The Thimble Burglar

by Greg Walklin

They were waiting for us. Branches and leaves shifted in the wind, like the ashes were dancing or swaying to a hymn of praise. Because it was nearly noon, none of the Beatrice Home for Disabled Adult’s brick buildings cast shadows. Below the lot where we parked, the valley of soybeans and corn swelled and sighed. My parents opened the car door for Beatrice. Much later, when I entered college, the University campus would strike me as familiar, in a way I could not describe, but I would eventually realize that Avery Hall reminded me of the Home. That windy day, though, near the end of 1981’s summer, I had barely noticed the Home’s buildings. A front was blowing through when we dropped Beatrice off, and the two nurses and administrator who greeted my parents, standing in a triangle on the front steps of the administration building, had to hold their coats down. I didn’t even get out of the Olds to say goodbye; and Beatrice—although this wasn’t unusual for her, I suppose—didn’t wave goodbye to me as she puttered up the steps. It would be more than a decade before I saw my older sister again.

I was not supposed to be there. My grandmother had been appointed to take me to the last weekend of the state fair, but she had come down with influenza. Neither parent told me we were in for a long ride, so I’d not brought anything to read, and spent what seemed like hours staring at the insipid, flat Nebraska scenery between Lincoln and Beatrice.  Bee-ah-tris and Bee-at-ris, homonyms: My sister’s name and the city where we abandoned her.

Traffic was heavy on our return, as cars streamed to Lincoln for the first home football game. At the very limits of my boredom, as Beatrice disappeared behind us, my mother pulled out The Twin Dilemma and handed it to me. That summer I had mostly subsisted on the same worn hardbacks of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys from the library. But now here was a brand-new copy in the brown paper of Lee’s Booksellers, and I snatched it away. Nancy Drew started to navigate a fashion-related mystery; the details, of course, I’ve forgotten now.

Marjie, my mother said, Be is just going to be spending some time here. I’d hit a chapter break and asked her how long my sister would be staying.

My father, I noticed, glanced at me in the rearview mirror; he’d turned on the pregame radio broadcast.

She needs some treatment that we can’t provide, my mother continued. This, I later realized, was probably a lie, although with time I’ve thought that perhaps my mother was being truthful, in a way; perhaps she had even convinced herself Beatrice would be back with us again in the future. Nancy Drew had nearly solved the mystery by the time we arrived home.

Throughout the next week it was impossible not to notice that my sister was gone, because she was almost always making noise: a grunt or a shriek or one of her few words, on repeat, broken record mode, as my father would say, and now our house was silent. At first it felt like one of our weekend vacations we sometimes took without her, leaving her with my grandmother, who only had the energy for two nights once a year. The quiet unnerved me. I’d quickly finished The Twin Dilemma and was trying to re-read some older books, but finding Joe and Frank Hardy boring. My horrible hay fever had flared up, and prevented me from doing anything outside. I paced around the house, one abandoned activity to the next, one creaky footstep after another, sniffling, until my mother finally yelled down to me: Could you stop moving around for just one minute?

When I didn’t respond, I heard her footsteps down the stairs, until we were facing each other. When is Beatrice coming back? I’d riposted. In the entryway I could hear the old grandfather clock ticking. My mother, I remember, looked young that day.

We’ll have to talk to the doctors, she said.

Another quiet week, and then another. Unburdened by having to care for Beatrice, my father had begun working into the evenings; as an attorney managing his own small firm, he was keeping himself in the office. My mother, too, had filled her new time. As I grew up. she had managed my sister, from dressing her in the morning to putting her to sleep. Soon after we took Beatrice to Beatrice, my mother started in a new stream of activities. Each day she ran off to crotchet, bridge clubs, golf lessons, or a women’s philanthropic association with a secret name, which held boozy lunches in living rooms. She volunteered, it seemed, nearly every weekend at some new function. On the Saturdays she spent at First Lutheran I’d find a new Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys hardback sitting on my pillow, instructions on heating a casserole as a bookmark.

There was little time throughout to ask why. All I can remember of these conversations, during these first few weeks, is that I kept pressing my mother about my sister—but not regularly. They usually went something like this: I would ask her when we were going see Beatrice again or when she was going to move back in with us, and my mother would demur with some excuse about her doctors not allowing it, saying she would keep asking. Then she would be off to her next thing.

My father’s absences were due to a criminal defense case he had taken, which was unusual for him, as his work was mainly family law. It was pro bono, and yet it was consuming his time. When I asked him, in my innocent way, if the man had done something wrong, my father said, Well, it’s complicated, and told me that the accused had difficulties understanding some things. He needs help, my father said. Just locking him up won’t do anyone any good.

