The First Day of the Rest of My Life

  I waited on the deck of the farmhouse with Annie until Granddad and Grandma finished their stroll through the lavender plants, the late-afternoon sun breaking through the clouds. The day seemed cheerful but ominous. Foreboding.

  I could see them in the distance, Grandma smiling, sometimes turning and stroking Granddad’s cheek, his smile warm, if not tinged with sadness. Watching Granddad deal with Grandma’s dementia had been so painful I thought my guts would split.

  “Here we go, Emmanuelle,” Granddad said gently, as they walked up the steps to the deck. He looked pale and exhausted. “Let’s take a nap.”

  My grandma smiled at him, coquettishly. “A nap?” She winked at him. “I’ll do it, Anton, let’s go and take a nap.” She glanced over at us, then put a hand over her mouth and giggled. “You mind your mouth! Keep this to ourselves!”

  He kissed her cheek and said, “You’re right, let’s keep it to ourselves.” He put an arm around her waist. “I’ll be right back,” he told Annie and me.

  Grandma turned around. “It will be awhile, dear. He doesn’t believe in rushing these things.” She said in French, “He’s a pistol. And the pistol has a certain . . . dance, shall we say? A certain rhythm. Boom, boom, boom.”

  I laughed.

  She added, also in French, to Granddad, “I love your rhythm. Rhythm me, handsome.”

  I watched as they hobbled into the house, Nola opening the door for them.

  They both thanked her, and Grandma kissed her cheek. “I love you, Nola.”

  “I love you, too, Emmanuelle. You are my best friend.”

  Nola followed Grandma inside. She would not interfere with their love.

  About thirty minutes later, Granddad came out and joined us on the porch swing. I knew he had helped her to lie down, brought a comforter up and over her body, then hugged her until she went to sleep. “I have to have Anton’s arms around me in bed, or the nightmares come,” she’d told me. “He battles those nightmares away from me. Sometimes with a gun! Sometimes with a knife! Sometimes he hides me.” Then she whispered, “Sometimes he puts me in a barn or a shed or under a house and I stay quiet. Shhh. I am quiet. Shhh. Quiet so we’re not captured and filleted like a fish.”

  I held Granddad’s hand as we swung back and forth. His hand was cold. I didn’t want to tell him what I had to say.

  “Granddad, I’ve said it before, I’m gonna say it again,” Annie said, handing him a glass of lemonade. “You need to go to the doctor—”

  “I’m fine.”

  He wasn’t fine. We knew he wasn’t fine.

  He brought his other hand up to his forehead and stroked it. Something was killing him, not just physically, but mentally. It was the atonement guilt he’d spoken about at Max’s.

  “You don’t look fine.”

  “Thank you, Madeline. You know how to make an old man feel older still, downright cadaver-like.”

  “Any chance you’ll go to see Dr. Rubenstein?”

  “I will not be going to the doctor. I don’t want to be shot, cut open, forced to swallow vile pills, X-rayed, poked or prodded, or told what to do.”

  “Granddad, something isn’t right,” Annie said. “I’m not a medical genius, but I see it. You’ve got a pretty gray sheen to you.”

  “That’s my makeup,” he joked. “I chose the wrong color. Girls, all is right in terms of the pattern of my life, of your grandma’s life. We’re old people. We’re getting closer to death. I have had a long, long life, and I’m ready to go, but I won’t go, I refuse to go”—he raised his voice, as if instructing God—“until after your grandma. I will care for her until she is no longer with us.”

  I pushed my eyelids down so I wouldn’t make a mess of myself. See what I mean about their love?

  “We love you, we need you,” Annie said. “Dr. Rubenstein could help—”

  “And I love you girls, with all my heart, with all my being.” He lifted my hand, then Annie’s, and kissed them. “You are everything to your grandma and me. Everything.” His voice caught on his tears.

  “Then stay with us, find out what’s wrong.”

  “Nothing’s wrong. I am old. Old people die.”

  “Something is . . .”

  “Do you think that I, at my age, would treat anything that was wrong with me? I’m not going to do chemo. I’m not even sure I’d consent to an operation, with the risks of problems afterward, recovery, the pain. There’s very little I’d choose to fix. I don’t want to do the treatment. I don’t want to spend my last days ill, in a hospital, doctors and nurses flurrying around like hyperactive bugs, bothering me.”

