Simple Recipes Page 8

  On her own birthday last year, their mother took them to Cipriano’s. She never drank like other people, in celebration. On her birthday she stayed sober. Twenty-four hours every year, just to prove that she could. The restaurant was small and hot, and they ate wedges of garlic bread and drank Shirley Temples and Luke Skywalkers. There were paper umbrellas tucked in the drinks. Lorraine loved her mom’s face in candlelight, the way her hair fell straight as a turning page. They ate pasta from heaping plates, mounds of spaghetti topped with red, crumbly meatballs. They lingered over hot chocolate. Lorraine and Kathleen tried not to notice how their mother watched wine being poured at another table, how it stole her attention. They said things to distract her but it was over too soon. Their mother paid the bill and they left, but there were no doors, just a wide rectangular window that you stepped through into the humid evening.

  Lorraine wanted to make it to fourteen. When she was fourteen, like her sister, she would have all this sorted out. Like Kathleen, she would believe that their mother would come back for them. She would be able to divide her mom’s sickness from her mom’s real self and she would keep them separate like glasses of water.

  Back then, she couldn’t decipher when her mother was telling the truth. It changed from moment to moment, fluctuating like an off-kilter heart. Those times when her mother emerged from the bedroom, eyes lit up and dancing, Lorraine knew she shouldn’t trust her. This was her mother full of lies, the one who’d walk away and forget them.

  “This thing that I do,” she told them once, “it does so much more good than harm.”

  Then she combed her hair straight back off her face so she looked like a movie star, her blue eyes like saucers, and drove to the store. Later on, after she had drunk the house empty, she lay on the sofa and wept, said, “What have I done? Ten years. I just blew it all.” Lorraine never knew what to say. That night she dreamed her mother was laughing, a swooping sound that reminded Lorraine of a seagull hoisted on the wind, dropping fast. She dreamed her mother died. All morning she believed it was true, until her mother pulled up in the driveway and ran into the house, the car still running and the door wide open, her mother swaggering heroically on the stairs.

  The morning her mother left, Lorraine was standing on the lawn. Kathleen had mowed it once, months ago. The grass was knee-high now, maybe higher. She and Kathleen used to stand in the grass blowing dandelion spores to the four winds. Now the yard bloomed with them.

  Her mother walked out carrying her purse in her hands like a loaf of bread, her fingers curled around the bottom. She was wearing her coat even though the sky was cloudless and heat blared down. Lorraine sat camouflaged in the grass. She watched her mother’s progress along the walk, one foot steady in front of the other. The sun on the back of her mother’s hair turned it blond. That hair, the prettiness of it, made Lorraine think there was nothing wrong. Not in the way her mother walked or the direction she went or her purse in her hands like a gift. She watched her mother and it might have been any day of the year, neither here nor there, a nothing picture. Her mother walked away down the street, turned left, and disappeared.

  Three nights passed. She and Kathleen stayed up late watching old movies on the television. “I’m not worried,” Kathleen said. “Are you?” Lorraine shook her head.

  It terrified Lorraine to wake up in the morning. She was used to finding her mother around the house, sometimes on the floor, right beside Lorraine’s bed. Her mother’s mouth would be fully open, churning the air in and out, a lone swimmer.

  On the fourth day, they called their father. Long distance, the telephone lines snaking across the water and up into the Island’s northern tip. Lorraine tried to calm herself by picturing him, phone cradled against his shoulder, mountains and forest in the background. He asked them over and over, “But when did you last see her?”

  “Days ago, days ago, days ago.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything.”

  “I promise you,” he told them. “She’ll be back before I make it home.”

  They wandered around the empty house eating peanut-butter sandwiches. Kathleen stared out the front window. “Mom’s coming back today,” she said. “She doesn’t know what to do without me.” Lorraine’s head hurt. She went and stood inside her mother’s closet, wondering if they would be able to take it with them when they left the house.

