The First Day of the Rest of My Life

  Grandma was sitting on her Persian rug, a box of Christmas ornaments open. Every ornament in that box was a bird ornament. Red feathered birds with black beaks, tiny yellow birds with orange feet, even pink birds. They were hand-carved, hand-painted, glass blown, realistic or fantasy-types of birds with swirling plumes and wispy tails, peacocks, pelicans, flamingos, cranes, and blue jays in Santa hats. And swans, so many swans, of all shapes and sizes.

  She hummed a piece by Chopin as she strung twine through the hoops of the ornaments, her voice rising and falling. Nola stood by and we said hello. It was apparently her job to take the birds, hung with twine, and staple them to the ceiling. They had been busy. There were birds all over.

  “It’s like we’re living in a flock of very strange, sparkly, funny birds. I have always wanted to be a bird,” Annie said mildly. “A bird with a wing full of miniature grenades.”

  “She is insistent sometimes,” Nola said, those warm, lovely eyes tender. “Determined. This is how she was before all this. No one could stop your grandma. She was a steamroller. A gentle French steamroller in high heels and high fashion, but still a steamroller.”

  “Nola, go and take a break. We’ll stay with her.” I gave her a hug, and so did Annie.

  “Hello, Grandma,” I said gently.

  She turned around from her seat on the floor, her face alighting when she saw it was us. In French she said, “How wonderful to see you! Hello, Anna. Hello, Madeline. Look who’s here, Nola. It’s my sister and my niece!”

  I tried not to sniffle. It’s heartbreaking when someone you have loved forever is floundering in the rolling mists of dementia. “Hi, Grandma.” Annie and I settled next to her amidst a mass of birds with feathers, beads, sequins, and wooden bodies.

  “Look what I’m doing!” Grandma held up a bird carved of wood with goggle eyes and limp feathers. “Anna made this for me.”

  I looked at the wood bird. No, Annie hadn’t made it for her. I checked the bottom for a date. There it was. Our momma made it for her when she was a girl.

  “This is my favorite one,” Grandma gushed to Annie. She held it to her chest. “My favorite one. You were always such a wonderful artist, Anna, wonderful! You have so many talents, especially with your violin. You are a talented violin player and a beautiful person.” She ran her hand over Annie’s cheek. “Most importantly, you are beautiful inside.”

  I wiped a tear as Annie glanced away, but I saw her jaw working. We’re fortunate, really. Grandma is often so confused about us, who we are, and she could have turned into a terrible, grumpy person, but no. Her essentials, that sweetness, that kindness, the love, all there still, but jumbled up.

  “And, Madeline!” she said, her smile broadening. “Gorgeous and talented, the butterfly amidst all of us moths. We’re all plain next to you, all dry and shriveled compared to the brightness of your light.” She handed us twine and extra scissors. “Here, you can help me. I’m doing this for you, Anna. This is all for you, because we had to let your birds go. I’m sorry, honey.” She leaned over and kissed Annie on both cheeks. “They would have starved to death in their cages but outside, maybe the birds could run away, hide, have a chance to hop again!”

  Grandma turned a pure white bird with gold-tipped wings in her hands. All the birds had gone on our Christmas trees in past years.

  “We let them go in the park, don’t you remember, Anna? You were there, Madeline. It was before the accident. That was terrible. The accident.” Grandma dropped the white bird in her lap, her eyes traveling backwards in time. She switched to German. “That was terrible! Right before! You know, it was right before! How could that happen?” She covered her face, shuddering.

  “Grandma, honey,” I said, hugging her close. Annie linked an arm over mine and patted Grandma’s knee. We have learned with the swift mood changes to simply comfort. “It’s okay.”

  She was back into French. “How can you say that? How can you say that? It wasn’t okay. It’s never been okay.” She grabbed a blue bird, glitter all over its body. “This will make you happy, Anna. It’s like you’re getting your birds back again. I can’t give you Ismael back, but I can give you your birds.”

  “Ismael?” Annie asked. “Who is Ismael?”

  Grandma whipped around. “You’ve forgotten, Anna? How could you?” She clapped a hand to her mouth. “You were very young. Very young. But don’t you remember going to the park with Ismael? To ice cream? To the museums? Don’t you remember his smile? He loved you so much, Anna. He carved you animals out of wood. Don’t you have those anymore?”

