Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  Isaac asked, “Is that all there is?”

  She shrugged. “How the hell should I know?”

  Isaac handed her the plate of fettuccine Alfredo and she ate it in silence, communing with the dead. Boyd wanted to lean on Isaac, but she wasn’t sure he’d let her. The wind died down and the night got loud around them. The moon rose behind the tree, huge in its low position in the sky, and Carla set the paper plate down and lit the candles one by one. Ten minutes before and the wind would have carried the plate away; now the plate rested lightly on the ground and did not budge.

  “How’s that going to get rid of the ghosts?” Isaac asked.

  “No ghosts. Never have been ghosts. Only this bad luck until they’re properly satisfied.” Carla hugged herself, gripping her elbows. “Bet it’s someone falsely accused.” The lore went that a tree that had hanged an innocent man would wither to the ground within a summer, but this one had kept right on growing. In the daytime, it was a haven; to be under the branches and to feel the cool air of transpiration was the next best thing to air-conditioning, was the way to be a part of the world. The candles were no match for the dark, but the moon was more than enough. Boyd stared at the ground, watching the attenuated shadows cast by the golden pinpricks of light. No wind, and then, one, two, three, the candles were snuffed out.

  “Carla?” Isaac said. But she didn’t answer. Boyd could not see either of them; the dark had come on so silently and completely that she nearly stopped breathing. But not full dark: the moon was still in the business of casting shadows.

  And the shadows on the ground, they were moving in a way … What was the word? Swaying? Is that how she would describe what the shadows were doing? Yes, swaying, ding-dong, like a bell, like a mast on a ship at sea. And there were more than three; there were perhaps twenty shadows moving on the ground, shuddering like cocoons, each chrysalis tethered to the tree shadow by a thin length of darkness.

  “Boyd,” Isaac said. “You got that Maglite?”

  She remembered the flashlight, felt for it, clicked the button on its side. The shadows disappeared, pushed back and headed off. But she heard the movement of wings and shone the flashlight up into the tree, and lined up on every branch were birds of carrion—turkey vultures and buzzards and crested caracaras—hooked beaks and hooked claws and oily, oiled feathers. They clucked and tutted, and when Boyd shone the flashlight on them, they spread their wings and took languidly, heavily to the air, reluctant to leave the place to which they’d been called. Boyd heard Isaac’s gasp and Carla’s slight moan, but Boyd was silent. The night carried the smell of the lake, and, from far away, the sound of Lucy Maud’s television, tinnily playing the theme song from Law & Order.

  “What are they?” Isaac asked, his whisper only barely audible over the sound of the wings.

  Boyd said nothing—she thought about mentioning the bean tendrils in her garden—but Carla made a sound as if she didn’t know, then continued, “Well”—she bent to relight the candles—“they could be a couple of things. One, they could be because of the hanging tree, because we are asking this curse to be lifted. They could be a good thing. The curse could be flying off as we speak.” She got the votive candle lit and handed it to Boyd, and then the pillar candle to Isaac.

  “What’s the other thing?” Isaac asked, cupping a hand around the flame, trying to keep it going in the windy night.

  “Oh,” Carla said, as if it weren’t important, “carrion birds can be an omen, not so great.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  She turned to him. “Yeah. They could mean death.” She smiled at him in the candlelight. She was just pulling his leg.

  Boyd rolled her eyes, a gesture nobody else saw. “Or they could just mean there’s a dead thing somewhere around here.”

  “Yeah,” Isaac said, considering. “Probably that.”

  The three of them walked back to Boyd’s house, letting the whole thing go, and, once there, Carla and Lucy Maud opened a bottle of wine and sat at the kitchen table over a game of rummy. Boyd walked Isaac out to his car, and here was the moment they’d both been waiting for, the moment they were alone for the first time since Isaac had left for his spring semester at UT. She leaned on the top of his car door, waiting for him to say whether he’d missed her or not.

  “Crazy about those birds, huh?” Isaac drummed on the steering wheel. She couldn’t tell if he was avoiding discussing their relationship or if he was truly preoccupied by what they’d seen.

  She shrugged. “I’ve seen crazier.”

