November 27
Contrary to what I told Ben, Thanksgiving is a little different this year.
The first thing I do when I wake up is call Parker. Mr. Ryan answers, to my surprise.
"She hasn't returned," Mr Ryan says lethargically.
Later, Mrs. Wallace jabs the doorbell, touring a slumped Lindsey with her.
"I have somewhere to be," she says hurriedly. No white lies about business this time, I notice. "I know it's Thanksgiving but . . ."
She doesn't finish her thought.
Lindsey's cheeks are deep red, a combination of the cold air and the humiliation of being imposed upon her neighbors.
Mom smooths things over. "We'd love to have Lindsey for Thanksgiving."
With that, Mrs. Wallace drops Lindsey's hand.
"You be good for the Faros," she orders as an afterthought, as she dashes off for the car.
Lindsey's face trembles. Before Mom or I can say or do anything that might help, she bursts into tears. She runs upstairs and barricades herself in the bathroom.
We allow her a few minutes alone before I knock on the bathroom door.
"Lindsey?" I call.
No response. I try again.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah," answers a wobbly voice.
"Can I come in?"
Lindsey flings the door open then retreats to the sink. She faces the mirror and uses a tissue to dab her eyes.
"Are you disappointed you didn't get to spend the day with your mother?" I ask gently.
"It doesn't matter," Lindsey intones.
"It doesn't?" I ask doubtfully.
In my mind, I shovel away the memory of Mom's face falling in dismay when I announced I don't want to celebrate Thanksgiving with this joke of a family. Thanksgiving, I had declared, was the biggest joke of all; it's all about pretending to like people when we secretly wished they would catch smallpox. Mom had worked for days beforehand to plan the perfect Thanksgiving meal for us and for Ronnie. I protested by refusing to eat a single bite of it. It had not helped my cause that Ronnie was on his best behavior.
"No," Lindsey says decisively. "Mom and I don't even celebrate like other families. It's not an important holiday."
"It's not that big for us either," I tell her. "We don't have any relatives to visit or anything. Sometimes we don't even have turkey."
Lindsey stares into the mirror.
"Are you going to have turkey this year," she wonders out loud.
"If you want." I figure Mom and Dad won't be averse to a mad dash to the grocery store.
Dad checks in on us.
"I have an idea," he brings up. "How about I take you girls to see my store?"
Dad has caught on to Lindsey's fascination with jewelry. Lindsey brightens.
"Really?" she exclaims. Then with a shade of skepticism, "Aren't you closed today?"
"To the public, but there's no reason we can't go in for a brief visit. Then we'll go pick up a few things for dinner."
I have to hand it to Dad. His jewelry store is the perfect diversion from Mrs. Wallace's abandonment. And entering the store when it is closed - when there are no other employees or customers - is like entering an unexplored tomb.
Lindsey drinks in the surroundings while Dad punches in the alarm code and turns on the lights. A long L shaped counter stretches down along the walls, with a cashiers station perched at the end. Two glass encased merry-go-round displays stagger down the middle of the room. On the wall behind the counter are shadowy posters of top brand jewels and watches.
Lindsey hovers over the glass displays, trying to identify each gem and each metal. Most of these details are labeled on accompanying cards, but Lindsey, determined not to peek, blocks out the printed descriptions with her hand. She also takes care not to touch or breathe directly on the glass.
The door in the back corner of the room leads to the a work room/ office. An array of microscopes, buffers, and other touch up machines line the wall and the free counter space is littered with papers, wires, pliers, screws, and oil rags.
Dad flicks on one of the microscopes and slides in one of the less valuable gem cuttings. He points out the flaws in the stone, and how it contributes to the pricing of the gem. Then he shows Lindsey a comparison of a real diamond shaving and a paste copy.
While Dad leads the lecture, I take a piece of scratch paper and scribble out a shopping list: turkey, gravy, boxed stuffing, canned cranberries, green beans, corn, Pillsbury rolls, and pie from the freezer section (cherry or blueberry if they're out of pumpkin.) We're also running low on margarine and milk, and I can't remember the last time we used cooking oil. I assume Lindsey will have milk to drink and the rest of us water. I'll ask Lindsey if she wants to add anything after we leave Dad's store; she won't welcome my interrupting her now while she is enrapt in the glamour of gems.
"I'm gonna be a geologist," Lindsey announces when we return to the car a couple hours later. "I'm good at math and science. I'll get to discover gems and minerals."
"There are a lot of interesting jobs in that field," Dad agrees. He and Lindsey discuss other angles in Lindsey's future career: everything from archaeology to water science. Dad explains how there are big sources of water underground called aquifers and a lot of communities in the land-locked western regions obtain their water from these aquifers.
"The question is," Dad says as he steers the car into the parking lot of the grocery store, "how long are these aquifers going to last? People use much more water than is replenished naturally. They were not made to sustain big cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas. Western states are working on teaching their inhabitants water conservation."
Lindsey has studied ecology in school, so she understands about water conservation. She knows more about it than I do. Although I did read Silent Spring.
Correction: Judith read Silent Spring, back in her lifetime, but I remember some of it. But I'm guessing that at least some of it is out of date by now.
