Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  One time, near the cave but not inside it, we made a fire and burned the bad father’s postcards one by one. It took two days to drive through the desert. I wish you could have seen the way the … I read before the paper went up in flames.

  I decided to submit The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained for entrance to the cave. At first, of course, he wouldn’t let me inside with it. “Wait there,” he ordered, climbing out. He had painted his face blue with finger paint. His body was covered with mud. He crouched on the ledge and held out his hand to me. I gave him the book. He read only one page. Then he turned and climbed back into the cave with it. He sat in the corner and read with a flashlight. I climbed in and sat quietly, waiting for him to acknowledge me. He was reading the section titled “The Book of Chance.” Finally, Alec looked at me. “This is good,” he said, “Listen to this.”

  Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.

  Girls who turn into boys have been discovered in the Philippines. (Miss Xao Ling Ping changed from a girl to a boy during a terrible thunderstorm.)

  A turtle marked by Robert Brown with his initials in 1887 was found sixty-four years later by his son-in-law.

  A boy named Jean Castel fell while trying to escape German soldiers during WWI and suffered total amnesia. This happened when he was fifteen. When he was twenty-four, he fell in love with a beautiful English girl. When he asked her her name, she said it was Jean Castel. Suddenly he remembered everything.

  Twelve hundred Turkish prisoners died because Napoleon Bonaparte coughed. When he coughed he said, “Ma sacrée toux” (My confounded cough), but his officers heard “Massacrez tous” (Kill them all). So they executed all prisoners even though they had been scheduled for release.

  There was a famous pianist in Paris at the turn of the century who was born without any ears. Instead, she could hear through her mouth. She married a man whose last name was Oreille, which is the French word for ear.

  After Alec closed the book, he said, “What do you suppose the chances are that your mother and my father disappeared the same year?”

  “But she didn’t disappear,” I said. “She drowned.”

  “She’s gone, isn’t she?” Alec said. “It just seems funny that it happened exactly that way.”

  I told him that the strangest part was that my mother had picked the green car to drive into the lake. That was my father’s car, the one he liked best. It had fins like a shark, I remembered, and a hood ornament shaped like a star. My mother never drove it. She always took the Purple Pig instead. When she was driving uphill, she would talk to it in pig Latin because she said that was the only language it understood. Pig Latin was one of the five languages my mother knew by heart.

  It started to rain. First softly and then in sheets. I was happy to be sealed inside the Room of Everything Good behind a curtain of rain. Alec stuck his head out of the cave and let all the blue run off his face. “I’m sick of this cave,” he said. “Let’s go outside.” We went outside and walked through the mud. There was lightning and thunder, but it was hard to tell which came first by the time we started counting. Alec walked through the woods looking for a clearing where he could be the tallest thing. That way he could be struck by lightning and see what it was like. The man in the book had been struck seven times, he said. I followed him, running a little to keep up. The rain was pouring down. When we reached an open place, I stood very still and tried to turn into a boy.

  A few months after my mother disappeared, my father had taken me to a museum of ethnography. “That means man-made things,” he explained, steering me down the narrow halls. The rooms were dimly lit; glass cases filled every corner. “Objects Made of Stone,” one section said. Inside was a stone carved into a half-moon; the handwritten tag said: 1905, used by a South American man who claimed, with the aid of a live mouse, to cure the lame and the blind.

  “Come here, Grace,” my father said. “I think you’ll like this.” He was standing in front of a glass case labeled “Objects Made of Birds or Parts of Birds.” There was a pair of scissors made from a bird’s beak that had been twisted and sharpened, and a medicine man’s staff made of brightly colored feathered heads. Found in Africa 1957, the tag said. My hands shook a little. I pressed them flat against the glass.

  “Look,” my father said. On the wall in a special case was a small blanket made of green and blue parrots’ wings. I thought that it must be meant for a baby. I wondered where birds whose wings were cut off went. They must live like moles, I thought, burrowing deep underground.

