Read The First Day of the Rest of My Life Online

Authors: Cathy Lamb

The First Day of the Rest of My Life (32 page)

“What?” My momma gasped. “I thought when the judge saw their past records, when he understood what they did to my girls, they would go to jail for decades!”

“No, they won’t,” Arthur said. “I’m sorry. They’re going to jail for years, Marie Elise, mark my words on that, but one day they’ll get out. It might be seven years, five, maybe less, but they will get out. This is not a life sentence they’re looking at.”

Momma listed the crimes that had been committed against us, her voice razor sharp.

“I don’t agree with it, Marie Elise,” Arthur said. “I’m telling you the reality here.”

“They’ll come and get the girls. Sherwinn will, I know he will. My girls will never be safe. They’ll
never be safe.
”

In the shadows Annie and I clutched each other, trembling. “Marie Elise,” Grandma said, reassuring, “you’ll come and live with us on the farm. We’ll put up an electric fence, we’ll hire guards, we’ll track them through an investigative agency, we’ll get restraining orders—”

“That’s not going to do it!” our momma said, screechy, pounding the table. “It won’t keep him from them. I know it won’t. He’s psychotic . . . he’ll come after them. He’ll hurt the girls, he may well kill them, I know he will.”

No one argued with her.

Why? Because they knew Sherwinn, knew the truth. Knew him.
He would come for us.

My momma wasn’t worried about herself. She never said, “They’ll come and kill me,” because she knew she’d be dead. That was her reality.

Annie and I cowered in that threatening, black shadow, sickened by fear. I heard my granddad swear, followed by my grandma’s useless comfort, before Momma dissolved into broken, choked gasps.

“I’m not going to let him do this to them,” I heard my momma weep. “I won’t. I will take care of this and I will protect my girls. I will protect Madeline and Annie.”

She did protect us.

That, she did.

If my dad had been around he would have protected us.

I closed my eyes and saw him. He was still crying.

That night I snuck downstairs in my flowered nightgown, the stars scared, cowering behind the clouds. I watched my momma staring at the fire and saw an expression on her face I’d never seen before—intense, focused, restrained.

When I squiggled a bit, she turned to me, her tense mouth turning upward into a smile. One has to understand her position at that moment in life. Her beloved husband had drowned. She had a brain tumor that was inoperable. She was going to die young. Her daughters had been abused and photographed. The criminals had threatened to kill us.

“Momma?”

“Come here, my love,” she said, her voice soft, melodious. I sat on her lap and she hugged me close and spoke in French, her face softening. “You are my heart, my daughter, my everything, you and your sister, and I love you both so much.” She kissed my forehead. “I will protect you always, Madeline, and Annie, too. I didn’t before”—her voice caught as her tears mixed with mine—“but I will not fail you again. Never again.”

“You didn’t fail us, Momma. We love you. You didn’t know. We didn’t tell you.”

She didn’t hear me. As the fire flickered across her face and around the shadows, her eyes were seeing something else. “I didn’t protect you girls. I didn’t protect the family. Family is all there is, my daughter. All there is. Family is what God gave us to get through life. I will protect you, and Annie, I promise you.”

My momma’s decision? In order for her girls to be safe forever, Sherwinn, Pauly, and Gavin would have to die. She did not believe she could control them, and she was right. She did not believe her daughters could live in peace, in safety, be guaranteed a life that would see them holding their own grandchildren, without them dead. In her head she had failed us and she would not fail us again. She did not see any other way around it.

Frankly, even now, as an adult, I don’t see another way around it, either.

Some people do not belong on this planet with the rest of us.

Steve waited a week after our last tearful conversation when I told him I didn’t want to be friends before he dropped off terrariums for Annie and me with all kinds of plants and rocks and plastic frogs. I dropped tears into the terrarium.

When I went back to school, Arty Painter made the mistake of saying to me, “Hey, can I see you in your naked pictures, Madeline? I want to see your boobies.”

Steve was right behind me and he whipped around so fast, he blurred. He pounded the tar out of that kid. Steve was suspended for three days, over his parents’ loud protests. Arty was suspended for a week. No one would sit with Arty at lunch for weeks. Steve made him apologize to me.

