by Jason Mott
“Whatever,” Wash said.
A small cricket made its way up onto the porch. It sat on the worn oak wood and looked at the two children. It did not sing for them.
“You know what I mean.”
She did know what he meant, of course, even if she did not want to admit to it. She noticed it immediately in the days after she woke up in the hospital. It was on the day when she was well enough to get out of bed on her own and make it to the bathroom. Macon was there with her and tried to help her, but she had inherited stubbornness from her mother. She refused him and, very slowly, made her way to the bathroom as he watched her every step, ready to leap up to help her. “I’m fine,” she told him when she finally reached the bathroom.
She closed the door and stood before the sink. She was so tired from those few steps that she’d almost forgotten her reason for coming into the bathroom to begin with. She leaned in against the edge of the sink, huffing. When she finally caught her breath she lifted her head and saw a different version of herself in the mirror.
The girl in the mirror had Ava’s bones and skin, but the bones were too sharp, the skin pulled too tightly about the face. Her cheekbones, which were naturally sharp—another inheritance from her mother—looked like shards of stone reaching out from the side of a cliff. The color had drained from her usually dark skin, and it was dry and flaky, as though it might suddenly crack and bleed at any moment, worse than any winter windburn she’d ever known. It was mottled and spotted in places, though the appearance of it was so odd that she wondered if she might be imagining it.
This was the worst of it, she had thought that day.
Now she was out of the hospital and a part of her had hoped that the version of herself that she saw that day was gone. But now Wash, being of the honest nature that he was, had confirmed for her what she had known the entire time: nothing was healed, not really.
A cricket on the porch seemed to look up at them. Out in the night, among the darkness and grass and trees and breadth of the world, other crickets sang a soft melody. It was always a mystery, how creatures so tiny were able to build such a large presence for themselves in the world. The sound of the insects rose and filled Wash’s and Ava’s ears and drowned out the conversation they were not having—the one they both knew they should have, the one about what really happened that day, beneath the rubble and debris of the fallen grain silo.
“It must be sick,” Wash said, looking down at the silent insect. “Otherwise, it wouldn’t just come up here this close to us like this.” He leaned forward, but the insect did not retreat, as it should have. “Yeah,” Wash said, “definitely sick. Or hurt. Did you know that you can always tell the males apart from the females because the males are the only ones that chirp?”
“You’re rambling, Wash,” Ava said. A chill swept over her and she folded her arms across her chest to keep warm.
“Sorry,” Wash said. He reached down and gently picked up the cricket. It was a delicate black marble in his hand. It did not try to escape. It only positioned itself awkwardly in his hand. “Its leg is broken,” Wash said. He showed it to Ava.
The silence that came and filled the space between them then was one of demand, one of curiosity, one that sought answers to a question so confounding that, between the two of them, they could not think of another way to answer it.
“Have you always been able to do it?” Wash asked.
Ava opened her palm.
Wash placed the wounded cricket inside.
“Does it matter?” Ava asked. “Does it make me different?”
“If you thought you had to keep it secret, even from me,” Wash replied, “I guess that would make you different than I thought you were. That’s all.”
“I just wanted you to be better,” Ava said.
For a moment, Ava only stared at the insect. It shined like a pebble, glossy and iridescent in the dim lighting from the porch. She did not know exactly what to do with the creature. She looked at Wash, as though he might have the answer, but the boy looked back at her blankly with his brown eyes and his mop of brown hair.
Ava closed her palm. The cricket wiggled about briefly, trying to maneuver away from her fingers. She was slow in her movements, being sure to keep a wide pocket in the pit of her hand so that the insect was not crushed.
“What now?” she asked.
Wash shrugged his shoulders.
Ava nodded. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the thing she held in her hand. From the wall of darkness in her mind, the insect began to emerge. It was shiny and small and full of angles. She thought about its broken leg and how she wanted it to be better.
Then the cricket she saw inside her mind—which was large and the center of her focus—receded into darkness and, in its place, there came what looked like a Ferris wheel lit up at night. Ava smelled cotton candy and caramel apples. She was gripped by the sensation of being very small and being carried on someone’s shoulders. The person that carried her smelled like her father—sweat and grease and earthiness. She soon understood that this was memory in which she now lingered. Something from the recesses of her mind having to do with a Fall Festival they had attended as a family before her mother’s death.
In the time since the death of her mother, Ava had forgotten nearly all of the moments she shared with the woman. She could not say exactly how or when it began—this specific type of forgetting. But neither could she deny its reality. For Ava, there were only two versions of her mother: one was the woman in photographs. In the early months after Heather’s death, when Macon was most at odds with accepting what had happened, the man took to collecting and archiving any photograph that contained his deceased wife. He kept them all in a box at the foot of his bed for that first year, and would spend late hours of lonely nights sifting through them, studying the woman’s face, trying to understand why she had done it, why she had taken herself away from a husband and daughter that loved her so. He would cry some nights, and Ava would hear him. So she would get out of bed and come to his room and hug him and sit with him as he went through the photos. Some nights Macon would narrate the photographs, laying out all of the details of how and why a certain photo was snapped. If Heather was smiling in the photo, Macon went through great effort to explain to Ava the conditions that caused the smile. He recounted jokes, told stories of sunny afternoons and days at the beach. And Ava sat with him, listened, and pretended she could remember the moments her father described for her.
