The Tear Collector (3 page)

“I did an extra Sunday shift at the hospital,” I say, which I know gives me a free pass. Duty trumps everything in this house. Maybe that’s why I spent the morning at church, the afternoon at the hospital, and the evening at a Starbucks listening to my theater pal, Michael, pour out all his problems. I’m always surrounded by people, and yet I’m all alone in the world.

“Always an excuse,” Mom says.

“If you’d let me drive, I wouldn’t have to wait on friends,” I remind her. Although calling the girl—Amanda—who often gives me rides home a “friend” stretches that word to the limit. Amanda and I share the same place at the same time, but nothing else. It’s a connection built on convenience and coincidence; I know a lot about those relationships in high school.

“She’s asking for you,” is Mom’s sidestepping response.
She’s sitting at the kitchen table drinking bottled water. Like everyone in my family, Mom lives, dresses, and consumes simply, acting out her beliefs in her daily life. She runs the local Red Cross. Anytime there’s a trauma or tragedy, from fire to flood and anything in between, Mom finds herself in the middle.

“Have you dealt with
that boy
yet?” Mom asks. Her term “that boy” refers to every boy I’ve dated in high school. She’s never met one or even bothered to learn their names.

“Cody,” I remind her. “And, no, I haven’t.”

“You know my rules,” Mom says, sipping water like fine wine.

“I’ll take care of it,” I say.

“I want this handled before the reunion next month,” Mom says. I nod in obedience.

“Veronica’s
still
waiting,” Mom says, then points upstairs like I’m a dog. That is all I do: obey. We move around the country, but for me, nothing changes. I just go where I’m kicked.

“Okay, I’ll see her,” I say, but first I head toward my room. It’s hard to call it “my room,” considering how often we move. I know this house is rented, and in a few years, someone else will hang their posters on these walls. Still, I can’t be without the Beatles watching over me. From my first listen to songs like “Across the Universe” and “Let It Be,” I was hooked by the majestic sound and, for me, unattainable emotion within their words and music. Yet, mostly it’s envy of their power to move people to tears. They’re my beautiful obsession.

I toss my/Cody’s coat on the bed and then drop my book
bag on the floor with a
thud.
Like Robyn, I take a few honors courses, and part of the honor seems to be building bigger muscles carrying the weight of the texts. I turn the humidifier up to high and pull out a fresh bottle of moisturizer I’ll apply after a swift shower. On top of the moisturizer, I’ll add a layer of baby oil. This routine is about the only thing to keep my skin from flaking away like a dried-up sponge.

I jump on the computer, check for messages, and hit my favorite sites like a doctor at the hospital making rounds. I pull up a news story from nearby Bay City and print the item. I read the short article, unlock my desk, and then put it in the folder with the other articles I’m collecting. As I’m locking up my desk, I hear Grandmother Maggie call my name through the locked door. Just in yelling my name, she sounds annoyed, disappointed, and concerned. Her ambivalent tone of voice reflects her attitudes toward me better than anything she does or says.

“I’m busy,” I snap. Maggie and I get along better than Mom and I, which isn’t saying much. We have a secret connection: our shared, if unspoken, impatience with our mothers.

“Veronica’s asking for you,” she says, and I stifle both a laugh and a frown. My great-grandmother Veronica never asks for anything; she only expects and demands.

“Five minutes,” I huff out, then click off the screen. The news will wait; the old can’t.

“Now,” Maggie barks. As I think of Veronica waiting for me, I know there’s only one thing to do, since I can’t deny duty; I
choose petty defiance. I turn off the computer while turning on my phone. Robyn doesn’t pick up her cell, so I call her at home. Her mother answers.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hey, Mrs. Berry, is Robyn there?” I ask.

“I’m sorry, Cassandra, she’s already asleep,” she says in a motherly tone. “I don’t think she’s feeling well. Might be the flu. You can’t be too careful.”

“Can you tell her I called?”

“Sure. Cassandra, as long as I have you, I need to ask you something,” she says. I’m trying to focus on Robyn’s mother’s words as my grandmother bangs on the door, loudly.

