Thank You for All Things (29 page)

“Poor dear,” Oma says. “I pray she’ll be able to see this in a different light soon.”

“Me too,” Mom says. She plants kisses on Milo and me, then says, “Be good, and get your work started right after you eat.”

“Hey, why you telling me?” Milo says.

“I’ll get my work done,” I say to Mom as she hurries out the door.

“I don’t see why she says that,” Milo repeats. “I always have my work done ahead of time.”

I roll my eyes. I’m not explaining it to him again.

I swallow my last bite of wheat toast, and as I watch Grandpa Sam waiting to be fed, I think about how hard it is to see things in a different light. For the moment, all I see when I look at Grandpa Sam is an overgrown toddler who can’t fend for himself. Ever since I started reading Mom’s journals, my image of him has been switching from the infantlike grandpa who I want to hug to the mean dad who kicks and shouts bad things and makes me want to hide.

In an old psychology textbook I had before the fire, on page 397, there was an optical illusion that promised to deliver two different images, depending on how you looked at it. One was the profile of a beautiful young woman, and the other, an old, ugly, crook-nosed crone. I saw the young woman first, but I had to try for what seemed forever before I saw the old crone. Then there she was. Sharing the same scarf, feather, and fur as the beauty, but the young woman’s cheek and chin had become the crone’s big nose, and the young woman’s necklace had morphed into her face. I remember how once I saw the old woman, I had to struggle to find the lovely lady again. Back and forth it went, the figure changing shape right before my eyes, until I got frustrated and slammed the book shut.

Now I know what that book was trying to illustrate. How our minds interpret what we’re seeing, and how once
it has an image ingrained and a new image is introduced, it will struggle hard between the two images until it decides which image is the
real
one. It’s what my mind does with Grandpa Sam, until I’m no longer sure who I’m looking at. And I know that for Mitzy right now, all she can see when she thinks of having a baby is dead little Dylan. And then there’s Mom, who is trying to see love in a different light, but her mind can’t switch over from some painful image of her past.

I look up and see that Oma is struggling to tie the dish towel that will serve as a bib around Grandpa Sam’s neck. And because Grandpa Sam is that sweet grandpa that I love at the moment, I say to Oma, “I’ll do that.”

“That’s okay. I have it now,” she says, as she pats his bib in place.

“No, I meant I’ll feed him.”

Milo’s fork stops midair. “I thought that grosses you out?”

“You’re so dumb!” I snap, and Oma tells us to be nice. She hands me Grandpa Sam’s spoon and gets his dish of yellow mush and gives it to me, but not before touching a spoon of it to her lip to test the temperature. “He’s not swallowing very well,” she says quietly. “I’ve asked the county nurse to come check on him tomorrow.”

And Grandpa Sam
isn’t
swallowing very well. In fact, twenty minutes after Milo and Feynman go out the door for their seven-mile jaunt, I swear I’m still scooping the same spoonful into his mouth. Finally he starts sputtering and coughing, and Oma gets fretful and takes the bowl away. She carries over a can of protein drink and pours a little into a plastic cup meant for babies—the kind with a lid and an upraised spout with tiny holes lined on it so the drinker can’t get too much at one time and choke. She gives him as
many sips as he’ll take, then wipes rivulets of thin milky liquid off his chin. “Time for your nap,” she says to him, in a voice much too cheerful to come from a battered woman.

Oma and I get him onto his bed, his weight making squeaking noises as it slides across the plastic mattress liner. I wait outside his room ’til she changes him, then step inside as she goes to scour her hands.

Grandpa Sam is getting littler by the day. I tuck his blanket up over his sunken belly and lift his arms out of the blanket. I set his good hand, his left (the one I’m now convinced carved the nice things), over his right hand (which I’m sure is the hand he hit with), and I pat them.

“Lucy, did you see that? He smiled at you!”

I turn and see Oma standing in the doorway.

“He did?”

“He certainly did!” Oma comes inside and stands next to me. “When you were patting his hand.”

“Oma? Do you think there’s a part of Grandpa Sam that knows when we do nice things for him?”

