by Beth Kephart
I thought about Mr. Genzler and our butterfly boards and how much they would miss me.
I thought about Mom, needing me, and Matias, stolen from a rock, and my uncle in his slippery shoes, and his rotten, no-good knee.
I thought about Dad never finding out how brave I had become.
Brave.
Get yourself together, Lizzie, I thought.
Be who you actually are.
I closed my eyes. I took deep breaths. I wiped away the tears. I thought of Keppy. “Listen to this,” my uncle Davy had read just a few days before, when none of what was happening had ever been dreamed up.
“Listen,” he’d said, and I remembered:
Instantly the unfortunate man is overwhelmed by a sense of utter isolation, as though leagues and leagues of savage forest surrounded him on all sides, through which he must wander aimlessly, hopelessly, until he drops from exhaustion and starvation. Nervously he consults his compass, only to realize that it is of no more service to him now than a brass button. He starts to retrace his steps, but no sign of footprint can he detect. He is seized with a panic of fear, as irrational but quite as urgent as that which swoops upon a belated urchin when he is passing a country graveyard at night. It will take a mighty effort of will to rein himself in and check a headlong stampede.
A mighty effort of will.
I inhaled and I exhaled, slow. I counted up to fifty. I reached into my pack and took the photos out—my mother and my uncle, Matias at the farm—and stared at them in the dull light near the mouth of the cave until I could remember being safe and strong.
Here’s what my father taught me about courage: It has everything to do with who you decide you are. You may have your dad’s last name, your father’s nose, your father’s ears, but you’re not him. You may have 50 percent of his blood, but you can be 100 percent you. You may be told that you don’t matter, but you can choose to matter.
And you may think that you’re alone, but if you have courage, you have yourself to lean on.
73
—MY FATHER TAUGHT ME TOO. My father had talent.
Your father? Really?
—My father painted every painting you see here. Look at them. See? There’s total talent. Beauty.
You think that’s beauty?
—I did. At the time, I mean. Back at the beginning.
Even if they were beautiful, though they’re not beautiful, so what? What does that matter? How does that explain things? How does that explain what you did?
—I thought someone who could make something so beautiful could be something so beautiful. That’s what I thought.
You thought these paintings made your father good?
—I wanted to think it.
That’s—
—I’m trying to tell you what I thought. I’m trying to explain why I did what I did. You’ve been telling your story. Didn’t you say I could tell mine? At some point? At some time?
I said I would decide.
—I’m asking you for time.
Time?
Well. Okay. You say he painted these rooms, all of these rooms here. Right?
—Yes. He did.
And you said he sent them to you? Or maybe you didn’t say that. Maybe the news did. CNN.
—He got the paintings smuggled out.
And you thought—
—I thought he must have been thinking about me. That he was remembering us when I was little, when he lived with us in the house of six rooms. I thought it meant he missed me.
Missing you still wouldn’t have made him good.
—People can change, you know. I thought he’d changed. I wanted him to have changed.
But look at these paintings. Look at each one. If your father loved you so much, if he painted them because he missed you, if he was thinking about you like fathers are supposed to think about their kids, if he’d changed, why aren’t you in any of the pictures?
Why?
Like this one. This is an orange room with a blue table. On the blue table there is a purple dish. In the purple dish there is one half of one cookie. In the window there is green, lots of green. Forests and trees. There are no people in this picture. There is no you. Someone must have eaten that cookie.
Right?
And here, in this picture, with the claw-footed bathtub and the floaty yellow duck and the tiny wet feet marks on the diamond-tiled floor and the big rectangle of lawn outside the window. Who is floating the duck? Who is walking that floor? Where are you?
Nowhere. Right?
And where are you in this big striped room with the polka-dotted rug and the game of Chutes and the blue-green sky beyond? You’re out of the picture. You aren’t here.
This is your excuse?
This is why you did what you did?
You want to know what I see when I look at these pictures? I see a man conning you. I see a man already gone.
Your dad.
Because murderers with hearts of gold are real and true; I know it for a fact. But murderers like your dad: They’re different. He painted these paintings to persuade you. He painted them to trick you, and yes, I’m sure, because look at me. Look at this bed that I’m in. Look at this room. I have nothing to do here but to think all day, to try to make sense of it, to try to see it as it happened, to try for answers.
Every scientist worth her salt will look for answers.
I’m worth my salt.
Your father sat there, in his honor block, where he shouldn’t have been, with the paints he shouldn’t have had, with the charm that wasn’t real, while his murderer friend sawed a hole through a wall, some holes through some pipes, some holes through the steam they finally turned off. He sat there painting rooms you’d both remember, or rooms he thought you would, rooms from when he was your dad, and he sent them to you through a prison friend after all those years of sending nothing at all, and not inviting you to visit. He sends you paintings, straight out of the blue, and you think he’s suddenly worth listening to.
You thought that what he’d made was proof of beauty. You thought that beauty was proof of good. You thought that good was love. But you aren’t in these pictures.
