All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel

PART ONE

1

AMY

March 1975

My mother always started the story by saying, Well, she was born in the backseat of a stranger’s car, as though that explained why Wavy wasn’t normal. It seemed to me that could happen to anybody. Maybe on the way to the hospital, your parents’ respectable, middle-class car broke down. That was not what happened to Wavy. She was born in the backseat of a stranger’s car, because Uncle Liam and Aunt Val were homeless, driving through Texas when their old beat-up van broke down. Nine months pregnant, Aunt Val hitchhiked to the next town for help. If you ever consider playing Good Samaritan to a pregnant woman, think about cleaning that up.

I learned all this from eavesdropping on Mom’s Tuesday night book club. Sometimes they talked about books, but mostly they gossiped. That was where Mom first started polishing The Tragic and Edifying Story of Wavonna Quinn.

After Wavy was born, Mom didn’t hear from Aunt Val for almost five years. The first news she had was that Uncle Liam had been arrested for dealing drugs, and Aunt Val needed money. Then Aunt Val got arrested for something Mom wouldn’t say, leaving no one to take care of Wavy.

The day after that second phone call, Grandma visited, and argued with Mom behind closed doors about reaping what you sow, and blood is thicker than water. Grandma, my soft-in-the-middle, cookie-baking grandma shouted, She’s family! If you won’t take her, I will!

We took her. Mom promised Leslie and me new toys, but we were so excited about meeting our cousin that we didn’t care. Wavy was our only cousin, because according to Mom, Dad’s brother was gay. Leslie and I, at nine and going on seven, made up stories about Wavy that were pure Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Starved, kept in a cage, living in the wilderness with wolves.

The day Wavy arrived, the weather suited our gloomy theories: dark and rainy, with gusting wind. Of course, it would have been more fitting if Wavy had arrived in a black limo or a horse-drawn carriage instead of the social worker’s beige sedan.

Sue Enaldo was a plump woman in a blue pantsuit, but for me she was Santa Claus, bringing me a marvelous present. Before Sue could get a rain bonnet over her elaborate Dolly Parton hair, Wavy hopped out of the backseat, dangling a plastic grocery bag in one hand. She was delicate, and soaked to the skin by the time she reached the front door.

Leslie’s face fell when she saw our cousin, but I wasn’t disappointed. As soon as my mother opened the door, Wavy stepped in and surveyed her new home with a bottomless look I would grow to love, but that would eventually drive my mother to despair. Her eyes were dark, but not brown. Grey? Green? Blue? You couldn’t really tell. Just dark and full of a long view of the world. Her eyelashes and eyebrows were translucent, to match her hair. Silver-blond, it clung to her head and ran trails of water off her shoulders onto the entryway tile.

Wavonna, sweetie, I’m your Aunt Brenda. It was a mother I didn’t recognize, the way she pitched her voice high, falsely bright, and gave Sue an anxious look. Is she—is she okay?

As okay as she ever is. She didn’t say a word to me on the drive over. The foster family she’s been with this week, they said she was quiet as a mouse.

Has she been to see a doctor?

She went, but she wouldn’t let anyone touch her. She kicked two nurses and punched the doctor.

My mother’s eyes went wide and Leslie took a step back.

Okay, then, Mom cooed. Do you have some clothes in your bag there, Wavonna? Let’s get you into something dry, okay?

She must have expected Wavy to fight her, but when she reached for the grocery bag, Wavy let it go. My mother opened it and frowned at the contents.

Where are the rest of her clothes?

That’s it, Sue said. She came to us wearing a man’s undershirt. Those are the clothes the foster family got together for her.

I’m sure Amy has something she can wear for now.

Putting her hands on her knees to get to Wavy’s height, Sue said, Wavonna, I’m going to go now and you’re going to stay here with your aunt. Do you understand?

The grown-ups talked to Wavy like she was a little kid, but at five she made a very adult gesture: a curt nod to dismiss Sue.

After Sue was gone, the four of us stood in the entryway, staring. Mom, Leslie, and I at Wavy. Wavy seemed to have x-ray vision, staring through the living room wall at the Venus oil lamp that hung on the other side. How did she know it was there to stare at it?

