Things Unsaid: A Novel (27 page)

Aida still could hear her husband slipping off his belt and chasing Andrew around and around the house, running upstairs until he caught him in his room. She remembered how he just kept beating him and beating him until he couldn’t lift his arm anymore. How she had wished her son were not too old for her to kiss his owies. He’d wanted so badly to be like his father. She shuddered at the memory.

Horrible stories kept filling her head like dead fish surfacing in a polluted pond. This was the time to conjure nostalgic, Norman Rockwell–esque images of family life in Ohio. When the head of their family was near death. Instead, Aida thought of family photo albums. Photos of her grandson Adam at his Marine boot camp. Like Andrew, hardened, forged in a furnace of shared hardship and tough training. But she had survived her own form of boot camp. She hoped her kids had, too. Aida would endorse the check from Bob’s life insurance policy to Andrew once she received it; Bob would certainly want their only son to have the money, wouldn’t he? As a sign of approval? He owed Andrew that much. After all he had to bear. No one would be the wiser, least of all her two daughters. Jules and Mike had steady jobs and only one child to care for. Soon they would be empty nesters. Zoë—such a talented girl. Wished she could see more of her, but Jules kept her away. Why did she do that?

She looked up at the machine, at the two slightly undulating horizontal lines that were slowly flattening. Going still. Bob’s ordinariness had been heartbreaking. She knew her husband had been a shadow father to Jules, who had told her—when was that? Jules was only a little girl then. She had told her that she wanted a star for a Daddy. Aida’s heart had stopped pumping as she listened to the words coming from that sweet little face. How she’d loved that pure, gentle first child of hers. Now there were only good-byes.

Maybe food would make her feel better. Seeing someone die was horrifying. She had had to take a break, get away from the hospital for just a few hours. Aida sat stiffly, gnomelike, at the small bistro table on Joanne’s patio. Her younger daughter should really get a larger
apartment. She wished she had more space—to lounge on soft pillows, for one, so she wouldn’t have to scrunch up her face on that narrow futon couch. Beauty enhancement was essential to the soul—the key to preserving your younger self, the one that had dreams.

Joanne set out dishes and utensils buffet-style, along with a tray of condiments—cilantro she had diced, guacamole from Mexicali avocados, and two kinds of salsa. Aida didn’t like anything spicy, so Joanne always made two of everything—one spicy, one not.
Probably begrudgingly
, she thought. She wondered if Joanne knew anything about what was going on with Jules and Mike. Where was Mike these days, anyhow?

“Mom, you have to eat something.”

“Okay, but only if we sit down and talk about your sister. Surely you must know something? Julia would never miss seeing her father when asked to come immediately. I told her he was dying. And I haven’t talked to Mike or Zoë for what seems like forever. Something is definitely not right!”

“No one ever seems to be home when I call. You know she is deferring college, Mother, right? Because of Mike and Jules’s financial situation. Zoë’s going to take some classes at a local community college near Palo Alto and then reapply in a year or so, I hear.”

Well, perhaps no one was keeping anything from her. Family was family. And she loved them all, even Julia.

“I didn’t get a good night’s sleep,” she said moving the entire plate of food in front of her. “I’m too old, you know. See—aging is no fun for me either.”

Joanne dropped a spoon, and Aida repressed a smile. Seeing her groggy daughter fumbling in her bathrobe fixing Mexican food made her want to laugh.

She’d told herself she was satisfied with Joanne’s answer, but she wasn’t. She tried again. “Where is Mike these days, anyway?” she asked, trying to make her voice light. “I miss my son-in-law. He came through for us, too. With a check, I mean.”

She watched Joanne playing with her napkin, and saw her feet jittering through the holes of the wrought-iron bistro table. Joanne was hiding something. She just knew it.

“Mom, I was thinking of trying to help Jules so Zoë wouldn’t have to give up Stanford. When you give me that topaz ring you promised, that is. I can sell it and give the money to Zoë. After all they have done for us, it seems like the right thing to do,” Joanne said.

Aida’s lips thinned. “Can we talk about this later, dear? God, if I didn’t know better, I swear we’re in for a thunderstorm.” She wasn’t going to say anything about that ring. “I think I just saw a lightning flash, like a silver-white bolt shooting down the sky, or an illuminated vein in a CT scan. Must be some kind of heat lightning … it’s still so damn hot.” Aida could imagine Jules straining her neck to look high over the roof ridge at rain clouds, using a literary allusion or an art reference to describe them. “Julia would say, ‘Wow! That was scary … let’s see. One hundred fifty miles, I think. Ten miles for each second between.’ ” Julia had loved to solve math problems no one else could. Counting, always counting to see when the lightning would strike. She could almost see the ciphers Julia would add in her head. Almost the way she herself liked to conjure up new lyrics—word by word—for tunes she would have liked to have sung, if only she had had the chance. If luck had ever struck.

Joanne’s apartment garage had a storage attic: raw wood beams with some nails curled over, others’ brutal jagged edges aiming straight down, ready to gouge out a person’s eyes. Aida peered up at the beams from the landing below the trapdoor as Joanne stooped over boxes, yanking at the untaped flaps crossed over each other.

Joanne dragged six boxes over towards the ladder and handed them down, one at a time, to Aida. Then she gingerly climbed down to look at their past with her mother.

