by Michael Rowe
Before I could answer my father, my mother interjected again. “What on earth would have possessed the boy to return the bike on the same day his brother had that accident? I would have thought that’s the last thing he’d be thinking about. The whole affair is rather odd. Still, I feel badly for the other boy, even if he’s a thief. And his poor mother must be beside herself. On the other hand, how very odd to be worrying about apologizing to Jamie at a time like this. If it were me, that would be the very last thing I’d be concerned about.”
I said, “I think it’s nice.”
“Hmmm,” my mother said, lighting another cigarette.
“Bad luck,” my father said. He rubbed his chin again. “Bad luck.”
“Well, it’s certainly more than bad luck, Peter, isn’t it? It’s a rather serious accident, all told. The boy could sustain a brain injury from those stings.” My mother could always manage to picture the worst possible outcome for any given situation, with or without the benefit of actual facts.
“No,” my father said. “That’s not what I mean, Alice. The boy’s brother—that’s why he brought the bicycle to the police station. He told the policeman at the front desk that it was bad luck. He didn’t want it in his house. He was afraid something would happen to him, too.”
Later at the hospital, with his Aunt Prudence standing behind him, Stevie Todd said that his brother was sorry for what he’d done.
“Thank you for not bringing charges against my brother,” Stevie said in a stilted voice. There was nothing spontaneous or natural in it. He had obviously been coached. Stevie was my age, eight. When Aunt Prudence told him to shake my hand, he started to cry.
“Stevie, shake Jamie’s hand,” she insisted. Under the harsh, unforgiving whiteness of the hospital’s overhead fluorescent lights, Mrs. Dodd’s sister’s face was puffy and blotched. Her eyes behind thick glasses were swollen and red from crying, bruised with plum-coloured smudges of exhaustion. If this was how her sister looked today, I couldn’t imagine how Terry’s mother must look. But still, Aunt Prudence pushed Stevie toward me. “I mean it. Come on now. He and his father are being very nice to us by not calling the juvenile authorities about your brother.”
“I don’t want to!” Stevie wailed. He shrank back from my extended hand as though it were leprous. “I said I was sorry. I don’t want to shake his hand. Why do I have to?”
“Stop it!” she practically shouted. Roughly, she grabbed Stevie by the shoulder and shoved him towards me. “Shake Jamie’s hand!”
My father raised his own hands in a gesture of gentle conciliation. “It’s all right Mrs. . . . ?”
“Miss,” Aunt Prudence said. “I’m not married. My name is Miss Prudence Rogers.”
“Miss Rogers, Stevie doesn’t have to shake Jamie’s hand. It’s fine. More than fine. The boy’s obviously upset about his brother. Thank you for inviting us to come and meet you. We don’t want to take any more of your time. You should be with your sister and Terry now.”
“I’m so sorry.” Aunt Prudence’s face appeared to fall in on itself. Her voice sounded raw and chapped, almost as though it was bleeding. “We’re all so upset. I thought this would be a good idea, you know. That the boys should meet. My nephew . . . Stevie that is, not Terry . . . well, he said he had a bad dream last night that something bad was going to happen. He won’t tell me about it. I just thought it would be a good idea for him to . . . to . . .” She began to cry. “My sister—Mrs. Dodd, Arlene Dodd—well, her husband passed away last year. It’s just she and the two boys, and me. I live with them and try to help out. Terry isn’t a bad boy, Mr. Browning, he’s just a little lost without his father around. And then this happened this morning. When the ambulance came for him, he was unconscious. Oh God, I’m so worried about my poor sister. If anything happens to Terry, too. His face . . .”
“Miss Rogers, please go to your sister. We’ll see ourselves out. My wife in particular asked me to send her best wishes for Terry’s recovery. I’m so, so sorry. We’re sorry, I mean. And thank you, Stevie, for being so honest. Your mother and aunt should be very proud of you.”
