The Window

by Jeanette Ingold

  "No," and I'm thinking back, trying to remember if I'd told her those words. Maybe they're Texas words, I think, and everyone says them.

  Hannah stays with me through the afternoon, even though she listens every time the phone rings, like she's hoping it's for her. We both know things must be really weird at her house if her mother's not calling her to come home.

  Hannah opens my bedroom window. "Mandy, have you seen Gwen anymore?"

  "No," I say, guilty because I'm lying but still not wanting to tell her about the last time.

  "Come try," Hannah urges until I stand next to her. "Call," she says, insistent in a way that's not like her.

  "Gwen," I yell, feeling stupid, "Gwen."

  I tell Hannah, "This isn't how it works."

  "You mean Gwen won't let me see her," Hannah says, jerking me inside and pulling down the window.

  Pulling it down on the voice in the wind.

  She hasn't heard, but I have. Little Abe is calling Gwen.

  In the evening, when I'm alone again, I go back to the window. To reach out to Gwen, or to wait for her to let me go to her. I've stopped knowing which way it is.

  I find her summer has turned into a chill December, and her house has become a house of careful, small moments....

  Gwen wandered through the rooms, touching this, looking at that, as if she was trying to memorize things.

  Abe came in from outside, dropping his coat in the hall.

  "Want to go play a game?" he asked.

  Gwen swooped him up and hugged him so tightly he said, "Let me down, you're hurting."

  Then she went up to the attic, to her room. She ran her hand along a shell pink wall and starched lace curtain. Looked across the stretching fields, already rented out now that her father was gone.

  She opened a drawer and wondered what she should take.

  "You're leaving, aren't you?" Her mother's voice at the doorway made her jump. "I thought so."

  "How did you know?"

  "Gwen, please. It can't be so bad here that you have to run away."

  "There's not anything bad, Mama," Gwen said. "It's just that..."

  "Then why?" her mother asked, but she didn't wait for an answer. She shook her head as though she had already decided arguing was useless. "Well, I can't stop you, but I won't take you back, either."

  Gwen spent the next long hours by herself, waiting for evening, for Paul. He'd written that he'd found a room for her just off base, that he was using his first real leave to come get her. Gwen had planned to go off with him and then write, but somehow her mother had guessed.

  Her mother came up to the attic just once more. "I hope you'll get married?"

  "We already are," Gwen said.

  Her mother made a strangled sound, more like a snort than anything. "Here, then," and she thrust one of her own nightgowns into Gwen's hands. "You can't go to your husband in pajamas."

  When Paul's car sounded in the drive, Gwen grabbed her suitcase and ran down all the stairs and out to meet him. And then, for all her hurrying, she looked back. Looked back at an empty porch and nobody waving good-bye.

  Her mother's nightgown was on top of everything, in her suitcase.

  Ted has started picking me up on his way to school. It's not far out of his way.

  He honks and I go out to his car, a vehicle that he is very proud of. He got it right after he got his license, he told me, because the bus doesn't go near his house and his mother wanted to stop driving.

  "His parents," Aunt Emma said, "think the sun rises and sets on that boy. If he wanted his own airplane, they'd find a way to give it to him."

  This morning I'm only halfway to his car when he calls, "Mandy, come here and hold out your hands. Together and carefully."

  He puts something soft and warm and incredibly light in my palms. "A baby possum," he says. "I found it by the road."

  "Alone?"

  "A big one was nearby, run over. I think it was this one's mother."

  The baby is so small I can almost hold it in one palm, and I'm terrified I'll hurt it. "Take it, Ted," I say, "before I drop it."

  "You won't. You can raise it."

  "Me? You found it. Him. Her. Whatever."

  But even as I talk, groping for a joke, my insides are thumping over because I want so much to care for the little thing. I'm wishing I dared trust it to one hand. I want the other free to stroke it, and find the top of its head, and how its tail feels.

  At the same time, I'm panicky.

  "I don't know anything about taking care of an animal," I say. "I've never had a pet. What do you feed it?"

