Life From Scratch (33 page)

That night Phoenix met us at her mother’s impeccable brownstone, a retirement complex with tall ceilings and grand hallways. Phoenix was 16 years older than me, now cresting her 40s. I could see the years marked along her face. She was soft in the middle, but carried her weight like a woman who was once thin.

We had the same flat cheekbones and eyebrows, and the same brown hair, though hers skimmed the waistband of her peasant skirt. Her big brown eyes were my eyes. When she smiled, her upper lip almost disappeared, just like mine.

Astonished, I realized we must have
his
cheekbones,
his
eyebrows,
his
eyes,
his
lips. She gushed over my belly and hugged me warmly, her bracelets making soft music as they collided with my shoulder blades and each other.

Upstairs, Lotty invited us into her apartment with a gentle smile. She was a slight woman with turnip-colored hair, but she hugged me with the force of a linebacker.

Keith and I sat on a couch in the living room, a wide-open space lined with windows from floor to ceiling. They were cracked open, a natural breeze ruffling the silence. I reached for Keith’s hand and squeezed.

Lotty brought in a pitcher of Mexican horchata and invited us to sweeten our glasses with sliced strawberries. A moment later, she emerged from the back bedroom with a worn shoe box and a manila envelope. She slid the contents of the box onto the coffee table: two dozen photos. “Here are the ones you’ll be interested in,” she said.

In the first photo, I am sitting on Phoenix’s lap in the water. I must have been a year and a half old. Together, we’re splashing the waves and clapping.

“This is astonishing!” I said. “We used to play with each other? We’ve actually
met?
”

Lotty explained that Phoenix had come out to the Cape to visit her father every summer. I locked eyes with her. This was, in fact, a reunion.

Phoenix smiled weakly and turned back to the flowers. Her mother picked up the next photo, folded in half.

“You might recognize this lady,” she winked.

On one side of the crease was my mother, on the other: a man. The two stand shoulder to shoulder, their faces frozen in a moment of stillness. Though the photo is tight around their arms, I can still make out a grove of pine trees in the distance. Mom almost disappears: Her eyes are at once expressionless and intense, like an old black-and-white portrait from the late 1800s. The man is half a head taller than she is, bearded, wearing a rumpled, plaid flannel shirt.

I took the photo from Lotty, trying not to snatch it. Even under the beard, this man’s face is thin, his eyes shining. No, not just shining—they are beautiful, the color of cinnamon. The left side of his mouth lifts almost imperceptibly. He looks like a stranger, but even more like someone I knew. He looks like Michael.

This was my father’s face. I looked at every detail over again, trying to read him like a bedtime story.

Keith put his hand on my leg and squeezed. “Hey, Sash …?”

I looked up. Lotty was holding out a third photo.

The faces were hard to make out: a mess of shadows and poor exposure in a grassy knoll. There’s a small child in a blue gingham sundress, maybe two years old. There’s a man with a floppy-brimmed hat, like the kind Jed Clampett used to wear. He’s resting on his haunches, arm wrapped around the child. His face is mostly dark, but I can still make out the smile; it’s him again—my father. To the left, another child leans in, with a dimpled smile and baby-blond hair—Michael.

“Is that Sasha?” Keith asked Lotty, his voice drawn out with wonder. I don’t need to look up to know the answer.

This little version of me leans toward her father, squirming with uproarious laughter at some silliness long since sublimated. One of his arms drapes around me; the other lies behind Michael’s shoulder.

A lump formed in my throat.

“You can keep that one,” Phoenix said from behind the flowers.

“T–thank you.” I pressed the photo to my heart. In this moment, I wanted nothing more than for my father to walk out of the photo and say hello—just once.

“What happened?” I asked Lotty. “My mom never told me why—”

“That’s your mom’s story to tell, and what’s more, I don’t know it,” she responded. “But I can tell you, your father was a complicated man. I met him out at Lake Tahoe when I was 20. I was at a resort with my parents, and he was the cook. He always smelled delicious and, oh, God, he was a looker. He proposed to me two weeks after we met on a bench at the end of a dock.” She laughed. “When you have eyes like that staring into your soul, there’s nothing to say but yes.”