Stevie nodded dumbly and followed his aunt down the hallway toward the elevator to the ICU. Aunt Prudence called out to the two women who were in the elevator just as the doors were beginning to swing shut. One of the women reached out her hand and held the door till they reached it.
Stevie Dodd looked back just once. When our eyes met, his were full of a black dread that aged him beyond his years, far beyond childhood, maybe even further. Then they stepped into the elevator and the doors glided shut.
In the car on the way home, I told my father that I’d changed my mind about the mirror. I said there was nothing wrong with it after all, that I was just spooked last night by having my bike stolen and that I wanted to keep the mirror right where it was.
At first, he told me he didn’t know what I was talking about, but then he remembered what I had said the previous night before he tucked me in. He looked at me quizzically, but said he was glad that I’d come to my senses, and he’d never planned to get rid of it anyway. He said we’d already had more than enough disruption and carrying-on to last us quite a while, thank you very much.
When we arrived home after picking up my bicycle from the police station, my father took it out of the back seat and told me to put it in the garage, which I did. He said he was going to go across the street and check on Mrs. Alban’s eaves troughs, and that I should see if my mother needed any help in the house.
Mrs. Alban had been widowed earlier that year and my father had been doing the sort of odd jobs around the house that were formerly Mr. Alban’s bailiwick. Mrs. Alban always tried to pay him, but my father always refused, as gently as possible. My mother said Mrs. Alban had no sense of the value of money, but my father said she was trying to keep her dignity intact in her widowhood.
That first autumn of her bereavement, I’d caught sight of Mrs. Alban through our living room window trying clumsily to rake the leaves in her front yard in all the brittleness of her old age. It broke my heart to see her fragility. I wished I were old enough to do it for her. When I saw my father do it that first time, a sense that some sort of elemental justice and kindness had been returned to the universe came to me, and I loved my father a bit more for being the instrument of it.
Inside the house, I called out to my mother. There was no answer. I called out again. In the kitchen, there was a note on the table in her rounded, loopy scrawl:
Monica Birdwhistle stopped by for a coffee and some cake. We’re off to check out a sale at Ogilvy’s at the plaza. She’ll drop me home in a bit. There’s cold macaroni salad in the fridge for lunch. I will be home later this afternoon. Dinner will be at seven SHARP!
Love, MOM
xoxox
She always signed her notes “Mom,” even if they were intended for my father. Some days it seemed as though that was their agreed-upon nomenclature; the rest of the time it seemed calculated to head off the possibility of shocking me with marital familiarity in case I came upon one signed “Alice” by accident. In any case, she wouldn’t be home for hours, and for now the house was empty. Silence, general and complete, blanketed the rooms. I felt my heartbeat quicken in my chest.
Downstairs in my bedroom, I closed the door. There was a bolt lock that I had been forbidden to touch, on pain of both spanking and grounding. Neither of my parents believed young boys had any reason to lock their doors. I turned the bolt handle now, hearing the soft click as the door locked. Momentarily panicked at my own audacity in flouting this carved-in-stone prohibition, I turned it counterclockwise to make sure it unlocked. When it opened, I sighed with relief. Then I closed and locked it again.
My mother had made my bed while my father and I were at the hospital. The carpet had been freshly vacuumed. I sat down on the navy-blue coverlet and took the room’s measure. It was innocuous, full of early-afternoon sunshine. The mirror wa
s still bolted to the wall adjacent to my bed. The glass was faintly streaked, and the ghost-scent of the vinegar she’d wiped it with hung in the air, mixing with the carpet deodorizer.
Briefly I wondered if my mother had caught a glimpse of anything in the glass other than her own reflection when she was cleaning it, but I already knew that Amanda—or whatever I had seen, or imagined I had seen, the night before—would never have shown herself, or itself, to my mother.
She’d been waiting for me, and no one else.
