Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  We drove by the frozen river and the houses decorated with white lights. No one had lawn ornaments here. I thought of my mother and her garden gnomes. My father hummed a little under his breath and tried to catch my eye.

  “Why don’t we get a dog, Grace?” he said. “You could name it anything you wanted. You could name it Laika like the first dog in space.”

  “That dog died,” I said.

  “Anything,” my father said. “You could name it anything.”

  I looked out the window. Already it was getting dark. Once my mother had told me that she had been named Anna because it sounds the same backwards and forwards. My grandfather liked words like that and had wanted me to be named Eve or at least Lily so I could be called Lil. He died just before I was born and my mother said that this was one of the last things he asked her.

  The last thing my mother asked me was this: “Do you know how to run the dishwasher, Grace?” I didn’t and she showed me how. That night, my mother went to bed very early. The next morning, I heard my father outside calling for her. I went to the window. My father stood on the grass in his pajamas. “Anna,” he yelled. “Anna.” A car glided through the light, silver like a fish. When my father saw me at the window, he picked up the paper and came inside. It was just getting light out. “Your mother’s disappeared,” he said. He looked bewildered, as if she had vanished in a puff of smoke instead of in his green car. There was no note, but there was a shell on the kitchen table that hadn’t been there before. It was white with a thin crack down the middle that forked like a lizard’s tongue. My father touched it lightly. “Don’t worry. She’ll be back soon,” he said.

  When she wasn’t, I took the shell upstairs and hid it in the pocket of my old coat, so I could find it later and be surprised.

  Two days passed and still there was no sign of her. My father went to the police and filed a missing-persons report. He slept in the living room, next to the phone, but it never rang. Sometimes he would pick it up and listen just in case.

  Later they found my father’s green car in the lake by the fire station. They pulled it from the water with a crane, but my mother wasn’t in it. Men in small boats dragged the water with nets all through the night. For weeks, they looked for her, shining lights across the lake. Finally, they gave up and called off the search. I wasn’t surprised that they hadn’t found my mother in the lake. They couldn’t find a forty-foot monster either, I knew.

  Soon after that, a policeman came to the door. He had an old brown coat in his hands. This was the coat my mother wore when she worked in the garden. The policeman told my father that when they found the coat its pockets had been filled with stones. He laid the coat gingerly on the table. It smelled like a wet dog. I reached my hand into the pockets but the stones were gone. My father took the coat and put it away. He said that my mother got the idea for the stones from a woman who wrote a book. Then he locked himself in the bathroom and turned all the water on. I put my ear to the door. “Anna,” I heard him cry, backwards then forwards, “annA.”

  I went to my room and took the shell out of its hiding place. One end was sharp like an arrowhead. I pricked my finger on it again and again, trying to see blue, but it was like trying to catch the refrigerator light off.

  WHY CAN YOU HEAR THE OCEAN INSIDE A SEASHELL?

  This is just a trick your ears play on you. What you hear is not the sound of the ocean, but rather the sound of your own blood rushing through your ears. All the shell does is amplify the sound so that you can hear it, the way a stethoscope lets you hear the beating of your heart. Some people say you hear the sea inside a shell because the shell remembers its home even when it has been taken away, but this is just a story.

  It was almost dark. My father drove carefully through the icy streets. There were lighted trees in all the windows of all the houses we passed. “What if I buy you some glow-in-the-dark stars?” he said. “How would that be? Would you like a telescope so you can see the planets at night?”

  “No,” I said.

  He put his hand on mine. “I didn’t mean to be short with you before,” he said. He leaned close to me. The car smelled like birds. There was one in the back he was going to use for the show. Every time the car slowed down, it let out a squawk. I climbed over the seat and put a black cloth over its cage. “When someone dies, their soul flies up to heaven and becomes a star,” I told the bird.

  My father swung around to look at me. The bird cooed quietly in the dark. “Did your mother tell you that?” he asked.

  “Everybody knows that,” I said. “You’re the only one that doesn’t.”

