Surviving Valencia (10 page)

Thanksgiving is the worst holiday. No presents. Bad weather. The patriarchs of the family reeking of peppermint schnapps, clad in their bright orange bloody hunting coveralls, telling tales of hauling twenty point bucks three miles over barbed wire fences. Football games blaring. Food that only old people would like. But in 1986 I was literally counting the days for it, more salivatingly desperate with each dismal, dreary hour. The Whitney Houston calendar in my room had pink X’s marking off each passing day until my sister and brother were due to return. I had casually set out the Uno deck on the coffee table, hoping a family game would spontaneously erupt from it. I had made Chex mix like we learned to in Home Economics, imagining all of us munching away, laughing and shoveling handfuls of it into our mouths.

They were supposed to arrive Wednesday evening. All night my mother waited for them, a saucepan of hot cocoa simmering on the stove until it turned into dark, sweet, chocolate mud. My father and I waited up with her. She made us drink milk because she didn’t have enough cocoa for all of us. Again and again I rearranged the Barbie feast and touched up my hair with a curling iron. Nervous excitement filled the air. At one point my mother remarked, “Look at us, you’d think the president was coming.”

My dad fell asleep first, snoring on the recliner. Then I dozed off on the couch. But my mother stayed awake all night, adding milk to that pan of cocoa, stirring. At one o’clock in the morning, I heard her on the phone, calling Van’s dormitory to see if, because of the weather, they hadn’t left yet. She called again and again, leaving messages with the answering service because the whole dorm was empty.

At four o’clock she woke up my father and, together, they called the police. I started to get really scared at that point, but still did not believe that anything could truly be wrong. I was scared in a perverse, excited way. In that way that makes you think,
I can’t wait to tell the kids at school about this
, before the gray reality of tragedy sets in. Scenes cut from soap operas and primetime television played in my head, vivid images of police officers in smooth blue uniforms with shiny badges. My brother and sister would be wrapped in blankets, sipping black coffee at a bustling police station, safe from peril but with a dramatic red gash across Valencia’s lovely forehead and Van’s arm in a sling.

I imagined my parents and me rushing to them crying, “We’re so glad you’re safe!” We would all be one big happy family, hugging each other and crying. The worst would be over and we’d go home and play a board game. We were one of those middle class families with the attitude that anything truly wonderful or terrible only happens to other people. We were complacent, dull, and selectively oblivious. We subscribed to the superstitious mentality that made safety and luck one in the same. Believe in Jesus, lock your screen door and latch the gate, take your Flintstone vitamins. I was only eleven. How could I know anything different?

The police told my parents to relax and go to sleep. They asked what route Van and Valencia might have taken, and said they would send someone out to take a look.
Don’t worry
, they said.
These things turn out to be nothing
. But then at six thirty in the morning they came to our door.

I remember the doorbell ringing, and I woke up. I was still in the living room on the couch. My mother opened the front door and saw the police standing there in their uniforms, both with their mouths poised to speak and no words coming out, and she instantly knew. She started screaming and sobbing, and her knees bent beneath her. She fell forward, right at their feet wailing, “No, no, no.”

At the time I wasn’t sure why she was reacting to them like that. I remember thinking that she needed to pull herself together because these policemen probably had some important news for us. I got up and wrapped my blanket tight around me. My pajama top was thin and I remember feeling self-conscious in front of these important men. I stepped back into the darkness of the dining room, unsure of what would happen next.

My dad came running out from the hall. He picked up my mother and held her as she screamed and moaned. Snot was streaming from her nose and nothing seemed real.
What’s going on
, I wondered.
Are Van and Valencia dead?

Then my dad was saying to the policemen, “I think you’ve made a mistake.” His voice sounded flat and reasonable, like always. This frustrated me even more. After all, the police still had not spoken. At that point one of them asked, “May we come in?”

My father nodded and my mother continued crying, sobbing, wailing. The room was filled with her gasps.
They must be dead
, I thought.
This must be the real thing
. But I still wasn’t sure. It just seemed too impossible. Then I watched the police and my parents sit down in the living room. I waited to be noticed and to be sent away to my room, but somehow I became invisible.

As the police began their story I learned that yes, in fact, Van and Valencia were dead. I felt a selfish, irritated pang of resentment for being the last one to get it, the last to understand. A pang of bitterness that would be absorbed, digested, and forgotten, so that later in my life, when I remembered the night Van and Valencia died, there would only be the appropriate feelings of devastation and sadness attached to these memories, as it should be. A trick of self-preservation, a selective amnesia of sorts.

The scene that was unfolding was something like a movie, but happening in my living room. How was this ordinary moment holding such an unbelievable turning point? The snow had come down and the hot chocolate had thickened. I had finished one book and started another. My father’s snoring had been interrupted again and again by the purposeful banging of a wooden spoon against the saucepan on the stove, and somewhere, throughout this, my brother and sister had gone from this world to the afterlife. That was what we were being told. And in the span of time just before the doorbell rang to this moment, it had all caught up with us and now nothing would ever be the same. I wished the policemen weren’t here yet. I wished the time of not knowing had stretched a little longer.

