Authors: Renee Manfredi
He shook him, called his name three times before he stirred.
“What? What’s the matter?” Stuart said.
“You have a sister,” Jack said.
“Another one?” he said, then coming a little more awake, “what’s wrong?”
“What do you know about tampons?”
The two of them walked to the bathroom door. “Slide the directions back out here, Flynn,” Jack said. “Here’s the schematic,” Jack said to Stuart. “We’re on step three, gently insert.”
Stuart glanced at the drawing and read the instructions. “Flynn?”
“Yeah?”
“Are you sitting?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He read through the steps that accompanied this position. “All right, if you’re seated, what you want to do is aim back and down, toward your tailbone. Take your time.”
“Can you send Baby Jesus in?”
“Why?” Jack said.
“For company.”
Jack didn’t want to open the door, didn’t want to risk a glimpse of anything. “He’s a boy. It’s not a good idea to have boys in there. Even boy dogs.”
Flynn sighed. “But why?”
“Boys aren’t as strong as girls. He might have a heart attack.”
Stuart shot Jack a look. “Take your time, Flynn.”
They waited through the silence on Flynn’s side of the door. In a few minutes she said, “Okay.”
“Okay?” Jack said. “Okay means you did it?”
“Yes,” she said.
The men applauded.
Flynn came out of the bathroom and sidled up to Jack.
“Good work, Flynn,” Stuart said, smiling.
“Yes. We should celebrate. I’ll go see if Anna has any champagne,” Jack said.
“Jack,” Stuart said, and shook his head.
“What? Oh, no? Maybe hot chocolate, then.”
“Where does Anna keep the sheets? I’ll change your bed,” Stuart said.
Flynn pointed to the hall closet. “Can we watch
Riverdance
?” Flynn asked.
“Not now,” Jack said. “Tomorrow. It’s late. How about some hot chocolate?”
“No. Can you sleep in my room tonight?”
“I need to be with Stuart. But if you need me, come get me.” He kissed her goodnight. “Okay?”
“Can I sleep in your room? I’ll sleep on the floor.”
Jack considered. It would be all right with him, but Stuart might not be comfortable with it. “I think you need to sleep in your own room tonight. But the minute you need me, I’ll be there. That’s a promise,” Jack
said. “Okay?”
She nodded. She kissed Stuart goodnight and then Jack again. Back in her room she felt like her body was closing in around her like those heavy drapes her grandma used to block out the light in her bedroom. It was dark both inside and outside herself and she was trapped in some terrible basement that she couldn’t tunnel her way out of. Her belly was a boxing ring, two big powers fighting against each other. Flynn was a TKO. The cheerful cocktail party of men was gone, and there was nothing around her but the twin scents of wishes and dreams—lemon and lavender—and the deep-down dread that everything was about to change again.
A
nna, vaccinating for the flu at Dr. Naylor’s office, guessed she was on her twentieth patient and it wasn’t even lunchtime. Naylor was offering a reduced price for adults and free vaccinations for the elderly and children. Just before nine, a whole busload of senior citizens from the nursing home poured in like it was bingo night at the church social hall.
“What was my rationale, again?” Naylor said, as he peered out into the waiting room beside Anna.
“That’s what I was wondering. My skills are wasted on the healthy trying to stay that way. What ever happened to the local jaundiced? The great unwashed? I was hoping for a white count raging out of control,” Anna said.
He chuckled. “Sorry. But I appreciate your coming in.”
“Next,” he and Anna said in unison.
A young mother and her toddler went with Anna, the town librarian headed toward Naylor—for some reason she didn’t like Anna, would barely speak to her when Anna went in for her weekly stash of books on tape.
“How are we today?” Anna asked, leading the mother and boy into the examining room. Anna had examined both of them before. The woman was about twenty-three or twenty-five, the toddler about three. The last time they’d been in, Naylor treated the woman for pelvic inflammatory disease and her son for head lice and an ear infection. Anna had looked at
her chart, the intake care worker’s rounded script that described the woman’s welfare status and her activities thusly: “Pt. spends her days watching television.” To the question, “Are you sexually active?” the woman had declared, “Not really. I just lay there.”
“I can’t sleep. Can you give me medicine?” the woman asked.