  He finally looked up at her. “Okay,” he said, amenable, not ready to talk about anything serious. He shifted, then finally said, “Boyd, I’ll be moving my stuff down tomorrow night.”

  She nodded. She already knew that. She’d take her camping stuff down tomorrow afternoon, then he’d be there later. They were going to have the whole summer together, panning side by side. They had plenty of time to figure out what they were to each other, but to Boyd the answer was becoming increasingly clear. She bit the inside of her lip. “See you then,” she said, tapping twice on the top of the car door, signaling that it was time for him to go, then she turned back to the house.

  In a second, he was behind her, his arms around her waist, and his face buried in the back of her hair. “Boyd,” he said, then stopped.

  Her breath hitched in surprise—he’d been so quick to get out of the car and cover the distance—and the relief that he was still Isaac, that he still felt for her what she felt for him. But really, it wasn’t the same.

  “Boyd, I—” He loosened his grip on her, the hug almost over. “I missed you. I just—I’m looking forward to this summer.” In his statement was the acknowledgment that he was leaving things unsaid on purpose, things that she wanted him to say. There was a distance here, deliberate and unintentionally cutting.

  She nodded, feeling his face against the back of her neck, then he let go. “Yeah. All right.”

  He got back in the car, and soon she was lit in his headlights. She lifted a hand in farewell, and he did the same.

  “Crazy about those birds, huh?” he said again as he pulled away.

  “Yeah,” she said, but he didn’t hear her.

  Isaac wasn’t ready for that serious conversation just yet, but was instead preoccupied with his own life as he drove from Lucy Maud’s house to his father’s. He’d be at the lake for two and a half months this summer, and to be honest, it wasn’t his favorite thing. Something about the endeavor was elemental, rugged in a way he imagined his personality was missing, but really, it was a hot and dirty thing to do. He had noticed that most of the people he’d met who embraced ruggedness had not had any sustained experience with said ruggedness. He did it for one reason—it was a reliable way to pay his tuition and avoid student loans. He earned much more in a summer of panning than he did working at a minimum wage job. He was thinking about panning, then this made him think about Boyd, how something about her made him somehow better.

  Isaac had been in middle school, sitting in the back of his father’s classroom reading a choose-your-own-adventure book when he’d first become aware of Boyd. Ruben King coached the middle school social studies team, and two students had been on the team that year: a girl and a boy. The boy had been familiar to Isaac, a kid he knew from track, but the girl had been unknown, even though Isaac had been in the same classes with her. She had been so uninteresting to him that she had floated underneath his radar, even though, Isaac thought later, she had been a bit weird, something not quite right around the edges.

  That day, the sun had slanted in low, even though it was only around four o’clock. The year was wrapping up, and it would soon be time for the Christmas break. The light, too, was cold, though the heater was on in the school, and he wasn’t uncomfortable. He didn’t feel the cold, he thought; he saw it. Then the girl dropped a book, a heavy novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear. He read the title in surprise; his father had read the book the previous summer, and when Isaac had asked what it was about
, Ruben had said that Isaac would have to wait a few years to find out. Now, here was this girl who was in his same grade, reading the book. Isaac had studied her then, studied her brown hair and freckles and the way her pant legs were just a little too high and her shoes—brown ballet flats—were just a little too worn. That day, too, he’d noticed the way his father had responded to this girl, noticed how he treated her with respect, almost as if she were an adult.

  Isaac saw the girl again a week later. By this time, he knew her name was Boyd, and he’d begun to notice her everywhere. That afternoon, he’d been at the H-E-B in Marble Falls. A man had been sitting at the picnic table out front, an old man with two long dark braids over his shoulders, a bandanna around his temples, a plaid flannel and Wrangler jeans and house shoes. Isaac, sitting in his dad’s truck while Ruben ran in for some milk and cereal, watched Boyd emerge from the grocery store, walk over to the old man, reach into a plastic bag, and hand the man something. Isaac couldn’t see what it was exactly, but the flat box looked like some kind of over-the-counter medicine. The man looked up at Boyd—Isaac was certain that he did not know her—hesitated, then took the box, sucking in his lips and nodding, looking, Isaac thought, as if he was trying not to cry. Isaac had watched them, Boyd in a black sweater and ripped jeans, and he imagined that Boyd had read the man’s mind. Boyd had patted him on the shoulder and walked away, while the man had gaped at her as if she’d been something from another planet, or an angel. Now Isaac thought about that day, and how Boyd had been a central figure in his life for so long. Now that he had left the Hill Country, probably for good, she had receded in his life, and this thought carried with it a sharp sense of loss, but only when he turned his attention to it. His headlights scraped the dusty road as he drove on home.

