The Silent Strength of Stones

by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  “Your mother’s here.”

  It came back to me. I remembered the spinning panic I had felt, dizzying as the whirl of a top, when I couldn’t stop long enough to make sense.

  He gripped my shoulder. “Listen. You’re safe. You’re okay. You’re still mine, at least for now. Whatever it is about her that scares you, I’ll do my best to protect you from it, okay?”

  “Scares me?”

  His eyebrows rose. “What would you call it?”

  “Scares me,” I said, tasting it, trying it for a match with what I felt. “Why should I be scared of her? All she did was leave.”

  He stared at me a moment, then pulled me into a clumsy embrace, startling me. What? What? He pushed me back before I could tell him to cut it out. “I wish we still had that skilliau,” he muttered. “It was a good one for calm. Remember to breathe, okay? I’ll be there.”

  “Maybe we won’t even run into her,” I said. I pushed to my feet and he rose beside me.

  I led Evan around back of the building and peered in through the window in the kitchen door. The lights were on, and so was the radio; I could hear country-western music faintly through the door. Granddad was sitting at the table, studying that morning’s paper. Pop was nowhere in sight.

  I glanced toward the motel and saw that a dusty station wagon was parked next to the office. Someone checking in for the night; Pop would be busy. I opened the kitchen door and held it for Evan.

  “Hi, Granddad,” I said.

  He looked up and smiled at me. “Have a good day, son?”

  “Mostly. Granddad, this is my friend Evan.”

  Granddad held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” said Evan, shaking hands with him. “Likewise.”

  Granddad held his head sideways and stared at Evan for a long minute. Evan stood quiet under his scrutiny.

  “You have a look about you,” Granddad said.

  I examined Evan sideways too. He looked like a wiry guy—plenty of muscles, but not bodybuilding muscles, flatter and tighter somehow—pretty tall, maybe chilled, though his swimsuit was dry and he didn’t look goose-bumpy. In this light his body hair wasn’t as bright or apparent as it had been under the sun. His face still looked something other than strictly human. His eyes were spooky looking, the yellow of goats’ eyes or cats’ eyes. He raised his dark brows as if asking a question.

  “A look of what, Granddad?” I said.

  Granddad’s gaze wandered. “A boy needs a dog,” he said. He shook his head and looked at the newspaper.

  Creepy. “I’ll be right down to start dinner, but I need to find Evan some clothes first. You hungry?”

  “Got rats gnawing in my belly.”

  I wondered if Mariah or Pop had given him any lunch. Come to that, it had been a long time since breakfast, and Mom’s arrival had spooked me out of getting myself a lunch. I had rats gnawing in my belly too.

  I got a bag of potato chips out of the cupboard, poured it into a big stainless steel bowl, set it in front of Granddad, then got him a can of Coke from the fridge. “I’ll get you something hot real soon, Granddad.” I grabbed a handful of chips, threw them into my mouth, and chewed them just enough so they would fit down my throat. I grabbed a second handful and offered some to Evan, who shook his head.

  Granddad ate some chips and nodded, looking back at the paper. He was still nodding gently as we went up the stairs.

  I led Evan up to the attic. Pop hated waste; he saved everything he had ever owned. He was taller than I was, and in earlier years had been skinnier than he was now. There were trunks and suitcases and boxes that held clothes in the attic. Maybe some of Pop’s castoffs would fit Evan better than anything of mine could.

  I pulled the chain on the hanging light bulb and looked around. Evan lifted his head and sniffed, his eyes wide. Dust was heavy everywhere except near one big steamer trunk with a bowed lid. I knelt and looked at footprints that made a trail through the dust. Bigger than mine; bigger than Granddad’s. Must be Pop’s. Curious, I headed for the trunk, tested the lid. It was locked.

  “There are things in there,” Evan said.

  “Eh?”

  “Things,” he said. “Strange things.” He stretched out a hand, held it above the trunk a second, then pulled it back.

  “How strange? What kind of things?”

  “Something with a touch of skilliau,” he said. “A pledge, I think.”