  What do you do with an older relative who is completely sane who won’t go to a doctor? Drag him there? Override his decision? Take charge? Take over his life? No. Not if he’s still with it, still able to make reasonable, cognitive choices.

  Even as I fought off panicky grief at the very thought of losing my granddad, I understood him. If I were his age, would I want to be at the mercy of the medical establishment and perhaps lengthen my life but lose the quality?

  “This is not a group decision,” Granddad said. “I am not a group. I make my own decisions. I will not listen to your arguments.”

  “Okay, Granddad,” I said, holding his frail hand with both of mine, knowing I was going to cause him grave pain but also knowing I had to do it. “There’s something else I have to talk to you and Annie about.”

  When I was done, Granddad was white. Annie was rigid, staring straight ahead.

  The sad part was that I had told them only half of the problem. I hadn’t had the heart to tell them about the blackmailing or the photos with the two girls wearing vapid, defeated expressions, dressed in slutty outfits made from leather.

  Click, click, click.

  Lavender has medicinal uses.

  Some say it can help with everything from fungal infections, migraines, aches and pains, insomnia, depression, anxiety, impotence, gas, and gum problems.

  There is no conclusive research stating that lavender can whittle away at memories best left forgotten forever.

  Annie did not want to talk about our conversation the next day. I accompanied her on a vet call to an alpaca farm, after she’d been on two calls already. One for a cow, one for a horse named Gotcha Baby. The alpaca farm is owned by Bertie Schouten.

  Alpacas are beautiful animals. They seem to me to be a cross between Santa Claus’s beard, a horse, and a centaur with the black eyes of wet gumdrops.

  Annie and I were there because Bertie Schouten said one of his alpacas, named Brad How, was sick.

  “He’s uh . . . he’s uh . . . uh . . . he’s under the weather,” Bertie told us when we got to his house. Bertie’s house was designed by his architect brother, Eric Schouten. It’s open and bright with windows and glass doors everywhere. “It’s not enough that I live in the country,” Bertie told me one time. “My brother wanted the country inside my house. He wanted me living amidst all these hills and trees and rabbits and chipmunks and mountain lions running around here. I can almost feel the grass under my butt when I sleep. Look at these walls of windows. If I saw a bear outside I’d probably start running in the other direction and plow right through a sheet of glass to get away and bust my head open.”

  Bertie is supersmart. He went to MIT. He flies in and out quite a bit, so he hires Annie to take care of his alpacas when he’s gone. We’re not sure where he goes, he’s very vague, but he has come back with a couple of not-so-fun diseases, his face has been mangled up a few times, an arm broken, and a leg smashed, so the guy is probably in and out of some third world countries getting in fights.

  “He’s in Special Ops,” Annie told me, cracking her gum. “Highly trained, on-contract. He’s like Tom Cruise in one of his movies only he loves Alpacas. He’s a strange guy.”

  “Brad How is coughing, too,” Bertie said, his face happy and shining with good glee. “But come on in first, I have lunch ready. You ladies need to sit down and take a break. How’s your shoulder, An
nie? Better?”

  “It’s fine,” she drawled. Annie had mentioned she scratched it in the woods on a horseback ride.

  “Lunch’ll be great,” I said. I turned to Annie and grabbed her elbow as she hesitated. She was wearing jeans and a green tank top. Her arms are so built up with muscle she looks like a Barbie doll—Ken, the Barbie doll, not dimwitted Barbie the Barbie doll. Annie might look slender all dressed, but she is wiry and hard and gives her punching bag hell every night for about an hour.

  Bertie opened the door wide. “I have your favorite soup, Annie, that artichoke chicken that you love from the café, plus a fresh shrimp and avocado salad from Darren’s Deli, those fluffy rolls from Chitty Chang’s bakery, and a fresh green salad. I went over to Sally’s and got some of her lettuce. I know you love her arugula.”

  Annie managed a tight smile.

  “And I bought a chocolate cheesecake. I know you like chocolate cheesecake, Annie.”

  Such an eager beaver.