Standing in that mellow suburban sunlight, the rational side of my nature, the pre-adult side, told me that the first part of the dream I’d had about standing on the promontory over the lake had started hours earlier that evening, and that I’d very likely dozed off immediately when I came downstairs, then woken when my father entered to tuck me in. But the irrational side of my nature, the part of the nature that connects the open minds of children with magic things unseen and unheard by adults, things of beauty and of horror—what grownups indulgently call “having a vivid imagination”—realized that what I had seen last night had been real. I had seen a little girl named Amanda in the mirror. She had used my own voice to talk to me, but they had been her words, not mine. Of that I had not the slightest doubt.
And even if any doubt had remained, the black dread in Stevie Dodd’s face at the hospital had told its own story, told it in a language in which both he and I were fluent. I doubted very much that I had been the only dreamer of terrible things last night. Perhaps Stevie had even dreamed of the wasps themselves, dreamed of the swarm of terrible arthropod bodies moving like a yellow-and-black cloud with murderous purpose, stinging Terry’s face and mouth over and over till he passed out from the pain of the venom coursing through his bully’s body, finally screaming the way I knew he’d made other children scream, while the wasps stung him again and again. He’d finally shut up, all right.
The irrational, magical child I was smiled at that. Good, I thought. He stole my bike. He deserved it.
Then I touched the glass and called softly, “Amanda? I got my bike back, just like you said I would.”
After a while, she came out and we spent the afternoon behind that locked bedroom door until I heard the front door open and the sound of my father’s footsteps on the floor above.
That year, I spoke with Amanda mostly at night, when the light in my bedroom was dim, or when I switched off my bedside lamp altogether and pulled out and lit the candle that I’d hidden under my bed so my mother couldn’t find it. I used the candle mostly when my parents were asleep, because my mother could smell a lit match or candle practically through a wall.
The next summer, my parents thought it would be good for me to get out of the house and interact with some boys my own age.
Their solution was Camp Manitou, which my older cousin Timothy had attended years ago. My aunt Grace told my mother it had done him “a world of good,” and that it might help me “learn to fit in a bit.”
I pleaded with my mother. “But Mom, why can’t I just stay here? Why can’t I just spend the summer playing with Hank? Why do I have to go away?”
“Jameson, stop whining,” she said. “I don’t want you underfoot. It’s time you started meeting some normal boys your age. Maybe it’ll rub off on you. I’ve already told you, I don’t like you spending so much time with that strange girl. Honestly, what sort of girl calls herself ‘Hank’? It’s not natural.”
“Mom, she’s my best friend.”
“Well, you need to make a new best friend. For heaven’s sake. A boy shouldn’t have a girl as a best friend. When you’re older you can date, then someday you’ll marry some nice girl who’ll become your wife. But boys and girls aren’t supposed to be friends. Aunt Grace says Camp Manitou is full of wonderful fellows. You’ll have a new best friend in three shakes of a lamb’s tail. When you come home, you won’t even be thinking about Hank. Lucinda,” she corrected herself. “Lucinda.”
I called Hank on the telephone to tell her that I was going away for the summer.
“I wish it was just going to be you and me for the whole summer,” I said miserably.
“Your mom would hate that,” Hank replied. “You know she wishes you and I weren’t best friends.” She sighed. “I wish I could go away to camp. I hate it here. There’s nothing to do. Boys always get to do the best stuff. You’re lucky you get to go. I wish I could go instead of you. I’d love to go away to camp.”
“It’s a boys’ camp, Hank,” I said. “It’s not for girls.” I was utterly baffled by her nonchalance. To me it was the theft of our summer together at the hands of my parents. My mother didn’t even like her. I briefly considered sharing that dislike with Hank as a way to bring her more in line with my thinking on the injustice of the matter, but I reasoned that it would be unnecessarily cruel.
“So what? I’m more like a boy than you are. You couldn’t even climb a tree till I showed you how to do it, Jamie. I’d probably have more fun than you would. I get all that stuff. Don’t be mad, but you’re way more like a girl than I am.”
I thought for a moment. There was no malice in Hank’s voice. She was simply stating a fact both of us were aware of, one that didn’t really bother either of us. She was right—we were an odd pair in our reversals.
