Tilly might say that it’s not fair that it’s the presidents and generals, the famous scholars and civic leaders, who get the monuments. But she’s also too young to see the way that we’re all acting out the same stories, over and over again. We are all, at any given moment, Adam or Eve, Bathsheba or Odysseus or Scarlett O’Hara. The Little Match Girl or someone you read about in the newspaper. Seen from a great distance, it might appear that none of us is ever doing anything new at all.
Imagine if ants made movies. We’d watch one or two of them, out of curiosity, but we’d tire of them quickly, and chances are, we’d miss a lot of the subtlety. We’d have trouble telling the players apart, for one thing, and the stories they told would start to seem like they were all the same. This one dies in the pupal stage, when the workers are forced to flee to avoid a predator. This one breaks off her wings as she prepares to care for her eggs. This one is digging; this one is guarding the nest. But the basic story? They work; they mate; they die. How many of these would we watch before deciding that all ant stories are basically the same?
It’s only a matter of weeks before the head of the school calls you into her office and tells you that she’s very sorry, that everyone adores Tilly and is going to miss her, but that the school simply can’t meet her needs any longer.
You and Josh nod and thank her. It’s not unexpected. There’s already a list of homeschooling supplies in your Amazon shopping cart. The first thing you do when you get home is make the requisite clicks to place the order.
You don’t know how this is going to work, if it’s going to be a disaster or the best thing you’ve ever done. You’re torn between seeing yourself as an ant and seeing yourself as a giant.
Imagine if our lives were treated as carefully as the rest of history. Imagine if we were documented as conscientiously, preserved as gently. Each birth at least as important as a naval victory. Each death a national tragedy. There are plenty of ways to remember someone: a park bench, a colossus, an epic poem. Your only job is creating a life that contains a story worth telling.
chapter 35
Iris
July 13, 2012: New Hampshire
On Friday morning, Tilly’s acting strange, all giddy and secretive. She tries to hold out on telling me what’s up, but I’m good at getting stuff out of her, so she gives in pretty quickly.
Finally, she closes the bedroom door and pulls something out of the pocket of her shorts. It’s a phone, an iPhone with green shamrocks on it.
“How did you get that?” I whisper. Our dad’s the only other one home, and he’s in the bathroom, so I don’t think there’s much chance he’ll hear us.
“It’s Ms. Frances’s,” she says.
“I know, but why do you have it?”
“Last night, after AD Block, I was walking past the office, and I saw a light coming from the window. But not the normal light, just like a little square of light. So I got a little closer, and I saw that it was Ms. Frances, and she was using her phone.”
“Really? How did she get it out of the drawer? It’s supposed to be locked.”
“I don’t know,” says Tilly. “But I had an idea that she might not remember to relock it when she left. So I waited until after everyone else was asleep, and I went back to the office to check. And . . . ta-da!”
The toilet flushes. “Shhh,” I say. We stand there listening, until we hear our dad moving around in the kitchen.
“There’s more,” Tilly whispers. She’s grinning. “I also thought it would be funny if I looked up a whole bunch of porn sites. So that when Ms. Frances gets it back, she’ll see all that in the history, and she’ll think Scott did it.”
I’m smiling along with her now. I’m half horrified and half impressed.
She takes the phone out of her pocket and opens up Safari. The page that pops up is a Google search for “hot shaved teen pussies.”
“Ew!” I say, jerking my head away. “How did you even think of that?”
She smiles. “I don’t know,” she says. “I just did.”
“You’ve got to get the phone back to the office, though, before Scott or Ms. Frances sees that it’s missing.”
“I will.” She stretches and yawns. “I’m really tired today, because I was up almost all night, using the phone. I also logged in to my old email account, to see if Mom and Dad had canceled it, but it still works. I remembered one time when Candy and I were talking about stuff, and she told me what her email address was. So I sent her a picture of Mom and Dad sleeping.”
“Did you delete that?” I ask. This is exactly the kind of detail that always trips her up. “If Ms. Frances finds a picture of Mom and Dad sleeping, she’ll know that someone else was using the phone. Because why would Scott take a picture of that?”
“Oh my God,” says Tilly. “I didn’t think of that.” She taps away at the screen.
“Girls?” calls my dad. Tilly shoves the phone back into her pocket.
“Yeah?” I say.
“Ten minutes till lunchtime.”
“Okay, thanks,” I call.
I whisper to Tilly, “Are you going to put the phone back before lunch?”
“No,” she says. “Dad will be walking with us. I’ll make sure to do it this afternoon.”
And so Ms. Frances’s phone comes with us into the woods to play Werewolf.
• • •
Today, Scott’s using Werewolf to teach us about tracking animals, which I guess could be a useful skill . . . if we ever get lost in the wilderness. He’s made fake tracks that look like the paws of different woodland creatures, and he has each of us stomp in the dirt, so we can see what kinds of marks our own shoes make.
“What does this have to do with the game?” Tilly asks.
“Nothing,” says Scott. “Yet.” Then he makes his voice soft and mysterious and chants, “Little feet that run away, what kind of Werewolf is it today?”
