Grave Surprise

Page 22

After all, the older Morgensterns weren't so darn old. "Judy has Parkinson's too badly to have gotten Tabitha to the grave, but her husband is really fit," I said. "Fred Hart looks pretty strong, too." and talk to Iona, we did Rock, Scissors, Paper. As always, I made the wrong choice, which is pretty funny when you come to think of it. If I were actually psychic, as I'm so often accused of being, I think I could manage to win a simple game like that.
I speed-dialed Iona's number. Iona Gorham (n?e Howe) was my mother's only sister. She'd been married to Hank Gorham for twelve years, twelve long and childless and God-fearing years. She'd taken charge of Mariella and Gracie when my mother and stepfather went to jail, after the investigation into Cameron's abduction exposed some of their worst faults as parents. I'd had nothing to say about it, because I was underage then. I'd gone into a foster home myself. Iona and Hank hadn't wanted me, which was probably just as well, I guess. At seventeen, they thought my lifelong association with my mother would have irrevocably tainted me. I had a senior year in the high school I'd been attending, a year that was weirdly pleasant despite my shattered emotional system. For the first time since my childhood, I lived in a clean house with regular meals I didn't always have to cook myself. I could do my homework in peace. No one made suggestive comments, no one used drugs, and my foster parents were simple, nice, strict people. You knew where you were. They had two other foster kids, and we got along if we were very careful.
Tolliver, who was twenty then, moved in with his brother, Mark, so he was okay. He came by as often as he could, as often as the Goodmans would let him.
"Hello?" The man's voice yanked me back to the here and now.
"Hank, hello, it's Harper," I said, making sure that my voice was even and level and uninflected. You had to be Switzerland to talk to Iona and Hank. Neutral, I told myself repeatedly. Neutral.
"Hello," he said, with a total lack of welcome or enthusiasm. "Where are you, Harper?"
"I'm in Memphis, Hank, thanks for asking."
"I guess Tolliver's with you?"
"Oh, you bet," I said, cheerful as all get-out. "It's cold and wet here. How about in Dallas?"
"Oh, can't complain. In the fifties today."
"Sounds good. I'd like to talk to Mariella, if she's around, and then Gracie."
"Iona's gone to the store. I'll see if I can track the girls down."
What a stroke of luck. I held the phone to my chest while I told Tolliver, "The Wicked Witch isn't there." Iona had a deep fund of excuses to keep us from talking to the girls. Hank was not as resourceful, or as ruthless.
"Hey," said Mariella. She was nine now, and she was a lot of trouble. I never told myself she'd be an angel if she lived with us, because I knew better. For their first few years, Mariella and Gracie had never had the care and attention of parents who were in their right minds. I'm not saying my mother and stepfather didn't love their girls, but it wasn't the kind of love that would prompt them to become sober and responsible. At least we older kids had had that, once upon a time. We knew what was right and proper. We knew what parents should be like. We knew about fresh sheets and home-cooked meals and clothes that only we had worn.
"Mariella, it's your sister," I said, though of course Hank had told her who was on the phone. "What's happening with you?" I had tried so hard, and so had Cameron and Tolliver. Even Mark had stopped by with food from time to time, when he'd had extra money.
"I got on a basketball team," Mariella said, "at the Y."
"Oh, that's great!" Actually, it was. It was the first time Mariella had given me anything besides a sullen grunt. "Have you started playing yet, or are you still practicing?"
"We have our first game in a week," she said. "If you were here, you could come."
I widened my eyes at Tolliver to let him know this call was not going as usual. "We'd love to," I said. "We have to check our schedule, but we'd be really glad to watch you play. Is Gracie playing, too?"
"No, she says it's stupid to get out there and sweat like a pig. She says boys don't like girls who sweat. She says everyone will call me a lesbo."
I heard a shocked exclamation from Hank in the background.
"Gracie's wrong," I said immediately. "She just doesn't want to play basketball herself. Maybe you can play basketball a little better than Gracie, huh?"
"You bet," said Mariella proudly. "Gracie can't come within a mile of the hoop. I hit it twice last practice."
"I'm sure there's something Gracie can do that's special to her," I said, floundering to be diplomatic and yet reinforce the positive stuff that was going on with Mariella.
"Huh," said Mariella derisively. "Well, anyway."
"Have you all had your school pictures taken this year?"
"Yeah. They should be back soon."
"You both save us two, you hear?" I said. "One for your brother Tolliver to carry in his wallet, and one for me to carry in mine."
"Okay," she said. "Hey, Gracie joined the chorus."
"No kidding? Is she around?"
"Yeah, she's coming in the kitchen right now." Sound of a scuffle.
"Yeah?" This was Gracie, all right. Gracie was deep into hating us.
"Gracie, I hear you're in the chorus at school."
"Yeah, so?"
"Are you a soprano or an alto?"
"I dunno. I sing the melody."
"Okay, probably a soprano. Listen, we were thinking of coming to one of Mariella's games. Do you think you could sit with us if we did?"
"Well, I might be there with my friends." Whom she saw at school, every day, and talked to on the phone half the night, if Iona was to be believed.
"I know that's important," I said, back to being Switzerland, "but we don't get to see you too often."
"Okay, I'll think about it," she said unenthusiastically. "Stupid basketball. When she runs down the court, her cheeks bounce up and down. Like a hound dog's."
"You need to be a good sister," I said, maybe not as neutrally as I could have wished. "You need to cheer for Mariella."
"Why should I?"
Okay, not neutral at all. "Because you're damn lucky to have a sister," I began, my voice hot, and then I heard myself and backed off. I took a deep breath. "You know why, Gracie? Because it's the right thing to do. Here's your brother." I handed the phone to Tolliver.
