“A promise?”
“We do need to talk about financial stuff—he worried about that—although now really isn’t the time, so remind me later.”
“Go on, then, spill it.”
Melinda swerved, the car nicking the curb. “Later. We can discuss this later. Just don’t let me forget, is all.”
“Whatever it is I need to deal with, I might as well know right now.”
“I’ll call you tomorrow when you’re feeling better,” Melinda croaked.
They drove on in more silence, until Sylvia blurted out—in order to break the pain of death—“Just tell me what I have to sort out already, and I’ll get it done.”
Tears trickled down Melinda’s round cheeks, her eyes on the road ahead, but she almost careened into the bumper of the car in front of her. “There’s a shit load of paperwork to deal with. Bonds et cetera, a lot to sort through.”
Sylvia blew her nose. Her head felt swollen as if she had the flu. She glugged down some water which she’d bought at the airport.
Melinda said, “The good news is that you’ve got that money in your joint account offshore.”
Sylvia looked blank.
“The account you have together in Guatemala. You remember? You must be getting bank statements every month and be able to go online and manage your money.”
“That’s right, I forgot, we have a joint account.” Sylvia remembered now. Her dad had been smart. He’d stashed his savings in an account with her name on it, too. Melinda was right; she still received bank statements once a month, but just shoved them in the filing cabinet, never even bothering to look—she had never considered the funds hers. And the last thing on her mind right now was this. She wished she hadn’t asked Melinda to “spill it.” Her father’s money was tied with a dark ribbon of guilt about it.
Melinda continued, “Mom doesn’t think he had any debts. But I don’t envy you—it’s going to take you a good few meetings with lawyers et cetera to deal with it all. Sadly, I have to get back to Chicago. Damn my job! I wish I could stay with you. I mean, of course I’ll be there for the funeral . . . but . . . I’ll drop you at home and then I have to get back to Chicago. You don’t hate me, do you?”
“No, I don’t hate you, silly,” Sylvia said despondently, “you’re like a sister to me. Better than a sister.”
“By the way, Mom is going to identify,”—Melinda stopped mid-sentence and took a breath—“the body at the morgue so you don’t have to. She’s still at the hospital now.”
“What would I do without you guys?” Sylvia’s eyes pooled with tears again.
“You’ll have to call Uncle Wilbur’s lawyer for a meeting,” Melinda rasped. “And his accountant. I’ve left a list of numbers for you. I mean, look on the bright side—that money’s waiting for you. Available now. You and Tommy can finally pry yourselves out of your horseshoe world in Wyoming and start afresh. You have a choice again. I mean, hasn’t that been the whole problem all along? No choice, because of money issues?”
The Money subject again. Even though Sylvia had unwittingly got the ball rolling, she wished Melinda would drop it. Had her dad really just gone and killed himself? Hoarding those pills, as he had done, and taking them all in one go, meant only one thing. But
why?
“You are so vague, my love,” Melinda went on. “Sometimes I don’t think you’re flesh and blood but some sort of ghost floating through life—a spirit that might start walking through doorways. How you manage, my beautiful Sylvie, to even pay a bill is an enigma to me. You are so disconnected with practical matters. Especially these days. You see, how clever your dad was? Thinking ahead. That way the money doesn’t have to wait to pass through probate. It is legally yours. He was such a smart man.”
Sylvia was silent. All this talk was making her insides flip and fold. She turned her eyes away from the cityscape—the empty crumbling buildings, the recession letting down a whole generation, and said listlessly, “But the account is in Guatemala.”
Melinda tittered as if to say,
Money talk is easy. Feelings and relationships are the complicated truths to deal with.
“So? Don’t you see, Sylvie, hun? That way you can avoid paying death duties. Uncle Wilbur was pretty crafty. He must have chosen Guatemala because it wouldn’t draw attention.”
“Wouldn’t draw attention? Who has a bank account in Guatemala?”
“Exactly. Who would even think to look there? Don’t you see, Sylvie? It isn’t considered an offshore tax haven like Switzerland or the Cayman Islands, yet it has all the advantages. They do not tax offshore-derived income and no capital gains tax on bank interest. No Tax Information Exchange Agreement with any country. You can get your hands on that money today if you want. It’s yours. Your dad was always canny about money.”
Sylvia sighed. “The duplicity of it all makes me a little nervous.”
“Do you want to pay your debts off or not?”
