When We Get There

by Shauna Seliy

"Tell them to leave you alone," I said.

  He tried to whisper something, but nothing would come out of his throat.

  Slats came into the room. "Lucas. Quiet down. Be respectful."

  "They got to go away. If they go away, then—"

  "Be reasonable, doll. Let them do their jobs."

  "Sorry," one of the great-uncles said to the priests.

  A great-aunt said to one of them, "He's just—" And then, looking away from me, "His mother—"

  "Leave him go!" I yelled.

  The great-uncles came at me. One of them wrapped his arms around my chest and pulled me out of the room and down the stairs. Slats shouted, "That's too much. You don't got to do that." The great-uncle kept pulling at me until we were all the way down in the basement. He set me against the wall and shook his head at me. "Learn your place," he said. He went up the stairs and shut the door behind him. The lock made a loud clacking noise sliding into place.

  Chapter 16

  The windows in the basement were up near the ceiling and covered with snow, but light still made its way through, a spread-out light, like smoke. It was quiet. I pulled the hood of my coat on and tried to make it even quieter.

  My father had told me that when George Washington first came to western Pennsylvania, he took a boat down the Ohio. He carried a matchcoat and a bottle of rum, gifts for the Indian queen Aliquippa. He looked for Frenchmen in the trees. My father seemed to think the story told us all we needed to know about George Washington. He had smarts, and had charm—bringing a gift for Queen Aliquippa. And he had some sand to be running the river like that, the woods full of Indians and Frenchmen likely ready to cut his throat.

  Back then, my dad told me, Pennsylvania was a big stretch of forest. A whole state made of trees and trees. It must have been so quiet, especially down by the river in the places where the water hardly moved. I thought of what Washington's boat looked like from up above, the water snaking through the hills, and the hills a carpet of trees.

  He told me that up in the north part of the state there was a little pocket of virgin forest still there, a stand of tall white pines and old hemlocks tucked inside the Allegheny Forest. It was called Hearts Content. He thought we might get our act together sometime and take a trip up to see it, have a walk through those old trees. We got out a map of the forest once and looked for it, but we couldn't find it. He said we could just pack some sandwiches and go driving around until we found it. How could we miss it? The trees would be giants, he thought, and so old.

  Down in the basement, I wondered for the first time if it was even a real place. Maybe it was just something he dreamed up, a kind of place where all the lost things were, like Banning Two. It had just the kind of name my dad would put together for a made-up place, the kind of phrase he might slip into a song if he forgot the real words—Hearts Content.

  The lock popped on the basement door and one of the great-uncles shouted down, "All right, you're allowed out of the dungeon."

  Slats came to the door and said to him, "Think this is funny? I don't hear anyone laughing."

  "I'm laughing," he said.

  "My own brothers," Slats said to me, coming down the stairs. "They're afraid of those priests because they don't go to church." She came over to me, reached out and put her hands on the sides of my face. "You okay?"

  I pulled away from her and walked through the piles of clothes to the far end of the room. She went back to the stairs and sat down on the bottom step. "We used to get sent down here when we were little," she said. "That's what would have happened to them if they'd disrespected someone. That's why he brought you down here. They don't have any ideas of their own. Don't you worry, you'll be avenged. When I go back up there, I'll raise complete and total holy hell."

  I didn't say anything.

  "You all right? Those priests' dark outfits put a scare into your

  I moved over toward a set of old rain jackets that were pegged to the wall and saw, under them, glinting in the bare light, a rusted pair of ice skates. I took them down off the wall.

  She said, "They obviously scared the shit out of Benci. Did you see him race out of here? He's probably halfway to Florida."

  "Whose skates are these?" I said.

  She shrugged. "Come over here and sit down."

  The skates were white with black heels. They were narrow. The pegs and eyeholes for the laces were rusted almost to black. I hung them back up.

  "Will you come and sit down? Please? You're making me nervous in that coat with that hood on. You look like a hangman."

  I stayed where I was. "You ever been out to Bedford?" I said.

  "No," she said, but I saw her flinch a little. She turned away. She started rubbing her hands one over the other, like I'd seen her doing before upstairs. I walked closer to where she was sitting. I had that feeling, like I did every so often in school, when something I couldn't make out was starting to set itself straight. Or when I could see that a balloon someone was working on was about half a breath away from blowing to pieces.

  She stopped rubbing her hands and turned and looked at me. "I got half a mind to get you locked up in a place like that for what you just did upstairs."

  "Marko said maybe she's up there."

  "Marko?" She looked at the floor. ". . . Maybe those priests scared me a little too."

  My mother used to say that Slats had the doctor take out her tear ducts when he took out her gall bladder. She never cried, but she did just then, for a second, a quick burst, more like a sneeze.

  She pointed to one of the clothes piles, "Get me something."

  I picked up an old pair of pants and handed them to her.

  "These are scratchy as a shingle. I'll bleed to death."