Well, why don’t we go upstairs and get Wavonna into some dry clothes, Mom said.

In my room, Wavy stood between the two beds, dripping onto the rug. Mom looked anxious, but I was thrilled to have my real live cousin in my room.

Here, Amy, why don’t you help her unpack while I get a towel? Mom retreated, leaving us alone.

I opened an empty drawer and unpacked Wavy’s bag: another hand-me-down sundress as threadbare as the one she had on, two pairs of panties, an undershirt, a flannel nightgown, and a new baby doll, smelling of fresh plastic.

This will be your dresser. I didn’t want to sound like my mother, like an adult. I wanted Wavy to like me. After I put the clothes in the drawer, I held the doll out to her. Is this your baby?

She looked at me, really looked at me, and that’s how I knew her eyes weren’t brown. Her head moved left, right, back to center. No.

Well, we can put it in here, to keep it safe, I said.

Mom returned with a towel, which she tried to put over Wavy’s dripping hair. Before Mom could touch her, Wavy snatched the towel away and dried her own hair.

After a moment of stunned silence, Mom said, Let’s find something for you to wear.

She laid out panties and an undershirt on the bed. Without any embarrassment, Wavy peeled off the sundress and dropped it on the floor, before stepping out of her tennis shoes. She was almost as bony as the kids in the UNICEF ads, her ribs sticking out through the dry cotton undershirt she put on.

I offered her my favorite corduroy pants and plaid shirt, but she shook her head. With her thumb and first finger she plucked at an invisible skirt. Mom looked helpless.

She wants her dress, I said.

She needs something warmer.

So I went into my closet and found a Christmas party dress I hated the one time I wore it. Navy velvet with a lace collar, it was too big for Wavy, but it suited her. With her hair already drying to blond wisps, she looked like she had stepped out of an old photograph.

At lunch, Wavy sat at the table, but didn’t eat anything. Same thing at dinner and breakfast the next morning.

Please, sweetie, just try a bite. Mom looked exhausted and she’d only been a stay-at-home aunt one day.

I love my mother. She was a good mother. She did arts and crafts projects with us, baked with us, and took us to the park. Until we were practically teenagers, Mom tucked us into bed every night. Whatever Wavy needed, it wasn’t that.

The first night, Mom tucked Wavy and me into bed, me with my Winnie the Pooh, and Wavy with the baby doll she said wasn’t hers. As soon as Mom left the room, Wavy threw off her covers and I heard the thud of the doll hitting the floor. If something else had happened to make the room go dark—if Leslie had played a prank or the bulb had burned out—I would have screamed for Mom, but when Wavy turned off my nightlight, I shivered under my covers, afraid but excited. After she lay down again, she spoke. Her voice was small and quiet, just what you would expect from a tiny, blond elf-child.

Cassiopeia. Cepheus. Ursa Minor. Cygnus. Perseus. Orion.

Since she had finally spoken, I grew brave enough to ask, What does it mean?

Names of stars.

Until then I hadn’t known the stars had names. Arm extended, finger pointing, Wavy traced out shapes above her head, as though she were guiding the movements of the stars. A conductor directing a symphony.

The next night, Wavy smiled at me as Mom crawled around looking for the unwanted doll. A minute after we were tucked in, the baby was again among the dust bunnies under the bed. Eventually that became the doll’s name: Dust Bunny. If Mom failed to look for the doll at bedtime, I said, Oh, no. I think Dust Bunny is missing again, to make Wavy smile.

While I had a growing friendship with Wavy, my mother had only anxiety.

In the first month, Mom took Wavy to the doctor three times, because she wasn’t eating. The first time, a nurse tried to put a thermometer in Wavy’s mouth. It didn’t end well. The other two times, Wavy mounted the scale and the doctor pronounced, She’s underweight, but not dangerously so. She must be eating something.

Dad said the same thing and he had evidence to back it up. One night, he came home from work after we were all in bed, and woke us up shouting, Oh, goddamnit! What are you doing? What are you doing?

Wavy wasn’t in her bed, so I ran downstairs alone. I found Dad in the kitchen with the trash can lid in one hand and his briefcase in the other. I’d never been in the kitchen that late. In the day it was a warm, sunny place, but behind Dad, the basement door stood open and dark, like the mouth of a monster.

