Tin Lily (10 page)

“Yeah, he called me too.”

She looks surprised. “He did?”

“Told me about the letter. Says he’ll overnight it.”

Margie looks like she can’t decide if she’s mad or relieved.

“It’s okay he called me,” I say. “It’s a letter from Mom. To me.”

“I know. I just wasn’t sure you were ready.”

I shrug. “Is anyone ever?”

“Good point, kiddo. Far too wise for your tender years, methinks.”

“He said they haven’t found Hank.” I don’t mean to speak the words, but they come out anyway.

“I wish they would.”

“Me too.”

Margie watches me and strokes my cheek with her fingertips. “I love you, Lily. I’m sorry for what Hank did.”

I nod against her hand. “It’s not your fault.” These are the words I can think without thinking the other, speak without speaking the other.

“I think maybe it was.” She folds her hands in her lap and looks down at them. “Partly, anyway.”

“How could it be your fault?”

She plucks a box off a nearby shelf and runs a finger along its rough edges. The box is shiny silver and has copper streaks that look like rainwater dripping down. I wonder if Margie got inspired for this box by looking through a window on a stormy day. The bottom has green stones for feet, one at each corner. Margie lifts the lid and runs one finger inside the empty space. The box’s interior is all smooth copper, no raindrops, like when Margie made it, she decided the inside and the outside had different personalities. One stormy, one calm. Finally, she answers. “Because I left him alone with our father.”

“You went to school.”

“Yes.” Margie’s still not looking at me. “I knew how he was, though. God, of course I did. I grew up in that house.” She finally looks up—anger and shame and terror, all mixed up in Margie’s gold flecks. “Things got very bad for your dad after I left. How much do you know?”

“I know Grandpa Henry was poison. I never met him until after Hank went to work for him.”

Margie’s flashing eyes drop the anger, the shame. Now there’s only terror. “You met him? My father?”

“Hank took me once. He never told Mom.”

“Did Grandpa Henry say anything to you?”

I shake my head. “He was sick by then. In bed. He never looked at me. Not once. Like I wasn’t there.”

“That’s for the best, believe me.”

“Hank said he could never do anything right.”

Margie nods. “After Mom died, it was worse. She loved us at least.”

“When did Grandma Josephine die?”

“Just before I left for school. Your mom mentioned Hank told her about Grandpa Henry finding his paintings. My mother had been storing them in the attic for years. My father went crazy, destroyed all the paintings and then told Hank if he wanted to be a woman—” Margie shakes her head. “He equated Hank’s wanting to be an artist with being less than a man. Anyway, he punished Hank by making him take over where my mother left off. Fetching his evening twelve-pack, cleaning the house, cooking, shopping. He became my father’s maid—slave, really—and if things weren’t just so, Hank never heard the end of it.” Margie puts the silver and copper box with its green stone feet back on its shelf. “Hank wasn’t just an artist, you know? He had an artist’s soul—temperamental, sure, but sensitive too. He was crushed by my father’s rejection. It took him two more years to get away.” Margie shakes her head. “Two years alone with that man would make anyone go crazy.”

“But then he met Mom.”

Margie smiles. “Yes. She was perfect for him. He was still very angry when they met and, at first, it didn’t look like they were going to make it, but she saw something in him. She loved him.”

This is enough, I decide. It’s getting too close, that night. It’s creeping up and the bees are starting to hum and I can’t think of Hank this way, of my mom this way. Not when she’s a dried up potato bug. Not when she’s not here to tell me why. “I forgot to eat today.”

Margie stares at me. Push, don’t push. “You haven’t had anything?”

“No.”

She touches my cheek again. “You feel hot. Are you sick?” I shake my head, feeling her soft fingers—not a mom thermometer because Margie’s never been a mom, but still nice.

“I was out on the patio too long.”

“No food and too much sun. Lily, do we need to have a talk about this?”

“No, it’s okay. Tomorrow I’ll remember. I can make dinner tonight. Can we eat early?”

“Actually, I thought we’d walk up the road and grab something. You up for getting out?”

I look around the apartment that’s getting harder to leave every day. Margie’s antsy, like she wants to go. She’s probably not used to being at home so much.

“Okay,” I say. “Sounds good.”

