Long Division (35 page)

“Gus, why did you wait so long to tell me? Why did you put the note in
Annie Harper's Journal
?” I take the ketchup bottle from our table and start sliding it back and forth between my hands.

“I guess I needed time to think things out. And I found out about the book as a result of all my Internet sleuth work, and so it just seemed right to give it time before I told you.” He rubs both his hands through his hair and they linger while they hold all the hair back, tightening the skin on his forehead and clearly revealing the red in his eyes.

“So Alden was more yours than mine,” I say, and I smile weakly. “You realize this makes our teen movie about looking for him so much more interesting.” Gus chuckles and picks up his beer. His forearms look so tense and troubled. He takes a sip.

“I guess so,” he says. “But at the same time, he's still an absence to both of us. And we were still nothing to him.”

T
oday my memoirs are being expressed as a multimedia art installation in a dark alleyway. There are LCD monitors and tapestries and a speaker that says my name forward and backward over and over again. Annie Harper. Reprah Einna. Annie Harper. Reprah Einna. There is red paint splattered across chicken wire. And there's a silent video of me that's a close-up of my face painted white. Except my lips are a shocking, bright red. I'm mouthing the words
No fucking way, no fucking way, no fucking way
over and over again. The installation is called
The Charisma of Coincidence.

 

The day after I found out about Our Brother Alden, I went to go tell Loretta. I figured telling Loretta would be good practice for telling my parents. I wanted to be their perfect, perfectly articulate child when I revealed it to them. And I felt like there was so much emotion plugging my ears and smudging my glasses
¹⁵⁴
that I just had to get some of it out. Gus and I had decided that after everyone knows, and if my parents and his dad and the two of us all want to get together and talk about everything,
¹⁵⁵
we can have a barbecue sometime next week.

When I arrived at Violet Meadows and checked in with Jean, she told me that Loretta was with the doctor and that I couldn't see her for twenty minutes. My stomach instantly spun, and I leaned over onto Jean's desk, resting my fingertips on the surface like two angry spiders.

“Is she okay?” I stuck my neck out and noticed that my movement had set all the bobblehead kitty cats on her computer into a steady, nodding fury. As if they were telling me not to fret.
Loretta, meow, just fine, meow.

“She's fine. Just a routine checkup. She's old, Annie. She sees a doctor once a month.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good.” And then I plopped into the chair across from Jean's desk even though I wasn't invited. Even though I could tell she was annoyed. “Hey, Jean?” I said. She spun her chair around and it squeaked kind of like a mewing cat and I wondered if she liked the sound. “Does anyone, you know, like family, ever come to visit Loretta?” Jean thought for a moment.

“Yeah. There's a niece that comes by every few months.”

“Oh. And how long has her husband been dead?” Jean rolled her eyes and yanked open a metal filing cabinet. Rifled through for Loretta's file. She opened it up across the desk. I leaned forward to peek.

“Ron Schumacher died in 1995.” Jean turned back to her computer, and I kept reading upside down. I was looking at this rubric of Loretta's basic facts.

“Shouldn't it say Captain Ron Schumacher?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Because her husband was a World War II veteran,” I said.

“No, he wasn't.”

“Yes, he was.”

“No. He wasn't.”

“Was too.”

“Was not.”

“Was too.” It felt like we could go on forever. Or at least until the end of recess. “He was in the navy, and they lived in Kansas, and then they moved to Washington when he got back. She has letters. He wrote poems about it.” See? See, stupid, flabby Jean!

“Loretta Schumacher has lived in Tacoma her entire life. Her husband lived in Tacoma his entire life. He was injured at a very young age in a logging accident and walked with a cane until he got sick and died. I know. I've talked to the niece. She doesn't come often, but she pays on time and she's very friendly when she's here. I don't know what kind of yarns Loretta has spun for you, Annie, but her husband was
not
a soldier and she definitely did
not
live in Kansas.”

“But what about her children? I know they come to visit. Ronnie? Opal? Diana, the rodeo queen?” Jean folded her arms across her chest and lowered her chin.

“She doesn't have any children, Annie.” And I stammered off a series of “buts” and “she saids,” and Jean just shook her head and raised her eyebrows, and with that gesture she nearly managed to destroy everything I thought was real and beautiful about Violet Meadows. Her look said that my believing Loretta's alternate life was more ridiculous than Loretta having invented it in the first place. And because I was so shocked and so confused and so crowded by Jean and her depressing, death-broker office, I made this frustrated grunting noise and said, “Whatever, Jean.”
¹⁵⁶
And then I stood up and left. I padded into the rec room and took a seat on a sofa next to a man named Henry who was watching
Jeopardy!
It was a very old episode on the Game Show Network. Alex's hair was dark and his face smooth. And even though I was sitting next to a shriveled man with a respirator, seeing the youthful exuberance of the trivia master made me feel ancient.

“What is salmonella?” Henry said and raised a finger toward the ceiling. How could Loretta make all that up? I thought. All the details and the anecdotes. The serious empathy and understanding she delivered to me while we drank tea and giggled about sex. Why would she lie to me? Or is she confused about the actual facts of her own life? Undiagnosed Alzheimer's, perhaps? I couldn't tell if I felt betrayed or if I was still incredulous, but I didn't have much time to think about it. Henry was saying “What is Montpelier?” when Jean poked her head out of her office and told me that the doctor was gone and that I could go in. If you still want to, she added.