Lotty pulled out a photo of my father holding baby Phoenix. He was beardless, clean-cut, and at 22, looked even more like Michael.

“He wasn’t just a cook. He was an artist. A poet. A brilliant inventor.

“But there was darkness, too. His mom was only 14 when he was born. He started off in a boys’ home. He spent Sundays on the front steps, waiting for her to visit. She never came.

“We did alright for a while. The darkness, his fits of anger, happened after Phoenix was born. We divorced, but saw each other every week for her sake.”

Phoenix was looking over at her mom for the first time since we’d arrived.

Lotty sighed. “I showed up one day with her when she was maybe a year old. He was painting furiously in his studio. He was convinced that he was the Count of Monte Cristo. I couldn’t talk him out of it. He spent a year of his life in an asylum. I checked him in myself.”

She leaned forward.

“He climbed over the fence and escaped to New England. He still deserved to see his daughter, so I sent her out there every summer until she was out of the house and old enough to make her own arrangements.”

Lotty pulled out a stack of letters from the manila envelope. “He wrote her about boys, about love, about everything a father should. But his return address always changed. And sometimes there was no way to reach him.”

She dropped the letters on the table, and I picked one up, addressed to Phoenix. I soaked in his words, pretending they were for me: “If this guy you say you like doesn’t treat you with respect and give you the attention he should, then he’s not worth your time. You deserve better, honey.”

Lotty continued. “He became a mountain man—that’s what Phoenix called him. He lived out his life deep in the woods of New England, camping, wandering. He was his happiest far away from it all. Being in society was like a cage to him. But when he died, I do think he’d managed to find some kind of peace.”

I looked up at Phoenix. “What was his funeral like?”

She shook her head.

“She didn’t go,” Lotty said.

“You didn’t
go?
” I spat back, incredulous. Phoenix looked away. I immediately regretted my tone. “I’m sorry.” I turned to Lotty. “Did you?”

She hesitated, and then shook her head: “Phoenix hasn’t seen him since that photo.” She paused. “He put her through … a lot. We spoke on the phone every few years, when we could find him. He got lung cancer, his smoking caught up with him. The state called to let us know he passed; there was no money for a funeral, and she was his oldest kin.”

Phoenix cleared her throat and spoke for the second time since we’d entered her mother’s apartment. Her voice trembled. “When I was looking for you, I found a picture of you and Michael with your firefighter cousin. Antonio—was that his name? I got the idea to call the firehouse where he worked. When I called, I guess you were already overseas. He had no idea where you were. He said Michael had …”

She sighed. “When I called Dad to tell him about Michael, we cried together over the phone.”

“It’s hard to believe that was 16 years ago.” Lotty added.

Mom had been right on every count. My father had been a man without roots, without stability. But what Mom hadn’t said was that he
cared
. The photos and the stories painted a man conflicted, a man who battled to love his world and be loved, sometimes with less success than others. I left California with one shadowy photo and more questions than when I’d arrived—questions that could only be answered by a man six feet under.

CHAPTER 21

A Baby and
a
Blog

I
CONSIDERED SEEKING OUT
my father’s grave, but decided against it. It was time to focus on our baby—transitioning from my job at the Girl Scouts to raising our child full time. I moved my old white teddy bear into the waiting crib.

Mom came to visit in late June, about a week before the baby was due. She brought along a few balls of tan-and-white cotton-cashmere yarn and taught me to knit while we waited for my body to kick into gear. Day after interminable day, we sat side by side, our needles clicking out two pairs of booties and two tiny caps.

We cooked together, too: three of Mom’s zucchini pies, made with a couple of white-flecked zucchini, three eggs whipped until frothy, and—as always—more Parmesan than seemed proper. For a finishing touch, Mom chopped a handful of parsley from my flower bed and stirred it into the egg.

