by Ursula Hegi
“Crazy stuff.”
“I have never felt this sane.”
“That says a lot about your sanity.”
“So clever. So very, very clever you are.”
“Mason—You need to see someone, a shrink…a doctor—”
“Hey, don’t you worry.”
“You can’t threaten something like that and then tell me not to worry.”
“You’d really do that for me, Annabelle? Worry?”
“This is one of your uglier games…and I’m not playing.”
“Oh, but you are. And I’ll tell you what scares—”
Eight
Opal
{ Rescue }
I n the morning, snow flurries. More and bigger till it’s a blizzard by noon.
Aunt Stormy slips her bare feet into her fuzzy boots and goes for the Sunday Times. But her red truck gets stuck in the driveway.
Annie and I help her dig it out.
“Are your legs hurting too?” Aunt Stormy asks Annie.
“You bet. I feel I walked all day yesterday in someone else’s hip sockets.”
“Must be my hip sockets.”
I explain to them, “People cannot walk in other people’s hip sockets.”
“Well, I think Annie wore mine out at the protest.”
I roll my eyes.
WHEN AUNT Stormy returns with the paper, Annie and I build a fire. Pete is fidgety. Walking around. Bumping into things.
“Sit with me,” Aunt Stormy tells him as she tugs blankets and rugs in front of our fire.
Pete heads toward the French doors. His elbow hits Annie’s easel.
Quickly, I move it aside so he won’t knock it over. “What are you doing, Pete?”
“Nothing.” He looks so sad.
I try to cheer him up. “Hey, Pete, look at the ducks out there on the ice.”
He brings his face against a little windowpane, four rows above where I’m looking out.
“What if they get their butt feathers stuck on the ice, Pete?”
He smiles. “Jesus ducks…walking…on frozen…water.”
“Holy ducks.” Annie says it like she would say Holy shit.
“Why am I not surprised?” Aunt Stormy sounds mad. “Once again, a miscount. The Times reports only one hundred thousand protesters.”
“There were a million of us,” Annie says.
“At least a million.”
Annie pokes at the logs, makes the fire big. “Now it feels like New Hampshire, Opal.”
“No.”
“Not even with the snow blowing?”
“It is not like New Hampshire.”
“But you like being snowed in.”
“Not so.” I cross my arms. Put my chin down so Annie can’t see my face.
“Wait till…spring…Opal.”
“Why, Pete?”
“Then…we’ll have…dozens…of baby ducks.”
“I don’t know if I’ll still be here.”
“The ducks…will be here.”
“Okay.”
“You…can visit…”
My toes start hurting. “Mason isn’t here to see the baby ducks—”
Mason. When he gets mad at Annie, he doesn’t talk with her. Never ever. Only with me. Talks with me more than ever and in front of Annie. So Annie can hear and know what she’s missing. So there.
Like when I was five or maybe already six and Mason told me, “Your sister locked me out of my car today.”
“I let you into our car,” Annie said quickly. “The end.”
“He isn’t talking to you, Annie,” I said.
“That never stops her,” Mason said.
“Are you having a fight?” I asked them.
“Of course we’re having a fight.” Mason, all mad. “Wouldn’t you if someone locked you out of your car and left you standing by the side of the road and laughed at you through the window?”
“I did not leave you standing by the side of the road,” Annie told Mason.
“Then what do you call it? I was standing out there, by the side of the road. You were sitting inside my car.”
“Our car. And what I mean is that I did not move our car.”
“Your sister locked me out, Opal,” he told me.
“It was supposed to be funny,” Annie told him.
“Do you see me laughing, Opal?”
“But you—You decided to go nuts and picked up a rock and—”
“Do you think it is funny to lock someone out, Opal?”
“Do not pull her in like that,” Annie said. “Please. If you want to fight, do it directly with me. Not in this…roundabout way.”
ROUNDABOUT round…roundabout round…
My toes are hurting worse.
I tell Pete, “Jake isn’t here to see the baby ducks.”
Pete turns his head slow-speed to me.
“Everyone’s not here. Or dead! Except for Annie.”
“You have two in me.” She kneels next to me. “Remember? We talked about that? How I’m your mother and sister?”
“And when you die, both of you are gone.”
“I’m here.”
“One person dying can make two disappear. So that would be the worst of all. And then I don’t want to be alive at—”
Annie goes ballistic. “You’re not going to pull that on me.”
“But—”
“You hear that?” Annie looks big and angry. Scared too. “You’re not going to pull that on me.”
Aunt Stormy says, “I don’t think that’s what Opal means.”
“My daughter tells me she doesn’t want to be alive. That’s pretty destructive.”
I snatch the boy doll.
Run upstairs.
Throw myself on the floor.
Punch the floor till my toes don’t hurt.
Then I kick the floor so they can hear me and be sorry.
But no one comes running.
I HOLD the boy doll by his shoes. “Poor baby.”
I bang his head against the floor. His shoes don’t come off. Nothing comes off. Except two specks of black paint from his hair.
