The Things That Keep Us Here (32 page)

“Who’s that?” Maddie asked me in a low voice.

“Haven’t a clue.” But there was something familiar about her. Mom was walking toward us now, the woman striding alongside her. Seeing them together like that tore back the years and suddenly I was thirteen again and it was winter. I stood, disbelieving.

Gleaming black hair smoothed back, almond-shaped eyes, the hesitant smile. “You’ve grown up,” she told us. Her vowels were soft, the consonants precise. That, too, was familiar. Her gaze lingered on me, moved to Maddie, returned to me. “You look so much like your father.”

“Shazia,” I said.

We were both astonished, I thought, when we threw out our arms. She smelled of patchouli, and her grip was strong. With a cry of delight, Maddie stepped into our embrace, too.

I finally pulled back. “Where have you been? Mom, how on earth did you find her?”

Mom smiled. “How else?”

Her nonprofit business, Family Finders.

The donations associated with that had saved us those early years while we waited for the university and the insurance company to come through. I’d been bemused at the sight of my technologically handicapped mother sitting for hours before the computer, helping people locate lost loved ones. But the real change had come later, when Mom started painting again. Turned out there was a pent-up demand for post-Pandemic art. I’d wandered down to the kitchen one morning to find Mom on the patio, standing before an easel I’d never seen before. The way she stood there holding her palette and leaning forward to dab paintbrush to canvas, recreating the landscape before her in unbelievable beauty, made me realize I didn’t really know her. Maybe that was when things changed between us. Like I’d said, not all surprises were bad.

“I have a son,” Shazia said. “Ali.” She glanced at Jacob, who was standing there beside my mom, watching us with curiosity. “He’s about your age,” she told him, then shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. You’re a man now.”

“At least that’s what he wants us to think,” I said, teasing, and Jake grinned at me.

Mom put her hand on Shazia’s arm. “I’d love to meet Ali.”

Shazia nodded. “I’d like that, too. He’s at the University of Cairo now. I brought pictures.”

Later, Alan brought out skewers of shrimp and peppers, paella, butternut squash soup. Jacob and Uncle Mike wandered around lighting the torches. I watched Uncle Mike, but Jacob was taking care to make sure he held the flame steady. Candles were everywhere, flickering and bright, releasing the aromas of flowers and sandalwood, vanilla and spice.

The trees played hide-and-seek with the setting sun. Now a long ray of golden light, now a glimpse of magenta.

I went into the kitchen to help Mom with the cake. It was always the same kind, carrot with cream-cheese frosting. I used to protest.

“Why can’t we have a real cake?” I would pout. Wouldn’t you know? Carrot cake was now my favorite, too. “Has Shazia said anything to you about where she went that night?” I whispered, though there was no one in the room but us. Mom shook her head. “She won’t talk about it.” She bumped the drawer closed with her hip and turned around with a stack of plates. “It’s not that unusual.”

I nodded. There were things we didn’t talk about from that time, either.

“But I don’t think she ever found him.”

“Ali’s father?”

“Maybe sometime she’ll talk about it. We’re just beginning to know each other again.”

“Still, she should’ve written or called to let you know she was okay. She had to know you and Dad would be worried.”

“I think she felt guilty.”

“About what?”

“It was something your father mentioned. He’d gone into the lab to analyze the samples from that second die-off, and when he came home, he was puzzled about something. The number of samples from that first die-off didn’t match. There was one missing. He wouldn’t say, but I figured it out later, after he died.”

Dad had found high-pathogenic H5. The university had kept his records. Years later, they’d granted me access. He’d been a thorough, careful scientist. “A missing sample? That doesn’t sound like him.”

“It wasn’t. It was Shazia.” Mom lifted her head and glanced out the window to the patio, where everyone sat ranged around the table. Then she looked back at me. “She must have dropped it or something. She came into our home knowing she’d been exposed.”

“Really.” I felt breathless with the news. I leaned against the counter and stared at her, sickened at the possibilities of what we had escaped.

“Thank God she didn’t get sick. I actually hated her for a while. Then I realized she’d made the best choice she could. Infect our family of four or put an entire dorm full of people at risk? Your father would have done the same thing.”

