by Beth Kephart
In honor of Uncle Danny,
lost much too soon.
I miss you every day.
Pluck has carried many a girl* triumphantly through what seemed the forlornest hope.
—The Art of Keppy,
a rare find passed down by Uncle Davy
*As adapted by Lizzie, as encouraged by Mr. Genzler
1
NOBODY IS JUST THEIR GENES, or just their proteins.
Nobody is only DNA.
I, for example, am Lizzie, pure Lizzie, and my uncle was my uncle and not the gossip people told, and my mother was my mom and not her cancer. We were all the all of who we were, and I’m going to tell my story straight through, and then, maybe then, you will tell yours. You will see how much it hurts to say the whole truth of who you are, plus the truth of all that happened.
This is a victim impact statement. Offered right here, from this bed, in this room, in this house, to you, because as you can see, I am not moving.
Another thing for this record, up front: Matias is a part of this story, and Matias was not his condition. So he had a problem with his pituitary gland. So it had turned his growth hormone off. So the only way Matias had a chance of getting taller was by keeping to a schedule—an every-day shot of growth juice. All true. He’d had this done to him since he was small. He’d done it to himself since he was eight. Had gotten up each day and punched the needle in, but he was still so short, and he was running out of time. Matias wished for his shoes to grow small or his pants to grow short, but neither happened. He wished for a body that could run as fast as other bodies run.
He did not have a body that could run like that.
That body, that gland, is not who Matias was.
But some of that is part of this story.
You know a little. You were there. You played a part. You had firsthand news about the prison break down the road—the two men who popped up from a sewer hole with their hair combed back and their hello hands waving. The two men who were Hollywood inside their own heads, who were coming close to famous, who’d waited winter to spring to summer and now were on the move, and weren’t just their DNA either, their genes.
Those two men had a choice.
They had an accomplice.
People ask me, was I afraid?
Not yet.
Not then.
But soon.
2
LET’S START IN SUNSHINE. LET’S start with the absolute true: My uncle was wild beauty in motion, and I was the one who knew. You couldn’t trench a fence around him. Couldn’t box him with a frame. He was in and out, there and here, a blaze of Day-Glo glory.
He loved me best. He told me so. I was his primo family. Which is why when Mom said, month before last, “Choose your summer adventure”—choose—I chose my uncle and his reno’ed schoolhouse cabin, his swatch of God’s elastic earth, his way of laughing, which made me laugh, which made us both laugh harder. Anytime I got a choice, I always chose my uncle. I chose four highway hours north from here, one quick bump east, one cut up a diagonal road that quickly skinnied. I chose where the hills are almost mountains, and the trees are so green that the shade is black, and the loose gravel rattles the belly of the car. And there are streams, and not just streams but something they call kettles.
I chose my uncle, which means I also chose my friend Matias. The three of us as indivisibles, or that’s what I thought then.
Mom’s hands were tight on the steering wheel. Her long black hair with its bright-white roots whipped around her head, tornado style.
“You ready?” she said.
I had my solo suitcase in the rear and my caterpillar backpack by my feet. I was wearing my turquoise Keens loose and my khaki shorts long to my knees. The bill of my Phillies cap was pointing back. I’d written emergency facts in the palms of both hands, and the ink was already sweating.
“Ready for anything,” I said.
3
NO.
I’m sorry. I can’t.
Won’t, either.
That’s running the story ahead of itself, and the rules are I tell you what happened. I tell it like I remember it happening, and you don’t ask me questions. We already know, you especially know, what happens when rules get broken.
I’m at the start of this story, here with Mom. I’m on the road with the gravel, with the buzzy shade and the perky streams. Up ahead, in his schoolhouse cabin, Uncle Davy’s waiting, breakfast-at-lunchtime on his barrel-bellied stove. In his own white house, like a snow-fort house, Matias is waiting too. His house is on a hill, and you can’t see it for the trees.
“Someday I’ll meet your Matias,” Mom says, like she can read my thoughts through the silence between us.
