Memory Wall: Stories (19 page)

You want to know? What it’s like? To prop up the dam? To keep your fingers plugged in its cracks? To feel like every single breath that passes is another betrayal, another step farther away from what you were and where you were and who you were, another step deeper into the darkness? Grandpa Z came to Kansas twice this spring. He sat in the rooms and smelled the smells. Now he leans forward till I can see the little red lightning bolts of veins in his eyes. You want to speak?

No thanks.

I mean talk, he says. Talk, Allie?

No. Thanks.

No? But to talk is good, no?

Grandpa Z makes gravestones. Gravestones in Lithuania aren’t quite like the ones in America. They’re glossy and smooth and made of granite, but most of them are etched with likenesses of the people buried underneath them. They’re like black-and-white photos carved right into the stones. They’re expensive and everyone spends money on them. Poor people, Grandpa Z says, spend the most. Sometimes he etches faces while other times he does the deceased’s whole body, like a tall man standing in a leather jacket, life-size, very realistic, buttons on the cuffs and freckles on the cheeks. Grandpa Z shows me a Polaroid of a tombstone he made of a famous mobster. The stone is seven feet tall and has a life-size portrait of a man with his hands in his pockets sitting on the hood of a Mercedes. He says the family paid extra to have a halo added around the man’s head.

Monday morning Grandpa Z goes to his workshop and school doesn’t start for two months so I’m left alone in the house. By noon I’ve looked through all of Grandpa Z’s drawers and his one closet. In the shed I find two fishing rods and an old aluminum boat under a tarp and eight jars of Lithuanian pennies and thousands of mouse-chewed British magazines:
Popular Science
and
Science Now
and
British Association for the Advancement of Physics.
There are magazines on polar bears and Mayan calendars and cell biology and lots of things I don’t understand. Inside are faded cosmonauts and gorillas hooked up to machines and cartoon cars driving around on Mars.

Then Mrs. Sabo shows up. She shouts something in her derelict Russian and goes over to a chest of drawers and pulls open a cigarette box and inside are photographs.

Motina, she says, and points at me.

I say, I thought you couldn’t remember things.

But she is sticking the photos under my nose like she has just remembered something and wants to get it out before she forgets it. Motina means Mom. All the photos contain Mom when she was a girl. Here she is in a polar bear costume and here she is frowning over what might be a lawnmower engine and here she is tramping barefoot through mud.

Mrs. Sabo and I lay out the pictures in a grid on Grandpa Z’s card table. There are sixty-eight of them. Five-year-old Mom scowls in front of a rusted-out Soviet tank. Six-year-old Mom peels an orange. Nine-year-old Mom stands in the weeds. Looking at the photos starts a feeling in my gut like maybe I want to dig a shallow hole in the yard and lie down in it.

I separate out twelve of the pictures. In each of them, my mom—my Subaru-driving, cashew-eating, Barry Manilow—listening, Lithuanian-immigrant, dead-because-of-cancer Mom—is either standing in murky water or leaning over the side of a junky-looking boat, helping to hold up some part of a creepy and gigantic shark.

Erketas, Mrs. Sabo says, and nods gravely. Then she coughs for about two minutes straight.

Erketas?

But by now the coughing has shaken all the comprehension out of her. The man in the track suit, her son, comes over and says something and Mrs. Sabo stares at the lower part of his face for a while and eventually he coaxes her back to her house. Grandpa Z comes home from his job at 2:31.

Grandpa, I say, your toilet paper might as well be made out of gravel.

He nods thoughtfully.

And is this my mom, I ask, with all these great whites?

Grandpa looks at the pictures and blinks and puts a knuckle between his teeth. For maybe thirty seconds he doesn’t answer.
He looks like he’s standing outside an elevator waiting for the doors to open.

Finally he says,
Erketas. He goes to a book in a box on the floor and opens it and pages through it and looks up and looks back down and says, Sturgeon.

Sturgeon. Erketas means sturgeon?

River fish. From the river.

We eat sausage for dinner. No bread, no salad. All through the meal the photos of Mom stare up at us.

I rinse the dishes. Grandpa Z says, You walk with me, Allie?

He leads me and Mishap across the field behind the colony of houses. There are neat little vegetable gardens and goats staked here and there. Grasshoppers skitter out in front of us. We clamber over a fence and pick our way around cow dung and nettles. The little trail heads toward some willows and on the other side is a river: quiet and brown, surprisingly far across. At first the river looks motionless, like a lake, but the more I look, the more I see it’s moving very slowly.

