Ghostbread

part one the get go

1

I know where I came from.

It must have been April or May of 1967 when he came through town, a vacuum-cleaner salesman with a carload of rubber belts, metal tubing, and suction hoses. Spring in western New York, it was probably a sunless day—he may have been chilled as he grabbed hold of his Kirby upright, walked to the door, and rang the bell.

She was a well-formed redhead with a dry-cleaning job and a house full of children to forget. She must have put hand to hip, flashed falsely shy eyes, and said something about not needing another vacuum.

He had full lips, and used them to throw a smile in her direction. And she, who was partial to full-lipped smiles, let him in.

He rang; she answered. She was hungry; he had a bit of sugar on his finger. He was tired; she provided a pillow for his head. Soft. Sweet. Easy.

Sometimes it’s just that simple.

2

I was late. Born in the wrong year, according to my mother. Though scheduled to clear her womb in 1967, I was mule-headed and did not exit my mother’s body until late January 1968.

The story was a good one. My mother swore by it. People clucked and laughed when she told it. Growing up, it made my birth seem special. Like I was cracked from another of Adam’s ribs or crawled from my mother’s womb fully-formed and armored, like some commonplace Athena.

I imagined myself made stronger by all that time inside her. As if twenty-eight extra days and twenty-eight extra nights pressed against the lungs could compensate for the lack of baby pictures, the lack of a proper last name, the lack of a daddy. As if four weeks could ever make such a difference.

We were all late, according to my mother. Except for her first, my brother Will, who was two months early, born backward and twisted. Breach baby. He almost didn’t make it, she said. The cord curled round his neck, threatened to pull him back into the womb. Keep him. Will was the only one who’d surprised her—the one whose birth she spoke of with wide eyes and hushed tones. The rest of us were easy—forward-bound, fat-faced, and untangled.

And a month late.

She just carried her babies longer than most, she’d explain if you asked, and if you listened, really listened, you’d understand that it was my mother, not us, who was special—the way her body wouldn’t give up its pearls. She’d say it’s just a part of who she is, the same way she stopped any watch she wore, all that energy pulsing through her veins. Some things the body just refuses to share.

My mother told the stories of our births over and over, and made them bigger with each telling. We were her handiwork. So she talked about water breaking, the running of fingernails into wood grain, the cutting of umbilical cords. Her tales were rich in gook and detail. Nothing was left out. Except for fathers. They were ghosts that folded themselves into the edges of her tales, vapors that floated in and out of delivery rooms, with us somehow, but never really showing themselves.

3

I had no father, which sounds much more dramatic than it was. If I’d known girls whose daddies held them tight and gazed at them with so much pride it tore at the eyes, I might have thought that all girls should have such a thing. But I never knew such girls. And how can someone miss what she’s never had?

No, of this I am sure: a mother was enough.

A mother.

Like mine. One who was smart and pretty and drew horses so well-muscled and real they could gallop off the page. One who came from the state of New Hampshire, where blueberries grew in back of the house her father built and tamaracks stood in lines outside the window. New Hampshire, the granite state, whose bird was the purple finch and flower was the purple lilac and whose motto was live free or die, which is what she’d say if you asked why she made up her own rules about clothes and religion and men.

I’d ask, from time to time, why she didn’t do things the way that other mothers did.

Why don’t you have a husband?

Why don’t you make regular meals?

Why don’t you teach me to do up my hair?

In serious moments, I’d ask such questions, and she would listen without showing it, her small hand resting on the spine of a book. I could see by the way she squinted her eyes that she was thinking, so I’d wait until she looked up, eyebrows raised, as though surprised by my presence. As though she’d just remembered me and my questions. She’d look at me hard, and say, Live free or die—I’m telling you girl, there’s no other way to be.

4

My favorite person should have been Carol Johnson. Carol’s voice was like gravel, her words came out slow and sifted through the cigarette perpetually pressed between her lips. She was as thick-fingered as any man, but kind. And painfully generous. She had four kids of her own, but managed to treat me like I was special. Carol said beautiful things about my hair and eyes, and when she ran out of things to say, she gave me things. Cupcakes and colored scissors and a glossy black purse with a gold metal snap that she wrapped up for my fifth birthday.