  “Yum,” I said, pinching Annie’s elbow

  She managed another tight smile. I saw her swallow hard. I pulled her inside.

  “I’ve got the table set outside on the deck, Annie,” Bertie said, so delighted to have Annie for lunch. “I know you like the view. The weather’s perfect today. We’ll eat, and when you’re ready we’ll go and see Brad How.”

  “You are so thoughtful, Bertie,” I said. “This is my favorite vet call of the day.”

  It was the only call of the day that I was going on. The only one I’d been invited on so far. Truth was, every time that Bertie called because an alpaca was sick, Annie made me come.

  Why?

  Because Bertie is in love with Annie. He can hardly think he’s so in love with her, and she needs me as a buffer.

  “Here, Annie,” Bertie said, pulling out a chair for her. Annie sat down, still silent, and he handed her a yellow cloth napkin. Cloth napkins. Can you imagine? A man who understands the value of a cloth napkin?

  I sat down and Bertie poured both of us raspberry lemonade.

  You might think that Bertie was very unattractive, like a sumo wrestler with two heads and a tail, which is why Annie won’t date him.

  Or you might think that he has a terrible personality, perhaps psychotic or clingy controlly or deadly boring, which would explain why Annie won’t date him.

  Perhaps it has crossed your mind that maybe Bertie has been married many times and has many bratty children and a leech-sucking momma, which would explain why Annie won’t date him.

  “I hope you like it, Annie,” he said. “You, too, Madeline,” he added as an afterthought.

  She smiled tightly. She swallowed hard.

  None of those assumptions would be true.

  Bertie is perfect. He’s tall, lanky, and strong with longish blond hair and rimmed glasses. He wears manly man sorts of clothes. He’s never been married, no kids. I’ve met his mother and father, and if I could adopt them, I would. His two sisters and two brothers live in the area, and they are so funny I wet my pants one time I was laughing so hard.

  “I bought you some of that peanut brittle you like from Elga’s, when I was on the East Coast. I’ll bring it over later.”

  See? He would bring peanut brittle over later. He wouldn’t give it to her now, no, he needed an excuse to drop by her house.

  “Thank you,” she said tightly. I kicked her under the table. “That’s nice.”

  Bertie’s face fell at her tone. He cleared his throat. He sat down, eying her, with more hope than he should have.

  Bertie told me once that Annie was the most beautiful woman he knew. No matter how Annie has tried to play down her looks, she can’t hide perfect bone structure, puffy lips, huge eyes the color of a twirling blue-green sea, and hair that is thick and dark.

  But it’s not her physical beauty he loves.

  “Annie understands people, Madeline,” he’d told me. “She is one of the only people I know who is able to look past the surface and see people, see what’s inside. She can talk about anything, but she listens, too. No one listens anymore, but she does and she’s so damn smart. She’s gentle with everyone. I can relax around her. Sort of. I mean, I can hardly think when I’m with her. I want to talk to her, and make her laugh.” He put his head in his hands. “I’ve tried everything, Madeline. I asked her to go to a play with me in Portland, out on my boat, to a barbeque with my family, out to dinner and breakfast and lunch, even brunch. She won’t go. She doesn’t like me, does she?”

  I patted his shoulder.

  Annie liked him. Everyone liked Bertie. What was not to like?

  But Annie couldn’t . . . get involved.

  She never had. We, together, can’t.

  She had tried, I had tried, but men make us feel physically ill when they touch us.

  “I’m not gay,” she’d told me, years ago, as we sat together overlooking the rows of lavender plants, yellow raincoats on as Oregon’s almost constant winter drizzle drizzled over our hoods. “I’m not attracted to women.”

  I put an arm around her shoulder. “Me either. I don’t want to touch a breast. I don’t want to touch my own breasts that much.”

  “And I sure as heck don’t need another vagina in my life.”

  “No, no to another vagina.”

  “And I don’t need another woman in my home with hormonal mood swings.”

  “Or cramps.”

  “Or yeast.”

  “No yeast. For heaven’s sakes, why did God make vaginal yeast possible?”

  “Mistake. It was a mistake. He had a whoops. Probably got sidetracked, we all do.”

