Sixfold Fiction Winter 2015

Valerie Cumming | Sixteen Days

  After the accident, we were told only to remember, above all else, that what had happened wasn’t Martha’s fault.

  At first it wasn’t clear that our cousin Lucy was going to die—at least it was not clear to us, to my brother and sister and me. Our mother was a nurse, and every day for two weeks she left us with an elderly neighbor while she drove to Columbus, because, she explained, it would do Lucy good to see a familiar face among those looking after her. At our mother’s urging, we went through our closets and shelves looking for old toys or books that could be sent along with her and given to Lucy, to help her pass the hours. “Think about it,” my mother pressed us when we hesitated or, as the days wore on and the novelty of Lucy’s situation began to wear off, complained. “You can go outside and run and play and swim, but your little cousin cannot.” She didn’t add, “ever again,” and perhaps she should have, because when Lucy’s death came sixteen days after her accident it was a terrible shock to us; I had been picturing her sitting up in bed in a frilly pink bathrobe with a cast on her leg, calmly punching out paper dolls while she waited for her small body to heal.

  It was Lucy’s mother, our aunt Anne, who returned our things to us in the weeks following Lucy’s death: stacks of coloring books and board games, construction paper get-well cards, all of them unopened, because, as we understood now, Lucy had never really regained consciousness. “Such sweet children,” Aunt Anne said, gathering all of us, including even my older brother, close to her. “She was lucky to have had such thoughtful cousins.”

  We thanked her, because we were supposed to. We knew well enough how to be polite, how not to correct adults, especially our grieving aunt, even though we knew that she was wrong.

  When I was young, I spent a lot of time imagining what it would be like to be Aunt Anne’s daughter: not Martha or Lucy, but myself, with Anne as my mother, Anne who wore long skirts and flimsy blouses while my own real mother yanked her dark hair into a bun every day and complained constantly about her weight. I imagined waking early in the morning and climbing into bed beside her, drifting off again on cool, white sheets. (Whenever I got into bed with my own mother, she complained that I kicked her and ordered me back to my own room.)

  It was a mystery, is a mystery to me even now, how my cousin Martha came to be born as she was: thick around the middle but unathletic, with dark, coarse hair that took an hour to comb out after her bath. Sometimes I would ask to touch her arm or leg hair, which was thick as my father’s but soft, like I imagined bird feathers would feel. She was kind, though. Even though she was older than all of us, even my brother, she would paint my nails for me sometimes, startling reds and purples that complimented her own dark coloring but on me looked wrong, almost violent, as if my fingertips had been dipped in blood. Once, behind the shed in our parents’ yard during a family dinner, she taught my brother how to kiss. She was ten and he was nine, so she had to bend over slightly to do it. The rest of us were allowed to watch, but only from a distance, and afterwards, we practiced on each other, rolling in the grass and laughing until the mosquitoes came out to feed at dusk and our parents called us inside to safety. Three months later, when Lucy was dead and Martha was gone, I thought back often to that night, trying to remember the feel of Lucy’s lips on mine, the last time I had ever seen her; but like the mosquitoes and the grass and the laughter of our parents echoing from the house it is all gone now, a memory distant almost from the moment it was made.

  It has become tempting, in recent years, to remember Lucy differently from how she really was; or rather, to remember only certain aspects of Lucy’s personality while selectively forgetting others. That she was often cruel, that she was spoiled, were traits that, after her death, we never talked about. The way that, if you had a toy or a treat and she wanted it, she would pinch you and try to take it; the way the adults, charmed by her fine blonde hair and blue eyes big as saucers, would only laugh and shake their heads as if it couldn’t be helped, or worse, suggest that you give in: She’s just a baby; be a big girl, why don’t you, and share with the baby. Had she lived to her teenage years and beyond, no doubt, terrorizing her parents the way all children do at that age, she would perhaps not have been remembered quite so fondly; or at any rate, remembered, at least, as a person flawed. But as it is she exists now only in photographs, the washed-out Polaroids of that era, all blue eyes and sunsuits and dimples: before acne, before boys, before big feet or breasts or body odor could tarnish our image of her. We pull out the old, crumbling albums now, we show them to our children, we speak reverentially—Lucy, who died when she was very young—and we watch our children gaze at her, seeing her exactly as we did, the way we always will: the unspoiled, unblemished image of childhood, of youthful innocence.

