The Sunflower Forest (30 page)

‘What can’t you stand?’ he repeated.

I turned back. ‘You remember Miss Conway? My French teacher. You know.’ I looked at him. ‘Remember how she used to let me listen to those tapes all the time in the language lab after school? Remember me doing that in March?’

He nodded.

‘Well, I asked her if I could start back on them. I was thinking if I could get involved in something that, well …well, maybe it’d take my mind off …Anyway, I asked her and you know what she said? No. Just like that. Not maybe. Not wait a little, it’s inconvenient. Just no. She said she couldn’t leave me alone in there any longer. That she didn’t want to stay herself. That she had to keep the lab locked. And cripes, Dad, she let me work in there alone a thousand times before.’ I frowned into my mug. ‘You know how that makes me feel?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I can’t stand it. It’s bad enough having everyone always looking at me, always whispering there goes the daughter of Mara O’Malley. But now not only does Miss Conway not want to be alone with me in the lab, she doesn’t even trust me with her stupid tapes.’

He lifted one shoulder in an expressive little gesture of understanding. ‘It’ll get better. We have to give it time.’

‘It’s humiliating.’

‘Yes, it is. But there’s not much we can do about it except live through it and prove them all wrong.’

I grimaced. The room was sweltering, and I became abruptly aware of how uncomfortably sweaty I was. Why the hell was I drinking coffee? I pushed the mug away.

‘I liked her,’ I said. ‘And I thought she liked me. I was the best student in the whole class. I killed myself to be best. Just because I knew French mattered to her and I liked her. I could have done that well in German without even bothering to bring home the book. I could have had it a lot easier.’

Dad wiped his forehead with the heel of his palm. He sighed. ‘So, you want to run away.’

‘No. Not run away. That’s not what I said, is it? That’s not what I’m talking about. I said I just wanted to get out of here and pull myself together.’

‘You’ll be leaving in the fall anyway, Lesley. When you go to Kansas City.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s not what I want.’

There followed a poignant moment when neither of us spoke. The intensity of my desperation swelled in the silence, and I think he was as aware of it as I was. He sighed.

‘It’s
not
running away, Dad. It isn’t the same thing.’

‘When you get out because someone humiliates you at school, Lesley, that’s running away.’

I released a long breath and let my shoulders sag. ‘That’s not what I mean. Not really. It only looks like that, but it’s not the reason.’

‘Then what is?’

I fingered the tablecloth.

‘This is a good family, Lessie. We’ve been through some bad times, but it’s still a good family.’

‘I know it. But I just need to be outside it for a while. Can’t you understand that? Can’t you see what I mean?’

He turned around and lifted the coffeepot from the stove. First the coffee went into his mug, then the sugar, slowly, in measured spoonfuls, then the milk. He stirred it and then finally raised his head to look at me. When he saw that I was still watching him, he looked back down and paused with the teaspoon in his hand. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t.’

M
ama had let me sleep with her when I was very young. My father, snoring softly, had formed the mountainous horizon of those nights, but it was with Mama that I slept, nuzzling into the thickness of her hair, protected by the tired bulk of her body. My memories of those nights were mostly of darkness, blissfully satiating after the autonomy of the day. I would drowse against her breasts and be enveloped in her deep, familiar smell. I didn’t have my own bed until I was more than three, until we moved to west Texas.

Megan too had slept with Mama and Daddy. I was old enough by then to remember them together clearly. Megan never had a real crib. Just a laundry basket with a gingham lining that Mama would carry from room to room in the daytime. At night, even as a newborn, Megan was snuggled down between Mama and Daddy in the big bed. I recall once coming in during the night. I had been sick in my stomach and had come for comforting. Megan was maybe two then, her hair already long and straight, like Mama’s, and there they were together. Mama, free of the restless energy that dominated her waking hours, was deeply asleep, her breathing soft and even. And Megan, like a little dormouse, was curled snugly into the small hollow beneath Mama’s arm. Even in the blackness I could see their hair mingled together, light and dark, and I could see the slack peace of their dreams. It was my father who’d awakened, not Mama, and although he’d let me into the big bed with them and had held me in his arms, I remember crying just a little because neither Megan nor Mama had stirred.

During the course of that May following the murders, the memories of those nights returned persistently to me. I couldn’t sleep very well, and while I lay awake in bed, I found it curiously easy to evoke the darkness that had surrounded me in infancy, to recall the unconditional safeness of those nights. Yet, I could bring back only the dim, snuggly emotions and not the actual heavy warmth itself. Thus, the memories always left me longing.

Deep into one night I actually got up, my head full of hazy, unformed thoughts about sleeping with Megan. It was then that I chanced across my father. He was in his nightclothes, tissues clutched in one hand.

‘What are you doing, Dad?’ I asked. The house was dark.

He shook his head.

