Part 23
Part 23 of 27 of Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott
We told Nora on a Sunday afternoon in the living room with the television off, which she identified immediately as a sign of catastrophe.
“Am I in trouble.”
“No, bug.”
“Is somebody dying.”
“No. Nobody’s dying.” Tom had her feet in his lap. “It’s good news that’s complicated, and we’re going to take a while with it.”
We had planned this for five days. We had a version worked out with Dr. Feld, age appropriate, no more than three facts at a time.
I got about two sentences in.
“You know how Grandma had a son before me,” I said, “and he went away a long time ago, before you were born.”
“Uncle Danny,” Nora said. “In the picture on the stairs.”
“Right. Well.” And my throat closed, and I sat there.
“He’s alive,” Tom said. “Everybody thought he wasn’t, and he is, and he’s been sick for a long time in his brain, the way some people are sick in their lungs or their heart. And he’s going to come live in the room over the garage.”
Nora looked at him, and then at me, and then she did the thing that seven year olds do, which is go straight past the whole architecture of adult catastrophe to the load bearing wall.
“Did Grandma know?” she said.
I have thought about lying. I want that on the record too.
“Yes,” I said. “Grandma knew.”
“And she didn’t tell you?”
“No.”
Nora frowned. She worked on it. You could see her turning it over, testing it against everything she has, which is not very much yet, and then she arrived somewhere and looked up.
“That’s really mean,” she said.
“I know.”
“No, Mom, that’s really, really mean.”
And she started to cry, and she was not crying about Danny, whom she has never met, or about the room over the garage. She was crying because she loved her grandmother, who bought her a slushie every single time and let her eat it in the car, and a piece of that had just come loose, and I watched it happen at seven years old on my own couch.
So that is what I did to my daughter with the truth, and I would do it again, and it is the thing Tom and I still talk about at eleven o’clock at night sometimes.
He moved in on the twenty fourth.
It took ninety minutes with the van and it was the least dramatic hour of the entire six months. Seven shirts. Forty paperbacks. A deck of cards. A calendar that we hung on the wall over the small refrigerator without discussing it.
The first night he did not come downstairs. The second night he did not either. On the third night Tom put a plate on the bottom step, knocked twice on the wall so he would know it was there, and walked away, and twenty minutes later the plate was gone.
That was the system for eleven days.
On the twelfth day I came home from work and my brother was sitting at my kitchen island with my daughter, and she was showing him a worksheet on fractions, and he was saying, “Okay, but why is that the one you picked,” in the exact tone he had used on me about leading trump.