Page 3 of Mornings By the Linden Tree
Your sister has died and left you her daughter.
Nine words. Nine small words with a gigantic impact. Nine words that played over and over in my head as I settled into my seat for the flight from Logan International to Lambert airport in St. Louis. Rattled did not even begin to cover how I felt. Cold. I was cold inside. For all the years and tears I had spent trying to save Aida from herself, and now that the outcome of a life filled with addiction had played out in one of the two ways it could have, I was icy inside. Chilled with grief, yes, and with remorse and shock.
Daughter. There was a child. A child whom I had known nothing about. The social worker had been quite kind on the phone, apologizing for calling so late with such bad news. Not her fault. If I had taken the fucking call earlier, I’d not be winging south at the crack of fucking dawn now. Maybe Percy was right. Was it possible my rigidity about Saturdaywasnothing but me being supercilious? Arrogant was a word that had been used to describe me more than once over the years.I preferred to think of myself as more self-confident than self-glorious, but perhaps I was more of a mixture of both attributes.
Daughter. A child. Three years old, according to the social worker. She seemed truly saddened by Aida’s passing. I’d stammered along as she had talked rapid fire, explaining things as best she could. The child’s name was Valeria. A pretty name. What the hell wasIsupposed to do with her? Why leave the child in my care?
Surely the courts would not deem me a fit parental figure. I’d shied away from such things for a reason. I’d seen what hell Aida had put our parents through. The hell she had putmethrough. Months of not knowing where she was, or with whom, or what kind of trouble she was in had shown me that giving your all to a child left you with a broken heart. Much like leaning too heavily on others, be they your neglectful parents or some foolish man trying to worm his way into your heart. Emotions were a weakness that left you hurt and alone.
Valeria was experiencing that firsthand. I prayed the child was too young to fully grasp the horror of what had happened. According to the social worker, Aida had left the child with her neighbor to babysit but the child had snuck home and made a horrible discovery. At least she’d not filled her veins full of poison in front of the child. Who this neighbor was or what they did, I had no clue, but I already had Rissa researching the old woman as well as anyone else in the rundown apartment building in St. Louis my sister had called home. The rest was a little sketchy, but I’d have the facts in my hand by the time I reached Missouri. I did not go into a situation unprepared. That was how Aida had handled her life. Just leap in and hope you can swim well enough to keep your head above water.
The buckle your seatbelt tone sounded. I turned off my phone after one last text to my partners to say I was taking some personal time due to a death in the family. I hoped to haveall this resolved and be back to work in a week so my clients wouldn’t have to deal with a covering attorney. Not that my partners weren’t highly competent, they were, but I disliked shirking my responsibilities.
The flight would be a little over three hours. Long enough for me to get some coffee into my bloodstream and try to sort out how to handle this potentially sticky situation. The child would need a good home. That was tantamount. I was sure the social worker would know of a quality foster care situation available. Once Valeria was settled with a lovely family, I would ensure she would be well cared for financially so when she was adopted, she would come into the home with more than I had when I was young. As we taxied back from the airport to wait for takeoff clearance, I closed my eyes. Just for a moment. They were burning from lack of sleep.
Percy, bless him, had been quite understanding and had taken himself from my home to a hotel on the harbor. Since there was no sex on the horizon, and he detested emotional scenes—not that I was overly distressed—he’d felt it better to simply rent a room. I had concurred, and he’d gone with a whispered word of comfort as he’d climbed into the back of a taxi. I’d waved him off and then returned inside, the man already forgotten as my thoughts went to other things. Packing, flights, and having a rundown of the situation. Calling Rissa at ten p.m. on a Saturday had not gone over well, once the pure shock of her hearing from me on a high holy day as my sarcastic British sometime fuck buddy liked to call it wore off.
I had to promise to pay her double, which was a sizeable chunk, since she made more than any of the other paralegals in the firm. But, to her credit, once she found out what had happened, she’d softened greatly, offering me sniffly condolences and asking about the child. Rissa had a son, so she was quite maternal, I imagined. We didn’t discuss her toddlermuch at work because…it was work. And I had no interest in which diaper rash cream she found superior. Color me cold as fuck. It took a special sort to stick with me, and Rissa had that intestinal fortitude, much like Mrs. Polkowski. I knew I was a lot. Not everyone appreciated my directness, but those who did were well rewarded.
Knowing I’d be fidgety on the flight—I always was—I dug around in my carry-on, a slim leather satchel with my laptop, cords, some headache tablets, and a small plastic sandwich box filled with tiny peanut butter-filled crackers. Nibbling at my crackers, I felt my stomach lurch as we took off. Once we reached cruising altitude, my gut settled after a smiling flight attendant delivered a can of ginger ale with extra ice. The laptop sat ready, so I opened a Word document and began typing out a detailed and numbered list of things that needed to be done upon landing in St. Louis.
The first was to visit the morgue to identify the body.
According to the notes Rissa had sent me, I could do that as soon as I could get to the coroner’s office. She had reached out to assure someone would be there so the first step would be completed. A man in the cheaper seats coughed, pulling my attention from my notes. My sight strayed from the myriad list of things I would need to do over the next few days to look out at the clouds below us. A soft little memory of a trip to Florida many years ago popped into my head. I was twelve and had been given the greatest gift of all for my birthday. A vacation at Disney World. Aida was around four or five, not yet in school, but already showing signs of her intelligence. We’d flown down, which was the first time either of us had ever been on a plane, and Aida could not remain seated. She knelt on her seat, with her nose pressed to the round window, staring down at the puffy white clouds. I told her the clouds were cotton candy for the angels. She’d grinned widely and then made Mom and Dadpromise to get her some angel cotton at the park. They did, of course, and some for me as well.
