Hand Me Down (20 page)

I smile. “I can’t wait.”

Without much waiting at all, the ground shifts from brown to green and spring officially settles in the Wasatch Valley. The warm air and bright sun make my muscles ache for movement and the knowledge that Dad can’t hurt Jaime makes each deep breath and sun-kissed step even better. Tammy and I hike in Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons, creek-filled valleys full of bushy, leaf-heavy branches bursting with shades of green and just-opening flower buds that show off slivers of the color that will fully bloom in a few weeks. We do yoga and play badminton in the condo’s shared grassy area and ride bikes along the stone wall that edges the cemetery on Eleventh Avenue at sunset with paper-white mountaintops highlighted against the hazy pink-tinged sky beyond the headstones. The wind whips my hair against my chilled face, but it’s worth it because when I pedal fast enough this high above the valley, it feels like flying.

We attend the first of the outdoor concerts at the neighborhood
library—a Celtic instrumental band with flutes and a bagpipe. Tammy grabs my arm and pulls me up to dance with the three elementary school kids doing
Riverdance
moves and the white-haired couple swaying and clapping their wrinkled hands. She twirls me around with the beat, our hair floating in the breeze. Tammy laughs and does an Irish jig move with her elbows bent, and I kick my feet, and we giggle and move until we’re out of breath and the musicians take a break. We sit on the rim of a planter box full of sprouting greenery, trying to catch our breaths while still laughing. The old couple stares at us. Tammy puts her arm around my shoulder and says, “Thank you.”

I wrap my arm around her waist and lay my head on her collarbone. “For what?”

“This is fun,” she says.

We take walks at Red Butte Garden, bring sketch pads and watercolors, carrot sticks and apple slices. We find a sunny spot to sit and spread out an orange blanket Tammy keeps in the trunk of her car and outline shimmering dragonflies and pastel-yellow baby ducks in charcoal, draw water lilies and cattails rising from the deep green pond. Brown rock peaks decorated with grass tufts and green trees stand watch above us, the air is sweet and clean and fresh, and I have never felt so full. The color comes back to my cheeks, my hair gets lighter with each day outside, and I even notice extra freckles on my face and newly tanned arms.

One weekend Tammy and I paint the kitchen a pale sage green we picked out together after careful swatch consideration and three failed test colors. She doesn’t watch my every stroke, and when she leaves the room to answer the phone I don’t eavesdrop
once I know it’s Sam. Tammy hasn’t mentioned him since he left and she hasn’t cooked any of the pork chops in the freezer, but after talking to Sam, Tammy almost always places the handset in the base and stares at her fingers resting on top of it for a few minutes before saying, “What did you say?” when I haven’t said a word.

Today, as usual after she hangs up, I want to ask if she’s okay but she’d say yes, and I want to ask if it’s because of me but she’d say no, so instead I tell her a story I know she won’t like about the biker I saw the other day on my walk who fell over. I laughed after he fell and I laugh again now telling her about it and picturing his legs stuck to the pedals, kicking in horizontal circles on the pavement.

Tammy says, “That’s not funny,” but I keep laughing. It is funny to me, but more importantly I know she needs something else to focus on, something to pull her out of the head space she retreats into after talking to Sam. It works. She picks up her roller brush, dips and slides it through the thick green liquid with excessive force, and lectures me on bike safety until it’s time for lunch. I only half-listen, but Tammy’s jaw loosens as she talks, her paint strokes become slower and more deliberate and her eyebrows relax. I know I can’t solve her problems, but at least I can help take her mind off the worst of it, even if only temporarily. And as I’m starting to understand, sometimes the temporary things are the most significant.

When the kitchen walls dry, the room looks like a page from one of Tammy’s
Sunset
magazines, with the hints of green undertones in the rosewood cabinets accented by the sage walls, her antique table as a dark anchor for the room’s center, and white doors full of windows leading to the awakening plants on the patio beyond.

We decorate, too, retrieve a painting Tammy had stashed away in her garage, get it framed and hung above the telephone table. The painting of an oversized striped teapot full of lavender stalks—an original, of course, from an art festival a few years ago—is full of rich purples and maroons, dark blues and blended gray-greens. We choose a deep slate-colored frame and a white mat, and the teapot stands out so much it looks like it might come to life and walk off the canvas. “Sam hated that painting,” Tammy says once it’s perfectly aligned and secure on the wall.

