“You want to see my collection?” Toby asked her. He took her hand and led her into his room. A minute later she heard music. He was playing his violin for her—the twelve measures of the Wieniawski Polonaise he’d mastered.
“One more thing,” Eleanor heard her son telling Phyllis. “Did you know I have a webbed foot?”
38.
Old Wonderful Life
If only we could just stop the world,” Ursula said. “If it just could always be the way it is right now forever.”
It was a Sunday the week after school got out. For three days they’d been experiencing a heat wave—unusual for that time of year, with the temperature never going below ninety and spiking over a hundred at midday. All that week, Ursula kept making trays of juice Popsicles—the only food besides watermelon that anyone felt like eating.
That week, Cam and Eleanor slept naked, no longer for the touch of each other’s skin, but only for the purpose of receiving as much relief as possible against the heat—and when they got up, they took long showers and rubbed ice cubes over their faces, squirted themselves from spray bottles. Jumped in the pond. It occurred to Eleanor that no babies would be born nine months from this. Nobody would be crazy enough to make love in this heat.
That day, Darla and Kimmie had made plans to take Alison and Ursula to a water park up north, Magic Waves—a place Ursula had been dreaming of going to since she spotted a brochure for the place at Friendly’s one night. But they had a strict minimum height requirement at the park, and Toby was too short. The morning Darla came to pick the girls up for the water park adventure, he’d sat at the window, watching them pile into the car, and for the next hour he wandered around like a man without a country, asking Eleanor when his sisters would get home.
The girls were back right after lunchtime. There’d been an electrical storm at the park and everyone had to get out of the water.
When his sisters burst in the door, he leapt into Ursula’s arms.
“I found you,” he called out.
“They gave us passes to come back another day with an extra for a friend,” she told him. “I bet by then you’ll be big enough to go.”
“It wasn’t really so great anyway,” Alison offered. “I have a feeling people had been peeing in the water.”
“You came back,” Toby said, stroking their hair—Ursula’s first, then Alison’s, his favorite people in the world. To Toby that day, it probably seemed as if he had conjured his sisters back home by the sheer force of his yearning for them.
Cam came in from the woodshop and cut up a watermelon for them, and after, they built a fort out of the box from a refrigerator delivered that week—the old Coldspot having finally given up the ghost—with a pulley leading to a second structure Alison called the Kasbah, made by draping a couple of old bedspreads over the rose arbor. All afternoon they sent messages back and forth on pulleys between the fort and the Kasbah, until everyone was too hot and too tired. Ursula ran into the house and came out with a pile of pillows and library books and smell markers and a giant bag of Goldfish.
They spread a blanket under Old Ashworthy and Alison read out loud to them for a while—Charlotte’s Web, their favorite. Then they made Toby a sword decorated with foil that Ursula had been saving from some chocolates, and Alison read them another chapter, and then Ursula and Toby took off all their clothes and raced into the pond together, holding hands, even though the water was still very cold.
When they came out, they wrapped themselves in towels and Ursula painted Toby’s toenails and her own, but not Alison’s, naturally.
Toby climbed up onto the picnic table then, naked except for an old straw hat of Cam’s, with his purple toes, and performed his current favorite song, “Shipoopi.” He’d learned the song from a soundtrack record of The Music Man they’d found on one of their recent dump-picking missions. He alternated this performance with his other beloved song, “Thriller.” Though the Thriller album had come out some time before, he particularly loved the video with Vincent Price and Michael Jackson turning into a werewolf. Toby knew all the moves, and performed them with amazing accuracy and, more than that, style.
They could smell dinner cooking—fried chicken with corn bread—and they knew there would be apple crisp later, too, with vanilla ice cream, and that afterward, the family might snuggle up on the couch with Sally to watch a movie on the VCR, with a fan going on account of the heat. The weekend before, they’d picked out a movie about a scientist who goes up to the Alaskan tundra to study wolf behavior, and because they hadn’t returned the tape to the video store yet, there was a good chance they could persuade their parents to let them watch it again, since it was one of those movies their mother believed instilled good values, like kindness, as well as courage.
