Homesick

by Jennifer Croft

  Amy freezes, eyes wide. She understands without knowing that everything has changed.

  Their grandpa says he thinks that Zoe might have bumped her head. Their grandma says, Oh, Zoe, don’t be such a baby, then flips another page of Amy’s notebook.

  Amy glances over at the notebook, sees that all the creatures from her stories have collapsed back into squiggles, lines snapping undone. Splotches over i’s and j’s bulge hideous, must be mistakes.

  Amy knows the worst thing you can do to Zoe is tell her that she’s a baby. Often if you do so Zoe howls. Sometimes she throws things.

  But now Zoe does nothing. She won’t even look back. Amy watches her and feels herself unfreeze and flush. She approaches Zoe taking the smallest steps she can, trying to catch her sister’s eye. When she hasn’t by the time she gets there, Amy whispers: Come with me. But Zoe doesn’t answer.

  So Amy reaches out and slowly, very slowly, scoops her up and carries her towards the parking lot, across the grass, pausing to point out where the rabbit hutches are. But Zoe doesn’t care.

  In the car, Zoe starts crying. Their mother opens up the door and bends down to ask Zoe if her sister has said something to upset her. Amy and Zoe both ignore her.

  When their mom shuts the door again there is no sound. The only thing there is is Zoe’s hands over her seat belt buckle, pulsing. Closer, you can see her tiny fingers twitch.

  Now Amy searches Zoe’s face. Tears are rolling down it, but Zoe’s eyes, always big and brown and sparkly as the campfire, are almost gone. The little slivers of life you can only barely see in the upper right-hand corners tick in place like the stuck hands of a broken watch. But Zoe isn’t looking anywhere because her eyes are almost gone.

  In a voice more audible than any Amy knew she had, Amy tells her grandfather to drive.

  We are going to the doctor now, says Amy, and her words restore the rest of sound.

  The engine starts. Their grandma flicks her lighter and sucks smoke into her mouth. The window on her side slides down.

  Their grandpa takes one look at Amy in his rearview mirror and takes off.

  As the trees and the houses and the streets all slide away from them, Amy searches Zoe’s face for Zoe. But Zoe isn’t there.

  Or where they might be going?

  After a while the doctors send them home

  They say that sometimes mild concussions lead to episodes like these. She’ll be okay, they say. It’s nothing to worry about, unless it happens again.

  That summer Amy hopes at first to finish her second-grade notebook, but she comes to hate her handwriting, and after a while she gives up. For several weeks in her spare time she reads the books their grandma gives them. She learns that plants eat light, and that the reason we don’t all fly into space is gravity. She wants to know why she can’t eat light, too, instead of broccoli, which is a plant, and what will happen if the gravity stops working, and what will happen if Zoe gets another mild concussion.

  Their grandma says because Amy isn’t a plant, and it won’t, and she won’t.

  When a tornado happens at their grandparents’ house, day still turns to night and the leaves still get upside down and the cars still disappear, but they also get to hide in the hall closet, which is full of their dad’s old games from when he was their age

  It is hard to imagine their dad being their age because their dad is gigantic, more than six feet tall, and he has a bunch of gray hair, which their grandparents make all kinds of jokes about when their mom’s not there and everyone laughs because they say it must have been because of her his hair went gray. Amy and Zoe are not supposed to tell their mom about these jokes, and they don’t.

  When they’re in the closet at their grandparents’, Amy lets them keep the light on even though Zoe is too little for a lot of the games. They play with the dominoes, but Zoe misses the point and knocks them down before it’s time to. They play with the marbles, but there’s not that much you can do with marbles on a small square of scraggly carpet. If you roll them around they’ll just get lost.

  Zoe always wants to play Operation, which is where you have to remove the diseases out of Cavity Sam with a pair of tweezers. You have to be really careful because if the tweezers hit the sides of Sam’s cavities where his ailments are, his nose lights up, and he buzzes and you lose the game. But Zoe loves the lit-up nose and laughs and laughs, missing the point, asking Amy for permission to mess up one more time.