  “Come up front again, Grace. Sit by me.”

  “No,” I said.

  We came to the road that led to the studio. My father turned onto it without a word. The bird grew quiet too. We pulled into the parking lot. I jumped out of the car and slammed the door. My father took the bird cage out of the back seat. “We’ll do the bird last,” he said. He tried to catch up with me, but the bird cage made him slow.

  The summer I was four, my parents rented an old house on Cape Cod. Our cove was filled with jagged rocks and no one liked to go there but us. “Who’s been walking here?” my father would say when the three of us went out after dinner. Then he’d pick me up and fit my feet to the prints in the sand.

  One day my father came home early from visiting friends. My mother was in the back, washing the sand from her hair. He kissed her hello, then went inside. She came and found me on the beach. “Let’s hide from your father,” she said. “Doesn’t that sound fun?” She began to walk crookedly along the sand, dragging her foot behind her. “See, we’ll leave clues,” she said. She walked backwards in her tracks toward me. “Like this,” she said, zigzagging back toward the water. I followed her, copying her limp and adding a little hop. We lurched and peglegged down the beach, laughing to think of my father tracking such strange animals. At the end of the cove, we hid behind a rock and waited for him to find us. We waited for a long time, but he didn’t come. The sun began to sink into the water. My mother held my hand so tightly it hurt. I shivered in my thin bathing suit. “I want to go home,” I said. My mother dropped my hand. We walked back without talking. It was low tide and the gulls were flying in. There was seaweed everywhere, twisted in great clumps on the beach. I closed my eyes and walked carefully around it. “Are you unhappy, sweetheart?” my mother said. “What are you thinking about when you close your eyes like that?” Her voice sounded funny. Above us, a plane wrote something in the sky. I dragged my bad leg through the sand. “I’m happy,” I said.

  When my father finished with the bird, a man came and took it away. It flew out of his hands and fluttered into the rafters. Before he could catch it, the lights began to dim. My father stepped behind a curtain and the spotlight came on.

  WHAT DID THE FIRST BIRD LOOK LIKE?

  The entire kingdom of birds is descended from dinosaurs, feathers from their scales and wings from the second finger of their claws. The first bird, called Archaeopteryx, may have taken flight more than one hundred fifty million years ago. It was a small crow-sized animal that wobbled over bushes and barely maneuvered among trees. But in the days when nothing else could catch flying insects, its awkward flight was good enough. It did not sing, but it may have croaked or hissed.

  HOW SMALL IS THE SMALLEST BIRD IN THE WORLD?

  The smallest bird in the world weighs no more than a sugar cube. It is called a bee hummingbird because its body is about the same size as a bee. Even though it is named after a bee, it would never sting you. If you tried to catch it in a jar, it would fly away. You will probably never see one, because they live only in Cuba.

  I stepped out of the light. The music came up, then the applause. My father picked me up and swung me through the air. The bird flew out of the curtains and was captured in a silver net.

  In June, we drove back to our old house in Vermont. In the back seat of the car were the books my father had brought to while away the time. How to, How to,
How to, they said. We passed the lake, which was filled with picnickers. Foxface had made us bag lunches to eat on the way, but I hadn’t eaten mine.

  I had an idea that when we got home my mother might be waiting for us on the front porch, but when we pulled in the driveway, no one was there. The house looked smaller than I remembered. The Purple Pig was still parked on the street, covered with a tarp. My father had a new car now with a convertible top. When we rode in it, we wore sunglasses and waved to everyone like movie stars.

  Inside, the house smelled musty and old. I wandered through the rooms, touching tables and chairs. I was surprised that everything was still there.

  My father went out on the back steps and looked at the yard. The grass was green and the sprinklers were on. Tomato plants grew in my mother’s garden. Someone had weeded the plot and made a small pile of dirt and roots beside the shed.

  I walked around the edge of the garden to the old doghouse. There was a piece of wood next to it that I hadn’t seen before. I knelt down and looked inside the house, but it was empty.

