The cuckoo clock

Her room was painted shades of black and white, the color of deadwood nestled against a sea of spring. Their wintry bark bore scars like eyes. I remember wanting to peel it back to see what was underneath.

   Oma would sit for hours staring into the thicket above our beds like it was a window to the old country. Mom was knee high when the nine of them boarded a steamship bound for Ellis Island—her sisters, her uncle, her brother, her mother. They all came to live with us the day after Oma was diagnosed.

   She talked to them every night. Oma would look straight through me as she took her plate at the dinner table near the end, repeating the same questions. When were they going back home? Why was God doing this? Sometimes I was Tante Ida or Tante Lena.

   Dementia was what the doctors said. For the better part of four years, it was something more insidious.

   I grew up thinking Oma was like a hard candy in an old dish that never aged and never emptied. She lived with us since I learned to ride a bike. I couldn’t believe the woman who brought three children into the world, put them through college, ran a bakery with my Opa, and washed the same paper plates for 50 years could die.

   Her bed was the one I would crawl into every night Mom and Dad were screaming bloody murder. She always hugged me sound asleep, humming, “Ring Around the Rosie.”

   Oma loved movies. We watched “Ever After” together so many times that it's etched into my eyelids. I can still hear the music every time I fall asleep. You know the story. Drew Barrymore escapes a life of service to her evil stepmother to win the heart of a French prince. For me, a French bulldog would have sufficed.

   She would sit bathed in the glow of the TV, explaining the story as it played out to whoever was there. Later, she could only remember bits and pieces. Then it was just a comforting noise. We watched it together once a week. Twice a week. Then once a day until the end when it was just on loop. It made her happy.

   She spoiled me when I needed spoiling. Sometimes Oma would slip $2 in my pocket. “How did that get there?” she would tease.

   Then her daughter took everything away from her.

   Mom wrestled the keys to the Volkswagen from her hand the day after a close call with a telephone pole gave its front nose a makeover. Next, it was her morning power walks—once the block in one direction, then the other, then back again through the briar patch around the house. When she started doing it at all hours, we put a tracker in her fanny pack.

   Then the day came when she forgot our names. Mom’s first. Then Dad’s. Mine was the last she remembered.

Oma said it like a question at the end.

"...Annie? ANNIE? Have we met before?"

   Sometimes we were strangers breaking into her house and stealing her things—her jacket, her purse, her jewelry—whenever she moved them. Her outbursts operated on a hair trigger.

   It was like childhood in reverse. She lost grasp of the simplest ideas, but chief among them were the words yes and no. No driving. No alcohol. No fighting.

   Mom loved all three. She never worked a day outside the home and spent hours each day to clean the house, watching her shows, smoking, and drinking straight gin like the women on TV Land. She wore a closet of nap dresses around the house and her hair in a sleek bob with bangs that changed colors when Jack came into our lives.

   Jack sold houses and bought Mom a good time when Dad was gone on business. He tussled my hair and called me doll face with a shit-eating grin.

   I could time their later fights by the cuckoo clock hanging in our kitchen. It was beautiful hand-carved birch with a thatched roof, an enamel dial, and a painted tin plate.

   Beneath its perch was a huntsman clutching a flintlock just like the Remington Oma used to keep, waiting for the bird to burst through its little door on the hour. The only gun in the house was the BB rifle Jack bought me that lived in my closet. He said it could rip through a five-gallon steel bucket.

Mom wound that clock every morning before she started her chores. She wound it so tight it snapped the morning he left.

I was decorating the tree when I heard them shouting in the kitchen. Then the sound of breaking glass. Jack told me to go outside. Mom fell and hit her head. There was blood. I shouldn’t see it. Oma was still fast asleep.

   He walked me to the front porch as he put on my boots. My pajamas didn't have feet. I remember how cold the rubber felt against my skin. I sat on the bottom steps rubbing my arms.

   Then I saw him walking out the door in nothing but his boxers and a wife beater with his hands in the air. Standing six feet behind him was Oma, pressing eight inches of steel against his skull. She asked him why he broke into her house and if he wanted to look like Swiss cheese as they marched outside, her finger on the trigger of my Benjamin Hotshot.

The shot sounded like a fart as he made a break for the Ford Sierra, the BB missing his ear by a camel's hair. I couldn't see past the glare of the headlights in the fog as he peeled out the driveway cursing our names.

   Oma just sat with me on the steps waiting for the police, gripping the Benjamin and caressing my shoulder. They never came. No one called 911. No one next door ever asked any questions.

