It happened during a green and sticky almost summer two months before the end of sixth grade. It seemed like my past didn’t exist anymore. I sat inside my house and tore apart journals, ripping out one page at a time. People I hardly knew came to the house and pretended to know me. I heard the words “I’m so sorry” repeated umpteen times as my mother’s friends and distant relatives pushed tubs of food into her arms. After saying hello, I ladled out glasses of red punch, trying hard not to spill any on the white tablecloth. The bowl was filled with sliced lemons that floated on top of the water. Visitors talked about traffic or the weather, giving my mother time to volunteer her story. I knew it by heart.
My father Evan Wachtel had died at on May 5th at 10:30 pm from a massive heart attack. He was forty-eight-years-old. No one saw it coming. He’d been home for a few days after returning from a geological trip to Zimbabwe. That evening, we planned to go to the movies. My father had chest pains. He told my mother it was nothing. She wanted to call an ambulance. He got in our car. Mom raced through red lights to the hospital.
People listened as she related those final moments when the hospital staff rolled my father on a gurney to the emergency room. The doors closed. She waited. I hadn’t gotten back yet from soccer practice. When the doctor came through the doors, she already knew what had happened.
People threw their arms around her neck and said, “You know we love you,” as if that could change anything.
My father used to tell me how different gems were formed inside the earth—turquoise, topaz, amethyst and after years of pressure and mineral deposits, they became beautiful stones, which is what happened, in a certain way, to people, and said I was his little diamond.
He’d given me a bracelet for my tenth birthday that I kept in a velvet-lined jewel box. My bracelet and his tools—rock hammers, hand lenses and a heavy compass in a silver case—were all I had left of him. A tall man, he had an extra flap of skin on his right ear that he used for magic tricks, made coins appear and disappear and then come out through my nose. I didn’t care about anything, not even school, couldn’t stand waking up every morning knowing I would never see him.
A tall man, he had an extra flap of skin on his right ear that he used for magic tricks, made coins appear and disappear and then come out through my nose. He’d told me about all the countries and cities he’d visited—the call to prayer in Istanbul, the garnet mines of Brazil, and the wholesale Jewelry District in New York City not too far from Rockefeller Center. I couldn’t stand waking up every morning knowing I would never again see him.
For the first several weeks, the phone rang constantly, then less and less. Sometimes I heard my mother whispering on the phone. I hung out in the backyard and played tetherball, watched the cord wrap around the pole until it could go no further. I hunted for snails and tossed them hard against the fence until they exploded into piles of slime.
Mom stayed in her bedroom for hours. She tried to muffle her sobs.
Her full name was Genevieve Hollander. Everyone called her Genny. She’d taken leave from her job as a bank teller and spent her days filling out paperwork and speaking with people from Social Security and other places that needed a copy of my father’s death certificate. She had brown hair pinned to the top of her head and long fingernails that were always filed and polished. These days her nails kept getting chipped as she moved my father’s things to the basement, boxes of his clothing, shoes, “until I decide what to do with them.”
One day she hugged me and asked, “How would you feel about a person coming to live with us?
Why invite someone to live with us while we were trying to figure out how to fill up the huge space dad had left behind, a hole neither of us wanted to fall through. His ashes were in a brown jar my mother said was a copy of an Egyptian canopic that was used to store the organs of mummies. This whole death thing was so creepy. “Who is it?”
She said it was my grandmother’s best friend. “Her name’s Basuma Tripoletti. She doesn’t have a place to live right now. I told her I’d have to talk with you first. I was hoping this would work out for all of us.”
I wasn’t sure how I felt about a stranger moving in, especially right now. It felt like someone seeing my moles and stomach fat and my breasts that I wore for the first time in a stretchie nylon bra. But maybe Basuma could tell me more about my grandmother. I only knew her from a picture Mom’s dresser. She’d run a restaurant in Asbury Park and was supposed to be a great cook, a trait my mother didn’t share.. Mom showed me another photo and pointed “See, that’s Basuma.” I only hoped she wouldn’t leave her teeth in a glass jar overnight, which one of my friends told me her grandmother did whenever she visited.
“Where would she sleep?’ I asked.
The one house project my father had been able to finish was the guest bedroom in the basement. Outside the window were lavender plants with purple spiky flowers that perfumed the room. Mom said she was going to show me how to use them to make sachets for our linen cabinet. For the first time in weeks, Mom smiled. I thought we could put one under my pillow so maybe I wouldn’t keep dreaming about being stabbed by robbers, but I didn’t tell her that.
Now I wanted to know, “When will she get here?”