Shadow Baby (16 page)

I closed my eyes and tried to let the young Georg drift through my mind, standing on the pier at Ellis Island, drawing stars and stripes in the air with his nose, his dark olden-days coat hanging down on his shoulders.

But he wouldn’t stay. He disappeared.

What came to me instead was the old man at his forge, the one he rescued from the auction in North Sterns. The old man stringing aluminum soda can tops together. The old man searching for possibility on scavenging night. The old man making me a lantern that was not a match for my missing lantern earring.

Warm air kept blowing up through the register. I sipped at the hot lemon water until it was all gone.

T
here’s many a time I’ve missed Baby Girl, missed her terribly. She would have walked beside me in the halls at school. Her locker would have been next to mine, in the last row of lockers where the U-V-W-X-Y and Z lockers are. There’re
only a few of us at the end of the alphabet. There’s not all that many students at Sterns Middle School to begin with.

She would have understood without explanation why I changed the W in Winter to w. That’s what twins do. They don’t have to explain things to each other. Or maybe the W would have remained uppercase after all. If my baby sister were alive, winter would not have won. Tamar and my grandfather would not have been defeated by a blizzard.

They would have triumphed in the face of adversity.

They would have laughed in the face of death.

My baby sister would have been born, taken her first breath of icy Adirondack air, and screamed. My grandfather would have had no reason to flee to a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border and become a hermit. There would be only one topic to avoid with Tamar, and my sister and I, together, would have insisted that she tell us about our father. Helpless against the mysterious power that twins together exert, she would have agreed.

Perhaps Tamar would choose to eat foods not necessarily jarred or canned. She might like not only marinated artichoke hearts but fresh artichokes steamed and eaten with lemon mayonnaise, such as I once read about in a magazine. Tamar might have allowed more sugar in the house. The three of us—Tamar and her twin daughters—might have baked sugar cookies together.

Everything might be different, if my baby sister had lived.

CJ Wilson might never have looked at me with those eyes. He might never have flipped up my skirt, the first day of school last fall. My chickens might not have turned out mean. There would have been someone to feed them with me, to research chicken violence with. There would have been someone
else to love the words I love. Peter Winchell, who has a locker next to mine, would be the person who was supposed to have a locker next to mine, instead of being a boy taking away a locker belonging to someone else, someone he’s never met, someone the school never heard of, someone no one besides me has ever known and no one besides me has ever dreamed about, a ghost girl: my sister.

I
t was the old man’s idea that I go to Utica and seek out my grandfather. We were at Crystal’s Diner. It was a Wednesday afternoon, and instead of going home after school I had walked to the old man’s trailer. I used to do that sometimes. I was taking notes on my roll of adding-machine paper, which I started keeping at the old man’s trailer when it continued to irritate Tamar.

“The very sight of that damn green thing annoys me, Clara,” Tamar had said, one time too many.

The old man was stirring cream into his coffee and watching Johnny Zielinski play in his booth. Crystal brought Johnny a plate of french fries and a little bowl of ketchup—red, his favorite color—to dip them into.

“Now, how close was your father’s forge to your house?” I asked the old man.

I was asking a series of questions for
Georg Kominsky: American Immigrant
and I wanted to get the details right. Take a fake book report for example. You have to get the details right, otherwise who would ever want to read the fake book?

The old man looked at me.

“My father’s forge?” he said.

Then I remembered. I had made the whole story up. It was all a figment of my imagination. It’s hard to get away from things once they’re written down. Written down, things become real. I had a memory of the old man as a child, little Georg, living with his father and mother and his baby brother, Eli, in a hut next to a forge, in their town that doesn’t exist anymore. Georg and his father, every morning eating their cornmeal mush and heading out the door for a day’s work. Georg the apprentice, his father the master.

None of it existed.

None of it was true.

“My father’s forge?” the old man said again. “What are you talking about, Clara?”

“Nothing,” I said.

