3
“T
he black ghost is flying in soon. He’s coming for us.
All of us.
” She tugged on my arm, frantic, eyes wild, her French fast and desperate. “We have to get out of here. We must save the children from the black ghost’s wrath.”
I stood near the butcher block kitchen table on The Lavender Farm, the morning light pouring through the French doors, as Grandma clutched me. I gave her a hug and answered in French. “Bonjour, Grandma. Sit down. I’ll make you some lavender tea.”
“No!” she said, grabbing my hands, holding them tight. “No time for tea! Other people are already in their secret rooms and climbing into their teapots. No time for sugar! They’re putting lavender in people’s mouths until they suffocate.”
It is awful to watch someone lose their mind, and Grandma was no different. She would sometimes run from our home screaming, or panting, trying to drag us with her, trying to get us into our pantry where the “secret door” was, or to turn off all the lights and be absolutely silent. She wanted to sleep in the barn. She wanted to sleep in one of the sheds or outbuildings or underneath the apple trees in the orchard. She wanted to hide from “the black ghosts.”
Her sleep was sometimes shattered with her own screaming, and she would burst into tears at odd moments and call out in a voice raw and desperate the names of people I didn’t know: Avia, Esther, David, Gideon, Goldie—and there was Ismael, who came up often. “Where is Ismael? Is he hiding? I feel him!”
“The black ghosts are gone, Grandma,” I said, trying to calm her, knowing her mind was erratic, confused, diseased. “It’s okay.”
I smiled at Nola, a most wonderful Hispanic woman who worked in my grandparents’ grocery stores, named Swans, for thirty-three years, most of it in management. She left as a vice president and now takes care of Grandma, full time, as a favor to Grandma and Granddad, their long-standing friendship, and our family. She lives here at the farmhouse in her own suite. We all love Nola.
“Good morning, Madeline,” she said.
“Good morning, Nola.”
“Sister,” Grandma said earnestly, as she flipped her silk scarf behind her shoulder, “they’re using sticks to beat the stars and the violin was dented in the secret room, and they’re packing all the cows in tight until they can’t breathe. We have to go.”
“I have all the sticks, Grandma, and the cows are okay. They’re in the field.”
She hurried to the window to stare at a couple of cows in the distance. Beyond the French doors lies a land quilt of hills and valleys and forests, and beyond that the blue-purple mountains of the Oregon coast. I don’t go to the coast. I don’t go to the sea. Neither does Annie.
“The black ghost will tear off our arms and use them for firewood.”
Honestly, sometimes Grandma’s words are terrifying. “The black ghost is locked away. He’s gone.”
Grandma put a hand out and ran it through a ray of sun, her jeweled bracelets from Granddad tinkling. She switched to German. “He’s locked away?”
I nodded, answered in German. “All gone.”
I had arrived at The Lavender Farm an hour before. I couldn’t sleep, anyhow, so I left my home at dawn, traveled down the freeways, out through the suburbs, and into the country. My grandparents’ white, old-fashioned farmhouse is filled with nooks and crannies and window seats, Grandma’s skylighted painting studio, a modernized kitchen with a long granite counter and open shelving, and an island painted blue. A grand piano in the living room takes up a corner, but Annie never plays anymore, though she knows how to make that keyboard sing.
Several paintings of Grandma’s swans were hung throughout the house: white swans in boats on a pond playing violins, black twin sister swans twirling parasols, swans crying into lace hankies, swans gathered for picnics of chocolate cake and pears, swans chasing a naughty fox wearing a black burglar mask, swans in tuxes and silky dresses in an orchestra. And, always, sparkling marbles, glittering crystals, mischievous elves, grinning grizzlies, laughing caterpillars, tea-sipping mice, and kiteflying gnomes hidden throughout the paintings, which young readers loved to find.
“Grandma,” I said gently. “Look outside. Did you see the lavender? It’s going to bloom soon.”