  “Pop has something with magic in it?” I thought about that for a minute. It didn’t make sense. “I wonder when he comes up here,” I said. Maybe while I was minding the store or maybe after we had all gone to bed.

  Imagine Pop having a secret and me not even knowing about it. I didn’t spend much time watching Pop because I figured I knew him so well that nothing he did would surprise me. Now I was surprised. I wanted to open the trunk and see what made him tick. How could he have something with magic in it? I had been thinking this over, and I was pretty sure my magic heritage came from Mom. Even though Evan wouldn’t touch the trunk, I reached for the latch again. There might be some way I could tease it open. Maybe if I talked to it in the right tone of voice. Failing that, I could straighten a paperclip and—

  Then I had a strange thought. Pop had a secret. Maybe Pop needed a secret.

  “Leave it,” I said to Evan, but mostly to myself.

  I opened one of the other trunks where I vaguely remembered having looked when I was younger, probably right after Mom left. I had been looking for traces of her then, thinking that something horrible must have happened to her. Something or someone had stolen her. It was the only explanation I could understand, at first. I had thought maybe she left a note or a map or something. I had searched. In this trunk I had found only abandoned clothes, but that was good enough for right now. The trunk with strange things in it was new.

  I found some bib overalls. I had never seen Pop wear overalls, but he must have at some point. These ones showed wear at the knees, some dark oily stains on the stomach where it would have been natural to wipe your hands off after doing a dirty job, and hand-stitched repairs near the pockets. He must have carried a lot of heavy awkward things in his pockets. I pulled the overalls out of the trunk and held them up to Evan, who was still stroking the air above the locked trunk, his eyebrows lowered in a frown of concentration. The overalls looked like a decent fit.

  “Come on. Try these on. I have to make dinner.”

  He looked at me, one eyebrow up, a faint smile quirking his mouth.

  “Please,” I said. “Look, Pop just started trying to trust me, and I’ve already let him down, I really need to get downstairs.”

  He took the overalls and slipped into them, with some confusion about how to fasten the shoulder straps, so I did it for him, and showed him that he could close the buttons at the sides if he wanted to.

  “I like these,” he said, pushing his hands down into the pockets. “They don’t bind anywhere.”

  They looked odd on him; maybe that was just because I still felt like a boy dressing his dog in a sweater, or maybe anything normal would look odd on him. I closed my eyes for a second and then looked at him from a fresh perspective. Decided I was right: anything normal would look weird on him. He might look all right if he was in a black body stocking with spiky silver armor over it, Or maybe in one of those bright, wild ski outfits athletes wore in the Olympics. All right, but never normal.

  “What?” he said.

  I shook my head. “It’ll have to do.”

  “I like it better than most clothes.” He studied the bib, popped open a snap on one of the tool​/​pencil pockets. “Lots of places to carry things,” he said.

  “Yep.” I turned back to the clothes trunk, dug out a worn plaid flannel shirt. “Here’s a shirt, for if you get cold. You put it on under the straps.”

  “How?”

  “Take the straps down. Come on.” I tossed him the shirt and headed for the door, let him out first, went back and turned
off the light, then clattered down the stairs after him toward the sound of country-western music.

  When we reached the kitchen Pop was still not there. A tightness in my chest loosened a little. Granddad had eaten all the potato chips, and he still looked hungry. I gave him a banana, starting the peeling process for him. I checked out the fridge and the cupboards even though there was nothing I hadn’t put there yesterday. Couldn’t make sandwiches two days in a row, but I needed something quick. I got out spaghetti noodles, put a big pot of water on to boil, and dumped a jar of marinara sauce into a saucepan to heat. I checked the freezer and found some sausages, started them thawing and frying. Turned around to find Evan watching me.

  “What?” I said.

  He gave me half a smile and shook his head. “What else do you do?”

  Like there was something special about cooking? Or maybe he was talking about something else. I glanced at my watch. It was almost six-thirty. We usually ate around now. Where was Pop? Not that I wanted him to show up any faster than he was going to, but what would he say about Evan? What if he said, “Another mouth to feed? Forget it!”