What’s the matter, Daddy?

It’s nothing. Go back to bed. He put the lid on the trash and laid his briefcase on the table.

What’s going on, Bill? Mom came up behind me and put her hand on my shoulder.

She was eating out of the trash.

What? Amy, what are you—

Not Amy. Your niece.

Mom didn’t take Wavy to the doctor again to complain about her not eating.

After failing to solve that crisis, Mom became obsessed with sewing for Wavy. The dresses you could buy hung on her like sacks and were too frilly, which Wavy hated. The first day she wore my Christmas party dress, she tore the lace collar off.

So Mom sewed dozens of dresses that Wavy unraveled, plucking at the seams until a thread came loose. From there she could unravel a dress in less than a week. Mom rehemmed her dresses each time they came through the wash. It slowed the unraveling down, which was a practical solution, but Mom didn’t want a solution, she wanted a reason.

One of the book club ladies said, Does she have toileting problems?

Mom frowned, shook her head. No, there’s no trouble like that. She’ll be six in July.

Wavy and I eavesdropped from the other side of the kitchen door. Her games all involved sneaking around and finding people’s secrets, like the cigarettes my father hid in a coffee can in the garage.

I wonder if she’s acting out over some inappropriate contact, the book club lady said.

You think she might have been molested? another lady said, sounding shocked but excited.

That conversation led to Wavy’s first visit to a therapist. She stopped unraveling her dresses and Mom went around looking triumphant. To Dad, she said: I think we’ve had a breakthrough.

Then she discovered the curtains in the guest bedroom, which were what Wavy took to unraveling when she stopped doing it to her clothes.

Mom and Dad yelled at each other while Wavy stared through them.

Why does there have to be something wrong with her? Dad said. Maybe she’s just weird. God knows your sister’s weird enough. I don’t have time for you to get hysterical over everything she does. We have to wrap up the books on the fiscal year-end.

I’m worried about her. Is that so horrible of me? She never talks. What’s going to happen to her?

She does too talk, Leslie said. I hear her talking at night to Amy.

Mom slowly turned to all of us, narrowed in on me. Is that true? Does she talk to you?

She stared into my eyes, pleading with me. I nodded.

Well, what does she talk about?

It’s a secret.

There can’t be secrets, Amy. If she tells you something important, you have to tell me. You want to help Vonnie, don’t you? Mom got down on her knees in front of me and I saw how it was. She would make me tell my secret. I started to cry, knowing I would tell and it wouldn’t help Mom or Wavy. It would just rob me of something precious.

Wavy saved me. With her hand over her mouth, she said, I don’t want to talk about it.

My mother’s eyes bulged. I—I—I. She couldn’t get a word out and even Dad looked stunned. The silent ghost girl could speak in complete sentences.

I want you to go back to the therapist, Mom said.

No.

Things might have gotten better after that, if it hadn’t been for the other secret between Wavy and me. She liked to sneak out of the house at night, and I went with her. Breezing down the stairs on bare feet, we eased open the kitchen door and walked around the neighborhood.

Sometimes we just looked. Other times, we took things. The night of Wavy’s sixth birthday, when she had left her cake uneaten, she jimmied open Mrs. NiBlack’s screen door. We crept across the kitchen to the refrigerator, where Wavy pressed her finger to the lever to keep the light inside off. On the bottom shelf sat a half-eaten lemon pie, which we carried away. Crouched under the weeping willow in the Goerings’ backyard, Wavy tore out a chunk of pie with her bare hand and gave me the plate. She went around the corner of the garden shed and when she came back, her piece of lemon pie was gone. No, she wasn’t starving.

Some nights we gathered things. A wine bottle scavenged from the gutter. A woman’s high-heeled shoe from the median of the highway, where we weren’t supposed to go. An old hand mixer abandoned outside the Methodist Church’s back door. We collected our treasures into a metal box stolen from the neighbor’s garage, and secreted it along our back fence, behind the lilac bushes.

