Stolen Secrets Page 8

  “Where do you keep your pictures? You know, of Mom when she was little, of you and Grandpa Herbert?” I asked.

  She whipped her head from side to side like a horse shaking off a fly. “No pictures!” She brought a finger to her mouth. “Shh, I’m a secret! No one can know I’m here. They’ll kill me if they find me alive.”

  I sighed. Why did I even bother? Adelle couldn’t remember what she had for lunch, much less where she kept her albums.

  I heard the front door shut and glanced at the clock. Thirty minutes was a leisurely jaunt to the corner store.

  “I want my ginger tea!” shouted Adelle.

  “Someone’s being bossy,” Vickie sang from down the hall. She meandered into the kitchen, slow as a city bus in afternoon traffic. “What’s the word, dear?”

  Surprisingly, Adelle found it. “Please?”

  I cringed when Vickie clapped.

  “How was the store?” I asked as I poured lukewarm water into a china cup. I didn’t want Adelle to burn her mouth.

  “They were out of organic milk. I’ll go back tomorrow.”

  Vickie sat down beside my grandmother and checked her e-mail on a laptop, her lips curving in a distant smile.

  “Have you always been a caregiver?” I asked.

  “I was in finance at one of the largest accounting firms until the economy took a nose dive.”

  “Do you like working with the elderly?”

  “I’ve been doing it since I was laid off from my real job.”

  I bit my lip. Real job?

  “But I adore your grandmother,” she added, catching Adelle’s eyes. Grandma tried to smile, but her mouth sagged into a frown.

  I studied Vickie more closely. She could be patronizing at times, but at least she was organized, which helped balance Mom’s scattered nature.

  She shut the laptop case. That’s when I realized that it was the same blue Dell that Mom had used to order a refill of Adelle’s prescription.

  “Isn’t that my grandmother’s computer?”

  “Your mom and I are sharing it. It’s in the contract. We agreed that it stays in the house at all times. That means you can’t take it out, either, Livvy.”

  I stared at her, surprised. I had my own laptop at home. It was five years old—officially defined as “vintage” by the Apple store. I could fold an entire load of laundry while it booted up, but it wouldn’t have occurred to me to sneak Adelle’s computer out of her house.

  Vickie patted my grandma’s hand. “It’s not like you use it anymore, right, hon?”

  Next to the computer, I spotted a stack of envelopes. Adelle’s water bill was on top. “Doesn’t my mom pay the bills?” I asked.

  “She has enough on her mind. I told her I’d help out.” She winked. “At least they’ll get sent in on time.” She considered the pile. “Most of these are mine, sadly.”

  I softened. Vickie had to be making less as a caregiver than she had at her accounting firm. “Do you want some tea?” I asked.

  She nodded, her smile returning. “Ooh, we can have our jasmine in the living room, like fancy ladies,” she said to my grandmother.

  “Do you want to have tea with Vickie and me, Adelle?” I asked, silently hoping she’d say, No! Just Livvy!

  “That’s not my name,” she said instead.

  “Sorry.” What was I supposed to call her again?

  “You’re my granddaughter, Livvy?”

  I smiled. “Yes, I am.”

  “Then I’m your oma!”

  Vickie and I led her down the hallway to the living room, where Adelle—I mean, Oma—stared at the room as if she’d never seen it before. “Isn’t this a pretty place, Livvy-my-granddaughter?”

  I placed the teacups on the coffee table, beside a gaudy gold vase shaped like a heart. The room was a museum from the Edwardian era. On the bureau, a stained-glass lamp with beaded fringe gave off almost no light. By the fireplace, a white porcelain cat crouched, its cold marble eyes trained on me.

  When Oma and I sat on the high-backed couch, dust rose into the air. Vickie coughed.

  “Maybe we should get a housekeeper,” I suggested. Neither Vickie nor my mom seemed to be doing much in that department.

  “We must save our money. I could never afford that, not in the Great Depression!” Oma cried.

  “Great Depression?” Vickie rolled her eyes. “You have enough money to hire all the maids in Buckingham Palace if you want, darlin’.”

  I detected a subtle twang that I hadn’t picked up before. “Where’d you grow up?”