“No,” Anna said, and positioned the syringe against the woman’s skinny arm. “Only the doctor can prescribe. Make an appointment at the front desk.”
She didn’t especially like working here, didn’t care for Naylor’s laid-back country doctor ways, but Naylor had privileges in the lab at the local college, where he sent Anna to read patient slides. She could check Jack’s blood samples while she was there.
“Next,” Anna called, and called for the subsequent two hours.
At lunchtime, Anna walked over to the Shimmer Deli—terrible food, but she could never resist the alluring name. She sat in a booth by the window and picked at her food; not hungry, but not ready to go back to work, either. It was a near record-breaking warm day—the clock on the bank said sixty-two degrees. Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and it felt like Indian summer. She and Flynn checked the forecast daily. Flynn loved snow as much as she did, and like Anna, preferred the cold to the heat. Last summer she and Flynn swam every day at the quarry or the public pool, muted and fuzzyheaded and somber; Flynn was the only other person Anna knew who reacted to heat the way she did.
Anna used her cell phone to call Flynn’s school. Flynn had been having more trouble than usual in her classes. Her classmates’ teasing had intensified after her teacher assigned the students how-to reports, oral presentations to demonstrate some special skill or talent.
“I’m really worried about her, Mrs. Brinkman,” Flynn’s teacher had said at the first conference of the school year. “Most children brought in blenders and knitting needles and basketballs.” Miss Jamison paused. “Most of the students showed us how to make fruit smoothies or knit scarves. Flynn brought in some glasses from the eye doctor’s office and told us how to communicate with the spirit world. The kids are picking on her without mercy.” Anna said she knew this; Flynn had been telling her all along.
It is always better to tell the truth
. Anna remembered that long-ago game she and Flynn played, and was haunted by her words. It would have
been better if she had taught Flynn to tell healthy lies.
The phone rang and rang; they were probably all in the cafeteria. Anna left money on the table and drove straight to the middle school. The children were eating lunch outside at picnic tables set around the playground. She scanned the crowd, saw the bright yellow hair of Flynn’s teacher, and then the group in her charge, who flocked around her in twittery energy. She spotted Flynn sitting alone, her lunch spread out over the entire table. Anna was pulled back through every sadness she’d felt in her own life. She caught Flynn’s eye and smiled, and Flynn’s smile in return was the most genuine Anna had seen in nearly a year—
this
, then, was why she had come, for this bit of happiness she saw now in her granddaughter.
“Hi,” Flynn said. “I had a feeling you’d be here.”
“Did you?” Anna glanced down at Flynn’s uneaten lunch. “Wanna ditch school and go to the quarry? I don’t know if it’s actually warm enough to swim, but we can sit by the water at least.”
And then the second smile, one of surprised delight that filled Anna with relief at the thought that everything might be okay after all. Anna called Naylor’s office from the car and told him that something had come up and she wouldn’t be back in until tomorrow.
It was warm enough in the sun, the day windless, so she and Flynn did swim. They floated on their backs in water so smooth and perfect the trees and rocks and clouds were mirrored in its glassy dark surface. Anna tasted the granite in the water at the back of her throat.
“Do you believe in heaven and hell?” Flynn asked.
Anna turned. Flynn was watching her intently. She was going to be beautiful, Anna saw; why hadn’t she noticed that until now? Her eyes had changed—or maybe it was just the light—from a dark brown to a deeper shade, nearly black. Her features were chiseled yet lush, her lips full and curvy and deeply red. One day, Anna thought, some man was going to fall in love with her for that mouth. Flynn’s hair was thick and dark and to her shoulders. She had recently had her bangs cut, and she swept them off to the side, which gave her a look of grave sophistication. She probably wouldn’t be tall, Anna thought, but she was perfectly proportioned with the long, lean legs of a runner. She was going to be more beautiful than Poppy, if that were possible.
Anna turned away, watched as the shadows of birds, disturbed from
the stand of trees rimming the quarry, moved over the water. What kind of woman would Flynn be, Anna wondered. Not like her mother, certainly, at least Anna hoped Flynn hadn’t inherited her mother’s streak of weakness and self-indulgence. She would be a handful, artistic like Marvin, if her highly developed imagination were any indication, her fanciful visions channeled into a creative outlet. Anna tried to visualize her granddaughter as a woman of thirty, of twenty-five, but she couldn’t get past the girl she was now. Perhaps there would always be something girlish about Flynn, something ageless and childlike.