  When I was very little, my mother tried to teach me to fly. I stood at the top of the stairs and spread my wings. My mother waited at the bottom with her arms outstretched. “Fly to me,” she said, and I leapt into the air between us. But my mother always caught me. “I was afraid you’d fly too far away,” she’d say, setting me down on the bottom step. Some days I practiced by myself. When my father saw my bloody elbows and knees, he tried to talk me out of flying. “People aren’t cut out for it,” he explained. “Our bodies are designed all wrong.” I didn’t believe him. He was the one who had told me about bumblebees, how their wings were too flimsy to support their fat bodies; yet, in the summer, they were everywhere, buzzing impossibly by.

  After a few days, Mary got tired of sunbathing and dared me to steal Mr. Bang! I was happy that Mary wanted to make dares again. Since she’d turned twelve, she hardly ever did. I always took dares because I was the youngest and had to. But this was a hard one because Alec carried Mr. Bang! with him everywhere. I trailed him all day, hiding behind bushes and trees until Alec wheeled around suddenly and shot the gun into the air. “Quit following me, why don’t you?” he yelled.

  Later, though, he fell asleep in the hammock with the gun beside him. I crept across the grass in the Indian way he had taught me. The gun kept catching the light and flashing like a secret code. Finally, I stood over him and quietly, quietly, reached for the gun, but when I touched it, he woke up. He grabbed my arm and twisted it hard behind my back until I started to cry. “Crybaby,” he said. He jumped off the hammock, holding his gun in one hand and my arm in the other. He dragged me over to the tree where the dead bird was hidden and made me stand against it. “If you want to be let back in the cave,” he said, “you have to play this game.”

  The game was called “Will you tell?” and meant I had to stand very still against the tree while Alec shot an apple off my head. Also, I couldn’t cry. Alec took a long time getting ready, finding an old crab apple, arranging it on my head, aiming and re-aiming his gun. Finally, he said he was ready. I closed my eyes. “Wait,” Alec said. “I have a better idea.” He ran inside and got an old dishtowel which he tied across my eyes like a blindfold. The towel smelled like fish. “Do you have any last requests?” he said. I thought of the apple, which was no bigger than a fist. I closed my eyes so tightly I saw spots. “Last chance,” Alec said. “Ready. Aim. Fire!” Alec yelled.

  I heard the gun go off, followed by a sound like a mosquito whizzing past my head. Then everything was quiet. Behind my eyes, it was green. I wondered if I was dead. Laika started to bark. I touched the apple on top of my head. It was still in one piece. Alec took off my blindfold and threw it on the ground. “Will you tell? Will you tell?” he said, dancing around me. I turned around. Above my head, I saw the mark the BB had made in the tree. It was no bigger than a dot.

  After lunch, I told Mary about the game, though I knew that this was cheating. Mary said, “William Tell, dummy, that’s what it’s called. He shot an apple off someone’s head once.” Then Alec came over and gave me a necklace made of the crow’s feathers to prove that I was back in his good graces. Mary said, “I’m so sick of that dumb bird. I’m going inside.” She slammed the screen door, exactly the way we weren’t supposed to. I knew she was just showing off, because nobody was home.

  Alec took off his shirt and ran around and around in circles, trying to get the dog to chase
him, but she was too lazy. Suddenly there was a loud roar and a plane passed overhead. I thought that my mother might be inside it, looking down at me. I raised my hand to wave, then thought better of it. “It’s only a plane,” Alec said in his mind-reading way. I pretended not to hear him. I lay down in the grass next to Laika and we both played dead until the plane was gone.

  On the last day of summer, my aunt drove me back to our house in Vermont. My father came out to meet us in the driveway when he heard the car pull in. He had grown his beard back and was wearing a blue shirt I’d never seen before. Laika ran up to him as if we’d been away for months, then she raced around the yard until we called her in. We went inside and had cake and ice cream. Aunt Fe wouldn’t have any cake because she was on a diet where you could only eat grapefruit. “Don’t be ridiculous,” my father said.

  After we finished eating, Laika wandered around the house, sniffing everything. I followed her from room to room. It was late but I wasn’t tired. I went into the kitchen and listened to my father and Aunt Fe talk about people they knew. After a while, Laika settled down and fell asleep.

