A Last Will and Testament

When I first got diagnosed with cancer, I went to see a lawyer about my will, and what he told me has stuck with me ever since. I'd pitched him the idea for a properly interesting will--the sort of thing that could get a blurb on Wikipedia--but he wasn't impressed.

"You think you want an interesting will. Everyone does. But I'll tell you what you really want." He sounded bored, and the rhythm of his words suggested that he'd given this exact speech a number of times before. "You want a will that will make everything easy for the people you love when they're grieving."

I think about that all the time now. Not because of my own will. It's all sealed up and extremely boring. The first draft just left my belongings to a cancer-research charity. The current draft leaves everything to my wife. I hope that before I ever need to use it, I will edit it a few more times to add my children to the document, but at the moment there are no children to add. Thankfully, the cancer is in remission, so it could be decades before the document ever becomes relevant, and my wife and I are happy and hopeful about the prospect of offspring in good time.

No, I think about the conversation with the lawyer because of my mother. She died, and she left behind a properly strange will.

Among other things, the will's stipulation includes:

• Each of her five children received an identical cuckoo clock, none of which any of us had seen before.
• All of her grandchildren at the time received cheap plastic kazoos. There's a fund to purchase more kazoos when more grandchildren are born.
• Another fund exists to give exactly 55 dollars and 55 cents to the a charity protecting wildlife in Brazil.
• A Luger used in WWII was left to her brother, who himself predeceased her. So instead it passed to her nephew, a man who none of us had ever met.

The vast majority of her fortune, however, was left in a contest.

"Is that legal?" Dirk asked. As the oldest brother in the family, it's his job to ask questions like that.

"We made certain that it would be on her behalf." The lawyer involved looked younger than any of us anticipated, but his suit made it clear that he meant business. Apparently he belonged to the firm that represented my mother, and they were supposed to be the best in the business.

During her life, my mother wrote and illustrated a series of children's books that were never successfully translated into English. While they were aimed at early readers, they also involved lots of clever wordplay and puns that relied on her mother tongue's idiosyncrasies. They sold well enough that she managed to make quite a fortune while also maintaining an iron grip on her empire. No matter how much anyone offered her to translate the books, she refused to budge unless they could prove that they could maintain her art's spirit in this language. None of them ever did.

You wouldn't know her name. You may have seen it, though. She shows up regularly on listicles about the best-selling authors you've never heard of, along with authors of paperbacks that are only sold at truck-stops. When she moved to America, she enjoyed the sense of mystery this brought with her.

Who was this European matriarch with apparently-infinite wealth who no one had ever heard of?

Imagine if Theodor Geisel had a flair for the dramatic.

Her young, sleek lawyer looked at us with total boredom. For us, it was the day our mother was buried. For him, it was Wednesday.

"Shall we proceed?" he said.

So we did.

The rules of the contest were as oblique as anything.

Before dying, mother had illustrated a final manuscript. She'd left it somewhere. Whoever brought it to the law firm within a year would receive the bulk of her fortune.

"Okay?" Anna said. "So, where do we begin?"

"That's all I know."

"All you know?" Dirk scoffed.

"I assure you, sir, if I knew anything more, I would be overjoyed to share it with you." He sounded like a man who had never been overjoyed in his life.

I didn't talk during that meeting. I rarely do around my family, especially after the cancer diagnosis. I remembered sitting down with my mother after I got the news and telling her that I wasn't sure how long I would live. I didn't know what to expect. Would she weep? Would she tell me that we would find a cure, no matter the cost?

We were sitting one of her over-decorated entertaining rooms, sipping tea from her bad china. After several long minutes of thought, she said, "You know, I heard that Margaret's daughter is getting married."

We never spoke about it again.

We assumed that either the kazoos or the cuckoo clocks had to be the starting point of the mystery. Anna smashed hers trying to find anything unusual, while Dirk went over his looking for secret compartments or markings. Ilyana stared at hers, dumbfounded, while Rich watched the rest of us.

"C'mon, Jack. What's your theory?"