  The next day, when her father walked in the door, Lorraine was lying on the carpet, her hand pressed to the cave of her stomach. Kathleen came out of the bedroom hysterical. She was screaming and it was so out of character that Lorraine sat up, her brain muddy. It looked like Kathleen and her father were dancing, the way his hands clamored around her shoulders, then her head. If only it were quieter. She lay still thinking that if everyone would leave her alone, she might be able to get up off the floor and find her way into bed. Then she became afraid that she was not real at all. In this room was Kathleen, unable to breathe, sobbing. Her father, calming her with his sad voice. And then the nothing of herself like a crumb in the carpet, gradually becoming nothing at all.

  Lorraine remembers that after their mother left, they went up to the logging camps with their father. They drove for hours along gravel roads. In the geographical center of the Island, the trees opened up into a little town. The air was so clean it hurt Lorraine’s throat. She tilted her head to the sky and the trees pointed up forever. Their father took them up to the side of a mountain where boys as young as twenty were taking the trees down one by one.

  “You see,” her dad said, as they drove along the logging roads, “I never could have brought you here.” He was wearing a white T-shirt, suspenders, and jeans. His skin was dark and shining from the sun. “This isn’t any place for a family. No shopping malls, no movies, nothing to do.”

  Lorraine didn’t bother to argue. They watched from the car while sunset turned the sky a blistering orange.

  There was a general store in the camp, the kind that sold milk and cheese among the diapers and saws. Her father towered over the shelves, his big hands scooping up Popsicles from the freezer and packages of marshmallows. Outside the tent, when the night was pitch black but the air was still warm, they sang songs around the campfire. Kathleen had a voice like an angel, thick and rolling like their mother’s. “Boy,” Dad said, his voice scratchy, “you sure know how to raise the dead, don’t you?”

  When he lay back in the dirt and his face disappeared in the darkness, he told them how excited their mother had been when she first found out she was pregnant. She thought it would turn her life around. Their father shrugged his shoulders. “She thought I might give up this kind of life. Move back to the city. Don’t ever think it’s your fault, because the one to blame is sitting right here. I was no help to her. I kept telling her I had my work. I had all this work to do.” His voice was dry as sand.

  When they got back to the city, their father arranged everything. He took them to meet their social worker. He explained that he wasn’t up to raising a family, that he’d had his chance and lost it. Kathleen, distant and aloof, told him, “We’ll be fine. Don’t change your plans on our account.” Lorraine said nothing. She couldn’t bring herself to look at him. Eventually, the social worker found Liza, their new Foster Mom.

  On the day he dropped them off at Liza’s, he said he’d never forget them. Lorraine said the same and she wasn’t lying. Dad, smelling of the great outdoors and cabin sleeping, would never fade. He’d always been a memory. But her mother, with her disheveled blond hair, was already slipping by. When Lorraine tried to recall her face, it seemed to disappear from view.

  When her father drove away and left them there, Lorraine knew she would remember it forever — white smoke trailing out the back, his left arm stretched out the window, temporarily fluttering, and the car rolling across the driveway, rolling out of sight.

  Lorraine and Kathleen watch an entire day pass in front of their house. By four o’clock, people start coming home fr
om work. They walk quickly down the sidewalk, stepping over Kathleen’s bare, outstretched legs, their eyes averted. Lorraine is slumped against the mailbox, one hand covering her face. Kathleen scans the street, hands on her hips. She catches sight of a truck rounding the corner. It is a white pickup. Lorraine sits up, her heart beating fast.

  “Has she come with Dad?” Kathleen says, walking into the road. “Is that her in the truck with Dad?”

  In the afternoon sunshine, their father’s truck comes floating by, slowing down in front of their house, then speeding up again. Lorraine sits rooted to the sidewalk. The white pickup swims in front of Lorraine’s eyes, but she can see right away there is no one in the passenger seat. Kathleen jumps up and down, behind the car, waving her arms, “Stop! Stop! We’re right here!” He hits the brakes. Lorraine sees it in slow motion, his head lurching forward then swiveling around, his eyes through the glass, shocked and alarmed.

  Kathleen stands awkwardly in the road, hand raised in an adult gesture. Their father stares through the windshield at them, uncomprehending. “Well, well,” he says, when he steps out of the truck. He smiles but his face is guarded. “So you’ve come back to see the old place.”

