Surviving Valencia (31 page)

“What took you so long?” asked Adrian, when I got back in the car.

“Sorry, there was a line. Shh, you just go to sleep while I drive.”

I put in an old Tori Amos CD to keep him from initiating a conversation and pulled back out onto the highway. Soon the sound of his quiet snoring drowned out the music and I felt like I could try to think. The newspaper was in my bag. My heart was racing, my head was spinning. I shook my head, laughing silently, shaking all over. I felt tingly with adrenaline. I was thrilled,
giddy
even, from the rare, elusive shock of a positive surprise. How often in life are we shocked in a good way? Once a year? Once a decade? At a certain point, maybe age forty or fifty, it may never happen again.

“What’s the matter with you? Are you alright?” Adrian asked suddenly.

“What? Sorry, I just…” I looked at him. He was squinting at me, looking a little scared, a little irritated. I wanted to tell him so badly, yet I wanted him to never find out. “I was just remembering something funny,” I said. It was the kind of answer that should have been completely dissatisfying, considering how I was behaving.

“Oh.” He relaxed and closed his eyes again.

I was glad he didn’t care. A moment passed and he was snoring again, fogging up his window, leaving me alone.

I drew in a deep breath.

Back to the paper. Back to the photo. Back to Coral McCray.

Proof of life after death.

Proof of life.

I should have felt nothing but betrayal and disgust. What kind of person disappears, leaving us all to assume she is dead? Even if she was able to abandon our parents, how could she have abandoned me? I loved her more than anyone in the world. How could she have let me ache for over twenty years? She knew I had nothing. I was just a child when she left me. I was so terribly alone.

I should have hated her. I should have been sick with anger. Or numb, empty of any emotion for her.

But I was none of those things. Instead I was elated. Ecstatic. Thrilled.

The world, flat and barren for so long, filled with color and sprang into the shape of a perfect sphere. Dead ends to questions that had been hanging like webs for my whole life connected to obvious, clear meanings. New questions flooded my brain, but in a pink lemonade rush of excitement. No longer the slow trudge sludge of problems that can never be solved.

Then I did something completely foreign to me. I didn’t even see it coming.

“Thank you, God,” I whispered.

Adrian kept snoring beside me.

“Wake up, Adrian. We’re here,” I said.

People were standing at my parents’ front window, watching us drive in. The driveway was filled with cars. My long-lost cousin BobbieMae had also just arrived. I hadn’t seen her for years. The man who must be her husband lifted a crying baby from its car seat. They pretended not to notice us parking, getting out, removing bottles of wine from the trunk, walking towards them. They hurried up the front steps and rang the doorbell.

Some small child I did not recognize answered the door and then dashed away, leaving it wide open. BobbieMae and her family disappeared inside, closing the door behind them, even though we were just a few steps behind. All the reasons I hated being here were quickly coming back to me, not that I had ever forgotten. Adrian’s hands were full since he was carrying the wine, so I reached out to open the door. It was locked.

“Jesus Christ,” said Adrian.

I rang the doorbell and waited. Adrian shifted the weight of wine from one hip to the other.  No one came.

“Ring it again,” he said, so I did.

Finally my mother appeared, looking about a hundred years old, wiping her hands on one of those old house aprons that is so old it’s back in style. They sell them for fifty dollars at places like Anthropologie.

“Hi, Mom,” I said, stepping forward to give her a hug. She stepped back.

“I don’t want to get your fancy dress covered in gravy,” she whined. “What are you doing ringing the doorbell? I had my hands full in the kitchen. Nice to see you, Adrian.”

“Hello Patricia. Nice to see you, too.”

“The door was locked,” I told her.

“Why would the door be locked?” She shook her head at the silliness of it.

“Here,” Adrian said, showing her the crate of wine. “We brought a nice mix of some of our favorites for you.”

“Well, I don’t know a chardonnay from a cabernet, so it’s all the same to me. You’ll have to teach me what’s good.” Wink, wink. It was nice to see she had not lost her flirty spark.

