The Gift

By Marc Simon

The Gift

It was a year and a month after the accident. It was her fifth birthday party. She walked into the living room with a slight limp and wore a long blue dress to cover bandages from a recent skin graft. Her smile stayed frozen on her face, even as her relatives descended upon her. They were loud and sweaty, these aunts and uncles with varying degrees of obesity, all trying to outdo each other with their sympathy toward her, and so they all talked at once, and then they told each other to shut up, you’re frightening her. Her smile remained, as if frozen in time.

They’d had to use The Jaws of Life to cut Ronna from the wreckage. For the rest of her family—her father and two sisters, ages eight and six—it was The Jaws of Death.

The air was close and cloying on that hot June afternoon, smelling of half-sour dill pickles and pastrami left out too long in the heat. One of the uncles, Louis I think declared that they should eat already, and then the lot of them hurried to the long table like pigs to a trough. Maybe that’s harsh, but that’s how I remember it. One of the aunts handed a plate of food to Ronna. She put it on a folding chair.

I stood by myself in a corner of the living room, keeping my distance. I wanted nothing to do with this side of my family, my father’s. I was fifteen, sensitive and secretive. I resisted their attempts to communicate with monosyllabic languor: How is school, Marky? Fine. You still playing baseball? Uh huh. Gotta girlfriend? No.

While they were feeding they pretty much left my cousin alone. I walked as softly as I could as I approached her, thinking she was as fragile as a china doll, not knowing what to say other than how are you, which seemed incredibly stupid, because how would she be given her injuries and her tragedy and this suffocating family gathering.

She kept her eyes and her smile on me. I squatted down. I asked if she remembered me, if she knew who I was. She said, “You’re my cousin Marc.”

The tears gathered in my eyes as I told her I loved her. She said, “I know.” And I think she did, on some fundamental level. I asked if maybe sometime she wanted to go to the Highland Park Zoo with me; not right now, but sometime. She said, “I have to ask Aunt Edie first.”

We looked at each other until an obese aunt blocked our line of sight. The noise began all over again and reached its crescendo when they sang Happy Birthday. I stayed out on the porch, smoking a stolen Camel, keeping an eye out for my father.

I didn’t see her again until thirty years later, at a family reunion. I hadn’t planned to attend. I felt no need to reunite, since I’d never felt united. When I politely R.S.V.P.’d that I couldn’t make it, my oldest cousin Shelly called me, said it was too bad, Cousin Ronna was coming in from Fiji.

“Fiji?”

Shelly explained. Ronna went to the University of Maryland. Got a job with the FBI. Became an F.B.I. agent. Was transferred to San Francisco. Went to Fiji on a vacation. Fell in love with the resort manager. Quit the bureau, never came back. Works as a communications consultant at the U.S. embassy in Suva. “If you kept in touch with your family you would know this.”

I chose to ignore the bait. “What’s a communications expert?”

“Ask her yourself.” It was a not so subtle challenge. I booked a flight to Pittsburgh that night.

A placard in the lobby of the Italian restaurant read Simon Family Reunion, with an arrow pointing toward a private function room. Some relatives greeted me warmly. Some warily. Some of them, I think, weren’t quite sure what I was doing there, since I’d never shown any interest in attending family functions, like weddings, bar mitzvahs, or funerals.

My brother sat at a table by himself. What we had to say to each other could have been said in a two-minute phone call.

My fat relatives were still fat. The loud ones were still loud. In addition to yelling at each other, some of my cousins had children to yell at, too. The food was deli-style. I wondered if it was left over from Ronna’s fifth birthday party. I mentioned it to my cousin Bert. He looked at me as if I had two heads.

I caught sight of Ronna before she saw me. She looked vibrant. Bobbed blonde hair, slender, white puka shell bracelet, Fiji-gold tan. A slight limp. We hugged a long-lost hug.

We sat at the head of the table on either side of our oldest relative, Uncle Red. He never said it, but we knew we were his favorites. Maybe it was because Ronna and I both had lost parents at an early age; my father, Red’s youngest brother, at age forty-seven, cerebral hemorrhage; Ronna’s mother, his youngest sister, age thirty, cancer, a year before the accident.

Ronna and I took turns bringing Red food and whiskey, since he was in a wheelchair. He once was a powerful man. One time I saw him lift a shop anvil by himself. Diabetes had stolen his strength and his right leg up to the hip. After a half hour or so, the transport service came to take him back to the Hebrew Home for the Aged. It would be the last time I saw him alive.

The waitress set a Maker’s Mark in front of me. I asked Ronna what she’d done at the FBI.

“Surveillance.”

On who?

“People.”

Bad guys?

“People.”

I said this sounded like dialogue from that movie, Uncle Buck. I asked her if she’d seen the movie. She laughed. I asked her if she’d ever killed anyone.

She laughed again. I couldn’t tell if it was a yes laugh or a no laugh.

“Can’t you tell me anything else?

“O.K. I had a station wagon, a credit card and a sidearm.”

Before I could follow up my cousin Shelly sat down between us. She had a photo album and she told us that it had belonged to our Aunt Anne, who’d died a few years earlier. I think I knew that. At least I said I did.

The first photos were black and white. Shelly asked me if I remembered these people. The best I could say was, “Sort of.”

She said, “Oh. Well this one is your grandmother. You would recognize her if you didn’t live in a state of family denial.”

She flipped a page and there was a bride and groom photo—Ronna’s parents. I froze. I wanted to ask Shelly how she could have been so insensitive, to show Ronna a photo of her dead parents. I wanted to slap her.

Ronna smiled her fifth birthday smile. I don’t pretend to know what went on behind her green eyes. Maybe she didn’t remember them at all since she was so young when they died. Or maybe she did, with love. At any rate, we moved past it.

Ronna and I met a few years later, when she came to Boston to visit us. It was April, and the weather was springtime chilly. She wore my wife’s fur coat the entire visit. Every time we went into a restaurant she checked the exits with an FBI gaze.

Before she left for home—she still lived in Fiji—she said she had a gift for me. She handed an envelope to me and asked me not to open it until she was on the airplane, so I waited.

Inside the envelope was a yellowed photo of her mother and my father, teenaged brother and sister, sitting on the hood of a car with their arms around each other’s waste. Her note said, “Weren’t they pretty?”

I watched her plane climb away.

Marc Simon’s short fiction has appeared in several literary magazines, including The Wilderness House Review, Flashquake, Poetica Magazine, The Writing Disorder, Jewish Fiction.net, Slush Pile Magazine, Everyday Fiction, The Adelaide Literary Review, Burningword Literary Magazine, Microfiction Monday Magazine and most recently, Ginosko Literary Journal. His one-act plays have been winners in New Works competitions in the Etc. Readers Theater, Naples Florida, The Hand-to-Mouth Players Playwrights/Directors Workshop in Westchester, New York, and the 2020/2021 Pittsburgh New Works Festival. His debut novel, The Leap Year Boy was published in December, 2012. In a former life Marc was a comedian in a sketch comedy group. Marc lives in Naples, Florida. View his work at marcsimonwriter.com