Ada Unraveled (8 page)

“They’d left me home with tia…an aunt. I
have little memory of it, just the hysteria, the rage and
frustration. They were forced to return to a Mexican hospital
barely better than a prison—which is where they would have been
sent next, if they’d lived. It was years ago. The hospitals back
then were….”

“They were primitive,” Andrea said. “And
they would have gone to prison because their laws presume guilt
before trial, the opposite of ours. Napoleonic, it’s called.
Primitive, I call it.”

Elixchel sighed again. “Yes, but the
American consulate did nothing to help them. The guilt is on both
countries.”

“Wasn’t much they could do back in those
days; it was like a diplomatic dark age between Mexico and the US,
wasn’t it?” Andrea.

“I don’t know. Do you want me to tell my
story or not?” Elixchel snapped.

Andrea smiled—I thought smugly--and bent to
her sewing.

“Anyway they both died, my mother within
days from the injuries, my father from pneumonia after several
weeks. It still makes me very sad. And yes, it makes me angry…at
this country and its attitude toward us. I mean toward us
Chicanos.”

“I’m sorry about your parents, Elixchel. You
have every right to be angry over their deaths. But, do you think
things are getting better now?” I said.

“Yes. No. Maybe a little, away from the
borders. But I grew up feeling ashamed of being
Mexican…Mexican-American.”

“Which is why you’ve taken a half-Mayan
name?”

“Yes, Andrea. I ran away from my aunts and
uncles. I hated their simple, peasant ways. That’s when Victoria
adopted me. We’re family anyway. My dad’s line goes back to the
Stowalls. He just had a different name.”

Another Stowall?
Was I the only one
here who wasn’t a Stowall?

“So you’ve shared your worst secret.” Andrea
said. “So can we call you Liz again?”

“No. I’ve changed my name legally, so it’s
done. Besides, Elixchel, if you say it properly, is beautiful. It’s
El-
ish
-el, Andrea. A soft shushing sound in the middle.” But
Andrea knew this. It was for my benefit that Elixchel sounded out
her name.

The rain pummeled the windows as if crazy to
get in. I pressed my shoulders down as Hannah had instructed,
stretching my neck and back. The massages were long over. I was
cramping up again.

Elixchel rose to put another log on, but
paused half-way to the fireplace, cocking her head toward the door.
I too heard female voices coming from the direction of the living
room, filtered and diminished by the angular hall. Victoria began
slowly pushing herself out of her chair, and left the room, with
Elixchel trailing close behind. The female voices grew louder. I
couldn’t make them out, but they were clearly filled with emotion
and struggle.

Andrea began babbling, started teasing
Abigail, making no sense—at least to me. I realized she was
attempting to mask the noises in the hall. She was doing a good
job. Frustrated, I reached for my tea cup, tilting my head so I
could better hear.

The teacup was empty. My bladder on the
other hand was full. And I still couldn’t hear over Andrea and
Abigail’s noise. So I stood and prepared to walk either to the food
table or better yet, the bathroom out in the hall, when a protest
reached my ears.

“
I’m not sleepy! I didn’t do anything
wrong!”
Several other voices were cooing and murmuring to
a…distraught child?

“
I’ve had it with this crap!”
Another
voice from the hall—this one angry. More clearly adult.

The front door slammed, which made me turn
to look at the chill rain spattering the windows behind me like a
hundred spiccato violin bows bouncing on glass strings. What a
terrible night to be out.

Finally Andrea got up and chased after the
sounds in the hall. Abigail followed her like a puppy. It must be
Victoria’s daughters, or some of them at least, perhaps another
foster child. I returned to my seat, new cup of tea in hand. If I
drank it I knew I’d drown in urine, but now I was uncomfortable
about leaving the room. Another shout erupted, a half child’s plea,
half adult’s demand.

“
I want daddy. Where’s Jake?”

Ruth peered at me around Gerry. The
miserable woman-child voice began sobbing. At least the other
voices were now mostly gentle, I thought. Soothing her fears,
distracting her hysteria.

“Is one of you going to enlighten me?” I
finally asked.