When autumn came, the lilacs lost their leaves, and Dad found the box of treasure, including Mrs. NiBlack’s heavy glass pie plate, her name written on the bottom of it on a square of masking tape. Mom returned it to Mrs. NiBlack, who must have told her how the pie plate went missing: stolen out of her fridge on a hot July night, a trail of small dirty footprints left on the linoleum.

Or maybe something else made Mom suspicious.

As the weather got colder, I wanted to stay at home in bed, but when Wavy got up and dressed, I did, too. If I didn’t go, she would go alone. Half of my fear was that something would happen to her. The other half was a fear that she would have adventures without me.

So I went with her, shivering against the cold, while my heart pounded with excitement. At the library, Wavy went up on tiptoe to reach her spindly arm into the book return. In the day, my mother would have driven us to the library to check out books, but stealing books was sweeter.

Wavy smiled and withdrew her arm to reveal treasure. The book was thin enough to pass through the return the wrong way, but it wasn’t a kiddy book. Salome, the spine said. We leaned our heads together to consider the strangeness of an adult book with pictures. Odd pictures. The cover was worn and layered with clear tape to protect it, and the pages were heavy. It felt special.

As I reached to turn the page, a pair of headlights fell on us where we crouched beside the book deposit. Wavy darted away, but I froze when my father yelled, Amy! Like in a fairy tale, where knowing someone’s name gives you power, my father was able to capture me.

My mother got out of the car and ran across the library parking lot. She looked so ferocious, loping toward me in her nightgown and coat, that I expected a blow. Punishment. Instead, she jerked me into her arms and pressed me to her chest.

After that, I had to tell everything. About the late night wandering. Not the stars. That was still my secret. Mom screamed and Dad yelled.

I know you mean well, Brenda. You want to help her. I get that. But when her behavior starts endangering our children, it’s time to choose. We can’t keep her. She’s out of control.

The police came to make a report, to get a picture, to put out a bulletin. The neighbors turned out to look for Wavy, but at dawn she returned on her own.

I woke to more yelling and screaming. That afternoon, Grandma came to get Wavy.

It’s a horrible idea. A stupid idea, Mom said. I marveled that she could talk to Grandma like that. It didn’t seem possible to get away with saying something like that to your mother. You can’t keep an eye on her all the time. You can’t stay up all night.

What would be the point? I suppose she will do a little wandering. From what I remember, you and Val did some wandering when you were kids.

That was different. We were teenagers and it was a safer time.

Pfft, Grandma said.

Think of your health, Helen, Dad said.

You haven’t been as strong since the chemo, Mom.

Grandma blew out a big puff of air, the same way she used to exhale cigarette smoke, and shook her head. Tell me your solution. Foster care? Send her to live with strangers?

We’ll keep her, Mom said.

No, we won’t. Dad stood up and blocked my view, so I’ll never know what look passed between him and Mom, but when he went to the counter to pour himself more coffee, Mom nodded.

She might as well come home with me today, Grandma said.

I sat on Wavy’s bed while Grandma packed her suitcase. There wasn’t much to pack. A dozen dresses that had survived the Great Unraveling. Some socks and underwear. The hairbrush that she sometimes let me run through her silky, fine hair. The last thing into the suitcase was Dust Bunny, the baby doll.

Grandma put it in the suitcase. Wavy took it out. Mom put it in. Wavy took it out. It was the only toy Wavy had. Nothing belongs to you, she told me once when Leslie and I fought over a favorite Barbie that later disappeared.

Wavy took Dust Bunny out of the suitcase and handed it to me. A gift? Then it was time for her to go. Grandma hugged us all, while Wavy stood near the door. Mom tried to hug her, too, but she skittered away, slipping past my mother to hug me. Not close enough for our bodies to touch, she rested her hands on my shoulders, and sniffed my hair. When she released me, she ran out the front door.

You see how it is, Mom said.

She’s her own girl. You were, too. Grandma smiled and picked up Wavy’s bag.

After Thanksgiving, I found the real gift Wavy had left me in the closet under the stairs. When Mom pulled out the boxes of Christmas decorations, I crawled in to sweep up loose tinsel and a broken ornament. Tucked in the very back was the stolen book: Salome.