  “Why?”

  “I thought I heard an accent.”

  Vickie snapped her fingers and pointed at me as if I’d won a point. “Guilty as charged. I tried to shake it, but it’s not easy taking a South Carolina drawl out of a girl.”

  “Did someone from Buckingham Palace beat you with a whip?” Oma asked.

  Vickie sat down on one of the matching rose-print armchairs on either side of a jade-tiled fireplace. I slid behind the ruby-colored settee to part the brocade curtains and roped them back with the tassel tiebacks. A swath of light cut through the lace panel, striping the parquet floor.

  “I don’t want to go to Buckingham Palace,” Adelle said with undeniable urgency. “The British are coming! The British are coming!”

  She searched the room for something unseen. Making sense of her hallucinations was like trying to see a picture in a dot-to-dot after skipping from 1 to 29, and back to 16.

  “Oh, is Paul Revere stopping by for a spot of tea?” Vickie said, nodding at me as if we shared a private joke. I didn’t react.

  I jumped when a warm liquid ran down my leg. Adelle’s teacup was upended at my feet. “Uh oh,” she said, her hands tightening into fists as a flush spread across her cheeks. She looked like an injured toddler, revving up for a blood-curdling yell.

  Vickie bent down and swooped it up. “Everything’s fine! I can glue that handle back on so it’s as good as new.”

  Adelle relaxed, her eyebrows settling back in place. Vickie’s quick response had stopped my grandmother from a tantrum. Whew. I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  After Vickie went to get another cup of tea, Adelle whispered in my ear. “My sister calls me Lazy Lillian. All she cares about is homework and report cards. Not me. I have more important concerns.”

  Lazy Lillian? The Alzheimer’s website said that recent memories were the first to disappear, but patients could sometimes remember precise details from long ago. I guess older memories were ingrained from years of recall—at least until the disease progressed, and everything collapsed into a sinkhole. If Adelle was forgetting her name, the situation was worse than I’d imagined.

  “I’m a little like your sister,” I said, trying to silence my depressing thoughts. “I can’t even sleep until my homework’s done and in my backpack.”

  “I don’t have a sister,” Adelle said, her lip trembling.

  I sighed.

  “I like to write,” she went on, “about boys and sunshine and flowers. I like journals, too. I have so many of them.” She leaned in close. “You can find them for me.”

  “I don’t know where they are, do you?”

  The question seemed to float past her and dissipate into the air. “I need them now!”

  “Okay, okay, I’ll check. Be back in a sec. Wait here and whatever you do, please don’t yell.”

  In the library, the half-moon stained-glass window cast a lavender light across my Vans. I walked to the bookcase and scanned the shelves. The books were as old as the room itself—row after row of titles from the 1800s. Maybe that’s why the anachronism stood out, despite being sandwiched on the bottom row between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The War of the Worlds. I opened the thick poetry anthology to the author index and skipped to a familiar name. I smiled. Mom had told me the truth about Adelle’s writing after all.

  Her poem had a weird foreign title: “Anne Frank Kastanjeboom.” I typed Kastanjeboom into my phone and saw it was Dutch
for “chestnut tree.” I dug deeper, searching for more information. Apparently the famous teenager who’d died in the Holocaust had mentioned it a few times in her attic diary.

  I skipped to an article describing a fungal infection that had plagued the chestnut tree outside Anne’s window. A few years ago, a foundation tried to save it by attaching it to an iron structure, but it toppled over in a storm anyway.

  I flipped to page twenty-three in the anthology, relieved that the poem was published in English. The last few lines described the fallen tree, so I knew the poem couldn’t be that old.

  I returned the book to the shelf and searched Oma’s desk, looking for the journals she’d mentioned. No surprise, they didn’t seem to exist.

  I went back to the living room and said, “I didn’t find any journals in the library.”

  Adelle’s nose flared. Her cheeks brightened like beets. Crap, why hadn’t I changed the subject? She couldn’t hold on to a thought for more than thirty seconds, anyway.

  “No journals! No journals!” A tear took a circuitous route down the contour of her cheek.

  “I’m sure they’ll turn up, Adelle.”

