Pinwheel bedspreads

It was ’99, I was sixteen, and my dad had just died. The circumstances surrounding his death were questionable—the words “poison,” “enemies,” and “cover-up” were used, always in the form of questions, by police. In the end, his death was not ruled a homicide.
The woman who birthed me left a month after I was born. I don’t use the term “mother” because she wasn’t a mother in any way except by biology. Dad was always both father and mother to me, and I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope without him. Sometimes I found myself talking out loud to him, and it was only after being in a trance for who-knows-how-long that I realized what I was doing and stopped talking. Sometimes mid-sentence.
I was sent to live with an aunt and uncle. My father was forty when he died—or was killed. His parents had him when they were fifty (much to the surprise of nearly everyone—most had supposed that his mother had already gone through menopause). They were an unhealthy pair and died when I was a kid. I had never met my aunt. She was twenty-five years older than my dad. He had always been tight-lipped about her. I assumed it was because they were so far apart in age that he just didn’t know her all that well.
Aunt Ingrid and Uncle Henry lived in Connecticut. I had grown up in downtown Orlando, the city beautiful, city of art, music, and immigrants. Irish food was served by people from Ireland—sometimes while they argued about how to deal with The Troubles. Little Vietnam was minutes away, and while the servers couldn’t really speak English, menus were printed in both Vietnamese and English, and they knew what you meant when you pointed. After getting a bite at a fancy Indian restaurant, you could see an indie show, dance at the eighties dance bar, or listen to writers read their stories and poetry. Coffee shops with actually tasty vegan entrees and desserts were not only prevalent, but unique. One had tables made from marble that had exploded in the making of a movie; another had a bright orange and yellow pinwheel-like tent on the ceiling.
I didn’t know much about Connecticut, but what I did know was wrong. I had expected giant colonial houses everywhere; white people with blond hair; Polos with popped collars on literally everyone. I expected Gwenyth Paltrow-esque fake British accents, and a general level of shit-don’t-stink attitude.
Instead, many of the towns were old and run down. Upper middle class kids did wear Polos, but there were a lot more poor people than expected. And I had no idea how rural parts of Connecticut was. Aunt Ingrid and Uncle Henry lived on a secluded farm. For some reason, I hadn’t expected there to be farms anywhere in the state. I didn’t really know much at the time.
A cab dropped me off on the farm and I paid the driver. Being so far away from my town made me miss my father. My hands sweated and my body felt hollow. It wasn’t fair. I already didn’t have a mother—why did my father have to be taken from me as well?
The house was larger than I had expected. It reminded me a bit of the Bates Motel, or maybe one of the homes in a Flannery O’Connor short story. Blackness covering parts of the wood and roof let me know that the house was old. The door had been painted a golden or urine yellow.
Aunt Ingrid answered the door when I knocked. She was much taller than me—probably close to six feet. At sixteen, I had just reached five-foot-four and was still a couple pounds short of a buck. Aunt Ingrid was overweight but not obese. She looked like a sturdy woman. She wore a long sleeve blouse tucked into an ankle-length mauve skirt. On her face were deep crevices around her eyes, mouth, and chin. I doubted that she spent hours at Mac and Sephora like I did. She probably hadn’t heard of either.
She didn’t smile at me at first, but stood there. After what felt like minutes, but was probably less than one, she cracked a small smile and sad, “So this is Katie. I met you when you were first born. You look like your mother.” I didn’t feel like telling her that I wouldn’t know or that I didn’t really care. As far as I was concerned, I was only my father’s daughter.
With that, Aunt Ingrid turned away from me and walked inside, leaving the door open. I followed her and shut the door behind me. The house was dark for it being the middle of the day. Amber yellow curtains allowed only parts of the sun in. I saw the back of a man’s broad head peeking out over the top of the couch, which was covered in a flowery sheet.
“Henry,” Ingrid called. Her voice carried a hint of raspiness. The man on the couch turned around, then stood up and walked over to me. He nodded to me and stared into my eyes.
“He don’t talk,” Aunt Ingrid said. “Not since the operation.” She didn’t elaborate.
I noticed a picture of my father when he couldn’t have been older than me sitting on the wooden table next to the couch. In the same picture, Aunt Ingrid had her arm around him.
“Lyssa! Meat!” she screamed.
A young man and woman emerged from a dark hallway off the living room. The woman was meek-looking. She was skinny and pale—even skinnier and paler than me—and had long ashy blond hair, light purple circles under her grey-blue eyes, and chapped lips. She could have been very pretty if she had cared to be. The man looked like Uncle Henry—broad, a bit overweight, brown-eyed, bushy-haired, and a bit stupid looking. I learned later that the woman was twenty and the man was twenty-five.
“These are your cousins,” Aunt Ingrid said. “This is Lyssa.” She put her hand on Lyssa’s shoulder and I swear I saw Lyssa recoil just so slightly. “And this is Jean, but everyone calls him ‘Meat.’” She hugged him and kissed his cheek. Lyssa didn’t look at any of us.
“I’m excited to have a girl here who’s not my sister,” Meat said. “I haven’t seen another girl around here since I was little.” Great, I thought. I get to fill the “I need a girl around here” void left in a man named ‘Meat.’ Who is also my first cousin.
Aunt Ingrid showed me to my bedroom. There was a full-sized bed with an amber yellow bedspread. I had a dresser with an oval-shaped mirror. There was one window. Aunt Ingrid told me I was adjacent to Lyssa’s room, but that I probably wouldn’t want anything to do with her. “She’s not right in the head,” Aunt Ingrid said.
“Dinner is served at six PM every night. Breakfast is at 5:30 in the morning. Lunch you can figure out on your own. If you want anything besides what we got, you can kill it or grow it yourself. We’re completely self-sufficient here. You don’t look like you got experience killing anything, so I’d start with trapping rabbits if I were you. That is, if you get hungry for more than we feed you. Judging by your boney arms, you probably won’t.”
The thought of killing an animal repulsed me. It wasn’t that I was a vegetarian or anything—I just couldn’t imagine doing the killing myself.
Before she left me to myself, she said, “Call me ‘Mama.’ You’re mine now.” With that, she smiled and left, closing the door behind me.
I lay down on the bed and turned the light on the nightstand on. I had brought a bunch of books and opened my favorite William Gay collection. Before long, I heard a knock on the wall coming from Lyssa’s room. She knocked twice. Pause. Three more times. I went to the wall and knocked back. She knocked three more times.
I decided to see if she needed anything. When I knocked on her bedroom door, she didn’t respond. I opened the door and saw her crouching on the floor with her hand balled into a knocking fist next to the wall.
“You shouldn’t be in here,” she said. “Mama and Henry won’t like that.”
“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.
“Just knock. Knock on the wall,” she said.
Well, I thought, Aunt Ingrid said that she wasn’t quite right. A loud “yeeeooooooeeaaaoooooh!” came from what sounded like far away in the house. I decided to knock once again, but didn’t answer her after that. I just wanted to read and sulk about missing my dad and my friends and my art shows.
Soon enough I would learn there were things much worse than missing one’s deceased father.