I was only half awake myself. It was like seeing an apparition. When he didn’t answer, I turned, bewildered, and went back to my bed, having forgotten what I’d gotten up to do.

That was the first time I noticed. But soon I discovered he paced every night after Megan and I were in bed. Like a forsaken, forgotten ghost, he wandered through the house. Things seemed so normal with him during the day. He said virtually nothing to us about his grief. But then he didn’t need to. Hearing his footsteps as he searched from room to room in the darkness was enough.

‘You want to know a secret?’ Megan asked me one afternoon. It was after school, and we were alone in the house. I was lying on my bed because my back hurt, and Megan had come to stand in the doorway and swing back and forth with her hands on the frame. I’d told her to go away because I was sick of her always hanging around me after school, but she stayed, swaying in and out of the doorway.

‘What secret’s that?’ I asked.

‘You want to know it?’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘I know where Mama is.’

I didn’t respond. I didn’t know exactly what to say. She continued her motion in the doorway, and her long hair flowed rhythmically around her.

‘You want to know?’

I nodded.

Letting go of the door frame, she straightened up. ‘Come with me. I’ll show you.’

I rose from the bed and followed her. She walked down the hallway to the linen closet. ‘OK, Les. Now, you got to close your eyes.’

‘What stupid joke is this, Megs?’

‘Just do it, OK? Just close your eyes for a sec.’

Feeling dumb, I closed my eyes, and I could hear Megan opening the door to the linen closet. She took hold of my arm and pulled me inside.

‘OK, now smell, Les. Keep your eyes closed and smell in here.’

I inhaled deeply. It stank of stale cigarette smoke, an ugly ashtray odour that I had always hated. Mama had been inclined to iron everything. She’d iron the sheets and the pillowcases, the towels and even the washcloths. If we didn’t get them off the line in time, she’d iron Meg’s and my underwear. And all the while she was working, she would smoke, and the smell of her cigarettes would permeate the cloth with the steam and the heat of the iron.

I had yelled at her about it. In seventh grade when we were studying the effects of smoking in hygiene class, I had come home every night and screamed at her to stop. I’d cried and pleaded and brought her pictures of cancerous lungs and addicted monkeys. In the end I’d told her never to kiss me because she stank, and that had made her cry.

Now, I stood in the gloom of the linen closet and breathed in the odour deeply.

‘Sometimes I come in here after school before you get home,’ Megan said. ‘I just stand here with my eyes closed and smell. It makes it like Mama’s just exactly right here, doesn’t it? Like she’s standing near by.’

I turned toward her. Megan had a sheet down and pressed close against her face. Like someone snorting cocaine, she was inhaling in deep, measured breaths. Then slowly, she lowered the sheet, returned it to the shelf and smoothed the ironed surface. We said nothing to one another but remained standing in the small, dark closet.

Megan looked up. She searched my face. ‘How come this happened? How come Mama died, Les?’

I regarded her. What I noticed was what a little kid she still was. She was wearing hot-pink terry-cloth shorts and a T-shirt she was growing too big for. Her stomach was still rounded, giving her that swaybacked, potbellied profile young children have. There were no signs of the softening curves of pre-adolescence in her.

‘Do you think maybe if we hadn’t been so much trouble to her, she might have been happy with us?’ Megan asked. ‘You know. And not needed to go find that little boy.’

I shook my head.

‘Maybe if we’d been better. If I could have done better at school. Mama worried because I didn’t do my schoolwork. She said that to me once. That I had to do my work so I could go to university when I got big. And you know what? I told her I didn’t ever want to go to university.’ There was a pause and Megan reached a hand out to stroke the sheet on the shelf. ‘I shouldn’t have said that. If I’d done better at school, maybe she wouldn’t have had to do what she did.’

‘Megs, Mama was sick. Just as if she’d had cancer or something. You know that. That’s what Daddy was explaining to you the other night.’

‘Then how come I couldn’t tell it? She didn’t act sick to me.’

‘But she was. Inside where you couldn’t see it. And just like cancer makes people die sometimes, this made Mama die. That’s what happened. It wasn’t anything else.’

Wearily, Megan looked away. With the toe of one foot, she nudged the base of the shelves. ‘Is that what you believe?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I don’t know,’ she said doubtfully. ‘Maybe so. Maybe not.’

Then one night I dreamed of Klaus. I dreamed I saw him in a field of sunflowers. He was a baby still, abandoned in a laundry basket. He was some distance away among the stalks. Although I could see him, I was terrified of going in among the sunflowers to get him. Yet the urge to rescue Klaus and be the one to bring him to my mother was so strong that I managed to plunge in anyway. At least I kept trying to. It was one of those frustrating dreams where everything I did was of no use, and I could hardly get through the stalks. By the time I finally reached the basket, I discovered it was no longer Klaus in there but rather Megan’s stuffed tiger cat.

