She took a breath and straightened. “You know, Turtle,
the van driver for the memory center, the one who picked
me up today, he really could not have been nicer. Do you
think I should send him a thank-you note?”
“What? Sure. Yes. Why not? We were talking about
Uncle Albie.”
“I know, but now I want to talk about the van driver.
You probably can’t understand how it happened but it
took me some time before I realized he wasn’t bringing
me here. Of course eventually I figured it out. Suddenly
we weren’t in the woods anymore. We were on a road,
going past the ocean. A beautiful road, with a pond on one side, and the ocean beyond that, and a pasture with herds
of cows and sheep and goats. None of the other people
on the bus said a peep. And then the van finally stopped
and everyone stood up and shuffled off so I got off too.
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When I asked people where I was, they said, ‘Have a cup
of tea. Have a piece of cake.’ They have very good cake.”
Lane wasn’t sure what a normal person in a normal
family would do in this situation. She tried to imagine
what Roxie would say to someone who wanted to get
their mother to go back to talking about the past when
she seemed nearly desperate to do anything but that.
Sit with her, is what Roxie would say. Take what’s offered with an open heart.
So she did. She sat in silence for several minutes and
when her mother finally met her eyes and said, “Oh well,”
Lane nodded and reached for her hand and her mother
did not pull away.
324
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
It was on Wednesday, the second week of camp, when
Henry’s favorite counselor, Amanda, took Lane aside.
“Dylan’s been leaning hard on Henry,” she said. “Trying
to convince him to stop drawing and join the pinhole-box
table. Henry told me he doesn’t want to so—”
“Wait. Henry spoke you?”
“Oh sorry.” Amanda blushed. “He signed to me. I
taught him a few words. I hope you don’t mind. I’ve been
a mother’s helper for a deaf kid, for a couple of years. I’m not fluent or anything.” She demonstrated as she spoke.
“I just showed him Yes, No, More, and Stop. Should have I asked your first?”
“No. That’s so lovely. What a great idea.”
She shrugged off the compliment. “The thing is, I
told Dylan that Henry does not want to switch tables and
to leave him alone and let him draw. But Dylan doesn’t
listen to me. Or any of the counselors. He does listen to
parents, so—”
Without thinking, Lane lurched forward and gave
Amanda a hug. She immediately backed away. “Sorry,”
she said. “I didn’t mean to overstep.”
“That’s totally fine,” Amanda said. “Dylan’s right over
there if you want to talk to him.”
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As Lane headed to the table at the back of the room
where Dylan was sitting, she thought about how there was
always a Dylan. Always a Dylan and always a Silas. The
Silas’s took Henry’s silence as a personal rejection. The
Dylans took it as a challenge. From what she’d observed
at camp drop-off and pickup, Dylan seemed fairly indif-
ferent to the rest of the campers but he was determined
to take Henry under his wing, regardless of whether his
wing was a place Henry wanted to be.
Dylan’s chair was tipped back, the front feet up in the
air. Dangerously, Lane thought. “Can I have a word with
you?” she asked. “In private.” He followed her outside
to the Rec’s small front porch. “I think it would be best
if you let Henry choose his own activities for now. If he
wants to draw, let’s let him draw.”
“Okay, cool. It’s just—like I explained to the little
man—I don’t want him to be left out and end up filled
with regret. I don’t know if you know this, but the kids
won’t be allowed to come outside to watch the eclipse at
the end-of-camp party if they don’t have a pinhole box.”
Lane’s stomach clenched at the words pinhole box. She had underestimated how hard attending an eclipse party
matter the theme, Henry’s end-of-camp celebration party
was not something she would miss.
Dylan was still talking. “I’m sure you don’t want the
little man to grow up bitter like my dad. I mean, think
about it. He’s upset about something that happened in
the nineteen hundreds.”
“I think you mean the nineteen nineties,” Lane said.
Dylan looked wounded. That was not helpful. “I know
your concern comes out of kindness. But Henry’s not
interested in that project. Does he know the rule that
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if he doesn’t make a box he can’t go outside during the
eclipse?”
“I tell him every day.”
“Okay. So no need to tell him anymore. He’s made
his choice. He’s fine with not seeing the eclipse.” She
didn’t say the rest. She was fine with it too. The coun-
selor begrudgingly agreed. They both returned inside,
Lane to say goodbye to Henry, Dylan to resume testing
gravity with his chair.
She found Henry sitting with his new friends, all three
of them concentrating hard on their drawings, today their
fingers fisted around fat markers. As she headed toward
him she heard an uptick in a voice behind her. Dylan had
detoured to ask her one more question.
