“Well, Nina,” the gray-skinned goblin says, “Picked any fresh oranges lately?”
“They’re a little harder to peel than I expected,” I say and shrug. “Maybe I’m not cut out for citrus.”
“I don’t like it when you girls talk like that,” the werewolf says from behind the pantry door. “It makes it sound like you’re living an imaginary, nonsensical life.”
Aren’t we?
“Oh, that’s right, Mother,” the goblin says. “You’re the one grounded in reality.”
“Very funny,” the werewolf says, coming out of the pantry and clawing her dainty hands at the goblin.
The goblin looks at me with her white-blue eyes. She shakes her head and sighs.
Ray comes back into the house through the kitchen door.
“Sorry,” he says. “Left my phone. Need to make some calls.”
“Who you calling?” the goblin asks.
Ray stops short and looks at the three of us. His face takes on a somber realization.
“Is this for Dad?” he asks.
The air around us is thick with knowledge of the date we have all watched coming on the calendar.The real reason we have all shown up here when there was not an invitation. It’s the reason Ray seems ready to jump out of his skin now.
Dad would have been sixty-eight.
Ray slips on a paper devil face with horns. Mom puts her hand on the devil’s shoulder, but he brushes it off. The goblin goes to him, and they stand together against the bright white kitchen and its flowered wallpaper and the efforts of the rest of the world to get in. The werewolf and I, a simple house cat, look at each other, and I wonder if one could eat the other whole.
Lola brings the four of us together in an embrace in the center of the kitchen. It’s easy to cry to with a mask on. A little hard to dab away the tears though. Ray can’t stand it for long and pushes out of the circle.
“Ray,” Mom calls to him.
He’s already torn off the mask and tossed it on the counter by the kitchen door. I hear his car start up, and Mom nods at me.
“He’ll be all right,” I say to Lola, both of us taking off our paper shields.
When I get outside, Ray’s car hasn’t moved. He’s just sitting there in the driveway with the engine spinning. I get in the passenger side.
“I’m scaring Lola,” he says and looks out the window toward the house like maybe he can see through the bricks and mortar. “I wasn’t here,” he says. “I’m never here.”
“Those choices were yours,” I say, and I know I’m not making things better between us.
Ray kills the engine, and we sit for a minute in silence. I reach over and take his hand. The feel of his skin surprises me. Not barbed wire and electricity, but soft and unguarded.
“Go make you calls.” I nod at the newspaper on the dashboard. “Don’t wear your devil mask when you go to the interviews.”
“It’s hard to take it off sometimes,” he says.
I squeeze his hand.
“Do you think I’ve messed up too bad to make things right?” he asks.
“There’s no use in asking a question like that,” I say. “What is there to do but go from here?”
Those were Dad’s words. He had been talking about Lola and life and how you can’t ever go back and undo the thing that changed the world. You can only deal with things as they are and hope to find a way to change it again.
Ray starts the engine, and I slip out to let him get on with it.
The first family function that occurred once Lola was back home after the accident was Dad’s birthday. He thought we should just let it go by. Grown men don’t need parties, he had said, and he worried that it was too taxing on Lola’s brain to sort out the acceptable words and body language to accompany the birthday of one’s forgotten father. She was still trying to remember who we all were and where she fit in with this family of people who seemed to barely know each other themselves.
But Lola read on the calendar that May tenth was Nate’s birthday.
“Who’s Nate?” she asked, having forgotten her father’s name.
“That’s Daddy,” I said.
She laughed at herself. “Duh. Stupid cheese brain.”
The doctor had called what she might deal with “Swiss cheese brain.” At the time, Lola didn’t know what Swiss cheese was. One of the nurses brought up a slice from the cafeteria to show her.
“I get it,” Lola said. “Holes.”
As soon as she’d seen the date of Dad’s birthday, she had determined that we would have a party. She planned it all out as best she could, and we followed it to the letter. She wrote it all down. What the cake would say. When we would eat it. What to sing. The lyrics to the birthday song.
She was always a good speller. I remember that about her lists. The meaning lost, but the details spelled correctly.
It was a lovely party. Dad had to excuse himself after the song. He told me later that the sight of Lola reading and singing and smiling was too much for a father and he needed a moment in private to put his face back together.
For a while, none of us were sure what memories Lola would get back. Maybe she’d remember the birthday song, but forget Dad altogether. Or remember Aunt Rose but forget how to sing. We celebrated when she made a connection and remembered some lost family vacation. But all the while, we were terrified of the day she would remember the accident. Ray was hanging on by the thinnest of threads and having Lola remember that he was the one who had coaxed her into the street that night