I waited for her to make some comment, good or evil, about how pregnant I was. Instead she turned around and bustled back to the kitchen, singing, “I better take a look at how Mr. Turkey is doing!”

I turned to Adrian. “May I take your coat?”

“Sure.” He set down the wine and took off his coat and scarf. I went to my old bedroom, now an office, and set our coats on the chair. It was freezing in there. I closed the door and exhaled, surprised I didn’t see my breath. There was new carpet, new beige walls, new drapes. Nothing about it was anything like it used to be. It looked so small and tidy. I opened the closet door and looked inside. It was filled with my parents’ summer clothes.

Someone was knocking at the door, so I answered it.

“What are you doing in here?” asked Adrian. “Don’t leave me out there with those people.”

“Come in and shut the door,” I said.

“We can’t hide in here the whole time.”

“I know that. I only want to hide in here for a few minutes. This used to be my room, you know.”

“Uh-huh. It’s nice. Twenty degrees below zero in here, but really nice.”

“There is nothing in here to show it used to be mine. It’s like I’ve been completely erased.”

“Parents do that when their kids grow up.”

“I know. Well some don’t. Some leave a reminder here or there.”

“True.” He picked up his scarf and wrapped it around his neck.

“So what was it like,” I asked him, “the first time you ever came here? The first time you saw pictures of Van and Valencia hanging on our walls, and thought ‘I’m in their house’? How did it feel?”

He shook his head at my crassness.

“Remember when I showed you the juice glass that Valencia always used, and I was sad. That had so much more meaning to you than I knew.”

He removed his scarf and set it back on his coat, making a move for the door.

“Tell me,” I said. “I want to hear it in your words.”

The door swung open.

“Oh, hi,” said BobbieMae. “Farnie is going to play in here.” The little boy I’d seen when we arrived came in and dumped a bucket of Legos on the floor.

“Come on,” said Adrian, reaching for my hand, always able to snap right back to normalcy. “Let’s get out of here and go mingle.”

“My room,” said Farnie, slamming the door after us.

We stood in the kitchen, awkwardly, munching on pickle spears. My mother and grandmother insisted there was nothing we could do to help. I felt big and very much in the way.

“Whose little boy is that?” I asked.

“That’s Farnsworth. He’s Beatrice’s grandson,” said my aunt Louise.

I had no idea who Beatrice was. I nodded my head, desperate for the time when I could get smashingly drunk again. I noticed Adrian pouring himself a Gatorade-sized serving of thirty-dollar merlot and I gave him a dirty look. He ignored me, throwing back his head and downing it as if it were a shot of tequila.

I took a ginger ale from the cooler on the floor and sat down on one of the old, tippy stools at the breakfast bar.

“No fancy wine for you?” asked Aunt Louise.

“She’s drinking for two,” my mother quipped. So she hadn’t forgotten.

“Oh, that’s what I heard. In my day you could drink wine. I don’t know why they changed that. When are you due?”

“March,” I said.

“You’re big already!”

“I guess,” I said.

“Boy or girl?”

“We want to be surprised,” I said.

I watched Adrian refill his glass. He was drinking for two as well.

“Now why would you want to be surprised? How can you buy what you need if you don’t know what you’re going to have?” said BobbieMae. Her baby was decked out in Green Bay Packer gear. I could not have said whether it was a boy or a girl.

“Sometimes it’s fun to be surprised,” I said. “Oh, look at that,” I added, feigning interest in some squirrels playing in the yard.

Then Adrian made things much worse. “What we are doing,” he said, “is buying clothes for boys and clothes for girls. So no matter which one we have, we’ve got it covered.” This made sense to him, and it had made sense to his family. But mine would see it as worse than wastefulness. They would see it as rampant indulgence.

Quickly I added, “And we will save what we don’t use for next time.”

It was too late.

“You have gotten very spoiled,” sniffed my mother.

“I heard you couldn’t even have babies. No offense,” said BobbieMae.