“Of course. That’s why he smiled at you. He knows you were helping him get comfortable. And I’m sure he hears us too. Besides, even if his brain was totally gone—which it isn’t—his spirit is registering everything, and it’s communicating with you, right here.” Oma taps me right over my heart, brushing one of the tiny new buds my chest is sporting these days. It hurts a little when she pats me. “And if you listen, you’ll hear what he’s trying to tell you.”

After Oma leaves the room, I tell Grandpa Sam about visiting Nordine Bickett, and about the photograph and the puppet. He turns his head as I tell him these things. “Would you like to see them?” I ask, and his dry lips open and close, and although no words come out of them, I know he’s said yes.

I run up to my room, put both items into one of Mom’s old backpacks that I’ve claimed for my own, and go downstairs. Oma is busy cleaning the house for Peter’s visit, so I slip into Grandpa Sam’s room and close the door behind me. I take out the photograph and show it to him. I don’t know if it’s his poor health or his failing vision that makes his eyes water as he looks at the picture jiggling before him, but the sight of his tears makes my eyes water too.

“You loved her, didn’t you, Grandpa Sam?” He doesn’t answer, but I feel in my heart that the answer is yes, and that makes me sad. Sad for him, and for Nordine. But most of all, it makes me sad for Oma, because she’s the one he was supposed to love.

I slip the photograph into a pocket on the backpack flap, then take out the puppet. “You gave this to Nordine,” I say softly. “I think you gave it to her so that she’d have a part of you with her when you couldn’t be.”

I move the wooden X in my hands and try to make the puppet wave at Grandpa, but making him move as though he’s real isn’t as easy as one would think, and the puppet spasms as though he has cerebral palsy.

“Nordine told me this is you, but I would have known it even if she hadn’t told me. And then she said, ‘Always a puppet. Always a puppet.’ I think she was reciting something you’d said to her when you gave it to her. Milo would call that pure speculation, and I guess it is, but it feels right in here,” I say, tapping my chest.

“I’m people-smart, if you haven’t noticed, and I think I know enough about you to guess that it was your dad who made you feel like a puppet. Was he bossy and mean to you?”

He turns away and closes his eyes, and I know he’s no longer hearing me with his mind—and maybe not even
with his spirit—so I gently put the puppet back in the bag and I just sit there for a minute, looking at him. With the shade drawn and the light in the room dim, his deep wrinkles aren’t as pronounced, and it’s easy to imagine him a young man again. A man young enough to love more women than a rock star and strong enough to cock the noses of nasty men and crash the heads of sweet, gentle wives.

He’s moved his hands to rest on his belly. His right hand is over the left now, and I stand up. “Have a good nap,” I tell him, then I switch his hands, left one up, and I kiss his cheek. I go into the kitchen and sit at my laptop. I have work to do. Not search for a topic for my oral report, as Mom keeps harping at me to do because she
is
going to find a place for us to give them yet, but to see if I can find all the sperm banks in California.

I
HAVE JUST
hit the jackpot when Milo comes into the kitchen, his pterodactyl helmet in his hands, his face flushed from his ride.

“Milo, come see. Hurry, before Oma gets inside. I’ve found our father! Well, not him per se, but I’ve found the place where …” I stumble over how to explain the links that brought me here, so instead I stop myself and give him the bottom line: “We are the products of artificial insemination. But not sperm donated by some derelict who just needed a couple bucks for a beer. Our donor was a Nobel Prize winner!”

“That’s absurd,” Milo says as he gets himself a glass of water.

“It is not! I read in one of Mom’s notebooks that when it came time for her to have children, she was going to skip the relationship angle and go to a sperm bank. She wrote it
twice. Once when she was a kid, and another time when she was grown.

“Now, we know that Mom went to school at UCSD and came back pregnant with us. San Diego is close to Escondido, home of the Repository for Germinal Choice, and—”

“So what?” Milo says after he drains his glass. “She was close to Cathedral Bible College too, but I bet she didn’t go there either.” Milo fills Feynman’s dish with water and is whispering to the dog while I’m speaking.

“Will you shut up and listen?” I hiss. “I didn’t jump to this conclusion based on that information alone, dummy. I came to it only after gathering enough data to support it. It all makes sense now. Why Mom and Oma never talk about Mom’s years in California. Why she has no real name to give us.
Smith
—the most common surname in this country. Give me a break.” I roll my eyes. “It all makes sense now, Milo. Why else would Mom and Oma have made the topic of our father off-limits? I mean, who would want to tell their children that their father was a tadpole in a petri dish?”

