by Beth Kephart
They were alive; I had to be sure of that.
Alive and listening.
The cicadas were hissing. A sound like a dream, but I wasn’t sleeping. I was remembering the last time my uncle drove the four hours west and south over the roads. The last time he’d come to visit. My mom had kicked my father out. She had finally had enough. She had been brave. That’s what brave does. Brave protects others and brave protects yourself. Courage should be everybody’s first and favorite hobby. Uncle Davy had come to help Mom rearrange all the emptiness my father’d left behind. He’d brought finds with him, an extra Dutch oven casserole, a grandfather clock, his Frank Sinatra records.
Accentuate. The positive.
“Listen to this, Sandy,” he said. Sandy and Davy. Sister and brother. Back then, when they were still best friends. Sinatra was singing from the stereo my uncle had set up on the window ledge. Mom was wearing the yellow dress with the orange stripe up the zipper in the back. Uncle Davy was wearing his lime-green socks and his silk bow tie, a hint of pink to it. He was taller than she was, like he’d always been, and she’d dyed her hair an orange red, the color of a flame against her too-pale skin, like the sickness was already there, a masquerade trick. The living room had been mostly emptied out. I was watching through the stair posts.
Uncle Davy took a Charleston step, reached for my mother’s hand. He danced his wild beauty. She didn’t. She pressed a tea towel to her face instead, a chunk of ice to stop the swelling.
“It’ll be better without him,” Uncle Davy said.
“I know,” she said. Her words muffled by the towel.
“You’ll have your chance at happiness.”
“I know,” she said, and sniffed. “But still. It’s just . . .” She looked around. He did.
On the steps I sat and stared. Thinking about my dad, the first-class narcissist. Gone. If you looked in a book about people with problems, you would find my dad, so much of a blow-up doll of an exaggerating man that you could put a pin in him and he’d pop. Narcissism is pretending you are what you aren’t, thinking you’re more than you are, putting a stomp over anything anyone else ever says, believing the dumb impossibles of your own made-up brand. Narcissism is Look at me, I am.
Narcissism is You aren’t.
Narcissism is I’ll lie until I get just what I want.
Narcissism is sometimes you’re glittery, too, you’re full of your charm, you’re making promises anybody would hope you would keep, anybody would think you might keep, sometimes you keep them. So confusing.
I knew all the words. I’d grown up listening to them. I’d heard all the fights since I couldn’t remember when. No job would have my father. Friends would come, but then they’d leave, they’d stay away. My mom had finally, finally said, “Go,” but I didn’t know, when she said that word, that I’d never hear from him again.
I didn’t know that I wouldn’t want to.
I didn’t know how brave I could be. How, when you’re a verifiable scientist, you can teach yourself to feel things.
What I knew was how suddenly empty our house had become. Circles of dust where lamps had been. Stains on the wall where frames had hung. Fade in the carpet showing where the stuffed couch had been. A quiet you could hear beneath the Sinatra song. My father was gone and most of our things were gone too.
I was watching my uncle and my mom.
“He can’t hurt you anymore,” my uncle Davy said.
“I don’t know what I’ll do,” Mom said.
Uncle Davy stopped trying to dance. He straightened his bow tie. He looked up at me and halfway smiled, covering his mouth when he did. Then he left the house, went out to the drive, opened the door to his Dart—I could see it all from where I sat—and came back with boxes of things, the M-B-As we’d fill the blankness with.
“Lizzie,” he called to me. “How is your dusting arm?”
“Good,” I said. “Enough.”
“Do us the honors,” he said. “Would you?”
So that’s what we did. We dusted the circles. We rearranged the fade. My uncle filled the house with the things he’d found and restored and loved, the things that you see here in this three-story house of five little rooms.
My uncle had brought his things to our house so that our house wouldn’t be empty.
And now he was lost in the woods.
51
I COULDN’T SLEEP. I COULDN’T keep my eyes closed, there in Matias’s bed, listening to the night, feeling the strength of the dark, remembering.
If they’d been found, we’d know. If there were a ransom wish, we’d have heard. If my uncle had made it back to the schoolhouse, he would have called or a trooper would have, or they would have driven up the road, come inside the white house, told us what they knew—more news, “you’re safe,” something. My phone was with Sergeant Williams, who was out in the courtyard, beneath the glass, watching for meteors, or sleeping. It hadn’t rung. There was nothing to report on the radio crackle.
Time was passing, and I’d smelled smoke, and I’d forgotten, and it was up to me to find my way back to the tobacco puffs in the woods. To find the evidence, the start of a trail, the direction they had gone in. Up to me, or that’s how it felt, say what you want, think it. Retrospect is everything, but it was still the night—too dark to leave, to find my way back to the woods.
Too dark, but I had to do something.
I lay on top of that quilt. I thought of the photographs, the paper birds, the empty cage, the machete in its sleeve. I tried to picture Matias out there in the six million acres. Matias and my uncle. Short and tall. Young and not. Afraid and trying not to be. In the dark of the night, in the tweak and the twitter of the bugs and the birds so loud it probably hurt. Night sounds start in your ears. They go to your heart. They get stuck inside your bones.
