by Ursula Hegi
“No. It’s mine.” Running from them. Hiding out in Jake’s bunk. Wanting to hide forever and crying, ashamed to tell him. Still, telling him. Promising: “I’ll do you, Jake, if you tell them it was yours.” Pity in Jake’s eyes—
Pity? And the shame inside me thicker for the eating and the lying and making Jake lie for me and—
“Jake—” Backward breath eating my voice eating the rope firestorms pelting the window Jake by the window melting all glass all caulking all—
“Jake?”
Here?
—firestorms melting the three of us on longer three on longer even one melting—
Annie?
Ask, me, Annie, what’s the worst thing—
That I don’t know the way back
Because even if you absolve me, how can I, Annie?
Air smelling of yeast and faraway smoke, and I’m difting—
—dreaming that I’m sleeping—
—drifting becoming a pattern of light on fire—
—shifting and being fire—
—rocking against a square of window filled by smoke, that covers the sun—
—and all those Canadians still waiting for rain—
—funny thinking of all those Canadians waiting—
—and I can’t quit shaking—
—can’t quit rocking against the window till it shatters—
—till I become fire—
—all those Canadians waiting for fire—
—till I become shards of milky glass—
—that pierce my skin hot—
—hot pressing hot against my chest—
—against my lips—
—oh Annie—
—my throat—
—breathing against it hard
—breathing and floating—
—film of light burning eyelids—
—drops of sweet red fire—
—lifting my bones to the surface—
Eleven
Annie / Jake / Opal / Stormy
{ Hungry Ghost }
{ Annie }
“T he police are trying to find out who dug through the sandbank between the pond and ocean,” Annie tells Jake as they lift the kayaks from Aunt Stormy’s truck.
“So that’s why it’s so mucky,” Jake says.
The launching area off Georgica Pond has receded, and the ground is swampy. When they drag the kayaks through the shallow water, dark mud sucks at their ankles, releases them, and closes around them again.
“Disgusting sounds,” Jake says.
“Usually, the town opens that gap every spring so that fish can spawn in the pond,” Annie says. “Then it gets closed and, in the fall, opened once again to let the fish into the ocean. Except this year, the rains flooded lots of basements, and when the town refused to let the residents drain the pond into the ocean, someone did it secretly.”
“Maybe it took just one shovel, middle of the night, to make enough of a break for the force of water to push more sand aside and—Damn. I’m stuck.”
“Try this.” Annie eases herself into her kayak.
“Then we’ll never get out.”
“Trust me,” she says in a deep-deep voice.
He laughs. “I trust you all right.” But when he sits in his kayak, he can’t move forward or back. “I am so stuck.”
“Time for some butt-surfing.” Annie demonstrates by wiggling her kayak forward, sliding her hips and torso in the direction of the open water.
Jake attempts to bounce forward. “Wait for me.” Mud flies from his paddles.
“Like this.” Annie plants one paddle blade into the muck ahead of her, wiggles and pulls herself forward.
“I hope they catch the ones who did it. It messes up that fragile balance of freshwater and salt water.”
When they come past the first bend of the creek that leads into the belly of the pond, they feel the swell of the ocean.
Just then a swan—wings spread, beak raised—slides toward them as if running on water. They paddle, hard, veer to the right to get off its path.
“It looks pissed,” Annie says.
“I bet it’s protecting a nest.”
“They can be aggressive. Break bones. Turn over boats.”
“I wonder if we should go back.”
Far ahead of them is the distant border of sand where the pond merges with the ocean. “As long as we respect the nesting area, we’re all right.”
Jake motions to something white in the reeds, more than a hundred feet away. “Must be the female.”
Half-rising from the water, the male charges toward them, puffed up like a carousel swan.
“Get away, you—” Jake raises his paddle like a flyswatter.
But the swan is taller than the kayaks, and he keeps advancing, hissing, neck extended as if to strike.
“Get away, you son of a bitch,” Annie yells, paddle swinging. “I’m sorry—”
Her blade strikes the chest of the swan.
She feels sick. “I’m sorry. Get away—”
The swan swerves to the left, keeps himself between the kayaks and the female in the reeds.
“Let’s give him a lot of space,” Jake says.
Gripping their paddles, ready to use them against the swan, they get past him, paddling as fast as they can past the huge houses that are set back from the pond. A deer grazes on a slope of lawn.
“Never just one deer,” Mason says.
And there are three more, feasting on shrubs that border the long veranda. No fear at all. Here, deer are considered a pest, but in New Hampshire, Mason used to feed them, buy salt blocks for them to lick, and watch them with Opal from the window.
“You know how Aunt Stormy tells the difference between a year-round house and a vacation house?” Annie asks Jake.
“Tell me.”
“Year-round people don’t need that many rooms.”
He laughs.
“Aunt Stormy says some of these go for over fifty million.”
“Crazy.”
When they reach the sandbank, he strands his kayak. “Remember, we still have to make it back past that swan again.”
“Are you scared?”
“Yes.” He pulls her kayak ashore. “You?”