I loved that purse! Its shine and promise. I opened and closed, opened and closed it, delighting in the cushioned clicking of the snap. I clicked it hundreds of times—until I tired of it, or it wore out.

Once the snap lost the hold it had on me, I began to wonder what to fill the purse with. For the first time, I wondered where money came from. I looked into its gaping black mouth and worried over how to feed such a thing. When I asked, my mother laughed.

Where does money come from? she cackled. You be sure and tell me when you find out.

Her laughter did not stop me. I asked my question over and over, until it lost its freshness and earned me only dark stares. I looked into the black interior of the purse and began to see its emptiness as a weight to be carried.

I loved the glossy little accessory, but couldn’t enjoy it, and in the end, Carol took the purse back to stop my worrying.

To give and take with such love is rare—so naturally, it was Carol I should have loved most.

Or my mother.

But it was neither. Instead, it was the woman with the owl earrings. A teacher at the day care center who made a seat for me of her lap. She helped me with my letters and held me for as long as I needed. I’d sit there as often as I could, pushing my head into her chest, looking up at her earrings—silver dangling owls. A few strands of silk-brown hair fell from her ponytail and I’d take them between my fingers while she held me. I’d plop a thumb into my mouth and stare into those earrings. Wise old owls. Silver and jangling. Moving as she laughed.

5

Something big happened.

I found five dollars and discovered what it felt like to swallow the sky. The money was folded on the sidewalk in front of our apartment. I saw its color first, a tight rectangle of green lying flat against the gray walk. It was sitting there like a gift, so I picked it up and handed it over to my mother who thanked me, hugged me, adored me.

Honestly, she said, I didn’t know how we would eat tonight.

To be taken by the hand to the corner store and allowed to choose a special candy—that’s something. To be talked of with gratitude and pleasure, my name coming out of her mouth like a song. To be lifted over the shoulder, made to feel like the sun and the moon—it was almost too much to bear.

But there was a twist. There’s always a twist.

Because when things are found, it is also true that they are lost, and the five dollars that made me family hero and benefactress of macaroni and cheese dinner was the very same bill dropped by someone else. So when my mother lifted me up to the counter, I smiled and let my fingers skim the ruffled faces of penny candy, but remembered the Brownie troop that had passed our place just minutes before my find.

I selected my candy reward and thought of the double-file line of brown-uniformed girls, giggling in their cocoa-colored berets, one of them not knowing she’d lost her money, one of them looking, digging perhaps, into her tiny brown pouch the exact moment the atomic fire-ball settled into my mouth.

6

Finding five dollars wasn’t news for long.

Other things happened.

Big things.

Three girls were killed. Right here, in our city. Rochester, New York. They were put into the ground, those girls. Buried under flat stone over at Mount Hope, lying silent beneath the red earth and wild violets of Holy Sepulchre. Something terrible happened to them. Something my mother spoke of with hands over her mouth.

They were from the city, was all she’d say, from the city, poor, and Catholic.

Like us.

She never said it, but it was there.

Each had first and last names starting with the same letter. Wanda Walkowicz. Carmen Colon. Michelle Maenza. The man on the news said they were found with half-digested cheeseburgers in their bellies.

Why had those girls let him feed them?

The mystery of their trust plagued me more than the mystery of their deaths. Here’s what I decided: I wouldn’t eat a thing if he came for me. I knew my letters, could spell out my name, and my mother had told me twice already that my initials were not doubled, so there was that to hold on to. There’s nothing to worry about, my mother said and tried to sound sure of things, but I knew by the way she told us to stay by her side that she was scared too.

One of the girls had lived close to us. Michelle was in the third grade with my brother one day and the next, his classroom had an extra desk.

Lucky for me my initials were mismatched. Good thing my mother mixed things up. And the girls he took were nine or ten, while I was not yet six. Still, he might have run out of double-initialed girls or changed his mind about the age he wanted. I thought of such things, but most of all, I worried about my hunger, that he might sense it in me, that I might forget myself and eat whatever he offered.

So if he came for me, I knew just what to do. I’d decided on the exact cupboard to ball myself into. And if he found me there, I knew how to protect myself. I’d keep my mouth closed, and no matter what—even if he pried it open with big angry hands—I would let nothing pass.

7

Sometimes we’d explore.