For many years I had forgotten about this conversation, forgot about what my father was doing at the time, but then in college—again staring up at Avery, where my chemistry class was being held—it came back to me: at that point I was having the reoccurring sensation that I’d done something horribly embarrassing or wrong, but I couldn’t remember what it was—just that there was something I should be embarrassed about. (I’ve had these kinds of night terrors since, so my boyfriends have told me, and it’s something I always apprise anyone I start sleeping with.) I’d concluded it must have been from a dream, that I hadn’t actually done anything embarrassing or wrong, but that the dream’s feeling lingered. After more time had passed, I’d asked myself the question: What was the awful thing I’d done or forgotten to do? Now, the origin of such sensation, which was like déjà vu, is obvious, as is the reason my father took on the defense of an indigent man with an intellectual disability. He just had a head start.

I share my father’s faults, and for that reason he has never been strange; rather, it was the quixotic way my mother acted that I still have trouble understanding. At first it seemed obvious that she was enjoying her freedom and doing what she wanted to do, except that soon she complained about all of these activities and found their obligations more burdensome than taking care of Beatrice ever was.

There is a moment, a year or so before the trip to Beatrice, which seems connected with how she had acted during that time. Beatrice, my mother and I were at a doctor’s office, at the family pediatrician, one of those old white-haired patricians who I have since avoided in my own medical care. I wasn’t paying attention to what the doctor said—it must have been another mystery book—but I did notice how my mother was, afterward. I kept asking her why she was angry, and she kept demurring.

Meanwhile, Beatrice wouldn’t keep repeating the same word: Cold. Cold cold cold. She wasn’t shivering: she had just seized on something said earlier and was repeating one of the words, which was a common habit of hers. She kept saying cold all the way home. Later that evening I overheard her telling my father that the physician had blamed her for Beatrice. For the way she was, I could tell she was saying. I now wonder: did the doctor recognize her frigidity, or did she become frigid because he had blamed her for her daughter’s disability?

Months of continued quiet passed and still my father and mother barely spoke of Beatrice. I’d asked a few more times, in passing, if the doctors were letting us see her now, but my father would only tell me to ask my mother, and my mother only ever put me off—shifting excuses about the doctors and Beatrice’s condition not improving. New Nancy Drew books continued to show up before I’d even finished the last one, interspersed with Hardy Boys tales. But Nancy was a trickster. The best liars don’t make you think they are honest: they make you think they are bad liars. At some point the chorus of people who constituted Carolyn Keene can’t keep up.

It’s best for us, my mother told me, if we let the doctors treat Beatrice and we move on with our lives. Maybe you can get your nose out of so many books.

If she wanted me to stop reading, I have always wondered, why was she buying me so many books?

Finally, one night over a quiet dinner, I made some noise. On this occasion my father was home, even though his case was near trial. My mother had put out their wedding china, which we hadn’t used for any occasion with Beatrice, who couldn’t be trusted not to break something. My sister wouldn’t sit and eat at the table; my father would have to follow her to her room with plate.

What’s going on with Beatrice? I asked as we sat down. You’re lying to me and I can’t take it anymore. Why can’t we go see her? Would someone just tell me what is happening?

Pass the mashed potatoes, my mother said to me. She hadn’t even paused.

Is she coming back? I asked again.

Pass the mashed potatoes.

After picking up the dish, I hesitated. With the massive thing in my hand I felt larger than I had before. Anger was bursting my temples. As I threw it at her head, a scream escaped me, something like the growl of a tennis player hitting a sharp backhand. My mother tried to duck but the bowl caught her full in the face. Mashed potatoes mashed her hair as the bowl clanged on the floor. Somehow it did not shatter. It didn’t even have a chip in it.

The next part I did not expect: my mother stood up, picked up the bowl, rinsed it in the sink, went upstairs, washed out her face and her hair, changed her clothes, re-did her make-up, returned, wiped up the mashed potatoes on the floor, re-heated her food in the microwave, and sat back down at the table to eat her roast.

While she was upstairs, after sitting in silence, my father finally spoke: They’re taking good care of Be. She has her own room, her own bed, daily activities, caretakers, all of that. The docs have told us that it’s better for us—better for you—if we move on with our lives. People like Be—they—well, your mother and I don’t want you to have to live a life crippled by your sister.

When my mother sat back down, it was clear the bowl had created a welt under her eye—not quite a black eye, but something close.

