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  “And my dad confirmed it. He took one look at the picture from Alden’s funeral and said ‘Jesus Christ, son of God, it’s her.’ ” Then it all starts to settle with me.

  “Wait. Wait. Wait,” I say. I stand up and spin around a few times like a cat looking for the perfect place to lie in the sun. I yank my bikini bottoms out of my ass and plop down a little closer to Gus than before. “So you’re saying153 that when you were a toddler, your mother up and left you and Rex. And then she met someone else and got pregnant again. And before she had this other baby she decided to give it away. And my parents decided to take it. And they did. And then Julia/Juliette decided she should take the baby back. And she did. And she moved them to California, where she raised him and convinced him that signing up for a war was a swell idea. And so he did it. And then he died. And now we’re here.”

  Silence. Silence. Silence. Gus nods.

  I sigh. Not just a breath sigh, but the kind that engages the vocal chords and uses the diaphragm with the earnest hope to expel and be done with some emotion or hard, fucked-up fact. Then I lean forward and melt into Gus’s arms. The strangest, sweatiest, quasi-incestuous embrace ever to occur on a sofa that nobody owns. I realize why he chose this location for this moment; it’s neutral territory. I whisper into his ear, and my bottom lip momentarily flicks against his earlobe (not on purpose, I promise): “I hate her.”

  We leave Hansen’s Furniture and take Gus’s van to a bar called the Shamrock that has both air-conditioning and a friendly Great Dane that wanders around resting its fat head in the laps of patrons. I’ve never been there, but even without these two selling points, whatever Gus wants to do is fine. In the course of several hours Gus and I suppose and speculate and ponder our brains out. If Juliette was no longer in love with Rex, how could she leave Gus behind? Did she take Alden back because she was guilt-stricken about abandoning yet another child? Will she come looking for Gus now? Should Gus contact her first? What would Bless Her Heart Barbara do? Is Bless Her Heart Barbara Gus’s grandma? I’ve never seen Gus cry before, and I hold one of his hands as he tears. He’s had many weeks to process this and he’s still crying. His mother chose not to know him. And then she replaced him. What a jerk. The waitress brings us another round of Sierra Nevadas.

  “Gus, why did you wait so long to tell me? Why did you put the note in Annie Harper’s Journal?” I take the ketchup bottle from our table and start sliding it back and forth between my hands.

  “I guess I needed time to think things out. And I found out about the book as a result of all my Internet sleuth work, and so it just seemed right to give it time before I told you.” He rubs both his hands through his hair and they linger while they hold all the hair back, tightening the skin on his forehead and clearly revealing the red in his eyes.

  “So Alden was more yours than mine,” I say, and I smile weakly. “You realize this makes our teen movie about looking for him so much more interesting.” Gus chuckles and picks up his beer. His forearms look so tense and troubled. He takes a sip.

  “I guess so,” he says. “But at the same time, he’s still an absence to both of us. And we were still nothing to him.”

  27

  Today my memoirs are being expressed as a multimedia art installation in a dark alleyway. There are LCD monitors and tapestries and a speaker that says my name forward and backward over and over again. Annie Harper. Reprah Einna. Annie Harper. Reprah Einna. There is red paint splattered across chicken wire. And there’s a silent video of me that’s a close-up of my face painted white. Except my lips are a shocking, bright red. I’m mouthing the words No fucking way, no fucking way, no fucking way over and over again. The installation is called The Charisma of Coincidence.

  The day after I found out about Our Brother Alden, I went to go tell Loretta. I figured telling Loretta would be good practice for telling my parents. I wanted to be their perfect, perfectly articulate child when I revealed it to them. And I felt like there was so much emotion plugging my ears and smudging my glasses154 that I just had to get some of it out. Gus and I had decided that after everyone knows, and if my parents and his dad and the two of us all want to get together and talk about everything,155 we can have a barbecue sometime next week.