“…probably why you’re not bitter like my Dad?”
He was like a dog trying to get marrow out of bone.
“Because you got to see the eclipse. Right? So, goes to
show, Henry should—”
She cut him off. “I appreciate your concern. But Henry
wants to draw. So that’s what he should do. Okay?”
“I guess.” Dylan saw her expression shifting to a warn-
ing. “Okay.”
Lane gave Henry a quick goodbye and made a hasty
exit, waving another thank-you to Amanda as she left.
Dylan eyed her, but stayed where he was. His voice came
with her, though. She heard him as she walked down the
narrow path to the water . Probably you’re not bitter because you got to see the eclipse.
What she’d wanted to say was, Stop talking. What
she’d wanted to say was, You have no idea how I feel about that day. But instead she’d cut him off. Now Dylan was a member in good standing of the crowded tribe of people
who thought her rude.
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The path stopped at the lake and offered up its choices.
She picked the route to the left.
She hadn’t meant to be rude to Dylan but she had
no choice. Getting into a conversation about the last to-
tal eclipse of the sun with him was out of the question.
And what would she say? She laughed out loud imagin-
ing it. My school wasn’t closed but my mother kept me home.
Not because she’d feared all
the children of the world would go blind at once but because we were getting a rare visit from her brother.
That day was the second time Albie had come to see
his nieces but Lane had no memory of the first time. She’d been too young. She felt like she knew him, though, in
the way people felt as if they’d experienced things when
family stories got told so often the lines between hearing them and living them became blurred.
“I adored my brother,” her mother often said. “And
he adored me back. He would have followed me off a
cliff. Did I ever tell you we promised to live next door
to each other when we grew up?” she’d ask, again and
again. “Unless we lived in apartments. Then it could be
next door, or above or below. Aunt Beadie put a kibosh
on that promise,” she’d tell them, over and over. “Good
thing she doesn’t know about the other promise.”
Lane and Shelley always moved their lips slightly—
just enough so they’d both know they were doing it—to
mouth what their mother always said next. “Eclipse of
the sun.”
“We’re going to watch the next total eclipse of the sun
together. When the last one came we were little children.
Uncle Albie was seven.”
“Last time you told us, he was eight,” Shelley would
say, to be annoying.
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“Maybe he was eight. I was ten. We were so excited.
My father made us special glasses. Not like what they
have today. It was just cut-up cardboard with lenses made
out of film. My mother said it was a waste of film but he
did it anyway. He woke us up early so we wouldn’t miss
it. But it never came where we lived. My grandmother
saw it, though. She lived in Minneapolis. She called,
all excited, to tell us how it came at sunrise. How one
minute the birds were singing and the next they stopped.
Poor Albie, he got so upset at that. He started crying.
Sobbing. Because he wanted to hear the birds stop sing-
ing. So I promised him he’d get another chance. There’d
be another eclipse. And he made me promise we’d watch
it together. Which I did. I promised whenever the next
eclipse came, he would come over to wherever I was,
which would probably be right next door, or downstairs
or upstairs, depending on where we lived, and we’d watch
it together. He won’t forget,” she told Lane and Shelley
more than once, sharply, as if they’d challenged her. And
they’d nod, to show they knew she was right. Their uncle
would not forget.
He didn’t. The day of the total solar eclipse their
mother woke them up to tell them the good news. “He
remembered! He’s coming. With your cousin, Ivy. So
we can all watch it together.” Then, more good news.
“You’re staying home from school.”
Shelley wasn’t happy. She didn’t want to miss school.
She had her own plans to watch the eclipse with her
friends. But their mother wouldn’t budge. Friends were
replaceable. Family was not.
That was why, while the rest of the world prepared for
the marvel of a total solar eclipse, her mother prepared the house for the bigger marvel of the arrival of the beloved
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uncle her children couldn’t remember meeting and the
cousin they forgot they had.
Lane only remembered bits of the visit but those
bits were vivid. Ten-year-old Shelley dancing into
her room to share what their father had told her about
Uncle Albie, that he reason they never saw him was that
he was the black sheep in the family. Every family had a
black sheep, she’d explained and then abruptly stopped
speaking.
From the look on Shelley’s face, Lane deduced what
her sister wasn’t saying: if every family had a black sheep, in their nuclear family, Lane was it.
Other things she remembered: Uncle Albie showed
up like it was nothing special, like he and Ivy stopped by every day. There were neither hugs nor introductions. It
was just, “Hey, kiddo,” and a smile that showed off the
wide space between his front teeth. He didn’t seem self-
conscious about the gap.