“John and I have our twentieth anniversary coming up on April ninth,” she starts. “We’d like you to babysit Becca for us that night, if you don’t have other plans.”

“I’m always happy to be there for Becca,” I say, knowing Cody’s long gone by then.

“Thanks. I’d have Robyn do it,” she says, then pauses. “But she and Craig are the ones taking us to dinner. Isn’t that sweet of them? They are just the sweetest kids and cutest couple.”

I pause. The knock at the door echoes the loud pounding in my head. I’m just beginning to understand how difficult this breakup is for Robyn. In this house, my breakups get greeted with celebration. In Robyn’s house, it will be devastation. I wonder how long Robyn can keep it a secret. That’s another area where I could be of great support.

“Are you there?” Mrs. Berry asks.

“Sure, sorry, just checking my schedule,” I lie. “Of course I can do it.”

“Thanks. You’re such a help to us and a good friend to my girls,” she says. “I’ll tell Robyn you called. It might make her feel better. I know Becca always feels better after you visit.”

“Thanks,” I reply, then say my good-byes. I know there’s nothing that will make Robyn feel any better anytime in the future. When we spoke yesterday, that was all she talked about: the Beatles song “Yesterday.” She said how the line in the song “there’s a shadow hanging over me” described her life. When she tells her parents, those shadows are sure to grow darker.

I’m surprised to find Maggie still standing by the door when I finally emerge from my room. We both still have our uniforms on: mine is from the hospital; hers is from Avalon Convalescence Care, this nursing home where she’s head nurse. In the summer, I volunteer there too. I don’t like being there, but I don’t have a choice. No wonder I relate so well to the patients.

“Cassandra, you can’t act this way,” Maggie says. “Especially at the reunion.”

“I don’t want to go,” I say. In four weeks is our family reunion. I hate it, but I do like seeing my cousins Lillith and Mara, as well as almost all of the male cousins, except Alexei. Yet this year, I dread it worse than ever. That coming weekend, not “yesterday,” is the shadow hanging over me. Anytime I speak of missing it, Maggie tells me there is no choice. Those
who refuse to attend or break family rules, like my cousin Siobhan, become exiles forever.

“Your cousin Alexei will be there,” Maggie says, sounding enthusiastic.

“I know,” I mumble, keeping hidden all I know about him. But I also know my duty to my family and what I’m expected to do. Maggie, even more than Veronica, raves about him.

“Alexei just turned seventeen recently too,” she says. “You could learn a lot from him.”

I think of all the evidence that contradicts her, but I don’t bother to say anything. “What do you mean?”

“He understands family and duty,” she says. “He’s not selfish, like you’re becoming.”

“Selfish?” I wonder if my eyes are popping out of my head. I am many things, but selfish isn’t one of them. “I do whatever I’m asked. I’ve sacrificed a normal life for this family.”

Maggie stares me down, “You have a duty to family. Some of the things you do—”

“I do those things for us, not for me.”

“No, you are selfish,” she intones. “Our existence owes itself to sacrifice.”

“Then when are any of you going to sacrifice for me?” I ask, but don’t give her time to respond. “You all ask so much and I get nothing in return. When do you do anything for me?”

“You mean other than this roof over your head?” Maggie replies.

“Why can’t it be one roof? Why do we keep moving? Why do I need to go out and make new friends all the time? Why do I always make the sacrifices? Why do—,” I say, then stop dead. And Grandma Maggie looks as if she’s about to stop breathing. I start to walk away.

“Turn around!” she yells, but I ignore her, and I hope we both can ignore what occurred: I almost weep, like any other teenage girl. But I consume tears; I don’t release them.

I knock on Veronica’s door, then enter once she grants permission. The lights are off, but a ray of moonlight shines through the window. The long white veil she often wears lies across the end of the bed. It must be a trick of the light, but her dry, scaly skin looks as yellow as the moon. Like everyone in this house, she’s thin with little body fat. None of us can stand the cold Michigan climate, but Veronica moved us here from New Orleans, just as she moved us from NYC to New Orleans. She’s always looking for opportunity, but I’m not sure what she sees in Lapeer. It’s east of Flint—once the most dangerous city in the United States—and people here seem like everybody else. Whatever the reason, Veronica hasn’t shared it with anyone.