We sit outside at a small café and eat cold turkey sandwiches and pasta salad. We’re in those cheap plastic chairs that perch on tiptoes and threaten to fold in on themselves when you try to move closer to the table or scoot back. They remind me of the stripy chaises and Mom. My focus: pasta salad. I eat half my meal, which is more than I’ve eaten in awhile.

“You’ve lost more weight,” Margie says. Her voice is all worry.

“A few pounds,” I agree.

“No more, okay? You’re thin enough.”

“Okay.” I sit carefully back in my wobbly chair, trying to keep it on all four legs.

“I spoke with Dr. Pratchett,” Margie says, then waits for me to respond.

“He said you might,” I say, hoping these are the right words. I’m not sure what Margie wants.

“Does it bother you that I might know what you’re talking about with Dr. Pratchett?”

“No.”

“Because I want you to be able to talk to him openly. But to help you at home, I need to understand more than you’re willing to share with me right now. Make sense?”

“Sure. It doesn’t bother me.”

She nods. “I’m glad.” I can see she is, too. “Shall we head back?” She’s paid the bill and the waitress has wrapped my sandwich up in an earth-friendly paper box. You won’t find Styrofoam in Queen Anne.

“Sure.” I get up from the table, holding onto my chair so it doesn’t go flying off.

“Let’s go a different way and look at some of the big houses. Sound good?”

“Okay.”

Margie links her arm through mine and we walk up Queen Anne Hill and look at the mansions. I wonder if any of the people living in them are as happy as me and Mom were in our dog food house. I wonder if the kids slice pineapple for barbecues and string popcorn for Christmas. I wonder if the dads bring guns into the living room and turn people into potato bugs.

My thread’s growing too big. I focus on my feet taking one step after another. Right-left-right-left. I think about Margie’s arm through mine. I use her as a tether, a touchstone.

Pretty soon I think the bees have changed their sound when I hear a loud
meeeeeewwwww
and then another. We’re close to a string of expensive neighborhood boutiques with no one else around. Now I wonder if I’m going crazy. Crazier. “Do you hear that?”

Margie’s looking left and right, back to left. “Where’s it coming from?”

I walk faster than I have in awhile, so fast Margie barely keeps up. I follow the
meeewwwws
to a row of dumpsters and lift the lid on the one that’s meowing.

“Oh my god,” Margie says.

I boost myself up, swing my legs over cowboy-style and land in coffee grounds and banana peels and earth-friendly takeaway boxes. The kitten, not more than six weeks old, is sitting on an overturned coffee can, her mouth open wide, her pink tongue vibrating with the force of her meows. Her black and white fur is gray with dirt. She looks like she’s stuck a paw in an electrical socket. I see right away she’s a spaz.

I pick her up and her tiny body is all fierce shaking and loud purrs. She goes immediately to my shoulder and sticks her nose in my ear. I laugh. Right out loud, I laugh. It’s an odd sound, not like it was before. Not like Mom’s. No tinkle, no music. Instead it’s muffled, flat.

Margie takes the kitten and hugs her to her chest while I climb out of the dumpster. She looks at me and smiles. “You laughed,” she says. “I love your laugh, Lilybeans.” I guess she didn’t hear the muffled weirdness, or maybe she thought it was the acoustics of the big metal dumpster. My laughing made Margie happy anyway and that counts for something.

I’m out of banana peels and on clean concrete again. I reach for the kitten and bunch up my sweater so she can nestle down in it. She’s too interested in my ear, though, and climbs back to my shoulder, sticking her nose in again. I’m getting grimy, but I don’t mind. Everything Mom made is washable, practical.

“There
’
s no use making something if you have to leave it on a hanger to enjoy it, Lilybeans. Stuff is meant to be used. We
’
re not here long enough to let things sit around and collect dust.”

“We should take her home, get some food in her,” I say.

Margie nods. “We can keep her if you want.”

“Okay, I’d like that.”

I feel something in me and I don’t mind the feeling—a lightness that’s more air than tin, not so hollow. Like with Cheetah. I think this kitten will be a good tether. I steady the black and white spaz on my shoulder as we walk down the hill toward Margie’s apartment. She’s busy purring and nuzzling. Pretty soon she wants to climb down in my arms and when she does, she flops on her back and lets me carry her like a baby.