  BEFORE

  2009

  The teacher’s son sat at the back of the class during those early practices, those days before she even knew his name. She thought that sometimes he watched her, but then she would turn to him and his gaze would be on his book. She caught nothing from him, no hint of what he was feeling, and this was unusual, because that year—seventh grade—she was beginning to feel everything. The other person on the social studies team, Paul, was quickly becoming an open book to Boyd, but not Ruben King’s son. Boyd knew that Paul liked a girl named Amanda, who didn’t like him back, and that he stayed up late into the night writing her name in his journal. Sometimes, Boyd knew, Paul dialed six of the seven digits of Amanda’s phone number and then sat there, finger poised over the final digit, but never called. But Ruben King’s son revealed nothing to her.

  It happened on a windy day in April, a day almost at the end of the school year. Would things be different now, Boyd wondered, if, on that day, she had stayed at home? Would she have made it to the end of the school year, taken a break, returned to eighth grade perfectly fine? Would she have finished high school? Would she have even known Isaac, or at least known him in the way that she knew him now?

  That year had been weird for Boyd anyway. That year, an innocence had begun to flake away, and Boyd had been shocked to discover that some of her classmates smoked pot. She caught their thoughts at lunchtime, and though later in her life this would be no big deal, in seventh grade, the idea of her classmates doing drugs came as a cataclysmic shock. Shocking, too, had been the first realizations about sex, the thoughts of a classmate about what her high school boyfriend had asked her to do in the back of his car, and another about what had happened at a party when the parents had been out of town. By the end of that year, by that April, Boyd had come to understand the world as a very different place from the one she had known just the year before. It was perpetually unsettling, and Boyd was on edge.

  But that day, there had been the new girl, the one whose sweaters were too big and whose shoulders were always hunched. Where had she come from? Boyd tried to remember, but she couldn’t. The girl had appeared sometime between the beginning of the year and April, and Boyd hadn’t had a class with her. The girl was behind, maybe, maybe not too smart, and so she hadn’t been in any of Boyd’s classes, not even in PE. Until that day in the cafeteria, Boyd hadn’t noticed the small girl in the big sweaters at all.

  Boyd was sitting by herself at a lunch table—no big deal; she did it all the time. She knew that many of her classmates thought that this was a fate worse than death, but Boyd preferred it, and they’d long since stopped giving her looks. Her oddness and solitude no longer registered. This was a good thing.

  Where had that girl sat all that time in between? Boyd did not know. Later she would think that the girl had eaten in the office with the counselor, a measured introduction to the world of school and other kids and the look and feel of normal lives and normal families. But the fact was Boyd did not know where the girl had been until this day, when she showed up at Boyd’s table, standing awkwardly, asking with her big eyes for permission to sit.

  At that time, Isaac sat with the athletic kids, though he never played football or basketball; he only ran track. In April, it would have been track season, though. She was only vaguely aware that Mr. King’s son watched her, watched what she did when the big-sweatered girl approached her.

  The eyes had been almost too much for Boyd. They had been sad—anybody could see the sadness that trailed that girl like a vapor—but what got to Boyd was the bravery she saw in them, the effort it had cost this girl to approach Boyd and merely gesture to the table, asking permission to sit down. That bravery nearly knocked Boyd back—the table was almost empty and Boyd was virtually an outcast. The girl did not need to ask Boyd for permission.

  Boyd, sensing a disturbance, smiled thinly and waved her hand, saying, Please, there’s plenty of room. And the girl—she exhaled then, a long breath that hitched in the middle. A girl who was accustomed to hiding what she felt, a girl who was perpetually afraid.