   Everything stopped when Mom and Dad divorced—the cruises, my German lessons, the birthday parties. Not the shouting matches. Mom spat Oma’s name like a curse. She was why he left, why we were poor, why she bagged groceries like a teenager again.

   I was starting high school when Oma’s legs started failing her. She came home every afternoon from the adult daycare center Mom shipped her off to on Dad’s dime once class got out. I was left on my own pushing her 50-pound wheelchair up the folding ramp into our house to start her daily routine, which always began with a mad dash to the bathroom. I needed the exercise, Mom said.

   “You have your grandmother’s body,” she told me. She lived on a diet of Fiber One bars and made sure I did too. I remember biting hard into one the Friday Oma died, biting my tongue in the process.

   It was swollen when I marched upstairs to Oma bringing her the same menu of pills, a goat cheese omelet, and a steaming bowl of oatmeal splashed with cinnamon.

   That morning was hard—dressing her, changing her, bathing her, feeding her. I kept a running list of her medications and doing her daily finger sticks. It was the same every morning—30 units of long-acting and 10 units of short-acting insulin. I always thought it would be easy to mix up.

   Oma could survive on the rosary and a spoonful of olive oil. I made her eat even when would spill it on the floor. I was trying to poison her, she would say.

   Something was different about that Friday the moment the tray touched her bed. She was calm. She looked me straight in the eye, grasping me by the shoulder like I’m 10-years-old again.

   “Ida, we’ll be late!” she said. “We’ll be late to the boat!”

   I lie. We’ve already boarded, I say. We're all going home.

   She lowers her brilliant blue eyes and rests her head on my chest, telling me to wake her when we get there.

   Oma was buried under six feet of sandstone in Mt. Calvary Catholic Cemetery next to Mom, who read my mind the day of our last fight.

   “Oh, here we go. Act Three! Annie pretends to run away! So go, then!” she blurted out an inch from my face, happy hour on her breath.

   I see the back of her hand. I remember how its rings grazed my cheek. How silent we both were. For ages, she stared past me in disbelief, glaring at it like it belonged to someone else. It carried me up the stairs. Threw away my birth control. Pointed at me like a criminal.

   Did I know how much she sacrificed bringing me into this world? The doctor's visits? The surgeries?

   The last thing I saw was Mom staring back at me in the rear view mirror, arms crossed in a goodbye. The Navy put six countries between us until changing tides brought me back to bury her.

  I see her framed in black and white in a square-shouldered jacket and long skirt from the stairs. She has her hair done up in large wavy rolls, the ends cut in a U shape like the girls in the pictures, the ghost of a smile etched on her lips. Oma loved being seen and seeing people.

   The house was mine and it was empty. The furniture was on its voyage to Goodwill. I’ll be hosting an open house next week, God willing.

   Morning streams in from the skylight above as I march back up to our room boxing three generations of Fischers.

   There I am at four-days-old held by Mom, thin as a reed in tight bell-bottom jeans. She said no one was ever allowed to photograph her barefoot and pregnant.

   I see the same red-headed girl at her first communion party seated with her parents. I never looked much like them. Dad was Sicilian with chestnut eyes, wavy dark hair, and a narrow nose. Mom was square jawed with high cheekbones and judging eyebrows. Between my emerald eyes and ginger hair, I never looked a generation removed from the Mediterranean.

   Now she’s Little Orphan Annie for Halloween. I was given every toy for that movie that existed—the dolls, the car, the bags. It must have been cute to dress up their one and only miracle child as the girl who got everything.

   Our house was no mansion on Fifth Avenue, but it came with a pool, a hot tub, and a makeshift bar. She papered over it with floral and baroque comic strip, groovy and surreal from what she called the best decade of her life. Sometimes the only way to save memories was to glue it down.

   The fragiles are boxed and ready for Amazon—vintage dishes, the herds of porcelain deer, the Japanese Go board beside the fridge. I would need some kindling for Mom’s Cabbage Patch dolls.

   I come to the last photo. She’s seventeen and draped in graduation robes, her head turned in protest like she doesn’t want to be living a historic moment.

   The box hits the second floor with a thud. Everything is taped down just like I left it—the trim, the baseboards, the door frames.

   I spend the morning patching holes and sanding down rough edges. I put it up to the light with a sun bright halogen lamp. I work my way around circling each one with a pencil, drawing an X on high spots to knock down and scribbling in areas that need to be filled in.

   Lunch is half an Italian hoagie with extra mayo and Gatorade. I hear him panting as the door creaks open. It never locks anymore. Sandy saunters over a paint-stained carpet of The Oregonian with a tennis ball in his mouth smearing a fresco on the classifieds. I fetch him a slice of salami and lead him by the collar to the backyard.