The Fincher boy really seems to like that, and he repeats it a couple of times.
“Before we get to the tracking, let’s take a look at the exciting items at the Building Store.”
I get up and help him pull the sheet off the table, without being asked. I can still be his right-hand girl. There’s all the same stuff as last time; I don’t really see anything new.
“Now each of you is going to get a special item to help you build your shelter. But to find it, you each have to pick a trail of tracks and see where they lead you.”
So we each pick a path and put our newfound tracking skills to work. My path leads me about ten feet into the trees, then right up to a big white box. I’m excited to see it’s the dog crate. I haven’t looked at it too closely before, but I do now. It’s made of plastic, with little windows covered with crisscrossing metal bars. It’s going to make an awesome shelter.
I see Tilly following her trail, a little ways off to my right; when she gets to the end, there’s a plastic sled waiting. “Cool,” she says. Then she sees what I have and yells, “No fair!”
“Too bad,” I say in my sweetest/meanest sister voice. “The Werewolf wants what the Werewolf wants.”
Tilly stares at me for a minute and then smiles. “I bet you’ll look really nice in it,” she says.
“Nice and safe from the Werewolf,” I say. And then we go our separate ways to build our shelters.
• • •
Later, I keep watch for adults while Tilly returns the phone to the office. When she comes back, she says, “Guess what? I sent one more thing to Candy before I put it away. A picture of a sweet little puppy dog named Iris.”
I shriek, then cover my mouth, in case anyone’s listening. “You did not! I didn’t know you even took a picture.”
“I did.” And then she puts on some kind of villain voice and says, “Never underestimate the Older Sister.”
“I never do,” I say. “As long as she doesn’t under
estimate me first.”
“What does that even mean?” asks Tilly, and soon we’re laughing so hard that it doesn’t even matter that we have to put signs around our necks and do our chores.
• • •
Dinner is normal, and the campfire is normal, and singing the Camp Harmony song is normal. Tilly and I go back to our cabin, and go to sleep just like we always do. But in the morning, an hour or so after the Finchers leave, a police car pulls up and parks in front of the office. And after that, nothing’s normal for a very long time.
chapter 36
Alexandra
March 2012: Washington, DC
Your first few weeks of homeschooling are shaky but successful. Getting set up was fairly easy: less administrative red tape than you’d expected, and tons of resources online. You have a couple of Facebook friends who have been able to make recommendations about schedules and curricula, and you’ve connected with a few people through local online groups. And you’ve been talking to Scott Bean on an almost daily basis. He’s helpful with big issues and small ones, with advice both philosophical and practical. And he’s giving you a discount, because you’ve been helping him out with things here and there, mostly related to publicity and marketing. He’s about to launch a huge new project—a “family camp” somewhere in New Hampshire, with a core group of families living there year-round and weekly parenting sessions during the summer—and he needs help spreading the word. Josh has made snotty comments a couple of times, suggesting that he thinks you’re becoming too dependent on Scott, but it’s these phone calls that are keeping you sane.
The academic requirements take about five hours a day on average; you and Tilly generally work for three hours in the morning and two in the afternoon. You both go for a walk at lunchtime, weather permitting, and you’ve signed her up for weekend swimming lessons, to compensate for the lost P.E. component. Socialization is another piece of the puzzle, but you’ve decided to let that slide for the first month or two. You can’t do everything all at once.
You schedule your first field trip for Theodore Roosevelt Island, a trip you owe her anyway, since she’s finished filling in the sticker chart you made to help her remember to change her pads when she has her period. You structure the week’s history lessons around Roosevelt’s presidency (jumping forward temporarily from the Civil War), and you get her reading a kids’ biography. For fun, you assemble a YouTube playlist: a clip of a Simpsons episode that centers around Bart’s interest in TR, an educational cartoon from the ’90s, a few sound recordings of Roosevelt’s actual speeches. As a long-term plan, you’re thinking that some time you should take her to a Nationals game, to see the fourth-inning Presidents Race, with giant mascot heads of Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and (for some reason) Taft, Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.
The two of you get in the car and head out to Virginia around 10 a.m. It’s an easy drive; it’s not far from National Airport (which you apparently still refuse to think of as Reagan National, even though it’s been almost fifteen years since the name change). You have bottles of water and a picnic lunch. A worksheet full of questions for Tilly to find answers to, and extra sweaters in case it’s chilly by the water. You’re feeling good. Optimistic, even.
You park and walk over the footbridge that leads to the island.
“Okay,” you say. “Easy question. What body of water is underneath us right now?”
“The Potomac,” she says. You give her a high five.
Tilly wants to see the statue first, of course. You’ve printed out a map and studied the crisscrossing hiking trails, so you know that the monument plaza will be somewhere off to your left, after you reach the end of the bridge. Last night on the phone, Scott said, “You know, you and Josh and the girls are exactly the kind of family I’m looking for to help me set up the camp. If you ever decide you’re tired of city life and all those daily battles, you let me know.”
