by A. J. Gnuse
But for now, there was nothing but the gentle whine of the dishwasher opening, a glass with a film of orange juice pulp appearing beside the Mason family’s dirty dishes, and a padding of feet on the tiles, leaving the room.
The antique clock in the foyer struck six, and its mechanics let out the loud cries of a nest of baby finches. Mr. Nick at once sat up and placed his feet on the library floor, stretched, and walked through the foyer and living room. He entered the kitchen and rummaged through the cabinets for pots and pans as he began to prepare dinner for his family. A few minutes later, Eddie’s and Mrs. Laura’s voices could be heard just outside the back porch as they wiped their shoes clean on the mat. Upstairs, Marshall’s stereo, without warning, soared to life with heavy-metal electric guitars and double-bass pedals.
In the laundry room, between the thick silver tubes behind the machines, the girl opened her book to the earmarked page. In that chapter, Odin, the oldest of the gods, journeyed beneath the roots of a great tree to a witch and paid her one of his eyes in order to gain wisdom.
“There are many ways to see,” Odin said, as a pair of ravens rooted up from under the ground between his feet. The birds shook their dirty wings, wrapped them around the god’s legs, and pulled themselves to his shoulders. “An eye on its own,” Odin said, “can give you only so much, and now I have so much more.”
The Last December
IN THAT COLD, STRANGE TIME BETWEEN CHRISTMAS AND NEW Year’s, when even the adults didn’t seem certain what it was exactly they should be doing with the different parts of their days, and the house showed their disarray. Strips of torn wrapping paper peeked out from beneath a sofa and coffee table. Decorations half-taken down, stockings emptied of their contents and carelessly folded on the seats of chairs or the mantelpiece. The Christmas tree beginning to dry, as her father forgot to water it, its needles slowly flaking free to fall and brown on the floor.
They went to City Park to see, one last time before the end of the season, the lights that decorated the botanical gardens. She had gone with her parents twice already that month, but before they had always arrived after dark. Now, she wanted to see what Celebration in the Oaks looked like in the afternoon, when the sun still illuminated each of the bulbs and cords that weaved between the hedges and formed the outlines of reindeer and snowflakes. She wanted to see the skeletons of the lights. They walked along narrow, manicured paths, bundled in coats. She trailed a few yards behind her mom and dad, sipping from a Styrofoam cup of hot chocolate, the warmth rising against her face. Hardly anyone else was there.
At the live oak in the center of the park, a huge octopus of a tree, and her parents knew already: the hot chocolate relegated to her mom’s hands, her dad waiting by the base of the trunk. He hoisted the girl up by the armpits, lifting her high enough to find a grip into the oak’s fork. For the moment he held her: his tangy-sharp cologne, the scent of fresh paint lingering beneath. Followed, as always, by his complaint that they’d both grown too old for this kind of labor.
“A hundred years old with a broken back—I’ll probably still be lugging you around.”
And up in the tree, she shrugged. Wind blew and the leaves flapped around her. She pulled herself higher into the bobbing branches—“Careful up there!”—her cold palms squeezing the chunky bark. With the sky having grown darker and the shadows lengthened beneath the branches, the light of the blue and yellow bulbs below and around her strengthened. She watched the shapes they formed grow flesh and life.
Later, on the drive back, she’d fallen mostly asleep, only lightly aware of the familiar bumps of De Gaulle Drive under the car, and of her mom’s voice in the front passenger seat, murmuring about New Year’s plans.
“I think the Wilsons’ party will be going on through midnight, if you wanted to stay.”
The seat belt pressed against her neck as the car slowed for a stoplight. The cloth of the seat had grown warm beneath her.
“Or maybe we could go back early. It might be nice to celebrate at home. Like we did last year, at the old house? I think we still have that jar for bottle rockets.”
The whir of the engine as the car accelerated again and the beat of the tires on the road. Her dad’s and mom’s voices taking turns. She slipped in and out of consciousness, as if she were moving back and forth between her bedroom and the hall.
Odin, the All-Knowing
MONTHS AFTER, HIDDEN IN THE OLD HOME WITH THE MASON FAMILY scattered around her, the girl read in her book of Norse myths that Odin—now Odin the One-Eyed—had become the wisest of all the gods, able to know what was going on in any place in the world. In the story she read, Odin sent out his ravens, who soared up high to spy on the events of the world while hidden in the clouds. When they returned, they tucked into his beard to warm themselves from the icy temperatures of the high altitudes. Once they caught their breath, they whispered in his ear what they had seen.
In this way, Odin saw the whole world through what they told him—storms raging in the mountains, giants stirring beneath the earth, animals rustling in the underbrush of the swamp—all in the near-darkness of his throne room.
When the girl finished the story, she closed one eye and scratched the back of her neck. A good story, but then again, as she sat and let its images drift through her mind, the feeling welled in her that something seemed off. Fishy. If she were in Odin’s place, when he first made the agreement with the witch beneath the great tree’s roots, would she have taken the same deal? Traded an eye for that?
The girl leaned her head against the laundry room wall, rubbed her eyebrows with her thumb and forefinger, puckered her cheeks, and made soft popping noises with her mouth.