“Could be.”
“We’ll have a picnic. We’ll go hiking.”
“Mom?”
“End of summer, I’ll be better. I’ll come for a Matias visit.”
Biology is my best subject and my second-most-important hobby, and I know a lot about cells, by which I mean mutations, divisions, arrests, and yes, DNA and genes and proteins and heredity, which is not the same as inheritance. Mom doesn’t know and I don’t know if Mom is going to get better. I don’t know, so I don’t answer. I believe in truth.
“You’ll keep my business as my business,” Mom says after a bit. “Won’t you, Lizzie?”
I nod.
“Including your uncle.”
“Mom,” I say.
“Some things are private.”
I dip my chin. That is my yes. Mom’s doctor news is just and only our news. That’s the way she wants it.
The road ahead grows skinny. I see the log cabins in their tuck behind the slippery elms and the aspens quaking and the eastern hop hornbeams, trees I know the words for. I see the skirt of raw earth, and the bumpy road, and the acreage of empty in-betweens. I see the vending machine by the side of the road, left there like some pay phone.
You think a pay phone would have saved us?
You think you can know for sure?
You don’t. You can’t. Nobody can. And besides: This is my telling.
They say telling heals. I’m not persuaded. I don’t know the honest what of my own healing, and ten days is all we have. I said yes to the lawyers, to telling this story, to giving you a chance to listen. Somebody said, but I forget who, that this will go down as your partial restitution. I looked that word up, “restitution.” “An act of restoring or a condition of being restored,” says Merriam-Webster. Also: “a making good of or giving an equivalent for some injury.”
Making good? You think me telling you this story can make this good? Can make us good? I have my doubts, but I said yes, and mostly I play by the rules.
You’re taller than I thought you’d be. Prettier, too, since I’m being honest. I see the daisies you brought and the Dixie cup you brought them in, and the daisies weren’t expected. Rules are you stay until the fireflies fly in each night and not one single tock later.
I’ll be watching for the blinks of light.
I’ll be listening for the tock.
Mom is driving and the road gets skinny. That’s how this starts. Mom is driving and the music of the mountains is, and her doctor news is too big for two, and I can’t see far enough ahead.
4
FIRST THING THAT’S COMING INTO view is Uncle Davy’s cabin—was coming into view, guess I should say. Back then. End of June. Red clapboard with white-trimmed windows, which were shaped like crescent moons. A tall violet door, because Uncle Davy was tall, and a doorknob the color of the sun. Three steps going up, a bunch of bushes to each side, garden goods popping from the earth out back, a little haze of butterflies, all of them, always, alive. And right out front, sitting low on the drive, was Uncle Davy’s
’69 Dodge Dart with its hitched-in trailer, which was painted black except for two white words: D’ERASIO COLLECTIBLES.
Mom cut in, pulled behind the Dart, and parked. She released the wheel, reached for my hand, kissed me on the cheek. I kissed her back, and all of a sudden I could picture her on her long, lonesome drive home, pulling up to the house, taking the medicine that waited, that would make her sick so that maybe she could get better, and I got an ache right hard inside my pulmonary action. You take pills like those and you’re walking radiation. They say to wait it out alone. I say that really sucks.
“News for two,” she said. “Don’t forget?”
She had tears in her eyes, two brown-green pools that I was swimming in.
“Two,” I said.
She looked past me then, and I turned and there was Uncle Davy hurrying out to the stoop, calling for me like he always did, waving halfway to my mother. A minor salute.
“Lizzie love,” he said.
He was a TV star. I was his best and only niece. Mom was behind me, touching, I could guess, one hand to the tornado in her hair. Him. Me. Her. Us. Combinations of two, but not three.
You know what estrangement is? You know how it looks and how it sounds? Like a crack in an egg, like my mother and my uncle, the silence between them, the way they talked through me. I got out with my stuff. Mom reached for my hand. I turned back to face her. She brushed at a tear and said, “I love you,” and I said, “I’ll miss you,” because sometimes you need only a couple of words and not all the words in the books to say everything you mean.