  She sat down and picked at her lunch, chasing the canned corn around the tray with her plastic fork, saying nothing, not asking for Boyd’s friendship or time or anything at all, just asking for a place to sit down. Relief came off the girl in waves.

  But Boyd—something was wrong. She felt it first at the back of her throat and realized that she was holding her breath. A feeling from this girl—behind the relief and bravery, there was something else. This girl knew something of the world that Boyd had not yet once suspected. Until then, Boyd had known about selfishness, about pettiness, about the serious character failings of the human animal. But this girl—she knew about evil, and Boyd had never before encountered evil.

  At first, Boyd did her best to hide the reaction. She didn’t get anything real from the girl, not yet: no images, no thoughts, nothing to grasp. There was just the sense that the girl had seen something, felt something, knew something, that Boyd could not yet imagine. Then it started coming to her, just flashes: how old the girl had been when it had first occurred, what her father had promised to do if she ever told, how old the girl’s brother had been when her father had started to go in that bedroom instead. And Boyd—she couldn’t believe it, had never suspected, felt the broken body and the head on the pillow and the guilt and scheming to try to protect the little brother. Boyd, in the cafeteria on that windy April afternoon, amid the smell of cafeteria pizza and corn, had put her hands on the girl’s forearms, had tried to take some of it away.

  When her thumbs slipped underneath the girl’s sleeves, Boyd felt a jaggedness run up her arms, as if she were being cut from wrist to shoulder with a serrated knife. Whatever traveled from the girl to Boyd had a sawing feeling, a sense that something was making its way in, a feeling as if her skin were ripping and as if she were dripping blood and tissue onto the school’s linoleum. Boyd screamed, unable to process anything, unable to help in any way but to take some of the pain as her own. She continued screaming, cafeteria forgotten, while the girl looked at her, an exhaustion in her eyes. Not letting go, Boyd stood, knocking the girl’s tray to the floor, and now other kids were also up, staring at her, and the lunchroo
m monitors ran toward her, and everybody watched, because it looked as if Boyd were hurting the girl, but Boyd was the one who was screaming.

  But the first person to reach her had been the teacher’s son, the one she would later know was named Isaac, and he wrapped his arms around Boyd in a way that broke her contact with the big-sweatered girl. Boyd was surprised by how large he was—in middle school, she still thought of the boys as boys, but Isaac was almost as large as her father already, and Isaac had a smell that was different from her own, oniony and sharp. He dragged her away as the other girl sat, stunned, and he pulled Boyd out to the hall where nobody else was, and he—a stranger—just kept his arms around her, even as she stopped screaming and started crying, and he stood there as other people walked by and stared, which surprised her, because he was popular, and she was not. He said nothing, only made soothing sounds, and his body blocked her from view. The ripping feeling that had traveled through her body was leaving her, but only gradually, and Boyd was convinced that the teacher’s son was taking that feeling away for her, was doing for Boyd what Boyd had tried to do for the girl. Boyd had never been comforted like this and did not know what to make of it. When she stopped crying, he rested his chin on the top of her head and finally said, “You okay?”

  From that day forward, he had been her friend, the only one who never asked for a thing from her, until much later, when he asked her to leave with him. The only one who could be trusted to sit with Boyd when she hurt because of something that had happened to somebody else. The only one who didn’t expect her to take away his pain. Isaac had been a refuge, and she had needed a refuge.

  Of course, Boyd hadn’t done anything real for the girl besides embarrass her, hadn’t fixed anything at all. Later, when the girl didn’t come back, Isaac had permanently moved to Boyd’s table in the cafeteria, just their two lunches on the table’s long surface in that packed space, Boyd fundamentally different, having lost some sense of safety in the world. Later, when the rumors about the girl started—It’s not true, stop making stuff up—how they had found her in the bathtub, water tinged pink, Isaac was there for Boyd again, sitting beside her after school in Mr. King’s classroom, asking nothing from her, just letting her sit with her discovery that a pain was in the world that broke people, a pain against which she, too, could be broken, if she let herself, because she was powerless against that vast scope. The world beautiful and lovely and joyous, yes, but molten as its core, capable of such utter destruction.