  Kathleen doesn’t move. She is searching the truck with her eyes.

  “House is falling apart, isn’t it? We got out just in time.”

  A car, pulling out of a driveway, swerves carefully around them.

  “It’s a joke,” her father says, his voice low. “Kathleen, I’m joking.”

  She nods her head, still looking past him. “We’re out of money,” she blurts out. “Couldn’t even buy an ice-cream cone.”

  Lorraine stares at their feet on the sidewalk.

  “It’s Mom’s birthday, you know?” Kathleen laughs nervously. “It’s so hard waiting. She won’t drink at all today. I just want her to hurry up and come.”

  Their father looks at her, then out across the street, at the two-story house. He takes Kathleen’s hand. Together, they walk over to where Lorraine is sitting. Lorraine’s never seen him so dressed up, a tweed jacket and gray slacks. His face, sunburnt and dry, is dark in the sunlight. When he crouches down and brings his hand to Lorraine’s face, she can see the lines of dirt in his palm, grainy and deep. “How are things with Liza?” he asks her.

  “They’re fine.”

  “Liza cooks good food,” Kathleen says. She lifts her pinkie to her mouth, chews a bit of skin, then nods. “She doesn’t know we’re here.”

  “We should call home then. Let her know you’re safe.” A string of cars grumbles past. He looks over at them. “Must be almost a year now since I’ve seen you two. You’re all grown up.” He scuffs his shoes against the curb, looks at his watch, then sits down. “I don’t get out to the city much any more. If I get some time off work, I take the ferry across. I drive by the old place, just to make sure it’s still standing up.”

  “Tell us you can’t stay away,” Kathleen says. Her voice sounds distant and mocking. She plucks a handful of grass from the dirt.

  He laughs, embarrassed. “Can’t stand to see it and I can’t stand not to.”

  Lorraine pulls her knees up to her chest and leans back against the mailbox. Kathleen scatters grass on her own bare skin.

  “There’s a woman inside,” Kathleen tells their father, pointing at the house. “We saw her blabbing on the phone.”

  “Her husband bought the house. Scooped it up. He’s a doctor or something.” He stands, smoothing his pants with both hands, then strides quickly across the street and gives the house a once-over. “I don’t like those flowers,” he says when he comes back. “Rhododendrons. They’re as common as rain.”

  “Mom liked them,” Kathleen says.

  He looks at her, then crosses his arms across his body as if shielding himself.

  “She used to stand out there, beside the flowers.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I remember that. She had a soft spot for them.”

  “I used to cut them for her and put them in the kitchen when she wasn’t feeling well. I bet you didn’t know that.”

  He shakes his head. After a moment, he says, “I’m glad you did that.”

  Kathleen doesn’t respond.

  Their father sits down beside them on the curb. “I know it’s her birthday today. She never was one to celebrate.” He nods at the house. “There’s your lady again.” The blond woman is back at the window, setting the table. A man and a child are sitting down to dinner.

  Kathleen leans forward, eyes fixed on them.

  Passing cars blow dust off the road. Their father starts to say something, lifting his hand, but then he stops. He spreads his fingers on the curb, his eyes unreadable, and looks up again through the picture window.

  Once, not long after they came to live with Liza, Lorraine woke up to find Kathleen next to her in the bottom bunk, their arms wrapped around each other like long-lost relatives. Lorraine lay still and tried not to breathe. She couldn’t understand how they ended up like this, tangled together. She prodded Kathleen awake to ask her. Kathleen scrunched her eyebrows, as if she were trying to remember too.

  “You were dreaming,” Kathleen finally said. “You were dreaming and saying funny things.”

  “What things?”

  “You were tossing and turning and calling for Mom.”

  “No. I wasn’t.”

  Kathleen shrugged. She loosened her grip around Lorraine’s stomach. “You don’t have to believe me. I was only trying to help.”

  Lorraine took a deep breath. She told Kathleen what she thought. “Mom’s dead.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Kathleen snapped. “You’ll make it true if you believe that.”