Arty was so upset, he blubbered his way through “I’m sorry.” Arty’s parents called to apologize and brought my momma a side of beef for winter.

Another boy, Runi Saleh said, “Is your boyfriend Sherwinn? Did you do it with him? You had sex!” Steve knocked both his front teeth clean out, blood spurting all over the playground in gushes.

Steve was suspended for three days, over his parents’ loud protests. Runi was suspended for a week.

Runi’s father wrote my momma an apology and built us an upraised flower bed and planted one hundred bulbs with his son.

One more classmate, Daphne, the daughter of Tilda Smith, she of the pyramid head, which is why she is so stupid, and cannonball bottom, said, “You did bad things with men. I would never do that. You’re bad now. You’re not a virgin. You can’t wear a white wedding dress.”

Steve found out and he isolated her so fast she didn’t know what hit. No one would talk to her, and her friends walked away when she approached them.

Her mother never apologized.

But that was that. I wasn’t teased at school anymore, and neither was Annie.

It is amazing what one popular kid like Steve can do.

But Steve and I, we weren’t friends again. He kept sending gifts—a frog in a fish tank and flowers he pressed between books and glued to cards. He drew a picture of him and me together, fishing, a light cloud of “red magic” encircling my head, because he saw so clearly the gift from my Irish dad.

I still have the picture.

But I was emotionally dead. It was too late.

The trial made everything worse.

A
bout a month before I was to give my speech at the Rock Your Womanhood conference at the convention center, I received a bouquet of purple tulips in a clear, curving, glass vase. At the bottom of the vase were a bunch of heart-shaped, glass rocks in a rainbow of colors.

The card read, “Good luck, Madeline. Steve Shepherd.”

There were at least twenty-four tulips.

They were very pretty.

They were my favorite flower.

He remembered.

I sniffled.

What to do? What to do with a boy named Steve Shepherd who grew up to be a man named Steve Shepherd?

What would happen if I called him?

Later, when I swung by my house to pick up mail, I pulled out the envelope I had with photos and articles about him. I pulled out my wallet, too, and stared at the photo of him and me and Annie, when we were kids, standing at the lake fishing with our poles. I held those photos for a long time.

I wouldn’t call him.

I couldn’t.

I was still too dirty.

“The Giordano sisters are here,” Georgie said. “They’re looking quite cat-ish today.”

“Prepare for a meowing good time and send them in.” I stood up and pulled at my gray skirt with my hands, slipped my arms into my suit jacket, and patted my hair, which had been flat ironed until not a curl would dare show itself. I was in my armor. I don’t like my armor.

The cats entered. They had outdone themselves. The sisters were dressed in world-class cat outfits, head to toe, their makeup like a feline from
Cats
on Broadway.

“Madellllliiiine!” Adriana sang out, hands up in cat claws as she scratched the air. “You have given us purpose!” She was a black cat with white paws. “Fun and fun!”

“Direction!” Bella said, twirling her tail. She was a golden cat. “Wicked naughty!”

“Goals!” Carlotta said, twisting a whisker. She was a striped gray tabby cat. “Fantabulous!”

“And to celebrate!” Adriana enthused.

“To embrace you and the wisdom you have brought into our lives!” Bella yelled.

“To thank you for what you’ve done for us!” Carlotta sang out.

“We have a present.”

“A gift from the heart.”

“We’re including you in the gift you’ve given us. Ready, ladies?”

And with no further ado, they opened a large black bag and pulled out a fourth, yes, a fourth, cat costume.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Today, Madeline, you’re going with us! We’re doing good cat deeds. You’re going to be an English shorthair, and we’ve brought the makeup, too!”

“I’m going to be a cat?”

“Yes! Meow meow!” Bella said. “We heard of a woman named Makeesha who’s battling lymphoma, and we’re going to her office building to give her a gift!”

“A gift? What are you giving her?” I envisioned a basket with goodies.

“It’s a cruise! We’re sending Makeesha Jefferson on a cruise with her best friend!”