Veronica’s lying in bed, where she spends most of her days and nights anymore. It is rare that she leaves the house. On the nightstand are various bottles and vials filled with liquids to prevent her from dehydrating. Her voice is weak. I lean in close and still must strain to hear her.

“How was the hospital?” she whispers, but her soft voice still
speaks volumes. The question is meant to challenge me, and there’s no right answer. Unlike me, everything out of Veronica’s mouth is judgmental. She builds me up only to knock me down and put me in my place. That place is medical school. Veronica worked as a hospice nurse, guiding people along the final steps of life, but she wants me to become a life-saving doctor. Everything that weighs me down—the Honors Biology class, the hospital job, and the peer counseling service at school—is because of her expectations. Now homebound and weak, she demands even more from me.

“Okay,” I mumble. After this past weekend with Robyn, Kelsey, and moving closer to breaking Cody’s heart, I feel as tired and worn down as she looks.

She takes a couple of deep breaths. Talking with Veronica is like conversing on a cell phone with a bad connection; it is full of long moments of silence. And plenty of interrupting: always her, never me. “You’re late,” she says, sounding exactly like my mother. They’re twins separated by a generation, much like Grandma Maggie and me. “I want to hear about that girl Robyn.”

I briefly recap Robyn’s rumor-inspired heart-wrecking breakup. Veronica sits up a little more in bed, puts her old dry hand on my shoulder, then says, “You know what you must do.”

“I know.” The only four-letter word that matters is
must
. Not
want,
not
love.
But
must.

“We depend on you, Cassandra,” she reminds me for the
millionth time. Veronica’s admonishments consistently remind me of my obligations and her infinite expectations.

“I saw that woman with the dying mother again before I left the hospital,” I say to change the subject. Robyn isn’t something I want to think about; I want to talk about her even less.

“You did good,” she says softly. In the space between those words, however, I think what she’s really saying is “You did good,
but not good enough
.”

“You feeling any better today?” I ask. Awaiting her answer, I’m overcome by my ambivalence toward Veronica. I fear her pronouncements, yet I envy her special gifts. But mostly I’m angry at how her weakness sucks the life out of the rest of us. I sense this in many people who visit their loved ones in the hospital. They love them and want them well, but the strain in the eyes shows another truth: they resent the ill. While Robyn would never say it—as it might cause the halo to fall from around her golden-haired head—she resents Becca. She resents all the attention that Becca sucks up from everyone; death and illness are time vacuums.

“Cassandra, child, you
always
make me feel better,” she says, but, like everything with Veronica, words have two meanings. “Always” isn’t a compliment, it is an expectation.

I suck it up and give her the obligatory embrace, then start to leave.

“You’re holding back,” she whispers. Her five senses are failing; her sixth remains strong. I could never, ever lie to Veronica, but of late, I don’t tell her the whole truth of my life.

I don’t deny it; instead, I lean toward her. Up close, I notice just how weak she really is. I take the handkerchief out of my back pocket. I gently rub my fingers over the monogram with Veronica’s initials, then dip the tip of it in a small bowl of liquid near her bed. Her skin is almost translucent; the blue veins look like rivers about to burst their banks. I squeeze the handkerchief like a sponge and let the fluid run down her satisfied and saturated face onto her bare shoulders.

NEWS REPORT #2

Michigan State Police reported that Robert Sanders, a fifth-grade student at Bay City Elementary missing since March 4, has been found. Sanders disappeared after school and was returned to the school’s playground sometime early Sunday morning. At this point, police are releasing few other details, except that the search continues for a black Ford van seen in the area earlier in the day. One source reported that the abduction seemed “abnormal,” as the motive, while unclear, does not seem to have involved ransom or sexual assault.