You laughed and thanked him, flattered but a little weirded out. It’s an ambitious plan, this utopian country haven he’s imagining for special-needs kids and their parents, but it’s a little bit crazy. You’re not really sure where he’s going to find these families who are willing to give up their entire lives to go raise organic chickens or whatever.
You and Tilly find the right path and start walking. It’s a beautiful winter day, chilly but sunny. You’ll have to come back in the spring sometime, when there’s more plant life and foliage to study. But it’s pretty today, too: the starkness of the bare trees, the interlacing shadows on the ground.
It’s a weekday so it’s not very crowded, but you do pass a few people here and there, running or walking dogs. Tilly’s chattering nonstop about the statue: who designed it, when it was built (and dedicated, a whole separate category in statue world), the fact that the architects wanted to showcase Roosevelt in “characteristic speaking pose,” which is why he’s depicted with one arm raised over his head. You get a few smiles, and an old lady walking a terrier stops Tilly to compliment her on her “knowledge of history.”
After a few minutes, you cross a low bridge onto a wide flat clearing, paved in bricks, and there’s the statue. Tilly stops and lets out a little gasp; she loves this moment, when the giant first becomes visible, rising up through the landscape of the ordinary world. She takes your hand and pulls you forward.
The two of you admire the monument, which is not terribly big compared to the others on Tilly’s lists, but is quite nice, as these things go. You walk together, slowly, around the plaza, checking out the other components of the memorial: a couple of fountains and four giant slabs of marble containing Roosevelt quotes. They’re labeled “Nature,” “Youth,” “The State,” and “Manhood.”
“They put those up in the ’60s,” says Tilly. “I think it was kind of a sexist decade.”
You let her wander around on her own, and you head over to one of the low marble benches to unpack your picnic. You can tell that she’s going to want to stay here for a while.
Through the trees, you can hear a school group approaching, a small chaos of voices and laughter. When the group arrives, you can see that the kids are around Tilly’s age, maybe a year or two younger. You can’t tell what school, but they’re wearing uniforms: khakis for the boys, plaid skirts for the girls, polos for everyone. A different life, and Tilly could have been among them, maybe. They’ve all ended up in the same place, for today anyway.
You take a bite of your sandwich. Tilly isn’t interested in eating yet; she’s still looking around. You’re facing the “Nature” monolith, and you read over the quotations. There is delight in the hard life of the open. You suppose that’s what Scott’s trying to get at with his camp.
Tilly comes running up. “Can I borrow your phone?” she asks. “I want to take some pictures of the statue.”
“Sure.” You hand it to her. You watch her approach the statue, walk around it, capture it from different angles. You rummage through your bag for an apple. Some of the kids near you are playing I Spy.
“I spy with my little eye,” says one of the girls, “something that begins with B.”
“Bench!” says a boy.
“No.”
“Bug?” says someone else.
“Eww, where?”
“Nowhere, I just thought maybe she saw one.”
“Nope,” says the first girl. “Not it.”
Sometimes your kids used to play this on long car trips. Tilly would change the wording to include a hint. “I spy with my hungry eye,” she’d say as you passed a McDonald’s.
“I know,” shouts another girl. “Barrette!”
“Yes! Finally!”
You smile. Here in a national park, and they’re looking at each other’s hair.
You hear sudden laughter from over near the statue, and you glance up, some mechanism of maternal radar pinging.
“Oh my God,” says one of the kids near yo
u, peering in the same direction. “What the hell is she doing?”
You don’t see Tilly at first, so you stand up so you can see over the crowd of heads. She’s lying on her back, taking a picture of the statue from underneath. You grab your bag and head over to . . . well, you’re not sure what. To protect her, or rescue her, or do damage control, if necessary.
“I spy with my little eye,” says a boy behind you. “Something that begins with R.”
“Retard?” asks one of the girls. Gales of laughter.
Little bitch, you think, without meaning to.
“Hey, Tilly,” you say. She’s sitting up now, looking curiously at the group of kids staring at her.
“What?” she says. She’s addressing them, not you. “I wanted to get that shot.”
A few kids are laughing, but she doesn’t seem to notice.
“Don’t worry, though,” she says. She pauses to stand up and brush herself off. “It may have looked like it, but I wasn’t trying to take a picture of his crotch.”
Now they’re all laughing. “Come eat your lunch,” you say. You take her arm, but she shakes you off. She seems glad to have an audience.
“So this statue’s only seventeen feet,” she says to the group. “But do any of you know what the tallest statue in the world is?”
“Hey,” you say, but she raises her voice to talk over you.
“It’s not the Statue of Liberty, if you were thinking that. It’s the Spring Temple Buddha in Lushan County, Henan, China.”
“Come on,” you say, pulling her with you. “We’ve got to go have our picnic. And these kids probably have to get back to their group.”
She lets you pull her this time, but yells back over her shoulder, “It’s 420 feet! Not counting the pedestal!” You’re really not sure—does she not hear that the kids are laughing, or does she just not realize that they’re laughing at her?
Harmony Page 24