  Annie shook her head. “I don’t think so, Grandma.”

  Grandma’s face fell and she jumped back into German. “That’s right. I remember now. We had to leave them. We had to leave them before we ran with blood on our hands. We were late, late, late!” Her shoulders sagged. “I still miss Ismael. I will always miss him, but I feel him.” She tapped her heart. “I feel him here.”

  “Madeline,” Annie said, her voice quiet, “how ’bout you go and get your violin. Play her a tune.”

  I scooted out of the room, brought my violin in, and played Corelli’s La Folia, then switched to “Lark in the Morning,” my fingers flying, for a little variety.

  Within minutes, all sign of tears and grief were gone. Grandma clapped when I finished, then came over and stroked the violin. “Do you see this scratch in the back?”

  I nodded.

  In German she said, “That’s where the knife hit. Right there. We were hiding the knife in it, but it nicked it on the way out. He killed three men with that knife. Right here.” She pointed to her stomach, then her heart, then her pelvic area. “If he hadn’t we all would have died. They tried to betray us, when we were in the barn before the long walk. Black ghosts. They had to die or we would die—you, too, Anna. You had to live. We love you. I held one of them down, kicked the other when he tried to get up until he didn’t move.” She went to her dresser and picked up a large photo frame of Granddad. “He saved me, and he saved you, Anna.” She touched Granddad’s face with the tip of her finger. “He had to kill to do it, but he did it. He did it for his family so one day we could go to the Land of the Swans.”

  I leaned against the bed, my mouth hung open. I told myself to shut it. Annie sank into a rocking chair.

  “I love him.” Grandma sighed. “I always did. Even after I knew what he did. I couldn’t help myself. He did it for me. For you, Anna, for us. Someone in our family had to live.” She stroked the picture again. “Someone had to live. They put the other birds in a prison, hurt them, tore out their feathers and plucked out their hearts and ripped off their feet and snapped off their beaks.”

  After that pronouncement, Grandma went back to stringing her birds. “Come, come. Aren’t you going to help free the birds?”

  Yes, we were going to help, even if our hands trembled while we freed the birds.

  “I love birds!” Grandma said, with grand exuberance. She threw one up in the air. It was wooden so it didn’t break. “Fly! Be free! Don’t get cooked in the fires!”

  We visited Granddad at the hospital the next day. We stayed for hours. Most of the time he was asleep, so we watched him sleep.

  He woke up and saw Annie and me hovering over him, like mother hens.

  “Not dead yet, girls,” he rasped out. “Not dead yet.”

  “No, not yet,” Annie drawled. “It would help if you could get some color in your cheeks, though. I’ll buy some blush.”

  “Superb.” He closed his eyes again. “I would like some of that shadow stuff you ladies put on. Longer lashes . . . red lipstick. I’m sure it will liven up my coloring nicely.”

  “Don’t forget that we can tattoo your eyebrows for you, too.”

  “Ah, my greatest wish, fulfilled.”

  We laughed. “How are you?”

  Granddad smiled. “I’m still tickin’.”

  “Tickin’ and clickin’ and everything else,” I told him.

  “How’s your grandma
?’

  We assured him she was fine. We did not mention the hanging of the birds or the killings.

  He sighed, then seemed to sink into the pillow, his face so pasty white. It is crushing, and humbling, to be in a hospital with someone who may not live long.

  “Girls, in case . . .” He took a deep breath, and I saw him tilt his chin up. “In case, I don’t make it—”

  “You’re gonna make it, Granddad,” Annie clipped, jaw tight. “You’ll make it.”

  He grabbed her hand on one side of the bed, mine on the other. “Sometimes it is your turn to go, and it may be mine, so I want to tell you.” His chin wobbled and I clamped down on my own cry. There was so much vulnerability in that wobble. “I must tell you that I am sorry. I am sorry.”

  “What are you sorry for, Granddad? There’s nothing I know of to be sorry for. You’re the best,” I rushed. “We love you.”