I did not think I looked bad as an English shorthair. With all the cat makeup on, no one could recognize me, Madeline the Cat. The sisters had a limo and chauffeur out front. The limo dropped us off at the pink building. We took the elevator up to the twenty-seventh floor. The receptionist was in on our Good Cat Deed, and he laughed and led us to the conference room, where Makeesha sat with a bunch of other businesspeople. She had an embroidered blue scarf wrapped around her head, but I did not miss the exhaustion, the lack of hope, the despair.

“Meow!” we all declared. “Meow!”

We gave a lot of those uptight businesspeople a shock, but no one was more shocked than Makeesha when we presented her with plane tickets, cruise line tickets, and a thousand dollars for spending money. Twelve days, the Bahamas. First class.

She burst into tears.

The uptight businesspeople cried, too.

Meow!

Honestly, I heard a violinist in my head.

Yep. It was “Memory.” From
Cats.

That night, around eleven p.m., I sat on the deck at The Lavender Farm and watched the lights of farmhouses tucked into the hills shine on and off.

I am swamped in work, buried under an avalanche of Things To Do.

I work to blind myself from realities I don’t like. I get it. I need the oblivion that work brings. I need the recognition so I can prove to myself that I am Someone Important, that I am not a bad girl, a dirty girl, a slutty girl, but someone who deserves respect and does not belong in a shack that smells like smoke and looks like a dying armadillo.

I have fought since the
click, click, click
part of my life to believe that
I am someone worthy
. I still fight for it.

I have surrounded myself with expensive “stuff” to prove it to myself, too. It hasn’t worked.

But now, someone else, some stranger with ambition named Marlene, had control over my life and what was going to happen in it. I have a visceral, instinctive reaction when I feel anyone is trying to control any part of my life.

The most personal, destructive disaster of my life, of Annie’s life, was in someone else’s hands.

I could not have that.

I heard again Annie’s words. What she’d told me to do.

I heard Momma next, so clear it was as if I were back in the pink beauty parlor with hair spray, pink nail polish, glittering chandeliers, and cookies with pink icing and Red Hots.

Take control
.

You can’t take control of anyone else, or anything else, in this world besides yourself, sugar, but you can take control of you. So do it, then sit down and make sure your nails are polished, your heels on, your hair styled. There is no excuse for frumpiness.

I thought of my suits. My momma would not have liked my suits.

She would like it, however, if I took control.

Yes, I was done.

Early evening the next day, Annie and I climbed into Granddad’s black pickup truck and he drove us to the top of the hill. As usual, we sat on the same wrought iron bench we’d sat on for years to admire the land quilt in front of us, the golden lollipop to the west heading down over the mountains.

“How are you feeling, Granddad?” I asked.

“I’m fine, dammit.” He took a deep but ragged breath. “Fine, dammit.”

“Dammit,” I said. “I’m glad you’re damn fine.”

He glanced at me. I interpreted the glance. Exasperated, but he loved me.

“It’s good to be damn fine,” Annie said. “For example, Fiji was damn fine.”

Granddad rolled his eyes. “Fiji was fine,” he muttered. He was a law-abiding man, but he was a realist and knew he could not stop that particular granddaughter. I chuckled.

We watched the leaves ruffle, the trees sway, a hawk glide, and I heard the faintest notes of Haydn’s Symphony no. 39 in G Minor in the back of my head.

We waited Granddad out, as was our plan.

“I believe I owe you girls more information,” he said.

“That’d be good,” Annie said.

“Please,” I said.

“It’s not pleasant, and I know it will hurt you girls.” He brought a hand up and pressed on his eyelids. “I tried to put my past, our past, behind us. I didn’t want to think about it. It hurt too much and it wasn’t anyone’s damn business. Plus, you girls went through so much as children, why add more pain to your lives? More confusion? More secrets? I wanted to protect you. I wanted you to start your lives over, here, at The Lavender Farm, with us, and to heal. What good would it do to tell you things you didn’t need to know? I wanted it all buried.”

I don’t like that word, buried.

“Buried pasts have a way of sneaking out of their coffins, don’t they?” Annie said.