I present my list to Dad.
There's no turkey left. Dad and Lindsey and I all agree that we're fine with substituting chicken. We get blueberry pie and everything else on the list.
Lindsey tugs on my sleeve. At first, I think she wants to ask permission to add ice cream or something to the cart. (At this point, we're in the freezer aisle.)
Instead she whispers, "What do you think Laurie's doing for Thanksgiving?"
The Judith reminiscences have not caused my mood to plummet precipitously, but this does. It cannot be a happy day for Laurie, in the shadow of what must have been pleasant memories with the Strodes. I doubt Laurie or any of the Strodes opted to protest that the holiday is a sham. Rather, she must have enjoyed the day with her parents.
"I don't know," I murmur. I don't know where Laurie would be at the moment: if she's under guard with the Feds or if she has been given a new identity. Because she's seventeen, they would not have to put her in a foster home; she could be legally emancipated. Maybe WITSEC has spiked her age to eighteen, and Laurie, like me, would be celebrating a different birthday.
"Maybe she's spending the day with the Feds or WITSEC," I say optimistically, though I think it's more likely that she's alone, with nothing but bittersweet memories to keep her company.
II
We unload the groceries. While we were gone, Mom has gone over to the Ryans.
"I was going to offer that they come eat dinner with us," Mom tells us as she shoves the chicken in the oven. "But they've got a full house. Joel and Kristi came home and Lucy's parents - Chelsea's grandparents - are there and a lot of people I've never even met."
Even with a full house, they would still feel Chelsea's absence, I think.
I hug Mom. "Thank you for doing this," I tell her.
Mom hugs back, her eyes a tad misty.
The four of us prepare everything in less than an hour and we set the table and eat. Lindsey has completely forgotten her gloom from this morning. Maybe she decides, in perspective with Laurie's and the Ryans' holidays, hers does not seem so depressing.
Or in perspective to the MacCreadys, or the Bracketts, or Adele's family. Thanksgiving is going to be different for a lot of people this year.
I wonder if Michael thought about Thanksgiving while he roamed around the county as a fugitive. I wondered if he ever missed Thanksgiving. Or if to him it was just another memory that Judith ruined.
III
In the evening Lindsey flips through my school books. My chemistry books enthrall her the most.
Too late, I remember my dream analyses list that I had written in my chemistry notebook. But Lindsey has not glanced at any page long enough to read in detail. Even if she does, now or when she's snooping later, I decide not to make an issue of it. I have already established to everyone I ever met that I have weird dreams where I am Judith Myers. Nothing I have written is news to Lindsey, and I don't think Lindsey would be judging Judith's secrets the same way most others would.
"I wish I had a notebook like this," Lindsey comments as she puts down the notebook and pokes at the set of carbon paper.
"No, you don't," I say. "It makes everything in it dirty and smudged."
"That's because when you write, you press your fist against the paper," Lindsey informs me. "Don't you notice that the side of your hand gets all covered in ink or lead?".
I twist my right arm to examine the side of my hand.
Judith did the same thing when she wrote, but that was more corrective, afterTonyhad snipped off the pinky finger on her writing hand.
I remember it now. Mom was out doing errands and she had Michael (then a baby) with her. Judith had gotten a thorn in my hand.
(A thorny twig had been mysteriously placed in her glove. There were a lot of these accidents lately. Broken glass in her shoes. A pin stuck in her T-shirt. A loose strap in her roller skates. )
Tony gets out the dread branch cutters. He has used it several times to fix wounds on her hands, to cut away gravel or remove stingers or splinters.
He flattens Judith's hand in his strong grip and laces her fingers between the blades. He might have sensed the threat was growing weak after so many repetitions. So he closes the blade cutters on her littlest finger.
Judith stares at her hand, suspecting it's a trick and knowing he would continue his torture if she screamed or overreacted. Blood runs out, but he had cut her before. "She squirms around too much," Tony had explained to Mom about the phantom cuts after he fixed her wound. Mom believed him. "It'll go much easier if you hold still," she told her, echoing Tony's scolding. Judith wants to say that Tony is the one causing the situations, but she doesn't think Mom will believe her.
The blades separate and her finger fell to the floor. Judith sees it lying on the floor. She can hardly register that it's her finger. She looks back at her hand, at the bloodied end of the pinky that suddenly looks too short, and then she starts bellowing.
Tony acts responsibly after that. He wraps her finger in a dish towel and retrieves the tip, stashing it in a Baggie of ice. Then he calls the hospital and explains that his stepdaughter's finger is severed and he's bringing her in.
Maybe, Judith hopes, now that this has happened, he will stop this game.
Mom meets them after the doctors have reattached my finger. "Judith was fooling around with my tools," is Tony's smooth explanation. Mom heaps praise on Tony and reprimands Judith for her carelessness.
Because he snipped her finger close to the knuckle, her pinky lost some of its pliancy. Judith learned to write with her pinky straightened, but to compensate, she pressed her other fingers lower on the pen. As a result, she ended up pressing her hand into the paper and the ink or graphite on top. And my body has adopted that habit.