So I picked up my salad plate.

You can break the rest of the dishes if you want, my mother said. All of the emotion had left her voice.

Instead, I ran out of the house, still holding the salad plate. I stayed out until late in the evening. This, I told myself, will teach them that if they don’t want a daughter, if they don’t want Beatrice anymore, then they won’t be able to have me anymore, either. In a neighborhood park I swung on a swing. I lolled around a convenience store and walked into an open church, where I saw an ancient man praying. Cars honked and I darted across backyards. Around midnight, exhausted, I returned home to find that my mother was still up, sewing. Her eye was swollen; it appeared she hadn’t even tried to ice it. She didn’t ask about where I had been or where the salad plate was.

I didn’t mention Beatrice for a long time after that. Returning home that night, I recognized, was a capitulation. Nobody had gone after me: were they ready to abandon me just like my sister? While I questioned my will for a continuing my guerrilla campaign, my focus during my return was my tone of voice: I told my mother I understood why she had done what she had done, that I realized it was the best thing for all of us, and gave her a hug.

Her big smile revealed a chipped tooth.

This surrender my mother saw as an opportunity, which was what I had been expecting. After returning from a music camp, I wandered into Beatrice’s old room to find that my mother had turned it into a sewing and crocheting center. As on the night I’d run out, she had begun to cross stitch and crochet late into the night. During the warmer months she created these little mise-en-scêne rocky waterfalls, or little Arcadian pastorals, which, looking back at them now, I find Norman Rockwell-esque, Life Magazine-y, some being classical, like something by Nicholas Poussin. At Christmas—our first without Beatrice—she produced scarves and sweaters for my father and me. He wore the hats and gloves to the courthouse and put the little pastoral scenes in his office’s waiting room. I kept telling her how much I loved them.

Cold. Cold cold cold.

She’d given away the rest of Beatrice’s things. We’d just put on a garage sale, but I’d stopped my mother from raiding my sister’s room. Instead, she had snuck it all out while I was at school. If it was my mother’s intention to cut Beatrice from my mind by removing her room, she succeeded for a time. I didn’t ask about my sister anymore; I didn’t know what point there was.

That first weekend at the university, I’d sat looking outside my dorm room window at the red brick buildings and sculpted walkways, a few trees just beginning to turn fiery or orange, and then suddenly stood up, left my roommate without telling her where I was going, and drove directly to the Beatrice Home for Disabled Adults.

Darkness had descended by the time I arrived. Approaching the campus on the east end of town, the blackness made it obvious the place had already been shut down. Half of the ashes had already been reduced to stumps; the city had taken them down before the emerald ash borer could. My stomach turned.

Weedy parking lots of the campus gave way to the old dilapidated brick of downtown. Unlike the bars in Lincoln, who would card a grandmother, the watering hole I tried in Beatrice didn’t blink when I stepped inside. A few bar patrons, a few former workers at the home, as it turned out, apprised me of a federal lawsuit and the resulting shutdown, grumbling about the state government while the Sunday Night Football crew on the corner TV waxed about Tampa-2 defense. Most of the residents had relocated to other cities, they told me: small places, more home-like. Through a bit of conversation in a beer garden I found one who had known my sister, and thought she’d moved to a duplex in town.

I never saw anything but a smile on her face, she told me, puffing her cigarette.

This should have made me feel happy that she seemed to enjoy living away, or sad that she enjoying living there and not living with us. Instead I thought back to the salad plate I’d taken years before, and how determined I was to leave it in a place where nobody would ever find it—so the china set we had at home would never be complete.

Would, after these years, Beatrice even remember me? The idea that I would arrive and she wouldn’t even recognize me had stopped me from even trying. If I wanted to find out where she was now, I realized, I’d have to talk to my mother again.

Nearing the end of my last summer living with them, my parents and I had returned home to find our house had been burglarized. To our surprise the only thing ransacked was the sewing room. The burglar had broken through the window and taken everything. Why would they do that? Our neighbors asked. The burglar didn’t go for any of my father’s antique guns, or the TV, the china, my mother’s jewelry, or the stereo.  My dad called him the Thimble Burglar, which wasn’t really an accurate name. My mother suspected neighborhood teen boys, who had broken into a few garages recently. When I swore to her I’d find out what happened, she believed me. But we just couldn’t figure it out.

 

Greg Walklin is a lawyer and writer living in Lincoln, Nebraska. His fiction has appeared in Arts and Letters, Midwestern Gothic, Emrys Journal, Palooka, and Pulp Literature, among other publications.