“Yes. And it’s coming out of that coffin now. I can’t protect you anymore from my history.” He dropped his hand, and said in French, “I am cornered. This reporter has cornered me. And, perhaps, it is all best, anyhow. Best for you to know.”

“Know what, Granddad?” Annie leaned forward.

“The truth may explain things for you, offer you clarity about your mother, about Grandma and me. You’ll know what Grandma is talking about now. It won’t make things easier when you listen to her—in fact, I think it will cause you great pain—but you’ll understand the context. You will, however, probably not wish to speak to me again, and I understand.”

I felt the breath in my body still, stuck again, holding on to itself. “That would never happen, Granddad.”

“Never,” Annie said. “We love you.”

“The Nazis marched into a quiet Paris,” my granddad said, his voice so weary, as if he hadn’t heard our reassurances. “People had fled, or were fleeing, or hiding, hunkered down. We needed to flee, too.” He took a deep breath. “It would be more accurate to say that we needed to escape.”

Escape. They needed to escape because they were being hunted.

“Doctors, mothers, musicians, artists, scientists, grandparents. We all had to escape, or die.” His bitterness was not lost on me. “Hitler was a psychopath, but he could not have done what he did without the help and agreement of millions of people, all of whom did nothing, nothing, save for a fraction of them, to help us. So we Jews were on the run. We were fighting to exist.”

His fists clenched, then he sagged, as if the anger rose, then dissipated again, too exhausted to hold on to after so many decades of futility.

“But we were late getting out. We stayed far longer in Paris than we should have. We had to. Your grandma’s mother, Frieda, was terminally ill. Her liver was failing. She was yellow. Her husband, Eli, was ill, too. He had had polio as a child, and a different form of it had returned. He was in a wheelchair, and moving him would have been almost impossible. Like I told you before, they begged us to go without them. I didn’t want to leave them, neither did Madeline or your grandma. I loved them, but I was desperate. Desperate to get my family out, to get the ones out who might live to see the next year.”

“Madeline?” I asked. “Who was Madeline?”

Granddad took a deep, trembly breath, his whole chest shaking. He reached out his hands, hands that never seemed to stop trembling anymore, and said, “My dear granddaughters. Madeline was your grandma.”

No, she wasn’t.
That was my first thought.
No, she wasn’t. Grandma is our grandma. Emmanuelle Laurent is our Grandma.

“What?” Annie asked. “What do you mean?”

Granddad held his eyes shut tight for a second. “Your grandma, Emmanuelle Laurent, is the grandma of your heart. She is the grandma whom you love and who loves you. She cared for you, she would give her life for you, that I know for sure. But she is not your direct, biological grandma.”

Neither Annie nor I could speak for long, long seconds.

“What—
what are you talking about?
” I asked.

“Your biological grandma’s name was Madeline. You, my dear”—he nodded at me—“you were named by your mother for your grandma. Your mother named you after her mother. Madeline is the sister of your grandma Emmanuelle.”

“I’m lost,” Annie said, her face pale.

“This is too confusing,” I said. Too much.

“Your grandma, your beautiful grandma, is my second wife.”

“Your
second
wife?” I asked.

“Yes. I was married to her sister, Madeline, when we were barely twenty.”

He was married to Grandma’s sister?

“But . . . what happened to her? What happened to your . . .” I could barely see it. “What happened to your first wife? To Madeline?”

His eyes closed, like he’d been hit, then opened to focus on the ruffling leaves, the swaying trees, the hawk that was back up after stabbing the mouse....

“She died. . . .” Granddad’s jaw clenched and his eyes swam in tears. Amidst my utter confusion, I was struck that after all this time, Granddad still cried for a woman he had loved and lost decades ago.

“She died right before we were to escape.”

Oh, my God.
“Granddad, I am so sorry,” I whispered.

“Shit,” Annie said. “And hell.”

He wiped his face and sunk back on the bench, exhausted already, overwhelmed.

“How did she die?” I asked.

He coughed, cleared his throat. “She died a few hours after she jumped.”

She jumped?
“She jumped from where?”

“She jumped from the second story of her parents’ home in Paris.”

I felt like I’d been slugged in the chest with a hammer.