Family

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” It was a cold Sunday morning in the fall. The trees were bare and looked like they needed a coat. The ocean water lapped up against the sand, liquid ice. Two boys played by the beach, each daring the other to go farther into the freezing water. A little girl sat atop a sand dune, staring but not seeing anything, her eyes dark blue and blank, her mind traveling far from the chilly scene laid out in front of her. *          *          * My mind was with my grandmother. I could just imagine her sitting next to me on the frigid sand, in her bright red coat, pointing out all kinds of clouds in the sky, finding things that were invisible, like fat Arctic terns hidden between the sand dunes. Then she would take me home, make her cinnamon hot chocolate, and sit down and keep knitting striped slippers to sell at her shop the next day. My brothers would come home, cold, wet, and laughing. Mother would return from the bakery and settle down, close her eyes, and listen to some unheard music. After dinner we would all sit around the fire. Papa would come from the kitchen and tell a story about growing up in Denmark. The story usually involved his brother, Uncle Alge. Uncle Alge was special because he could feel no pain. He did ridiculous things. He once took a swim in the ocean in December, came out, and rolled around in the snow. My grandma would be sipping elderberry tea, Mother would be stoking the fire and drawing things on her sketchpad. My two brothers would be playing some card game. I would be listening to Papa’s story. Now Grandma has gone back to her home in Wales and Papa has gone to help Uncle Alge in Denmark. It is just Mother and I running the bakery. Grandma’s knitting shop has a big, mean, red “For Sale” sign in front of it. Mama says that once we sell the shop we will go back to Wales and join Grandma. I do not want to leave our town in Quebec by the sea. This is the only home I have ever known. I am Glas Aaderyn Eden-Pasãre. The funny thing about my name is that if you translate it into English it would literally mean blue bird bird-bird. As it happens, I love birds. It was seven o’clock when a knock splintered the soft morning silence. Mama opened the door and was met by a stream of apologies, in French, of course. This must be the postman, Étang, I thought. He is our village chatterbox. Once the swell of explanations had subsided, he handed my mama a small, rather plain, brown envelope, the kind of envelope that could not contain anything good. He left, and Mama promptly shut the door, locking out any further disturbances to our morning. She slit open the letter with a satisfying rip, as if ripping it would make all the trouble it might contain disappear. My mama looked distinctly unhappy with the contents of the letter. She opened her mouth to speak but closed it again, an indecisive look on her face. Finally, after giving the distinct impression that she was a fish, she spoke. “It seems that your cousin Maskine is coming to visit.” Maskine is the daughter of Uncle Alge and my dead Aunt Marge, who died when Maskine was ten. She arrived two days later. I saw her in the driveway, a small, coat-shaped figure, looking up at the house. The house is beautiful, it has a looming presence that you cannot easily forget. She seemed to be relishing every last detail, as if imprinting all of the worn, smooth stone in her mind. She struck me as a person who would not miss anything. Perhaps she could teach my brothers not to dump their green beans on the floor for Galapagos, our dog-like pet tortoise. She finally came inside. Placing her suitcase down in the center of the entrance hall, she proceeded to start staring again, looking up at the stairway that spiraled like a snake, a beginning but no apparent end. At dinner that night Maskine was silent. In the days that followed, the silence expanded, an ever growing puddle. She did not seem to be able to speak. Some tricky hobgoblin had stolen her tongue. She seemed to wear sadness as a second skin. I decided to give her time to adapt, like a new species. It takes them millions of years to develop all the skills that they need to survive. If they don’t die out first. One cold December day I was sitting on my favorite sand dune. As usual I was watching the birds run from the crystallizing foam. I loved the way they did their complicated dance across the frigid sand, as if their feet were flying to escape the cold. I wish I could dance that well. I am a horrible dancer. When I try I stomp on my dance partner’s feet, and then my brothers keel over laughing at the look on my mother’s face. Soon we are all holding our sides, we laugh so hard. “Beautiful, aren’t they?” I was rudely jumped out of my imagination and back into reality. I turned around. Maskine stood there, looking cold. “What do you mean?” I asked. “The birds, of course. Aren’t they dancing?” And those words would echo in my head for a long time after that. In that moment she saw the birds exactly the way that I did. The silence still hung around Maskine afterward, but it was more comfortable, like one between old friends who understood one another. One morning, about a week later, the doorbell rang. I was in my attic room, working on my mechanical birds. I love to make things. Especially things involving birds. My father started to teach me how to make mechanical animals when I was five.