  For this, I suppose, we envy her.

  Our mother never told us how she spent her hours with Lucy, the details of how exactly she cared for her during her long last days. Was she in a hospital, which seems likely now, or even a hospice? Or is it possible that, despite her medical training, our mother did not go to Columbus to care for Lucy at all?

  After my mother’s death of a pulmonary embolism at age 63, a note came, one of many such notes but special, because this one was postmarked Texas and came from our cousin Martha, whom we had not seen or heard from since childhood. She wrote that she was saddened to hear of our mother’s passing, that she had always looked up to and respected our mother; that she had, in fact, chosen to become a nurse out of reverence to our mother, who had shown her such kindness in the weeks leading up to her younger sister’s death. Was it possible, then, that our mother had made the four-hour round trip each day not to nurse Lucy but to keep Martha company, support and love her, even as Martha’s own family fell to pieces around her?

  We return to the old albums, search the fading photographs for answers. But the faces are, without exception, opaque, posed, smiling. They reveal nothing.

  Later, we argued—my brother, my sister, and me—about who told us the story, Lucy’s story, if it was our mother or our largely-absent father or Martha herself; more than likely, though, no one told us; we pieced it together, I am certain now, from what we managed in those days to overhear of adult conversations, the adults, in their grief, forgetting what was to be revealed and what kept secret, buried along with Lucy in the tiny metallic-looking silver casket. The story, or what we know of it, goes like this: Martha and a neighbor friend were walking to the swimming pool, six blocks away; when Aunt Anne called to them to take Lucy along, too, they ignored her, not wanting the smaller girl to tag along; Lucy, chasing after them anyway, forgetting to look both ways before crossing a side street, was hit by an oncoming car and killed: not instantly, though damaged beyond repair in a way that led to her inevitable death sixteen days later.

  This is the telling of the story as we always understood it, as we accepted it, as we passed it down as a warning to our own children, the story serving either the moral of Look both ways before you cross the street or as an admonishment of the older children to look after the younger ones, because How would you like such a thing to haunt you for the rest of your life? It is an effective tool; our children get along better than most, the older always taking a guiding hand with the younger siblings and cousins; at reunions we are happy to sit back with a drink in the shade and watch them all play together, in relative peace, the others wondering—I’m sure, as I do—how much of this harmony can be traced to lessons learned by past generations, to Lucy’s—or rather, Martha’s—legacy?

  But in truth there is much we don’t know about that day, much that is taken away, added, imagined with each retelling. In my mind, for example, Lucy calls out for her older sister, running down the sidewalk in her bathing suit with her towel flying behind her; Martha resolutely ignores her, tightens her hand on the neighbor girl’s arm. Which is to be forgiven; why, in fact, was the child her responsibility to begin with, she little more than a child herself? What household task was my aunt attendin
g to at that moment, what laundry or vacuuming, that kept her from being able to supervise the girl on her own?

  I imagine it: the squealing tires, the long moment it must have taken Martha, an eternity really, to force herself to turn around and look.

  It is possible, as my brother has always believed, that she did not even hear the little girl calling to her, lost as she was in conversation with her friend, the anonymous neighbor girl. It was possible, too, that both she and Aunt Anne underestimated, fatally, the potential dangers of that road, which had once been a quiet residential street but now, thanks to the development of a shopping complex a few blocks west, had become flooded with traffic. It was perhaps even the roaring of these passing cars, my brother argues, that kept Martha from hearing her younger sister’s pleas in the first place.