"Gracie, I want to hear you sing," Tolliver said. That was exactly the right thing to say, and Gracie promised to find out when the chorus would be singing for the first time so Tolliver and I could put the date on the calendar. Then Gracie evidently handed the phone off.
"Iona," said Tolliver, with the faintest pleasant intonation. "How are things going? Really? The school called again? Well, you know Gracie isn't stupid, so there must be some other problem. Okay. When's she going for testing? It's good the state's paying for it. But you know we'd..." He listened for a while. "Okay, call us with the results. You know we want to hear."
After a couple more minutes of listening to this broken conversation, I was delighted when Tolliver finally hung up. "What's going on?" I asked.
"A couple of things," he said, frowning. "That was almost a good conversation with Iona. Gracie's teacher thinks Gracie may have ADD. She recommended testing, and Iona's taking her this week. The state will pay for the testing, evidently."
"I don't know anything about that," I said, as if I could have been prepared for this. "We'll have to look it up on the net."
"She would have to take the drugs if she's got it, Iona says."
"What are the side effects?"
"There are some, but Iona was more concentrating on the benefits. Evidently, Gracie's been pretty disruptive at school, and Iona wants some peace."
"Don't we all. But if the side effects..."
We spent the rest of the evening on the Internet, reading articles about Attention Deficit Disorder and the drugs used to treat it. If this seems excessive or odd, consider this: Tolliver and Cameron and I had raised those girls from birth. My mother had been roused to try to take care of them when they were infants, but if it hadn't been for us, Mariella and Gracie wouldn't have eaten, or been changed, or learned how to count, or been read to. When Cameron had been snatched, Mariella had been only three and Gracie had been five. They'd gone to a preschool together for a few mornings a week, because we'd enrolled them and then told my mother they had to go. We'd gotten them to the preschool before we went to our own school, and all Mom had to do was remember to pick them up, which she usually did if we left her a note.
Here I was remembering, when that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.
"Enough of this," Tolliver said after a while, when we felt we knew a little bit about the disorder and the drugs used to treat it. "We'll learn more when we know if she has it or not."
I felt like I was drowning. I'd had no idea there were so many things that could go wrong with a child's learning processes. What happened to kids in the years before all these things were identified, and a course of treatment laid out?
"I guess they were labeled slow or difficult," Tolliver said. "And that was the end of it."
That made me feel sad for all the kids who'd never had a fair shake, because their problems hadn't been understood. At the same time, we'd just read two articles about how parents were overmedicating their children for those same problems, so that even children who really did just have some disruptive personality traits were being dosed with drugs that shouldn't have been given them. It was just scary. I wondered if I'd ever have the nerve to have a baby myself. It didn't seem too likely. I'd have to trust my partner completely, to bring his child into the world. The only person I'd ever trusted that much was my brother Tolliver.
And the strangest thing happened as I had that thought. The world seemed to freeze for a minute.
It was like someone had thrown a giant switch in my head. Tolliver was turning away to go to his room, and I was getting up out of the chair I'd pulled over to the desk so I could read the screen on the laptop. I looked at Tolliver's back, and suddenly the world slid sideways and then realigned itself in a new configuration. I opened my mouth to say something, and then I closed it. I didn't know what I wanted to say to him. I didn't think I really wanted him to turn around.
He started to turn, and I bolted for my room.
I shut the door behind me and leaned against it.
"Harper? Is something wrong?" I heard his anxious voice on the other side of the door. I was in a total panic.
"No!"
"But you sound like something's wrong."
"No! Don't come in!"
Tolliver's voice was a lot chillier the next time he spoke. "All right." And he moved away, going to his own room, I supposed.
I sank down to the floor.
I didn't know what to say to myself, how to treat someone as idiotic as me. I was poised in a perfect position to ruin the only thing I had in my life. One word, one wrong act, and it would all be gone. I would be humiliated forever, and I would have nothing.
I had one black moment in which I wondered if I should just go on and kill myself and have done with it. But my strong survival instinct rejected the fleeting notion even as it ran across my brain. If I'd lived through being hit by lightning, I could live through this new knowledge.
He must never know. I crawled across the floor to the bed; pulled myself up, lay prone across it. I planned the next week of my life in a few painful minutes, appalled at my own monstrous selfishness as I did so. Keeping Tolliver with me for one more minute was an awful thing to do.
But I couldn't let go, I argued with myself. If I suddenly shooed him away, he'd suspect something as sure as shooting. I just couldn't do it. In a week or so, when I could figure out the right way. Until then, hold myself carefully; guard my every action.
Life, which had seemed like such a rich crazy quilt laid out before me, suddenly assumed a grayer prospect. I climbed into the hotel bed, as I had climbed into hundreds of hotel beds.
I stared at the ceiling, at the bar of light from somewhere below that crossed it, at the bright red eye of the smoke detector. For hours I tried to remap my life. But I didn't have a clue which direction to go.
Chapter fifteen
I was more like a zombie than a person when I came out of my room the next day. Tolliver was eating breakfast, and he poured me a cup of coffee without a word. I went over to the table cautiously, sinking into my chair with as much relief as if I'd negotiated a minefield. He glanced up from his paper, gave me a horrified look.
"Are you sick?" he asked. "God, you look like something the cat dragged in!"
That actually made me feel much better. If he'd said something sweet, I'd have lost it then and there, grabbed hold of him, and sobbed all over his shirt front.
"I didn't have a good night," I said, very carefully. "I didn't sleep."
"No shit. I can kind of tell. You better get out your makeup."
"Thanks for the boost, Tolliver."
"Well, I'm just saying. We don't want the coroner mistaking you for the corpse."
"Okay, enough." Somehow, I felt much better after this exchange.