  When I arrived at Violet Meadows and checked in with Jean, she told me that Loretta was with the doctor and that I couldn’t see her for twenty minutes. My stomach instantly spun, and I leaned over onto Jean’s desk, resting my fingertips on the surface like two angry spiders.

  “Is she okay?” I stuck my neck out and noticed that my movement had set all the bobblehead kitty cats on her computer into a steady, nodding fury. As if they were telling me not to fret. Loretta, meow, just fine, meow.

  “She’s fine. Just a routine checkup. She’s old, Annie. She sees a doctor once a month.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Good.” And then I plopped into the chair across from Jean’s desk even though I wasn’t invited. Even though I could tell she was annoyed. “Hey, Jean?” I said. She spun her chair around and it squeaked kind of like a mewing cat and I wondered if she liked the sound. “Does anyone, you know, like family, ever come to visit Loretta?” Jean thought for a moment.

  “Yeah. There’s a niece that comes by every few months.”

  “Oh. And how long has her husband been dead?” Jean rolled her eyes and yanked open a metal filing cabinet. Rifled through for Loretta’s file. She opened it up across the desk. I leaned forward to peek.

  “Ron Schumacher died in 1995.” Jean turned back to her computer, and I kept reading upside down. I was looking at this rubric of Loretta’s basic facts.

  “Shouldn’t it say Captain Ron Schumacher?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because her husband was a World War II veteran,” I said.

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “No. He wasn’t.”

  “Was too.”

  “Was not.”

  “Was too.” It felt like we could go on forever. Or at least until the end of recess. “He was in the navy, and they lived in Kansas, and then they moved to Washington when he got back. She has letters. He wrote poems about it.” See? See, stupid, flabby Jean!

  “Loretta Schumacher has lived in Tacoma her entire life. Her husband lived in Tacoma his entire life. He was injured at a very young age in a logging accident and walked with a cane until he got sick and died. I know. I’ve talked to the niece. She doesn’t come often, but she pays on time and she’s very friendly when she’s here. I don’t know what kind of yarns Loretta has spun for you, Annie, but her husband was not a soldier and she definitely did not live in Kansas.”

  “But what about her children? I know they come to visit. Ronnie? Opal? Diana, the rodeo queen?” Jean folded her arms across her chest and lowered her chin.

  “She doesn’t have any children, Annie.” And I stammered off a series of “buts” and “she saids,” and Jean just shook her head and raised her eyebrows, and with that gesture she nearly managed to destroy everything I thought was real and beautiful about Violet Meadows. Her look said that my believing Loretta’s alternate life was more ridiculous than Loretta having invented it in the first place. And because I was so shocked and so confused and so crowded by Jean and her depressing, death-broker office, I made this frustrated grunting noise and said, “Whatever, Jean.”156 And then I stood up and left. I padded into the rec room and took a seat on a sofa next to a man named Henry who was watching Jeopardy! It was a very old episode on the Game Show Network. Alex’s hair was dark and his face smooth. And even though I was sitting next to a shriveled man with a respirator, seeing the youthful exuberance of the trivia master made me feel ancient.

  “What is salmonella?” Henry said and raised a finger toward the ceiling. How could Loretta make all that up? I thought. All the details and the anecdotes. The serious empathy and understanding she delivered to me while we drank tea and giggled about sex. Why would she lie to me? Or is she confused about the actual facts
of her own life? Undiagnosed Alzheimer’s, perhaps? I couldn’t tell if I felt betrayed or if I was still incredulous, but I didn’t have much time to think about it. Henry was saying “What is Montpelier?” when Jean poked her head out of her office and told me that the doctor was gone and that I could go in. If you still want to, she added.