He watched me tear away the part of my roll of adding-machine paper that had the made-up story notes on it. I rolled it into a tight tube and then I folded the tube over onto itself. Then I put it into my mouth and chewed.

“Clara?”

I shook my head at the old man. The paper wouldn’t chew. It just got soggy in my mouth. There was a taste of paper throughout my entire nose and mouth. How do spies do it?

“Clara.”

The old man couldn’t read anyway, so I took the paper out of my mouth and threw it into the trash behind the grill. Crystal watched but she didn’t say anything. I pictured the old man the night I first saw him, hanging lanterns in Nine Mile Woods.

“What will happen when you’re gone?” I said to the old man.

It was happening again. Words, tumbling out of my mouth without heed.

“Like if you move away or something?” I said.

Too late. The old man already knew whereof I spoke. He already knew I was looking ahead to the day when he wouldn’t be there, to the day when he would be gone.

“Clara.”

Clara clara clara
.

“It happens,” I said.

He said nothing.

“Everyone will be gone,” I said.

“You have your mother.”

“I want my grandfather. I want my sister.”

The old man regarded me. That’s the term for a certain kind of look.

“It’s true that I will be gone someday,” he said. “So will Tamar.”

“I know,” I said. “I know. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“But by then you will have found something, Clara,” the old man said. “You will have found the one thing that will change everything, the thing that will make sense of your life and keep you going.”

I asked Tamar about my father once, point-blank.
Is my father dead?
I asked her.
For all intents and purposes
, she said, which is a typical Tamar response.
Where does he live if he’s dead only for intents and purposes?
I asked.
As far as I’m concerned he doesn’t live anywhere
, she said, which puts him in the same category as my hermit grandfather, who may or may not be living in a patch of primeval forest near the Vermont border. I kept on, though, and finally Tamar caved in just to make me stop talking.

“Your father was someone I met one night at a party,” she said. “The next morning he drove to Virginia and I never saw him again.”

She made her eyes huge and stared back at me.

“There,” she said. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yes and no. What was his name?”

“He didn’t have one.”

“Everyone has a name.”

“I have no idea what it might have been.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No idea.”

“Did he know about me and my sister?”

“You mean did he know about
you
,” Tamar said. “You don’t have a sister.”

“Did he know about me?”

“What do you think?”

She stared at me and didn’t blink. That’s another of her skills. Tamar can go a long time without blinking. It’s very difficult to go without blinking. Try it. I didn’t answer her question. Answering questions gives the question-asker the upper hand. That’s what I wanted to avoid. So I just repeated my own question.

“Did he know about me?”

That’s the kind of thing I’ve learned to do just from observing Tamar.

She shook her head. “Your
biological father
does not know about you. He has no idea about you. I doubt he even remembers meeting me, and therefore it is as if he does not exist.”

She stabbed an artichoke heart with her fork.

“Got it?” she said.

She stuck the fork in her mouth.

“Got it,” I said.

Then I cleared my plate and scraped it into the wastebasket and put it in the sink. I threw my napkin into the wastebasket. I put my glass of milk into the fridge for breakfast tomorrow morning.

“Good night,” I said.

Then I left the kitchen. I went outside and started down the dirt road. The daisies were nodding on their long stems. The Queen Anne’s lace was standing tall, with the tiny black dots in the center of each that always make me think of bugs. Queen Anne’s lace is not native to North America. It came from another country. It’s an immigrant plant.

“And that’s all she wrote,” I said to the old man. “So as far as I know, my father is alive and living somewhere in this world.”

“Then there’s still a connection. You have a connection to your father.”

If you are ever close to someone in the world, then there exists an invisible connection between you and that person, a connection beyond the ken of ordinary people. I read that in a book about reincarnation and near-death experiences. It’s a true book. I didn’t make it up. I told this to the old man once and he nodded. He believed it, too.

Tamar? Not a chance.

“Ma? What do you believe happens when you die?”