“I’m going to hate it. I’m going to really hate it.”
“Don’t be such a baby,” Hank commanded, ever the pragmatist. “You’ll probably have a great time. And when it’s over, you can come home.”
I had one last, terrible, burning question. “Hank?”
“What?”
“You won’t find a new best friend while I’m away, will you? We’ll still be, you know, best friends when I get back?”
“Don’t be such a baby,” she repeated, but kindly this time.
“Come on, swear?”
“I swear.”
“Pinkie-swear?”
“We have to be face-to-face for pinkie swear, dummy.”
“Okay, let’s just pretend we pinkie-sweared, then.”
Hank sighed. “Okay, Jamie, pretend-pinkie-swear.”
“Promise?”
“I promise, Jamie. We’ll be best friends till the day we die.”
Late that night, after I was sure my parents had gone to bed, I lit the candle in front of the mirror and tried to call Amanda so I could tell her what I had told Hank—that I was going away, even though I wanted to stay home that summer. I wanted to beg her to come with me, to find a mirror somewhere in the camp where I could see her.
“Amanda, it’s me. It’s Jamie. I have to talk to you.” I closed my eyes and relaxed my throat and willed her to speak to me, through me. But no words suggested themselves. I tried again, concentrating harder this time. I squeezed my eyes so tightly shut that I saw purple supernovas exploding behind my eyelids and my head throbbed with the sheer effort of my concentration. I tried again. “Amanda, please come out. Don’t be mad. I have to go. I don’t have any choice. They’re making me go.”
The candle flickered, and then went out.
In the dark, I whispered, “Amanda . . . ? Is that you? Don’t be mad . . . please? It’s not my fault.” But when I switched on my bedside lamp, I was alone in the mirror.
I lit the candle every night for seven nights, but she never came.
A week later, I left for summer camp. In all that time it was as though Amanda had never even existed, as though she had been nothing but a flittering enchantment I had conjured up from the depths of my imagination.
I spent three long, horrible weeks at Manitou as one of the camp’s two untouchables. I was in a cabin with five other boys, all of whom had been to Camp Manitou before, and all of whom seemed to be friends already. Worse still, they were friends in that way young boys have of being friends not based necessarily on shared experiences but simply on shared gender. They all spoke the same language, a language with which I had never been naturally fl
uent. Boys can smell difference at five hundred paces, and whatever they smelled in me, they hated everything about it on sight.
The ringleader was a boy named John Prince. He was a big ugly kid with a forest fire of red hair and a face that was prone to flushing just as hot. He had small, cold fish eyes and fists like hams and, based on my last name, he nicknamed me Brown Nose that first night.
The next night, I was short-sheeted and spent half an hour trying to unmake my bed while the five other boys laughed in the dark at my fumbling because I was too terrified to turn on the light. Finally, in despair, I ripped the rough red blanket off the bed and cried myself to sleep as quietly as possible on the crude pine floor beside the bunk. Two nights later, one of them put a dead squirrel at the foot of my bunk, under the blanket. When I shrieked, they broke into applause and crude laughter.
That night, after everyone else was asleep, I snuck out. I lay in my sleeping bag under a pine tree behind the cabin. After I’d cried all the tears I had to spare, I fell asleep watching a thick cloud of ghostly white moths spin and whirl around the rear exterior light of the cabin. The trembling movement of their beating wings acted as a hypnotic, summoning sleep.
The next morning, when I told one of our cabin counsellors about the dead squirrel, he laughed and said he thought it was a fine prank in the old Manitou spirit. He told me to stop complaining or I’d never make any friends.
The only boy who had it worse than I did was a fat blond boy named Olivier. He had a high, warbling voice and sad eyes set in his face like pale blue poached eggs. He seemed perpetually on the verge of tears. Had we been smarter about it, we might have formed an alliance of sorts, but we despised each other, for each saw in the other some reflection of his own loathsomeness, and we ate alone at opposite ends of the mess hall to avoid attracting the negative attention we would doubtless have attracted sitting together.