by Beth Kephart
“See that?” he said.
I did.
“Miniature. Beautiful. Amusing. The M-B-As. Whatever it is that you’re not telling me, your mom will be okay.”
I said nothing.
“If you want to tell me.”
I shook my head.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough.”
I couldn’t hear the stream or the frogs or the fish. I couldn’t hear Matias up on that rock, with his two canes crisscrossed beside him. I couldn’t hear him, but he had to be there, he would always be there, that was our plan. Directly after Cream of Wheat, rain or sun, come to our whale of a rock. There he’d be, upon that throne, keeping his pupusas steaming.
Out on the road there was a car or two, but they came and they whooshed and they passed.
Uncle Davy tucked the tissue paper back in, closed the box, pressed the yellow tape back up against the corners, slipped the box into the shade beneath the trundle. He went to the sink and the dishes. He left me sitting there, thinking.
I leaned down.
I lifted the lid off the box.
I unpeeled the tissue paper. Quiet.
I found the picture of my mother and her brother, ten years old and four years old, united. I pressed it to my palm. I opened my Keppy, stuck the picture inside, slid the Keppy into my pack, that picture being a mint-condition story for me to tell Matias, a story about where I’d come from to set beside the stories of where he’d come from; stories are for trading. A girl and a brother traded for butterflies as big as bats. A sister and a brother, united, traded for Tiburcio and the roll of r’s. I slid the lid back on the box, slid the box back into the shadows, put my hands onto my lap, and left them there. When my uncle turned and looked back, it was like nothing else had happened.
Nothing stolen yet besides that photograph.
It was a Friday. Newspaper column filing day. Uncle Davy finished his work, removed his apron, tied his tie, grabbed his keys off the brass hook.
“You want to come with?” he said.
“I’m good.”
“You going out with Matias?”
“I am.”
“Tell him hello from his uncle,” he said, and he blew me a kiss and I blew him one back, and I called out so that he could hear me.
“To the M-B-As,” I said.
“The M-B-As.” He tipped an invisible hat.
Five minutes later he was headed down the road in his ’69 Dodge Dart, dragging the trailer behind him.
20
PEOPLE ASK ME, WERE YOU afraid?
You asked me.
And I say, when? What part?
People say, did you have a hunch? And I say, explain to me a hunch.
Sun through the moons. Birds in the trees. Bugs in their riot. I could hear the bits of the road tingling the belly of that car.
And then I heard nothing. Quiet.
21
SOMETIMES YOUR EYES DRIFT TO the skylight above me, that rectangle of sky. You can’t see the clouds that are gone. You can’t see the clouds that are coming. You can’t see the storm in the distance. But there is that rectangle and inside that rectangle is my portion of the sky, and you sit there, and you see that, and I am watching.
It’s two o’clock in this afternoon, and there’s no going back on this now.
The bad thing has started.
* * *
My uncle was gone.
I was off to see Matias.
I need you to see Matias, before he slips away, before the rest of this gets told.
You close your eyes. You know it’s true. I keep reminding you: You have to know the person before you know the plot.
You have to know him more.
22
PROPORTIONATE DWARFISM IS A MISUNDERSTANDING that begins in a pea of a gland.
The pituitary, the master. It sits inside a hollow place back behind the bridge of the nose. In the basement of the brain.
You can’t see it.
You can’t touch it.
It sits. In charge of some things.
Matias. Was something. Matias. Had those bright-light eyes, that black-fringe hair, that forehead this big, like a storage chest for his thoughts. He had hands that knew how to turn color into pictures. He had pupusas representing for his country, a beautiful country, despite the dangerous parts, an M-B-A of highest ranking. Matias had Tiburcio and those cool rolled r’s. He had ideas about who people really are. Matias had that stream, it will always be his stream, and he had that rock, and he could climb it. He had two canes, just temporary canes, thanks to an operation he’d had for reasons I’m not sure of. He had that stool he sometimes carried. He had that white house in the woods that I said we called the snow fort, right over the stream, to the west of the rock. He had my uncle as his uncle and me as his good, best summer friend, one head and a pair of shoulders taller. He had proportionate dwarfism, which is just two words, and you know this, right?