“What? Who will bloom?” She tugged at her cashmere sweater. “
Who will bloom?
”
“The lavender.” I turned her away from the cows. Grandma could sometimes be distracted by the lavender. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
I saw her blue-green eyes soften. “So beautiful. Anton planted those for me. Do you remember?”
“Yes.” Anton was my granddad. I didn’t remember him planting them. He’d sowed them when my momma was a young girl, replacing plants as they died. The lavender was just always there.
Grandma’s eyes teared up and she whispered, “I love you. You are a wonderful sister, Madeline, and I hope you can forgive me for what I did. It was love, love did it to me. It was after the Land of the Swans, I promise. Don’t forget your violin.” She gets confused about whether I am her sister or her granddaughter. She does not have a sister. She thinks that Annie is her niece. She does not have a niece. We don’t correct her anymore. “You must take it with you. It’s our history. No more crying. You must be brave or they will stick a spear through your heart and hang you on a wall of fire next to the ogre and the dragon.”
I took a deep breath. See, terrifying. “Okay, Grandma, I won’t cry.”
She patted my cheek. “We will have a new life. The black ghosts can’t follow us there.
Ach.
This life. So much pain.”
I settled Grandma down, then watched my hand tremble as I poured the hot water over Nola’s and Grandma’s lavender tea bags in pink-flowered teacups. I often don’t breathe right, which causes the trembling. It’s not panic attacks or anxiety problems, it’s like my breath is stuck in my body behind organs and inside bones. It’s been that way since the weather was furious.
Nola, Grandma, and I stared at the rows of lavender in the distance, precise, rolling highways of plants that would soon bloom into brilliant fireworks of blue, pink, purple, and white. Grandma abruptly stood and drew a finger through the condensation on the window. I knew she was drawing a swan.
“There was so much blood that day,” Grandma said, her words floating, reminiscing. “Blood. So many other violin people were turned to blood.”
I breathed in deep, told myself to be calm.
“And the swans were murdered.” She used her fist to make the swan disappear. “They were all murdered
.
Dead.
”
I tried to breathe like a normal member of my species. It did not work.
“Play your violin, my sister. Don’t mind the scratches from the mountain,” Grandma said, her voice still tight, worried. “It always calms me down. Please? It’ll calm Ismael down, too.”
I didn’t know what Ismael she was talking about, but I went to the foyer and grabbed my violin. I played Beethoven’s Romance in G major, then I played Massenet’s “Méditation” from
Thaïs
.
My grandma closed her eyes and listened, swaying back and forth.
When I was done, I bent to kiss her wrinkled cheek, her gaze off again, lost somewhere, floating through her past, jumping from here to there, helter-skelter, one vision after another, the circuits fried, or closed, or blocked, or dead, her brain slowly killing her.
“Bloody swans,” she breathed in French, then swore in German. “Bloody and broken. Their wings sliced off.”
My grandparents flip between speaking English, which they were taught by their English governesses from the time they were each three, to French, and German.
And in between all those languages lay their lies and secrets.
I sucked in air like I was drowning.
About thirty minutes later, I saw Annie striding up and over a slight hill toward my grandparents’ farmhouse. She’d had a busy night. On one of her calls she helped deliver a foal. I know because she called me on the way home at 1:00 in the morning. She hardly sleeps, like me. It is more comfortable, and we are in more control, when we are awake.
“Hi, Annie,” I called out when I heard the front door open.
“Hello, Madeline, how are ya?” Her cowboy boots thunked against the floor. She is the most courageous person I’ve ever known. She’s gorgeous and looks a lot like our momma, with the blue-green eyes of our grandma—but she hides her gorgeousness. No makeup, no frills. She is also slightly off her rocker.
“How are you, Ms. Vet?” I asked, giving her a hug. She hugged me back.
“Haven’t had to run from anyone swinging a machete today, so that makes it good. You?”