“I guess. But it wasn’t the first thing on my mind.”
My father has just died, Melinda.
But this was obviously her cousin’s way of easing her own pain. Thinking practically so she didn’t have to dwell on her own emotions. She’d always done that. Always been the listener, the one to focus on other people’s problems, never her own.
She went on, “You can finally get the house in Wyoming finished, sell, and move back to Brooklyn, maybe. Perhaps you could even afford to buy a spacious apartment with a small backyard. Or somewhere near a park. You could even look into private schools.”
A private school for Grace—that would be nice.
As her mind wandered, Sylvia noticed a muscle-bound man in a wife-beater tank top, strutting along the street, with a pit bull wearing a studded collar. Poor dog was probably being used for dogfights in some disused warehouse, or car factory. She turned her attention back to Melinda, who seemed to be suffering from verbal diarrhea.
“I mean, Grace may not end up being a horse rider but she could do ballet, or even martial arts. Not bad for a girl to learn that sort of stuff, especially in the city. Or Sylvie, the other option is that you guys could come back to live in Saginaw, although come to think of it, I’m not sure that’s something Tommy would welcome. I mean, I know the romance of the beautiful countryside wooed him in the first place, and a town like Saginaw in the middle of a recession probably wouldn’t be much of a temptation. I guess you don’t want to test your marriage.”
“No.”
“Speaking of which, are you and Tommy, you know . . .?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you make up the other day, after you baked him that apple pie? You’re not being all cool with him, are you?”
Sylvia shifted in her car seat. “Cool?”
“Detached. Unavailable. You need each other right now. With your dad gone, you need him now more than ever.”
Sylvia stared out of the car window again, and focused her eyes on a woman pushing her baby’s stroller ahead of her, across the road. She always marveled at how women could do that—use their children as a sort of buffer with oncoming traffic. The car fumes were nose level for a child. She had always carried Grace in a special sling until she was old enough to walk.
“Sylvia?”
“Sorry?”
Melinda shook her head and smiled. “Never mind, honey, I’m just being my bossy old self—ignore me.”
Sylvia
W
alking into the hallway of her childhood home without her parents, or at least one of them to greet her, was eerie.
Sylvia felt the pit of her stomach dip as she stood there in the hallway, her eyes moving about the still, quiet house; memories living in the walls, soaked in the furniture, the drapes, her mother’s tennis trophies, the paintings that her grandmother had done. Like colorful friends supporting her through heartbreak and happiness, they’d seen her have her diapers changed and get ready for her first date. She looked up at the sweeping, wrought iron staircase and remembered coming down, one step at a time, as a princess, a witch, a fairy, dressing up with Melinda and their friends, her mom taking snapshots. The little Regency sofa, where she’d chatted for thousands of hours on the telephone, sat below, it too remembering, perhaps, the time she fell and landed on its arm, saving her life (or at least a hospital visit) from the hard, Spanish tiles below.
And Tibby, her Siamese cat, was his spirit here, too? Tibby, her best friend, who was one when she was one, eighteen when she was eighteen. It didn’t seem right that he had died when he had, just as she was going to college, as if his heart could no longer bear the parting. He obviously knew; he could smell her treacherous suitcases, the betrayal of a girl grown up. Her eyes now wet with tears, Sylvia sobbed, her body heaving from all the memories. She sat on the cold terracotta floor and felt the weight of responsibility shroud her like a musty-smelling winter coat from the attic, demanding,
What are you going to do with us?
Armchairs, sofas, crystal, miniature wooden boxes, paintings—they all commanded her attention. Right here, right now.
Help us
! they cried.
We are all alone. We need your care. Remember . . . your parents are dead.
Sylvia walked into the kitchen, opened the icebox door, and took out a Coke. Rows of pretty glasses, green with golden rims, twinkled in the glass-fronted cupboards. They too, wanted a promise.
Don’t abandon us, we are part of you!
She looked inside a drawer for an Advil, or something to lift away the burden; her head pounding with regret, guilt, love, sadness. The drawer, packed with a hundred pill prescriptions, including perhaps, the ones that killed her father, laughed at her.
Where will you even start?
