Seven Stories Up (19 page)

Only then
she
was sobbing. Mom.

She tried to stop herself at first, raising a hand to cup her face, but her fingers were over her eyes and her face was buried in my hair and I could feel her tears, her shaking. We were just like that, a mess, a family. I buried my face in her T-shirt. I felt like my body was coming apart at the seams, flying into pieces. I was in her lap. Too big, spilling out, but I needed to be there.

Mom leaned over me, resting her head on mine, and a wrenching cry ripped from her. An animal sound. Her chest heaved. Her body shook.

“It’s okay. I’m fine now,” I said. “I can breathe. I promise.” I looked up and took a deep breath. “See? You don’t have to worry. I’m fine.”

“I know, kiddo,” Mom whispered. Then she shuddered. “But sh-sh-sh-sh-she’s still g-g-g-gone!”

She?

Oh!
She
.

I reached up and pushed her hair from her face, saying, “It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

“She’s gone. She’s gone, and I—I—I’m an orphan
now,” Mom cried in a heaving voice. “Isn’t that f-f-funny? I keep thinking that. Can grown-ups be orphans?” She started to wipe her face with her sleeve.

I remembered
that
, that gesture, a sleeve wiping a tearstained face. Automatic. I remembered—Molly! Then all through me came a deep, slow ache. A heavy mourning, as I understood what had happened. What had
just
happened. Molly … was gone.

I
was here, was home, had made it, but she—

Tears started to roll down my face again, but now I was crying with my mother. We were together in our sadness, crying for two people, a girl and a woman.

Molly was gone, dead, cold. In the next room. In 1987. Where she belonged. It was okay. It was the
right
end. It was time, and yet, in a wash of fuzzy memories, it felt as if someone had wrenched me from a dream.

“I’ll miss her,” I said. “I’ll miss her so much, Mom.”

“I know you will, kiddo,” said my mom, straightening up. “We all will. She was an amazing woman.”

I nodded my wet face. But then I sat up. Because—what about the dandelion clock, the smile like a knife? “She—she
was
? Amazing?”

Mom laughed, a laugh with a sob stuck in it. “You have a better word for it? Of course, she wasn’t like
most
grandmothers, was she? When she was mad, boy howdy,
she was mad! But when she was happy, wow. She was a force of nature.”

Mom reached for a tissue and blew her nose. “I wish we’d made it back up here more often to see her. I wish we’d lived closer. But oh, she loved you, Annie, and how you made her laugh. Nobody laughed like Mom. I’ll always remember her that way, laughing. Won’t you?”

And then the strangest thing happened. Suddenly I did. A picture was forming in my mind of a tall thin woman with a head of gray curls, laughing. Her dark eyes snapping, her head tossed back. And somewhere in that face was Molly,
my
Molly, laughing too. Molly, her arms in a trash can. Molly on a fire escape. Molly, her quick fingers braiding my hair.

Then Molly was fading away, into the fog, and the gray-haired lady was back, and I was remembering moments. A day at the beach. A club sandwich. A bedtime story. A fight over a green jacket. A morning of baking Christmas cookies. And beneath all of that—a word, a single word, surfacing in my mind, bubbling up. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, she could laugh. Gosh, could she ever. Nobody laughed like … 
Gran
.”

Then that was all there had ever been.

The next morning Mom looked rumpled, with big bags under her eyes. Still, there was a ton to do, so she didn’t even bother to shower. She just chugged three cups of coffee in the café while I ate my waffles. Then we went back upstairs so she could put on some lipstick and call Aunt Ginny and Aunt Maggie to break the news.

While I made the bed and did the dishes in the sink, Mom sorted the bills that had piled up on the desk while Gran was so sick. She looked stressed. “I’ll need to call a lawyer about this stuff. I don’t know what kind of magic Mom’s used to keep this place running all these years. It’s so freaking complicated.”

Gran didn’t want a funeral. She’d asked to be cremated
and cast into the harbor, but we still had to visit the mortuary so Mom could sign a bunch of papers. I hated that place, with its slick leather furniture, and the shelves full of fancy death jars. Everything glossy and cold.

Back at the hotel, we rummaged in Gran’s jewelry box and closet. Mom sorted out the plastic pop beads from the pearls, while I tried on Gran’s rainbow of ball gowns from the fifties. Then we pawed through the knickknacks on her dresser together, little boxes full of dried corsages, fortune cookie fortunes, lost buttons, and one tiny tarnished spoon. After a few hours, we made tea and ordered up a round of Sneakypies, our favorite Hotel Calvert specialty, full of jam and cream to sustain us.

We packed a big trunk with the things we didn’t trust the movers with—Gran’s journals, the dolls she’d been collecting since she was a kid, her letters and pictures. There were
so
many pictures.

Gran’s photo albums were full of hazy memories, moments I could barely recall—Gran holding me up to an elephant at the zoo. Gran reading to me from her old copy of
The Secret Garden
. Gran watching me smash a cake on my first birthday. There were also people I didn’t recognize in the pictures, people she’d worked with at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, girls from her college, as well as folks she’d met on the jillion trips she’d taken over
the years. A week in Paris, an African safari. Gran had made friends everywhere.