  Their grandparents call it getting sprung when they’re let back out of the hall closet, and the reward for getting sprung is pop and cookies. Amy and Zoe are not allowed to drink pop at their house so at their grandparents’ they drink all of it they can, and then they jump and jump on the enormous bed upstairs until they’re ready for their grandmother to read to them, and then they collapse into all the great big mismatched pillows and spread out like they’re making snow angels and follow along in their heads because they always choose the same stories, and they know them all by heart but still get scared each time their grandma switches to her witch’s voice, like when Hansel and Gretel get lost. Then the girls straighten up, hands at their hips under the covers, and Zoe scooches over to her sister’s side.

  Amy has taken one Polaroid picture of each room at her grandparents’ house, including the garage, the backyard, and the front yard, and two of the staircase, since they don’t have one at home

  One is a close-up of the white metal railing that has a big S with a mustache on its waist between every other bar. The bars look like candy canes that have had their stripes sucked off them and their heads chopped off. The other one shows Zoe sitting sulking on the middle step, overshadowed by the big bright light behind her where the bathroom door opens onto a window that lets in the sun.

  In the four years since she’s had her camera, Amy’s taken fifty-one more pictures of her sister, seven of which feature the dog Santa gave to Zoe last year. The dog is a scruffy Scottish terrier with a black plastic-looking nose. Like Zoe, the dog is wild, and Amy suspects it is a bad influence, eating things off the floor it knows it’s not supposed to, like dead bugs and Silly Putty. Amy knows for a fact that Zoe still eats the dog’s treats even though she has told her not to more than a million times. But in her camera Amy discovers a way of civilizing both creatures, of teaching them to sit still. They even learn to play dead. Amy takes her pictures carefully because the film is not cheap, making the dog and her sister pose for ages till she gets it just right.

  Afterwards the dog trots off to chase some imaginary thing and the girls wait while the picture slowly comes out. Amy lifts it by the tip of the hard white strip at the bottom and waves it gently in the air as the colors begin to bubble out of the shiny gray. Without realizing it the girls both hold their breath.

  Every time Zoe asks if she can have the picture, but Amy never says yes. Sometimes Zoe cries, but Amy is never persuaded by tears, and her confidence in her own judgment regarding what is for her sister’s own good is total. This way they will have the pictures forever. If she gave them to Zoe now, Zoe would inevitably let the dog have them, and then they would get chewed up and destroyed, like when the birds in the forest eat the path that Hansel made for him and Gretel to go home.

  So Amy keeps the pictures inside a secret manila envelope at the bottom of the drawer where she stores the arrowheads and fossils she collects at camp.

  Ordinarily the girls only have secrets that they keep together, from their mother.

  This is the first secret that exists between them.

  Take, for instance, rest, which used to be the distance after which a traveler must pause—which must be what I’m doing now, hopefully maybe finally writing you this letter. (By the way, this picture and its odd word come from a cemetery right here in Berlin.)

  Every summer the girls go to Camp Waluhili with their mom, who works there as a counselor

  It’s for members of the Camp Fire Girls, which is like Girl Scouts only different. The girls are technically too young to go w
hen they are five and two and six and three and even seven and four, but their mother promises to watch them like a hawk. You have to be careful at camp because it’s full of poisonous things: snakes, spiders, scorpions. Some of them can kill you.

  The girls always nod when she says this, but they don’t really care. Now that they are eight and five they run around and around the meadow until they fall down in the bright yellow flowers and laugh and laugh until they can’t breathe.

  Amy learns to tie knots, and she is good at it. She learns directions, and she tries to get Zoe to repeat after her: north, east, south, west. You can remember it by saying: never, eat, soggy, waffles, she tells her, but Zoe can’t remember all that yet. Amy learns how to build a fire: you put together three pieces of wood in the shape of an A, which is easy to remember, and then you put tinder all along the middle part, but not too much because fires need air. Their mom doesn’t let her light the fire, but they sit there with the older girls and eat the s’mores together. Zoe likes to smear the marshmallow on Amy’s legs instead of eating it. But then she asks for more.