You could put us all in a bag, dump us at the pharmacy (isn’t that what you’re meant to do with old fogies like us?) but we are a drop in the ocean, a speck of sand on a beach. What about the rest of the house—your mother’s country club clothes, your father’s suits, the silver, the candlesticks, your father’s ’68 Mustang in the garage, his diaries, golf clubs, photo albums, the letters, your essays from school, the boxes in the attic, the—
“Stop!” Sylvia cried out. “Please, leave me alone! It’s all too much, all I want is to be home with Grace—”
“But this
is
your home,” the paintings, the sofa-that-saved-her-life, the trophies and the ’68 Presidential Blue Mustang all said at once. “You can’t abandon us!”
“Hello? Hell-oh-oh? Sylvia?”
Sylvia’s heart missed a beat. Someone had let themselves through the front door, never locked, always open to friends—that was the way the neighborhood was.
“Hello Syl-via? Are you ho-home?”
It was the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Wicks, holding a large casserole dish. She looked just the same as she always had, squeezed into polyester pants, lemon-colored, paired with a tight blouse, her bra strap digging into the flesh in her back. She was one of those people who was always perky and kind, no matter the circumstance, no matter the weather. “I thought you might be hungry,” she purred, “and Lord knows with everything you have to do around here, I know the last thing you have is time for cooking.”
“Oh Mrs. Wicks, you’re a saint! I was actually feeling ravenous and wondering where I could go to get a bite around here.”
“Well isn’t that lucky I arrived in the nick of time? Where are Tommy and Grace?”
“They’ll be here in a couple of days. I’m just about to call Gracie, actually.”
“When’s the funeral, honey?”
Sylvia gasped. “The funeral? I don’t know. I need to make a thousand phone calls. Speak to the funeral parlor. I guess I need to call everyone, too. Tell them Dad has died.”
“Let them know he’s passed away?” Mrs. Wicks corrected. “Good idea, though most of his friends already know. I can make some more calls if you like.”
Passed away.
It was a word everybody insisted upon using these days. Nobody dared say the word “died” or “dead.” Some people didn’t even add on the “away” part, just, “he passed,” or “she passed.” But her dad was dead and making him “pass” didn’t make it any less painful.
“Mrs. Wicks you’re an angel, thank you so much for your help,” Sylvia said, taking the dish. “Umm, this smells delicious.”
“Pop it in the microwave for a few minutes. You know you can call me Marg. I’ll come back later, and remember, if you need me to do anything, anything at all, just say the word. Is Jacqueline coming today?”
“I think today’s her day off.”
“So she’ll still continue to work here?”
Sylvia hadn’t thought that far ahead. Jacqueline had been with them forever. Sylvia’s forever, anyway. She loved that woman. She knew that she would probably be sitting at home, with swollen red eyes, devastated about the death of her boss, her working life now over. She should have retired long ago—she was too elderly to be pushing a vacuum cleaner about. But she didn’t want to retire, she’d said so a hundred times. To Sylvia, Jacqueline had never been a maid—she had been her lifeblood. Sylvia could keep her on a while longer, of course, but not indefinitely—she wouldn’t be able to afford it. But the idea of not having her in her life didn’t bear thinking about.
“I guess that’s something I’ll need to discuss with her.”
“Well,” Marg said. “See you later, honey.”
“Thanks a million. See you later, Marg.”
The Coca Cola tasted good. It tasted of America, of everything Sylvia knew and trusted. This house had been her world. She, a nice Midwestern girl with her wholesome friends and a college degree from the University of Michigan, should have been content with her lot. But New York changed all that and she doubted she could ever return to Saginaw for good. Especially now. Poor Michigan. Once synonymous with growth and opportunity, now smashed hopes and run-down housing projects seemed to be the symbol to the outside world of this great state.
She loved this house, though. It was considered a historic property, built in 1930, Spanish in style, with a red tiled roof and balconied windows. Could she ever live here again? It was too raw to even consider that now, but she couldn’t keep two homes going at once. The truth was, as Melinda had sensed, Sylvia would have liked to have moved back to Brooklyn. Get back her old life, or a semblance of it. They’d gone to Wyoming mainly for Grace’s sake. Fresh air, plenty of space, low crime—a place where her daughter could ride a horse and go hiking and camping. The first time Sylvia set eyes on Wyoming—when she and Tommy drove across the country and stopped by Yellowstone—she thought it was the most beautiful place she’d ever seen. Sweeping blue skies, mountains, and rivers with gushing crystalline whitewater, beckoned them to return. And they did return with open hearts.