I stood there in the dark, watching my mother breaking down, watching her expel the gritty devastation for all of us, and it was as if she was siphoning it away from me. I didn’t cry. I just stood there, becoming more and more numb.
Is this really happening? No, I mean is this
really
happening?
The more real it became, the farther away I seemed to float, up, up, far from myself, far from my parents and my house. I had a peculiar feeling, a silly almost hysterical feeling, like we were having the wool pulled over our eyes.
This is weird. Is this really happening? No, I mean is this really, really happening?

Like police on television, the men seated in our living room reconstructed an entire chain of events, working backwards from the final scene: It had started raining as Van and Valencia drove home to us, and the rain had turned to ice. And then the ice had turned to snow.

“Yep, snow on ice. ‘Wintery Mix.’ It’s a real dangerous combination,” said one of the officers, shaking his head like we were talking about a parade getting canceled. Wintery mix. Chex mix.

Fuck off. I hope you die in some wintery mix,
I thought. He was an idiot. He was saying the wrong things. He was the wrong person to be relaying this message. As a child I had contempt for stupid people. It takes the self-discipline of adulthood to overcome such animosity, to understand some people just aren’t smart.

“Then they lost control on that bridge by Red Wing,” he continued. I watched my mother pause from sniffling and gasping, open her mouth to speak. She made a raspy, gagging noise but no words came out. She wanted to interrupt, to say that they would not have gone that way, but my father put his hand on her arm and the officer continued. “The bridges always freeze first, you know, because there ain’t any ground under them. Just air, you know, and the rain falling on top, and, before you know it, the bridge is slick as a skating rink.”

“Slick as a skating rink,” parroted his partner, softly.

At five o’clock on Thanksgiving morning, the police found Van’s body lying on the banks of the Mississippi in tall, icy grass where he had landed. Dirt was in his mouth, all the way into his throat, said one of the policemen. He was a new, inexperienced cop, and didn’t know that families aren’t supposed to hear that kind of thing. He didn’t know that it’s details like that that never go away. I listened to it all, standing there in the shadowy dining room, softly touching Valencia’s class ring on my finger, feeling throughout it all that there was still the strong possibility of it being a dream. I never moved and my presence had no influence. It was as if I was watching a play; it would have been the same scene with or without me there.

“What about Valencia,” my mother cried, realizing at a point that they just kept talking about the weather, and about Van.

The officers looked dumbly at one another and finally the one who seemed to be in charge said, “Well, the car is in the Mississippi, you realize that, ma’am?” He made a noise, almost a laugh.

“In the Mississippi?
In it?
Isn’t the Mississippi
frozen?
” asked my mother, having regained enough composure to speak.

“No ma’am.”

“Oh,” she cried, covering her face, her body shaking.

“It don’t look real good for her, ma’am,” said his partner with bowed head respect.

My mother kept crying and my father kept holding her. They went with the police then, I guess to identify Van’s body, and my mother still believed Valencia was alive. My father seemed to have given up already, simply because these men wore uniforms, and that was enough to settle it.

I invisibly watched them putting coats and boots over their sweat pants and sweatshirts they’d been wearing. My dad had to help my mom. Her arms and legs didn’t seem to be working. Then they were going out the door and I was alone. I went into the kitchen and turned off the stove, and set the hot saucepan on the back burner.

My parents were too in shock to worry about what I was exposed to during the aftermath that followed. I am not blaming them, not this time, not for that.

When Van and Valencia died, every part of my world fell apart. Instead of the target I had been morphing into, I became invisible again. My mother went even crazier than she already was. I cannot say exactly how it affected my dad. He just went even more inside himself than before.

The policemen found Valencia and Van’s car at the bottom of the river two days later with the big machine that drags the water, but they never did find my sister. So I guess she is still out there, alone in that black water, even now, tonight, after more than twenty years.

Spring flew by in Savannah with no letters that I was aware of, and I began to forget to feel worried all the time. We bought hanging baskets of flowers for our porch and invited friends over to cook out on the grill. I took my old sewing machine down from the attic and began making sundresses for myself. As I got better, I decorated them with rickrack and added pockets, buttons, a sash.

“You look like 1972 invaded,” Adrian told me, reaching under the dress, grabbing my naked ass. He was pretty accurate, considering the patterns I had bought online were authentic 1970’s designs.

Adrian was busy with his art, and I traveled with him wherever he needed to go.

We spent a weekend in Atlanta in April and then a weekend in New York in May. He bought me bags of clothes in New York, so I would feel chicer on our next trip. Our life was sweet, filled with travel and socializing, creativity and constant, distracting new presents. “You’re my little Georgia Peach,” Adrian told me.