That was the afternoon when Ursula had made her observation about wishing she could stop the world.
It was true. This may have been the best day ever. (And the funny thing was, they never even got to ride the giant slide at the water park.)
Later, the girls would remember exactly where they were when Ursula said this: lying on the plaid TV blanket in the sideways refrigerator-box fort, munching the last of the watermelon, juice dripping down their chins. “Let’s all hold hands and close our eyes,” Ursula said. “So we remember.”
Alison had been the one who suggested making the time capsule. Some time back, she had dug an old metal safe out of a pile of trash at the dump, and though it wasn’t easy getting this thing up the hill to the station wagon, she had persuaded her mother the safe was a treasure worth salvaging.
It had been sitting in the garage for at least a year. That afternoon, they hauled it out. The three of them spent the better part of an hour scrubbing off the dirt.
The plan was for each of them to put something in the safe. “It shouldn’t just be some dumb piece of junk or some prize you got with a Happy Meal,” Alison said. “It has to be something that really matters to you. It might be something you have a hard time giving up, but that just goes to show it belongs in our box.”
Nobody was supposed to tell the others what they were putting in the time capsule. They wrapped their items in toilet paper. Each of the girls composed a letter to their future selves—or whoever it might be who one day discovered the box. These, too, remained secret.
Toby wanted to write a letter also, not that he knew how to write. Alison suggested she’d help him with this but he said no, he’d do it by himself. Reaching for a purple smell marker (grape), he spent a surprisingly long time—five minutes, at least—composing his note.
When they were done, and each of them had placed their time capsule treasures in the box, along with their letters, they located a shovel in the garage. They considered carefully where the best spot might be to bury the time capsule.
It was almost dinnertime; their mother was calling them in. “Five minutes!” they called back to her.
The sun was hitting the leaves on Old Ashworthy just right, so they seemed almost to glow, and the sky was cloudless.
This was the place, of course—under their special tree—but far enough from the biggest roots that the shovel could break through the earth.
“What if we forget where we buried it?” Ursula said.
“I don’t think that would happen, but just in case, we’ll draw a map on the wall of the woodshed,” Alison said.
They would not forget this or anything else about that afternoon. It was the last day of their old wonderful life.
39.
Pocket of Stones
Monday was the day her Family Tree non-comic strip had to be delivered to the syndicate, and the heat wave hadn’t let up. Eleanor had gotten up even earlier than usual, hoping to get her work done before the brutal heat settled over them. Most of the time she had a dozen ideas for stories to write, but that morning her brain was empty. She wrote the word “Hot” on the top of the page. Then nothing.
From her drawing table off the kitchen, Eleanor could hear Ursula washing ou
t the ice cube trays, singing the song that had been her favorite all last summer, “We Are the World,” in that high, thin, bright voice of hers. Alison was upstairs with a Japanese fan and a stack of old National Geographic magazines. Sally just lay in the dirt panting.
Phyllis had taken the day off to go to the doctor, and Coco was off checking out a holistic healing school in Vermont that she was thinking of attending, as an alternative to college. A little grudgingly—because one of the guys from the Yellow Jackets had stopped by suggesting they go take a look at a truck he was thinking of buying—Cam had agreed to watch the children.
Early that morning he had turned the sprinkler on and set up the Slip ’N Slide, but nobody had much energy for running around. At one point Eleanor looked out the window to see Ursula and Cam stretched out on the grass while Toby squirted them with water from a spray bottle. Cam was reading out loud to them from a collection of Shel Silverstein poems. It was almost too hot to waste energy on laughing.
Eleanor turned back to the panel she was drawing, of a woman vaguely resembling herself—this was her continuing character in the strip, Maggie, the mother—sticking her head in the freezer.