  I told Henry to have a nice afternoon and walked slowly157 down the hall toward Loretta’s room. I stood at the doorway for many long moments, my fist suspended in the air, poised to knock, to enter, to waltz into a comfortable, chocolate-pudding-flavored lie. What do I do? Do I call Loretta on her bullshit? She’s ninety-three; how can she still have bullshit? Do I just keep playing along? The last thing I want is for Loretta to feel like she’s disappointed me. Maybe Jean was wrong. Maybe Loretta has been dispensing the sweet truth all along. And then my arm fell. I was thinking so hard that my fist just dropped and bumped along the wooden door weakly on its way down, like a poorly skipped stone barely lifting off a lake’s surface. An unintentional, exhausted knock. I heard Loretta shuffling over to the door.

  “Good afternoon, Annie!” She swooped her arm to present the gray room, and I walked in. Took my spot on the bed as I usually do. And as I plopped down on the quilt and she assumed her regular position in the rocking chair, I noticed the similarities to a patient/counselor situation. I was coming by, confused and muddled, for my weekly visit. Loretta was chipper, welcoming, open-minded. I lounged comfortably, primed to open my mouth and spill my nasty, turbulent guts to her. She sat upright: the voice of reason, clear as a bell.

  “So, how are you?” she said.

  “Pretty good,” I said. “Did your doctor’s visit go alright?”

  “Indeed it did. I think he’s a little frustrated with my snail’s pace of deterioration. I’m very healthy for my age, you know.” Then we both laughed.

  “Yeah, Loretta, your youthful vigor is pretty damn impressive.”

  “So, are things still rocky with David? Are you writing him more like we discussed?”158 Loretta said this like she was skeptical that I’d done anything to revitalize my relationship. But also in a way which revealed that she didn’t blame me if I hadn’t. I kicked my flip-flops off and folded my legs (criss-cross-applesauce style) up onto the bed.

  “Not really,” I said. “Well. There was Helen dying, then I was in Boston, and not. Oh, Loretta.” I just couldn’t get myself to start my story when my brain was still murky with confusion over the validity of hers. Then I looked at her for a long moment. I followed the lines around her eyes as they bent toward the blotchy redness on her cheeks. The wrinkles on her forehead and the ones around her mouth. How did they get there? Were the initial creases from worrying about Ron while he steered submarines off the coast of Normandy? Or were they from the years of grimacing while she helped him up the stairs to the local bank, his bum leg weighing down the marriage? And just when my wondering was about to plunge into a deeper series of imagined scenarios, all the wrinkles reversed. Each line—dozens of sine and cosine graphs—reciprocated and pulled up, and I looked up to her eyes and they were dancing and smiling in a way that transcended all war fronts and Kansas post offices and nursing homes in South Tacoma.

  “Annie? Am I losing you? What were you going to tell me?” She waved a hand in front of my face, a gesture I imagined the V-Meadows staff used to check the status of their more fragile and life-wavering residents.

  “Yes. Sorry. I’m here.” I asked Loretta if she wanted to hear a really weird, but true, story. I spouted off a lengthy disclaimer about the oddness of it all and an apology about how I hadn’t told her anything about what had led up to it. And even though in the course of a few minutes Loretta’s past had transformed from a clearly depicted, sweeping love story to a bundle of vagueness and uncertainty, for some reason, I didn’t care. Maybe it’s because I’m wildly selfish, but I like to think it’s because I still know Loretta. Maybe she is a delusional story weaver, but I’m fairly certain that doesn’t matter. I know that she likes lemon in her hot tea but not in her cold tea and songs with extended trumpet solos. I know that she listens and shares and comforts and compliments. And that she’s been such an enormous friend to me. While I was explaining all the Alden backstory—how my parents had him, then didn’t have him, and how I found out as a teen—I was thinking about how wise Loretta is. Maybe she’s had several conversation partners while at Violet Meadows. Maybe she knows that changing her story so it relates to someone else’s story will help that person cope with the more abrasive edges of our universe. At ninety-three, perhaps she’s right sick of her true past. Why not concoct a new one to help a crazy young fool who probably needs it?