Nobody is the judgment they’ve been given.
Nobody’s the label, the T-shirt, the slogan. Nobody’s the category or the entry in the manual of diagnoses. Nobody is anything except who they are.
23
THOSE TWO PRISON GUYS HAD plans. They had a getaway car, parked at the ridge. Not a great car, not a good one, just a beat-up Honda nothing even close to mint condition, and filled up with the goods they’d need, and by the time they walked, then ran, themselves up to the ridge by way of the abandoned railroad tracks, by the time they found the key in the ignition, by the time they blew the car out of its park, by the time the till started to do its business on the metal auto belly—by then the Hollywood part about the getaway car was losing all its limelight. They’d planned on Canada. They got as far as two miles in the direction of west, and the car bailed out, it was done. The car wasn’t going any farther, and they had to choose. What to carry. What to leave. To push the car into quick hiding or to set the thing on fire.
Two men on the run.
Two men all over the news. CNN specials.
Two men who’d need some ransom money to get them up to Canada. Two men who thought ransom was a kind of working plan.
I was setting out—tick-outsmarting socks to the knees, P on my cap with the bill to the back, my backpack crammed with everything I’d need, plus Keppy, plus the photograph, plus the emergency facts I’d transferred to the inside cover of the book before they vanished altogether off my sweating palms. Emergency facts being not much more than the numbers I was to call if there was a phone.
Uncle Davy would be back by two. I’d be back by some time after that to make the pie we’d make with the rhubarb he’d buy. I’d meet Matias by the stream up on the whale of that rock, and I’d look for the stills of butterflies for my specimen box, and he’d paint, and we’d talk. I’d show him the Keppy. I’d show him the two—the brother and the sister, hand in hand, united—and he’d tell me more about El Salvador, then something, maybe, about the private school in Manhattan and the subways he took and the underground elevators that carried him in and out of the dark parts of the city; he knew all the elevators. He knew the secrets of what he called his vertical distance.
I locked the door. Looked both ways at the road. Nothing was coming. I crossed and climbed up into the path between trees. The old logging path had been padded down by a fox, or maybe a bear, or by my uncle in the fall and winter and spring, when I wasn’t around to walk the six million acres for him.
“You’ve got them covered?” he’d say to me.
“Covered.”
The earth is many layers of itself. Sometimes a stone will come out of the dirt or the dirt will be the dust of trees or there’ll be so much damp moss that you have to reach for a low limb so you don’t start slipping back. There were all kinds of places in those woods that could lead to being lost, but if you found the near stream and kept to it, if you stepped across the fallen limbs instead of trekking all around them, if you walked across the backs of rocks and up the stairs of living tree roots, you’d find you
r way.
You’d see the same saggy squirrel nests in the crooks of bur oaks and black willows. You’d see the similar spiderwebs in the staghorn sumacs and nannyberries, the same I LOVE YOUs in the skin of the hop hornbeams. As big as six million acres were, you could take them small—one stream at a time, the dribble of eskers, trees with personalities, landmarks to sight for, until, finally, the big whale of the rock up past the hook in the nose of the creek came into view.
I was singing “Ac-cent-tchu-ate” and sometimes clapping my hands, which is what you should do to keep the bobcats and the bears away. I passed a landmark hut, one of those shelters left behind for anyone needing some survival. I reached the Y in the trail and heard the rattle of a downy woodpecker banging for bugs. The path pushed up at a harder angle. I shifted the pack on my back and still climbed, past the mass of dwarf dogwoods and the bilberry, past the hollow rock where once, last summer, I’d seen the timber rattlesnake, like a black garden hose, coiled up in the shade.
From the snow-fort house to the big-whale rock was maybe ten minutes walking east—over the stream by way of two planks that Matias’s father had put there for him. The way from the schoolhouse was maybe thirty minutes north and steep. My sneaks were up to it. My bug spray was working. I was twenty minutes in. I was twenty-five. I was where I could see the rock, and I saw the rock—the silver legs of the stool flipped like a stranded bug, the limelight shine of the sun.