  Whatever time Pop arrived, he’d be expecting dinner, ready. Thinking about speed healing, speed mind-altering, I asked Evan, “Can you make water boil any faster?”

  “Sure.” He came to the stove and put his hands on the sides of the big pot before I could yell at him not to.

  “It’s hot!” I said.

  “Sure,” he said, rubbing the metal. I didn’t smell burned flesh. Suddenly the water was boiling, great domes welling up from the bottom and bursting at the surface.

  “Uh,” I said.

  Evan let go of the pot and smiled at me. “Sign fire.”

  Like I knew what that meant. I swallowed. “Thanks.” I opened the package of noodles and dumped them into the furious water, set the timer for eight minutes. I rinsed and chopped up lettuce and tomatoes for salad, added canned olives and grated cheese. The sausages sizzled and smoked and smelled delicious. I turned them over with a fork.

  Granddad had left his banana peel on the table among the newspapers. “Gotta do setup,” I told him. He backed his chair away from the table and I cleared it and wiped it clean, then put down place mats, silver, napkins. Got the guest chair from the closet and unfolded it.

  The back door opened and Pop breezed in, followed by Mom.

  My throat tightened. I set the chair at the table and tried to smile at my parents.

  “Smells good, Nick. I hope you’re making lots. I brought company,” Pop said, then glanced at the table. “Oh, good. How’d you know?”

  I pointed a thumb at Evan.

  Pop’s eyebrows rose. “Oh! Who’s this?”

  I swallowed, and said, “My friend Evan.” My voice squeaked. How was I going to not recognize Mom? And what if Pop kicked Evan out? I had never brought a guest to dinner before. Neither had Pop, at least not since Mom left.

  “Evan, again?” Pop glanced around.

  “Yeah. Weird, isn’t it? We left the wolf in the woods for now.”

  “Interesting coincidence,” he said. He cleared his throat “This is Susan Fox. She’s staying at the inn. Just thought I’d offer her an alternative to Mabel’s. Susan, this is my son, Nick, and his friend Evan.”

  Susan. Mom’s name was Sylvia. I held out my hand and she stepped across a distance and gripped it, and a million memories flashed through my brain—I was nine and her hands stroked my back after I’d coughed and coughed, her fingers warm and her voice singing something that touched my throat more than my ears and relaxed it; I was five and wanted to chase a ball across the park because I hadn’t caught it when she threw it, but I ran toward it and smacked into a wall that wasn’t there and fell, and when I turned around, I realized I was too far away from Mom, a hundred feet, a year away, farther than I’d ever been before: I had to wait until she came closer before I could go after the ball; her hand against the side of my face after I’d drawn a picture, at six, of our family, with her outlined in yellow and Pop outlined in green and me without any colored outline at all; I was three, and she held me in her lap and stared into my eyes a long, long time, until I felt like she had stared me right inside of her; my hand cupped around the green rock and her hand curled around mine, and her whispering, “Hold on tight, hold on tight,” until light leaked from our nested hands; the press of her lips on my forehead in a good night kiss, night after night, and the whispered words, “May the night hold you gently”; the first time she took me down and introduced me to the lake, dipping her fingers in, touching them to her mouth and then mine; the tight grip of a hug after I had fallen down on asphalt, my bike spinning out from under me, my arm and elbow scraped and bleeding…

  “I’m so pleased to meet you,” she said. Her voice hadn’t changed. Now that I was sensitized I realized it had an element of push in it—not a push for me to do something much, just a little push for me to believe her.

  The questions rose up in me like bubbles in boiling water: Where have you been? Why did you leave? How could you do that? Don’t you even care about us? What did I ever do to make you leave me? What can I do to make you come back? Could I stand it if you did come back? Do you know how much you hurt us? They rose and faded, and I said, “Pleased to meet you.” My voice came out flat. I let go of her hand. “I better get the other chair from the store.”

  Mom’s smile faded a little. She shook hands with Evan, murmuring something nice.