  The girls learn to swim. Amy’s long body slips into the water like a fish thrown back. But Zoe keeps sinking and getting water in her nose. They give up. They do somersaults in the meadow instead. They play hide and seek. When it takes too long to find Zoe, Amy calls her name, or she says, A to Z, A to Z, over, like it’s a Walkie-Talkie, and then she says that it is time to take pictures. Amy takes pictures of Zoe in the trees. She fixes her sister’s long light hair that gets tangled when they play. Sometimes she only pretends to take pictures.

  In the sun Amy gets freckles, and Zoe turns brown. Together they try and count the freckles on Amy’s left arm: twenty-seven, or twenty-eight, or twenty-nine, because they always lose count. The right arm is impossible. Amy and Zoe examine their elbows. They ask their mom what elbows are for. Their mom says to bend their arms. The girls try to do cartwheels in the meadow, but they can’t because of their elbows. Zoe tries harder than Amy.

  Amy has Zoe help her look for arrowheads and fossils. Zoe finds plain rocks and brings them to Amy to ask if they are fossils. Amy knows all about the Cretaceous period and that we don’t know what color the dinosaurs were so they could have been all the colors, even pink, even hot pink. Hot pink is Amy’s favorite color, although she pretends it is blue. Amy’s favorite dinosaur is the brontosaurus. Amy explains to Zoe that arrowheads were what the Indians used to catch food back when Indians used to live at Waluhili, too. Every summer they find at least one arrowhead, but it takes a lot of work, because arrowheads are little, and you have to look hard between the grass and underneath the dirt.

  The fossils are seashells because in the old days all of this was underwater. Sometimes there are fossils with the imprints of different sea plants. The seashells look just like what seashells look like today. They know because their grandmother collects them.

  Their mother takes them fishing. There are many words that don’t mean what they mean, however, like when their mother cleans the fish they catch. Amy boycotts the results, refusing to eat anything but s’mores those nights, threatening to run away if forced. Zoe does what Amy does and takes the opportunity to eat more s’mores.

  Sometimes the girls play games with the campers like Red Rover and tug of war. The older girls like to have Amy on their tug of war team because Amy never lets go. Even if she ends up getting dragged through the mud. Zoe is better at Red Rover because it is easier for her to go berserk, become a human missile, and being so little still, she can often take them by surprise and break right through.

  Amy is allowed to learn archery. Zoe complains until something comes along to distract her. The camp teems with butterflies, birds. The older girls stay up late telling ghost stories, but Amy covers her head with a pillow because she likes to wake up when the birds wake up. Sometimes you can spot a bluebird if you’re out early, or even a tanager.

  Amy takes a picture of the little red suitcase Zoe uses to run away from home

  Zoe runs away from home once or twice a week. She takes the dog and goes and sits beneath the pear tree that every year at the tail end of summer produces inedible pears that their dad picks up and throws away. The pear tree is in between the front yard and the backyard, a no man’s land, where Zoe believes that no one will think to look for her.

  She whiles away the fifteen to twenty minutes it always takes her to run away from home playing with the plastic animal figurines she has packed and distributing provisions evenly between her and the dog. To the dog she gives the brown treats, which are flavored like lamb and vegetable. For herself she reserves the green treats, which are chicken. The peanut butters they share.

  On the side of the suitcase containing the figurines and the Milk-Bones is a little drawing of a girl in front of a white picket fence. Above her float the words Going to Grandma’s.

  But the picture Amy takes does not show this, because what interests Amy is the things the suitcase contains. So while Zoe is in the bathroom Amy snaps it open and lays it splayed atop their rumpled constellation-print sheets. She points her Polaroid down but can’t fit it, so she gets on the bed and stands over it, points, and pulls the shutter swiftly with her forefinger.

