Amber Raiken

Unwanted Riches

RIPPED WALL

June 2005

On the other side of my wall, there was a far too familiar sound.

            The white wall had turned brown, and the peeling of the wall paint had gotten worse. Sometimes, the paint peeled off before anyone even placed a hand on it. No one fixed it. No one took it down. I liked it when the walls kept our family divided.

“Are you tired?” Janine asked me through her side of the wall. The wall was so fragile that I felt when she placed her hand on it. Three months ago, she told me that a guy was coming tomorrow to fix it. Two days ago, Grandmother scheduled the appointment with the guy herself.

“No, it’s okay,” I said.

She never let me call her mom, so she was Janine. But every night, at 10p.m. sharp, I sat in my room and communicated with her through this thin wall. We never said any words. I never made a sound, but she always cried. I wanted to help her, but I was not close enough to her to know how, nor was she close enough to me to ask for it. So together, we leaned our backs against the wall and waited for nothing to be said.

Janine breathed heavily, screamed, or went silent when she cried. Most nights, everyone in the family heard her, but feared asking her what was wrong. Three weeks ago, when Aunt Lydia knocked on her door, Janine told her to fuck off. Sometimes, when the sounds of her crying were too quiet, I looked over at the wall next to my bed, where all the photos of my friends were, and wished that I was somewhere else.

But she finished her crying by 11p.m., and I heard her snoring around 11:30. When she sniffled around 11:15, that meant she wore herself out too much to continue. Janine’s crying sessions were the only mother-daughter times we had together. This was the closest she ever got to me, even though we each stayed in our own bedrooms. But when she spoke to me through the wall for the first time, I did not believe that it was her on the other side anymore.

“You should sleep, darling,” she said to me, kindly. It was only 10:30.

            I never called me darling. She was never compassionate. She was never overwhelmed with love for her daughter, like her sister Lydia was with my cousin Alison. But still, I listened to her and walked to my bed.

This wall worked for my relationship with Janine because of how much she liked keeping herself hidden. And this was just a bedroom wall. It was built there before we even lived here. But it was also more than that. It was how Janine hid from us all, especially her mother, that she was weak and vulnerable. This wall held up and covered up all of her secrets, including the ones about me. They’re secrets about everything she used to be and everything she wished she was. She tried to keep it a secret that she wasn’t happy living with here, but she failed miserably. From my bed, I heard something bang on the floor of Janine’s room and then the zipping of a bag. Right when she told me to bed, I knew that she had not cried at all this night.

            I heard her step towards the wall. Gently, she tapped it twice. It was gracious, somewhat compassionate, and very out of her character. Seconds after, I heard her walk away from her door and the wheels of a suitcase roll. I wanted to go outside and see where she was off to, but I was supposed to be asleep. However, without getting up that night, I knew she’d be gone when I woke up the next morning. And I was right.

TREASURE

September 2005

Our town was surrounded by blonde people with blue eyes, and my Grandmother thought those people were the most beautiful people. Grandmother told my two cousins that their golden hair and piercing blues eyes is something they should treasures; it was a look of beauty different than any other.

I was the youngest kid in the house, my cousin Alison was the oldest. She was one year older than her brother Noah, who was one year older than me. Alison and Noah’s parents, uncle George and aunt Lydia, lived in the basement. Grandmother had the master bedroom, which was upstairs, along with my room, Lydia’s room, and Noah’s room. All our rooms were very small, except Grandmother’s. Janine used to complain about how tiny her room was, but it felt bigger now that Grandmother had cleared some stuff out of it.

            Over the summer, Grandmother loved to organized treasure hunts for all her grandchildren in the backyard. It was a search for little things; chocolates covered in gold wrappers, shiny quarters, or bracelets made out of gold, plastic beads. Before we went on our search, Grandmother gave us each a kiss on our foreheads; she always left lipstick stains on my pale skin, which Alison helped me rub off with her fist. Every week, we looked behind chairs, under tables, throughout the shed, and within bushes. Grandma always yelled “keep going!” to us, as she watched us through the kitchen window or the tabled in the backyard. 