  I went out to the garage to get The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained, which was still in the car. Alec had tried to keep it, but on the last day I had stolen it back from the cave.

  It was too dark in the garage. There were badminton racquets in the corner that made strange shadows on the wall and a collection of old skis and snowshoes jumbled next to them. My old bike was there too. Something white in the basket caught my eye. When I went for a closer look, I saw the letters Edgar had given me the day he drove away. I got my book out of the car and put some of the letters in it. The rest I carried under my shirt so my father wouldn’t see.

  I went upstairs and laid them out on my bed. There were twenty-four letters, all addressed to my mother, but at the very bottom was a thin envelope with my name on it. Ms. Grace Davitt, it said on the front. Urgent! Open at Once! I had never received a letter addressed to me before. I examined it carefully, then put it aside to open last.

  I divided my mother’s mail into piles and opened it piece by piece. There were six credit-card offers and an invitation to the firemen’s ball. There were letters asking my mother to subscribe to a magazine about birds and an entry form for a contest to win a trip to a volcano. There was a sample size of a new kind of mouthwash that came with a pamphlet about how to avoid bad breath. Also two letters from a senator asking my mother to vote for him. At the bottom of the pile was a postcard from my grandmother describing her visit to Canada. She had wanted very much to see a moose but there were no mooses to be seen, she said.

  I put my mother’s mail under my bed and took out the letter addressed to me. This is what it said:

  Dear Grace,

  Have you ever lost an hour? Daylight savings is fast approaching and 38% of Americans say the time change catches them by surprise year after year. Let us be your personal alarm clock. At 976-TIME, we have a special offer for the months of April and May. Call now.

  Sincerely,

  Timefinders

  I put the letter under the mattress. I wondered if it might be a message from my mother in code. I remembered the night in the desert when we had lost an hour and my mother said that my father had stolen it away. I took out the letter and read it again. Then I went and called the number listed at the bottom. A recording came on and said that the number had been disconnected. There was no new number, the recording said. I had an idea that my mother might be playing a game with me. I remembered the way she used to race me those dark nights at the lake. Catch me if you can, she’d call out just before she streaked ahead.

  The lost hour. My mother drives with me to the lake. The radio is on. We are playing a game called Radio Fortune. My mother flips through the dial and stops on the third song. This is the one with the message; the first words I hear are the ones meant for me. I can hardly breathe, waiting. I make my hands into the shape of a steeple, then open the door to see all the people. A man sings, It had to be you. It had to be you. My mother stops the car and gets out, leaving the keys inside. The man keeps singing. I step out of the car carefully. I am wearing my best dress because we have just come from church. My mother finds a pretty stone in the snow and puts it in her pocket. Then she finds another one, speckled like an egg. Together, we make a pile of stones on the shore. My mother does a little twirl and pulls me onto the ice. The sun is shining. It’s a lovely day. My mother says so and I echo back the words. Lovely. You’re my silly girl, she says, smiling. My mother takes my hand. In our smooth shoes, we slip and slide across the lake.

  It has rained overnight and our car looks brand-new in the sunshine. There are birds on the hood that scatter as we approach. Birds, my mother says. She holds a hand to her heart and presses where it hurts.

  We drive all the way to the river. There has been a flood. The water is still rising. Our feet are underwater, but the car glides along without a hitch. My mother puts a hand to her face. She has a headache from the night before. There is a dog swimming in the river. Also a child’s pool swept in by the rains. From the bridge, we watch the water rise. People jump into the river with ropes tied around their waists. They slip under, then bob back. The dog is being swept away by the current. The pool has gotten tangled in a net. A girl tied to a rope swims to the dog and pulls him into the pool. I cover my eyes. When I turn back, the river is empty. Girl, dog, and pool are all on shore.

  My mother leaves the bridge and drives toward the river. Lightning splits the sky. Water, water everywhere, she says, and not a drop to drink. We speed along the dark pier. The car makes a clicking sound as it moves across the wooden slats. Then there is nothing beneath us and we fall. The windows fill with water, mud, leaves. The car floats.