I watched the news. Your lawyer talked to me, the judge, the people who told me this story, who told me your name, who explained the victim impact statement. They told me you didn’t understand the man your father was. They said you believed him when he sent you the paintings and the notes inside the paintings. They said he told you he wanted to see you like a dad again, out in the world. He said he’d done his time on the honor block in Little Siberia and it was his turn to be free, to be your dad, to know you, to be there for you. True.
He asked you to help him with that: to arrange a few things, so he could see you.
“Please help me see you, Caroline,” he said.
And you believed him. You believed in him. He sent you paintings with colors so thick that if I touched them right now, I would bleed, and you should have seen through that.
Put the paintings all together like this quilt across my bed and all you get is a house. Tables and chairs and floaty ducks and things and windows looking to the great beyond, but no people. Six rooms. Six doors. Twelve windows. Your father put most of his paint into those windows, like he could slip free through them, run to the trees on the other side of them, disappear into them, wild greens and wild blues.
You thought he could be trusted. You wanted to believe, and I believe you. But he was painting for himself, for what he wanted, for what he thought he could get from you, the daughter he had left. The daughter he would leave again.
Aid and abet.
Criminal facilitation.
I know something about that.
Because your father’s not the world’s first narcissist.
Because narcissists, according to the pamphlets Mom used to leave around the house, only love themselves.
I read that, Caroline, and I read this: Narcissists only give you two choices. Give them what they want, or learn t
he art of courage.
There were sixteen hundred law enforcers out there. Eleven kinds of uniforms. Twenty-five hundred false alarms. People locked into their houses. Hunting lodges with open doors and bottles of gin and peanut butter. There was an uncle and there was a best friend and there was a girl out there, there was a storm.
It all came down on us because of him and because you gave him hope. Because you told him you would help him.
You can’t take it back, Caroline.
You can’t.
74
I WAS WHERE I WAS. I was still without a plan. Past the mouth of the cave, the rain was still pouring down in thick white sheets, and inside the cave everything was growing darker, like somebody was turning out the lights.
Bears like caves.
Bats like caves.
Snakes like caves.
I tried not to think what else liked caves, but unfortunately, I remembered Keppy:
Transparent fish, white crayfish, cave lizards, white mice and rats, cave crickets, and minor species—all blind, and some of them quite eyeless—besides the usual colonies of bats.
You get a bunch of crayfish and lizards and mice and crickets in your head, the fact that they’re all blind in your head, and you start feeling even more itchy. You start thinking that they’re crawling on you, and that if you sit right where you are, your back against a rock wall, your chin to your knees, your body soaked with storm, you’ll be buried in just an hour or two by all the blind cave things that’ll find you.
Out there the rain was washing my footsteps away, my proof of my existence. It was washing away Matias’s MB and his flourish, flooding the pond, smashing down on the heads of the rhododendrons, extinguishing any trace of smoke. I thought of El Cipitío, one of Matias’s legends, the son of a curse named La Siguanaba. According to the story Matias told, La Siguanaba had been beautiful once. She’d also angered her god husband and so he’d gone and ruined her looks, given her a case of supreme uglies. Her son got caught in the fury of it too. This kid named El Cipitío. He’d never grow up, he’d always be eleven, he’d wander the earth in perpetual motion, wearing a large straw hat and a blanket too short to cover his belly. He’d eat a load of bananas and the ashes out of kitchens. He’d come into your house and leave a mess. But the biggest thing about El Cipitío was that his feet had been turned backward. Anyone trying to follow his trail would end up following that trail in the wrong direction, would end up being lost.
Anyone out there looking for me would be as lost as I was, and there I was, sitting with the blind things, waiting for a bear to rise up from the shadows. Black as the burned bottom of a pan.
With claws.
With teeth.
I needed something to eat, or I’d pass out with imagining it all.
I unzipped the pack.
Granola.
The sound of me crunching echoed for miles.
Then I stood up and shook myself off. I beamed on the flashlight. I grabbed the pack. I walked deeper and deeper in, my heart up in my throat, my pulse up in my ears, my sneaks squishing with every step they took, and with every flicker of my light I saw something people aren’t supposed to see, even if their second-most-important hobby is biology. I saw bugs that were big as bats. I saw rocks that were orange, slick, and pink. I saw things that looked like stone that started, suddenly, to slither. I turned around, and when I looked back, I couldn’t see the mouth of the cave. I couldn’t hear the rain falling either.
And all of a sudden I couldn’t go on.
I sank to the ground.
I sat on my butt.
I pulled my knees up to my chin.
I kept my hand on Tiburcio’s machete and waited for a bear, and I didn’t turn out the light.
75
THE BRAIN PLAYS TRICKS.
It tries to save you.
It tries to teach you who you are when you’re on the edge of forgetting.
The cave dripped and things slithered and the remembering was vivid.
I was back with Uncle Davy, in my mind. Back in the schoolhouse cabin. Uncle Davy was polishing the acorns with his fingers, and there was a bowl of Cream of Wheat between us, a rhubarb pie in the potbellied stove. It was a TV studio afternoon, and there was leftover TV powder on Uncle Davy’s cheeks, and it was the summer before this one, the middle of August.