“Me too.” She turns her kayak over, spreads a tablecloth across it. “But I don’t want to think about the swan now.”
He opens their picnic basket. Pours red wine into metal camping cups. “What is it like for you, living in North Sea?”
“It’s an…easy fit. Familiar. And lovely.”
“Will you stay?”
“My mother once said this place wraps itself around your heart.” She passes the focaccia bread to him.
He slices fresh mozzarella cheese and tomatoes.
Mist swirls from the ocean, sheer spirals of moisture that race across the blue of sky, the green of shoreline.
“Will you stay?” Jake asks again.
“For the time being…”
“How long is for the time being?”
Annie smiles. “That’s exactly what Opal asked Aunt Stormy after we moved in last year. And she told Opal, ‘For as long as you want.’ ”
“And you?”
“I’m on the list for substitute teaching. I could do that and my own work. Aunt Stormy has fewer clients in the winter.”
A thickening of the mist…darkening.
Houses and trees become shadow cutouts, are blotted up.
The color of air and water and sky all one, cocooning them on this shelf of sand.
Only Jake here, close by.
She aches to touch his lips, his dear, dear face. No— What if any passion between them can only move through Mason, a conduit, a current?
“We still have to make it back again,” she reminds herself.
“We could stay here,” he whispers. “Just the two of us.”
“On the way back…if we keep way to the left and together, far away from the female…we’ll be safe.”
“Let’s
wait out the fog.” Jake’s face, paler than the mist.
Everything gray on gray…shimmering…and the ocean louder now that she can’t see it…that rolling disorientation.
With one thumb, she brushes the corner of his mouth, across his lower lip.
“Annie—?”
“You had some sand there.” She pulls her hand back. “Because anything else would be…awkward,” she says quickly to prove to him that it really was just sand even if it’s a lie. “Because it wouldn’t work.” She feels relieved. Something has been solved.
He hesitates. When he says, “Yes,” her heart constricts.
“It’ll be better for Opal…not to, being together as friends…only.”
Jake looks miserable. “Do people still use that word?”
“What word?”
“Platonic.”
“Ah, that word,” Annie jokes. But it feels fake.
“So…do you think we’re handling this well?”
“Sort of. Yes. I think.”
“Because this is what we both want now?”
“Right. To leave…sex out of it.”
“A pact…And then we can have our friendship again?”
“Not if we blame each other.”
“Oh, Annie, I don’t blame you.”
“Not if only one of us carries the…guilt. But if we were to carry it between us, as we carry Opal…like that, yes, in a weave of…of kindness, together, then we can’t fall through.”
“Just as the pain will be ours too. Within that weave.”
“Yes.”
“We can do that,” he says, but his eyes are sad.
“We’re lucky we can,” she says. But then why does it feel like the end between us?
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Jake says.
She nods. “I’m listening.”
“Not now. But when I come back in August for the Hungry Ghost. Pete says I can stay with him.”
She squints at him. “You sound…grim.”
“More scared than grim, Annie.”
{ Stormy }
“Please, tell Mr. Bush that his acting job aboard the Abraham Lincoln was ridiculous,” Stormy tells the operator on the other end of the White House line. “To posture there in a flight suit and declare ‘Mission accomplished’ demonstrates to the world how arrogant and ignorant he is.”
Every day, the White House answering machine greets Stormy with the same lie, that her message is very important to the president, and every day she’s stunned by the beauty of her surroundings, juxtaposed with the madness of war. Both real.
“Please, tell Mr. Bush that he has pushed this country into an immoral war, and that people can see through his lies and justifications.” As always she gives her name.
In Nazi Germany, I could have been shot for this.
She continues to speak out though she’s no longer sure that her voice—or an accumulation of voices like hers—can make a difference. That belief has become disillusion. Disillusion even in the act of believing that made her question her parents for not speaking out after she’d lived in America for a year.
One night, when she wakes up, sickened by the violence toward the people of Iraq, Pete is already awake.
“Do you ever feel implicated as an American?” she asks him.
“Of course.” He reaches for her.
“So do I. Just as I’ve felt implicated all my life as a German.”
“Most Americans won’t. They…grew up trusting their government.”
“Europeans are more skeptical.”
Stormy keeps calling the White House even if the only person who’ll hear her words is some minimum-wage phone operator.
“I’m calling regarding the staged rescue of Jessica Lynch from an Iraqi hospital. Please, tell Mr. Bush that he’s using her for his propaganda. Victim and heroine in one.”
The end of May, when Bush goes to Auschwitz and compares himself with the liberators of the concentration camps, Stormy cries. When she’s calm enough to phone the White House, she says, “One of Mr. Bush’s greatest transgressions so far, a disrespect for the victims of the Holocaust, using Auschwitz for another one of his photo ops.” She checks the Internet for the press coverage. No shock. No rage.
“Is it too dangerous a subject for the press?” she asks Pete. “Doesn’t anyone dare fault Bush for posing at Auschwitz?”
“Or that insipid Laura,” Pete stays, “for standing on…the train track to Auschwitz with a red rose.” He draws her close to him. “It’s a terrible time. I find some strange…comfort in little rituals. I put a candle in…my window. I go to a vigil.”