            I never felt like anything got found throughout every treasure hunt we did, and regardless of what Grandmother said, far too much felt too buried. These riches never did much for me. I wanted Grandmother to burry some of Janine’s old jewelry, but instead, I knew she had Janine’s leftovers away in her own hiding place. And Grandmother refused to say anything about Janine’s disappearance all summer. The morning after Janine left, all Grandmother said was, “Janine had to go for a while, she’ll be fine and so will we.” She then placed some eggs in front of me and then walked back into the kitchen, with her face to the floor. Janine never said goodbye to anyone.

Grandmother loved to live her life in ignorance, focused solely on things that made my cousins and I happy. She didn’t want me to ask questions. She wanted me to push down that feeling of disappointment and confusion that I felt because my mother ran away. And the scavenger hunts did help me forgot about being sad throughout the summer, until they didn’t, and Grandmother never knew when they didn’t. Grandmother was my mother now, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about her parenting skills.

Grandmother’s locket around her neck shook every time she jumped up and down, overjoyed by all the treasure we showed her we found. George sat in the backyard, with a white shirt untucked from his pants and beer in his hand. He raised his beer up whenever one of us found something, and Lydia smiled at him sweetly.

On the Saturday before we went back to school, Lydia insisted upon organizing the scavenger hunt this time.

“I want to make our kids as happy as you do, Mom. Please, let me help out,” Lydia said to Grandmother in the kitchen, as I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge.

Despite what Lydia said, I knew I was never her child. Sometimes I wished Lydia was my mom. Often, I got mad at myself when I wished that.

The first item I found during the Lydia designed scavenger hunt that day was an actual gold necklace, at least that’s what I thought it was. Along the chain, was one gold charm in the shape of a spade. It looked familiar, but I worried about where it came from.

I ran to the table in the backyard, where Aunt Lydia, Uncle George, and Grandmother sat, with the necklace in my hand. Grandmother snatched it from me and glared at Lydia.

“Did you hide this for the kids?” Grandmother asked Lydia, as she stood up from her chair.

“Mom, what’s the big deal? It’s fake gold. Why shouldn’t see be able to have it?” Lydia asked. She sat up firmly in her seat.

“Because she doesn’t need it. She does not need to be thinking of her. None of us do.”

“Mom, Janine didn’t die.”

Without a word, Grandmother took her chair and pushed it back into the table. The legs of the chair made an uncomfortable noise on the cement as it moved. She calmly opened the back door, which led right to the kitchen, and went inside.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings,” I said.

“You didn’t,” Lydia said. She lifted me up and put me on George’s lap. She wiped a single tear off her face with her thumb and went back into the house.

George watched Alison and Noah search, so I did the same. He pointed at them, as a way to urge me to get back in the game, but I shook my head. As he watched, I turned around and looked through our big kitchen window. Through that, I saw Grandmother in the sink with her head bent down. She looked like she was about to cry. She had a frown on her face, as Lydia’s hand reached for her shoulder. Grandmother nodded, with her back still turned, and Lydia then backed away. Lydia help her arm up, in front of her forehead, and her body looked stiff. She aggressively wiped her tears.

It was then that I realized the side effects of a mother losing her child. Grandmother was not fine, and because of that, Lydia was not fine. But by saying and doing nothing about it, everything was slightly fine. And that was something I just needed to live with.

JANINE

January 2007

The driveway was covered in ice. I liked to stand around it and crack that ice with the back end of a fork. I enjoyed staying in the cold for a little while. I loved the days when I watched my own breath because it was so freezing outside. I found myself too determined on breaking the ice with that fork, as if something significant about this family was hidden specifically under the driveway. This house, my Grandmother, Janine, and my absent father were all things that Grandmother encouraged me to never learn more about. And whenever thoughts these thoughts came to mind, I spent hours on end trying to break the ice even more. But often, it didn’t crack, and this fun habit felt like a chore.