  Her hands fluttered in her lap like a captured butterfly. “Don’t call me that!”

  “Oh, right. Sorry, Oma.” I repeated it in my head, making it stick: Oma, Oma, Oma.

  “I am not Adelle!” Her left foot dug into the carpet, leaving indents in the wool piling.

  Vickie swung the door open. “Inside voice!”

  Oma went still.

  “I’m sorry, Livvy. She’s too tired for a visit today.” Vickie picked up Oma’s hand. “It’s nap time, isn’t it, doll?”

  She led my grandmother out of the room.

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  I WALKED INTO THE APARTMENT TO FIND MOM IN the kitchen, the counter crammed with ingredients. She was making spaghetti casserole, which was one of my favorites. Half the meal seemed to be spread on the front of her shirt.

  “A little dash of this. A dash of that.” She shook two spices into the saucepan at the same time, swinging her hips, hula style.

  I hadn’t seen Mom this happy in a while. I dipped a spoon into the sauce to taste it. “Someone had a good day,” I said.

  “Hardly,” she said. “I’ve been trying to show Adelle how to put her dirty clothes in a hamper instead of dropping them wherever she takes them off. Jesus, you’d think I was trying to teach her to … I don’t know, to balance a checking account or something.”

  I bit back a comment. Mom didn’t even know the password to the bank website. It fell under my domain, had been that way since she bounced the payment for my eighth grade Girl Scout camp. “Speaking of money, is Vickie in charge of Oma’s bills now?”

  “Oma, huh?” she said, voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “That’s what she asked me to call her.”

  “Well, you know how bad I am about sending bills in on time, but I do most of the grocery shopping to make up for it.”

  “So you like her? Vickie, I mean?” I added a teaspoon of basil and a few shakes of salt to the sauce, then put the spices back on the rack, turning the labels out so they could be read.

  “What’s there not to like? She loves responsibility, and I don’t.”

  I shrugged. “She seems nice, but a little too nice, you know?”

  “Oh, right, I can see where that might be offensive.”

  I sighed. “She acts like a preschool teacher. Like Oma’s a helpless child.”

  Mom raised an eyebrow.

  “Come on,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

  She shook her head. “Vickie’s a godsend. I couldn’t do this by myself. I’d go crazy. Sometimes I think your grandmother uses the Alzheimer’s thing as an excuse. It’s like she doesn’t want to remember.”

  “Alzheimer’s thing? Oma’s sick, Mom, really sick.”

  She plucked a strand of spaghetti from the pot and flung it against the wall to see if it stuck. The al dente test. I’d have to wash the wall later.

  “Listen, Liv, I have to keep reminding her that my father’s been dead for a few decades.” We watched in silence as the spaghetti curled in on itself and flopped to the floor.

  “She still remembers things from when she was young,” I said. “How she loves to write, and about her sister—”

  Mom gave a strangled laugh. “My mother never had a sister. Only a brother named Hans, but don’t ask her about him, or she’ll start screaming about how he bit the head off her doll.”

  “She told me her grandmother lived in Holland,” I said, wondering how much Mom knew, how much she’d tell me.

  “For Pete’s sake, Adelle’s family was not from Holland. I think she was from somewhere in Germany.” Mom reached absentmindedly for the pot of simmering sauce. “Damn it!” She yanked her hand back, flicking off the pain.

  “Could we be Jewish, Mom?”

  “No.”

  “What about that silver box on Oma’s door?”

  “My mother’s delusional, Liv. Maybe she wants to be Jewish.”

  I passed her an ice cube from the freezer. She closed her fist around it. “Isn’t Friedman a Jewish name, though?” I asked.

  “It’s also Swiss. My father’s parents immigrated from Lucerne to Pennsylvania, where he was born. No one’s Jewish.”

  “Is it possible Oma converted later on?” I pressed.

  Mom laughed as if the idea was ludicrous.

  “You think she’s making this all up?”

  “Listen, Liv, there’s no point pushing her on the details. She’s obviously a hostage to her warped imagination.”

  “Maybe there are things you don’t know about her.” I made my voice sound mysterious. “You know, secrets she’s never told you.”

