Winter Loon(11)

“You’re leaving me alone?”

“You’ve been alone before. You’ll be fine.”

“What am I supposed to do all day?”

“I don’t know, Wes. What do you usually do? I know Val didn’t sit around entertaining you. Just”—she waved her hands around—“play or something.”

“I’m fifteen, not four.” I propped my head on my hand and spooned the soggy cereal into my mouth.

“This is the way it is,” Ruby said to the back of my head. “You got to get used to it now. You got to accept it.”

How had I wound up in this house, with these people? My parents had been wiped away, a smudge off glass, and I was to get on with it, to accept it in my open hand like change for a dollar bill. But I couldn’t imagine getting past the brokenness I was feeling. I picked at the scrape on my chin until it bled.



I DON’T KNOW THAT I had a mission exactly, or even a scavenger’s list of items to find, but I began in the kitchen and inventoried every single drawer and cupboard in the house. I was looking for clues—clues about what kind of people my grandparents were, about the way they lived and whether my mother had left parts of herself behind in the rooms of this house. Drawers full of string, dull scissors and wooden spatulas, undeveloped film, pens with names of businesses, receipts and bills and bank statements, some dated years before. I wondered whether my mother had made the peg-loom potholders when she was a girl, weaved colorful nylon over metal teeth, whether she had wrapped them in tissue, given them as a gift. I found where they kept their cartons of cigarettes and bottles of whiskey, the Green Stamps, cans of peas, powdered milk, and Campbell’s soup.

In the living room, I sat in each seat on the olive-colored davenport and in both of the ragged tweedy recliners and ran my hands across the stubbly fibers, cranking the footrest up and down. There was a radio on top of the television console so I turned it on, hoping it would fill the quiet and keep me company. I looked more closely at what I figured was Gip and Ruby’s wedding picture. Ruby, girl size and rail thin, barely came up to Gip’s shoulder, but she was tucked tightly there, invisible arms intertwined behind stiff backs. She held a bouquet of flowers upside down at her side. Gip wore a pinstriped suit, Ruby a dress but no veil. They both were bent toward the camera, as if the photographer was on his knees in front of them. Neither was smiling, though I could just barely see Ruby’s splayed teeth—her real ones before she got dentures.

I touched every knickknack—the porcelain cow with the blue bonnet, the sad clown with flowers pressed hopefully upward on thin bronze wires, a wooden sea turtle, its flipper reduced to a tattered stump—wondering how long they’d been on that dusty shelf and whether my mother had cared about any of them or anything else in that house.

The medicine cabinet in the bathroom was filled with prescription bottles, tubes of ichthammol ointment and toothpaste, denture polish and hemorrhoid cream. I opened the bottles and smelled the pills. The rubber dropper on the tincture of merthiolate flaked and cracked as I twisted off the lid. I dabbed it on an old scar on my knee until the whole thing was stained bright red. A phantom sting coursed to the bone, and I thought of my father blowing on the fresh gash as he applied the medicine. “Tiger blood,” he’d said. “For brave boys.”

Time has numbed the ache of that moment, but I remember feeling the loss of them, both at once. It ran deep in me, through that scar and into my veins and right up to my mouth, so that when I spotted the familiar green Nyquil bottle behind the toilet brush, I reached for it, remembering how many times my mother gave it to me before bed, sick or not, to make me sleep. I took a swig and coolness lifted off my tongue, tiny moths taking flight. I felt the menthol spill into emptied-out nooks around my heart. I took another drink and brought the bottle with me to the kitchen.

I slathered a piece of white bread with butter and sugar, then went back to that wedding picture. Those people, though decades younger, bore some resemblance to my grandparents. But something in the picture, if only around the edges—a possibility—didn’t last in the real world. If there had been love between them, as the neglected snapshot hanging there seemed to imply, it was gone like the rent money, the better job, gone like their dead daughter.

I would come to know the cold of my grandparents’ house and felt it that first day. I turned up the thermostat until I heard the click and smelled dusty heat from the baseboards. When I returned to the bathroom, my intention was to put the medicine bottle back under the sink. But I was so cold.

The room was dim and dinky, one bare bulb lit, the other burned out. The tub was surrounded by a striped shower curtain that hung from an aluminum bar suspended from the ceiling. The tile, the tub, the sink, all of it had once been white. But a yellow and gray layer of age and grime had built up that the dim light couldn’t disguise. I leaned over the tub and plugged the rust-stained drain, careful not to touch my bare stomach on the chipped porcelain. The pipes clanged as water, hot as I could stand it, gushed into the tub. I took another swig and climbed in, letting the water scald every inch of me until only my head was dry. I took the bar of soap from the wire dish in the corner and rubbed my skin until I could hardly feel it anymore. Then my pink body disappeared in the murk of bathwater. My father had told me that if you put a frog in a pot of water and boil it, the frog won’t jump out. “It’ll sit in that pot and stare at you while you cook it alive,” he’d said. But if you tried to put a frog in a pot of boiling water, he’d jump right out to save his own skin. I couldn’t save my mother. Could I save myself?