I couldn’t sleep that night. After my long trip, I had hoped to get a full night in, and so crawled into bed between Lily and Aiden sometime around ten. We had been sleeping all together since they were born and I loathed the day when they chose to end the tradition –I never would. However, instead of collapsing into an exhausted slumber, I found myself drifting continuously in and out or dreaming, and every little noise proved reason enough for my brain to drag me back into the land of the waking. So I lay there for hours, Lily snuggled into my side and Aiden’s arm draped across my neck, listening to their steady, soft breathing, the wind whistling against the window over my head, the old air conditioner rattling the walls of the house when it clicked on and off, and the constant whir of the old box fan sitting out in the hall, doing its best to make up for the poor, overworked air conditioner.

When I heard the faint tinkling bell coming from Grandma’s room a little after six in the morning, I carefully slipped from beneath my children and tiptoed down the hallway to peer in and see Grandma sitting serenely in her bed, holding the bell high above her head. The moonlight spilled in the open window and cast a pale, ghastly glow over her creased and pallid skin, and the wind, following the dim light in, rustled her limp hair and sweaty nightgown just enough to give her a surreal quality. As I stood in the doorway watching her, I wondered if she hadn’t already died and this was her angel sitting on the bed, humming a low, sorrowful melody that the night snatched out the window and carried off to the ears of the stars.

I shifted and, hearing the doorframe creak under my weight, she turned blank eyes to me, staring at me as though she had never before seen me in her life. I feared she would start screaming at this stranger in her bedroom. However, after one long moment, she suddenly smiled broadly and, with droopy eyes as though she had just woken up, cried, “Jemma-Lou, dear, you’re here!”

“Yes, Grandma, I’m here,” I nodded slowly, recalling that I had been thirteen the last time she had called me Jemma-Lou. I stepped into the room and sat gently on the edge of her bed and asked, “How are you doing?”

“Oh, just fine, just fine, but did you hear the news?”

“What news, Grandma?”

She leaned in, as though propriety demanded she not make the announcement public, and whispered, “Old Man Tippet’s gone and gotten himself murdered!”

“And how did he do that?” I inquired, pushing myself up and walking over to shut the window against the humidity pouring in. The moment had been destroyed as I realized that no, she wasn’t dead at all, merely stuck in the past. However, as I grabbed the window to shut it, something outside caught my attention –what, I can’t say, for as I looked, there was nothing out of the ordinary– and held my gaze as she rattled off details I already knew from the very summer I wished to forget.

It was the very day that I had arrived in Hideaway after spending two months visiting my father’s parents in Iowa, Zane and Catherine meeting Michael and I at the bus stop, Zane with a bouquet of some kind of pink flowers in his arms for me. I had tripped on the last step of the bus, perhaps on purpose, and Zane had tossed the flowers aside to catch me. While I laughed and Michael and Catherine teased me about my clumsiness, Zane kissed my forehead and whispered to me how much he missed me, how the three months had stretched on for an eternity. He didn’t want to make a big scene in front of Catherine and Michael, but as soon as we had finished the walk to Grandma’s house, all of Michael’s and my bags in tow, Zane tugged on my hand and pulled me away from the hubbub of the house, calling to Alex over his shoulder to cover for us. Alex didn’t seem to upset by my immediate disappearance; he still had Michael and Timothy to catch up with.

We ran along the beach for a bit, then turned inward, following an old dirt path that Alex, Timothy, and I had made several years earlier to provide easier access to the tiny, run-down shack Old Man Tippet called home. The elderly veteran of World War Two had been a constant playmate for me and my friends in spite of the warnings and scoldings of the rest of the adults in town. Normandy had left Old Man Tippet a little rattled, to say the least, but while his constants shrieking fits and strange habits scared away the other children of the town (what few there were), they drew me in, and through me, my friends. Though none dared go around his house without me to act as a guard, I couldn’t find anything dangerous in his dark, drooping eyes or his yellow, toothy smile, or the way he walked with his back hunched, his gnarled hands holding on to a stick or bag, his freckled, bark-like face cast down to the ground in submission to anyone he came across.

The townspeople considered him a recluse for never venturing into Hideaway except for Christmas Eve and Easter Day church services, but I knew that outside of town limits, the country belonged to Old Man Tippet. He knew the forest and the fields, the coves and the caves alongside the water’s edge better than any map-maker ever could, and on numerous occasions, we had followed him around, listening as he told us tales, stories of his past confused with dreams and folklore and myths until I’m not sure anyone knew anymore where he had actually been or what he had actually done. He taught me songs and how to play the harmonica and how to clean a fish, and when my friends and I built our clubhouse, he was the only adult in the entire world who knew where it was. Often we would arrive to find firewood or fish or baskets of berries waiting at the entrance for us, telltale signs that, in his own strange way, Old Man Tippet considered us his friends and family.