I told Henry to have a nice afternoon and walked slowly
¹⁵⁷
down the hall toward Loretta's room. I stood at the doorway for many long moments, my fist suspended in the air, poised to knock, to enter, to waltz into a comfortable, chocolate-pudding-flavored lie. What do I do? Do I call Loretta on her bullshit? She's ninety-three; how can she still have bullshit? Do I just keep playing along? The last thing I want is for Loretta to feel like she's disappointed me. Maybe Jean was wrong. Maybe Loretta has been dispensing the sweet truth all along. And then my arm fell. I was thinking so hard that my fist just dropped and bumped along the wooden door weakly on its way down, like a poorly skipped stone barely lifting off a lake's surface. An unintentional, exhausted knock. I heard Loretta shuffling over to the door.

“Good afternoon, Annie!” She swooped her arm to present the gray room, and I walked in. Took my spot on the bed as I usually do. And as I plopped down on the quilt and she assumed her regular position in the rocking chair, I noticed the similarities to a patient/counselor situation. I was coming by, confused and muddled, for my weekly visit. Loretta was chipper, welcoming, open-minded. I lounged comfortably, primed to open my mouth and spill my nasty, turbulent guts to her. She sat upright: the voice of reason, clear as a bell.

“So, how are you?” she said.

“Pretty good,” I said. “Did your doctor's visit go alright?”

“Indeed it did. I think he's a little frustrated with my snail's pace of deterioration. I'm very healthy for my age, you know.” Then we both laughed.

“Yeah, Loretta, your youthful vigor is pretty damn impressive.”

“So, are things still rocky with David? Are you writing him more like we discussed?”
¹⁵⁸
Loretta said this like she was skeptical that I'd done anything to revitalize my relationship. But also in a way which revealed that she didn't blame me if I hadn't. I kicked my flip-flops off and folded my legs (criss-cross-applesauce style) up onto the bed.

“Not really,” I said. “Well. There was Helen dying, then I was in Boston, and not. Oh, Loretta.” I just couldn't get myself to start my story when my brain was still murky with confusion over the validity of hers. Then I looked at her for a long moment. I followed the lines around her eyes as they bent toward the blotchy redness on her cheeks. The wrinkles on her forehead and the ones around her mouth. How did they get there? Were the initial creases from worrying about Ron while he steered submarines off the coast of Normandy? Or were they from the years of grimacing while she helped him up the stairs to the local bank, his bum leg weighing down the marriage? And just when my wondering was about to plunge into a deeper series of imagined scenarios, all the wrinkles reversed. Each line—dozens of sine and cosine graphs—reciprocated and pulled up, and I looked up to her eyes and they were dancing and smiling in a way that transcended all war fronts and Kansas post offices and nursing homes in South Tacoma.

“Annie? Am I losing you? What were you going to tell me?” She waved a hand in front of my face, a gesture I imagined the V-Meadows staff used to check the status of their more fragile and life-wavering residents.

“Yes. Sorry. I'm here.” I asked Loretta if she wanted to hear a really weird, but true, story. I spouted off a lengthy disclaimer about the oddness of it all and an apology about how I hadn't told her anything about what had led up to it. And even though in the course of a few minutes Loretta's past had transformed from a clearly depicted, sweeping love story to a bundle of vagueness and uncertainty, for some reason, I didn't care. Maybe it's because I'm wildly selfish, but I like to think it's because I still
know
Loretta. Maybe she is a delusional story weaver, but I'm fairly certain that doesn't matter. I know that she likes lemon in her hot tea but not in her cold tea and songs with extended trumpet solos. I know that she listens and shares and comforts and compliments. And that she's been such an enormous friend to me. While I was explaining all the Alden backstory—how my parents had him, then didn't have him, and how I found out as a teen—I was thinking about how wise Loretta is. Maybe she's had several conversation partners while at Violet Meadows. Maybe she knows that changing her story so it relates to someone else's story will help that person cope with the more abrasive edges of our universe. At ninety-three, perhaps she's right sick of her true past. Why not concoct a new one to help a crazy young fool who probably needs it?

And I know that even though she might be a liar, Loretta is still a compassionate, feeling creature. It takes more than storytelling to constitute true phoniness. Loretta's fake past feels more authentic to me than Annie Harper the First's real one. She wept when I told her that Alden was killed just months ago. She lifted her hands to cover the drop of her jaw when I told her that Alden was Gus's half-brother.

“Isn't it nuts?” I said.

“Bonkers,” she said.

“And this is my
real life
.”

“Your
real life
.”

I gave Loretta a big hug when I left. She told me to call her if there was anything,
anything
, I needed to talk about. “Annie,” she said as I moved toward the door. “I've been here for a long time, and there are many people who, because of age or disease or whatnot, have become very, very confused. And the confusion is often frightening. Not knowing what you feel or what you think or how things really are. But the confused ones—I honestly think they're better off than the droolers. The ones whose minds have numbed and slowed and who don't even notice when a stranger is wiping off their behinds. That blind acceptance is far worse. At least when you're confused, Annie, at least you know that your brain is doing
something.
”