“She should have said something.”

“Think how terrified she must have been, Kate. Twenty-six years old, thousands of miles from her family. She didn’t know me. She didn’t know what I’d do.”

What she’d done
. I remembered how Mom had stood planted against the door while Dad had slipped around and brought Jake in. I didn’t say it aloud, but Mom nodded at me, her eyes shadowed, as though she knew exactly what I’d been thinking. On the whole, she seemed at peace with it now.

She poked candles into a colorful ring, gripping each one carefully between thumb and forefinger. She stirred her iced tea in the same way, as though she was gripping a stylus. Small constancies like this comforted me. Her love for me had never wavered. It was what pulled me through those years. I didn’t know if I could ever become the woman she was.

“Frank asked me to marry him,” I found myself saying.

She looked up at me. “And?”

I shook my head.

“Sweetheart—”

Tears clogged my throat. “Mom. I just can’t.”

My niece slid the door open. “Hurry, Grandma. The sun’s setting.”

It was time.

I carried the cake outside. Kayla climbed onto a box to blow out the candles. Alan ruffled her hair. Petey was asleep, curled in Maddie’s arms. I set Uncle Mike’s plate down before him, though it was no use. His chin had sunk into his chest and he was snoring a little. Later, Jacob and Frank could help carry him to the guest room.

THE NEXT MORNING, MY MOTHER PULLED ME INTO HER STUDIO
. The garage was gone, the space opened up and skylights installed. More change. My mom, whom I had fixed in my mind as one way, kept surprising me. Her earlier paintings were soft watercolors stacked in the closet behind us. Someday they would be Maddie’s and Jacob’s and mine, she’d told us, if we wanted them.

I did. But I loved the work she did now, big canvases of bright acrylic colors. In their whorls and lines and shapes, I saw courage, determination. Hope.

She reached into that closet now and drew down a wooden box. Setting it on her drafting table, she motioned me over. “I think you should look at this.”

I’d never seen this box before. She lifted the lid, and I came closer.

Papers, dozens of them, brown-edged and lying neatly stacked. A luxury of paper. Interesting how people used to write everything down like that. But more precious still was the handwriting on them—a narrow slanted penmanship that crowded the margins and went off on arrowed tangents.

“What is this?”

“It’s that book your father was working on. Some other things.”

She had such tenderness in her voice. I’m glad Mom and Dad made up before he died. I remember waking that morning and finding them standing close together in the kitchen. I knew instantly that something had altered between them. Was it my teenage imagination that makes me think they’d never stopped loving each other, even during that awful year they were apart? I lifted the top sheet and tried to decipher the words.

The rise and fall of virus in feral birds and their water source has been going on for centuries, a complicated and beautiful process undulating with the fluid exchange of virus between feral and domestic birds.

And then it had flooded mankind and killed almost half the world’s population. Estimates later set the American death toll at almost forty percent. One hundred and twenty million people. Some of them had been my friends. Many had been our neighbors. The world seemed much smaller afterward. The survivors moved more hesitantly. I remember how cars used to zoom past us on the freeway. I remember talking fast in that impatient, speedy teenage language. That fell away. Now people drive the speed limit. Now I pause before I speak. We all do.

I set that sheet aside, looked at the one below.
Sparrow Lake
, I read. I frowned, thinking. “That’s where Dad found that first die-off.”

“Yes, but I don’t think of it like that. Your father loved that lake. It wasn’t just a research site for him.”

I recognized the handwriting on the next page. “I wrote this,” I exclaimed. “Dad had me and Maddie write letters to all the neighbors. I was so bored, I didn’t even complain about it.”

Here was a piece of white paper folded into a square.

“I found that in your father’s pants pocket.”

I opened it and read the typed words.
Ann. Sorry to write out of the blue like this given how we left things, but I just had to. We made it to Virginia and I was online searching databases this morning. I’m so sorry to see that your mom and sister died. I know you were close to them. Maybe when this is all over, we can reconnect. We all miss you. Rachel

I looked up at Mom. “Who’s Rachel?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.

“The mother of one of Maddie’s friends.”

That’s right. Hannah, Maddie’s best friend when she was little.