After, Alison said she remembered Toby wandering off, but she hadn’t been worried because a minute later she heard him playing his violin back in the house. He had recently learned a couple more measures of the Wieniawski.
After, they would find his violin leaned up against the tub, as if he was planning to get back to practicing later. This was Toby for you: He could focus in like a laser beam. Or race off to something totally different with an explosion of energy like Super Mario. Maybe, in the middle of practicing, he’d heard Sally barking. Maybe it occurred to him that he needed to go say something to Alison in that secret language of theirs. Maybe he spotted a bug on the windowsill and decided to take it outside to find its mother. That would be Toby for you.
Maybe their web-footed boy just decided to take a swim.
Ultimately, all they ever knew was that at some point Toby had wandered off into the woods looking for rocks, another of his pastimes. They figured out that part from the rocks in his pockets when they found him.
Back on the grass, Cam had fallen asleep with Alison next to him and the Shel Silverstein book open on his chest. Ursula had gotten up to refill the spray bottle with water from the hose. That’s when she’d seen it: her brother’s small, sturdy body lying facedown in the pond, his long red curls fanned out around his head like a sea creature, his arms stretched out as though he were making snow angels, one flip-flop still on his foot, the other floating a few feet away among the lily pads.
Toby was not simply on top of the water but underneath it, deep enough that his face appeared to be touching the bottom of the pond. He wasn’t moving.
Ursula called out for her parents. They came running—Cam from the lawn, instantly awake, Eleanor from the kitchen. She was the one who reached their son first, wading into the pond and wrapping her arms around him, pulling his limp body from the water, screaming for help.
After, they understood what had dragged him under and kept him there. All those stones he’d been gathering in his pockets.
By the time Eleanor had laid Toby on the grass the rest of them had reached the spot. Alison ran in the house to call 911. Cam knelt over Toby, pumping his chest, trying to recall what he’d learned years ago in lifeguard training.
None of them had any sense of time as it was happening, but Cam probably kept pumping Toby’s chest for many minutes. Eleanor knelt on the ground beside their son, rubbing his cheeks, his feet, his hair. Alison, who’d returned to the spot after phoning for the ambulance, stood on the grass with an arm around her sister’s shoulders and her gaze locked on her brother’s face. Except when he was sleeping, they had never seen him so still.
It wasn’t only Toby who wasn’t breathing. It felt to Eleanor, at least, as though none of them was. Somewhere far away—though really, this was happening right next to her—she could hear the sound of Ursula weeping.
The shirt Toby was wearing that day featured a picture of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle on the front, Donatello. Cam, pumping on Toby’s chest, said something Eleanor could not make out. A prayer, maybe. Eleanor herself, kneeling on the grass, made a silent bargain. There was nothing she owned she wouldn’t give to see her son draw a breath of air into his lungs.
He lay unmoving. His face had taken on a bluish color. His hands—fingers callused from all those hours practicing the Wieniawski Polonaise—lay at his sides like two dead fish.
Let Toby wake. This was the prayer Eleanor made. Not out loud, but in her head. This farm could burn to ash, if their magical boy might only be restored to them. She chose, at that moment, to offer, in sacrifice, the thing most precious to her other than her children.
A minute passed. Possibly five. They could hear the siren down the road now—a sound they’d never heard outside of town. For a fraction of a second Eleanor thought, Toby will love this. Toby—lover of backhoes and excavators and fire trucks and anything that made a loud noise. A lover of flashing lights and men in uniforms and vehicles driving fast.
The truck was just pulling up under the ash tree when the miracle happened: Toby’s body, that had been totally limp, suddenly jerked up off the grass as if an electric current had passed through him. Then he was spitting water—water and mud. He didn’t cry, but his whole body was shaking.