He’d untied his bow tie and left it on his collar. He had his tangerine-colored apron on. He kept rolling those acorns between the fingers of his hands, and I knew something was coming, because things, lately, had been different. Things with Mom.
She’d call during breaks at the Tin Bar, but she didn’t sound like her. She was talking about men and slurring her words and laughing too hard, and Uncle Davy wasn’t laughing. He’d sit on that stoop, pressing the phone to his ear, blocking the sound so that I couldn’t hear, but I knew.
To me, he said, “Your mom and I aren’t seeing eye to eye.”
“It’s about the Tin Bar, isn’t it?” I said.
He nodded.
“About her friends? The men?”
He nodded again.
“I wonder what you’d think of staying on at the cabin, Lizzie. After summer ends?”
I looked at him. I looked around. At the trundle bed where I slept, at the TV where we watched our shows, at the M-B-As. “After summer ends,” he’d said. When Matias would be back in New York City. When school would be . . . I didn’t know what. When there’d be a winter’s worth of Deviled Eggs Express and so much snow we’d live in lockdown.
You can love more than one person best.
And I belonged with Mom.
“Your mother and I disagree,” he said.
He arranged the polished acorns in a row like a fence. Him on one side, me on the other, the gingham tablecloth like a nubby map.
“Does Mom know you were going to ask me that?” I asked.
“I told her I might,” he said.
“Doesn’t Mom want me back?” I asked.
“Oh, Lizzie,” he said. “It’s not like that.”
“What’s it like, then?” I asked.
“Like trying to know what is best.”
And that is when I knew that even Uncle Davy didn’t always know about best.
I could hear them fighting after that. On the phone, late at night, on the stoop. Him with that phone in his hand, his side of the conversation, his words: “No place for a child.” “Get yourself together.” “What would she think about that?” My mother had no excuses, my uncle said. My mother was acting out against the past, against the man she had married who had left—my dad the narcissist, who’d talked so loud and so long and so much about himself that this was the value Mom thought she had. “Incidents with men,” my uncle said.
They talked late at night, on the phone. I’d hear him from my trundle bed, through the door. Sometimes a firefly that had floated in earlier in the day would lantern up the room, go on and off inside the fractions of the seconds that felt like they were days or months, and I would watch and I would listen—and it was only Uncle Davy’s words that I heard.
Then one night I heard Mom fighting back. I heard, I mean, the silence of him listening. Two days before I was supposed to go back after my big summer adventure, I heard my uncle struggling to speak on the stoop, and then I heard him saying this:
“You know that isn’t true. . . .”
“You have to stop. . . .”
“I do know what love is. I lived love. Remember?”
There was nothing after that.
I waited for him to come back inside. I fell asleep before he did. The next day, a day earlier than planned, Mom came to take me from the six million acres and the schoolhouse cabin and the uncle I loved best. My mother, with a strange lavender stripe in her hair, and her clothes too loose, and her body too thin.
That’s how I learned the meaning of “estrangement.”
Nobody knows the exact minute of the exact day when cancer creeps in, but I can tell you this: My mother
started feeling sick shortly after that. The lavender stripe in her hair turned to gray. Her skin went white as a frog’s belly. Her fingers became so sticky thin that her one blue ring fell off.
She quit the Tin Bar. She would not call the doctors. She would not tell the truth. Pride or hurt or shame. Don’t know.
She wouldn’t call her brother.
But I did.
I was the bridge between. I was the one on the phone, in secret.
I was it.
And all that autumn, winter, and spring, while I learned more and more words for butterflies, put them down in my book of words, Matias didn’t forget me. He painted postcards. He marked them MB. He sent them through the mail to me. Paintings of our rock. Paintings of our stream. Paintings of the sunbeams that rushed in through the trees.
From New York City to me.
Matias.
The postcards had no words, just pictures.
Matias, with his pictures, saved me.
76
I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I sat inside that cave. Minutes, maybe, that felt like hours, with all that moisture leaking down, falling down—drips through both the caps I wore on my head, through my hair, down my neck, into the trickle of my collarbone. I’d be a stalagmite soon.
“Shake it off,” I told myself. “Pick yourself up. Keep going.”
I ran my hands up and down the cardboard of my soaked-through jeans. I felt the swelling in my ankles, the burn behind my Band-Aids, the poison ivy puffing up with itch, my heart beating hard. I reached into the pack for a banana. I peeled it down, ate it fast, tried not to think about the rats and the mice that would smell the sweet yellow smell, crawl up out of their holes, climb down from the tucks of close rock, scurry over the mineral veins, scurry over me, stand there wagging their spiny tails, waiting, and now, thinking about that, I couldn’t move, and I reached into the pack for my bottle of water, and I drank half of it down, and I thought of how I’d been missing sunup to what was probably sundown and how Uncle Davy and Matias had been missing longer than that, and I was sorry, 100 percent, for the trouble I knew I’d caused, for the clues I’d missed, for the extra worry that would be rocking Sergeant Williams and the Bondanzas by now, for the call I knew Sergeant Williams would have to make to Mom, who was already sick enough, and this was all my fault. I shouldn’t have had the hero’s urge.