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Moments later Adrian’s Audi came flying into the parking lot. He jumped out and ran to my passenger door. I forgot I had locked it.
“Let me in!” he said pounding on the window. I opened the door. He was sweating and panting, agitated nearly beyond recognition. His uproarious, disheveled state made me almost calm.
“I hired this guy,” I began. “A private investigator. And he went to Minneapolis a week ago…” And there I stopped, not sure how to proceed. I felt that nothing I was saying could make any sense to Adrian. I looked up at him, afraid to show him the picture, afraid he would hate me forever, never love me again, think this was all my fault.
“Adrian, get in. I don’t want to say all this with the door open.”
He got in and shut the door, and with shaking hands he reached into my lap for the envelope. Obviously the first thing he saw was that the envelope was addressed to him. He looked at me but did not comment on my opening his mail. Then he reached inside and pulled out the picture. He squinted at it and then, without warning, vomited all over the dashboard. It went into the vents and he shook his head, having the presence of mind to be annoyed with himself. He quickly opened his door and continued in the parking lot. I sat there watching the thick orange liquid roll down over the word AIRBAG and plop onto his leg. I looked around us, fearing someone would park nearby us at any moment.
“Do you want me to get out of here?” I asked him.
He ignored me, wretching out the door.
My impatience and paranoia were almost bubbling over. “Adrian, we need to get out of here.”
“Relax,” he whispered. He wiped at his mouth with his sleeve and opened the glove box.
“Should I call the police?” I asked him, after he’d cleaned the interior of the car and himself with a stack of Starbucks napkins I kept in the glove box. The hot car smelled terrible. He began to gag again.
“Adrian, let’s get out of here,” I said. “Let’s take your car. I’ll drive.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. He picked up the envelope and photograph and followed me to his car.
“I don’t know where to start,” I said, turning down a side street, driving aimlessly. “Where do you want me to drive? You probably need to go home and change your clothes? Adrian, say something.”
He shook his head then turned to me, his green eyes locked into mine and now assured and cold. “Don’t call the police. Let me handle this.”
Chapter 48
By the start of my sophomore year in high school, I had stopped mourning the loss of my brother and sister. I still missed them, I still thought of them, of course, but I was adjusting to my identity without them. I can look back before that time and see difficult times when I felt isolated or overwhelmed, when I had thought about how much easier it would be if they were there. I may have even believed that being without them was the cause of all my misery. After all, wasn’t there a time several years earlier when my family played Yahtzee and my mother made cupcakes for us? Weren’t there times when we were truly happy? Times when we lived up to the cheery sign hanging on our front door proclaiming us The Loden Gang.
Sure I got left at the grocery store when I was four and no one noticed I was missing until
the deli supervisor dropped me off at home an hour later, but we also took those family trips I mentioned. There were bigger indications of authentic happiness too, like the treehouse my father built for Valencia and Van on their seventh birthdays. Throughout the years, warping in my parent’s backyard, it has stood like a giant, beckoning trophy of hand-forged Gemütlichkeit, advertising to all the world that Love Lives Here.
Growing up, I heard the story of the treehouse many, many times. As if just seeing its heaving dormers looming high above, casting black shadows on my sandbox, was not enough. Back in the day, back before stories involving the twins ground to a rusty halt, the treehouse story was a fixture of all get-togethers on our property. How could such a monstrosity not prompt some kind of explanation?
My father, or actually, the man he used to be, worked on that treehouse for months and months at night while the twins were sleeping, building it in the garage and telling them he was working on something boring like a garden shed. He then got all the pieces hauled up into the tree with pulleys and put them together while it was storming so no one could hear the nails being pounded in. That part, I think, was a lie.
Then my mom would step in and take over, telling of how she’d had to keep the twins out of the backyard for days so they wouldn’t see what was happening back there. (It wasn’t easy!) She would go on to describe how my dad set up the electricity by following the instructions in a twelve-page book he bought at a garage sale and wasn’t it a surprise that he didn’t cause the whole neighborhood to have a power outage. This story delighted everyone who heard it.
On the morning of their seventh birthdays (Van’s actually, since Valencia’s wasn’t technically until the next day) he woke them up early and said, “Do you want to see your new treehouse?” Well they didn’t believe him. But there it was. There were even geraniums in the window boxes! He had thought of everything. It had two rooms and was outfitted with carpeting, lights, and electrical outlets. They even had their own radio. And inside on a child sized table there were birthday cakes. Not one birthday cake, but two. One for each of them. Twin birthday cakes. For the beautiful, the fortunate, the blessed Van and Valencia.
After they were gone, and I was trying to make sense of their loss, I wondered at times whether too much good fortune may have caused them to have some kind of cosmic implosion. I told myself when things were particularly grueling and difficult that my misfortune was my insurance policy and that I was saving my luck for later on in my life.
There are dozens and dozens of photos of that glorious birthday treehouse day. In one of them, if you look closely, you will see, parked against a withering lilac bush, a rusty little pram that looks like it was left over from the 1960’s. A burgundy buggy designed to hold twins. And in it you may notice a homely little bundle wrapped up in a poop-stained bed sheet. That’s me.
I was a month old. Which tells me, in a comforting sort of way, that, considering the building of the treehouse bookended my arrival by months, my father’s lack of interest in me started before he even met me. It was not necessarily because of something I did wrong. My mother on the other hand, grew to hate me. But wait, I am stumbling off course. My point is that, if I went back far enough, I could find evidence of normalcy and love. Evidence of parents who could be generous and kind. If not to me specifically, at least to our family as a whole. And for years I was caught between obsessing over the possibility of bringing it back and mourning its loss.
It had been easy to try to hold on to those memories, or rather, hard to let them go. They made me believe we could be happy. What is there besides happiness?
I used to do a lot of that believing-in-luck thing that children do: If the phone rings in exactly one minute, this last few years will be a bad dream that only I know about and everything will be okay. Valencia and Van won’t go to college. They’ll stay here.
A minute would pass and the phone would not ring, so I would revise it to five minutes instead.
I let it all go my sophomore year. I stopped missing everything I had lost and stopped thinking about how differently things could have gone. I was still aware of my parents’ disappointment and annoyance towards me, but I officially stopped expecting them to change their ways.
In letting go of all that bitterness and expectation, I was left with an empty hole that made me feel light enough to blow away.