Gerry said, “It’s the Stowall girls. Martha
just left. She’s the one with the excessive voice and impatience to
match. Jake’s their father, of course. The youngest, Sarah, is the
hysterical one you hear.”

Stowall girls.
Sarah was the
youngest, Martha has a loud voice. More mental notes.

While I was wondering how to ask if Sarah
was handicapped in some way, Victoria came back into the room, so I
kept my question to myself…thank God. One by one the others
returned and resumed their sewing as the cooing and sobbing voices
moved away.

Minutes passed before Victoria said, “She’s
spending one night. She’s in the room by the kitchen, so please
don’t make a lot of noise down that end of the house.”

“You shouldn’t be alone.” Ruth.

They were back to an earlier discussion, one
I was not part of, of whether Victoria needed a helpmate. A
caregiver.

“I’m fine alone. How could she help me,
anyway?” Victoria.

“At least she could call her sisters if you
fall. Besides, she’s capable of doing a lot. She could learn to
care for you.”

“No! I don’t need taking care of.” Victoria
tried to adjust her chair and winced in pain at the movement. “Why
doesn’t someone tell another childhood story?”

The butterflies were multiplying. Now there
were four of them flitting around my belly.

A tolling clock, down the hall I think,
reminded me that only half this night had passed. And we weren’t
even close to turning the quilt. We had at least one more expansion
rolled on the dowels before us. Sleep was calling me to bed. But I
was six hours away from it even if we ended by five. The drive down
the mountain and putting on my jammies would take another hour.

“All this tea,” I mumbled and pushed my
chair back once more, stretching my back and neck as I went.

The bathroom was down the hall to the right,
but I turned left at the door instead, hoping the women at the rack
were all looking at their stitching instead of my retreat. Snooping
again. Good habit on the job, bad habit when making new friends.
Sometimes I had difficulty separating the two.

Again I noted the dim lighting in the hall.
I’ve always found old houses depressing. The picture display once
meant to enliven the crazy hall had long been neglected. I realized
I was reviewing a family pictorial history that had stopped when
the children reached adulthood. One group photograph revealed there
had been seven of them.

Seven children and not one grandchild?

I peered into the faces of the grainy photo,
taken many years ago. Looking for similarities between Victoria in
her eighties and the Victoria of this large tribe—then, maybe, in
her thirties. I couldn’t find them. Maybe because Victoria and Jake
were still so young in this shot. The youngest child was barely
more than a toddler. It looked to be a first communion for one of
the daughters. She was dressed like a bride, all in white.

I remembered seeing some of my mother’s old
photos of first communions.

I looked for other family photos, found one
a few feet away. This second group photo showed Jake and Victoria
well into their fifties. All the children were grown, those that
were in attendance. I couldn’t identify the occasion of this second
gathering. Two young men and three young women with their aging
parents.

Missing were John, and maybe Sarah? Maybe
Sarah was taking the picture. Or John. But why would both of them
not be in the grouping? And, I reminded myself, that Sarah’s
abilities were limited. Just how limited, I had no idea.

Victoria’s husband Jake, father of this
brood, was holding something up in his right hand. I couldn’t tell
what, in the faded picture. Perhaps a stick.

I thought about how dramatically women aged
compared to men. Not a new thought, now that I was in my fifties. I
still had difficulty finding the old woman in the other room in
this more mature face. Maybe a little similarity. But it could just
as easily have been a cousin’s.

Jake, on the other hand, held his identity
through the two to three decades that separated the two photos.

But there were no more group photos of the
family in this hall. Perhaps the relatives had begun picking over
the remains of Victoria and Jake’s lives already. It wasn’t
uncommon. I guessed the china cabinet would look as scavenged as
these walls.

I listened for any sounds behind me and
ahead as I snuck down the hall and around the corner, searching the
handful of pictures closer to the kitchen.

“The bathroom is the other way, Rachel.”

I startled, but recovered quickly. Sneaks do
that.

“Oh, thanks, Elixchel. I’m completely turned
around in this house.”

