Remarkably Bright Creatures(70)

I will do everything I can to help her fill it.





Some Trees


The tower of tea towels threatens to topple as Tova adds another to the top. Stacks of this sort cover the floorboards of her attic. Above, the polished beams are bathed, cathedral-like, in the afternoon light streaming through the large picture window. Tova’s disposition, however, is less sunny. She cannot stand piles.

Will was a notorious maker of piles. Receipts, stale mail advertisements, magazines he’d already read twice, scraps of paper upon which he’d jotted some note or another that even he couldn’t decipher. In Will’s view these things needed to be kept. When Tova would nag him about the clutter, he’d simply collect the detritus into a stack, square off the corners, and plop it on the edge of some counter or credenza, with a satisfied remark. See? Nice and tidy.

Tova would wait until he dozed off in the recliner, and then, with a sigh, would shepherd the junk to its proper place, which was occasionally the filing cabinet, but more often the trash bin. When Will’s cancer generated enough paperwork to overstuff the small cabinet, Tova bought another, expanding her filing system so each page from the insurance company, every medical bill, had a proper home. Caring for her husband as the cancer worked its way through his organs may have taken over her life for a time, but she would not tolerate the paperwork taking over her kitchen counters.

“Quite a disaster, isn’t it?” Tova directs this question at Cat, who patters up the attic stairs. A gray tail appears a moment later, popping up like a question mark behind a box. The cat winds his slender body between the stacks with impossible grace, arriving at a patch of sunshine near Tova’s side without disturbing so much as a speck of dust. He casts a bored glare before lowering onto his side and closing his yellow eyes.

Tova smiles, allowing a smidge of her crossness to melt away. “I suppose you tromped all the way up here to nap on the job, didn’t you?” She strokes Cat’s side, which starts to rumble, purring.

The room is divided into three categories. It’s a start, anyhow. A system. Tomorrow, Barb and Janice are coming over along with Janice’s son, Timothy, and two or three of his friends. Voluntary labor for all of this sorting and hauling. Tova promised to order pizza for everyone, even though eating delivery food when her freezer is full of casseroles seems indulgent. But she does need the help, and better for it to come from people she knows rather than allowing a team of strangers to descend upon her family’s heirlooms. Besides, Barb and Janice have been calling nonstop, offering to help. This will mollify them.

The first category of items, and by far the smallest, is for things she’ll take to Charter Village: a couple of Erik’s old toy cars, a handful of photographs, what’s left of her mother’s porcelain tea set, which she fancies she’ll take coffee in once in a while. It’s quite a shame so much of this has gone unused for years. Decades.

The slip of tissue that had wrapped the saucer gets wadded into a ball and tossed into the section nearest the door: trash. Here, too, goes a large volume of photographs and other memorabilia. Although it feels odd to discard these things, so meticulously saved, where else could they go? Janice suggested a storage unit, but why? There is no one left to want them.

Then there’s the largest pile: the donation pile. A truck from the local secondhand shop is scheduled to do a pickup next week. Most of Erik’s toys are in this pile; perhaps they’ll be played with by someone else’s grandchildren. Alongside the old toys is her mother’s bone dinner china. It survived a trip across the ocean, so it should make it through a journey to the thrift shop downtown; whether anyone will buy it once it arrives there is another question. First, she’d tried to give it to Janice, but Janice said she didn’t have room. Barb, likewise, apparently does not have room among her elephants. She had considered offering it to Mackenzie, the girl who works the desk at the aquarium, or even the young lady who runs the paddling shop next to Jessica Snell’s office. But young women don’t want bone china anymore. They’ve no use for old Swedish things. They have their own dinnerware, probably from Ikea. New Swedish things.

Also in the donation section are five wooden Dala Horses, straight-legged figurines with their delicate paintwork in shades of yellow and blue and red. The sixth one, the one Erik broke, has been missing for ages. She always thought perhaps she’d find it and repair it, but what good would that do now? She takes one of the horses out and studies it. If she takes them with her, the whole lot will be left at Charter Village for someone else to dispose of. Not even a muckle-toothed lawyer and his private investigator will be able to find someone who wants them.

Still, the Dala Horses switch piles. They’ll go with her to the retirement home.

She picks up a stack of yellowing pillowcases; her mother had hand-embroidered the roses along the hem. The sheets let off a musty puff as Tova plops them onto the nearest linen pile, to be washed, of course, before being donated.

All of these things had been stored away for her to pass along someday, relics to be carried up the branches of the family tree. But the family tree stopped growing long ago, its canopy thinned and frayed, not a single sap springing from the old rotting trunk. Some trees aren’t meant to sprout tender new branches, but to stand stoically on the forest floor, silently decaying.

She unfolds the next item to be added to the pile: a linen apron, its sturdy fabric heavily creased. It’s what her mother wore when she baked. Tova holds it close to her face; it smells sour, like flour turned bad. Folding up the fraying strings, she tries to push away the thought that has been nagging at her all afternoon. There was a girl.