“Poor baby.”
His shiny-stiff head sounds like someone knocking on the floor.
I turn myself into a snake and slither to the top of the steps.
“You want me to go to her, Annie?” Aunt Stormy’s voice.
“She needs to kick and pound to get it out of her body.”
I do some more knocking and kicking. So there.
“It’s not that Opal wants to hurt herself,” Aunt Stormy says. “Rather that after knowing a world without her birth parents and now without Mason, she can imagine herself not being in that world.”
“I can’t do this again. Those threats…those tantrums…Not after Mason.”
“You’re so good with her.” Aunt Stormy again.
“I’m a mess with her.”
“You’re a wonderful mother to her.”
Annie bawls.
“I thought you knew that.”
Annie. Snot bubbles and all, I bet. Saying, “Mason…he was much better with her.”
“Up and down,” Aunt Stormy says. “Like a man on a ladder—”
Man on a ladder? Mason? Up and down. With me? Mason—
“You listen to me, Annie. From the day you got her, you were the steady one.”
“Theatrical…what Opal…learned…from Mason…”
Bawling, Annie is. Bawling snot.
“Pete noticed how theatrical Opal was when she was just a toddler. And how Mason cheered her on. Both of them—they love upheaval. Look at how he—”
“None of…that…now.”
“All I’m saying, Pete, is that’s where Mason and Opal are alike. They take that upheaval inside themselves, leave the rest of us to clean up. It’s safe for her to attack you, Annie. Because she knows you won’t go away.” A long, long breath from Aunt Stormy. “That’s certainly more than I intended to say.”
“Opal…is listening.”
>
Whispering.
Steps.
More than one person.
I SLITHER back to the boy doll. “Shut up.”
But the steps don’t come up the stairs.
“I’ll rescue you,” I promise.
I get the orange rope from inside my snow boot. That’s where I hide it for playing rescue. It’s from the little kayak, all soft from being wet so often.
The rope is thicker than the head of the boy doll. That’s why I have to tie it around his painted-on belt. With two knots. The other end of the rope I hold. Tight. Then I toss him high across the railing.
But I don’t let him crash dead. I yank the orange rope back before he crashes on the stairs.
“Stupid baby.”
I rock the boy doll.
“Shut up!”
Rock him side to side.
“I’ll rescue you.”
Toss him across the rod and rescue him. Cradle him in my arms, the tossing and the rescuing and the rocking all-in-one.
So I do it again.
Then I hide the rope for when I’ll play rescue again.
“DOING BETTER this morning?” Annie, sitting on the edge of my bed.
I pull the quilt to my eyes. I can’t remember how I got into bed. But I’m in my pajamas.
“No school today. You have a snow day.” Annie’s voice is perky. But her face is worried. “Let’s go search for seals. It’ll be an adventure. We’ll go cross-country skiing on the beach below the Montauk Lighthouse.”
“You are being perky, Annie.”
She laughs.
So I make her stop laughing. “I can’t do this day.”
But she doesn’t blink. “You’ll be glad afterwards.”
“I don’t care about afterwards.”
“I do. But we have to hurry. We got ten inches of snow.”
“What if there are no prince bits, Annie?”
“Maybe the princes were lucky.”
“Because they got away in time?”
“Sometimes they do. About getting away…that snow won’t last on the beach because the tide will wash it away.”
On the drive to Montauk, squirrels keep running across the road. I count nineteen. Five of them dead.
“This is so weird.” Annie swerves to avoid a squirrel.
“Suicide squirrels.”
She bites on her lip.
So there.
At the lighthouse, she helps me strap on my skis. Snow races across the sand, low and fast, when we ski along the beach. Annie first because she makes good tracks.
“Like white foxes,” she says.
“Like small, fast animals.”
“True.”
“Like weasels.”
“Yes.”
“Or smoke. Or like the white bellies of bottom fish.”
“Weasels or smoke or bottom fish.”
“Bottom fish are funny-looking,” I tell her. “Their bellies touch the sand. They scurry along the bottom.”
“Aren’t you glad we’re doing this?” She gets so happy that she slips.
When she tries to get up, she laughs.
I know she wants me to laugh with her. But I don’t want to. “What if the seals aren’t there, Annie?”
“They’re always there in the winter. And at low tide, they climb from the water and lie on the big rocks. Long and fat and shiny. Like huge wet pebbles.”
“Maybe not this winter.”
“Are you going to leave me sitting in the snow?” She holds out her hand.
I don’t take it. “Opal! Come on—”
“That photo isn’t even true.”
“What photo?”
“The naked bride photo.”
“She’s not naked.”
“With me naked. It’s fake.”
“It’s posed.”
“Fake.” I glare at her. Pull her inside the hurting so she’ll do it for me.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Opal.”
“The only reason you got me is because my real parents died.”
“We both miss them.”
“Well—you suck as a mother!”
“And you suck as a daughter!”
We stare at each other.
I’m so scared I can’t swallow.
Annie really said that?