2

GRANDMA

October 1975

Irv and I raised one daughter who turned out fine. Brenda married a good man, had nice kids, kept a clean house, and worked hard. Valerie, our youngest, I don’t know what happened.

I suppose nowadays, she would be diagnosed with something, but at the time, we lived with her behavior. For example, her germ problem. There was a time when she washed her hands a hundred times a day, until the skin cracked and bled. I made her wear gloves to help her feel clean. Two dozen pairs of white gloves that I washed and ironed every day.

Then her junior year in high school, she got pregnant and ran away with Liam Quinn. We didn’t like him, but we’d never tried to keep her away from him. He was a troublemaker and I didn’t feel he treated Valerie right. The sort of boy who thinks he’s the center of the universe.

Later I found out he was worse than just a selfish boy. I found out he’d gotten her mixed up with the sorts of things that put her in prison. As for that whole mess, it wearied my heart. I hoped Brenda wouldn’t hate me when she found out how much of Irv’s pension I cashed out to pay for Valerie’s lawyers. I’d hoped to do college money for Amy and Leslie, but there was nothing left for that.

The first day I took Wavonna home with me, she didn’t speak. To be honest, she didn’t talk for weeks. That’s harder on your nerves than you might think, having another person in the room who won’t speak. It turned me into a real chatterbox. I narrated everything I did, the way I had for Irv when he got bad at the end.

The first night, Wavonna didn’t eat dinner. The next morning, no breakfast. By lunch the next day, I started to get a taste of why Brenda looked so broken. Three days of worrying, before I had the sense to count things in the fridge and cupboard to tell what she was eating. At bedtime, I had six cheese slices in cellophane, nine apricots in the crisper, thirteen saltines in the open tube. In the morning, only five cheese slices, seven apricots, ten saltines. Not enough to keep a mouse alive, but she managed on it.

The second day, I set out some new toys I’d bought her on the coffee table in the den. It had out-of-fashion pine paneling and shag carpet, but we’d used it as our family room when Irv was alive, so it was full of mostly happy memories. I spent the day piecing a quilt for a church fundraiser and watching the TV. Wavonna sat on the sofa, staring at the wall or the TV or nothing. The girl had a hundred-yard stare like Irv had when he came back from the war. Once she got up, and I thought, Finally, she’s bored. She’ll do something. Play with her toys.

She went to the powder room. The toilet flushed and the sink ran. Back she came to the couch. The Barbie, the stuffed elephant, and the Lincoln Logs stayed in their packages and eventually they disappeared.

After two weeks, I did what I should have done first. I bought some flash cards—letters, colors, shapes, numbers—the kind of thing they use in kindergarten classes. The next morning, I made her a nice bowl of oatmeal and went out of the kitchen for a good fifteen minutes. I spent the time calling the gals in my bridge club to tell them I wasn’t coming that afternoon. When I went back to the kitchen, sure enough, there was less oatmeal. I cleared the table and got out the alphabet cards.

A is for Apple. I knew she wasn’t going to parrot back what I said, but at least she’d be seeing and hearing them.

I went through the whole deck that way. When I finished, Wavonna walked over to the counter and got the grocery pad. Some claptrap thing Irv built that held a roll of adding machine tape and had a hole drilled in it for a golf pencil. Wavonna rolled out some paper and started writing the alphabet. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather.

I reached over and put my finger on the A. Do you know how to say that one?

Wavonna considered my finger for a second before she said, A.

What about this one?

B.

This one.

She sighed and said, Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz. Silly Grandma.

Come Monday, I enrolled her for school.

The first day, after I dropped her off at school, I took a two-hour nap. The second day, I went for some much-needed beautification. Old women need sprucing up and my hair was starting to look bedraggled. The third day, I don’t remember what I did, but on the fourth day I went to bridge club. I had a martini and a lovely raucous time with the gals. They were expecting me to tell them all about Wavonna, and I pretended to be the proud grandma. Oh, she has the finest, baby-down blond hair. She already knows her ABCs. Nothing really about her.

I held Leslie in my arms after she was born. Same with Amy. They were my granddaughters, my babies. I flashed their pictures and bragged on every little accomplishment.