  Possible, yes. But in my mind’s eye, I see Martha tightening her grip on the neighbor girl’s arm, painted fingernails digging almost painfully into flesh; I hear Lucy’s cries just as I have heard them so many times, infinitely it seems, in my own parenthood: the incessant begging of children for attention; for you to look, to help, to tie this, to loosen that, to want, or hurry; to play, or bandage an invisible wound, or fix a broken toy, or soothe away a nightmare. How many times have I myself ignored those small voices, Lucy’s voice: feigned sleep, or sent one back to bed with only the most cursory reassuring kiss, or left one to cry a few extra minutes in his crib while I finished a task, or put one on the bus to school despite a low-grade fever because I couldn’t bear having them with me in the house all day? It is impossible for me to blame Martha without condemning myself, and human nature in general; still, in my mind’s eye, at unexpected and unpredictable moments, I see them there, feel them: the fingernails, digging in.

  It would not be fair to say that we hated Lucy, or Martha, any more than it would be fair to say that we loved them; it is true only that we were children thrown together based solely on a vague, shared blood; that we knew them only because our mothers had once, in a black-and-white time long ago, shared a childhood; we pitied them sometimes, and were jealous of them others, and were, the rest of the time, largely indifferent, in the way that children are always indifferent to something that doesn’t immediately concern them.

  We were indifferent, too, to the new baby our aunt Anne gave birth to two years after Lucy’s death, though our mother made it clear to us that while all new babies are a blessing, this one was particularly so, because she would give our aunt and uncle “new life,” as my mother put it. Maybe knowing this about the baby—that she was more wanted than most, maybe even more loved than most, certainly more loved than Martha or any of the rest of us—solidified our indifference into something that bordered on cruelty; when we drove to Columbus to meet the new baby, only days old, and take our turns sitting in our uncle’s large easy chair to hold her, our mother fluttering around us, reminding us to support the neck, none of us made the slightest attempt to kiss the baby on her tiny, prunish lips, or even to smile at her. “Will you call her Lucy 2?” my younger sister asked, no doubt thinking of the succession of cats we kept in those days, all invariably named Patches, one right after another; still, there was the hint of cruelty in the question. My mother went pale and reached to remove the baby from my sister’s arms, while Aunt Anne, her mouth disappearing in a thin, tense line, informed us that, no, the baby would be called Penelope, which meant—though we had no idea why she wished us to know this—faithful.

  We shrugged, nodded; the name made no difference to us, any more than the child herself did. We asked if we could go outside to play and our mother said of course we could, but to take Martha with us, Martha whom none of us up to that point, my brother included, had thought to ask about. When we found Martha she was in her room, sitting on her bed, writing in what looked like a diary. She and Lucy had shared a room at the time of Lucy’s death, and the bed that had once been Lucy’s remained as it had been: the same Holly Hobbie throw pillows and blue gingham spread, the stuffed animals that had been arranged at the foot for as long as we could remember. Martha looked overgrown and ridiculously out of place in such a room; she wore jeans and black lipstick, which gave her a dramatic, almost attractive look, though she was even heavier now than we remembered her. When we asked her to come outside, she surprised us all by shrugging and standing up to follow. “Anything to get away from that screaming baby,” she said, and we all nodded, though in truth none of us had heard a sound.

  Years later, at Penelope’s wedding—she was by then called Penny, though we her family always seemed unable to refer to her by anything but her full name—my brother and sister and I stole outside behind the parish hall after all of the toasts and made one of our own, to Martha, who by then had married a handsome farmhand and was living somewhere in Texas with him and their four children. The children were said to be beautiful, as was the husband, though none of us had ever seen a picture and could not imagine how dowdy Martha had managed it. But we missed her that day, a little; after all, she was our only cousin, because Penelope didn’t count, Penelope who was a decade younger and spoiled even worse than Lucy had been, who spent, we had heard, nearly fifty thousand dollars on a wedding and cried when the roses in the boutonnieres were pale pink rather than peach. “Do you remember,” my brother asked us, “that day after Penelope was born, when we went to visit them in Columbus, when we all got bored and went outside to play?”

  My sister said she didn’t. I did, I said, but only in patches.