We gaze at the detail of the paint strokes, the intricate lines of the lavender’s silvery-green leaves and gray-purple buds. “Of course, he wasn’t around when I bought it.”

“I love it,” I say.

“Me, too,” she says. “I had forgotten how much.”

We place a blue-and-white patterned trivet on the tabletop, and I fill one of her clear glass vases with real lavender I pick from the library’s garden and set it on the raised porcelain tile. She switches out her plain white fruit bowl for a faded burgundy piece of pottery shaped like a tulip, and we buy a dark blue ceramic pump soap dispenser at Macy’s that costs fifteen dollars to replace the three-year-old plastic drugstore soap container she’d been reusing.

When we’re done, we stand together and survey the fruits of our labor. Tammy says, “It’s lovely.” Her face shines as she smiles at me, and I think about what a difference a little color makes. It’s like all the ruby-red and Valentine-pink tulips popping up in people’s yards around town, the summer yellow of daffodil blooms in roadside beds, and forsythia flowers appearing on branches. The kitchen looks like a new room.

Tammy hugs me and says, “Thanks for helping.” She leaves her arm around my shoulders and walks me to the patio doors. No bulbs bloom in her garden, but bright spots of green peek through the flattened gray plants, and pale new shoots rise up from the brown earth. “That’s next,” she says, squeezing my upper arm and smiling at me. “I hope you like digging and pulling weeds,” she says and I’m surprised to find I’m excited about more work.

One night after a delicious
dinner of spinach salad with chicken and feta cheese, and a few rounds of Mastermind that Tammy wins, Mom calls. She asks how things are going, how the packing’s coming along, what the weather is like. I’ve lived here four months now and not once has she called to chat, but I really know something is wrong when she asks to speak to Tammy. “What happened?” I say. “Did the appeal get denied?”

Mom says, “We haven’t heard yet.”

“But I can still come home?”

“Of course,” she says, but the brightness in her voice gives her away.

While I wait for Tammy to pick up the phone downstairs, my stomach cramps. Mom’s changed her mind. Jaime and I will never live together again. Sam will come back and say he didn’t sign up for my return. He’ll threaten to leave if I stay and Tammy will keep me because she feels like she has to and she’ll resent me for Sam dumping her. Or, like my mother, she’ll give in to her man and I’ll have to live with Dad.

I hold down the mute button when Tammy yells, “I got it.”
I press the phone to my ear, heart thumping frantically like Pandy the bunny’s tiny heart. I remember her constant panic, the way she clawed at my chest with her hind legs, a fur ball fighting to get away like her life depended on it.

“Linda?” Tammy’s voice knocks me back from memory lane, and as much as I hurt when Pandy died, I would trade that pain for the current ache in the space of a terrified heartbeat.

“Hi, Tammy,” Mom says.

“What’s wrong?”

“Geez, you sound like Elizabeth.” Mom sighs. “I do want her to come home.”

“She is coming home.”

“Well, yes,” Mom says, “but—”

Tammy says, “No buts, Linda. I already bought the plane ticket. It’s all she talks about.”

“I’m not saying she can’t come home,” my mom says. “It’s just that the parole decision won’t be made until the end of June, and Terrance has nowhere to go, so…” She nearly sings the word “so,” turning it into three syllables, and then takes a deep breath.

“Are you kidding?” Tammy sounds as outraged as I feel.

“I thought maybe the ticket could be changed to a later date,” Mom says.

“What about Liz?”

Mom says, “You don’t have plans, do you?”

“What if the appeal is denied again?”

“If you can’t switch the ticket, it’s okay,” Mom says. “We’ll figure something else out.”

Tammy says, “You know that’s not the point.” It’s almost exactly what I would have said.

“I know children have never been your first priority,” Mom says.

Tammy lowers her voice. “Excuse me?”

Mom says, “I just know how busy your life is, and how a child can sometimes be an inconvenience and I know you never wanted—”

“Stop it, Linda, just stop.”

“You’re right. I’m sorry,” Mom says and clears her throat.

“You know how much I love that kid,” Tammy says quietly. “She won’t tell you, but she’s hurting.” I hear the tightness in Tammy’s throat and realize this is hard for her, too. We’re a team now, and I wish she really was my mother. How different life would be.