  "It's a baby, Mandy." Ted sounds exasperated, but he's laughing, too. "Milk, of course."

  "And Aunt Emma probably won't let me keep it. If she wanted a pet, she'd have a cat or a dog."

  "Why don't you ask?"

  I pull back one hand just a little, begin to explore the hairless tip of its tail with my finger. A low growl and hiss make me wonder if I'm going to get bitten. Then I realize probably it's the baby that's frightened.

  I leave the opossum with Ted and go in the house to find Aunt Emma. I was right about her not wanting a pet. "Keeping a wild animal is probably not even legal," she says. "I'll call the shelter and see what they say to do."

  I won't beg. It's something I've never done and I'm not going to begin now. I turn, walk partway down the hall.

  And turn again and go back.

  "Please, Aunt Emma. Just until it can go out on its own?"

  "Mandy..."

  "Please?"

  There's a long silent moment, a moment in which I swear to myself that if Aunt Emma says no I won't ever ask her for anything again. Won't ever ask anyone for anything. I shrug and start to say, "Never mind."

  "I guess," she says, "we could try feeding it some of the milk replacer your uncles keep on hand for calving. I should have an eyedropper somewhere."

  Then she catches my arm as Ted and I are leaving. "Mandy, it probably won't live, you know. Wild things often don't."

  I'd like to say it doesn't matter, but I can't. "Please don't let it die, Aunt Emma," I say. "Please, please don't."

  Ted, on the drive to school, is absolutely delighted with himself, all out of proportion to saving an orphaned opossum.

  At school Hannah's lining up my day, telling me we should go shopping in the afternoon.

  I tell her I can't. I have to get home to the opossum.

  Besides, I wish Hannah would understand that I don't want her help shopping. Finding the right presents for Aunt Emma and the uncles is something I should be able to do by myself.

  The school halls are even more noisy than usual, and at lunch the cafeteria is thundering with band instruments playing a preview of a holiday concert. I can't hear what anybody is saying, can't even hear voices well enough to know who's sitting where.

  "I'm leaving," I shout, to whoever's listening. I get up, only where I thought there was a space there's not and I knock a tray crashing to the floor. I reach down, touch something cold and wet, wonder how to clean up.

  Someone says, "I'll get it."

  I sink back into my chair. For a moment everything—the tray, all the noise—it's more than I can deal with.

  "Hey," somebody yells in my ear, "you're complaining about the food?" I recognize Ryan's voice. He's trying to make me feel better.

  Then Hannah's with me, and we're walking outside toward the building where the resource room is.

  "I don't know what happened," I begin. I realize I owe Hannah some sort of explanation, but I'm just too tired and overwhelmed to make it. The opossum, Aunt Emma giving in to me, those blasted presents I don't know what to do about ... This day feels like it's been thirty hours long. "Sometimes I just want to get away from everything."

  "Me top," says Hannah.

  In Ms. Z.'s room I slump into a seat, and for once nobody comes and asks me if I need help. I must sit there twenty or thirty minutes, listening to the quiet click and chunk of keyboards and printers, to th
e hum of machinery fans, to the murmur of one of the boys reading under his breath. Slowly things calm down inside me, until I'm finally ready to get to work.

  I go to my computer and begin a file for a paper I'm writing for English. The assignment is to capture an instant using sensory detail. I'm doing mine on an early summer morning, as far from Christmas as I can get.

  It's pretty boring stuff, how the sunrise looked through the back window of the car the summer Mom and I drove west. How the sky went clear down to the earth. How empty the road was, empty as we were because we hadn't stopped for breakfast yet, empty like I always felt when we'd left one place and hadn't yet found the next.

  I hear someone come up behind me. Ms. Z. says, "You make it seem real."

  "It's just what I remember," I say.

  "Being able to remember details is a gift."

  And then she goes away and Ted takes her place. He must have been watching us, reading our lips, because he says, "I heard the ocean once, in a seashell. When I was little, before my hearing got so bad. But I don't have words for the sound."

