that
bad, Rebecca.”

“But I know you wouldn't miss today unless you were sick. We'll just reschedule and bring the flowers another day.”

“Let me see how I feel after the tea,” Callie said.

“Okay. But we won't go if you still feel horrible. I'm sure that missing it this once won't be the end of the world. Right?”

Twenty minutes later, I heard the shower running, and I knew that she was coming. We left for Cansdown just before ten, and although Callie was wearing the same dirty T-shirt, I didn't say a word.

My mom didn't approve of our twice-a-year visits to the cemetery. She thought it was the equivalent of watching a weepy movie or staring at pictures of starving orphans: it was unnecessarily morbid, it would end badly. She didn't realize that thinking about Joyce was something we did already, every day. It wasn't a choice, and it wasn't always sad. It was just a way of remembering and coping and keeping her in the air.

Callie's old grief counselor was the one who'd first suggested we write the letters to Joyce. The McKenzies had kept Callie away from the funeral because they thought she was too young to understand, but by the time I became her guardian, a year later, it was clear that hiding the
truth hadn't made it hurt any less. The counselor explained that writing letters would help Callie to finally grieve, as well as to negotiate a new kind of relationship with Joyce. When we wrote to her, she lived in our words. When we thought or spoke about her, she wasn't gone. There was an absence but also an opening: we could find ways to keep her alive.

Together, we'd placed a stone in the shape of a heart on Joyce's grave, and left our first letters anchored underneath. By that point, fewer things were cluttering her plot, and it made me feel calm to see it.

In the early months after Joyce's funeral, I'd become upset when I noticed the mementos that had been left on her grave. There were cheap gas-station bouquets, dirty yellow candles, a Santa Claus ornament with a mean silver hook rising out of his cap. Someone had left a Beanie Baby that was now rain-soaked, and a bag of orange circus peanuts—a thing I'd never seen her eat in her entire life. It didn't make sense, and anyone who wandered past would've got the wrong idea completely. They would've imagined that Joyce was some kind of sentimental dimwit. But I knew that she would roll her eyes at the pile of soggy junk and die laughing at all those cheap flowers.

There'd been a couple of articles in the local newspaper after her death, and the only explanation I could come up with was that some well-meaning strangers had read about her and decided to drop off this meaningless trash. Anyone who'd really known Joyce wouldn't have tried to insult her this way. One day, I collected all the dirty trinkets and carried them to the garbage can at the edge of the parking lot. Then I went back and picked off the plastic flowers, the photos of babies I didn't know. Those went in the garbage, too. When her grave was clear, it felt more like her again.

By the time Callie and I laid the heart-shaped stone on her grave, the
frayed pink ribbons and stuffed toys didn't upset me as much. I knew that I could clear them off like ordinary trash. Over the years, these things slowed to a trickle and then finally stopped. But we still came here regularly to leave our letters for Joyce.

After the exit for Cansdown, I drove along the route I always used to get to the cemetery. I passed a dilapidated motel with a single truck parked out front, low industrial buildings, wholesalers, and empty parking lots strewn with garbage. Cansdown was no worse than it had been when I was a kid, but my years of living in Pembury had made it seem even shoddier. The endless auto shops, the scrubby weeds sprouting from the asphalt, the dismal places where you could cash a check. The recession wasn't helping, but I knew that the blue tarpaulin used to patch the fence outside the used-car lot had been hanging there for years.

The cemetery gates were open, and as I drove up to the parking lot, Callie began to stir. She'd been dozing for most of the drive, and there was a bright red mark on her cheek from where it had pressed against the door. She tilted her head back as she shook out her hair. Then she shimmied her shoulders, stretched her long legs. Sometimes it took my breath away, how at certain angles, with a shrug or a yawn, she was her mother exactly. I was glad she'd come today; I was relieved I wasn't alone.

“Okay, Cal, let's give your mom those roses.”