It’s not that she didn’t believe the magic, or think it was worth the cost. For limitless knowledge and wisdom? She’d give an eye for that. Heck yeah—and she felt pretty attached to her eyes, too: light green with brown specks. But the girl also had two of them. And once, her dad had given her a book about Ann Bonny, the lady pirate. On the cover, she was illustrated steering her ship through the blue Caribbean Sea with a wild, free grin and a big, black eyepatch.
The girl wouldn’t mind that look. She’d trade an eye for magic birds.
Well, maybe not for ravens. She figured those were loud and squawking birds. She hadn’t yet had the chance to read it, but she had heard about that old Edgar Poe “Nevermore!” story.
Something quieter. Smaller, too. Like a wren. She liked their puffed-out chests. It was like a pillow they could rest their faces on, one they carried with them and could use wherever they chose to sleep at night. And their size meant they could fit anywhere, go wherever they liked.
But still. The birds weren’t what was wrong with the story. There was something else. What was it?
The whole exchange with Odin and the witch. It didn’t make sense.
The witch. What was she doing down there, beneath the roots of a tree? Why did she give the man this power to see the whole world over—seemed like a pretty big deal—and only get an eye in return? What does anyone do with an eye anyway?
And even then, did Odin actually become that all-knowing, after all? The girl had read a couple of other myths about the Norse gods (Eddie already owned a collection of short stories that had samplings of almost all the good ones: Egyptian, South African, Greek, Native American, Middle Eastern), and she knew that Odin, even with all his knowledge, had no idea what kind of tricks his wicked son was up to, even when they happened in his own home.
Then—the girl held still. Mrs. Laura padded through the library toward her into the laundry room. The dryer in front of the girl reverberated as it opened, and she heard the brush of fabric against the metal well as Mrs. Laura pulled the dried clothes out into a basket. The door of the dryer clicked shut, and as suddenly as Mrs. Laura entered the room, she left. The woman trailed away, now humming the theme music to Survivor and bouncing the laundry basket against her knees.
The girl flipped open her book again. Turned through the pa
ges and squinted at the illustration of the old man and the witch, shadowed by the massive roots of the World Tree. Maybe the lesson to be learned from the story was simply that adults, even the smart ones, were kind of dumb. It was a lesson the girl had learned before. In her experience, adults had often demanded fairly stupid things of her. Adults like her old teachers, who talked to her as if she was an infant. The foster guardian, Ms. Brim—one evening with the woman, yet the girl still remembered her name—who suggested that families and homes are things people can recreate. Even her mom and dad had required pointless chores of her (sweeping the back porch, though it would only get dirty again half a day later; dust-mopping the rooms they hardly used; and, worst of all, their own constant projects on the house—the girl’s earliest memory was coloring in a book while lying on a plastic-covered floor). Ridiculous to think of the hours her parents had wasted of hers. But she stopped herself from dwelling too much on the thought. Of course, she’d take their chores and projects as a trade-off. Hundreds more, if she could.
But—the story. So, why didn’t the witch just take all wisdom for herself? Down beneath the roots of a tree, she must have wanted it more than anyone. To close her eyes, listen to the whispers of her ravens, to see each facet of the world appear before her like a flickering television screen. Why would anyone give the birds up?
What made her go down beneath the tree, and what was she doing down there? If she made Odin the smartest of all the gods, what else was she capable of? Seemed to the girl like the story had skimped on the most interesting character.
She liked this witch. She felt like she was being winked at from the page. There was more to this woman than she was letting on, and she was keeping it hidden from everyone in the world. Except her.
The girl turned back to the beginning of the story. She rolled her neck, feeling the gentle pops as it loosened. Then she read the story again.
Here, in her home, time moved as she wanted. Here, in the world she found, the one she created—who knew? She might as well stay a little girl forever, as long as no one else ever knew to find her.
Boys
LONG AFTER ALL THE LIGHTS IN THE HOUSE HAD BEEN PUT OUT that night, the girl watched the stars through the kitchen window. When she was finished, she brushed her teeth in the downstairs bathroom with the toothbrush she kept hidden behind a rack of magazines. Then she pulled herself back into the walls, like pulling a bedsheet over herself before sleep. Inside, she felt the vibrations of the building, a tremor of a pulse beneath her fingertips. She scaled the space between the walls. But as she neared the second story, she stopped.
How could they still be awake? Sounds of their feet creaking on the carpeted floor above her. The older boy kept his voice low, so as not to wake their parents.
“You think I can’t hear you moving around in here? The fuck were you even doing?”
Eddie’s returning voice was soft, frail. She couldn’t make out what he said. Before he finished, Marshall cut him off.
“Shut up.”
She pictured Marshall standing over Eddie, his pointed knuckles whitening as he gripped the doorframe. Narrow face turned gray by the dark of the bathroom that connected their rooms. She imagined him leaning in close as he spoke.
“You weird, idiot, little kid,” he said. “For the love of fucking God, why can’t you just be a normal brother? Wake me up again, and I’ll beat the shit out of you.”