“Is it foolish to expect results from the protests? Is it, Pete?”
“No. Of course not.” He kisses her on the lips, the chin. Over the months, his face has been reemerging, the muscles defined once again. His former self arising as he works around what ailed him. Adapting. And as a result, strengthening himself.
The microwave is humming today’s tea…camomile and peppermint. Sweet. Soothing. What soothes? Seeing Annie work again. Reading to Opal. Pete’s arms at night, and now.
Nudging herself deeper into his embrace, Stormy locks her arms around him. “Some days I feel I’d fly off without you, and what keeps me on the ground is seeing you heal.”
“I like having you on the ground right…here,” he whispers, “with me.”
{ Jake }
When Jake returns in August for the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts, he brings a dragon kite for Opal. For Annie a CD by Annie Gallup. “Another Annie who tells stories,” he tells her when they cut bamboo canes behind Pete’s garage for the ghost’s chest and tepee skirt.
Afterward, they drive to the nursery where Jake wants to buy a rosebush for Pete. Between the bedding plants and flowerpots, two little boys are dragging their comfort blankets, swiping off leaves and blossoms, while their father strolls along, talking on his cell phone and pulling a red plant wagon.
“Yuppie parenting,” Annie says.
“And how does one define that?” Jake is sweating.
“Like that.” Annie motions toward the boys. “Too precious to be refused anything.”
What if—once he tells her how he ran and let her find Mason dead—she won’t talk to him again? Still, unless he tells her, they can’t move forward. He isn’t sure what’s beyond that forward. Only that not telling Annie is in the way.
What’s important is to stay together today, Jake tells himself. To steer every word into discussing the kind of rose he’ll buy to thank Pete for the invitation to stay.
Annie picks up a morning glory vine, the blue of faded denim. She hesitates. Then abruptly sets it back down.
“You don’t want it?” Jake asks.
“Not really.” She looks upset.
“Because I’d be glad to get it for you.”
“It’s not about that.”
The boys bounce against their father’s plant wagon. Turn it over. Run off while he scoops up the plants that are still intact and, with one foot, swipes the others to the side of the path.
“And all that without stopping his phone conversation,” Jake says. “What a talent.”
“You forgot your plants,” Annie yells after the man.
He gives her a bored glance. Turns away.
“Creep,” Jake says.
Annie picks up the pot with the morning glory. “I guess I didn’t want to get it because I was afraid that shade of blue would remind me of Mason. But how can I deprive myself of a color because he loved it?”
“You are amazing,” Jake says. “Do you know that?”
“Maybe it can remind me of what was good with Mason.”
“You’re more generous than I am.”
When they get back to the cottage, BigC is on her boardwalk, unwrapping a huge roll of Bubble Wrap. She waves. “I’m taping it to the wood and leaving air underneath.”
“Why is that?” Annie asks.
“So that if ducks step on it, they’ll topple over and
get spooked and won’t come back.”
But the instant BigC tapes the Bubble Wrap to the wood, ducks swarm toward her from all directions, drawn by the crinkling of plastic.
“Must evoke memories of Wonder Bread plastic for them,” Jake says.
Annie laughs. She seems happier to Jake than in the spring, when he saw her last. No longer so cautious with him.
{ Opal }
“Don’t make the ghost too scary,” Opal says.
“What would you like to change?” Annie is making the ghost’s hands from old bamboo rakes.
Opal steps back to inspect the Hungry Ghost. His chest one huge triangle. It comes up from his waist. Ends with his straight shoulders. His head is set above the shoulders with no neck. Hair made from tinsel. Eyebrows from licorice. A papier-mâché nose. Bulging eyes from the halves of a tennis ball that Luigi has carried home.
“I don’t like yellow eyes,” Opal says.
“You want to change the color?” Annie asks.
“Purple. All purple with a little white around the purple.”
“Climb up.” Aunt Stormy boosts Opal onto the kitchen table. “You do the eyes. Afterwards you and I’ll tape crepe streamers to the ghost’s sleeves.”
Annie dips a brush into an old salsa jar where she’s mixed glue and water. “Here.”
“But it’s dripping.”
“Brush it quickly across the tennis balls.”
“Gross. They’re all chewed up, the eyes.”
“You’ll cover them up. Keep brushing. Good. Like that.” Annie tears purple tissue paper into long strips.
Yesterday, Opal and Annie took the jitney into the city and bought lots of spirit money in Chinatown. Tissue paper in purple and red and yellow. Tinsel in silver and in gold. Crepe streamers and sparkling yarn.
“Now the tissue paper.”
“On top of the tennis ball eyes?”
“And then brush more glue on them, yes.”
“Excellent.” Aunt Stormy smells of the perfume Pete gave her for their anniversary. Not a wedding anniversary. But of the day they met.
Opal wrinkles her nose. Maybe if she asks Pete to give Aunt Stormy chocolate instead, he’ll do that. And she’ll get to eat some.
“You like his eyes better now?” Aunt Stormy asks.