I relaxed into her company, content
not
to talk about my father,
not
to fight about the past. I was simply grateful she could be beside me in this time of endless expectation. Finally, when it seemed every ounce of water I’d drunk over the last ten months had pooled under my skin, I went into labor.

It was 2 a.m. on the Fourth of July. According to the doctors, the baby was ten days late. Of course, Mom had told me that was hogwash. “Babies know when they want to be born,” she said, “They’re stronger if you listen to your body, not some chart.”

Now Mom’s door was open. I could see her small, sleeping form in the moonlight. It surprised me how a twin bed swallowed her up. When I knocked lightly, she sat up like a rocket, her frizzy curls bouncing forward.

I nodded through the darkness: It was time. She grabbed a skinny, green mug off the desk, handed it to me, and told me to drink the contents. Then she turned to shut the door.

“Aren’t you coming with me?”

She looked me up and down.

“It’s going to be a while. You’re just getting started.” She pointed to the mug: “Drink that. I’ll come by in the morning.”

On the way to the hospital, I sipped Mom’s lurid brew, a bitter and potent blend of chamomile tea, turmeric, and honey. The combination made my stomach churn. Almost immediately, my contractions quickened and I abandoned the mug in the cup holder of the truck.

At the hospital, when the nurses checked me, I was a half-centimeter dilated. Under normal conditions, they’d send me home, but since the baby’s sluggish heartbeat indicated it wasn’t responding well to stress, they wanted to monitor us. More to the point, I was getting sick with every contraction. Once they added antinausea medication to my drip, there was no sending me home.

Finally, after four hours in triage, a penguin-shaped nurse wheeled me over to labor and delivery. “You’re going to have a baby today,” she twittered as we rolled down the long, shiny hallway. I looked up at Keith and smiled.

Around 8 a.m., Mom breezed into the hospital room. I was between contractions. She inspected all the beeping, blinking computers, and groaned. “This is exactly why I had you at home. It’s a
baby
, not a disease.”

The nurse stared at Mom with pinched face and large, unblinking eyes. Mom screwed up her brow, primed for a debate.

“Hey, Mom …” I called, loud enough to distract her, “you made it!”

Mom softened her expression and pulled a chair up to the side of the bed. “We can’t have a
birth
day without a few gifts,” she said, smiling. She dug three wrapped packages out of her leather tote: a sketchbook made with recycled paper (to draw the baby), a jade necklace (for me), and an old three-dimensional valentine from 1914. Mom got the card from her father, who happened upon the unused card in his piles of paperwork.

The brittle card was a good ten inches tall, scalloped along the edges. On it, a Victorian mother held her child to the sky, smiling up at the baby’s face. I was moved that Mom had saved it all this time.

Mom pulled a small bottle of champagne from her purse. She’d sneaked it past the colony of nurses who bumped and jostled in and out of my room. Mom said the bubbles would help me relax. Hastily, I pushed the bottle back into her purse, worried that we’d get kicked out if we were caught.

Our eyes were still locked while I wheezed through the searing pain of another contraction, my hand gripping the pillow. The nurses glanced at me, and then frowned at the monitors. Quickly, one strapped an oxygen mask to my face. Mom stood by, helpless, while Keith grabbed my hand.

Mom’s eyes brimmed over. She busied herself smoothing the sheets at the foot of the bed. A few stray tears rolled down her cheeks, which she quickly wiped away. As the contraction passed and my breathing slowed, she mumbled something about getting some cups for the champagne and rushed off to the cafeteria.

I don’t ever remember seeing my mother cry. Not when she thrust us into the arms of the Dumonts, not when Michael was in the hospital—
never
. She’d always been able to keep it together in front of me. Even in the courts, she’d worked to exude the sort of strength one would expect of a mother. But in the process, I realized, she’d made herself appear cold and uncaring.