I was off in my own world, racing through the imprints of time I can remember as clearly as my own name, the sound of the rain pounding mercilessly away at the roof of my grandfather’s house and the howl of the wind outside the raindrop-painted windowpane. I slouched in the rocking chair in the living room, watching the rain hammer away at the wood boards on the back porch and rocking absentmindedly. The droning hum of the heater vent vibrated through the musty air of the house. It was all white noise, buzzing away at the back of my head. In truth, my mind was not in that gloomy old house. I was off in my own world, racing through the imprints of time. I was back to that summer, with my friends on the beach, taking in the sun and talking about nothing in particular. We laughed at jokes that made no sense and splashed through the surf, making an obvious effort to have as much fun as we could before school stole those days away from us. There was no telling how much I would give to be back at the beach, in the warm sun with my friends, rather than watching the rain come down, miles away from the seashore. My parents were at a Class of ’85 reunion, probably laughing with some of their old friends and catching up on years lost. Naturally, I was outvoted, and here I was sent to suffer in solitude in the musty air of my grandfather’s lonely old house. I leaned back in the chair, closing my eyes. The silence began as the heater faded off, surrounding me, cutting through the pounding of the rain and the relentless howl of the wind. I listened for a moment before noticing the oddity of the silence. Where was my grandfather? For at least an hour, I had not heard a thing from him, which was unusual, for he was normally bustling around the house, occasionally with his cane, giving orders or letting Sparky, his highly energetic border collie, out into the yard. Now I could hear not a sound from his room or the kitchen. Befuddled, I rose to my feet, out of the chair, and curiously made my way down the hall to his room. My ever-prominent grandfather’s sudden silence held a feeling of gripping cold dread that wrapped around my heart like an iron fist. The pictures that hung from the walls in the long hall seemed to stare at me from either side, watching me, making the feeling that gripped me no easier to bear. Cautious, I touched the door to his room with my fingertips, pushing the light, wood door open. “Grandfather?” I called uncertainly. “Are you in here?” Relief washed over me when he answered in a clear, full voice. “Jane? Come in,” he replied. I sighed and entered, pushing the door all the way back. He sat on the tall, highbacked armchair that stood erect by the window, gazing out into the rain-soaked street. I rested a worried hand on the red fabric of the chair, furrowing my eyebrows in discombobulated confusion. “What is it?” I asked tentatively. Never was my grandfather this quiet, this withdrawn, so deep in thought. It startled me beyond all physical or mental belief and worried me to some extent. I had never really bonded with my grandfather, nor were we close at all, but the prospect of any idea bothering him this much was foreign to me. “Jane, could you fetch the photo album from my dresser?” he asked, gesturing at the old mahogany chest of drawers in one corner of the room. Bewildered, I scampered over to the dresser and picked up the leather-covered old photo album, cradling it in my hands so as not to ruin the antique delicateness. My grandfather turned to look at me and saw the way I looked at the old book. “Well, come on then. It won’t crumble beneath your fingers, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said, the strength returning to his voice, seemingly breaking the brittle layer of ice that seemed to cover the room. Awoken from my daze, I walked more briskly to the chair and placed the album on his lap, stepping back after I did so. His eyebrows furrowed in thought as his hand ran over the leather cover, dull in some places but shining on others from the pale light gleaming through the window. He was silent once more, and I could feel the ice beginning to spread again, the delicate webbed frost spreading like a shadow. My grandfather sighed deeply, and a look of profound sadness came upon his face. “Your grandmother…” he began, fading off. “Your grandmother gave me this photo album, the first Christmas we ever spent together,” he said, talking more to himself than he was to me. “She told me to store all the memories I could in it, so on days like this one I could look back and remember.” He sighed, looking out the window through the rain-spattered glass. “So many memories…” he mumbled, flipping open to the first page. The picture was in black and white, depicting a man and a woman in a suit and dress, each wearing a brilliant smile. “Was that…” I began, but he cut me off. “Our wedding, a day I will forever remember, every color, sound, smell, everything,” he mumbled. I sat on the bed, not taking my eyes off his face. The former silence took over as he bowed his head over the photo, broken only by the patter of the rain and the rhythmic ticking of the clock on the wall. We seemed to sit in deep quiet for eternity, neither speaking nor moving, as if the entire room had been encased in amber, and trapped. Finally, my grandfather looked up at me, a question in his eyes, “Jane, do you remember your grandmother?” he asked, his voice brittle,