The smiling woman in the photographs was one version of her mother. It was the easiest to see, the easiest to believe. But that was not who Ava remembered. The only memory of her mother that lingered, intact and undiminished, in Ava’s mind was the sight of her swinging from the rafters of the barn.
But now, on the porch with Wash, with the broken insect in her hand, she could remember something more: she and her parents together at the Fall Festival, happy.
And then her eyes were open and she was on the porch again and there was something rising up inside her throat. She turned her head away from the porch and heaved until she vomited and, even in the dim light of the night, they could both see the blood mingled with the bile.
“Oh, God,” Wash said. He stood and turned to go into the house, his eyes wide.
“No!” Ava managed. “I’m okay. Don’t tell. Please.”
“What?”
Ava spat the last of the bile from her mouth. Her head ached and her bones felt hollow once again.
“I don’t want to go back to the hospital, Wash,” Ava said. She sat up, huffing, and looked Wash in the eyes. “Just keep this between us. I’ll be fine.” She smiled a fast, apologetic smile. “You’ve never seen a person vomit before? It’s no reason to call the ambulance.”
Wash sat again. He pulled his knees to his chest and folded his arms across them. “Okay,” he said, and there was guilt in his words.
“I’ll be fine,” Ava said. “Really.”
It was only later that the children remembere
d the cricket. When the vomiting began, Ava had opened her hand and the cricket had escaped. Neither of them, amid the darkness and the worry, saw the small black marble leaping away quietly into the night. Neither of them heard its song, vibrant and full of life.
Where there should have been crickets and the singing of owls in the deep darkness of the woods, there was only the sound of door hinges rattling. The sound of a low, snuffling growl. The sharp intake of air as a large dark snout sniffed at the bottom of the door.
Her father—tall and wide, with skin as dark as blindness—was there with the shotgun, easing up to the front window above the couch, craning his neck to get a better angle on the animal.
“You can’t kill it,” Ava’s mother said. She appeared suddenly behind the child, like the ghost she would eventually become. She placed her arms around her daughter—the two of them standing in the center of the living room like small trees, both of them thin as rails, their nightgowns displaying all of their bony angles. Ava’s mother squatted beside her and placed one hand on her head and said, in a voice that seemed like a command rather than a reassurance, “He won’t kill it. I promise.”
“I suppose I’ve got to reason with it, Heather?” Macon said. “Dear Mr. Bear,” he said in a stern voice. “Please cease and desist your activities on these premises and return to your home. Have a beer.”
“You can’t kill it, Macon,” Heather replied, holding back a smile.
“I’m open to other ideas,” he said. “But I don’t think they make an Idiot’s Guide to Speaking Bear, so I believe my options are limited.”
“You can’t kill it,” Ava parroted. Very suddenly her concern over the life of the bear was greater than her fear of it. After all, she was only five years old. “You can’t kill it, Daddy,” she said.
Still Macon was at the window—shotgun in hand—twisting his neck and squinting his eyes, peering out and seeing little more than darkness. But the pounding on the door and the bellowing confirmed that nothing had changed. There was still a bear trying to get into their home.
“It just wants food,” Heather said.
“It’s just hungry,” Ava said, supporting the case for the bear.
Macon stepped away from the window and walked to the door. He lingered there, looking at the hinges and listening as the bear growled and moaned and banged against the door.
Macon moved away from the door and returned to the window above the couch. There was darkness and the broken silhouette of a mountain covered in trees beneath a thin salting of stars. But he could not see the bear. He would not be able to take aim at it from here. If he were to kill it, he would have to open the door. A thought came to him then. “Ava,” he called, “did you feed this bear?”
“No!” Ava said loudly, and the bear responded with a bellow—whether it was confirming or condemning the girl’s story was uncertain. The yelling of the bear was so loud and well-timed that, for an instant, the family couldn’t help but laugh. They knew then that all of the dark sharp-tooth things that existed in the world would not enter into their household. At least not tonight.
Macon sighed and, with resignation, said, “Okay.” Then he opened the breach on the gun and removed the shells and leaned it near the door and, in the loudest, deepest, most policelike voice he could muster, yelled, “Dear Mr. Bear! As sheriff of Stone Temple, I hereby demand that you vacate these premises. If you do not comply I will be forced to issue a warrant for your arrest. We do not entertain visitors at this late an hour.”
The bear fell silent.
Macon chuckled to himself. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” he said, turning to his wife and daughter. But in their faces he saw something akin to gratitude. Come what may, he would spare the animal’s life, and they loved him for it.
“Go away, Mr. Bear!” Ava shouted, looking at her father as she spoke. He seemed pleased, happy even. “No visitors this time of night,” she said.
“The diner doesn’t open until seven,” Heather shouted. And then they all laughed. “I’ll cook you eggs in the morning,” she yelled. “Eggs and bacon and maybe pancakes, whatever you want. But you’d better be a good tipper!”
