Seeing the two of them standing there stiff as statues set my blood boiling. They were hunkered together—my four-year-old daughter and 75-year-old stepmother—gazing up and down the street as if awaiting heavenly guidance.
Why didn’t they move?
When I offered to accompany them, I did so without implying they couldn’t find their own way to the park, three blocks away. I had instead suggested that I’d enjoy walking there with them along the streets now that the leaves were splashed color.
My daughter had scorned the idea. “We want to go on our own so we can talk.”
Talk about what I wondered. Probably about who had pinched my stepmother’s underwear?
“Nothing has been stolen,” I had assured my daughter the first time she had reported the ‘thefts.’
“So where’s her underwear?” Carol had challenged me, hands on hips, in her ‘you’re not the boss of me’ voice.
“Nana didn’t bring many pair of underpants,” I said.
Which was true. My stepsister hadn’t realized that visiting for a week and often being caught short, Nana needed at least a dozen pair of undies.
But my explanation fell on deaf ears. Nana’s report about thefts and of chilling encounters had a ready listener in my daughter. Carole took it seriously when her grandmother fretted. She knew from experience what it was like to have one’s fears scorned. Having found in the other a colleague in a world in which neither had control, they had become as thick as thieves.
My assurances about misplaced underwear were dismissed. After all, I am the one who crouches down to check for ogres under the bed, stares into the black hole and insists there is nothing there but dust-balls. Carole knows for certain the baddies are there, hiding.
So here I am, Enemy Number One watching from behind the curtain as the two lost souls huddle together and consult on how to get to the park.
I can hardly restrain myself from ripping off the screen, leaning out the window and shrieking, “It’s down the hill, damn it,” in a voice loud enough to blast the neighbors out of their doors.
Two days ago, a kindly senior from down the way had escorted my stepmother, clad only in her housecoat and dog-eared slippers, home. “Someone lost her way,” he said, “I thought it was your mom.”
“Stepmother,” I blurted and immediately regretted disowning the poor old soul.
“How’s Tom?” the man, anxious for street gossip, had asked. “I haven’t seen him lately.”
“Often away on business,” I said, tempted to add that, when my husband did come home, he offered advice about being patient with Carole and Nana then hunkered down in front of the TV.
I am beginning to finally realize that the challenge Carole and Nana present is beyond me. How can I explain to my daughter that her Nana is no longer the chipper grandmother who told her stories, showed her how to bake ginger snaps and liked to skate board. And how to reassure my stepmother that her underwear was not stolen nor was her wedding ring (which after a frantic search was found hidden under a book on the bedside table) taken by burglars?
“I can’t look,” I thought, dragging myself away from the window to seek diversion at the computer. It was time for a cheerful note to my stepsister. But I couldn’t forget
the drama being played out on the street. Even before I signed off curiously dragged me back to the window.
They’d disappeared. I ran to the door, craned my neck to see up and down the street. They were nowhere. I fumbled to the back door, cracked my shin on the footstool, and hopped in pain to the porch.
And there they were, huddled together beside an elderly woman who was struggling with an impatient dog and pointing down the road to the park.
“The kindness of strangers,” I sighed.
But I couldn’t always count on that. And watching the two lost souls wander down the street, happily hand in hand, I recognized I couldn’t fix things.
I run a small, successful company, this wasn’t rocket science and I had thought that I could figure out what to do. Now I saw I would have to seek counsel. This was new territory; I needed a map.
~ Melodie Corrigall
Published in Blank Spaces (Canadian Magazine), March 2020