  Pop gave me a stern look, letting me know I wasn’t behaving quite right. He said, “Susan, this is my dad, Leo Verrou.”

  Would Granddad remember Mom? I had been about four when he first came to live with us. Nine years he’d spent in the same household with her, and sometimes I thought Granddad saw things none of the rest of us did. Then again, Pop had lived with Mom fourteen years, and he didn’t seem to sense anything.

  While Mom was reaching for Granddad’s hand, I slipped through the hall to the store to grab the chair behind the sales counter. Evan followed me after excusing himself. “Look,” he whispered as we stood in neon-tinted darkness, “forget what I said before about not letting her know you recognize her. That’s none of my business. Let her know you know, if you want.”

  “I don’t want to.” I closed my hands around the top of the chair and gripped hard.

  He waited a moment. “I didn’t give you a chance td talk about this before. You just seemed so close to some edge. I hope it didn’t hurt you that I took that away from you for a while.”

  “It’s all right,” I said, though I wasn’t sure. The afternoon had been full of enough chaos. If I had been thinking about Mom on top of all that…well, maybe things would have happened differently. I would never know.

  He murmured, “How come she left? What happened?”

  “I don’t know. She never said.”

  He roughed my hair. A moment ticked by in silence. “Maybe she’ll tell you now,” he whispered. “Maybe there was a really good reason.”

  I shook my head. “She’s alive,” I said. “She could have said something.” Maybe she had said something, in all those letters; but that was too late. How could she leave me after making herself the only thing that mattered? She had stolen my very breath.

  I didn’t want her to do it again.

  The timer went off in the kitchen. I lifted the chair and took it down the hall to the kitchen table, then grabbed a fork and tested the pasta, which was ready. Got out the colander, drained the noodles in the sink. Put the salad and a bottle of dressing in the center of the table. Cut up the sausages and dropped them into the marinara. Glanced over my shoulder at my mother, who had taught me to cook, here in this kitchen. “I had to learn this out of books,” she had told me. “Except my roommate from before I married your father taught me a few things, but mostly how to make dishes that your father doesn’t like, like tofu and eggplant. It’s more fun if somebody teaches you.”

  She had taught me while she was teaching herself, and it was more fun. Pop w
asn’t so pleased when Mom started teaching me to cook, but he eventually relaxed about it. I had loved those hours after school with her.

  After she left I had wondered if it had all been part of her plan: how to take care of Pop without having to be there. Soured me on remembering how much I had liked being in the kitchen with her, listening to the music she loved (mostly classical), reading around in cookbooks, mixing things up, kneading dough, cutting out cookies, experimenting sometimes if we had made a trip to the valley and found strange vegetables or spices or cuts of meat Pop didn’t carry in the store.

  Mom was staring at me, her smile trembly. Evan had gotten out another place mat, napkin, and set of silver, and he edged one of the other mats aside to add it to the table.

  “Anybody want anything to drink?” asked Pop.

  “Soda,” said Granddad.

  “Wine, Susan? Beer?”

  “Fruit juice?” she said.

  Pop opened the fridge and got out the orange juice, and another can of Coke for Granddad. I took plates and cups from the cupboard, filled a glass with water, and handed it to Evan. He swallowed the water and handed the cup back to me, so I filled it again. Pop took a cup from the collection on the counter and poured juice for Mom. I had a weird flashback of him doing that morning after morning while she cooked breakfast for him. She thanked him just the way she always had. How could he not know it was her?

  Feeling a little dizzy, I dished up some spaghetti and sauce for Granddad and set it on the table in front of him. “Serve yourselves,” I said, “please.”

  “Ladies first,” Pop said.

  Mom helped herself and I stood and watched, with Evan beside me, his hands in his pockets, his whole self somehow dimmed. I had an intense feeling of longing: Mom belonged here. Things were finally set right.

  Be realistic. She’ll leave after supper. The ripples of this will fade. Things will go back to non-Mom normal.

  I couldn’t let them go back to Mom-normal. I couldn’t take the chance that something would hurt me that much again.

  “Evan?” I said when Mom had filled her plate.