When Flynn repeated her question, Anna said, “You shouldn’t be thinking of such things as heaven and hell at your age, Flynn. It’s a beautiful day. Just enjoy it.”
“But there is such a thing as hell,” Flynn asked.
Anna didn’t answer.
“Do you think my mother is gone for good?” Flynn said.
Anna floated beside Flynn, watched the fog gather and drift across the mountains in the distance. “I think she might be. It doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you, though. She just has some problems she has to work out before she can take care of you.”
“You have been very good to me,” Flynn said. A minute or so went by. “Is there fear in heaven?”
“I don’t imagine there would be.”
“If there is no fear in heaven, then hell must be very foggy.” Her eyes rested on the mountain range. “Fog is just a cloud with a fear of heights.”
A few weeks ago Anna had called a child psychologist and asked for a meeting. Flynn’s facial expressions had been changing. “You mean a lack of affect?” the psychologist had asked, and Anna said, no, it wasn’t that Flynn had stopped smiling or laughing. To prove it to herself, Anna wrote down how many expressions crossed Flynn’s face in the span of two hours. Roughly the same number as Jack and Stuart each showed; Anna had counted theirs, too, as a control. No, what she meant was the manner in which Flynn’s expressions and emotions transited her face—her smile moved from the outside in, instead of breaking open from the center of her face. Amusement began in her eyes instead of her chin and mouth: delight started in the lips and tongue for children, hadn’t the psychologist noticed this? Adults, not children, were amused from the top down, from
the eyebrows to the mouth.
The psychologist, a fiftyish man with one blue eye, one brown, studied Anna as if she were fine print. “Where does your amusement begin?” he asked.
“Maybe here,” Anna had said, then walked out.
“Get your things together,” Anna said now, getting out of the water. “We need to get going.”
At home, Anna called to Jack and Stuart, who was still here even after Anna postponed Jack’s birthday party. Jack had an unpleasant reaction to one of his medicines, but was now steadily improving, either from the recombination of his meds or Stuart’s presence, or both. Anna encouraged Stuart to stay as long as he could. The classes he taught were on Monday and Tuesday only, so presumably he could be here most of every week. Anna liked having him around. She especially appreciated his reliability. Anna could count on the fact that if she overheard Stuart holding a one-way conversation in an empty room, it was always because he was on the phone.
Anna went around back to let Flynn’s dog in. He was sniffing all along the cedar fence. Anna whistled, and the dog looked over and wagged. “Hiya, fatso. Wanna come in?”
A voice spoke on the other side of the fence. “Thanks, but I best be ticking on.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “Violet? Is that you? I was talking to the dog.”
“Okay. I do need to whittle my middle, truth be told. Getting on, you know, and picking up flesh.”
Anna heard the clink of dog leashes, collars. “Do you happen to know where Jack and his friend went off to?”
“I do not. But they set off near to noon. I was having my lunch when they motored past.”
Anna thanked her, and went inside. Flynn was taking a bath. Anna heard the ancient groaning of the pipes. She sat at the kitchen table in the path of the late afternoon sun, made herself a cup of tea and picked up the phone to call Greta, to whom she hadn’t talked in nearly a week. “It’s me,” Anna said, when her friend picked up.
“Hi,” Greta said. “Do you know anything about crème de cassis?”
“What is that?”
“That’s what I was wondering. I’m making something that calls for crème de cassis, and I don’t know if it’s a spice or a liquid, or what.”
“Hmm. Sounds like a seduction dinner. Who’s coming over?”
Greta sighed. “It’s hopeless. I’ve given up on dating, anyway. But even so. What’s up with you?”
“Not a lot. Just haven’t talked to you in a few days.”
“You sound exhausted,” Greta said. Anna heard the motor of a blender start up.
“I do? Well, now that you mention it, I am,” Anna said.
“How’s Flynn?”
“Better, I’d say. She’s always going to be peculiar, but many wonderful people are strange.”
“Indeed,” Greta said. “Anyway, I don’t think she’s all that peculiar. She’s twelve. Who isn’t insane when they’re twelve?”