“I heard that too,” said Aunt Louise. “Did you do in vitro?”

“What ever happened to that car you had with that pro-choice bumper sticker on the back?” asked my dad. “Little foreign car. Was that a Renault?”

“In vitro costs a fortune!” said my mother, checking the turkey and letting the oven door slam shut for the hundredth time.

“Who said we couldn’t have babies?” I asked.

“You’ve been married for
years
,” said my mother.

“What if your next baby is the same sex?” asked my Uncle Dave. We all blushed when he said “sex.” He was an uncle by marriage and had never quite gotten the rules.

“This really isn’t something for everyone to get all worked up about, please,” I said.

“Who’s getting worked up?” asked my mother.

“Did we mention we have to drive back tonight? Ugh, that cat of Alexa’s needs its diabetes shot,” blabbed Adrian. His story came out of nowhere and everyone knew it was a lie. “Without its shot, it’s toast.”

“Who is this Alexis he’s always talking about?” asked my grandmother in a stage whisper.

I went into the living room and sat down beside my grandfather who was asleep on the couch.
It’s a Wonderful Life
was playing. Adrian stayed in the kitchen next to the alcohol, telling stories and lies.

Half an hour later my mother yelled, “Dinner is served,” so I pushed myself up and went into the dining room. Adrian was already sitting at the table.

“I saved you a place,” he said, rubbing the pheasant print chair pad beside him.

“Everyone tell what you’re thankful for,” said Aunt Louise. Oh no. The worst part of Thanksgiving. “Patricia, we’re at your house, so you start.”

My mother smiled. She had a remnant of a pickle covering one of her front teeth. I took a sip of ginger ale and looked away.

“I’m thankful that we’re all here today. I’m thankful for this big old bird… I’m thankful I got a two thirty-seven the other night, which put the Lucky Lady Strikes into the statewide bowling tournament in March…” Everyone clapped and cheered when she said that. “And last but not least, I’m thankful that I’m going to be a grandmother. I just hope that baby doesn’t show up when I’m at my tournament,” she added, pretending she was kidding, but clearly serious. Followed by lesser claps and a few chuckles.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said softly.

She ignored me. “Your turn, Dave,” she said to my uncle who was seated beside her. I couldn’t bear a whole table of this. Perhaps God would come through twice in one day, to make up for lost time.
Please, God, intervene
, I silently begged.

“I smell smoke,” yelled Farnie, alone in the kitchen, sitting at my old Playskool desk with a plate of corn in front of him.

Sure enough, above our heads, ribbons of faint white smoke were streaming through the air.

“Why isn’t the alarm going off?” asked my mother. If there was no alarm, there could be no fire. “When did you last check the batteries in the smoke alarm, Roger?” she yelled at my dad. He didn’t say anything.

“You’re stove is burning,” called Farnie.

“Everybody outside!” yelled my mother.

“I‘ll grab the wine. You get our coats,” said Adrian.

“Forget the wine,” I said.

He ignored me, dashing off to find the wine. “Don’t forget my scarf. It’s cashmere,” he called.

“Everyone outside. Now!” yelled my mother.

Adrian and I met outside, where he carefully nestled the wine into a snug spot in the trunk of our car. “There you go,” he said, patting a picnic blanket against it with care. “Leaving it here would be wasting it,” he explained with a shrug, catching my look of disgust.

We stood back at the end of the driveway, watching the chaos unfold.

“Move your car,” my dad yelled at us. “Make way for the fire trucks.”

I got in the driver’s seat and Adrian got in beside me. We meant to just move the car a little farther down the block, but the street was packed with cars. It seemed all the neighbors were hosting Thanksgiving this year. We just kept circling the block, unable to find a place to park. Snow began to fall and we heard the fire trucks on their way.

“Do you think they’d even miss us?” asked Adrian.

“They might notice if we never come back, but I don’t think they will
miss
us,” I said. So we left Hudson and my family behind us, and headed back to Madison.