The House
THE OLD HOUSE HAD BEEN CALLED A PROJECT BY EACH OF THE half-dozen families who had lived there through the decades. Over time, each had left their mark when renovating their home, in shaping and reshaping the floorplan. They added cabinets, constructed a back porch, and, later, closed that porch in to become an interior back patio. Utility closets had been converted into pantries, a playroom transformed into a lounge then into an office, and the kitchen at some point doubled in size and expanded into the garage.
Inconsistencies abounded; the house was like some hybrid, ridiculous creature from an ancient myth. The white Ionic columns in the foyer were followed by the living room’s 1970s cream drop-ceilings and fluorescent lights. The exposed hardwood floors of the upstairs hallway changed into the thick brown carpet of the separate bedrooms. In the library, an unusable fireplace without a chimney. In the master bedroom, an ornate wrought-iron heating system, without any gas hookups, jutted from the wall. The look of the house resembled its history: of people trying, and failing, decade after decade, to make the house their own.
As long as the girl had known the home, something had always been about to break: a plumbing pipe or a rusted water heater, a ceiling leak or cracked gutter, a garage on the verge of being infested by carpenter bees, or an attic with a pair of nesting squirrels. For her own parents, and the Masons now, she figured this was why so many projects stood half-finished (the broken upstairs-to-downstairs intercom system, the stained-glass kitchen window above the stove that led into the darkness of the wall).
Throughout her childhood, her mom and dad had always complained how, as soon as they began one project, they’d need to stop halfway because, somewhere across the house, another one became more pressing. Too many memories, like the one of her mom: screwdriver between her teeth, rushing down the stairs to the kitchen where dinner boiled over on the stove. Of standing beside her dad as they looked up at the pantry ceiling, where once again it had darkened from moisture. “Is the leak coming from your bathroom? Ours? Or somewhere else?” The house’s insides unfurling above them, a cave system through walls. “Let’s think.”
So, it’d been a kind of déjà vu, a month ago in early March, when the girl listened to Mrs. Laura coming to terms with the house’s stubbornness. The Mason mother had wanted to add an extra door to the office to help bridge the divide between the boys’ bedrooms and their own. A single hallway led through the upstairs, curling like a horseshoe, separating the rooms, making them feel like they belonged to different homes. (A problem the girl knew well: when Marshall’s room had been her own, she’d felt stashed away, and would strain to hear the murmur of her parents’ voices in their bedroom before sleep.) That day in March, Mrs. Laura brought in a contractor, and his saw shrieked through the bones of the house, revving and spitting for most of the morning. After lunch, Mr. Nick lost his temper with the noise and took the boys to a matinee. Mrs. Laura stayed and sat out in the Adirondack chair by her vegetable garden. The girl could only cup her hands over her ears and wait.
Around two in the afternoon, with a withered sigh of its motor, the saw eventually gave out. The worker stomped over to Eddie’s bedroom window and called out for Mrs. Laura to come up.
“I mean, I thought I’d just cut through the studs,” he said in an accent thick with the southern parishes. “But, would you believe it? It’s like that wood has petrified. Bent the teeth of my saw blade!”
The contractor picked up a hammer and smacked its side against a stud for effect. The noise was as if he’d struck stone. The girl, who had pressed her ear against the side of the office closet when he began to speak, bit her tongue in surprise.
“This house might as well be a mine shaft!” the worker said.
The girl spat into a small basket of Marshall’s old video game controllers. Decided she wouldn’t mind the loud man himself being thrown into a mine.
“Well, it sounds like you’re saying you can’t do it.” Mrs. Laura’s voice was heavy with disappointment. The girl could imagine her already bending over, feeling the texture of the wood, wondering whether her own saw might fare better.
“I’m saying that nobody’s cutting through, short of using explosives.”
“Let me see.”
It was Mrs. Laura’s turn to thump the hammer against the wall. This time the girl was prepared.
“Hard as rock,” the mother said. “Jesus. We’re learning something new about this place every day.”
Here, the Masons would temper their expectations as to what could be done with the home. The girl had learned enough her
self to know some things wouldn’t change. She counted on it. She had felt those walls on their insides, traced her fingers along their grooves and indentations.
The Mason parents could spend their weeknights curled up in bathroom cabinets breathing in paint fumes, or bent over a table saw on the back porch. The boys could be called down, grumbling, on Sunday evenings to help with the latest project, whether it was to realign the lazy Susan cabinets in the kitchen, rip up cracked tile in the master bedroom and caulk in new, or lay fresh insulation in the attic, or hook up new ceiling fans to the old wiring that veined through the walls, or dig through the back of the deep living room closet to sort through the leavings of families who had lived there years ago.
But none of them would ever know the house like she did.
A Clock of Birds
THE ONLY CHANGE THE MASONS MADE THAT THE GIRL IN THE WALLS liked was the clock. Loud enough to be heard throughout the first floor’s rooms, so that ears, grown sensitive in the quiet, would hear it in the attached garage when coiled within the foot space of the kayaks, or upstairs, tucked in the plush quilts in the hallway’s linen closet, or even higher, in the dark heat of the attic.