  “I am sorry for what I did. I am sorry that what I did years ago may affect you now. I am sorry for the pain it will cause you. I am sorry for the pain it caused your mother. I am sorry.” Tears trickled out of his eyes.

  “Sorry for what?” Annie asked. “We know there are secrets, Granddad, we get it, but, hell, we don’t know what’s truth here. Honesty might be a good option.”

  His eyes filled with tears. “I cannot stand to see the hate in your eyes, the shame, the disappointment, when you find out who I was. I cannot stand it. I cannot stand myself. It has followed me my entire life. Like a shadow. Like a crow that caws at me. Like death.” He laughed, but it was mirthless. “I have been stalked by death, stalked by ghosts my entire life.”

  “Why, Granddad? What happened?” He was shrinking into himself before our eyes.

  “What happened is that I sinned most grievously. It is unforgiveable. I am unforgiveable. It was a bad time. All I could see was myself, my family. Your mother. Nothing mattered, nothing else. We were hunted. We were going to die. . . .”

  Exhausted, he put a trembling hand to his forehead and looked at the ceiling. “Sorry,” he whispered, as if he were not with us anymore. “A million times, I am sorry.”

  He sighed again, then fell back into a deep sleep, where his apologies could be heard only by him alone.

  Annie and I locked glances.

  “He’s sorry,” I said, baffled. “What the heck is going on?” I felt everything colliding, all at once. “I don’t know what’s going on here. I don’t get it.”

  “I hate surprises,” Annie muttered. “Hate ’em. And I don’t think I’m going to like what we find out with this one.”

  We sat with our granddad, holding his hands, for another hour, then drove home, through the city streets, the traffic, the noise, down the freeway, into the country, out to The Lavender Farm with the drive lined by tulip trees, the lavender waiting to bloom, and a passel of Annie’s animals that had all been diseased or injured when she found them.

  Injured and diseased animals and people. Not much difference.

  On Sunday afternoon we brought Granddad home. When he hobbled into his master suite on a walker, he found it covered in birds hanging from the ceiling.

  He hardly showed any surprise at all. Grandma floated to him, arms out, the kimono she wore a blaze of red. It was see-through. Beneath it she was wearing a red negligee with a push-up bra. “Isn’t it beautiful, Anton? So flighty! So wing-y! We have Anna’s birds back! The ones that we freed!”

  “It is beautiful, Emmanuelle.” He put an arm around her shoulders.

  “Anton!” Grandma said. “Let’s go to the park soon and watch the birds and swans before they come and fry them all to death, or starve them with typhoid and sick dragons. Can we?” She twirled around under her birds, her face glowing, her blue-green eyes vague but peaceful.

  “I do believe a stroll in the park is exactly what I need,” Granddad said. The man looked like he could barely stand up. He leaned heavily on his walker. We got him into bed, then fed them both dinner later on. Grandma insisted on wearing a different purple negligee that she stored in her “Sexy Drawer,” as she called it.

  So there was Granddad, exhausted, recovering from a heart attack and a range of other medical problems, and next to him was Grandma, in her sexy, purple negligee, the bodice cut to her navel, smiling coyly and whispering, “Wait until they turn out the lights, Anton! I’m going to give you a night to remember! Would you like to be on top?”

  “Thanks for moving in, Madeline,” Annie said as we sat drinking wine on the dock that night, our feet hanging over the ledge. “It’ll be good to have your advice when I’m whacking at my wood carvings with a chain saw.”

  “I’m happy to. I’m actually looking forward to it.” That was the truth. In fact, the more I thought about living in my childhood room with my white bedspread and piles of purple pillows, the peaked ceiling and window seat, the better I felt.

  I wanted to be with Grandma and Granddad. They had been with me when I wanted to curl up tight and die as a younger person, I would be with them now and I would be with Annie. Taking care of dying parents or grandparents should never be left to only one child. It is too much.

  I snapped opened my violin case and pulled out my violin, a gift from my mother to me, from her mother to her, with all its dents and scratches each, apparently, with a story behind it. I wish Annie still wanted to play the piano. Not that we could have dragged a piano out here to the dock, but it would have been nice to strum some strings and bang some keys together.