  I know what he's saying, that he wishes he could put sounds on paper, to keep them.

  The way I wish I could know for sure I won't ever forget the sky, or the color of an empty road.

  "I hope Ms. Z.'s right," I say, "about me having a gift for remembering. Because sometimes I wake up and everything is black, and for an awful time I wonder if I've forgotten how it was, what things looked like."

  "Like the sun," says Ted. "Like the sun through the car window. You won't, Mandy."

  I shrug. How can he know?

  Chapter 12

  EMMA'S WAITING for me on the front lawn when I get home. She tells me right away that the opossum is alive. "Cute little thing," she says. "And hungry! He's been eating all day, eating and sleeping."

  Emma's been busy, made some phone calls, bought some stuff that is supposed to be better than the cow milk replacer. "Not," she says, "that he doesn't seem just as happy eating bugs."

  She leads me to where she's got him in a big carton on the front porch. The opossum's half hidden in a pile of leaves in one corner, and Emma tells me he moved them there himself.

  "I'll sit out here with him awhile," I say. Then, as she goes inside, I add, "Thank you, Aunt Emma."

  "You're welcome," she says, and she sounds enormously pleased.

  The uncles have missed all this, the opossum, I mean, because they've been gone since before dawn to a stock show. Now their car turns in the drive. Uncle Gabriel calls to me that he's going out to the barn and will be along in a while, and Abe comes up the steps.

  "What have you got there?" he asks.

  "An opossum. An orphan."

  "It's pretty big," he says. "Probably born in September and about ready to go out on its own."

  "I'd wondered why there would be a baby now, instead of spring."

  "Possums have young different times of the year," Abe says. "Carry them around in pouches like kangaroos until they grow a decent size. When they're born they're about the size of my thumbnail."

  The one I'm holding suddenly seems a lot bigger, as I try to picture him just a bit bigger than my thumbnail. Without warning he wraps his tail around my finger and drops to my lap. The tail, unwrapping itself, tickles. "I think this one's going to be a circus performer."

  I say that and a memory clicks in sharp, clicks in about circuses. Without taking time to think I say, "You used to have a circus, didn't you? When you Were little? A pill bug circus?"

  I hear Abe catch his breath, then the silence of him holding it, like he can't breathe. Then his harsh, "What makes you say that?"

  And I'm frightened to tell him, frightened and feeling that I'm at the edge of something terribly sad.

  "Oh," I say, "I don't know. I guess I was just thinking most kids like bugs."

  This night there's no calling when I first lean out the window. I lean out farther and wait a long time, wait in air cold and heavy. And then I hear the child's thin, crying voice, little Abe's voice....

  "Gwen, Gwen? Please, Gwenny, come back."

  "I miss Gwen," Abe said. "Will she ever come back?" He was standing close by his mother, as if standing so close would make her answer.

  "Gwen's best forgotten," she said. "Go play."

  But after he went outside, she stepped to the secretary, took an envelope off the top. She pulled out a letter and read over it quickly, as if she was looking again at something she'd already memorized. Pressed her lips together. Murmured, "Just what do you expect from me?"

  She tore the letter three times across and three times down, and after that she tore up the envelope. "I told you I wouldn't have you back."

  Then she sat in a rocker, closed her eyes, and murmured, "I did what was right, didn't I? Told you the consequences if you left?"

  After a while she went to the wastebasket, pulled out the pieces of paper, and tried to fit the envelope back together. Tried, and couldn't, and gave up.

  It's Saturday again. Aunt Emma is standing at the kitchen table, wiring pine boughs into a wreath. The uncles have put a Christmas tree up in the living room, and the boughs are what they cut off the bottom.

  "They smell so good," I say, picking one up. Sap sticks to my fingers and I try to roll it off. The wonder is the boughs can be smelled at all among all the other smells. Aunt Emma has spiced cider heating on the stove and cookies baking. Ginger and cinnamon and apple run into the cool air that comes from a window she's cracked open, air that smells just a little of damp earth and cows and hay.