Mishap sneezes. I don’t think he’s ever seen a river before. A line of cows saunters along on the far bank.

Grandpa Z says, Fishing. Is where your mother goes. Used to go. Past tense. He laughs an unsmiling laugh. Sometimes with her grandpa. Sometimes with Mrs. Sabo.

What’s it called?

River Nemunas. It is called River Nemunas.

Every hour the thought floats to the surface: If we’re all going to end up happy together in Heaven then why does anyone wait? Every hour the Big Sadness hangs behind my ribs, sharp and gleaming, and it’s all I can do to keep breathing.

Mrs. Sabo, Grandpa Z says, is either 90 years old or 94 years old. Not even her son knows for sure. She has lived through the first Lithuanian independence and the second one, too. She fought with the Russians the first time, against them the second time. Back when all these houses were a collective farm under the Soviets, she used to take a rowboat every day for thirty-five years and row six miles up the river to work in a chemical plant. She went fishing when no women went fishing, he says.

Nowadays Mrs. Sabo has to be hooked up to her oxygen machine every night. She doesn’t seem to mind if I come over to watch TV. We turn the volume up really high to hear over the wheezing and banging of her pump. Sometimes we watch the Lithuanian pastor, sometimes we watch cartoons. Sometimes it’s so late we only watch a channel that shows a satellite map of the world, rotating forever across the screen.

I’ve been in Lithuania two weeks when Counselor Mike calls on Grandpa Z’s cell phone. Counselor Mike, a lawyer who chews bubblegum and wears basketball shorts. It’s two in the morning in Kansas. He asks how I’m adjusting. Hearing his wide-open American voice calls up for me in a sudden rush summertime Kansas. It’s like it’s right there on the other end of the phone, the air silky, the last porch lights switched off, a fog of gnats hovering above Brown’s Pond, the moon coming to earth through sheets and layers and curtains of moisture, streetlights sending soft columns of light onto grocery store parking lots. And somewhere in that sleepy darkness Counselor Mike sits at his clunky kitchen table in his socks and asks an orphan in Lithuania how she’s adjusting.

It takes me a full ten seconds to say, I’m fine, it’s okay.

He says he needs to talk to Grandpa. We got an offer on the house, he says. Grown-up stuff.

Is the offer good?

Any offer is good.

I don’t know what to say to that. I can hear music coming from his end, faraway and full of static. What does Counselor Mike listen to, deep in the Kansas night?

We’re praying for you, Allie, he says.

Who’s we?

Us at the office. And at church. Everyone. Everyone is praying for you.

Grandpa’s at work, I say.

Later I walk Mishap across the field and over the fence and through the rocks to the river. The cows are still on the far side, eating whatever cows eat and whipping their tails back and forth.

Five thousand miles away Counselor Mike is planning to sell the orange plastic tiles Dad glued to the basement floor and the dent I put in the dining room wall and the raspberry bushes Mom planted in the backyard. He’s going to sell our warped baking sheets and half-used shampoos and the six Jedi drinking glasses we got from Pizza Hut that Dad said we could keep only after asking our pastor if
Star Wars
would have been “endorsed by Jesus.” Everything, all of it, our junk, our dregs, our memories. And I’ve got the family poodle and three duffel bags of too small clothes and four photo albums, but no one left who can flesh out any of the photos. I’m five thousand miles and four weeks away and every minute that ratchets past is another minute that the world has kept on turning without Mom and Dad in it. And I’m supposed to live with Grandpa Z in Lithuania, what, for the rest of my life?

Thinking about the house sitting there empty back in
Kansas starts the Big Sadness swinging in my chest like a pendulum and soon a blue flood is streaming around the edges of my vision. It comes on fast this time and the axe blade is slicing up organs willy-nilly and all of a sudden it feels like I’m looking into a very blue bag and someone’s yanking the drawstring closed. I fall over into the willows.

I lie there for who knows how long. Up in the sky I see Dad emptying his pockets after work, dumping coins and breath mints and business cards onto the kitchen counter. I see Mom cutting a fried chicken breast into tiny white triangles and dunking each piece in ketchup. I see the Virgin Mary walk out onto a little balcony between the clouds and look around and take ahold of French doors, one on either side of her, and slam them shut.