In the trunk of the car, the rosebush had wilted. White petals had fallen to the floor. Callie had chosen it the day before. I'd told her she could buy whatever she wanted, and after she disappeared inside the garden center, I'd filled a bag with hyacinth bulbs. Afterward, I'd wandered the aisles and finally found her squatting beside a row of rosebushes.

“Roses are a great idea,” I'd said.

It was only then that I noticed the color of the blooms she'd chosen.
They were a deep purplish brown, almost black. They were hideous, actually. Ugly and dead-looking.

“Do you think your mom would want black roses?” I asked carefully.

Callie pursed her lips. “I don't think she cares.”

Then her mouth twitched, like she was about to smile, and I realized she was making fun of me. Or of Joyce. Either way, it was disrespectful. But then she seemed to realize and she tried to make up for it. She had walked over to the white rosebush, glancing up at me for approval, and it wasn't until now, as I cradled the root ball in my arms, that I realized the cemetery might not even let us plant something so big.

Callie let the shovel bang against her leg as we made our way over. The cemetery was the largest in Cansdown, and it mixed rich and poor, northsiders and southsiders. Joyce's mother had died of a stroke and was buried here less than a year after her daughter. And Autumn Sanger was here, too; I'd visited her grave once. As we passed Autumn's row, I remembered hearing the news. She'd been missing for several days, and Joyce and I kept trying to summon her. We whispered her name into the grass, listened for her voice in the whir of sprinklers. If only she'd tell us
whose
basement, we could break in and save her. Then Aunt Bea found us in the yard. She crossed her arms and told us, “They found her. She drowned. She washed up under the docks this morning.”

Callie had got ahead of me and I hurried along to catch up. I placed the bush at the foot of Joyce's grave, and in the sun, the stones seemed to waver, sharp, then blurred. I blinked as Callie stuck the shovel into the ground, beginning the hole to the right of Joyce's headstone. She didn't check with me first—she just started digging. I took out my pile of letters, and watched as Callie lifted out the soil. Her hair was matted against her neck in sweaty clumps and she looked uncomfortable in her oversized shirt.

“Let me do some,” I said, but she didn't stop. The earth came up
quickly, and I knelt on the ground, holding the letters we'd written for Joyce. Then I lifted up the heart-shaped stone. Opened the plastic folder underneath. And in that moment, I saw the red ink.

What the hell?

“What's wrong?”

On pink-lined paper, the red words slanted:

Your daughter hurts people. She threw the paint and sent the picture. Callie deserves to die like you
.

If I'd expected it, I might've hidden it, but my mind wasn't ready. I hadn't thought of Robyn Doblak in weeks, maybe longer.

Callie had stopped digging when she heard me gasp.

The red handwriting looked evil, tipping backward on the page. I dropped it on the ground like it was powdered with anthrax, but when Callie reached for it, I tried to grab it back.

“Cal!” I said. But she already had it.

In the bright sunlight, she stood as still as a statue. Her face was pale, as if a fine film of dust had settled on the surface. I snatched the paper out of her hands as she wobbled and then started to sink. She didn't cry out, she simply collapsed to the ground. Then she arranged her legs in front of her, dangling wrists over knees.

“Put your head between your legs,” I coached, thinking of my old dizzy spells.

She dropped her head and I rubbed small circles on her back. “I'll go to the police,” I told her. “I won't let her get away with this. Just try to breathe. Breathe slow, honey.”

She spoke from between her legs.

“I told you I was sick. I shouldn't even be here.”

I touched her hair, stroked it. It was slippery under my fingers, and
I watched her back rise and fall with every breath. It was a shock, of course, finding out somebody hated you. Hated you enough to threaten you, to find your mother's grave.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I don't understand what's going on.”

“She wouldn't have wanted me to come if I was sick!”

“Callie,” I said. “Has Robyn done anything like this before?”

With her face against her knees, she looked like a very small child playing hide-and-seek, waiting to count to one hundred so that I could hide.

She shook her head, still hiding her face.

“She hasn't contacted you until now?”

“Nuh.”

“I'm gonna get you home,” I said. “Are you okay to stand up?”