Whether he ever had any family of his own was never made known to me or anyone else, and everything about his life was such a blend of real and imaginary that the only thing I ever heard from his mouth and knew to be entirely honest and reality-based came one Christmas when, at the age of eleven, I grew frustrated with the crowd at Grandma’s house and ventured over to his for a visit. Old Man Tippet’s mind was really that of a child, and had he been diagnosed by a doctor, I’m sure they would have declared him a terrible case of PTSD and possibly other mental degenerative diseases. So his speech wasn’t always entirely there, and his mind never was, and often his sentences would skip around so much they were hard to follow, or else he wouldn’t speak at all and just listen to me rattle off like a jaybird.

Michael didn’t like me going over to his house alone, but that Christmas I escaped to his house and there sat by his feet as he whittled and suddenly launched into a speech more lucid than I had ever heard him, or ever would again. He told me about storming Normandy, about the bodies and the blood and the moans of his friends and comrades who, faced with slow, painful deaths as bullets racked their bodies or arms and legs were blasted off by explosives, sobbed like the small boys they still were, crying out for mothers who would never again get to kiss their sons’ foreheads or stroke their hair. He told me about helping clear out a concentration camp where dead people, skeletons, hobbled along, their bodies and spirits so far gone it was a wonder they could still breathe at all. He told me about dancing with pretty French girls and drinking strong German wine with his buddies and he told me about watching those same French girls running for their lives and those same buddies falling down around him, staring up at him for the last time with cloudy, empty eyes. When he had finished telling me all this, both of us with tears rolling down our cheeks as I, a child, found myself entrusted with the greatest burden a soldier bears, he handed me the figure he had whittled, a small mother and baby bear, and sighed, “And my country forgot me. Nobody remembers the life I gave in that great war. If only my body had died that day, too!”

He was never again half that coherent, and though he continued to teach me and my friends and sing to us, he sank even further into himself until it was as though we had two different companions –one a ghost of a man who, never speaking to us, left us sweet gifts at the clubhouse, the other a five-year-old who, given an audience, would sing and yell and laugh hysterically for us, putting on one-man shows for us that had the rest of the town shaking their heads, muttering about what war could do to a man.

The day Zane and I ran up the trail to his forest, I should have realized from the start that the forest was too quiet. Not that Old Man Tippet’s presence ever made much noise in the forest, but always before I could feel his presence, feel his protective eyes watching over my friends and me as we romped around, oblivious to holes and snakes and wolves and poisonous plants. I was seventeen, though, and far too caught up in seeing my boyfriend for the first time in three months to pay any attention to sneaking suspicions.

When we reached Old Man Tippet’s shack, Zane called out for him to see if the old man was anywhere around. When there came no reply, Zane snickered and, kissing my neck, whispered, “Let’s go inside.” I had argued that Old Man Tippet didn’t like us going into his home if he wasn’t there, but Zane kept pushing and, grabbing my hand, pulled me inside where he quickly pushed me against the wall and kissed lower on my neck, his hands sneaking around to my back. I rolled my eyes and pushed him away, not amused with his very boyish behavior. Though he groaned and pretended to be hurt, I left him in order to inspect the shack that for some reason looked much different than it had the last time I had been in it at Easter. The scant furniture had been moved, which was odd enough, but all the dozens of little carved figurines that Old Man Tippet kept lined up on a shelf on one wall had disappeared, and the contents of a homemade cabinet had been strewn across the floor. I followed this trail of oddities until, stepping out the back door, I walked right into a pair of bare feet, dangling in the air at eye level.

“He was murdered, he was murdered, poor soul,” Grandma sighed, making me jump. I turned to look at her and offered a sympathetic smile as she shook her head and kneaded her fingers.

“I’m the one that found him, Grandma. Remember?” I prodded, stepping closer.