Lane could still see it in her mind’s eye, her uncle’s
gap-toothed smile. Ivy had it too.
Another memory: her mother was not herself. On a
regular day if the doorbell rang, Sylvie would grab the
nearest daughter and push her toward the foyer with
instructions to tell whoever it was to go away. But on
that day Sylvie raced to the door and let out an odd
laugh—delight or embarrassment, Lane couldn’t tell the
difference—before skipping, like a child, arm in arm with
her brother to the living room.
That the TV was on was not unusual; that it was
tuned to the news was. Until that moment, Lane had
thought news was only on at night. She didn’t watch the
TV, though. Her eyes stayed fixed on her cousin with
the gap-toothed smile and the braids on either side of
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her face. Ivy’s face was as round as the moon and tipped,
from the minute she arrived, toward Shelley.
When the broadcaster began describing exactly were
in Oregon he was speaking from, Ivy announced she’d
been to Oregon too, the previous summer, to visit her
mother’s parents.
“You went to Oregon?” Shelley said. “You’re lucky.
We never go anywhere.”
Lane felt dizzy with confusion. Was her sister was
sick? Did she have a fever? Was it scarlet fever? Was that the one that affected the brain? Because something had affected her brain. Why else would she say, We never go anywhere. The Mecklers did nothing but go.
Maybe when Lane wasn’t looking, Shelley had been
hypnotized. She was acting hypnotized, complimenting
Ivy on everything, even her braids. Shelley hated braids.
Whenever their mother tried to braid Shelley’s hair, she’d run out of the room and Sylvie would have to make do
with braiding Lane’s hair instead.
Why would anyone like Ivy’s braids? They weren’t
neat or pulled tight like their mother made them. They
had bits and pieces of tiny hair flying out every which
way, like she’d been attacked by a jolt of static electricity.
But Shelley was seeing something else. “Can I touch
your braids?” she asked.
“Sure,” Ivy said. She tipped her head so Shelley didn’t
have to stretch to do it.
Lane wanted to barf; she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it
was because of Ivy’s smile, which now took up half of her
face, or maybe it was because of Shelley’s voice, which
was completely fake. Was this how Shelley made friends
at school? Fake smile. Fake words. Fake nice.
Her sister seemed to have forgotten Lane existed.
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At some point Shelley asked their mother to change
the channel because it was boring. Ivy immediately piled
on. “Boring. Boring. Boring me to death.”
“It won’t be bor
ing when it happens,” their mother
said. “Maybe if it were a partial eclipse it would be bor-
ing. But not a total. They have no idea,” Sylvie told her
brother.
He agreed. “Not a clue.”
The eclipse wasn’t happening for a while, so Shelley
asked, “Can Ivy and I go out and play?”
Ivy and I.
Their mother was the one who insisted she take Lane
along. Shelley and Ivy made a face at that, with mirror-
image eye rolls and two sets of lips curled up, but in
unison—Ivy was a barely discernible millisecond behind—
they both said, “Fine.”
Outside Ivy asked Shelley why her house had a sad face.
Lane hadn’t noticed it before but Ivy was right. “I
see it,” she said. “The second floor windows—with the
shades halfway down—they look like droopy eyes. And
the front-door window—it’s like a frowny mouth.”
“That’s not it at all,” Ivy said. “It’s an upside-down
face. The roof is the smile. See how the roof looks? Like
a smile made out of rotten teeth.”
Forever after, that was how Lane remembered that
roof. A roof of rotten teeth.
Later, upstairs in Lane’s room, when the sky darkened,
Ivy and Shelley moved to the window, standing so close
together it was as if they were a person and a shadow.
At some point Shelley called downstairs, “I think it’s
happening.” Ivy repeated her words like an echo. The
sky brightened, ignoring them both.
“False alarm,” Lane said. “It was just a cloud.”
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Ivy wasn’t sure but she took a step back. “We’re not
supposed to look out. We could go blind.” She took an-
other step back. Remembering her father’s warnings had
made her momentarily timid.
“Aw,” Shelley said. “You’re so cute. You don’t have
to worry. It’s not the eclipse yet. You can still look. Too bad we don’t have those glasses that let you look right at the sun. I asked my mom to get them but she didn’t have
time. I don’t know why. She doesn’t work like your mom.”
Ivy nodded. “Someone’s got to put food on the table.”
It was taking forever for the eclipse to come.
“You’re lucky,” Shelley told Ivy. “Your mom works
and your dad’s nice.”
Lane didn’t know how to stop what was happening.
“I don’t think people are allowed to be best friends with
their cousin,” she announced.