  Mom plucked the whittled ice cube from her hand and pitched it into the sink. “She’s not altogether right up there. Never was. My mother was a liar before the disease. Difference is, when she does it now, no one blames her.”

  At lunch on Thursday, Alex, Franklin D., Elizabeth, and I went to Grant High’s first-ever Chess Lunch Club. Alex, a nationally ranked chess player, was president. I’d never played before. Elizabeth taught me Scholar’s Mate, a way to win a game in only four moves. Inexperienced people don’t see it coming, she told me. As I played Franklin D., Candace’s voice rose from the recesses of my brain: Are you out of your mind? Chess is for nerds.

  If chess was for nerds, what would Candace have thought of my memory? I’d never told her or Audrey the truth. Having a talent for recall and a love of facts would probably move me into the same category as my new friends.

  Shut up, Candace, I thought, banishing her from my head once and for all.

  After school I stopped by the apartment to drop off my backpack, then hiked over the hill to Oma’s. The other day, I’d told Mom that Oma needed exercise. I couldn’t believe it when she agreed.

  “Why don’t you come directly from school and take her around the neighborhood?” she said. I figured she liked the idea of knocking a half hour off her shift.

  No one answered my knock on Oma’s door, so I rang the doorbell. Where was Mom? I remembered her saying something about an extra key in a plant on the porch. A fake-looking palm sat in the corner. I ran my fingers through its plastic leaves until I found the key, hammocked on a leaf and covered in a coat of rust. It had probably sat outside for the last twenty years. It took a minute of finagling before I could turn the lock.

  I stepped into the foyer. “Hello?”

  No answer. Only a distant squeak like a train moving away. Had Mom forgotten to mention a doctor’s appointment? Wait, I recognized that sound. The teapot! The whistle stuttered as it ran out of steam. Someone must’ve left the stove on. My palms went clammy at a horrible thought: Please, God, don’t let me find my grandmother dead.

  “Oma? Are you here?” I called, not very loud. I flicked on the hallway light. A yellow gauze spilled across the floor. I walked toward the kitchen, the heel of my boo
t striking the floor with each step. The door was closed. I rested my hand on the cold metal knob, took a breath, and turned it.

  My grandmother glared at me, wide-eyed and alive, a frying pan raised above her head.

  I flattened myself against the wall. “It’s me, Oma!”

  “You missed roll call.”

  I gingerly pried the pan from her fingers. “Well, I’m here now, okay?”

  The teapot gave a final hiss.

  “Please don’t take me back to camp.”

  “What’s wrong with camp?” I said, desperate to keep things lighthearted. “There’s swimming. And canoeing. Sleeping under the stars …”

  Mom was right—in the past few weeks, she’d gone downhill. I turned off the burner, then spotted the note on the fridge.

  Liv,

  Need a cup of coffee. Go ahead and walk Adelle. Vickie should be here when you get back. See you at home.

  Hugs,

  Mom

  Walk Adelle? She made my grandma sound like a dog.

  Getting Oma’s sneakers on was no simple task. She curled her toes, giggling like a child. “It’s a warm day, Oma. How about we take off that blouse and get you into a T-shirt?”

  She clasped her hands behind her back. “No! No! No!”

  Vickie and Mom had warned me about Oma’s need for privacy. She never let anyone help her get dressed, even though it took her a half hour to do. Lately we had to help her eat so all the food wouldn’t end up in her lap. Still, I couldn’t blame my grandma for clinging to the last bit of independence. “I’ll get you a shirt,” I said. “You can put it on by yourself.”

  “So cold.” Oma drew her elbows together.

  I threw my hands on my hips, frustrated. “Fine.” Maybe if she got good and hot, she’d be more cooperative the next time. If she remembered.

  Ten minutes later, I knitted my fingers through hers, and we started up Fillmore toward the bakery on Sacramento Street. Oma had a sweet tooth. I knew she’d love the almond bear claws. At the intersection, I waited as she leaned against a traffic sign, fanning herself with a hand.

  “Hey, remember when you told me about your sister? That she was obsessed with getting good grades?” The conversation I’d had with Mom had been bugging me all day. How could Oma have forgotten the gender of her sibling?