She nodded and squeezed her eyes shut, as though watching the scene play in her head, “Yes, yes, you screamed . . . I’ve never heard a scream like that in all my long years, my dear.” Zane had grabbed me and pulled me away, I remembered, and when Alex, Catherine, Timoty, and Michael came sprinting up the path not long after, I collapsed and had to be carried back to the house. I don’t remember what happened after that, except that the police asked me a couple questions and, nodding sadly, agreed anyone could have seen it coming. For a crazy old recluse to hang himself could be expected, they explained, but that didn’t make me hurt any less, and it was several days before my friends could convince me to even leave my room. Alex was mainly responsible for that, sneaking up to my room in the middle of the night to ask if I wanted to go look around Old Man Tippet’s house for any better clues as to what might have set him off and to clean things up and to find anything I wanted buried with him. The two of us had worked silently, but when we had finished cleaning the shack, several electric lanterns lighting our work, we had found no answers to any of my questions, nor any items of consequence that I thought Old Man Tippet might appreciate at his grave.

“Will there be a funeral for him, do you think?” Grandma mused, capturing my attention once again. “The church doesn’t like a suicide, you know . . . ”

“I thought you said he was murdered,” I reminded gently, sitting on the edge of her bed.

This bit of information confused her, and for a moment she just nodded her head slowly, then smiled, “Yes, my dear, he was murdered. You told me that, didn’t you?”

I had told her that, though I don’t think I had ever believed it myself, even. The police didn’t want to make Old Man Tippet’s suicide a big deal, and so insisted we couldn’t call a preacher in from Corpus for a service, and the local church refused to hold services over someone who had taken their own life. So Old Man Tippet had been buried without the pomp and splendor I was positive he deserved. Few came out to his service –my friends and I, our families to humor us, and a few of the local gossips who surely wouldn’t miss such a momentous occasion as the death of the local old coot. I was the only one to shed tears for the old war hero, sniffling as they lowered him into the ground, and though Zane and Michael held my hands just as they had four years earlier when it had been my dad I was watching lowered into the ground, and though Alex later held me tightly and stroked my back as I cried into his shoulder as he had done five years earlier when, confronted with the death of my beloved parent, I had sobbed myself sick, I couldn’t help but agree with Old Man Tippet. His country had indeed forgotten him.

“Jemmalyn, honey, would you be a dear and get me my pills?” Grandma asked.

I walked over to the bag of Skittles on the night stand as I asked, “How many do you take, Grandma?”

“Three.” I gave her two and she didn’t say anything, just tossed them back with a gulp of water and settled back into the pillows. “Oh, and dear, there’s a new girl I’d like you to meet, Catherine Paramour. She’s going to college here and she’s been helping me around the house. I think you’ll really like her.”

The name still sent chills down my spin, but I didn’t say anything. I just watched until she had fallen back asleep, and then returned silently to my room, slipping in bed between my sleeping angels. Perhaps I could blame Catherine Paramour for destroying our lives, but I didn’t let myself think about it. At that point in my life, I was sick of trying to figure out why or how because I only ever came up empty handed and broken hearted.

I didn’t stay in bed much longer before giving up on getting any good sleep. It had been too long; it was too late now. So I rose to greet the day with a frown. I couldn’t help but nod my head that yes, it had been a mistake to come back. There was nothing for me here but painful memories, and if after just one night, I was ready to curl up in a ball and rip my hair out, how in the world was I going to make it for however much longer Grandma held on? As horrible as it was to even think it, part of me hoped she would hurry up and get it over with so I could leave Hideaway and, all ties severed, never look back.

The television wasn’t working, nor was the radio, and I wasn’t sure where Grandma’s record player had gotten to, so I was left alone in the quiet downstairs as the sun slowly peeked its forehead up over the trees to the east of the house. Not to be idle, I looked around the kitchen and rearranged a few things since Connie had insisted I let her put the groceries away while I check the receipt to make sure she had got everything I asked and count the money to prove to myself none was missing. I didn’t really care if a dollar or two was missing, but she insisted, I guess assuming I would harbor some long-term distrust after I caught her stealing the money out of my china dog bank as a kid to buy alcohol. Whatever. I had long ago decided she was a waste of hate and resentment. But I guess she felt she needed to prove the change in herself to me, and even used some of her own money to buy a little game for Lily and Aiden that had kept them happily occupied for the rest of the evening.

After the kitchen was arranged as I wanted it, I pulled things out to make breakfast, knowing Lily would probably be up soon, whereas Aiden would gladly sleep through noon if I let him. Sure enough, I had just begun cracking eggs onto the skillet when she came stumbling into the kitchen, rubbing her groggy eyes and yawning to reveal little pearly teeth.

“Good morning, pretty girl,” I greeted over my shoulder, snickering as she lost her balance and almost fell over before leaning against the cabinets.

“Morning, Mommy,” she returned.

“Did you sleep well?”

“Yes,” she nodded. She silently watched me for a couple minutes, then came closer and, tugging on my arm, whispered, “Is Grandma awake?”