  "Aunt Emma," I start, and then don't know quite what I want to say. That this is like a book, maybe, or a TV family. "Aunt Emma," I say, "you've made this house nice."

  "It's you that's made it nice, Mandy. You can't imagine what pleasure you're giving your uncles and me."

  Then she hugs me. Something scratchy, a piece of pine branch caught on her dress maybe, tickles my neck, and her cheek next to mine feels floury.

  I start to pull away, but then I think, why? And so I give her a little hug back. I'm not sure what to do with my arms, which makes the whole thing clumsy, but I guess it's an OK hug. Emma says, "How about pouring us some cider?" and her voice tells me how pleased she is.

  I take down two mugs and position them on the counter, where they'll be easy to find after I pick up the saucepan. I hear wire being clipped, so I know my aunt has returned to her wreath making. She's not even watching me, is she? She knows that I can do this. It's silly, I guess, but I feel quite proud of myself.

  I'm proud of Aunt Emma, too. I know it was hard for her the day my caseworker said sooner or later I'd have to learn to cook for myself and it might as well be sooner.

  "But it's so easy to get burned," Aunt Emma had protested. "And there are sharp knives, and..."

  And we'd all gone out into the kitchen and the caseworker had marked the stove dials with a 3-D marker. "One line at twelve o'clock for off, Mandy, two lines at three o'clock for high."

  And now, thinking about Aunt Emma and me, how we're working together in the kitchen, this leads to another thought. It's one that's tangled, but I like it—a thought that I'm fitting in here.

  Me pouring us cider and it not being something to especially notice, that doesn't have anything to do with how well I can get about on my own. It's because I'm family. Doing for each other, it's how a family is.

  Or should be.

  "Aunt Emma?" I say.

  "Yes?"

  "Will you answer a question?"

  "If I know the answer."

  "When Uncle Abe and Uncle Gabriel were little, what was it like here?"

  She takes awhile, as though she's searching through details. Finally she says, "They've never talked much about when they were little. But I can imagine."

  She shuffles pine boughs before continuing. "The first year we were married, your uncle Gabriel and I, I wanted to buy the most beautiful Christmas tree we could and decorate it with him. But his mother—this was her house, and we
were living with her then—said if we had so much money we ought to be able to find a better use for it. She set a scrawny little tree out on a table, put it up one day when nobody was home, like it was just one more job that needed doing."

  "Do you think she loved Gabriel and Abe?" I ask.

  Aunt Emma blows on the cider I hand her, then sips a bit. "I don't know. I suppose, as much as she was able. I probably shouldn't say, I was just a daughter-in-law, but ... I always thought she didn't know how to love."

  Emma's next words come in a rush. "I wish you could see the old photo albums, Mandy. Her, and her mother, and her mother's mother. Like, like..."

  "Like coldness passed on?" I ask.

  "Exactly," Aunt Emma says, sounding surprised, as if I've shown her something she's never seen before. "Like coldness passed on."

  Chapter 13

  I HEAR the crying outside my bedroom window, hear it even though I stay in bed, try to smother my ears with covers.

  I hear the boy's voice, crying for Gwen.

  I hear Gwen's voice from a far distance, awful cries...

  "Paul, stop falling. Please God, don't let him, don't ... Paulllll!"

  ...Gwen?...

  "How can he be dead? What do I do now?"

  Monday is Big-Little Day at school, something done around here for enough years that no one thinks the name is funny. All the second graders in the district spend the morning in high school, parceled out one-on-one to sophomores and juniors.

  "I think they're supposed to see how much they have to look forward to," Hannah tells me when I ask why.

  Ted, who is standing with us, says, "Which we'll demonstrate by coloring Santa pictures, serving snacks in every class, and limiting the academics to rented videos."

  "Not really," I say.

  "Really," they answer in unison.

  "What?" Ted adds. "You expected truth in advertising from a school district?"