South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [58]
Randi raised her eyebrows and gave him a very brief skeptical frown that made him laugh. He opened a beer of his own. “Just getting off work?”
She nodded and yawned hugely, covering her mouth and looking embarrassed.
“Long day?”
She yawned again, nodding. Paul found himself yawning in reaction, and they both started to laugh.
“So what are you reading?” Randi asked, reaching across to his bed and picking Up his book.
“Joseph Campbell.”
She shook her head, shrugged.
“Myths.”
“Like Zeus and all that?” She leafed through the pages.
“Sort of. He’s talking about the stories we tell ourselves to give meaning to life.”
“Mmm,” Randi said, nodding. After a little silence she said, “What stories do you tell yourself?” smiling at him as if she really wondered.
Paul felt his entire self lean toward her.
“I’ll go and get Walter,” Ted Braith said to Madeline one afternoon near the first of July. He started along the hall and she followed. “He’s Up in his room. You can go along and sit in there.”
He said the same thing every time she came. There was a small room off the hall that had perhaps once been a sunroom or a breakfast nook. A bay window bulged with houseplants. Otherwise, it held three rocking chairs, a lamp, and an end table. Madeline sat in a rocker and waited. It had been almost three weeks since she’d found out about Walter. The first time she came had been the most awkward.
She’d stood when her Uncle Walter walked in, her hands clasped in front of her, her fingers ice cold. How did you go about meeting your developmentally disabled great-uncle for the very first time?
“Walter, this is a friend of yours,” Ted had said.
“Oh, yes,” Walter answered, turning a worried smile on Ted.
“It’s your niece. Your brother Joe’s granddaughter. Do you remember her?”
“Oh yes. Madeline. She was a pretty little baby.”
Madeline felt a bewildered, dizzying sense of displacement.
“All right,” Ted said. “Well, she’s come for a visit.”
Walter wore leather house slippers, gabardine slacks, a white T-shirt with a plaid flannel shirt over top of it. His face was grizzled, with a trace of beard, and his skin was a healthy pink. He looked like a pleasant old man, and there was nothing to tell you he was different except perhaps for some lack of Urgency in the tone of his waiting. She wondered if he looked like his brother, her grandfather.
“Hello, Walter. I’m Madeline,” she said faintly.
“Hello.” He turned to Ted with a questioning expression and Ted patted his shoulder. “Sit down, go on.”
Walter perched on the edge of a rocker, both feet planted flat on the floor and his hands on his knees. Madeline pulled a rocker around and sat down across from him, then glanced at Ted for guidance.
“You’ll be fine. I’ll be in through the back, in the kitchen, if you need me. My wife and I are fixing lunch.”
Walter and Madeline looked at each other, both she thought with diffident, puzzled expressions. “So I’m Madeline, your niece,” she said finally. “Great-niece.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Do you remember me?”
“Oh, yes. You were Jackie’s baby.”
Madeline nodded very slowly and focused on breathing. In, out. In, out. You were Jackie’s baby. Here it was. Her past. Her time on earth before Emmy, remembered by this old man who was, as Gladys had explained, “simple.”
“I don’t—remember you,” she apologized after a moment.
“No,” Walter said. “You were a little baby. Jackie took you away.” He looked off across the room, toward the plant-filled window.
Madeline got Up and moved over to the window, touched the petals of a pink geranium. “It’s pretty, huh?”
“Oh yes. Mama always loved posies. Animals too. We had a skunk, she called it Jim. I never was afraid of him, she