Gently Aida coaxed open the ancient blue cover of what looked like a very old album, perhaps the oldest one they had. Memories. Tongue pressing into her teeth, opening the album and turning to the first page, Aida stared at an old black-and-white photo—at least four decades old. The five of them on a boat on Lake Tamsin, circa 1968 or 1969. Joanne was barely in her teens. Bob looked content or smug, hard to tell …
he never could smile naturally. Aida smiled at her own image—holding her white straw hat, her white, Audrey Hepburn–style sunglasses masklike, obscuring half her face. The photo was terribly faded, sepia with gray tones.

“What’re you going to do with all this anyway?” she asked Joanne.

“Oh, just hobbling down memory lane, trying to recapture what happened to us when we were so young,” Joanne said. “What photo are you looking at?”

Aida surrendered the album willingly. “Didn’t I look like a movie star? I was so glamorous! No wonder your father was so taken by me,” she said, reaching over and stroking the photo.

“Hmm, the sunglasses certainly are theatrical.” Joanne seemed subdued. But as she continued to flip through the photos, most of them taken at Lake Tamsin, her mood changed visibly. “It would be so fun to spend a whole day reminiscing over them. That would be so much fun, wouldn’t it, Mother?”

Aida sniffed. “Suit yourself. I threw away all of our movies from years ago. All of that old 16mm film. Your memories are only what you have made of them … all in your mind. Who wants to relive the past?”

O
n the way to the Tahoma National Cemetery in Kent, two hours south of Mukilteo, Aida saw Mount Rainier when she looked southward. It was the end of turning-of-the-leaves time, but a few still remained scattered on the maples and oaks, autumn colored, reminding her of the Bronx botanical gardens of her youth. November weather. Just the way she liked it: sunny, crisp, and cold. She stuck her hand out the window to grab at the invigoration she felt.

Aida didn’t feel like talking with her kids, or even her two granddaughters. Perhaps she was preoccupied, thinking of the memorial service and buffet scheduled after Bob’s urn had been placed in its mausoleum drawer. The five of them—Julia wasn’t there—rode together in a limousine. It was the first time her son and daughter and two granddaughters had been together for more than a day. But no Julia—how could she do such a thing! Telling her that Zoë was sick.
Zoë’s a big girl now—she can be by herself for a day
, Aida thought.

Her husband had a reserved spot—actually a his-and-hers spot—because he had received military honors as a Korean War vet. The paperwork had taken some time, however. Bob’s discharge papers had been lost years ago. An airplane carrying thousands of documents on Korean War veterans had crashed in the Appalachian Mountains and nothing was ever retrieved.

Now their small one-room efficiency at SafeHarbour was hers alone. She could do what she wanted with it. More room. She hoped that Joanne wouldn’t pressure her once again to move in with her. For Christmas.

Along the sides of the national cemetery were rows of committal shelters, structures that looked like places to picnic in areas of the country with lots of snow. Sturdy roofs and pillars, but open on all sides to let the fresh air in. Set up on the side of the long cemetery park. Rows of committal shelters for newly deceased veterans. A handsome Air Force officer, tall and straight like her son had been in his military school days, escorted them to a row of chairs in a committal shelter near where their his-and-hers spot was located. Aida knew her son would like the military funeral, all the pomp and circumstance. It would remind him of his son’s military training at Parris Island and his time at George Washington Military Academy. Forged in steel, taught to live in service to others. Her own life had been spent in service to others, too, and what had she gotten for it?

The band played “Taps.” She looked around her. No one cried. She didn’t cry either, even though “Taps” always made her sad. She hummed along. Five servicemen marched in front, two carrying and then folding the American flag into a compact triangle. Saluting, then bowing towards her, one of them offered the red, white, and blue triangle to her in both hands. She smiled and nodded, and rifles shot into the air, four bullets in all. They would make nice souvenirs. Aida would pass hers on to her son, so he could have two.

One of the military guides escorted them to the mausoleum “niche” where Bob’s ashes would be placed in an urn designed specifically for Korean War vets. Instead of a tombstone, there was an engraving on a drawer set into a marble wall filled with hundreds of identical drawers. Twenty-six letters, including spaces, were allocated for summing up his life. Aida would be allowed only nineteen letters—seven less than Bob—when her own time came. Who knew why.

Aida had thought of having “Ladies aren’t fat,” the title Bob had proposed for another book he never wrote. It would be about losing weight, he had explained to her—about how obese women weren’t ladies because they preferred food to looking attractive for men. That fantasy book would be written after his first one,
Beat the Wife and Save the Marriage
, a title that seemed inappropriate for an epitaph. She had heard him mutter the title in his sleep once. So much for secrets from her. How Julia had been embarrassed by her father’s views as
a teenager! But she supposed “Ladies aren’t fat” wasn’t particularly appropriate either. The marble drawer would proclaim: “To a beloved dad and gramp.” Joanne had looked up epitaphs online to get that one. The original sentiment had actually read, “To our beloved father and grandpa.” No one called Bob “Gramp.” But they would have needed seven more letters for that.

An MIA-POW flag was prominently waving in the northeast corridor. Megan and Sarah walked together down the lanes, if you could call them that, where the marble walls were lined up like bunkers in the beautiful 160-acre park. Aida never liked having her granddaughters around her older daughter. Not quite sure why. Julia could influence Megan and Sarah too much, if left to her own devices. Perhaps say something not so nice about her. Although she couldn’t imagine what that might be. Still, Julia could concoct something. That was just like her—always imagining. Why couldn’t she just let memories be? Maybe it was better that Julia couldn’t attend. Though it bothered Aida that she didn’t know the real reason why. Her daughter, gone AWOL.