  And I know that even though she might be a liar, Loretta is still a compassionate, feeling creature. It takes more than storytelling to constitute true phoniness. Loretta’s fake past feels more authentic to me than Annie Harper the First’s real one. She wept when I told her that Alden was killed just months ago. She lifted her hands to cover the drop of her jaw when I told her that Alden was Gus’s half-brother.

  “Isn’t it nuts?” I said.

  “Bonkers,” she said.

  “And this is my real life.”

  “Your real life.”

  I gave Loretta a big hug when I left. She told me to call her if there was anything, anything, I needed to talk about. “Annie,” she said as I moved toward the door. “I’ve been here for a long time, and there are many people who, because of age or disease or whatnot, have become very, very confused. And the confusion is often frightening. Not knowing what you feel or what you think or how things really are. But the confused ones—I honestly think they’re better off than the droolers. The ones whose minds have numbed and slowed and who don’t even notice when a stranger is wiping off their behinds. That blind acceptance is far worse. At least when you’re confused, Annie, at least you know that your brain is doing something.”

  Q: How wrong is a lie when it serves to lessen someone else’s pain?

  A:

  Subject: with my deepest regrets

  Date: Wednesday, July 14, 2004

  From: [email protected]

  To: [email protected]

  Dear David,

  This is probably the worst e-mail you’ll ever get from me. This is actually my fourth draft of it and I’ve come to the conclusion that it will always be the ugliest piece of writing that I will ever produce. And though I would prefer to tell you in person, or at least on the phone, that’s obviously impossible. You haven’t called in a few days. I just need to get this out.

  Last week Gus and I went to the circus. He got free tickets from a coworker and I agreed to go because a) I’d never been to a circus and b) I’m not really doing much of anything these days. In many ways, the circus met my expectations. There were many beautifully sculpted women in sparkly lycra outfits and scores of adorable children with their grandfathers. But the circus was not in a tent. It was in the Tacoma Dome. So that was disappointing. Naturally, I was really excited for the animals. Despite knowing that circuses are definitely not the optimal lifestyle for an elephant or a tiger, I was still anxious with the knowledge that I would soon see a real elephant and a real tiger in the flesh. We would be sharing molecules of air and maybe I would hear them roar.

  But when the ringmaster (he was satisfyingly portly) announced the arrival of the show’s three prize pachyderms, and as the spotlight panned toward the entrance of the concrete tunnel where the elephants were posed to emerge, my heart fucking sank. There was the first elephant, thick and gray and draped in blue silk and pink ribbons. And there was the concrete archway, thick and gray and draping the elephant in complete human wrongness. They just didn’t match. A bad fit that seems like a good idea and still delights thousands of people. But elephants do not belong in The Tacoma Dome. It’s a place for RV shows and monster trucks and Garth Brooks concerts. Not elephants.

  Gus could tell that I was upset about something and so he bought me some cotton candy. He s
aid, “I know you think you don’t want it, but as soon as you taste it you’ll realize that it’s the only thing you’ve ever truly wanted.” And he gave the vendor the money. And the vendor gave him the cotton candy. And then Gus gave it to me. And then I gave it a long, long look. And then I looked up at Gus. I leaned in and I gave him the biggest, richest kiss I’d kissed in a very long time. I know this is probably horribly upsetting for me to tell you in such detail, but this is the truth, David. And because I’ve completely betrayed you I feel like I owe you at least the favor of fully disclosed, brutal honesty. It was a very nice kiss. But I must clarify that while in it, I did not have some profound realization. I didn’t think this is the only thing that I’ve ever truly wanted. Now that would be a lie. Instead I thought this is what I want now.

  After the circus, Gus came over to my place for a drink. Later that night after he left, I was brushing my teeth when I noticed the toilet paper had been messed up. You know, the way you used to fold it. In an act of sentimentality, I had left it untouched since your last night here. But Gus had thoughtlessly messed it up to blow his nose. I found the crumpled bit full of his snot in the trash can. I feel wretched about this. I have totally wronged you.