   “Good boy,” I whisper in his ear, playing the good cop like I do with our cats.

   The Otterhound must be 80 in dog years, as his thinning coat and popping joints attest. Poor guy gets lost and bumps into things. Sara says I should have him put down. I have no idea why. He’s not in any pain.

   That afternoon, I mask up and roll on a coat of primer. It’s extra thick and unsightly. It bleaches my Navy hoodie and blue jeans snow white.

   By Saturday night, I cut-in with a paintbrush and the top coat around the corners. Dad always labeled the paint he used in permanent marker. The paint left in the house is enough for a can of baby blue—a gallon of cyan, magenta, and a splash of black. It reeked like rotten eggs, but I’m not going back to Home Depot and rubbing elbows with a bunch of mouth breathers.

   I lay down waves of baby blue along the wall in wide “V” shapes. I do about four feet before the wall is tucked beneath a velvety, matte quilt. Two more coats should make the room look like a million bucks—or whatever people are paying for a two-bedroom Portland bungalow in 2020.  

   The For Sale signs strewn about our neighborhood look like Christmas trees in July. The world is ending and I’m holed up here until Sara tests negative. Our studio makes it hard to keep much distance between us. She was also a paralegal who taught me how to lose an argument for free.

   I fire up the air mattress and unfurl a sleeping bag downstairs like I’m in basic training. Thinking about the apocalypse keeps me up. So I whip out the sanding pole and take another pass at my bedroom wall.

   Then I spot a sleeve peeking underneath the closet door. Most of the clothes hanging in the closet were mine, save for overflow items of Mom’s.

   Stepping inside, I stub my toe against a dust-caked wooden box huddling beneath a Thriller crop top. It's the cuckoo clock, hollowed out like a Christmas Turkey, with a thin lip of cardboard taped over it.

   There must have been 50 yellowing letters that spilled out of it spanning more than a decade. They were all addressed to my parents and written by an 18-year-old named Sam.

   Buried with them was a faded picture of a smiling red-haired woman in uniform standing beside a Humvee with a taller mustached man in uniform. The photo was dated May 5, 1977. The names Sam Caufield and Steve Gerald were scribbled on the back.

   They were both in the army. Their daughter, Ann, was born at U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa, Japan. She was a translator. He was a drill sergeant. They broke up before their daughter was born. Her parents disowned her. She wanted Ann to have a better life stateside.

   She connected with two would-be parents through an agency while she was pregnant. They met up a dozen times for brunch and maternity clothes shopping.

   There was more to the box. Five years of Christmas cards from Sam after she married another man. Pictures of them and their three kids around the tree.

   Her last letter was dated June 9, 1990. The name Samantha Caufield was printed on the envelope, along with a Vancouver address.

   Dead silence wallowing up in me.

   There were a million places she could have put this, but she kept it in my closet all these years. The time this box must have spent moving around the house to stay closed.

I tried to imagine it. When she's 14, I'll show her. Then she turns 15. Then 16. Someday, when she’s a mother, she’ll understand.

   I wanted to throw the letters back into their box, shove it back in my closet, brick up that room, and paint over it with concrete.

   Then I got the feeling I was about to do something stupid. Really, really stupid.

   I close my eyes. I take a long, deep breath. Then another. Hands by my side, the skin taut over my knuckles, my fingers curl into fists. My hand hovers over the door in debate.

   Without another thought, I rap on the door.

   The slab of glass and mahogany between us swings open. There she is standing six feet away from me. She’s 5’4”—tall enough that we can look each other squarely in the eye. Her ginger hair is the same shade of rusted copper. It’s like looking into a mirror 20 years from now. We could be sisters in the wrong light.

   Her sea green eyes swell like balloons before the door slams shut on a dime. I raise a fist, prepared to bang on it before it flies opens again.

   “…Sorry. I forgot to put my mask on,” she says, stepping further back into the foyer, fiddling with elastic ear loops between her fingers.“What can I do for you?”

   I started and stopped like my Hyundai. “…Is there—is there a woman named Sam who lives here?…Did she give a little girl, Annie—Anne, up for adoption in 1977?”

   “I’m sorry, who are you again? Have we met before?”

   “I…I think we have. At U.S. Naval Hospital Okinawa, Japan. Where I was born. To a woman named Sam. Samantha Caufield. I think I might be your daughter?” I stammer, biting my lip beneath the thin layer of cotton covering it.

   Her eyes welled up like a fountain as they searched my face. Mine do too.

   My chest heaves like someone rolled a boulder on it. I breathe in. And out. Then we step one foot closer.