By the time the EMTs reached Toby, Cam and Eleanor had him in their arms, and he was making more sputtering sounds—the glorious noises of a living, breathing boy. His skin was returning to pink. He had his arms around Eleanor now, and she was pressing her face in his hair, and he was staring at the sky and at Sally, who had raced over and was licking his feet. Those wonderful webbed toes.
You’re okay, they said. Over and over. You’re okay. We were so scared. We got you back. Nothing else matters. Just this.
But he was different. He was crying, but not in the way the old Toby cried, on the rare occasions when he cried at all—not wailing, or angry, or indignant.
Now his voice, that had always been big as a man’s, was barely audible, not a cry so much as a whimper, and there was none of the old ferocity in him. Eleanor remembered a bird that had crashed into the plate-glass window of the kitchen one time. The bird had dropped to the ground and, for a minute there, showed no signs of life. Then it had begun flapping its wings, making odd chirping noises, finally dragging itself to a standing position. After flopping around for a bit, it flapped its wings again, and took off in strangely tentative flight before lifting off and disappearing beyond the tree line.
It would be like that with Toby. It made sense that for a few minutes he would lie there in Eleanor’s arms with his family on all sides stroking his face, his hair. First he would have that look on his face, like a character in a comic strip who gets bopped over the head and stars explode around him. Any moment now he would shake his beautiful mop of hair—wet from pond water—and burst out with that big, deep laugh. He’d look around, shake himself again, and take off like the bird.
Only he didn’t. He sat there staring at them all, still looking dazed, as if he was thinking, Who are these people?
“You okay, buddy?” Cam said. “You sure gave us a scare.”
Now Eleanor could put her arms around Ursula, who could not stop shaking. “If it wasn’t for you, Ursie, we might not have got to him in time.”
What she didn’t say, because she hadn’t worked through to this part yet, was that if Cam had been doing what she asked of him—if he had been watching their children as he had promised—Toby would never have been in the water in the first place. If he had been doing what he was supposed to, instead of falling asleep, he would have kept their son safe.
One of the EMTs was performing some tests now—shining a flashlight into Toby’s eyes, telling him to follow the light. He was taking Toby’s blood pressure, listening to his heartbeat.
“You learn the alphabet yet, pal?” the EMT
said to Toby. This was Toby, who could recite the alphabet before his second birthday, and had recently been working with his older sister on counting to twenty in Mandarin. Also the times tables and the capital of every state and the name of every dinosaur, even the ones nobody else ever heard of, and the first thirteen measures of the Wieniawski Polonaise, not to mention every mineral in his Encyclopedia of Rocks and Minerals book. He looked blankly at the man. “K,” he said. “K. L. Z.” His head flopped onto his chest.
“He’s still a little groggy,” Eleanor said. “It’s understandable, given what just happened.” She could hear, in her own voice, a certain note of terror just below the surface. Who was she trying to convince? Herself, probably.
“I’m not sure I could recite the alphabet myself at the moment,” Cam told the EMT.
“Just take it easy, Tobes,” he told their son.
Alison stood a little ways off, hands in her pockets, as if she already knew. Not Ursula. Kneeling beside her brother, she brushed his hair out of his face, arranged his curls.
“A, B, C, D,” she sang. “How ’bout we sing it together?” She must have thought this was like school, where if you didn’t get the answer right, you could get in trouble.
“X,” Toby said. He sounded like an astronaut, coming to them from somewhere out in space. “W.” His eyes looked glazed, unfocused. His skin was so cold.
“Listen,” the EMT said to Eleanor. “I’m sure your son’s going to be fine, but we need to bring him in to the ER for a little testing. Just to be on the safe side. They’ll probably hook him up to an EEG. We need to be sure his brain is functioning like we want.”
They were buckling Toby onto the stretcher. It was unlike him to offer no resistance. One thing about Toby, he was not a boy to pin down.
A terrible sick feeling had started to come over Eleanor. “No, no, no,” she told the EMTs. “I want to keep him here.” So long as they were on their farm, he’d be all right.
Count the Ways Page 18