  We pondered that, God getting sidetracked.

  “But I think about having sex with a man and all I can see is . . .” Annie whispered out a terrible mutual flashback in a few succinct words, the bad dream we’d lived through barreling in in Technicolor.

  “I can’t do it. I can’t have a man touching me.” She ran her hands over her arms, as if they were suddenly crawling.

  “I feel the same.” A mental image of the snake lover popped into my mind. The snake lover could touch me, but only him.

  “I’ve accepted that I can’t change this part of myself, Madeline. No can do. I have a blue house here in the country. I see Grandma and Granddad and you all the time. When I’m not with my animals I work on my rose garden, or fire up the ol’ chain saw, punch my boxing bag, go to Fiji, walk. I read, I listen to music. That’s enough. It’s more than most people have, and I’m sick of trying to be someone I know I’m not and can’t be. That relationship, with a man, is not going to happen for me.”

  Those three men had robbed my sister and me of much of ourselves, as surely as if some phantom wielding a scythe had burst through the ceiling of hell and carved us inside out and thrown our guts into a bonfire.

  “I get it, Annie.”

  “Any feeling or desire I might have had to be with a man, have a husband, was killed. Slaughtered by him and his sick friends. If only I had been trained in knife fighting or grenade throwing then.”

  “My rage about them comes like a rush, like a train, and either I am bowled over by it or I come up swinging. I can’t predict when it’ll come, but when it does it’s like I’m gone and the rage is replacing me. Do you think the rage will ever go away?”

  “I don’t know, Madeline, I don’t know. Shit. Why do you think I’m so good at attacking wood with my chain saw?”

  In that drizzle we watched the sun go down, right over the bluish purple coast range in the distance, the lavender swaying ever so gently under the rain.

  So a relationship with the eager Bertie wasn’t going to happen.

  We ate lunch and Bertie and I talked. Annie entered the conversation sporadically, and she even smiled several times. Each time she did I saw Bertie’s face light up, like the sun was feeling a burst of delight, a spurt of joy.

  But when his hand and her hand accidentally touched as they reached for the same bowl, Annie’s hand jerked away and the sun
on Bertie’s face went down.

  “Come here, Brad How,” Annie murmured to the alpaca after lunch, standing in the middle of the corral among six other alpacas. “Come here, my friend.”

  I didn’t think the alpaca was sick.

  In fact, I knew he wasn’t sick. If he was sick, Bertie would have separated the animal from the others. He knew to do that. He had simply forgotten to do it, because he was lovesick.

  Brad How looked perfectly healthy. He even ran about, had tons of energy, nuzzled Annie.

  It was all a ruse.

  All an excuse for the lovesick Bertie to have yet another few hours with the love of his life, my sister, Annie, who was haunted by a shack of a house, a camera, and men who had perversion coursing through their arteries, like the rest of us have blood. Annie couldn’t love a man because of the clawed demons that sprung from the murkiest recesses of her mind. That’s what caused my rage.

  My rage was eating me.

  In my head I heard an orchestra warming up. Eventually they played Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio Espagnol. Totally opposite pieces.

  Stunning.

  “I remember where that long, skinny scratch came from, Madeline,” my grandma said the next morning, running a finger down the back of my violin.

  “You do? Where?” Grandma and I swung on the porch swing, the sun poking over the hills, red, fluffy blankets wrapped around our shoulders. Grandma had asked me to “fiddle it out,” and I played “The Arkansas Traveler” and “Ragtime Annie” while she clapped her hands, then asked for the violin.

  “That scratch happened when we were playing in the gardens by the swan pond. You were playing a song for the unicorns! Do you remember that? How colorful the gardens were! All the grass to run on and the trees! Old, so tall, the branches wide enough to hide tiny tree dwarfs here and there, chatting yellow cats and singing peacocks. . . .”

  I smiled, my heart aching a smidge. I had so loved my grandma’s stories when I was younger. She would pretend there were tiny angels hiding between the purple lavender flowers or miniature villages filled with frogs riding bikes and chasing butterflies. She would point to an outbuilding and tell me there was a silver staircase made of stars leading down, down, down into the earth where a pile of colorful jewels was guarded by a jealous witch.