When Karen—Pete’s wife, and now the chatelaine—had been assigning them to beds on the way back from Applebee’s, she had quite naturally and reasonably assumed that Sophia would want to sleep in Patricia’s former bedroom. Patricia had been the only girl in the generation that had included Alice’s husband, John; Sophia’s uncle Richard; and Jake, the straggler, the only one still living. Naturally John and Dodge had bunked in one room so that Patricia could have her own: a small, cozy third-story attic build-out with sloping walls. Upon reaching adulthood, getting married, and discovering that she was infertile, Patricia and her worthless husband had adopted Zula—Sophia’s mother—from Eritrea. The husband had gone on the lam and was no longer spoken of. Patricia had then died young in a freak accident. Zula had been raised by John and Alice, with Richard always hovering around the edges as a favored, cool, transgressive uncle. She’d ended up in Seattle, employed by Richard’s company. They had become close. Thus, when Sophia had been tiny, Richard had been her uncle/granddad. She still had memories of sitting on his lap reading books.
Three years ago, when she had been packing for the move out to Princeton, she had found the tattered copies of the D’Aulaires’ Greek and Norse myths that he had given her shortly before his untimely death. Opening Greek she had found a dried maple leaf, still faintly reddish, and heard the story from her father, Csongor, about how Richard had slipped it in there only minutes before the medical procedure that had killed him. They had taken it to an art store to have it framed under glass, and Sophia still had it among her effects. In sum, to the extent that Sophia conceived of herself as being part of an extended Forthrast clan, it was all about Richard, and about her longing—which would never be satisfied, and never go away—for the relationship she might have had with him.
And so she had requested that Karen Borglund place her, and, by implication, Phil, in the room that Richard and John had once shared. Karen—acting as designated driver since Pete had indulged himself with two flagons of Miller Lite—had given her an amused, knowing look in the SUV’s rearview mirror. “That room still has the original bunk beds,” she warned, with the briefest flick of the eyes at Phil.
“We’ll manage, thank you,” Sophia said. “Did Richard sleep on the top or the bottom?”
“To judge from the graffiti carved into the underside of the top bunk, he slept on the bottom.”
“As befits the younger brother,” Pete threw in, being as puckish as it was possible for a podgy Swedish-Iowan estate lawyer to get.
“Is that graffiti still there?” Sophia asked.
Karen paused before giving the answer, and the back of her neck flushed. “No,” she admitted, “it was on a sheet of what do you call it—”
“Masonite, sweet,” Pete said.
“—that was laid over the—”
“Slats.”
“—and supported the mattress. Which was just foam rubber. The whole thing had gone bulgy with age. I believe we took it to the dump. I can have Manuel hunt around for it.”
“No worries,” Sophia said, “I was just curious.” Earlier her voice had betrayed a little too much eagerness, and now she was trying to walk it back.
“The names of girls,” Pete informed her. “He would, I’m told, become very attached to certain young ladies, and then a breakup would occur for one reason or another, but they stayed on his mind for a long time after. He felt things deeply but didn’t always show it, your uncle Richard.”
After lying awake for a time in the lower bunk, hearing the slats creak as Phil settled into slumber above her, she reached over the edge of the bed, groped for her shoulder bag, and found the little flashlight she kept in an outside pocket. Rolling over on her back, she turned it on and played it over the blank sheet of plywood that had replaced the bulgy Masonite. There was, of course, nothing there except a layer of varnish. The slats themselves bore traces of carved words, but these had been painted over. All traces of Richard, or for that matter of Patricia or John or anyone else, had been expunged from the house. All of the history had been erased in Karen’s earnest efforts to make the house historical.
Later, she got up and padded out of the room. To the embarrassment of Karen, the master bath—originally the only bathroom in the house—was out of commission, as some plumbing was being replaced. So the visitors had been relegated to a sort of gimcrack mini-bath that the father of John, Richard, Patricia, and Jake had shoehorned into a wedge of space under the attic stairs so that he would have a decent statistical likelihood of being able to take a crap in peace. Stepping into it was like time-traveling to 1970. Its autumn-toned daisy Formica countertop, its op-art wallpaper, its light fixture, even its shower knobs were straight out of a Nixon administration Sears, Roebuck catalog. Sophia made herself comfortable on the padded seat of its harvest-gold toilet and reflected that this was probably where Uncle Richard had taken his last piss before walking out the door in 1972 to head for Canada to avoid the draft. Though of course he’d have been standing up. Sitting down, she was looking directly into the door of the shower stall. Its walls were covered in little inch-square tiles with a sort of randomized pattern. The floor had been adorned with peel-and-stick daisies made of some grippy high-friction plastic, to prevent slip-and-fall accidents. They’d been there, silently waiting to perform their assigned task, for sixty years. The color, she guessed, had faded—these were daisies as reinterpreted and geometrically abstracted by one of those acid-dropping hippie artists who made album covers for the Beatles or whatever. Through some fascinating process of aesthetic percolation, they had made their way here of all places in the world. The colors were now pastels, but she guessed they’d started out as primaries.
She had brought her bag with her. Tucked into the end pocket was a folding multitool—a going-to-college gift from her uncle Jake. This detail empowered her, somehow, to do what she did after she was finished on the toilet, which was to crawl into the shower stall on hands and knees and get the blade of the knife under the edge of a nonslip daisy—the best preserved of all the specimens, only one of three that still had all of its petals, not directly visible from the toilet, bettering her odds of getting away clean. With care and patience born of insomnia she pried up each of the petals, one at a time, exposing fiberglass that had not seen light since the Vietnam War. Then she worried the circular middle loose. Finally it came free and she gazed at it delightedly on the palm of her hand; it was limned in grime rich with Forthrast biomass, smelling faintly of Comet. The rest of Uncle Richard’s DNA might have been reduced to water vapor and air by the ion-beam scanner, but perhaps traces of it were still embedded in the slip-proof porosities of this artifact. She doubted she would ever make any practical use of it as genetic material, but it did make for a nice souvenir.
Lovely