  Three days ago, Kathleen woke up choking and wheezing, her eyes wet with tears. Lorraine stood and reached for her. Then Liza was there, her hands on Kathleen’s slippery back. She rocked her and Kathleen said, “Go away,” over and over again, even while she held Liza’s wrists, the pressure of her fingers turning Liza’s skin white. “Go away,” she whispered, but the words didn’t mean anything. They floated up in the room, above where Liza and Kathleen hunched tangled together in the top bunk, their heads brushing the ceiling. And Lorraine down on the floor with her hands reaching up, thinking words didn’t mean anything, and least of all what they said. These were words: alcoholic, trauma. But they never linked up to her life. Only her mother’s loose smile, her damaged face, her purse in her hands. Lorraine remembers a windstorm on a hot June night. They watched it from inside, turning the city dusty when the electricity went off. She remembers looking at her mother’s mouth, the lips chapped and dry, how they opened to say something, about the storm, about anything, but no words came out. On the lawn, the trees swayed forward, leaning to the east.

  Out on the sidewalk, the three of them have not spoken for a long while, and the sun is beginning to set. The street is quiet and a chill wind rustles the trees. Her father looks from them to the house and back again. His voice is low when he says, “I think I understand why you’re here, and I have no right to say it, but I don’t think she’s coming back.”

  Kathleen lifts her head to look at her father. Then she turns her face away, as if that will stop her from hearing.

  “Christ knows, I can’t stop thinking about her either.” He takes his hands and folds them together, holding them in his lap as if they might jump away. “I’m the same as you. I want her to come back. Maybe she will, sooner or later.” He looks at Kathleen’s expression. “Maybe today, even,” he says gently. He settles back against the mailbox, his shoulders sagging. “We drank too, out in the bush. Maybe your mother would have liked that life. But I wanted her to get clean, to pull herself together. I never counted on her leaving. I never thought she’d do it.”

  He stares across at the house, at a loss for words. Now or never, sooner or later, Lorraine thinks. Still, she looks at the crest of the street. A woman walking towards her, she can see it in her mind’s eye. She can see the four of them embracing in the road
and how they cry, but it isn’t like crying at all. It’s something else. She looks at her sister. Beside their father, Kathleen’s face is buried in her knees.

  Lorraine’s father has his arms around them. He is sitting beside Kathleen, and his arm reaches past her to brush Lorraine’s shoulders with his fingers. Kathleen is crying now. She’s saying, “I let her go. I saw her walking. I knew. I knew she was going.”

  Her father says, “Shh. Shhh.”

  “Everybody blames me,” she tells him.

  “Nobody does.”

  Her hands are covering her face and tears are flowing out of her hands. “Don’t you blame me?” she asks Lorraine.

  “No,” Lorraine says. “I never have.”

  Their father turns his head again and again as if to clear it. “I can’t save you,” he says. “I can’t do it.”

  Lorraine looks into his face. “I know,” she says.

  Kathleen’s eyes are wild and sad. They dart from her to the street and the house and back again. The street goes forever. Their father leaves his arm around her, like a last line, to pull them back again.

  They waited until it was dark and then their father drove them home. The sky was very clear. On the other side of the city, there were celebrations. There were hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the shoreline watching fireworks. How they blazed up from a floating raft, burst in the sky, and rained down. From the car, Lorraine couldn’t see them but she could hear the explosions. They came every few seconds, like approaching artillery. Their father drove slowly, taking side streets and alleyways, watching for pedestrians. Kathleen watched with him. They drove in silence, peering up at the fireworks. Lorraine refused to look. In her mind’s eye, she was watching a woman in a long coat, too warm for this summer night. The woman was standing in front of the house like someone in mourning. She was admiring the flowers and thinking of her children and husband. There was that windstorm, remember? Trees leaning to the east. They were bending and she felt like she was running among them. They were calling for her; so many things did. She drank to stop her grief. But when she stood in front of this house, she pictured her children and her husband, she pictured how they climbed into his truck together, how he comforted them, so that when they left, when they turned their backs on the house, all their grief was left behind. The picture went on and on. She would never leave. She was alighting from a bus. She was standing on the corner waiting for the light to change. The truck sped on the empty streets, and she was still there.