For court cases, if needed later, in their defense.
“Do you want me to ask them to stop taking photographs?” the young man said.
What were they talking about? He’d lost the thread again. He looked around him: He was in the cafeteria. It was empty. The young man smiled his uncomfortable smile. Smiled like those high-school kids who came in here once or twice a year.
There was this one girl, Frank forgot her name. Maybe Taylor? Or Tyler? He asked her, “Why do you high-school kids come in here?” And she said, “Colleges think it looks good if you’ve done some charity work.”
Two or three times they’d come, then disappeared.
He asked this Taylor or Tyler why all the students only showed up twice and then never came back, and she said, “If you do it twice, that’s good enough to put on your college application.”
She said this with no shame. Like she was such a good girl doing the absolute minimum to get what she wanted.
She asked him about his life. He said there’s not much to tell. She said what did you do? He said he worked at the ChemStar factory. She said what did the factory make? He said it made a compound that when jellied and lit on fire would literally melt the skin off of a hundred thousand men, women, and children in Vietnam. And then she realized she’d made a big mistake coming here and asking him that.
“I was wondering about Faye,” the young man said. “Your daughter Faye? You remember her?”
Faye was so much more hardworking than these high-school shits ever were. Faye worked hard because she was driven. There was something inside that pushed her. Something big and deadly and serious.
“Faye never told me she went to Chicago. Why did she go to Chicago?”
And now it’s 1968 and he’s in the kitchen with Faye under a pale light and he’s kicking her out of the house.
He is so angry with her.
He’d tried so hard to live in that town unnoticed. And she made it impossible.
Leave and never come back, is what he’s telling her.
“What did she do?”
She got herself knocked up. In high school. She let that boy Henry get her pregnant. Wasn’t even married yet. And everybody knew about it.
Which was the thing that enraged him most, how everyone knew. All at once. Like she advertised it in the local mailer. He never figured out how that happened. But he was more mad that everyone knew than about her getting knocked up.
That was before he picked up the dementia and stopped caring about things like this.
After that, she had to go to college. She was an outcast. She left for Chicago.
“But she didn’t stay long, right? In Chicago?”
Came back a month later. Something happened to her there she never talked about. Frank didn’t know what. She told people college was too hard. But he knew that was a lie.
Faye came back and married Henry. They moved away. Left town.
She never really liked him, Henry. Poor guy. He never knew what hit him. There was a word for this in Norwegian: gift, which could mean either “marriage” or “poison,” and that probably seemed about right to Henry.
After Faye left, Frank became like Clyde Thompson after his daughter died: kept a straight face in public and nobody asked him about Faye and eventually it was like she’d never even existed.
No reminders at all, except for the boxes in the basement.
Homework assignments. Diaries. Letters. Those reports from the school counselor. About Faye’s issues. Her panic attacks. Nervous fits. Making up stories for attention. It was all documented. It was here, at Willow Glen. In storage. In the basement. Many years’ worth. Frank kept everything.
He hadn’t seen her now in so long. She’d disappeared, which of course Frank deserved.
Pretty soon, he hoped, he wouldn’t remember her at all.
His mind was falling away.
Soon he would be only Fridtjof again, blessedly. He’d remember only Norway. He’d remember only his expansive youth in the northernmost city in the world. The fires they kept going all through the winter. The gray midnight sky of summer. The green swirls of the northern lights. The splashing schools of blackfish he could spot from a mile away. And maybe if he were lucky the walls of his memory would enclose only this one moment, fishing from the back of the boat, pulling up some grand thing from the depths.
If he were lucky.
If not, he’d be stuck with the other memory. The terrible memory. He would watch himself watching that salmon-red house. Watch it shrinking in the distance. Feel himself growing older as it faded. He would live it out over and over again, his mistake, his disgrace. That would be his punishment, this waking nightmare: sailing away from his home, into the darkening night, and judgment.
6
SAMUEL HAD NEVER HEARD Grandpa Frank talk so much. It was a constant bewildering monologue with occasional moments of clarity, moments when Samuel managed to seize a few critical details: that his mother had gotten pregnant and left for Chicago in shame, and that all the records from Faye’s childhood were stored here, in boxes, at Willow Glen.
About the boxes, Samuel asked the nurse, who led him down into the basement, a long concrete tunnel with chain-link cages. A zoo of forgotten things. Samuel found his family’s heirlooms under a skin of dust: old tables and chairs and china hutches, old clocks no longer running, boxes stacked like crumbling pyramids, dark puddles on the dirty bare floor, the light a hazy green mist of overhead fluorescents, the sour smells of mold and damp cardboard. Amid all this he found several large boxes marked “Faye,” all of them heavy with paper: school projects, notes from teachers, medical records, diaries, old photographs, love letters from Henry. As he skimmed through them, a new version of his mother took shape—not the distant woman from his childhood but a shy and hopeful girl. The real person he’d always longed to know.
He lugged the boxes to his car and called his father.
“It’s a great day for frozen food,” his father said. “This is Henry Anderson. How can I help you?”
“It’s me,” Samuel said. “We have to talk.”
“Well, I would love to interface with you one-on-one,” he said in that polite, artificial, high-pitched lilt he used whenever he was at work. “I’d be happy to discuss this at your earliest convenience.”
“Stop talking like that.”
“Can I tell you about an upcoming webinar you might be interested in?”
“Is your boss, like, standing over your shoulder right now?”
“That’s an affirmative.”
“Okay, then just listen. I want you to know that I figured something out about Mom.”
“I think that’s outside my area of expertise, but I’d be happy to send you to someone who could help you with that.”
“Please stop talking that way.”
“Yes, I understand. Thank you so much for bringing this up.”
“I know that Mom went to Chicago. And I know why.”