My mother and her children walked in a line through the neighborhood, a ragtag group of boys and girls, arranged by descending height. We’d crisscross the streets in the northeast section of the city, resting along the way until we found ourselves on the sloping green hill near the softball field on East Main and Culver. Six kids, grubby-fingered and pushing through the slippery pile of books fished out from the twin Dumpsters that stood like sentries outside the high school. So many gloss-covered books were discarded that they slopped over the tops of the Dumpsters and fell into our hands.

Who would throw these away? My mother’s eyes grew with the prospect of all those words.

She pushed her red-brown hair into a knot at the back of her neck, sat on the grass, and entered a book so softly that we barely spoke. She only answered after we asked twice if it was okay to chew on purple-headed clover.

It was warm, with a breeze, and we watched as three Vietnamese men pulled June bugs from the small trees lining the sidewalk. They pulled the bugs from the air, flattened the shells between finger and thumb, then tossed them into the plastic buckets they carried.

They’ll eat those bugs, someone said, and we laughed and chewed the nectar from clover.

We lounged, spread out on the grass until the sun lowered and our skin cooled. Even then, we didn’t want to let go of the day and tried lugging armfuls of the books home. In the end, there were not enough hands and arms to carry all those books away. But the want was there.

8

Annmarie VanEpps may as well have been rich.

She had a dollhouse as tall as we were, and though my mother said Annmarie was spoiled, she sometimes let me cross Leighton Avenue to play with the girl and her toys.

My mother was right.

Annmarie was spoiled—but only in the way that poor children can be. She was given things, but they always fell short of what she really wanted. Still, she was the only girl, the youngest, and her mother doted on her in a small and nervous way. Annmarie’s mother was tiny. Dark hair curled around a heart-shaped face, and she would have been pretty had she not been so tightly wound, like a hummingbird, moving hard and going nowhere.

In a neighborhood of untucked shirts and mismatched socks, Annmarie and her mother stood out. Her mother wore slacks with creases sharp enough to cut a hand and outfitted her daughter in periwinkle dresses that tied in the back and brought out the blue in Annmarie’s eyes.

Annmarie had older brothers, and from them I learned not to play with sticks. One of the VanEpps boys had played with a stick and put a girl’s eye out. The girl was left with only one working eye, and after that, whenever any of us picked up a stick and pointed it at a face, my mother would remind us of that poor girl and her nonworking eye. The VanEppses were brought to court by the girl’s family, and who knows how that went. It could not have been too damaging, since Annmarie’s father had left them years before and other than the oversized doll-house and a working Lite-Brite, there wasn’t much to claim.

9

We had big plans.

We were going camping.

My mother placed an empty cardboard box in the kitchen and once a week deposited some camping essential into it. Toothbrushes and a flashlight one week, pop-up camping cups and a box of matches another. We were planning a big trip. To the Adirondacks, or maybe to New Hampshire, where we’d pick blueberries all day and see what a real mountain looked like. Maybe we’d go back to the house at the foot of Mount Washington. Back to the place my grandfather built, when he was alive and my mother was a girl. Back when the world was as sweet as it ever would be.

10

How to tell it so it’s not misunderstood: the hatchet was in her hand and we’d been jumping on beds.

Again.

My mother had told us time and time again not to, but we couldn’t resist the cushioned bouncing, the way our hair splashed in the air as we fell. Carol and her kids were visiting and we were bored, so we took to the bed and started bouncing. Then there she was, tight-eyed and in front of us with a hatchet fished out of the camping box.

In a line, she said, and we made ourselves into a line along the kitchen floor and did what she said because she had a hatchet, and a hardness to her eyes.

In a line, she said, jumping.

So we jumped, feeling silly even at our young ages, knowing it was wrong somehow to be forced by hatchet into jumping. But it was no time for joking. My mother’s face was red, and though she was looking right at us, she did not seem to see.

She pounded the linoleum with her hatchet, dull side down—jump, jump, jump, she said, and the blade was sharp and her eyes had never been colder and even good old Carol could not calm her and so pretended it was all a joke and told her children to keep jumping in my mother’s line.

Jump, you kids! my mother said, eyes empty where there was usually blue.

And we jumped. We kept our bodies in flight, feet slapping the floor, faces wet as we sobbed and called out to her to please stop.

Who knows how it ended.

So often, only the beginning of the