“She’s tough,” Mom says. “She can handle it.”

“She’s still a kid,” Tammy says.

“Try telling her that,” Mom says, and I wonder again at how two sisters can have such different perceptions. Tammy understands that my wanting to be an adult is not the same as being one.

Mom and Tammy sit silent on the line for a moment, their breathing heavy and deliberate. I try to picture them as kids, like me and Jaime, laughing at nothing and playing made up games together, pledging solidarity against their stepmom, sharing whispered secrets across the dark space between bunk beds, but I can’t. Protective instincts don’t necessarily create closeness, and I know Tammy did her best to keep Mom safe, but if they were ever friends, I can’t see it now in their separate lives, their distance, their conversations. Sisters connected by genes and the survival of
a shared history they don’t like to talk about. I hope Jaime and I don’t end up like that.

Mom finally says too cheerfully, “Okay, well, tell Liz we’ll see her on the sixteenth as planned.”

“She deserves better than this, Linda.”

“Well, we can’t all live up to your expectations,” Mom says and hangs up. I hear Tammy slam the phone into its base, and I know it’s something she’s been told before. My heart aches to sprint down the stairs and hug Tammy until my arms hurt.

Later, Tammy makes a simple basil, tomato, and asparagus pasta dinner and we eat in near silence in front of the season finale of
Melrose Place.
She avoids my eyes and I know she is debating whether or not to tell me that Mom is likely to send me off again as soon as my plane lands. Tammy serves me seconds, and then brings out bowls of rocky road ice cream. I raise my eyebrows at her. Dessert is usually reserved for high-calorie-burning days.

“I thought you might like a treat,” she says, her eyes bright with too much liquid. If I didn’t already know what was wrong, I would be suspicious now. She dips her spoon into her bowl. “Besides,” she says, licking chocolate off her lips. “You have to help me finish the ice cream before you leave, or I’ll eat it all and get fat.”

Later that night, I lie awake and stare at my starry ceiling as it loses its luster. The energy absorbed by the plastic fades after the lights go out, and when I try to look at one star directly, it disappears from view like it doesn’t want to be studied. I run my eyes over the shapes I’ve found and named during weeks of falling asleep to these glowing points, La Pomme, Baby Unicorn Head, Bigfoot. Tonight a guillotine appears in the starry outlines and the
game stops being fun. I roll over and squash my eyes shut just as Tammy walks in. The angled line of the blade I saw burns neon green against my closed lids.

The mattress shifts as Tammy settles next to me on the bed. “I’ll bring home some boxes so you can pack up the stuff you want me to ship.”

I say without opening my eyes, “Will you move to California?”

Tammy takes a deep breath and lets it out with one long exhalation. “Maybe someday,” she says. She picks up my hand. “But I want you to know that you can always come back here. If things don’t work out.” She squeezes my hand with her long fingers and I squeeze back. “There’s always room for you in my house,” she says.

“Thank you,” I say. I sneak a peek at Tammy’s face and think I see shiny lines trailing down her cheeks. We lie there for a few minutes, the distant laughter from the TV downstairs or a bus opening its doors across the street occasionally breaking through the silence. “I heard what Mom said today,” I say. “On the phone.”

Tammy’s eyes pop open. “Your mom loves you,” she says and rolls onto her side so she can look at me. “She’s dealing with some things right now, I think.”

“It’s still not right to break a promise.”

“You know we moved out when we were just a little older than you?” she says, and I nod. “We got jobs. We worked on weekends and while our friends were at football games and class trips to Disneyland. We didn’t really get to date.” Tammy clucks her tongue. “I think your mom sees Terrance as a chance to be a teenager, to have the fun she didn’t get to experience.” Tammy shakes her head. “She’s rebelling at the same time you are.”

“You didn’t get to be a teenager, either,” I say. “How come you haven’t escaped into a fantasy world?”

“I was older,” she says. “And your mom and I have very different needs.” Tammy smiles and looks up at my stars. “She was so good with you guys when you were little,” she says. “Amazing, really. Patient and gentle. Modeling correct behavior, teaching without punishing. Making you laugh.” My eyes tear up. Tammy sighs. “I used to watch her, the way you girls looked at her, and think I’d never be as good with kids as my sister.”