They’d be hungry out there, if they were still alive. There’d be no sharing of whatever food the convicts had, or I could not imagine that. There’d be no lighting of fires to cook any fish or fowl they might have caught: too risky. My uncle and Matias were somehow there, they had to be there, with the convicts whose faces had been smeared across the news—their eyes like marbles in their heads, their hair combed back strict and unnatural, the stripes behind them in their prison photographs measuring how tall they’d stood on the nights of their arrests, years apart, for different crimes, one murderer no better than the next.
My uncle and Matias were there, out in the woods. They were hungry and cold. They had walked or they had climbed and they had swum or they’d been carried in their bow tie and their slick shoes and their bad hips and their one cane; I didn’t know. The earth is dirt and moss and stones and sticks, and you need good boots, an Indian walk, first Keppy rule. You need equipment in the woods.
They needed equipment.
I could help them.
Couldn’t I?
And didn’t I have to?
The night was moving slow. I lay there with my eyes wide open, imagining, and then I was remembering and then I was caught inside the stories Matias had told about his El Salvador, the coffee farm in the jungle hills that his grandfather still worked. The trees made canopies, he said. The beans grew like clustered beads up and down the slender twigs. They started green. They ripened red. Christmas was the picking season, and there’s a talent, Matias said, to pulling a bean from a tree. There’s the sound of fingers picking, whole families out there, working the trees, stuffing their burlap bags, carrying from the low parts of the hill to the flat top, where Matias and his grandfather waited.
I lay there trying to imagine a different season, a different woods, the El Salvador Matias had loved and left for the first purpose of safety.
Each sack was weighed, he said. Each weight was put down in a book. Each picker was paid according to the weight of his sacks. Everything happening beneath birds and butterflies—green beans sorted from the red. Christmas. At the top of the hill Matias’s grandfather weighed the bags and wrote the numbers beside the picke
rs’ names inside his leather book. Matias counted out the cash from the previous week’s work and paid. Tiburcio disappeared and then came back with a sack of mangoes on his back, the blade of his machete sticky with fresh juice.
This was El Salvador, Matias had said. His home. Until the gangs came and wanted ransom for the land, until they stood there with their guns and made their threats, and in the end the coffee trees were left.
Left.
Left for the safety of my country.
In the dark I waited for the dawn to come. I imagined Matias and my uncle waiting for the same dawn to come, all the songs of birds and bugs in their hearts and bones, all the not knowing of what would come next, and I had to come next, but there was still so much night outside the windows of the white house, and now I remembered another story Matias had told about El Cadejo, the white dog with the red eyes who protected faithful Salvadorans on the roads at night. The legend of El Cadejo. There was a good dog, a white one, and there was a black dog, devil owned, and both these dogs had bright-red eyes, and whenever the two dogs met on the roads at night, they went all out. Teeth and claws.
Worst fight you ever saw, Matias said—goodness against badness.
The sun was coming. The dawn. I sat up on that bed and watched the crack of light break through Matias’s window and creep across the room, light things up from a slanted angle, put the paper birds on the move. The sun came up, and the machete hung and the cage was empty.
If I was going to put my courage into action, the time had finally come.
52
FEAR IS THE WORST LONELINESS there is.
Also: thinking you’re not doing what you can.
53
I FILLED MY PACK: THE Art of Keppy, M&M’S, three granola bars, water bottle, bug repellent, flashlight, that photograph of my uncle and my mom, the photograph I stole from the corkboard in Matias’s room—the one right there, in the frame, by this bed. That’s Matias in the hammock. That’s the farm behind him. The jungle cliff. Tiburcio.
Like I said.
The air was insect song and the slant of the sun had lit the house and I borrowed two apples and borrowed some bread and borrowed three bananas and I had a plan.
What happened next was not the plan.
54
THE NIGHT BEFORE, SERGEANT WILLIAMS had washed my arm and reapplied the calamine. She’d left the bottle in the room; I reapplied. I checked beneath my Band-Aids, pulled my best jeans on, slapped down my cap with the P facing back, zippered the backpack. I had to move fast.
Be decisive.
Brave.
There was no one up in the white house. No coffee perking. No talking. Even the crackle of the radio had simmered to zero and the sergeant was asleep; I heard soft snoring. I whisked down the hall of glass and no one noticed. Down one hall, down the other, past the kitchen, to the front door. I hadn’t put my sneakers on yet and my socks were quiet. I did not breathe until I reached the door. I turned the knob with the most extreme care and the lock retracted: slo-mo. I closed the door behind me.
Dawn. Or almost.
The pack on my back. The cap on my head. Tiburcio’s machete strung across my chest. He’d touched the tip to the heart. That’s all it had taken. It was morning, and I had my honor on.
From the front of the house I walked to the back. Through tall grass and the morning dew. There was nothing out there. No mulched fence. No beds. The Bondanzas’ garden was in the middle of their house, a fortress of flowers protected, and everything beyond the house was grass leaking into wilderness, with a very gradual line between the tame parts and the wild. More grass than trees, then more trees than grass, and then I was in the woods.