I woke up crying. It was sometime after three in the morning, and I woke, choked with tears. Sitting up, I turned on the bedside lamp to dispel the dream, but it clung to me, seeming very real. Amid my rumpled bedclothes, I sat and wept.

Rubbing his eyes, my father appeared in the doorway. His hair was wildly tousled. He was bare chested, wearing only the bottoms to his blue-striped pyjamas, the ones that were too long for him and hung down over the tops of his feet.

‘What’s wrong, sweetheart?’ he asked, shuffling into the brightness of my little lamp. He reached down to touch my hair. ‘Did you have a bad dream or something? What’s happened?’

I couldn’t answer.

‘Hey now,’ he whispered and sat down on the bed. Putting his arms around me, he pulled me close against the crinkly hair on his chest.

I tried to explain. I tried to tell him about the dream, about how I had found Klaus, about
wanting
to go among the sunflowers to get him. And then when I had, it hadn’t been Klaus, and the bitter disappointment had awakened me. Daddy kept his hand against my face and whispered softly into my hair. He kissed me. But I could not stop crying. It wasn’t the disappointment that had shattered me so much. What had was the brutal realization when I woke that, even if I had found Klaus, Mama was no longer there to bring him back to.

I could see I had to leave. Again and again I tried to explain to my father what I meant, why I felt getting away was so necessary. I couldn’t see how he’d fail to understand what it was like for me in this family, to be smothered by things, great, glorious and extending back before memory. But I was apparently not finding the right words, because every time I tried, he would simply frown and turn away.

What are you searching for? he would ask. Why are you running away? What do you want to escape?

I could no more answer his questions than he could answer mine.

‘Where are you thinking of going?’ Dad asked me one evening while we were doing the supper dishes together.

I shrugged.

‘Would you like to go spend some time with Caroline and Roger? I got a letter from Caroline today. She says you can spend the summer with them, if you’d like. I was telling her about things, you know, and she says they’d be more than glad to have you. Roger says he might be able to give you work in his office. Not much, maybe some filing and phone answering. But it’d be pocket money.’

‘No.’

My father looked at me. He had his shirt sleeves rolled up and his hands plunged into the dishwater. There were suds up to his elbows.

‘Dad, I need to get away. Not go visiting Auntie Caroline and Uncle Roger. You see what I mean?’

‘Not really, Lesley, I must admit.’

I scratched the side of my face, I turned away, then back. Picking up a glass from the counter, I dried it and then held it up to the light to see if I’d gotten all the spots. ‘What I think,’ I said, more to the glass than my father, ‘is that I want to go see the places Mama was at. After the war.’

‘Like where?’

I shrugged. ‘Hungary, maybe. Germany. Or Wales.’

‘Oh, surely not there. You don’t need to go that far. I don’t want you gallivanting all over creation on your own.’

‘I’m eighteen.’

‘I’m well aware of that. And in many ways you’re very mature and responsible. But we’ve never vacationed much, Lesley, and you’re not very informed about things like that. Those are foreign countries you’re talking about.’

‘I can manage.’

I took up a pot and dried it with intense thoroughness. Then I dried the plates and took them to the cupboard.

‘It would be nice to work in Uncle Roger’s office, I think,’ my father said at last. His voice was soft but hopeful. ‘And you could stay with them in their house. You’ve always liked their house. Remember that big porch swing? And Caroline says she’ll take you shopping in Chicago. Maybe you can get some new things for college. Caroline could help you. She’s very good with that sort of thing, you know. She was always the best of all the girls when it came to looking nice. And Betsy and Carl are over all the time with the grandkids. You’d be the first to see Betsy’s new baby. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

‘No.’

‘You could think about it. I’ll tell Caroline that you’re considering it.’

‘No, Dad. I’m not considering it.’

He drained the dishpan into the sink. There was distance between us. It might as well have been a mile instead of a few feet. Or a month instead of a few moments. With the sprayer he rinsed the sink out, swirling the water around with the dishrag.

‘So, just what exactly do you think you’re going to do, going to those places?’

I shrugged. ‘Just go there. I was thinking mostly about Forest of Flowers. We still have the tickets. I thought I could go and see what it was like.’

He turned on the tap.

‘Or I thought I might go to Germany. I’d like to see some of those places, those camps and stuff, where all those things took place. They’ve had such an influence on my life that I’d just like to know what they look like.’

He squeezed out the dishrag. There was silence, faint and ill-defined by the sounds of the faucet. I dried my hands on the dish towel and then pressed it to my cheek. It was damp and felt good in the humid heat of the kitchen.

‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I was thinking that if I went to Germany, maybe I would look for Klaus.’

My father’s activity at the sink halted abruptly. Frozen for a moment, he made no sound. The colour drained away from his cheeks and left his face an ashen hue.