“Not yet, she’s not. Nobody is except you and me,” I assured her, scooping her into my arms and covering her face with kisses. She giggled and kissed me back, then sighed deeply when I set her down on the counter beside my workspace.

“What are you sighing about?” I asked.

“No-othing,” she promised. When I raised my eyebrow, she giggled and repeated, “No-othing! I’m hungry.”

“Well it’ll be ready soon. Do you want to go wake your brother up? He’d sleep all day if we didn’t keep after him, don’t you think?”

“Yes, he would sleep all day,” Lily agreed, nodding seriously, though I knew she couldn’t see what was so bad about that. I helped her down from the counter and watched her run from the kitchen, her little feet barely touching the floor and her arms spread out like wings.

When she returned several minutes later, dragging Aiden by the hand as he stumbled along behind her, I had already set the scrambled eggs and toast out on the table and was just carrying orange juice over.

“Mommy, Connie is awake. I saw her,” Lily informed me, jumping up into her chair. Aiden let out a yelp as, losing his balance, he slammed his head on the corner of the chair and began wailing. Well, if she wasn’t, she is now, I muttered to myself, picking my son up and kissing his forehead and rubbing his back until his cries had quieted to sleepy sniffles. He wouldn’t let me put him down for a while longer, though, so I fixed his plate while holding him on my hip and let him eat sitting on my lap –as long as my son wanted to snuggle, I would have a lap and arms ready for him. I had learned the hard way to appreciate people as much as you could in the time you had, because all too soon would come the time for missing them.

Connie strolled into the kitchen a while later, pulling her hair back to complete the light-blue work uniform she wore. When she saw the three of us giggling and whispering to each other, she grinned, “What a wonderful picture to find in your kitchen when you wake up.”

“You look pretty,” Aiden complimented when Connie had stepped close enough for him to reach out and feel the material of her uniform. He had been going through a very touch-oriented phase lately, and anything that felt interesting to him, such as the coarse material of this vintage-style waitress dress, he deemed beautiful.

Connie’s smile broadened, “Thanks, sweet cakes.”

“I’m not sweet cakes!” he insisted. “I’m Aiden!”

“Oh,” Connie laughed, trying to share an amused look with me that I averted my eyes to avoid. “Well thank you, Aiden.” To me, she explained, “I have work all day . . . I’m covering a shift for someone . . . but if you need me here, I can–“

”I haven’t needed you for the past twelve years; I think I’ll be okay today,” I assured her. My words were sharp, even to me, and I instantly regretted them, if only for being unnecessarily mean on an otherwise pleasant morning. To try and smooth things over a little, and maybe get rid of the sudden guilt-ridden look on her face, I asked, “What time will you get back?”

“In time for dinner, I think. Sixish?”

“We’ll save you a place, then.” The idea of us holding off dinner for her cheered her up considerably and her smile returned as she bid us all a good day and bounced out the front door.

Once she had disappeared, Aiden grinned, “I like her. She’s funny.”

“That’s because she acts like she’s your age,” I sighed, shaking my head. I took another bite of eggs and squashed them against my teeth. They weren’t quite as good when you hadn’t pulled them out from beneath the hen yourself.

“Do you like her, Mommy?” Lily asked innocently, cocking her head sideways as though looking for a response in more than just my words.

I hesitated, then forced a grin and reminded, “We’re supposed to love everyone, remember?”

“But we don’t have to like everyone,” she replied. “Remember? You said that, Mommy.”

“I said that? When did I say that?” I pressed, silently cursing myself for forgetting that kids not only hear everything you say, whether it’s directed at them or not, but they also remember everything you say.

“You told Aunt Carol.”

“I did, did I? Well, little monkey, if I said it to Aunt Carol, how did you hear it? Were you eavesdropping?” I teased, reaching over and poking her in the side. She didn’t really know what eavesdropping was, though I used the word often enough with her. She giggled and didn’t have an answer for me.

“What are we going to play now?” she asked instead, pushing her plate away from her.

I smiled, “We’re going to play ‘Put the dishes in the sink,’ and then we’re going to play ‘Go upstairs and get dressed and check on Grandma,’ and then we’re going to play ‘Clean the house.’”

“Woah,” Aiden gasped. “That’s a lotta playing.”

“Yes, it is, so let’s get to it or we’re going to run out of time! Hurry!” They didn’t need any encouragement from me to spring into action, and I thanked my lucky stars that my kids were either sweet enough to do chores without complaining or else dumb enough to believe me when I made them sound fun.

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