  The moon shone through wandering clouds onto the water as I practiced Bach’s Concerto in A minor, then threw in a Texas-style fiddle tune, “Beaumont Rag,” to move my mood to a better place.

  Annie said, “Tomorrow I’m going to carve a swan.”

  I nodded, put my violin away.

  “The swan is going to have a knife in its mouth. For protection. Everyone needs protection.” She swung her feet, in and out. “I wished I’d had a knife.”

  I knew what she was referring to. Not having a knife was part of the reason Annie’s a little off her rocker.

  “A sharp one,” she said.

  I heard a fish flop in the water, then another.

  “One with a jagged edge.”

  “Got it, Annie.”

  The fish flopped again.

  “I think I’ll carve a cape on the swan, too.”

  “A super hero swan, then?”

  “Yep. Super Hero Susan Swan.”

  Later that night, in my own bedroom, a bouquet of dried lavender on my nightstand, I stared at the ceiling. I thought of my granddad, who was in the good-bye years of his life, his health slipping away, my grandma’s mind jumbled up. I would miss them when they were gone. I would miss them as I miss my parents. The grief I have for my parents seems to be unending, controlled, but unending, because the bare truth is that if you are fortunate enough to be born to loving parents, as I was, you know that no one, no one, will ever love you as much as they do. That love is not replaceable. My parents were never replaceable.

  I miss them every day.

  When I was done staring at the ceiling, I slept.

  In my nightmares Sherwinn was on the back of a vulture. He giggled. The vulture flew right toward me, his beak ripping me in two before setting me on fire.

  Too bad Super Hero Susan Swan wasn’t there. She could have saved me.

  16

  Lavender is soothing. It’s used in perfumes and massage oil, bouquets, wreaths, eye pillows, sachets, potpourri, essential oils, and topiaries.

  Momma, Annie, and I made all sorts of crafts using lavender with Grandma when we visited from Cape Cod during the summers. We made lavender wreaths and sachets, sewing the purple silky material by hand, tiny stitches like Grandma showed me, then dropping in the lavender buds. We cut lavender and arranged the stems in vases throughout the house as the sun’s rays tumbled down.

  Our momma played her violin, and our dad sang Irish songs and recited poems in the gazebo overlooking the rows, his deep voice soaring and snappy.
To my momma he once recited “My Dark Haired Girl,” by Samuel Lover:

  My dark-hair’d girl, thy ringlets deck,

  In silken curl, thy graceful neck;

  Thy neck is like the swan, and fair as the pearl,

  And light as air the step is of my dark-haired girl.

  My dark-haired girl, upon thy lip

  The dainty bee might wish to sip;

  For thy lip it is the rose, and thy teeth they are pearl,

  And diamond is the eye of my dark-haired girl!

  My dark-haired girl, I’ve promised thee,

  And thou thy faith hast given to me,

  And oh, I would not change for the crown of an earl

  The pride of being loved by my dark-hair’d girl!

  He grabbed her afterward, leaned her over his arm, and planted a smackeroo on her lips while Grandma and Granddad and Annie and I laughed and clapped.

  When we arrived to live with them permanently, damaged and destroyed, Annie not speaking, I lost deep in my head listening to the violins, Grandma always had new crafts for us, often using lavender. She’d take us on strolls through the rows and we’d drop those sparkly marbles here and there, “For the gnomes . . . for the good white witches.” This time, though, she used the lavender to keep our young, battered minds from being blown to dust under a hurricane of trauma.

  Lavender is soothing. But it cannot protect anyone from the quicksand and swamps of life.

  Sherwinn picked Annie and me up from school on a Friday. I remember it was a Friday because every Friday we had spaghetti and brownies for lunch. I loved the school’s spaghetti and brownies. We could buy lunch only one day a week. The other days Momma packed us tiny sandwiches, croissants, quiche, cheese, potato or carrot soup, cheese crepes, and pink cookies or tarts.

  Sherwinn told us to “get in the damn truck,” then drove us to Pauly’s house.

  Pauly’s house was a shack outside of town. The home slouched like a dead armadillo, the porch sliding off, weeds two feet high, surely a metaphor for what was happening to us. Behind it was a mammoth oak tree, its branches curving and bending and stretching, leaves blowing. I wanted to climb that tree and hide.