“If our parents were alive,” she says, “I would still be your sister. They were my parents too and I miss them every single day.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t give a flying—tomato.”
“I know what you were going to say. Flying fuck.”
“I still don’t give a flying tomato.”
“Brussels sprout?”
Her eyes are hollow like she’s not in there anymore.
“Annie? Annie!”
Waves jab at the snow. An edge of white for a few seconds. Then sand, brown and wet.
“How about a flying Brussels sprout, Annie?”
“So I don’t give a flying Brussels sprout.”
“Get up!” I hold out one hand to her. “Now! Or you’ll freeze your big butt.”
Annie takes my hand. Scrambles up. And back into her eyes.
I slap snow from her fleece pants.
“You can ask me about our parents…anything you want to ask, Opal.”
“I know stuff about them you don’t know.”
“I’m so…very glad for you.” Annie slips her hands through the straps on the ski poles.
“From Aunt Stormy.”
“I’m so glad for you both.”
“Did you know that my father walked faster than anyone else?”
“Good. So let’s keep moving.”
We stay on the snow. On our right the water and sand. On our left sand and another edge of snow, frazzled from when the tide was high.
“My father walked twenty miles every day, Annie.”
“That’s a lot. Keep moving.”
“My mother had a dog in Germany when she was little.”
“Her family had a cocker spaniel. Brigitte. A brown and white cocker spaniel.”
“You know my mother’s dog?”
“From stories. But when I was little, I used to pretend Brigitte was my dog.”
Annie pretends too?
Wind blows through me, but it doesn’t get me cold.
“I guess you inherited me, Annie.”
“We inherited each other.”
“Pretty soon you’ll only be my sister.”
“All right with me…once you’re eighteen.”
“And then I won’t need you as a mother anymore.”
“I can’t do this without you, Opal.” Her eyes push at me.
“Do what?”
“Be a family.”
It’s taking forever, getting to the big rocks where the seals are supposed to be.
“You can call me your child,” I tell her.
“Hallelujah and then some.”
“Because I am a child.”
“Should I be dancing?”
“And since you are taking care of me, you can say my. Like in my child.”
“I’ll do that.”
This is real. As real as sliding one ski ahead of the other. As real as snow all around us like white foxes. Or weasels. Or the white bellies of bottom fish. As real as, suddenly, Annie singing. Singing without words, her back to me. Like wind singing. As real as those seals—
“Look look, Annie!”
“They’re huge,” Annie cries out.
“Like ponies.”
“Yes, like ponies.”
The seals’ heads are like dogs’ heads. Almost. But their bodies are bigger. Much bigger. And limp like sacks of potatoes. But not lumpy. Smooth like big, big slugs. They slouch across each other, those seals. Melt into one another on those rocks, crusty with shells and salt.
“Three of them there”—Annie points to the gray water—“swimming.”
“Where?”
“Those big balls moving—”
“Where
, Annie?”
“They’re much faster in water than on land. Over there now—where the water is swirling. Each head like the top of a bowling ball.”
And now I see them. “But they’re darker than the water.”
“Yes.”
“And when they’re on the rocks, they’re lighter than the water.”
“Because their fur is drying.”
“Can you eat seal, Annie?”
“Eskimos eat seal.”
“Good.”
One seal pulls itself from the waves onto the largest of the rocks.
But another seal blocks its way. Roars and lifts its head so that its back curves like a banana.
When it chases the new seal off the rock, the entire clump of seals ripples.
AUNT STORMY and Pete drive to a moving sale in Noyack to look for a sewing machine and more dishes for her business. But they bring back a dog. He’s for free to a good home. And he already has a name.
“Luigi…” Pete’s voice is baby-talk. “Come and…meet Opal.”
Luigi’s eyes are almost all white. That’s how he rolls them when he crawls backward. Away from us. He’s only up to my knees. But the white shows the red around his eyes, makes him look nutty.
“Luigi?” I kneel down to make myself little.
His nails scratch the floor as he stuffs his butt into the corner.
If he could get away through the wall, he’d do that.
I hold out my hand. “Luigi?”
“Don’t be scared, Luigi.” Annie squats next to me. “Why are they giving him away?”
“They’ve bought an apartment in the city.” Aunt Stormy spoons dog food into a dish. “We said we’ll try him out. Take him home for a week so you and Opal can be part of the decision.”
“I don’t want to try him out. I want to rescue him,” I tell her.
“We’ll see. I’ve been thinking about getting another dog…after Agnes, for a while now. And I like mutts so much better than those overbred dogs.”
“Mutts have…better…dispositions.”
Luigi is breathing fast. In and out and in and out. The fur on his skinny sides going in and out. Like he’s been running a marathon.
Aunt Stormy sets his dish down by the sink.
We all step away to let him go there and eat.
He whimpers. His fangy little teeth show. But he doesn’t move. Just watches us with his white eyes.
We step away even more. Pete doesn’t need to touch the wall anymore. Just walks close enough to the wall to catch himself if he has to.