It got late. Mom crashed for a while on the couch, but I kept working. When she woke up, I was leafing through the very last scrapbook. It was blue, with gold letters on the front that read
MY SCHOOL DAYS
. Mom raised herself off the couch and stared at me with bleary eyes. “Got anything good there?”

“Oh, just Gran.” I smiled. “I found this insane list she made. Pages of stuff she wanted to do someday—visit the pyramids, meet Fred Astaire, eat an entire lemon pie. What’s funny is that a lot of it is stuff
I’ve
always wanted to do. But guess how many she checked off.…” I shuffled through the pages.

Mom laughed. “Knowing Gran, I’m guessing all of them. Even Fred Astaire.”

“Yep,” I said. “All except one. She never became a nurse. It’s circled. I wonder why she wanted to do
that
?”

“No telling,” said Mom. “Hey—you know what
I
want to do? Eat a cheeseburger at the Buttery. With a vanilla milk shake. Right now. How about you?”

I nodded. “Sure, yeah.” But when I stood up, the scrapbook fell from my hands and hit the floor, where it split open along its spine. “Oh, Mom, I’m sorry,” I said, reaching for the pieces.

“It’s nothing we can’t fix with tape,” Mom said, sliding on her clogs. She finger-combed her hair. “Leave it. We have more important matters to address. I want mine with extra pickles.”

“Okay,” I said. But as I set the two halves of the scrapbook in the trunk, with all the news clippings and old dance cards, a single picture came loose and fluttered to the floor. When I reached to pick it up, I found myself staring down at a strip of photo-booth shots. Black-and-white images of two blurry girls. One was Gran, for sure. The other was a faded face I’d never seen before. Yet somehow, despite the scratched and stained photo, she looked familiar.

In the top shots, the girls were startled, unready. But in the last frame, Gran was hugging the other girl, with a huge smile, a fierce grin.
That
was Gran all over. Fierce. I stared at the picture.

“Hey, Mom!” I called. She was already at the door, waiting for me, her purse over one shoulder. “Mom, wait! Do you know who
this
is?” I held out the picture.

“Whatcha got?” Mom asked.

I pointed. “This girl with the braid. Is she a cousin? She looks like Gran, doesn’t she?”

Mom peered down at the picture and chuckled. “You’re right, there’s a resemblance. But she’s actually not
related. I’m sure Gran mentioned Annie to you. She kept that picture taped to her vanity for years.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” Then I looked again. “Really?
Annie?
”

“Yep,” said Mom. “I
know
Gran told you this story when you were little. You should listen better, kiddo. She was Gran’s best friend, but Annie got sick or something and moved away. I’m not exactly sure about the details. Maybe she even died? If memory serves, her family stayed in the hotel one summer.”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t remember anyone telling me this.”

Mom laughed. “Gran
insisted
we name you after her. She put her foot down about it, and you know how things went when Gran put her foot down.”

I smiled. “Yeah.”

“
That’s
why your legal name is Annie, not Anne.”

“Wow, I was named for some random kid you never even met?”

“Pretty much,” Mom said. “Though of course, if she’s still around, she’s not a kid anymore. She’d be Gran’s age now.”

I stared at the picture a little longer, then slipped it into my pocket as Mom reached for the door. “Come on, kiddo,” she said. “Time for supper. Past time.”

So we left the apartment, made our way through the hallways, down the elevator, into the lobby, where we waved goodbye to Anderson the concierge and Hassle the cat, latest in a long line of Hotel Calvert tabbies. We stepped out beneath the trees and street lamps onto the familiar gray bricks.

There was a soft breeze, and the moon was out. The Washington Monument gleamed white above us. The hotel windows were all lit up and golden. It was a perfect night, except for one thing. There was an ache, just beneath my ribs.

“I’ll miss this place,” I said. “I’ll miss it a lot.”

“Of course you will,” said Mom gently. She put an arm around me. “I’ll miss it too. But you know, we can always come back.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Only it won’t be the same.”

Mom stared at me a minute, then slowly she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I won’t lie to you.
Nothing
will be the same. But after a little while it will get easier. We were lucky to have her as long as we did. Try to think about it that way.”

I closed my eyes and felt the tears in them. I nodded.

“She loved you
so
much, Annie,” said Mom. “More than just about anyone.”

I nodded again, as a horn honked in the distance. “I loved her too.”

“She knew that,” said Mom. Then she grinned and shouted out, “Jeez, enough with all the feelings, already. I need a milk shake to go with my sadness. Let’s move!” She started walking quickly toward Charles Street.

But I didn’t follow her right away. I stood there on the sidewalk, alone, for one more second. I took a deep breath, and I smiled. Because suddenly the air smelled like cinnamon.

It was nice.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I’ve always loved old things. Antiques stores full of junk jewelry. Faded black-and-white photographs. Dusty dolls with china heads. Remnants of the past.

But if you’d asked me when I was a kid whether I liked History, I’d have shouted, “No way!” I thought History (with a capital
H
) meant memorizing a timeline of major world events. The Battle of the Bulge. The Magna Carta. President Roosevelt’s birthday.
Boring
.