The sun came in at a tilt. There was a soft path that Matias had worn into the earth with his canes. Over pine needles and tree roots, past toadstools, under nests, to the bridge.
The stream was low, needing rain. The bridge clattered as I walked. By now there was more sun in the woods—a fireball of orange in the distant faraway and a glow right at my feet.
At the whale of a rock I could see the boot scuff of yesterday’s police. I could see where the dogs had pulled at their leashes, and where the troopers had stood and how the rock must have felt—exposed and guilty. I could see the ways the police had culled their evidence—the stool was gone, the quiet, the sack that had contained the pupusa steam. I fit my shoes in the notches of the rock and climbed.
There was a scramble at the base of the rock, and I looked down. It was those newts again, rushing toward the breaking sun, then rushing back into the shadows. I stood where I was, smelling the air, watching the fireball of sun in the far distance.
55
I CAN SEE HOW IT’S getting dark and how you’ll have to leave and how the clock is ticking. How the sun’s falling off and the sky is turning purple. The men who wait for you are jingling keys and talking. Sometimes I wonder if you tell them my stories at the end of our days, or if they drive you to wherever you go to in silence.
I don’t know where you go.
I’ve never asked you.
It’s evening here, but it’s morning inside my story. It’s morning and I am standing on that rock, and maybe tomorrow when you come back, you will tell me what the moon looks like from the windows you look through.
When you come back tomorrow, it will still be morning.
56
YOUR FEET WERE HEAVY ON the steps just now.
You were walking slow, and now you’re late.
Now you’re here with a big yellow tote over your shoulder and a pair of sandals on, red toe polish, and I look up, away from you, toward the sky above my head, the clouds, while you settle in.
Who gave you the toe polish?
Who gave you the bag?
Why am I the one lying here? I didn’t commit the crime.
You’re late, and I didn’t think you being late was allowed and besides:
I thought you wanted to know what happened.
Don’t you?
57
I DON’T WANT TO SEE what you have brought me.
I just want to stick to the rules, which is I tell you the story in the order that I can, and then I ask you things when I want to. If.
You’re supposed to listen.
You’re supposed to pretend that you were me.
You’re supposed to imagine what all of this felt like.
58
IN THE MORNING LIGHT, LOOKING down at that rock, I saw something I’d not seen the day before—the MB, inside the circle. The watercolor mark! Like Matias’s own brilliant SOS, something he must have thought of when he saw the two men coming. Just one look, and he must have known, and so he left his mark.
For me to find.
“Matias,” I said out loud.
Matias.
Like he could hear me.
I’d missed the smoke and I’d missed this and my eyes got hot with tears.
Go, I thought, I told myself. No time for tears.
The newts poked out of the shadows, scrambled east. The newts seemed to have a hunch, so I climbed down and I followed. My sneaks crunched the fallen leaves, scattered spiders, sent squirrels leaping. I scoured the woods, searching for something else that might have been left behind—a pebble trail, another mark, proof.
Please.
Wherever Matias was, that was where my uncle had to be. That’s what my heart said. The two of them together. I had already decided and I decided again. Straightened the sling of the machete. Pulled the cap tight on my head. Yanked the sleeves of my flannel shirt. Slapped at the mosquitoes.
Followed the orange arrows of the newts.
Looked for other signs.
59
IT WAS ON THE LOW limb of a tall tree that I saw the second scribble.
Near where the fox had been, on this side of the rhododendrons, where the oak had fallen and cracked into four big jigsaw pieces and grown a fur of moss, and this, I remembered, was where I’d smelled the smell, or somewhere close to here, of smok
e.
But there was no smoke now.
I stood on the fallen oak to get more height. I breathed. Only mountain air, the smell of water sizzing, bird nests, fish, biology, but yesterday there’d been smoke and it had floated downhill, to somewhere like this. The smoke had come from up above. I’d smelled it and gone east and south, toward the two-toothed waterfall.
The ground was dry. No boot prints. No tip of a cane pressed into muck. But when I crouched low, I could see proof in the leaf rot, the ghosts of feet heading toward the higher ground, through the patch where the rhododendrons were worst, where walking through would be like trying to swim in a river full of logs.
Once, when we were talking, Uncle Davy said that every rhododendron gives off a million seeds in dust. That there are places in Ireland where they war against the stuff—chainsaw the bush’s flesh, then herbicide the things to death. You plant one rhododendron, Uncle Davy said, and you’re in for an army of them. We’d been sitting in our schoolhouse chairs with our pots of tea. He was wearing his mustard-colored bow tie loose at his neck, had his lime-green apron on. He was polishing the acorns inside the turning of his hand. We were listening to old songs on the record player.
“The point of life, Lizzie,” he said, “is to find the rare and to cherish it.” These rhododendrons were multiples of multitudes. They were extreme biology.
They were a problem.
The clock was ticking. The Bondanzas were back at the snow-fort house, maybe waking up now, maybe calling for Matias, maybe forgetting, for one instant, that he was gone, maybe thinking that it was a nightmare they both had had, that Sergeant Williams wasn’t asleep on the chaise lounge in the greenhouse courtyard, that my mother wasn’t four hours away with her radioactivity and CNN on. That my uncle . . .