Milo is standing next to Feynman, watching him crunch his dog food, as if that is somehow more intriguing than the story of our beginnings. “Milo, listen, will you? Don’t you see? This also explains why Grandpa Sam said we have no father
and
why we are geniuses, even though Mom and Oma—and probably Grandpa Sam in his day—are of only slightly above-average intelligence. Mom hates relationships, Milo. Something like this would appeal to her in the first place. Mix that with the family message she got from Grandpa Sam—that being stupid deserves a punch—and of course she’d resort to such a thing!”

Milo turns to me, his head protruding so far from his
skinny shoulders that he looks like a chicken ready to peck my eyes out. “I can’t believe you’d believe such nonsense, Lucy. That’s not gathering data. That’s grasping at straws, grabbing one, then wrapping it in circumstantial evidence to reinforce it so it won’t bend.” I’m rather impressed with Milo’s use of metaphor, but I don’t say so.

“There’s more.” I grab my laptop and swirl it around to face us. I maximize an article from the toolbar. “Look at this. The sperm bank was started by an optometrist, Robert Klark Graham, who sold a patent for a hundred million dollars and used that money to fund the clinic himself—”

“What invention?” Milo asks, showing a spark of curiosity. I press the right lens of Milo’s glasses with my thumb and twist it, adding my fingerprint to his collage of smudges. “These, Wheezer. The shatterproof plastic lens.”

“Wow! A hundred million?” Milo leans over and starts reading to himself, his pale lips moving silently as he does.

“Yeah, well, before he becomes your hero, you should know that he was a eugenicist. He believed that the human race was slipping backward because stupid people were having the most kids and that the only salvation for this world was the birth of more intelligent human beings. I think this shows that he wasn’t all that brilliant after all. A true genius would have realized that the problem isn’t that we aren’t smart enough but that we aren’t kind enough. Anyway, in an effort to populate the world with more intelligent beings, he opened a sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners in 1980, in Escondido, California—only eighteen miles from where Mom went to school.”

Milo is no longer paying attention to a word I’m saying but is reading the article for himself. He squints when he looks up at me and pushes his glasses farther up his nose with his middle finger”—he doesn’t mean it to insult me, of
course, because I doubt that Milo even knows the meaning of that gesture. “William Shockley,” he says, reciting the name of the one verified donor. “He received his Nobel Prize in physics in ’56 for inventing a transistor. He was the father of the electronics era!”

Milo’s eyes sparkle at the possibility that a prizewinning physicist could have fathered him. “There were nineteen donors by 1983,” I add.

By the time Milo finishes the article, his eyes have lost their luster, and I realize that they sparkled only for the information itself, not because of our possible link to it.

“Nice wish, but I don’t think it’s a valid assumption, Lucy. It says that the clinic produced only 218 children, and of them, only one showed exceptional intelligence, with an IQ of 180. If we were a part of this, don’t you think we’d be included in the statistics?”

“Knowing our mother, she probably ran off and broke contact with the optometrist, just like she does with every man in her life.” But Milo’s skepticism suddenly grates on my nerves. “Believe me or not, I don’t care. I don’t know why you’d doubt this, though. It seems obvious that this is our history.”

“Two words to prove my point, Lucy: Scott Hamilton.”

I
’
M STILL
on the road, five yards yet from the driveway, pedaling with all my might to catch up to Milo, when he cocks his head around as he coasts and shouts, “He’s here! Peter’s here!” My chest is already heaving, but I get a second wind when I see Peter’s black Suzuki. It’s the only vehicle in the drive, telling me that Mom is going to be caught off guard too, since he wasn’t supposed to arrive for another two hours.

“Peter!” I shout when I get inside, racing toward him and hugging him with such force that he says, “Whoa!” as coffee from the mug he didn’t have time to set down sloshes onto the table. He stands up, laughs, and puts his arms
under mine. He picks me up off the floor, twisting from side to side so my legs wave like pendulums until my foot bangs into the leg of the table. He sets me down and grabs Milo, giving him a bear hug too.