Wavonna, I’d never seen her until Brenda got custody of her. I know you’re supposed to love the hard ones more, but most of what I felt was pity. Her wispy hair and scrawny shoulders were so sad, and then those empty looks. Leaving bridge club, though, I felt like it was going to be okay. I would learn to love Wavonna the way I loved Leslie and Amy. She would learn to love me.

When I got to the school, Wavonna didn’t come out. I waited for a few minutes before I went into the front office, where I was met by the school principal and Mrs. Berry, Wavonna’s teacher. I’d handed Wavonna off to her on the first day in the school office. She was a friendly woman with a big smile, but that day she was a hysterical, sobbing mess.

Wavonna had run away from school.

I cried, but mostly I remember thinking, This is how it started with Valerie. Of course, skipping school didn’t start with Valerie until she was in high school, but all the same I had a sinking feeling I had failed.

At eight o’clock, I went home and waited to hear from the police. I held the phone on my lap as I soaked my feet. I’d walked I didn’t know how many blocks, knocking on doors all around the school. I needed to call Brenda, but I couldn’t bear the thought of saying, You were right. I can’t handle her.

My doorbell rang and I didn’t know what to feel. Hopeful. Terrified. With my feet wet, I went to the door. Wavonna stood on the porch alone, shivering. Once she was in the house, I locked the door, like that would keep her from escaping.

You scared me so much! What if something had happened to you? I knew yelling wasn’t the best way to communicate with her, but I couldn’t help myself. Never, never do that again! Do you understand me?

She nodded, but I knew that nod from Valerie. It meant, I understand you, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to do what you say.

After I called the police to tell them Wavonna was home, I made her some soup and counted out a pile of crackers. While I cried in the bathroom, she ate a few spoonfuls and two saltines. I couldn’t go on like that, but I couldn’t let her go into foster care. Would anyone else eye the level of soup in her bowl as carefully as I did? Would a stranger count crackers to make sure my granddaughter was eating?

I cleared the table and brewed some decaf. When I was sure I was calm, I said, Wavonna, will you please come into the kitchen and talk to Grandma?

She didn’t sit down, but she stood waiting for me to talk.

If you run away from school, they’re going to take you away from me and make you live with strangers. I don’t want that to happen. I want you to stay here with Grandma.

She didn’t react to that, but I didn’t expect her to. I could have had a French poodle dancing the tango with a monkey on my head and she wouldn’t have reacted.

Will you tell me what happened at school? Why did you run away? If you’ll tell me, I’ll try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

It was like with the alphabet. She had to prepare herself, but after a moment, she said, The loud lady touches me.

My stomach almost gave up the coffee I’d drunk. That sweet woman? I couldn’t imagine her doing something like that to a child. In my mind that’s what bad touching was.

Touches you?

She stretched her arms toward me, her hands curled into menacing claws, and then brought them back tightly to her chest.

She hugs you? I said.

A nod.

And you don’t like that?

She shook her head seriously. I was sick with relief, and with knowing how awful the world looked to Wavonna. Of course, she never hugged me, and whenever I touched her, she shrugged out from under my hand.

The next day, we went to school, and I did what I should have done the first day. I walked her directly to class, planning to explain everything to Mrs. Berry.

All that went out the window when I reached the classroom.

In the center of the room sat three children in wheelchairs. I don’t mean to be cruel, but they were drooling vegetables. In one corner, a child flopped around on blue rubber floor mats. The school could paint the walls as bright a shade of yellow as they wanted and hang up all the pretty mobiles in the world, but it was a horrible place. I couldn’t imagine Wavonna spending five minutes there, let alone the four days I’d left her there.

Mrs. Berry hurried over with a big smile and said, Oh, Mrs. Morrison, what a relief! Wavonna, honey, you had us so worried.

That was the day I earned Wavonna’s trust. Mrs. Berry swooped toward us, clearly planning to deliver an enormous, smothering hug. I spread my feet and put out my arm to block her.

Mrs. Berry, we need to talk to someone about changing classes. She made a wounded face as we backed away from her. I had nothing against the woman, but I was too old to beat around the bush.

When I sat down with the school counselor, I took the same approach. I looked her square in the eye and said, "My granddaughter is not