As Bud disappeared around the corner towards the fall, pulled from sight, Harper looked at Poppa for confirmation that what he thought was happening was not happening, and that was the worst moment of alclass="underline" the look on Poppa’s face as he stared after Bud, the knowledge that the fissure that had opened in his head had opened in Poppa’s head too. Something so horrible it could not even be imagined had actually happened, right before their eyes. The edge of the fall was a few feet away, just out of sight. While they were still trying to believe the unbelievable, Bud was already dead.
It was four months on from that afternoon, when their house was still cloaked in grief, that the letter came from Holland, the pale blue envelope with the blue and red flashes on the edge, wafer-thin like an old man’s skin, his mother’s spidery and precise hand, addressed to Michael Luther Senior.
It was a Saturday so he was home — he didn’t go to the cartoon shows at the Variety any more, not on his own. He had collected the letter from the mailbox himself. When he handed it to Nina, she put it on the kitchen counter and said lightly, ‘Let’s wait till your grandfather is home, shall we?’
‘Why is it to him?’ he asked, looking past Nina at the letter where it lay.
‘I really need some help with these greens.’ It was only later that he realised she had been playing for time.
Poppa arrived back about an hour later, carrying some fresh rolls from Balian’s. He had been calling in on a neighbour who needed some advice: lots of people wanted free advice from Poppa. The neighbour lived in a big house in Sugar Hill and while they had lunch Poppa talked about how this neighbour had not one but two white maids and how a famous musician lived next to him — the conversation was low-key, as it always was since that day. Harper felt much older, these days — old enough, in any case, to recognise that normality was effortful for all of them. It was only as Poppa was patting his lips with his napkin that Nina, who had scarcely spoken a word throughout the meal, rose, turned to the counter-top where the letter lay and held it up.
Poppa stared at the letter in Nina’s hand, and then he stared at Nina, and Nina stared right back.
‘It’s from my mother. .’ Harper announced, unnecessarily. ‘We haven’t opened it.’
Poppa said, calmly, his gaze still locked with Nina’s, ‘Nicolaas, if you’ve finished, you can go and play with Jimmy.’
Harper rose and picked up his plate and Poppa said, ‘You don’t need to clear the table today, Nicolaas, go play.’ Harper began to feel sick. Clearing the table was a rigid duty. He looked at Nina but she was still staring at Poppa, the letter in her hand.
Poppa repeated, in a light tone of voice, ‘Nicolaas. Go kick a ball around the garden.’
As Harper closed the back door behind him, slowly because he wanted to hear what would come next, Poppa said, ‘We don’t know for sure.’
He sat down. A long silence came then.
Then Nina’s voice, a strangled kind of shriek. ‘That selfish. . selfish. . trash. . that’s all she is.’
He had never heard Poppa raise his voice to Nina before now — Michael, when he was here, him occasionally, but not Nina.
‘Never use a phrase like that of our boy’s mother! It isn’t right.’
‘Is it right what she’s doing? Is it? How can you defend her? Everything went wrong the minute she came along. Michael.’
‘Michael wasn’t her fault, you know that.’
‘She didn’t help.’
A concession, then. ‘No, she didn’t. But. .’ Poppa’s voice was softer now.
He had descended two of the steps before he sat down to make sure his head wasn’t visible in the glass panel in the top half of the door. All the same, all they had to do was glance out of the kitchen window to see that he hadn’t made it as far as the backyard.
Nina was crying now. ‘Haven’t we lost enough?’ she sobbed. ‘Haven’t we?’ Poppa was soothing her.
The most frightening thing was that, whatever the contents of the letter, things were bad enough for them to have forgotten him. Normally, Poppa was sharp enough to realise if he was hovering around. He sat on the step, listening to Nina’s sobs. At the end of the garden, Jimmy was snuffling in the border, the fluffy swoop of his tail a crescent-moon shape, batting to and fro.
He still expected his brother to show up at any minute — still caught himself wondering why Bud did not come jumping down the stairs, two at a time, like always, or appear running around the corner of the house just as Harper had picked up a ball or a bat, claiming it was his. In the mornings, he woke up alone in the box room and looked over at Bud’s empty bed, the quilt neat and smoothed. If he closed his eyes again immediately, he could hear Bud’s voice in his head. He still thought to himself, some mornings, When I open my eyes again, Bud will be there. If I believe in it strongly enough, then that will make it so. Arjuna the warrior could have made that happen, somehow. Reverend Wilson had organised a memorial service and the whole of the district had come — people still left pies and casseroles on the veranda with chequered cloths over them — but there had been no funeral. His body had yet to be found.
Later that day, Poppa called him into the sitting room and asked him to sit down. It reminded him of the first time he had come to the house, when Poppa had asked him into the kitchen and enquired, with a lawyer’s solemnity, whether it could really be true that he had an extra a in his name; and for the first few minutes of the conversation, even as it became clear how serious this matter was, he wondered whether Poppa was about to turn the whole thing into a joke.
‘Nicolaas, son, tell me, how much do you remember about your mother?’ Poppa continued without waiting for him to answer. ‘Do you remember how, when she left, your mother said she would either come back or send for you and Bud? Do you remember that?’
He didn’t remember the conversation quite like that, but that didn’t seem important right now. It was more than three years since his mother had left. There had been letters occasionally, a birthday card each year. There had been a Christmas present that had arrived one February, three small hardback books he couldn’t read with a note saying he mustn’t forget his Dutch.
‘Well, even though Bud is gone, has been taken away from us, that time has come,’ Poppa said.
They were going to Holland? He remembered so little about having lived there. The bread they ate was stale. They had to wear three coats inside the house because it was so cold. His mother had wailed every day that without his father’s army pension, they would starve. They were going back to mud and cold? Did you still have to wear three coats inside the house?
‘When are we going?’
Poppa paused. ‘Nina and I aren’t going, son. Our lives are here, in Los Angeles. My work is here. We would keep you here with us forever, if it was possible, I want you to know that. We think of you as ours. But your mother is your mother and she wants you back.’ It finally became clear: no Nina, no Poppa, no Jimmy either. He had lost Bud and now he was losing the rest of them.
It was very simple. ‘I’m not going.’
‘Nicolaas, your mother wrote us some time ago, after — after Bud was taken from us. We didn’t tell you because we didn’t want to worry you in case it wasn’t going to happen. We wrote back saying how we very much wanted you to stay with us but she has written us again and she is insistent and she is your mother, after all. She wants you back.’