When George came home from work and saw in the driveway, he rolled his eyes and carried me inside. The second he placed me on the living room couch, right in front of our fireplace, I missed the cold. George’s brother, Caleb visited us for the week from Arizona, so George asked him and our two neighbors, Nick and Scott, to help clean the ice off the driveway.

When the three of them were done, Grandmother served them coffee and scones at the dining room table. In the midst of everyone at the table having a conversation, Caleb mentioned Janine.

            Caleb’s cousin, who lived two blocks away, saw Janine in New York City when he was there three months ago.

            “My daughter would never like the city,” responded Grandmother.

            But Grandmother liked to pretend. that she actually had another daughter who lived in the city. Instead of establishing how Aunt Natalie, Grandmother’s youngest daughter, left home when she was eighteen for college and then chose not to move back, Grandmother just forgot she existed. Aunt Natalie visited once when I was little, but Grandmother acted like she wasn’t happy about that either.

Two weeks ago, Natalie sent Grandmother a postcard, which had a photo of the Empire State Building on it. On the card, Natalie asked her mother how she was doing and wished her well. Grandmother read it for about thirty seconds before she tossed it in the trash. Natalie learned years ago that if she wanted to send anything to me, Alison, or Noah, she had to address it specifically to us, so it didn’t get thrown out. Grandmother continued to toss Natalie’s letters away for years, and Natalie knew Grandmother never replied, but she still kept sending them.

And if Janine had sent us a letter, Lydia would have thrown it out well before Grandmother even gotten to it. Grandmother was close to the point where she viewed Janine as just another Natalie. When Caleb mentioned Janine, Lydia rolled her eyes and went into the kitchen. Lydia said that at this point, because it had been so long, she thought Janine was dead.

Lydia claimed that she had nothing against her sisters and that she had just lost touch with both of them. But when Janine did live here, her and Lydia never got along. Lydia convinced herself that Janine did not feel any remorse about anything, especially leaving.

When I was nine, Alison and I listened to our mothers and Grandmother argue from the top of the staircase. We sat on the wooden steps in our pajamas, arms clenched together. We heard someone’s body bang into the table.

“I think your mother is drunk,” Alison whispered to me.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Shh, we don’t want them to hear us.”

            I heard Janine stuttering, and I wanted to run down to see why, but I never did.

            “You do realize you have a kid, right? Lydia asked her sister.

            “I’m sorry I was working, so I could make money for my kid,” Janine said.

            “Really? I didn’t know waitresses were supposed to smell like tequila and mango juice at work.”

            “Lydia’s right Janine. You could have been back sooner. I thought your shift ended at five?” Grandmother asked calmly.

            “Um- it did, I just had to stay later to help my co-workers with uh stuff,” Janine said.

            “Bullshit. Who were you out with this time? Guy option number four of six?” Lydia asked.

            “Oh, back off, it’s none of your business.”

            “It is when you’re neglecting your kid.”

            “You want to talk about neglect? At least I didn’t have sex with someone two weeks before I was getting married! I don’t even know why George forgave you for that,” Janine said.

            Before Lydia responded, there was the sound of a slap across someone’s face. Janine shouted, breathed heavily and shouted “ow” during that slap.

            “Stop it, Janine!” Grandmother yelled. “Lydia made one mistake. You don’t have to use it against her all the time.”

            “You mean like how you’re using my mistake of working late against me now?” Janine asked, with her voice breaking.

            Janine walked into the kitchen and slam the door. Grandmother then calmed Lydia’s sobbing down.

            “Do you want to go down and talk to your mom?” I asked Alison.

            “No. It happened before we were born. I don’t think we need to talk about it, so don’t, okay?” Alison said.

            I nodded at her, and she pulled me up from the step.