Mom looked for a quasi at my uncle, threw a mini of a salute, then stared straight ahead and unparked and waved for real at the brother she wasn’t looking at. She gunned the car, turned onto the road, spun for a second, and was gone, and in four hours she’d be home, where all three stories of the narrow house were mostly empty, and where the world’s worst word—“diagnosis”—was shivery in the shadows. Radiation iodine is not for sissies and it’s not for sharing. Just ask the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
“Lizzie!”
Uncle Davy had left the door to the cabin wide open, and I could see the whole insides from where I stood, everything like it always was: The downstairs trundle, where I’d sleep. The weird stove in the middle and the unwashed chalkboard and the kitchen table with the gingham cloth and the bowls and spoons and the basket of polished acorns, a celebrity prerogative, Uncle Davy said. I could see up the ladder, to the loft, to the bed where my uncle slept, which was gold, and the three silk pillows, which were raspberry fade. Everything other was the flea market finds that had made my uncle famous.
Because my uncle and I, we were collectors. Him of the stuff that dead people made. Me of the stuff all around us. He liked stained-glass lamps and tasseled chairs and tin-toothed nutcracker soldiers. I liked rocks and butterflies, leaves and shells, pinecones and polished acorns. He had a name for everything he owned. I had a book and a pencil and a list and an idea that someday, somehow, I’d have a noun for every Earth thing I saw, I’d be world beloved for my supreme, impressive knowledge. My knowing everything would be a kind of cure.
“I’ll be famous as you someday,” I’d say to Uncle Davy, who was a guy who needed sunglasses big as turtle shells to go out in public. “Be careful what you wish for,” he’d say back, because fame turns into stories, and stories into gossip, but I guess that’s not something I need to tell you. I guess you know the fame facts well. I guess I’ve been distracted. Point is:
I loved my uncle true, and I was hugging him so hard that I almost lost my breath, and it was “Missed you,” “Missed you,” until his arms unclasped and we were walking side by side into that cabin, and my mother was driving away, driving away down that road. I threw my pack into one corner. I smelled the Cream of Wheat steaming on the stove. “Breakfast every time of day” was Uncle Davy’s motto. I was four hours of traveling hungry and I was full of secret sorrows, and I was headed for the table.
“Holy Vogelzang,” Uncle Davy said, looking past me, through a window.
I turned to see what he was seeing, but he was already out the door and down the steps in his slippery-soled shoes and yellow socks and navy trousers—he was running to the back of his reno’ed schoolhouse cabin with a turquoise-colored fly swatter in one hand. There are rocks out there and dewy grass, and that cabin sits on a hill, and my uncle is really tall and kind of spazzy—all wild beauty in motion, like I said. I had a bad feeling. I ran. Got around to the back in zipper time. In a single second, with my biology eyes, I saw the problem—a clump of garden rhubarb chomped right down to stubs. Food chain problems.
“Was planning on making you pie,” Uncle Davy said, out of breath and still holding his swatter high. He was looking out beyond the small square of mowed backyard, past the bushes, toward the forest, and down the hill, where the white flags of deer tails were disappearing.
“Criminal element,” he said, meaning the whitetails. And then he bent down and rubbed one knee, and then he stood up and he leaned his weight onto my shoulder, and we stood for a while staring at the chomped stubs, feeling the mountain air.
“I’m too old to be chasing deer,” he said.
“You’re a star,” I said. “You shouldn’t have to.”
He laughed and I could see his twisted tooth. He straightened his hair, his trousers, his purple tie, and he was handsome. We started our walk back, his twisted knee giving him a funky limp.
“Was planning on making you a breakfast pie,” he said.
“Would have been nice.”
“You plant a garden for your favorite niece and you end up feeding Bambi.”
“Way of the world,” I said before I could stop me. “Way of the world.” Words that belonged to my mom.