“This is how you found out about Grandma and Aunt Beth?” I asked, and Mom nodded.

We never did learn what happened to my grandfather. My mother tried to find out, but he’d vanished, along with so many others. But Mom wouldn’t give up looking. Just like with Shazia. Twenty years had passed, but she’d never stopped looking, not for one day.

I reached deeper into the box and found a yellowed newspaper clipping. I stared at my long-ago brother’s face. William. “God, he looks like Petey!”

“I see it, too.”

I stared down at the thin paper. My hand was shaking.

Mom put her hand on my arm. “You never let me talk to you about this.”

“I barely remember him.”

“You were three. You were a baby yourself.”

I should have remembered. But I didn’t. I didn’t remember taking my pillow and climbing into my baby brother’s crib. I had no memory at all of my mom coming into the room and grabbing William from beneath the pillow I’d accidentally pushed over him. I didn’t remember his still, silent little body. I didn’t remember the social worker taking me away from my parents while the authorities sorted things out. My memory didn’t start until two years later with a vague image of my kindergarten teacher and the way she wore her light-colored hair pulled back in a bun. But some part of me must have remembered. I’d never slept with a pillow since. When Jacob came along, I had a chance to do it differently. I had a chance to make up for what I’d done.

“Honey, Frank is a wonderful man,” my mother said softly.

So, this was what this was about. I started to give her back the box, and Mom shook her head.

“I’ve held on to this stuff for so long. I don’t need it to remember your father.”

That night, I read everything twice through to brand it into my memory. Then I burned it, stirring the pile until there was nothing left but ash.

I BUMPED MY PICKUP DOWN THE NARROW RUTTED ROAD. RED
pines pressed in close on both sides, filling the truck with their scent, then fell away to reveal a sandy beach and the calm gray water beyond. I pulled into the narrow clearing and turned off the engine. No sign of anyone or anything. I got out and slammed the cab door. A hawk wheeled overhead. I walked to the shore. The lake lapped the toes of my boots. Shadowy shapes nudged the leather, then darted away. Fish. They’d come back, too.

The boat slid easily into the water. When I was far enough from shore, I opened up the motor and went bouncing across the hard surface. My hair whipped my face. The hawk followed me, soaring out of sight, then reappearing. Dad taught me how to distinguish the owl from the gull, the eagle from the hawk. It was more than their profiles. Sometimes they were too far away to see. You had to watch their flight pattern. I’d learned that applied to people, too.

I turned the tiller and skipped along the shoreline to the right, imagining how this must have looked twenty years before. I bet there were more houses and at least one other boat on the water. Now there was just me and the hawk and the ghost of that old duck blind rising up on broken stilts, its body long gone, collapsed to the water below and sunk out of sight.

The lake curved around a finger of land spiky with fir trees. Slowing the boat, I turned to follow the shore and puttered into a small cove. This was where Dad came upon the teal. There was nothing remarkable to mark the site. It was just another puddle of water, a quiet shore, a fringe of trees. But Dad would have recognized this spot instantly. He’d been transformed by the experience. I remembered hearing him talking to Shazia in the den. I’d been coming in to ask for help with my homework and they sat there, their backs to me.
They’d gone there to die
. His words had stopped me in the doorway, made me take a cautious step back to listen unobserved.

They must have flown around, looking for a secluded spot. Then they settled on the water and, one by one, rolled over. Do you think it’s high-path?
she asked. The kind that spread rapidly and usually killed its victims. He replied,
I hope not
.

I pictured it now, hundreds of the small, pretty birds with their little feet curled against their feathered bellies, their heads submerged, their beaks opened. Their bodies would have touched the shores and bumped against the sides of the boat.

I almost expected to see their ghosts hovering above the lake now, but there was nothing, just softly moving water and the reflection of the drifting clouds above. Dad would have had to come up close, bend over the side of the boat and haul in the first little body. I saw him capping tubes, returning the bird to the water, and retrieving the next one. There had been two fishermen with him that dawn. They would have assisted, bringing the boat around the bobbing mass, leaning over and fishing out the next corpse. They would have been troubled. They would have asked questions. Dad would have shaken his head and replied noncommittally, but he must have known right then.