  My father came over and picked up the piece of wood. He examined it for a moment, then threw it on the weed pile. “Edgar’s certainly done a fine job of looking after things,” he said.

  We went inside and made lemonade. My father wandered around the kitchen, opening and closing drawers. “Now, where do you suppose he’s put the mail?” he asked.

  We looked in all the usual places, the basket in the kitchen, the hallway table, the foot of the stairs, but there was no sign of it. Finally, I found a stack of letters on the floor beside the coatrack. Some of them had spilled over and were half hidden by scarves and boots. I gathered up the mail and brought it to my father.

  He went through the pile carefully, but when he got to the end, it turned out every letter was for him. My father frowned. He looked through the mail again. “That’s odd,” he said. Usually my mother was the one who got the most mail. She liked to enter contests and was always sending away for things. You may have already won! was the way letters to her often began.

  My father got up and fixed himself a drink. He gathered the letters from the table and put them in the basket by the door.

  “Maybe she came to get her mail while we were gone,” I said.

  My father looked away. “Maybe,” he said.

  The next morning, my father got out the lawn mower and worked on the grass. He weeded the garden and planted new seeds. I sat on the porch and watched him work.

  “Would you like to give me a hand, Grace?” he asked.

  “No thank you,” I said. I went inside and called Edgar’s house again. Already I had called five times, but there was no answer. He must be on vacation, my father said.

  I went across the street to spy on the blind girl. All the curtains were drawn and the car was gone. I hid in the bushes for a while, waiting for someone to come home, but no one did.

  I decided to walk over to Edgar’s house. I didn’t expect him to be there, but when I rang the bell, he answered the door. He was dressed all in white and his hair was cut very close to his head.

  “Edgar, you’re home!” I said. He didn’t say anything, but he let me in. He took me to the kitchen and gave me cookies and milk. I told him about the new house in Connecticut and Foxface and my week as the question girl. Also about the star I had tried to buy for my mother. Edgar nodded, but he didn’t say a word.

  I looked at him. His face was smooth and blank. “Why aren’t you talking?” I asked.

  Edgar reached into his pocket and pulled out a card. He handed it to me. The card said:

  Please be advised that I have taken a vow of silence. All necessary communications will be conducted by paper and pen.

  “When did you start?” I asked him.

  “January 2, 1986,” he wrote on a pad.

  I calculated this in my head. I thought this must be the longest anyone had ever played the silence game. “How come?” I asked.

  Edgar shrugged.

  “How come?” I asked again.

  He took out a piece of paper and scribbled something on it. “Your mother said not a word until she returns.”

  I looked at the note. “My father says she’s not going to,” I told him.

  Edgar closed his eyes. I asked him what he did with all the time he saved by not talking.

  He went into the living room and brought back a book. An Introduction to the Meditative Arts, it was called. I opened it to a picture of a man in a turban twisting himself into knots. We pass through boredom into fascination, the caption read.

  “Can you do that?” I asked him.

  Edgar nodded. He sat cross-legged on the floor. Then he flipped himself over and stood on his head. He stayed that way for a long time, much longer than I would have asked him to. I sat on the couch and watched his face turn red. His eyes were wide open, but he didn’t seem to be looking at anything. I tried to be fascinated, but mostly I was bored. After a while, I tapped him on the foot. “I want to go home,” I said.

  Edgar rolled over into a somersault. He went to his mother’s purse and got out her keys. He had his driver’s license now, he wrote, but his parents wouldn’t let him have his own car until he started speaking to them again.

  In the car, Edgar gave me the book on meditative arts, even though I hadn’t asked for it. When I got home, I tried to do what the man in the turban did, but whenever I stood on one foot, I fell over right away. There were hundreds of poses in the book, each one with a different name. There was Downward Dog and Warrior and Triangle and Snake. Last of all was one called Corpse, where you lay on the ground like a dead man. Guard that you do not become attached to the things of this world, the book said.

