River changes each time I’m there. When we arrived in high school, traumatized and exhausted, it was small and dumpy. Now there are art galleries, cafés, coffee shops, bookstores, a gourmet ice-cream shop, and a classy tattoo parlor named The Painted Vein. There’s also world-class windsurfing, skiing on Mt. Hood, and nature fanatics can get high on nature.
Surrounding the town are orchards and farmland. My grandma’s Queen Anne home, sitting on five acres, amidst a vast expanse of perfectly green lawn, can best be described as cakelike. Why? Because it reminds me of a blue cake.
Built in 1899, it’s four thousand square feet and light blue with white trim and white shutters, lacy lattice, a gabled roof, a huge wraparound covered porch on the main floor with an attached gazebo, a tower that Grandma visits often to “hide her secrets,” and a sunroom filled with wicker furniture and walls of windows.
Inside there are nooks and crannies, two bay windows with window seats, built-in bookshelves and built-in china cabinets. The rooms are large and airy, with stained-glass windows in the living room and perfectly preserved antiques.
Two clematis, one with pink flowers and one with white, wind their way up and around the porch like no one’s business.
I drove up on my motorcycle, with Janie behind me driving her silver Porsche. We would return to Portland soon and get my black Porsche. I had to have my motorcycle for mental escape.
Grandma’s Queen Anne is the most charming home I’ve ever seen. Inside it smells like fresh-baked bread, vanilla, cinnamon, and history.
Our family’s history.
I wanted to turn my bike and peel on out of there, one wheel up in the air.
Janie and I stood in front of the house together like soldiers before a battle, though we did not have any grenades or assault rifles with us.
The wind swirled around, like it was welcoming us home, fun and frolicking…mysterious.
I have never forgotten the wind here.
To me, the wind has always seemed like a person, with all the mood swings and rampaging, out-of-control emotions that we have. Sometimes it’s angry and whips around corners, sometimes it ruffles the river as it hurries toward the ocean, sometimes it puffs on by, gentle, caressing.
“The wind never stops,” Janie said, in wonder. “Never.”
She grabbed my hand, pulsing it with her fingers. She does this when she gets nervous. She’ll squeeze my hand four times, then pause, squeeze it four times, pause again. She gasped a little. Coughed. Breathed in. Breathed out.
“I feel faint,” I said. “I may need a one-night stand.” Sometimes I try to humor myself when things are particularly bleak.
“I need to tap and count,” she replied. “In fact, I think I’ll pause for a sec and count the roof tiles.”
At that second, the door flew open and a man came sprinting out, legs pumping, arms waving. He was wearing a straw hat over brown curls, blue shorts, and a T-shirt that said ABC. His white shoes had Velcro straps. He had a tummy, he wasn’t as tall as me, his eyes tilted, and his smile beamed, as usual.
He put his arms out wide as he hurdled toward us, screaming and laughing.
“They here! They here!” he shouted. His hat flipped off into that wind.
We knew what would happen.
“Now, Henry, no tackling us!” Janie said, so kind, because she loves Henry, but she backed away, hands up.
“Be gentle, Henry,” I said. “Give us a nice, gentle hug. Gentle!” I love Henry, but I backed up, too, sticking close to Janie.
Henry was not to be stopped.
Within two seconds, Janie and I were splat on the grass, tackled by our happy, mentally disabled brother who was on top of us, laughing.
“You home!” he announced, giving us both a kiss. “You home for Henry! Yeah, yeah. H-E-N-R-Y-H-E-N-R-Y!”
I gave Henry a kiss on the forehead and said, “I love you, my brother, Henry.”
Henry giggled. “I love you, my sister, Is.”
Janie kissed both of his cheeks. We hugged him as my love for Henry walloped me hard.
I heard Janie counting out loud. Soon we would be with our momma, a tricky sorceress; our grandma, who thought she was Amelia Earhart; and our sister, Cecilia, who has a hurricane for a personality.
Honest to God, Henry is the only normal person in our family.
The only one.
A long wood farm table slouched in the middle of the stunning, country-style kitchen Janie had paid to have remodeled so she could assuage the guilt she felt for not living here in the nuthouse with the viper.
A vase of flowers, purples and pinks, in a clear, curving glass vase sat on the table. On the windowsill was a collection of old, colorful glass bottles, the sunlight shimmering right through them. A set of French doors let in that ever-present, meandering wind.
Cecilia hugged both of us, bear-hug tight, then stood to my right, a sister-soldier in the battle against Momma/The Viper.
Momma did not bother to stand from where she was sitting at the table cracking walnuts when Janie and I entered. She said, almost melodically, “Henry, darling, would you please go and pick me a bouquet of flowers? You’re the only one who can do it right.”
“Yeah! Okay dokay, Momma!” Henry grabbed some scissors, blew us a kiss, then jump jump jumped out the door. “I bring the sisters in, now I get the flowers. I be right back!”
To get a full picture of Momma, blend together an older, blond Scarlett O’Hara and the steely coldness of the Queen of England. Except Scarlett and the Queen were not conceived on the banks of the Columbia River, which is how Momma got her name.
River Bommarito has ash-blond hair that curves into a stylish bell to her shoulders. When we were younger, it was either elegantly brushed or wedged onto her head. The wedging happened if she was spending days or weeks in bed, her depression getting the best of her, as she screamed at us to get the hell out.
One day, for some mysterious reason, after she’d molted, decayed, and sunk deeper into her own emotional pit, she’d get up, shower, apply her makeup, slip on a dress and heels, and it was like her depression never happened.
She’d get another job, usually a soul-shredding one, or her old boss would take her back because she made him so much money, and that was that. No explanation, no apology, no thanks to the three young daughters in the house for keeping things together while she dissolved into an almost-catatonic state.
No family meeting to discuss the trauma we’d recently lived through. The traumas became family secrets, never discussed or let out of the locked box.
Fortunately, after we sisters moved away, and Momma got older and the very same Grandma Momma had once called, to her face, “a wrinkled, mean hag-monster,” slipped and slid into dementia, she rarely took to her bed.
Maybe Momma was hoping to enjoy as many sane days as she could before Grandma’s dementia caught up with her through the gene pool. Or maybe, because she was no longer in dire emotional and financial straits, she didn’t get depressed.
Or maybe she took drugs. She’d told us she didn’t take medication, but I wasn’t sure about that. Not sure at all.
Next to me Janie started counting, her fingertips meeting as she muttered each number. “One…two…three…four…”
I stuck my chin up a fraction of an inch.
Cecilia whispered, “Speak, witch.”
Momma glared at us, like we were larvae, then stood, carefully placing the walnut cracker on the table and swishing her hands together to get rid of any nut residue, her intense gaze never