            This was the first and last time we heard anything about Lydia’s affair. And the moment Janine left, I knew it was never going to be spoken of again. Before and after that night, Janine never bothered with Grandmother or Lydia because she knew that if Grandmother had to risk her life for either of them, she would do it for Lydia, end of story.

            And once Caleb finished his coffee that night, he told his all-time favorite scary story. The one that Alison loved and the one that freaked me out beyond belief.

            It was about the dead little girl whose body kept reappearing in the abandoned lake. After a seven-year-old girl had been missing for a year, her body was then found at the bottom of Old Seneca lake. On the night of her funeral, the little girl’s mother, filled with grief, went to visit the lake to commemorate her daughter. However, once she got there, her daughter’s body suddenly popped out of this body of water. The little girl was very pale, her hair blonde hair was filled with tangles, her eyes were dark red, and she wore a light blue dress that had a red blood stain on it. The mother, terrified, heard her daughter scream, “Get in the lake!” in a deep and unfamiliar voice, as if the dead child was possessed by a demon.

            Instantly, the mother ran home, but the voice of her dead daughter followed her there and haunted her all through the night. When she tried to sleep, the voice stuck in her head and shouted, “Get in the lake!” The mother screamed every second, which made her husband think she’d gone insane. Despite how much he attempted to calm her down, the mother didn’t know how to explain this voice explain to him. Nothing stopped the voice. After hours of dealing with the noises, the mother went back to the lake. She allowed herself to get sucked into it by her daughter, and no one ever saw her again. And according to Caleb, every person who has gone to the abandoned lake, has been sucked in by the little girl. They were probably still deep in that lake today.

            Just like the little girl, Lydia had a way of screaming at her mother, without actually screaming; that’s why Grandmother always fell to her knees for this daughter, uninterested in Janine. So, I never knew who Janine trusted. Alison and I never knew if she really did work late that night. I knew my mother had the potential to be good, but I also never knew what was and wasn’t a lie.

            As Alison and I walked Nick and Scott out, I stood on the iceless driveway. As we waved goodbye to them, Alison pulled me back inside. She hated being out in the cold.

NEW YORK CITY

September 2010

            I never trusted a big city, but I desperately wanted to see one. Grandmother told me New York City was dangerous and dirty. She told me to think about 9/11 and the tragedy of that.

            New York City had always been loud. It had been filled with tourists, a complicated transportation system, old cigarette buds on the corner of every street, and a population of more than just the 3,000 people I was used to. A population of 9 million. A population that sounded completely absurd to me.

            The idea that New York City never slept didn’t sound right to me. Nick told me that he was in New York City last year, surrounded by overpriced booze and homeless people asking for money. He said that there wasn’t any space to walk because of how many damn people were there. He also thought that the people moved too fast.

            “Didn’t Caleb say Janine moved there?” I asked.

 “Maybe she did, I didn’t see her! New York is big,” Nick said back to me.

I turned away from him silently.

“But she’ll never be reliable, you know? She didn’t bother to look back when leaving,” George told me.

            “Do you think she knew anyone in New York?” I tried to ask.

            This was another question Nick and George dodged. Sometimes I thought that she went to New York for a guy. Maybe she met an older man with biceps and five tattoos on each arm. What if she met with my father, who I knew nothing about?

            I walked out to the backyard and saw Allison and Noah kicking a soccer ball. Quietly, Grandmother sat at the table. She watched them play as she read a magazine. She half smiled at me, but I didn’t reciprocate in that moment. For all I knew, Grandmother lied about what she did and didn’t know. She got so good at hiding things, ever since our first summer treasure hunt. Janine definitely got her secret keeping skills from her mother. This was the one and only thing that Grandmother and Janine ever had in common.

             I forced myself into the soccer game, and it turned into a game with me and Alison against Noah, since Noah thought he could beat us on his own. However, the game ended with me missing the goal, and the ball then breaking one of Lydia’s favorite ceramic flowerpots. Grandmother then ran over to me and told me this was never my business in the first place.