  A few days later, a spotted dog appeared at our door. She had sad eyes and a lame paw. When I tried to pet her, she shied away, but that afternoon she came back and licked my hand. From then on, every time I opened the door, she was waiting for me. The only time she growled was when I went inside. Then she would scratch the screen and whine until I opened it again. Sometimes we played ball in the yard. She couldn’t run very fast because of her hurt leg. When my father saw her limping, he came over and examined her paw. She gave it to him without complaint, as if she were having her fortune read. She had a thorn in it, my father said. I brought him the tweezers and he took it out. Later I saw her testing it out gingerly on the grass. I waited awhile, then threw the ball again; this time she ran so fast her spots were a blur. Would you like to keep her, my father asked. Yes, I said.

  I named her Laika, after the first dog in space. I knew that she had come to me from far away. Sometimes, at night, I worried that she might run away again. She kicked her legs and whimpered in the dark room as if she were being chased. When she did this, I woke her up and petted her until she was quiet again. Her tail thumped out her thanks on the floor even after she had fallen asleep. I liked to sleep with her paws around me, breathing in her biscuit breath.

  Laika knew three games: fetch, hide-and-seek, and rescue dog. Rescue dog was best in the snow, but we made do with just grass. I was the famous mountaineer climbing the mountain without oxygen. She was a St. Bernard that no blizzard could scare. At the top of the compost heap, I planted my flag. Then I began the treacherous descent, buffeted by winds. Laika waited in the garden, chewing grass. She had a thermos tied to her collar that I’d fixed there before. Sometimes she got bored waiting and tried to chew it off. Halfway down the mountain, I had a terrible fall. “Mon Dieu!” I yelled. “Rescue dog!” I had read a book called They Lived on Human Flesh about what happened to people lost in the mountains. Laika ran over and licked my face. I played dead. She licked my arms and legs too. There were some apple peels and coffee grounds on my shoes and I could feel her nibbling them. I drank the lemonade she brought me, happy to be saved.

  Laika brought deer bones back from the woods and hid them behind the shed. She thought I didn’t know where she kept them, but when she wasn’t looking, I poked around in them. So far, Laika had found
eleven bones. Soon she’d have enough for a whole deer, I thought.

  In the woods, Laika was as quiet as a cat. She could sneak up on squirrels until it was almost too late for them to get away. One squirrel she almost caught, but at the last minute it ran up a tree. Laika never forgot about that tree. Every time we went to the woods, she would go to it and sit patiently, waiting for that squirrel. Weeks later, she still remembered.

  She had a funny idea about time, I thought. An hour or a day or a week were all the same. She didn’t think the squirrel might have run away when she wasn’t there. Instead, she thought he was waiting for her too. My father said that Laika believed in circular time, which meant that everything that had ever happened would happen again. And so one day when she was walking through the woods she’d see the gray squirrel again, waiting in his patch of sun. He hadn’t heard her yet, but in a moment he would and the old chase would begin. He’d race up the tree, Laika at his heels, and they’d both stare at each other until I called her away.

  Was time a circle for people too, I wondered. If so, that meant my mother would drive her car into the lake a thousand times and each time would feel like new.

  Laika wouldn’t come for my father. Only for me. It seemed she’d forgotten about his help with her paw. When he petted her, she’d stare at him calmly, as if to say, I think we’ve met, but as soon as he stopped she’d walk away. Finally, he let her be. “She’s your dog now, Grace,” he said. And so she was. I fed her and walked her each morning and night. At night, she slept on the end of my bed and kept the darkness away.

  Most days, we went to the lake. I told her about the monster who lived there, but she wasn’t afraid. She’d swim out to retrieve the sticks I threw, then bring them back and drop them at my feet. Once I threw a stone instead and she paddled around and around in circles looking for it until I called her in. She was tired when she swam back. She lay on the beach, panting. I buried my face in her wet coat. She smelled like rain and dirt and fur. I’ll never trick you again, I promised, and she licked my hand.