“No bad checks,” Ava inserted, her face bright.
The small family could hardly breathe for laughing. It was a loud, hearty laugh that reverberated around their small, drafty home in the heart of the mountains. “Come with me,” Heather said. She took Ava’s hand and led her into the kitchen. When they returned Ava and Heather both carried cooking pots and metal spoons and they began banging and stomping in circles, half dancing, half marching, with Ava chanting, “Diner opens at seven,” in rhythm with her stomping and banging.
Macon held his sides with laughter.
“You hear that, Mr. Bear?” Ava called. “You’ll get eggs and ham in the morning. The diner opens at seven. But go away now, people are trying to sleep!”
Then, after a few more moments of silliness, Heather and Ava stopped and all three of them listened. They heard only silence. The bear was gone.
The family sat up together for the rest of the night, giggling and talking of nothing in particular. And when the sun rose it found them crumpled in a heap on the couch—Ava’s mother holding her in her arms, Ava’s father holding them both. Then, without word or explanation, the three of them cooked breakfast and, true to their word, set aside some eggs and ham. They set off into the woods, far enough away from the house so that the bear would not begin to think of their home as a place to be frequented in the hopes of food.
“We shouldn’t be doing this,” is all that Macon would say.
As a family, they cleared a place and left the eggs and ham and, just to properly complete the scene, Ava picked a flower and garnished the ham with it. “Do you think he’ll like it?” Ava asked.
“I’m sure,” her mother said, smiling. The sun crested the mountains and it filtered down through her dark hair and lit a halo around her head so that, when Ava looked up at her, she seemed to be floating above the earth, unattached to anything and yet connected to everything. She reached into her pocket and took out a small slip of paper. On it was written “Diner Hours: 7:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. Closed Sundays.”
“The world doesn’t have to be cruel,” Heather said as she took her daughter’s hand. “Sometimes it can be whatever we want it to be.”
THREE
WASH’S GRANDMOTHER, BRENDA, had always had a way with animals—dogs in particular. She garnered the nickname “the Dog Lady” and, for the most part, didn’t think it was something worth getting worked up over, so long as people chose discretion over valor and never said it to her face. If there was a dog that didn’t have a home, or one that had a home and simply needed a place to mend, it was brought to her. And sometimes the animals were left for years and simply became a part of the household, with no questions asked and no complaints offered by the commanding old woman.
So when the years had stacked up around her and life unfolded in its unpredictable way—taking from her a husband and a daughter—cancer for one; a car crash for the other—and she found herself with a grandson named Wash, who needed everything a child needed, the notion of turning her home into a dog shelter and clinic was as good a way as any to help the ends stay met.
And because she was an old-fashioned woman appreciative of her solitude, she liked the way the dogs always let her know when someone came calling. This morning they were at full tilt.
Wash heard what sounded like a car door closing outside, followed by the slow swish-swish sound of his grandmother’s house shoes sliding across the floor as she approached his bedroom. “I’ll handle it,” she said, looking in at the boy. “Likely as not it’s some damned reporter. Most of them got the hint, but there’s a hardheaded one in every bunch. And sometimes you just got to give them both barrels.”
Wash hoped his grandmother was speaking metaphorically, but he couldn’t really be sure. She kept an unloaded shotgun by the front door—a habit that, as legend went, she learned from a
n ornery cousin who lived on the other side of the state. She kept the shells for the gun in the pockets of the flowered apron she wore around the house because, as she once told Wash, “The world likes to sneak up on you, so you may as well be as ready as you can.”
“Just go back to sleep and get your rest,” she said, leaving Wash’s doorway and heading down the hall. “I’ll get this situated.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wash said. He pulled the covers over his head and listened to the sound of the barking dogs out back as his grandmother moved to the front of the house. He heard the curtain in the living room slide back gently as she peeked out to see who had come so early in the morning. Then the knock came at the front door.
“Hell,” Brenda said, but Wash couldn’t discern exactly which “Hell” it was. She had a “Hell” for every occasion.
He heard the door open.
“Hell,” she said again.
“Hello, Brenda,” the voice said. It was a man’s voice, deep and even.
“I guess the creek done rose that high, huh?” Brenda said. “High enough to bring you back this way. Can’t say I expected otherwise. Not really.”
“How have you been, Brenda?” the man asked.
“Rose petals and beef Wellington,” Brenda replied. “I suppose the polite thing for me to do is to ask how you’ve been.”
Wash got out of bed and walked softly to the doorway of his bedroom.
“You stay right there,” Brenda said loudly.
Wash froze. “Yes, ma’am,” he answered. He’d lived with his grandmother all of his life, and he knew which commands to obey and which were elective.
“Well...” the man at the door said.
“Well...” Brenda replied.
“You’re not going to make this easy, are you, Brenda?”
“Give me one good reason why I should?”
The man sighed. It was then that Wash recognized his voice. Perhaps it had been the sound of the dogs barking that had made it take so long, or perhaps it was the early hour—the sun had only just broken the sky and the world was still gold and amber and sluggish in the new day—or perhaps it was simply that he had not heard the man’s voice in nearly six years.