I can hear Mishap sniffing around nearby. I can hear the river sliding past and grasshoppers chewing the leaves and the sad, dreamy clanking of faraway cowbells. The sun is tiny and flame-blue. When I finally sit up, Mrs. Sabo is standing beside me. I didn’t know she could walk so far. Little white butterflies are looping through the willows. The river glides past. She says something in machine-gun Russian and sets her frozen hand on my forehead. We watch the river, Mrs. Sabo and Mishap and me, in the grass in the sun. And as we watch and breathe and I come back into myself—I swear—a fish as big as a nuclear missile leaps out of the river. Its belly is spotless white and its back is gray and it curls up in midair and flaps its tail and stretches like it’s thinking, This time gravity will let me go.

When it comes back down, water explodes far enough across the river that some drops land on my feet.

Mishap raises his ears, cocks his head. The river heals itself over. Mrs. Sabo looks at me from behind her huge eyeglasses and blinks her milky eyes a dozen times.

Did you see that? Please tell me you saw that.

Mrs. Sabo only blinks.

Grandpa Z gets home at 3:29.

I buy you a surprise, he says. He opens the hatchback of the Peugeot and inside is a crate of American toilet paper.

Grandpa, I say. I want to go fishing.

Dad used to say God made the world and everything in it and Grandpa Z would say if God made the world and everything in it, then why isn’t everything perfect? Why do we get hernias and why do beautiful healthy daughters get cancer? Then Dad would say, Well, God was a mystery and Grandpa Z would say God was a, what’s the word, a security blanket for babies, and Dad would stomp off and Mom would throw down her napkin and blast some Lithuanian words at Grandpa and go jogging after Dad and I’d look at the plates on the table.

Grandpa Z crossed the ocean twice this spring to watch his daughter and son-in-law die. Did God have explanations for that? Now I stand in Grandpa Z’s kitchen and listen to him say that there aren’t any sturgeon anymore in the River Nemunas. There might be some left in the Baltic Sea, he says, but there aren’t any in the river. He says his dad used to take Mom sturgeon fishing every Sunday for years and Mrs. Sabo probably caught a few in the old days but then there was overfishing and pesticides and the Kaunas dam and black-market caviar and his dad died and the last sturgeon died and the Soviet Union broke up and Mom grew up and went to university in the United States and married a creationist and no one has caught a sturgeon in the River Nemunas for twenty-five years.

Grandpa, I say, Mrs. Sabo and I saw a sturgeon. Today. Right
over there. And I point out the window across the field to the line of willows.

It is photos, he says. You see the photos of your mother.

I saw a sturgeon, I say. Not in a picture. In the river.

Grandpa Z closes his eyelids and opens them. Then he holds me by the shoulders and looks me in the eyes and says, We see things. Sometimes they there. Sometimes they not there. We see them the same either way. You understand?

I saw a sturgeon. So did Mrs. Sabo. I go to bed mad and wake up mad. I throw the stuffed panda against the wall and stomp around on the porch and kick gravel in the driveway. Mishap barks at me.

In the morning I watch Grandpa Z drive off to work, big and potbellied and confused, and I can hear Mrs. Sabo’s machine whirring and thunking in her house next door and I think: I should have asked Grandpa Z to trust me. I should have told him about the pastor’s old daddy and the stepladder and Jesus and gravity and how just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it.

Instead I wade into Grandpa Z’s shed and start pulling out boxes and granite samples and chisels and rock saws and it takes me a half hour to clear a path and another half hour to drag the old aluminum boat into the driveway. It’s flat-bottomed and has three bench seats and there are maybe a thousand spiders living beneath each one. I blast them out with a hose. I find a bottle of some toxic Lithuanian cleaner and pour it all over the hull.

After a while Mrs. Sabo comes tottering out in her big eyeglasses with her little arms folded against her chest and looks
at me like a praying mantis. She lets off a chain of coughs. Her son comes out in his track suit with a cigarette between his lips and they watch me work for ten minutes or so and then he leads his mother back inside.

Grandpa Z gets home at 3:27. There are boxes and hoses and rakes and tools all over the driveway. The bottle of solvent has left bright, silver streaks across the hull of the boat. I say, Mrs. Sabo and I saw a sturgeon in the river yesterday, Grandpa.