“You bought her a gift?”
“I’m not foolish,” she says. “The box is empty. She always liked the little blue boxes.”
In the car, on the way home, I debate calling George. I imagine the conversation in my head: “It’s Jane’s birthday. I didn’t know if you’d remember, but I thought I should check in on you.”
“You fucked her,” he says.
“That’s not why I’m calling. …” The thought of it stops me from going further.
The boy’s aunt Christina calls back, says she’s got a couple of questions — she wants to make sure it’s not going to cost them anything.
“It’s all on us,” I say.
And then she says, “My husband wants to know if we have to bring a tent?”
I’m not sure where the tent idea comes from, but it makes me nervous.
“No need for a tent,” I say. “We’ll be staying indoors. A couple changes of clothes and a toothbrush.”
“Okay,” she says, “we’ll go.”
We pick them up at the aunt’s house. The husband comes out with them, carrying two enormous suitcases, a knapsack, and a bag of groceries. The aunt is dressed up, wearing her good jeans, a nice blouse, high heels; and Ricardo looks doughy, tense, and overexcited all at once — I instantly don’t like him. He’s wearing bright-yellow soccer shorts and an enormous blue Yankees T-shirt, all of it conspiring to make him look like a giant molten blob. By Trenton, I’m having second thoughts. The noise level of Ricardo’s video game seems to drive only me crazy, it’s like no one else can hear it. “Can you turn it down? Can you please turn it down? How about off? How about turning it off for a little bit? Just take a rest. Please. I’m asking you nicely. Okay, I’m begging you, I can’t keep driving if that noise persists.” And then he starts kicking the back of my seat and opening and closing the electric windows — changing the air pressure in the car. Nate and Ash speak to the kid in Spanish, he laughs, he puts the game away. The kid has a really odd, almost animal laugh that’s off-putting, and yet totally genuine and charming.
I ask the aunt where she’s from — I’m assuming Colombia or Nicaragua.
“The Bronx,” she says.
“And where were you from originally?”
“The Bronx,” she repeats. “My father is the super for a group of buildings, and my mother owns a store.”
Jealous, or worried she’s leaving him for the murderer’s brother and two kids, the aunt’s husband calls every twenty minutes.
Meanwhile, despite the great laugh, Ricardo is hyper — he never stops moving, except when he’s eating smelly papaya and blowing explosive farts.
On the Delaware Memorial Bridge, after the fifth phone call from her husband, the aunt breaks down: “It’s too much for me, I can do no good for anyone. Everyone wants my attention — I don’t know why men can’t take care of themselves, why they can’t cook something to eat. … He works in a restaurant, you would think he could cook. … I am only one person. I cannot be there for everybody all the time. There is nothing left of me. I work for someone else, and then I come home and work for him, and then my parents need my help, and my husband says I’m not fun anymore. I used to laugh and go to the beach and play with him — or watch him and his friends race remote-control cars. …” I nod, hoping she’ll keep talking as I cross the bridge. I don’t know why, but I worry she’s going to jump out of the car and throw herself over the guardrail — I wouldn’t blame her if she did.
“He can’t share me with anyone. In my dreams I run away, I get a job taking care of a very old man who likes to sleep all day and have oatmeal for dinner and oatmeal for breakfast. He has no teeth, so he can’t bite me. The man falls in love with me and his family is glad — okay, not really glad, but I pretend they are. We have a wheelchair wedding and he takes me to a spa that I already have the T-shirt for — Canyon Ranch. I got it from my cousin who cleans houses, who got it from the lady she works for, who was doing ‘spring cleaning.’ He takes me to Canyon Ranch for our honeymoon and says, ‘I knew you would be happy here, because your T-shirt told me so.’”
She goes on and on. I’m nodding and listening, occasionally offering a compassionate “uh-huh,” or “I can imagine that would be difficult.”
Somehow, in the back seat, the kids know better than to interrupt; it’s like a curtain of quiet has fallen over them, and they play video games with the boy.
We go from Delaware into Maryland, slip past Baltimore, and then are in downtown Washington, D. C. I take them on a quick tour of the Capitol, the World War II Memorial, Jefferson Memorial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Lincoln Monument, Iwo Jima Memorial, and the White House.
As we go from place to place, I fill everyone in on the history. At one point the aunt stops me and says, “Why do you think my history is different from your history? I was born here.”
“But your family came from somewhere else,” I say, lamely.
“So did yours,” she says, and she’s right.
The husband calls a half-dozen more times, and just before we’re about to get back on the road towards Virginia, the aunt announces she’s decided to go home; she gives me Ricardo’s medication and writes out the instructions on how and when to give it.
“What exactly is it for?” I ask.
“It’s to help him think at school,” she says. “But when it wears off, he’s cranky and bouncing off the walls — I like to send him outside.”
We say goodbye and put her on a train in Union Station with a souvenir FBI baseball hat from the terminal gift shop. The aunt seems relieved to be dismissed, and the boy happy to be with Ash and Nate.
We continue on to Williamsburg, arriving just before supper. The children quickly get into the program. Ash wants to dress in a costume of the time period. While I’m in the process of renting her one at the Visitor Center, Nate leans in and says, “Save yourself the trouble, buy new and avoid lice; besides, she won’t want to give it back.” And so I do. I buy her the dress, and then she wants the Pilgrim shoes — which in the old days were neither left nor right — and so we buy those, and the boys want tricornered hats and wooden guns, which seem safe enough until they start using them as bats and fencing foils. We visit Tarpley’s Store and the post office, where Nate buys old newspapers and various legal documents and proclamations, while Ash collects quill pens and powdered ink and I play the role of human cash machine. Every time I buy something for one of the kids, I have to buy something for the others as well. Whenever I take my wallet out, they come running like ducklings, but, curiously, Nate wants very little. Instead of stuff, he repeatedly says, “I’ll take the cash,” and I give him ten or twenty bucks. For Ashley it’s something from the silversmith, and then something from the pottery place, and then a candle for her art teacher, and, and, and. I find myself wondering what a period cash machine would look like — someone posted in the center of town squatting on sacks of gold coin?
I have my own dim memories of coming here long ago, recalling that at Yorktown I got a black wooden spear with a rubber arrowhead end and later used it as a fishing rod. We have dinner at Ye Olde Pub and attend an evening performance in which we’re all taught to dance the Virginia Reel.
“Usually we have one room and our parents have the other,” Ashley says as she surveys our very large room at the lodge.
“Well, this time we’re bunking together,” I say, and no one says anything more.
I’m less stressed staying in a hotel than I would be at home. I don’t have to worry about cooking and cleaning, and it feels as though I’ve got backup: housekeepers armed with extra pillows and towels, and the elderly concierge who never comes out from behind his desk but does a decent job of getting us tickets to everything from dance performances to farm tours and munitions experiences.