“She loves you already,” Margie says.

“Who throws away a kitten?” I ask. But I know. Mack-Hanks throw away kittens. Mack-Hanks do all kinds of things to cause pain. The lightness in me spreads a little. I think I’m glad because I have a kitten no one else wanted.

Margie shakes her head. “Someone with no idea how precious life is.” She strokes the kitten’s head with one finger. “Someone with a hole in their chest where their heart should be.”

We keep walking.

I name my kitten Binka after a black and white cat on a British cartoon I watched once. My first impression of her was right. She’s a spaz. She walks around the apartment on tiptoes and her fur stands straight out from her body, like she’s rubbed up against a balloon from head to foot and worked up some static electricity. She’s ambitious too, trying to climb Margie’s bookcases. I’m guessing when she’s older she’ll make it to the top. For now she’s picked out her favorite three boxes, all on bottom shelves: one too small for her tiny butt, one so big she can stretch out head to tail without touching the ends and a shiny copper one that reminds me of an old-timey bathtub with a lid. This one she bathes on. Of course.

I’m curled up in my favorite chair and the sun’s shining on both of us now. It’s toasty warm. Binka’s asleep in my lap, stretched out like she’s on the Serengeti, a lioness in the shade of some random tree, resting after a big gazelle meal. I stroke her swollen belly and she stretches her little legs out as far as she can. She’s kept me here all day—a good tether.

I’ve finished the Stephen King and moved onto a Cormac McCarthy. It’s an end-of-the-world one too. He uses a lot fewer words than King, but I feel the horror of it more, the loss, the desperation. No room for a final stand. No hope. Just what is and what could have been. It’s too close to how things are right now, so I set it aside and decide to take a break.

I look around at the books closest to me and pull one off.
Toxic Parents
, the title reads. Pretty soon I’m lost in the stories of adults who were abused as children, but sometimes thought their parents were only strict. I’m halfway finished with chapter three and it occurs to me Grandpa Henry was maybe worse than I thought if Margie had to read these books. Maybe more than poison. I start looking at other titles and realize she’s got a pretty big collection on the subject. There’s one about emotional blackmail and another about never being good enough, a workbook about life after trauma. I don’t touch that one because I think Margie’s probably written in it.

I don’t remember these books from when Mom and I were here last summer. I think Margie probably put them away when we visited.

A photo album sits on the bottom shelf. The spine has a strange label: “Always Remember.” I set Binka on the chair, where she curls up with her nose tucked into her bushy tail, and then pull the album onto my lap. There’s a Post-it note inside the cover. The handwriting is Margie’s. The note says the same thing as the spine—“always remember.” I know I’m snooping now, that I should ask Margie first. But something in me needs to know about the books, about this album, about why Hank was sometimes nice, sometimes mean.

I flip a heavy piece of paper over and stare down at three pictures on the first page—Hank and Margie as kids in the first one. They’re still little, Margie maybe seven, Hank five. They’re standing in front of Grandpa Henry’s house, Hank with a little toy truck, Margie with a ratty teddy bear hugged to her chest, a balloon that says “Happy Birthday” tied around her wrist. She’s got a little chocolate or something smeared on her cheek.

Their faces should be smiling, should be happy since it’s a birthday, but they’re not. What I see in their eyes is what I see in mine now. Hollow.

Grandpa Henry stands away from Grandma Josephine, Margie and Hank. He’s staring at the camera, his mouth frowning, his thumbs hooked into the pockets of his workpants. He’s wearing a hard hat, like he came home for some lunch and got his picture taken instead.

I don’t know what the picture means. I only know Margie and Hank and Grandma Josephine are huddled together while Grandpa Henry stands away from them.

The other two pictures look like they’re from the same day, only Hank’s crying his eyes out in one and Grandpa Henry’s moved closer to them, his hand half-raised. Margie’s got one arm around Grandma Josephine’s leg, one around Hank’s shoulders, her teddy bear dropped in the dust at her feet, her Happy Birthday balloon still floating from her wrist. Her face is turned up to Grandpa Henry now. This one shows more than the hollow, the misery. This one shows her eyes narrowed, her tiny lips pressed together. This expression I know. It’s the same one she wore when she told me about leaving Hank behind with Grandpa Henry.