"I don't have one." It was true. But I did have a plan. Perhaps this is also a direct consequence of my brush with cancer. My doctor told me once that my particular diagnosis would have been a death sentence as little as twenty years before, but I intend to live a long and healthy life. My lawyer looked at my idea for a snazzy will and told me what I really wanted, and he was right. That's the thing about experts. They know things.

So I gathered up my cuckoo clock, then I researched who was the best clock repair-person in our state, and then I drove my clock over to her. She looked at it for several days before making her pronouncement.

"It's ordinary."

"How's that?"

"It's well-made, I'll give you that. A piece like that, it probably costs five or six hundred dollars. More, even. But it's nothing special."

I did not ask her if she was sure. She sounded sure. I paid, and I left.

So, the kazoos, then?

That felt unfair to me. After all, neither Ilyana or myself had children, and our mother must have known that would be the case when she made her will. I contacted the cousin, and through a translator I asked if there was something special about the Luger.

"Yes," he said.

"And what's that?"

"You should know." Then he explained the story of how, before my mother moved to the United States, she was playing somewhere with her brother. They found a skeleton in a dense part of a forest wearing a faded uniform. His body was half-eaten with vines, but they found a German weapon on him. The skull was broken, a small hole on the right side of his head and a large hole on the left side.

Even after all that time, the safety on his weapon was off.

My uncle didn't realize what he was holding, and he shot my mother through the foot.

"Whenever he told the story, he grew nauseous. He could not bare the thought of it. He said his sister walked with a limp until the last time he saw her."

My mother did not walk with a limp, and I rarely saw her barefoot. But in one of those rare occasions, there had been a scar on her foot. Dirk asked her where she got it, and she said she got it from a foolish boy who didn't know how to be careful. We thought she was cautioning him to be more careful with his questions, but my cousin's story clarified the situation.

"I don't know anything about kazoos, clocks, or wildlife," he said. "Frankly I would have preferred to be left out of this, and I know my father would have been as well."

I only speak English. Ilyana knows a little ASL, and Anna can order Mexican food with proper pronunciation, but that was about it. None of us have ever read any of her books. I think she preferred it that way. Dirk, Ilyana, and Rich were all born in London, but Anna and I entered the family after the move to the Americas.

Of course it was strange, but can anyone really appreciate how strange their own family is? My mother's library was full of books in languages that I could not read. Her own name was splashed across many of them. Those all existed beyond my realm, however. They were hers, and she did not want to share them.

According to the stipulations of the will, ownership of my mother's home would pass into the possession of a corporation that only existed to maintain the rules of her will. However, each of us were allowed to use the house during the month containing our birthday. Ilyana's came first, and we all waited to see if she would emerge with a copy of Mother's final manuscript.

She did not.

Neither to the increasingly-frustrated Rich.

Neither did Anna.

Next it was my turn. There, I did not find the manuscript, but I did find a locked drawer in my mother's study. After carefully picking the lock, I discovered mother's journal. I hoped that this would be the treasure, but the lawyer was clear that the manuscript contained my mother's illustrations as well. It was a final project, ready to be sent off to the printers as her final achievement, and the journal was only text in a language I could not read.

I called Dirk.

"What about another translator?"

"It's mother's journal."

"Exactly."

"Do you want some stranger reading Mom's journal?"

A kazoo tooted in the background of the call. "It was her decision to play this stupid game. She had to know that this would happen."

It was no secret that Mother was closest to Dirk during her life. He was the first of the children to fulfill her dream of becoming a grandparent, and he taught literature at a prestigious university. Any family gathering would be dominated by their discussions of European writers the rest of us only ever pretended to read, and they acted like it was all the latest episode of an HBO show.

If anyone was correct about Mother's intention, it would be Dirk. At least, that was how I justified contacting my translator friend and sending him the journal. At the back of my mind, I knew that Dirk was pissed off that Mother hadn't left him the fortune that he felt he deserved.

The journal detailed a four year period of my mother's life during which we barely heard from her. She'd left our father and she had a steamy affair with a man who she identified by name and graphic description throughout the journal. She would have been fifty-five at the time. He worked in conservation in Brazil, and she spent a good deal of time with him. When their affair ended abruptly after a little over a year--fifty-five weeks, to be exact--she wandered through South America before returning home.