  Of the numerous plastic animal figurines in her collection, Zoe has chosen one elephant and a family of giraffes. Then, in addition to the small box of Milk-Bones, there is a toothbrush, one sock with a friendly-looking shark that prowls the ankle, and a framed five-by-seven photograph, black and white, of Dorothy holding Toto up to her cheek, the two of them gazing off into the distance. The photograph takes up a massive percentage of the space inside the little red suitcase, and Amy wonders why her sister takes it when she runs away from home, since it is just a piece of someone else’s junk they got at a garage sale.

  Then Zoe comes back from the bathroom and catches Amy red-handed, still standing over her stuff, and she screams and hollers like a wild banshee until Amy offers her a piece of tropical fruit punch gum.

  Or dwell, which used to mean to lead astray. (I took this picture right around the corner from where we used to live, in Paris.)

  Amy takes pictures of everywhere they go

  They go to Lincoln, Nebraska, for their family vacation, and Amy takes pictures of the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History. Zoe always wants to be in the pictures, and usually Amy says yes, but on occasion, Amy says no. Then Zoe cries until someone else takes her picture in the same spot. Amy on the other hand does not like to have her picture taken and rarely smiles when she is urged to pose.

  Amy likes the dinosaurs but not the stuffed owls, which she says are disgusting because they are dead. Amy knows the dinosaurs are dead, too, but it’s different because they’re almost more like rocks. Zoe makes a face when Amy says the word dead or the word disgusting. She sticks her tongue out and scrunches up her little nose.

  Their other grandparents live in Kansas in between Oklahoma and Nebraska, but their mom says she does not want to visit them on the way back because they’re assholes. Their dad says not to say bad words in front of the girls.

  They go to the Porter Peach Festival in Porter, Oklahoma, and Amy takes pictures of peaches until the dog runs away, and they all have to chase it. But when they’ve caught it, they all get to eat fresh peaches with vanilla ice cream. Even the dog eats peaches. They are all sweaty and smelly and filled up with sugar. Amy and Zoe and their mother sing camp songs the whole way home until their dad turns on the radio.

  At the Tulsa State Fair Amy takes pictures of the roller coaster and the stands selling corn dogs and cotton candy and of Zoe with cotton candy like spiderwebs in her hair. Zoe cries until their dad buys her some more cotton candy to eat. At the Fair there is a petting zoo where the girls get to feed farm animals, but their mom has to take away the food sometimes because Zoe likes to try the little pellets of alfalfa herself. At these confiscations, Amy howls with laughter, and Zoe’s eyes get wide.

  At the real zoo Amy learns to stand like a flaming
o, one foot in the crook of the other leg’s knee, and she can stand this way in silence just observing the birds for as long as it takes Zoe to run around the prairie dogs a dozen times.

  They ride their bikes in the parking lot at the Tulsa Teachers Credit Union three doors down from their house when it’s not business hours and their dad can take them. Their dad still rides his old green Schwinn with the baby seat on the back even though neither one of them is a baby anymore, and he calls it Gone with the Schwinn to their mom whenever they are heading out. Then they have races around the big post in the middle of the parking lot and from the dumpster to the main doors. You have to get up onto the sidewalk to win.

  Lately Zoe keeps talking about getting her training wheels off although Amy keeps reminding her that even with them on she always manages to find a way to topple over, and if she hadn’t had her helmet on she could have killed herself a thousand times or gotten another concussion, and besides, Zoe is only five and a quarter, and Amy is almost eight and a half and just got hers off last year. But Zoe doesn’t care and keeps on talking about it.

  Amy always has to remind Zoe repeatedly about everything. Like to drink the rest of her juice and to keep her shoes on and not to water the bonsai in their room so it will not drown like the last one. It is exhausting taking care of young children. Usually their mom and dad are too distracted so Amy does it, even though it leaves her barely any time.

  They go to Tahlequah for the Intertribal Powwow, and Amy takes pictures of real teepees, tall as the sky. The Indians wear leather dresses with leather strings and turquoise beads and feathers and circles that symbolize things. The Indian children get to wear feathers, too. The Cherokees have lots of different symbols to mean different things. Amy wants to learn them all. She begins to invent new symbols for her and Zoe only, so they can write notes to each other without their mother interfering.