We were lazing in the backyard on Memorial Day, swinging in the hammock and drinking wine when Adrian brought up the subject of a baby.

“This seems like the right time, doesn’t it?” he asked, playing with my hair. I knew what he meant by the tone of his voice. For once I couldn’t argue. He was in his
forties
. What were we waiting for?

“We have the names picked out, and plenty of room,” he continued. “Let’s go for it.”

My head felt cloudy from the wine and I started to giggle. “We have names picked out?” We had never agreed on baby names. He was set on recycling some of his family’s ridiculous old names like Winston and Gladillia. “Your families’ names are
over
,” I teased him, “They are
obsolete
. So drop it.”

“Adrian Winston Junior, if it’s a boy, and Gladillia Cornelia if it’s a girl. You agreed to this two years ago, Mama.”

“Mama?” We were both laughing and in a heap in the middle of the hammock. What was left of the wine was spilling onto the ground.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what I call you now.”

“I never agreed to any of this! So if it’s a boy he’s being named after you, and if it’s a girl she’s being named after some dead aunt of yours? Where do I come in?”

“Stop calling our baby an
it
.”

“I’m serious, Adrian! Where do I fit in this equation?”

“You get to be pregnant, which I obviously don’t, and you get to make them little clothes that match all your little dresses.”

“You are on crack.”

“Your crack.”

“Stop, stop,” I wiped tears from my eyes, I was laughing so hard. “Winston sounds like a scrappy little dog.”

“Sure does.”

“Gladillia sounds like some kind of cleaning brush.”

“A spinning wand,” said Adrian.

“Something to clean a vagina.”

“You’d like that.”

“No I wouldn’t. It would hurt.”

“I think that’s actually where they first came up with it. There were some wooden gladillias in the 1833 Sears Roebuck catalog and my great-great-grandmother thought it was a nice name.”

“Okay, I will have your stupid baby.”

He moved in to kiss me and the hammock flipped us out onto the ground.

“Come on,” he said, when we finally stopped laughing, taking my hand and leading me inside.

As the saying goes, a watched pot never boils. A few days after Memorial Day, I was wearing one of my sundresses, the black and white gingham one with the yellow rickrack, coming back from a walk, definitely not watching my pot as the water lurched and bubbled. Adrian and I had just had a wonderful weekend together. Visions of babies were dancing in my head, and my fingernails were painted the most spontaneous shade of melon. My husband, who I had decided to let myself be madly in love with again, had left early to go to Atlanta and I was on my own, so cheerful and content I think I was actually whistling on my way back up our steps.

I opened the mailbox and pulled out good mail, the kind of stuff I love: Two fat fashion magazines; an artsy postcard from a local gallery; a padded envelope from Seattle, no doubt filled with more sundress patterns I had purchased online. And then I saw it: One of the terrible, hand-typed mystery letters. I began shaking and set all the other mail aside on the kitchen table. I held that letter in my hand and paced. I picked up the phone and began dialing the number of Adrian’s cell phone, hung up, started again, hung up…

From the back of a drawer in the kitchen I pulled an open, stale pack of cigarettes that had been left at our house after a party a year or two back. I’d been saving them for some reason. For this, I guess. I lit one of the crumbly cigarettes and inhaled, dying for some calm and clarity. Still shaking but feeling more in control, I returned to the front hall and closed the door, locking it. I need to be alone to really think. An open door invaded my ability to reason. Even an unlocked door could be so distracting that I could not think.

I then opened the letter, carefully. Inside was another one of those lined, fringed pieces of notebook paper. Wrapped around what looked like the back of Polaroids.

Stop. Set them down. Think.

Do you really want to see what is on the other side?

No.

Inhale. Exhale until you can’t see smoke anymore. Inhale again.

I missed smoking, being a smoker, carrying the etched silver antique cigarette case I used to love. Depending on what I found, I decided right then and there I might start again. If it was bad enough, I could smoke. I could do anything I wanted if it was bad enough. I could be free to smoke or become an alcoholic. Kiss the Coach and Prada purses goodbye, and curl up in an alley. Crawl right back inside myself and die.

Isn’t that the true you? Maybe just a little? Wouldn’t you like to be free? Admit it. That sounds kind of good.

I looked around me, at the white wainscoting and the Crate and Barrel hall table. The umbrella stand held umbrellas, of course. The fruit bowl of course held fruit and the vase of course held flowers. I was unmoved by my enviable life. The woman in the mirror was prettier than me and she was nodding to herself like a lunatic. She looked crazy, and thin. Rigid and elegant and scary. She looked like someone who would not invite me to her fancy parties.

I lit another cigarette.

Who are you being so good for?

No one.

I stared at the backs of the photos, hanging in that moment before everything changes.

Really. Why are you depriving yourself of everything you really want. He isn’t, you know.

I unfolded the paper and braced myself for pictures of Adrian and some stranger kissing, embracing, or worse… Nothing could have prepared me for what I actually saw.