“Matias?” I called.
“Matias?”
His name echoing out across the six million acres of earth.
24
SOMETIMES STORIES SAVE US. SOMETIMES they are the only stuff we have of the what-happened-when. Sometimes, even Mr. Genzler would have to admit, if I were talking to him and not to you, if I weren’t in this predicament, if you hadn’t let this happen, if I were outside right now, beneath the sky, running free on my own two unfractured legs, it’s not the sciency list of facts that matters most but the feelings on the edges.
The memories and the rememberings.
Take, for example, my uncle Davy’s loon stories. Loon. Yes. The bird. With the shadow of his puppet fingers, at night, he’d tell the loon tales. How the loon sleeps in the lake (a curl of one finger). How the loon dives through lake silence (no fingers at all). How one loon lives for another loon, one pair per lake (his finger touching his thumb to form a lake). How in March, in the cold air of Cape May, Uncle Davy and Mom would wait for the migrating loons at the Point, and the loons would come—floating backward in neat, dark seams, he said. The loons facing the current and sucking their feathers in to dive and dreaming about the summer on their Adirondack lakes.
My uncle’s loon stories.
And then my uncle’s one loon story—the one he told me only once, when I was twelve, the summer before this one, on the last night of my first summer adventure, the official estrangement just getting its start. “I was twenty-three,” my uncle said. “I came to the mountains for my first time. I came with a friend. We rented a cabin by a lake.”
My uncle, who wasn’t famous yet.
“It was June,” my uncle said. “He cooked the dinners. I baked the pies. No one but us and a pair of loons, and every night on the cabin porch we sat, listening to their love songs.
“A loon can laugh,” Uncle Davy said. “Did you know that?”
A loon can giggle.
A loon is biology, but a loon’s a phenom, too.
So they sat. My uncle and his friend, they sat. Best friend, my uncle said. Best two weeks. Ever. Two and two and a lake. All they needed. No one looking in on them. No one asking questions.
“What happened?”
I turned in the trundle as he told his tale. Followed the beam of light up to the loft. Saw the shadow of my uncle sitting there, on his gold-and-raspberry bed. His hair frizzed out. His TV powder off. His eyes looking dark inside the shadows and trusting me with his whole story.
“I lost him,” he said. “One year later. To a hemorrhage. The blood rushed to his brain. It was our first anniversary. We had come back to the lake.”
Outside we could hear the cicada orchestra. The sizz of snakes. The owls. Inside it was quiet except for the yellow light, which hummed.
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Greg,” he said. “I bought the schoolhouse in the woods so that I could be near him again.”
“Is he?” I asked. “Near?”
“I like to think he is,” my uncle said. “I like to believe in his ongoingness.”
Where are you? That’s the call of the loon. That’s the story my uncle told. That’s the stuff outside the edges that’s bigger than biology and proteins, no offense to the clan of kick-butt girl scientists that I will someday be a part of.
“Matias,” I called. “Matias. Where are you?”
25
I DON’T REMEMBER IF I ran, but maybe I did. I don’t remember how my heart felt, except for the squirm of it, like it was riding a carousel inside my chest.
There was something to know, but I didn’t know it yet. Anything was possible. In that split of that second it was.
Matias down on the other side of the rock? No. Matias just a few steps west? Not even. Matias clapping off a bear? No. I heard no clapping.
“Matias?” I kept calling, and his stool was there and he was not and now I realized that something else was where Matias was not: the pupusas.
No canes, no cap, but the stool and the pupusas.
He wasn’t anywhere nearby.
“Matias?”
I scrabbled up the rock, past a blot of spilled paint, but I didn’t bother to look close. There was the empty leather sack, minus its pupusas. He wouldn’t have brought them and eaten all three and left. That was not Matias.
“Matias?”
I stood on that rock, my hands to my face, and called. The trees and the bears and the bobs did not call back.