The final passage of the journal explained that she'd intended to strike things up with our father, only to find that he'd died slowly from a series of strokes while she was gone. She hadn't heard, and since none of us had been able to contact her, we couldn't get the information to her.

So she claimed, at least. But I expect that someone, either her lawyer or agent or some professional contact, would have passed on the information, and she just needed an excuse for skipping the funeral for the man who'd fathered all of her children.

Six months after her funeral, the five of us gathered at Dirk's place. He dominated the conversation, explaining that we'd already solved two of the four clues. The wildlife donation was a memento of her midlife crisis and the Luger was evidence of childhood trauma. What about the cuckoo clocks? What about the kazoos?

I thought about my own lawyer. His suit is a little tight, since he's clearly put on a little weight over the years, and his face isn't nearly so smooth and well moisturized as the representative of my mother's law firm, but I wonder if my mother wouldn't have benefited from hearing him out before making her will.

"You're awfully quiet, Jack."

I blinked and returned to the conversation. "Just thinking."

"Scheming, more like." Rich was angry with me. He'd been angry with me since I sent away the journal, even though Dirk signed off on the decision. He felt that all five of us should have been included. At least, that was what he said. I think he meant that he should have been included in the decision, and he was finding different ways to be pissy with me because of that. "You think it's escaped our notice that you were the only one to piece together the last two?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, you never were the brightest of us, so something's up."

I resisted the urge to rise to his bait.

Of the five of us, Rich is the only one who has never actually done anything of his own. He sits back. He watches. And then he tries to pick up the pieces other people leave behind. He's a vulture, and if our mother hadn't been independently wealthy, he probably could have found success as an advertising expert. Instead, he's an investor. He managed Mother's various investments and she paid him a commission. He ended up with a small fortune thanks to starting with a large one.

I've hated Rich since I was twelve.

They came up with plans, but I blanked out of the conversation. I kept thinking about the woman who looked over the clock for me. And three days later, I brought the clock back to her.

"There's nothing wrong with it."

"I was wondering if you could advise me about another clock."

"Another clock?"

It's probably obvious by now, but I didn't need another clock. I just hadn't been able to forget this incredibly competent woman since I'd met her. She couldn't be any older than me, but she handled the clock with such mastery.

She talked me through every clock in the store, growing increasingly strange as it became obvious that I wouldn't buy any of them. This clock? It was made to house a live bird, but the manufacturer had gotten confused and included a wooden one instead. That clock? Whenever it strikes midnight its owner drops dead, which is why she refuses to sell it or repair it. That clock? It was made by a man who crept along through cemeteries, using the death-force to power his unholy creations.

We were laughing by the time her strange display was over, and I think I was in love too.

My phone rang three months later. Time was running out. Dirk said, "Ilyana figured out the kazoos."

"What about them?"

"Mom sold a drawing to a teacher at her school when she was growing up. It was the first money she ever made from her art. She used it to buy a kazoo."

"Okay."

"Don't you see what that means? None of the others had to do with the final manuscript, so it has to be the clocks. You still have yours, right?"

My girlfriend stared at me over her coffee. It was misting up her glasses.

"Have I ever told you about my lawyer, Dirk?"

"What are you talking about?"

"When I had cancer, and I thought I was going to die, he told me that I don't want a silly will. He said, 'you want a will that will make everything easy for the people you love when they're grieving.'"

"Okay, what's your point?"

"Do you know what Mom said when I had cancer? She said nothing. She said that Margaret's daughter was getting married."

"Jack?"

"I figured out where the cuckoo clock leads me. I don't think it's where Mom went, but I'm okay with that. I hope you figure out whatever you want to figure out, but I think I'm out."

"What do you mean you're out?"

What I meant was this:

Three months later, on the anniversary of my mother's funeral, I sold the only thing my mother left me for twenty dollars to a stranger with some help from my fiance. A year after that, I amended my own will, and I left everything to my favorite clockmaker.