“Not bad.” She knew I wasn’t “good.” She knew I felt like I was collapsing from the inside out because I was two people, in one, and they were clashing.
“Good morning, Grandma.”
“Good morning, Anna.” Grandma smiled angelically, as if the fear of minutes ago had never occurred. “You can’t bring much when we leave, remember. I will leave all my shoes, and you’ll have to wear clothes under your clothes, then your blue coat.”
“Okay, Grandma, I’ll get the blue coat. Hi, Nola.”
Nola smiled back. “Good morning, Annie.”
Nola and Annie launched into their usual discussion of the headlines in the news, as Grandma climbed back into the labyrinths of her mind and I poured lavender tea for Annie.
Annie lives in a blue home she built years ago, about an eighth of a mile away, up the hill from our pond and dock. She is my best friend. I have brown eyes, with gold in ’em, but we both have dark brown hair with, no kidding, a reddish sheen from our Irish, Boston-born-and-bred father. Hardly anyone else ever sees the red, but to us, it’s like a beacon. I flatten my hair until it’s straight—no curls allowed. Annie pulls her curls back into a tight braid—no curls allowed, either.
After high school Annie went to an Ivy League school. They were impressed with her grades (all As), her SATs (perfect score), her years of karate (black belt) and her awards in that area, her years of archery and awards in that area, her crack shot with a gun, and her awards in that area. She also wields a mean chain saw and can carve anything out of wood including, but not limited to, a pioneer woman with a gun and two kids, a Porsche, two girls on a bench holding tulips, a swan in full flight, high heels, a sea nymph, a cracked violin, a cupcake, Zeus, and—one time, after a bad date in high school—a large penis, which she propped on the guy’s lawn.
She also made a carving of a girl named, get this,
Buffy,
who called both Annie and me “ugly, wild freakoid horse monsters,” but she made Buffy about a hundred pounds heavier with pimples on her face. She brought it to school five days later.
Buffy wasn’t pleased.
Annie graduated with degrees in economics and Arabic. After that . . . well, it’s sketchy. She spent six years in . . . whatever (undercover) U.S. government agency she joined, of which she does not speak. She spent much of her time in places that precluded her from telling me much about where and what she was doing, and sometimes she would come home with a mashed-up face or another injury.
However, I do know her particular expertise: Explosives.
Now and then she blows up: Houses.
You think our government doesn’t train women to explode people/buildings? That would be: Wrong.
When the home of a vicious, demented man who had a dirty, pathetic puppy mill in northern California exploded into Kingdom Come, when Annie was supposedly “vacationing in Fiji, loved the sun,” I looked the other way.
When the home of another vicious, demented man who whipped and starved his horses for sport caught fire and turned to a hunk of ash in Washington when Annie was supposedly “vacationing in Fiji, loved the sun,” I also looked the other way.
No one was hurt. Annie did not come home with a sunburn.
Annie relates better to animals than people, and she cannot abide abuse of any kind. She decided to be a veterinarian during her “mystery” years. “I saw too many human limbs in places where they shouldn’t be, and I decided I wanted to be a part of putting things back together, not destroying them. But I don’t want to work with people. I love animals. They don’t frighten me, they don’t need anything from me but medical care, and they won’t hurt or betray me intentionally.”
She has a half-blind greyhound with only three legs, who she found limping across the road, named Mr. Legs. She has a mutt who looks like a cross between a beagle, a German shepherd, and a banana named Morning Glory. The dog was so diseased when Annie rescued her from a shelter, anyone else would have put her down.
She has two white, furry dogs she stole from an abusive home, named Door and Window, who were smothered in muck and shaking when she rescued them. She went to the owner’s house when he was gone, cut the chains that kept the dogs leashed to a tree 365 days a year, attended to their various life-threatening wounds and infections, and exploded the man’s house. The report in the local Washington State newspaper said there was “clearly an electrical wiring problem. These are old homes, code not up to date. . . .”