  He told us that he and Martha, teenagers at the time, or almost, had gone around the side of the house to smoke, and she had told him that she was leaving as soon as she could and was never coming back; she’d go to New York or California and be a model or a waitress or a whore, whatever it took to get away. She had to, she told him. Left in that house—alone in that house, was how she phrased it, which puzzled my brother—she would die.

  My sister and I sipped our gin and tonics, made especially for us by the handsome young bartender who stood at the open bar wearing an ill-fitting tuxedo. The band was playing a Jimi Hendrix song, and everyone inside was laughing and clapping along: Penelope’s dance with her father, the father of the bride. My sister glanced back toward the hall and I knew she was thinking of the handsome bartender. I asked, “What did you say, when she told you all of that?”

  He shrugged, swallowing down the rest of his drink. I watched the Adam’s apple bob in his throat. He’d grown skinnier since his own wedding, the arrival of his own two children. I wondered if he ever thought about that afternoon before Lucy died, kissing Martha back behind the shed, that day before the whole world tilted and collapsed; I wondered if he even remembered it, and if he didn’t, if it had ever really happened at all.

  “I told her that I thought it would be cruel, to let her parents lose two children.” He grinned at us sheepishly, apologetically, in a way I hadn’t seen him do in years, since the days of sneaking in past curfew and house parties while our parents were out of town. “She handed me the rest of the cigarette and walked away. And she hasn’t spoken a word to me since.”

  I didn’t ask him how often he thought about that day, or how much it still bothered him, the way we never ask each other about our marriages, or our lives, or if we are happy. I only nodded, and looked down into my empty glass, and when I suggested that it might be time to go back inside, to rejoin the party, neither of them disagreed.

  At our mother’s funeral, we half expected to see her: not at the viewing perhaps, but at the service itself, slipping late into the back, maybe with one or two of her children, who were now themselves nearly grown. But she never came. Penelope, or Penny as she prefers now to be called, read a poem, and I don’t remember what it was except that afterwards, as she took her seat, a few people clapped, despite the fact that you are not supposed to do that sort of thing at funerals or inside churches in general.

  It was odd, we told each other later, half-drunk at the wake, that she had not come. Had not even sent flowers. br />
  (Just as we had noticed that it was odd, maybe even a little cruel, that out of her own four daughters she had not named even a single one of them Lucy.)

  But then, a few days after the service, it arrived in the mail, to our mother’s address, though bearing our names: a note, a simple cream-colored card with a silver M embossed onto the bottom corner. No photo enclosed, though we had all hoped for one, would have forgiven the implied lack of impropriety for even the briefest glimpse into who she had become.

  Such incredible kindness, Martha wrote—her handwriting slant and perfect, the way our elementary school teachers’ had been, the way we told ourselves we remembered our aunt Anne’s to be—I’ve never forgotten it. How she helped me, in those awful long days after Lucy’s accident.

  Her kindness.

  I don’t know which of us saved the note—my brother probably, though after his divorce he has always lived simply, in small bare apartments void of clutter; it’s difficult to imagine him exhibiting such sentimentality—but I would like to have it now, to reread it, to run my fingers along the marks Martha made with her pen: the ink now faded, absorbed into the cheap cardstock of the note. It has occurred to me only now, relatively late in life, that those of us who remember Lucy are now few and far between: our parents are dead, and Lucy’s; my sister has forgotten, though she claims she hasn’t; Penelope, in her honey-blonde middle age, never knew at all. Photos, faded or water damaged, have been spread thinly, passed from relation to relation, sometimes lost; aged albums crumble and separate at the spines; gaps exist where images removed for school projects and family trees have never been replaced. I would like to see Martha’s letter now, to hold it in my hand, touch my tongue to the looping whorls of the “L.” In the way that Lucy has been forgotten so will we all soon be forgotten, and the rest of us even more swiftly, because the rest of us, unlike Lucy, have no dramatic story associated with us, no warning, no moral. There is only a life, simply lived; photographed moments and scraps of notes; moments shared at weddings and funerals until new moments, populated with new characters, come along to replace them.

  If we are lucky, there is forgiveness.

  And at the end, at the most: kindness.