“Matias?”
My heart carouseled inside my chest.
People ask me, were you afraid?
What do they think?
What do you think?
I was out there in the woods alone.
Matias was gone.
The word is “terrified.”
26
I HEAR THEM JUST OUTSIDE, close, the people who bring you here. The men. Two men. I hear their voices. Always watching the window. Always close. Always near, if I need them.
Soon there’ll be the setting of the sun.
Soon there’ll be the blue of the blue moon rising.
Soon you’ll stand, the tallest thing in this room, and I’ll lie here with my heart beating wrong inside my chest. The bad thing has started and, again, I’m terrified.
Your shoes going down two flights of steps.
The door opening.
The car driving—you in the backseat, the two men in front.
The blink of fireflies.
You’re free and I’m not. Or that’s how it seems.
27
THERE’S ONE PIECE OF GLASS between the sky and me.
There’s one big blue moon past that glass. That would be the extra moon, the second full moon in this month.
I wonder if you can see the moon, from wherever you are right now, on this night.
I wonder where they take you when you leave here.
You never say.
I never ask you.
This is my story.
It’s called the betrayer moon. On the other side of the glass, it stays until it disappears. Now there are only stars in my slice of sky, and my thoughts are turning into dreams and my dreams are turning into regrets, and even if none of this is actually my fault, I feel like it is. I keep asking myself what might have happened if I’d left sooner on that Friday to meet Matias. If I’d climbed the forest hill faster. If I’d been more aware, paying better attention, doing the work of a real biologist. If I’d have heard the crack in the woods. The scream.
Time, time, time.
Whoooosh, whooooooooosh.
I can’t stop the pain.
My uncle was beautiful. My world was beautiful. The things we did were beautiful. The things I had, the summer before this: The Deviled Eggs Express at Timber. The breakfasts-for-dinner in the cabin. The way my uncle would put the Sinatra on and dance—wild beauty into motion. The way Matias and I would sit in the cabin watching Uncle Davy on his TV shows, Matias half watching, half painting. The way, afterward, when it would be getting close to dark, we’d pile into the ’69 Dart and drive the couple of miles down the road and up the bend to the white house, with the trailer rattling behind us. We’d drive straight to the top and park, and Matias would climb out, grab his stool, take his pouch, and right about then his mother would open the front door, step out, wave hello, and that was all we’d ever see of Matias’s mom, who had come to this country from El Salvador. That house like a secret.
“Good-bye, Matias,” we’d say.
“See you tomorrow,” we’d say.
“Don’t forget the pupusas,” I would say.
The summer before this, when I was already the queen of biology and already very brave, but not half queen or brave enough.
Afterward Uncle Davy and I would drive back, windows down, listening to the sound of the crickets and frogs. It’d be too pretty to go inside, so we’d sit out on the stoop, watching the sun fall through the trees, little grabs of yellow light, like fireflies. We’d talk about my uncle’s latest finds, the antique gossip, the tea at Herbalish, the kids I knew at school, the most interesting facts about Pinus spp., which is the scientific name for pine trees.
Sometimes, some nights, Mom would call during her break at the Tin Bar, where she’d gotten a job being hostess. Uncle Davy would dig the phone out of his apron pocket and put it to my ear and leave me there so I could listen to her giving updates on the regulars. The old man who had a tattoo on one cheek who wore a snake at his neck—a thin yellow thing, she said, delicate as a chain. The young kid, skinny as a bean, who drank his Coke and rum from a square glass he brought in from home, a real vintage, she would say, because she wasn’t sick yet, or she didn’t know it yet, or she hadn’t told me she was worried, and then it would be dark, and I’d go inside and lie back in my trundle bed and watch as, from up above in his loft, Uncle Davy would start to talk about the second-prettiest place on Earth: Cape May, New Jersey. He’d talk about September after the crowds had gone and the birds rushed in, and how there were dolphins in the waves. He’d talk about my mother and him, out on the beach, chasing the sandpipers that ran around like they’d all just been let out of a prison.