To this day, I call cotton candy angel cotton.
A soft hand on my shoulder jarred me from my daydream. I swiped at the rogue tear on my cheek and graciously accepted another drink from the slightly worried attendant.
“Is everything okay, sir?”
“Just a wandering eyelash in my eye,” I told the flight attendant.
She nodded, handed me some tissues, and moved to tend to another passenger. I tucked the tissues into the pocket of my jeans. I’d not need them again. Crying solved nothing. Action was what got problems settled. Action, work, and a well-thought-out plan of attack. Weeping and wailing did nothing but clog your sinuses and make you look weak. Only tough boys survived. That was a lesson I learned early in life.
***
I was not that tough of a boy after all, it seemed.
Using the damp wad of tissues from the plane, I dabbed at my eyes as I pushed out of the medical examiner’s office late Sunday night. I climbed into the first taxi I could wave down and returned to my hotel, my head a mess of tangled emotions. I declined to speak to the driver when he tried to pull me into a conversation about the local baseball team. When we arrived at the front door of the five-star hotel, I paid and tipped him, then stopped at the reservation desk to tell them to send some dinner—a steak cooked well with a side salad topped with some cilantro lime dressing—and a bottle of their best bourbon to my room.
Once I was inside my suite, I removed my jacket and tie, toed off my loafers, and went into the gray and white bath to splash water on my face. I studied myself in the oval mirror,water droplets on my whiskery chin and red eyes. I looked a fright. I’d thought I was made of sterner stuff, but seeing Aida on the cold metal table had shaken me deeply. It brought up all the dark moments of having to identify my parents after their deaths, which had been traumatic. Perhaps if I’d had my sibling to commiserate with, that horrid task wouldn’t have been quite so ghastly, but Aida had been unwilling to help. The demon addiction she carried around inside her kept her at a distance from those who loved her the most.
“Fucking hell, Aida,” I gasped, more tears breaking through the meager dam I’d tried to erect. I yanked some tissues from the box by the sink, turned from my reflection, and had a good cry. Something I’d not done even when my parents had passed. I did not have time to weep over them. Someone had to take charge.
Shaky and dry, I exited the bathroom after the worst had passed, going to the window to gaze out on the city at dusk as vivid recollections of my past whirled around me. Aida coming to live with us two years after I’d been adopted. I’d been so thrilled to have a sister. She was a tiny little ball of energy with thick black hair and deep cocoa-colored eyes. Her English was spotty, but within a year of attending a wonderful preschool with an amazing staff, her Venezuelan accent was barely noticeable. Another thing she would complain about when she hit her teens. How my parents had stripped her of her heritage by making her accent a thing to be purged. Perhaps she was right about that, perhaps not, but the lessons were given with love and not malice that I knew.
The rap on my door pulled me from the maelstrom. The porter served my meal with precision. I tipped well and then sent him off to his other duties. Perfectly cooked steak, crisp salad, and asparagus on the tender side. I ate without really tasting much other than the bourbon I drank to wash each bite down. There was a small dish of fresh fruit for dessert. I picked throughthe squares of pineapple and melon to find the fat, red grapes. Pinching one between my fingers, I was taken back in time to a summer on the beach, a rocky shore where my parents spent a few weeks with other well-to-do medical sorts. I was about fourteen, gangly as a colt, with a terrible crush on one of my parents’ friends’ son. He was a beautiful boy, hair yellow like the sun, eyes blue as the waters off the private beach where our resort sat. Clement, his name was, and he loved grapes just as much as my little sister did. Oh how mad Aida got when I would steal all the grapes from the fridge in our room to give to Clement.
“Be grapeful there are more to be bought,” Dad would say to calm my irate sibling. God I missed him. I wish he were here to offer some guidance. But, on the other hand, I was glad he wasn’t. Viewing my sister had taken everything out of me. It would have crushed my parents. Best it fell to me. I would handle it. I always did.
I tossed the grape back to the tray, covered it, and set my dirty dishes in the hall before closing the door. Falling into a chair, my socked feet resting on an ottoman, I spent the rest of that night reliving memories of better times with Aida as I cried softly into each glass of bourbon I downed.
***
It was a dark and dank Monday morning as I made my way to meet with child services. My head was mossy from all the bourbon I’d ingested. Sometime during the night, I’d called down to the front desk to have more booze brought up. Not the wisest of moves, given I had so much to accomplish before I could return home to my life as it had been. Quiet, calm, and with no hangovers.
I’d not felt this terrible since the night I’d gone out to celebrate passing my bar exam. Getting sloshed was not acceptable behavior for a man with dreams of becoming partner. So, I sipped only here and there socially, as my parents had, ever mindful of the fact I’d been taken from my mother due to her own reliance on alcohol. There were ghosts of memories of cleaning up after her before going to school. Wesley’s dark days, I liked to call them, before I shoved them into a mental box with a sturdy lock where they stayed until something freed them. Like the death of my sister had last night.