She passed by me, her Mayan beauty turning
to chiseled rock. Chastened, I retreated back through the broken
hallway.

Rounding the last corner, I saw that
Victoria had left the light on in her bedroom, perhaps when she
last rested. The room at the end of this twisted house. Dead-ahead
and lighted.

As I neared I could make out Victoria, now
lying on the bed in a rumpled pile of loose clothing and blankets.
I couldn’t make out her face. She was just a messy bump with arms
and feet.

There might be clues to Jake’s life and
death in there, but I couldn’t get to them while Victoria was
napping.

And just this side of her was the bathroom I
so desperately needed to visit.

Our little group of women had grown silent
and angry with lack of sleep and hours of monotonous detail
work.

“We need to hear your secret, Rachel,”
Abigail said.

My flock, herd, bevy, cluster, school, or
whatever of butterflies lifted off simultaneously.

“Right. Sure.”

But not now.
I continued sewing,
hoping to wait until I pushed through the sleep-deprivation into
some sort of second wind.

I rose to get fresh tea. Stalling.

A clock chimed as I repositioned myself at
the rack, the first two phrases of the Westminster clock tower
music. Big Ben’s song in miniature voice. It was lovely, in a
melancholy way. I looked around and discovered it was coming from
an antique Regulator only a few feet away, high on the wall at the
end of the windows.

Such a small clock to be making such a big
sound.

What I didn’t yet know was that I would grow
to hate that clock before the long night of sewing ended.

I bent to my task, concentrating only on the
lovely stitches, not on the torture my fingers were enduring.

The memory began to coalesce in my sleepy
head, from decades ago. My story.

I nodded, and looked up at Abigail whom I
caught staring at me again…or still. Smiling like a cherub about to
shoot an arrow. I took a deep breath and began my tale.

“Frankly, Abigail, I have difficulty
separating my real memories from stories I’ve heard while growing
up and pictures I’ve seen. This memory happened when I was seven
going on eight.

“In this instance, I’d come to the defense
of a girl a head taller than me. A girl who was basically shy. And
in that defense, I’d challenged another girl for starting rumors
about my shy friend. Called her out. “In the end, the older kids in
our gang decided that the two of us combatants should ‘duke it
out.’ In a fair fight. A fist fight.

“We circled each other, me with my sister as
my mentor, Erika with her brother as her mentor, Robert
Swansen.

“My sister Rita egged me on. ‘Hit her,
Rache. Hit her hard!’ I was thinking, No! I can’t hit anyone!

“Roger did the same, shouting, ‘Hit her
Erika! Hit her in the face. Hit her big nose. Hit her, hit her, hit
her!’

“So I did. Hit Erika Swansen right in the
eye. Then my sister and I ran away.”

I was thinking my story had been too
personal and too long, until Abigail said, “That was great Rachel.
You’re a natural storyteller. I knew you’d be a great addition to
our group.”

Victoria said, “Let’s take a second break. I
have fresh pies from my daughters’ bakery.”

Almost simultaneously the old Regulator wall
clock began sounding out the hour phrase of the Westminster chimes
and one count. One o’clock. Surely now my energy levels would
lift.

When I asked about it, Hannah said that
three of Victoria’s daughters, Martha, Mary and Anne, ran a
restaurant and bakery that made pies to die for.

As we slowly filtered into the kitchen, the
pies were pulled from a warming oven and laid on the counter, and
the room filled with apple and peach and berry perfumes. My nose
had an orgasm.

We spent a half hour enjoying this break. My
hands actually stopped thrumming and began to unclench. And then we
paraded our way back to the sewing room, all feeling much
better.

Behind me in the pack, Andrea said, “He’s an
innocent. A victim. He needs our protection.”

Andrea was angrily defending the same
mystery man she and Elixchel had argued about earlier. The man with
no name. The man that Elixchel didn’t trust, apparently. But I got
no more information from them this evening. Just the occasional
angry discussion leaving me little usable information.

The air was filled with smoke. The heat and
winds said Santa Ana’s. Eddie was planning once again to take that
walk to his grandparents. Trying to muster up the courage.