“You’re dead, that’s what happens.”

“But at the exact point of death, what happens? Where does your spirit go?”

“In the ground, along with the rest of you.”

That’s Tamar. I knew I could count on an answer like that, and that’s the answer I got. Still, I persisted. It’s my nature to persist.

“What about the white light?” I said.

“What white light?”

“The tunnel of white light that envelops your spirit. The people you loved who come back to help you from this world into the next.”

“Oh, that white light,” Tamar said. “That’s just the last neurons popping off in your brain. Pop, pop, pop. It’s like a camera flash.”

“Then how do you explain the many documented cases of eerily similar near-death experiences?”

“I don’t,” she said.

That’s another thing about Tamar. She feels no need to explain or excuse. That’s why you can’t argue with her. You run into a brick wall. Any time she senses the presence of Baby Girl, for example, the wall appears.

“Ask your mother about your grandfather,” the old man had told me.

“You don’t know Tamar,” I said. “She is unaskable.”

“Ask anyway,” he said. “You have nothing to lose.”

I could feel the truth in what he was saying. I had nothing to lose. The other half of that sentence is
and everything to gain
. My third-grade teacher was fond of that saying. “Children, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain.” She made that saying fit a variety of situations, situations that you wouldn’t ordinarily think it would fit, such as putting plastic bread bags over your shoes before you put your shoe-boots on.

A few days later I tried to ask Tamar about my grandfather. She was eating her dinner, which was the dinner I had made. If I make dinner, she’ll eat whatever I make. Even if it goes against her personal rule of cans and jars, she’ll eat it: green beans, chicken surprise, and corn pudding. I read how to make corn pudding in a recipe book in the library. In my corn pudding recipe, there is a consistent relationship among all the ingredients.

One
can of creamed corn,
one
can of regular corn.
One
cup of sour cream,
one
stick of butter.
One
package of cornbread mix. I like that kind of recipe—all the ingredients in a ratio of
one
to
one
—because it means I never have to write it down.

Did the pioneers write down their recipes? They did not.

“So,” I said.

I could see Tamar’s face get a look on it. She could tell that something was coming, just from the way I said “So.”

“So,” I said again.

I thought of the old man.
Ask her about your grandfather anyway
, the old man had said. But I couldn’t.

CJ Wilson may sometimes ask his father, Chuck Wilson Senior, about his mother, or CJ’s mother may be a forbidden topic in the Wilson trailer. Still, there must be times when CJ thinks about his mother, wonders where she is and if she is still living somewhere in this world. CJ might dream about his mother, at night when he’s asleep on the pullout couch in the living room of his trailer, which is where I imagine him sleeping.

“Clara, would you clear the table, please?” Tamar said on a Tuesday night the week after the old man told me I should ask her about my grandfather. “It’s court night. Chuck Wilson’s done it this time.”

That was uncharacteristic of Tamar. She does not discuss the dealings of the court with me.

“Second DWI with a suspended, doing 70 in a 25 zone, totaled his Camaro. Plus a resisting arrest and attempted battery of a police officer. State trooper,” she corrected herself. “Which is worse.”

“What does that mean?”

“Six-month minimum. And the state’ll get his kid, I guess. Do you know this boy, Charles Junior Wilson?”

“No,” I said. “Never heard of him.”

I
did know CJ Wilson the chicken, though. I knew that chicken inside and out. I could sense the soul of CJ Wilson, the chicken, emanating from the broken-down barn. Sometimes at night, last year, when the old man was still in his trailer in Sterns and my chickens were still scratching and pecking in the broken-down barn, I lay awake at night and thought about them. I told no one, though. Those chickens were my secret. I said nothing about CJ Wilson the boy, either. Never once in our time together did I ever mention CJ Wilson to the old man.

Tamar was annoyed by the lack of eggs from my chickens. There were still only a few eggs, the ones that I could reach in and grab from outside the pen.