“How is your mom?” Uncle Davy asked.
“Mom?” I said. “You saw.”
“She going to be okay?”
I nodded. I swallowed hard. “You need a fence,” I said.
“A fence?”
“If you’re serious about the rhubarb, you need a fence to stop the deer. Separate the species.”
“I’m not a fence builder, Lizzie.”
“Just telling you what Mr. Genzler would say.”
“Mr. Genzler?”
“My biology mentor.”
“Hmmm,” he said. Then: “Wish we could all just get along.”
“That would be nice.”
“We’ll buy a pie. We’ll be just fine.”
We walked slow. We took our time. I tried to see what was new about the place; it’d been a while since last time. The rocky earth still fell down, down. The birds still perched on the limbs of forest trees. The air was sweet, but then it wasn’t. Uncle Davy smelled it first.
“Cream of Wheat,” he said, a catch in his throat.
I smelled it now.
“Uncle Davy!”
I left him stranded and ran. Around the house, up the steps, into the one room of the old cabin, to the barrel-bellied stove, where the pot was scorched and smoking. I grabbed the kitchen mitts and then the pot and tossed the mess into the sink, turned on the spigot. If there had been fire alarms, they’d have been ringing. The smoke spewed thick as fog. Only thing I could see for a little while after that was my uncle’s yellow socks and my uncle’s turquoise swatter, knocking the smoke this way and that.
“Oh, Lizzie,” Uncle Davy said, coughing. “I’m sorry.”
“We’re good,” I said, keeping my voice real calm and my wits about me and my courage front and center, courage being my first and most important hobby, courage being the only choice we have, according to what Mr. Genzler says.
“First day here and you’re putting out fires.”
“I’ve seen worse,” I said, “in bio lab. You should see Terrence Ridley with the Bunsen burner.” The smoke was up in my lungs, my throat. My voice was squeaky. My eyes burned.
“That was going to be an excellent pot of wheat,” my uncle said.
“The pot’s wrec
ked,” I said.
“Probably.”
“The smoke . . .”
“Let’s open windows.”
He limped one way. I went the other. There was a lot of smoke, but there really hadn’t been much fire, and we were together on this, with a plan.
“How old are you now?” my uncle asked after we’d done what we could do, after the mountain air was pushing in and the smoke was starting to clear. Asked it like he didn’t know, like he’d never known, like he wasn’t there the day I was born, back when Mom and him were still best of friends and told each other secrets.
“Thirteen.”
“Remarkable,” he said.
5
RULES ARE I DON’T HAVE to answer anything you ask, if you ask, but since you did and since it’s up to me, all I’m saying is this: I learned my courage from my father. No. Not like you’re saying. No. Nothing like that. No, he was no firefighter. No, he was no cop. He was . . . my father. He taught me—who not to be and how to stand up for myself and how to be strong for my mom.
I don’t see my father. Haven’t seen him. Wouldn’t. I’m—I’m just saying that it was from my father that I learned my best and my most useful hobby, which is courage, and besides: Someone had to stop the fire.
There were eggs. I cracked and fried them. We kept the windows open and the violet door, too, and the smoke grew thin, and sometimes a dragonfly would zig its way into the cabin, then zig back out, and sometimes a squirrel would hop right up to the open door, then quit and go back to the forest where it had come from, and after a while we forgot about the fire, and the smell, and the Cream of Wheat, and the pie, and it was just the two of us, like it normally was, getting caught up on everything that wasn’t private.
Uncle Davy gave me the news on his latest finds—a pair of chairs he called the mission and the Hunzinger. I reported on the admirals, swallowtails, and monarchs—the prettiest butterfly collection he could imagine. I’d pinned them to the mounting board, I said. I’d built the shadow boxes. I’d worked with Mr. Genzler as an after-school project, and no, I promised Uncle Davy, no butterflies had been killed for this assignment. Every butterfly we pinned was a stilled specimen we’d found in the school’s garden.