  I went to get her something else, but she put her hand on my arm. "Just. . . it's okay. These are all right. Just sit down. Sit still here next to me, all right? Everything around here's happening so fast."

  I sat down. She kept her hand on my arm. Wind shook the windows. The floor creaked above us with everyone's footsteps. Kaya yelled down for Slats to come upstairs and help her cook. "Cool your jets," Slats said.

  "I'm trying to make that apricot roll the boys like, but I don't think I know what I'm doing," Kaya said.

  "I know you don't know what you're doing," Slats said.

  Kaya laughed.

  "I'm making a conversation with my grandson," Slats said. "They don't deserve that apricot roll anyway."

  Kaya walked away from the basement door. Slats stared ahead of her for a long while. Then she said, "You know, when we were growing up, he used to stand in the middle of the living room with his arms stretched out, and then we could hang on to him, two of us on one arm and two on the other. He would raise his arms up and down. It was hard to hold on, but what a kick, like a ride at the county fair, only it was in the living room. He was so strong. I had no idea. I thought everyone could do that, and that I would do it too when I was as big as he was. Turns out I can hardly hold two grocery bags at the same time."

  "What about what Marko said—"

  "I'm trying to tell you something." She wrapped her hands around my arm. "I'm trying to tell you that it's hard to keep going sometimes, hard to be strong all the time. Sometime it happens that you find out you can't hold two grocery bags at the same time." She had another sneeze of tears and said, "Don't you say nothing to those people upstairs about me crying." She wiped her face on the old pants and threw them on the pile. "They'll think I'm going soft and they won't know what to do with themselves." She started up the stairs.

  "What about my mom?" I said.

  She kept walking.

  Chapter 17

  King was tapped out.

  Rumors had been running around for a long while that it was spent, that it was too dangerous, that they could never get the air clean enough. After my father got killed, it seemed that people said those things more often. On the nights when my mother couldn't sleep and she'd make me go out walking with her, we sometimes ended up at
King. As much as I didn't like getting woken up in the middle of the night, I liked to walk over there and make sure the mine was still up and running. I thought that us going over there, looking after it, was helping it stay afloat. I didn't like the idea of the places he'd worked getting sealed shut, the whole thing called off. I didn't know about her, but I wanted King to keep running, on and on, forever.

  The company had posted notices around town letting us know when they were going to pull out the stump that held up the pit's roof. Benci and I saw them when we were driving to the school. Slats had made him stay with us through the night at the farm. In the morning, she called in sick to the Plate Glass and had Benci take me to her house to get ready for school.

  Benci didn't work a mine, but he said that when they yanked the stump there was going to be about 150 feet of earth caving in on itself. He said we didn't have anything to worry about, that the notices were for people that had creaking porches, or pretty china plates, or nervous ways of thinking.

  Coming down the road to Slats's house, I saw there was a police patrol car parked in her driveway. "What in hell?" Benci said. He slowed down.

  Mr. D'Angelo was sitting on her front porch swing.

  I slid down in the seat. "Keep going."

  "Let's find out what's going on."

  "You got to keep going."

  "Maybe her house got broken into or something. You don't need your books or anything? Why are you all slid down like that?"

  "I got the books. Or they're at the school already."

  He gave me a hard look and started to wind down the window.

  "Benci, don't say anything to him. Keep going."

  "You do something?"

  "I got to get to school. I got things to do there."

  "I think you're telling me a story."

  "I'm not. I got a test."

  "You're definitely telling me a story," he said, but then he sort of smiled at me and wound up his window.

  When we got to the school, he said, "Whatever you done, you know that D'Angelo is kind of a hard-ass. Be careful."

  I nodded. I went inside and waited until I heard his truck pull away, then I went out the back. I took the bus to Brilliant first. Once I got there, I couldn't really figure out how to get the rest of the way to Bedford, and I didn't want to ask anyone. I stood at the bus stop watching people come and go. I saw a pack of student nurses in blue capes. They had student nurses in a couple of hospitals, and I thought they probably had them out at Bedford too. I took the buses they took. When they finally got to where they were headed, it seemed like it was in the middle of nowhere. There was a patch of low buildings across the road from the stop and as soon as we got off the bus, the nurses disappeared into those, their capes fluttering behind them.

  A few other people had gotten off the bus too. I followed them. They went up a hill and then turned onto a road. Once we got to the crest of the hill, I kind of caught my breath; there was the yellow smokestack that I knew, but aside from that, Bedford wasn't at all what I'd pictured. From far away, it always seemed like it was just the one red building with that smokestack poking out over the hills, but it was practically a whole town. The big red building was in the center, and spread out all around it were sets of smaller buildings, and barns, and wide fields with animals scattered over them, and tractors, and office buildings with wide shining windows.

  Once we got up the long driveway to the entrance of the big red brick building, the people walking ahead of me went off in all different directions. I saw a sign pointing the way for visitors and I followed it inside the main building. It smelled like food cooking, but not a good smell, more like a pot of meat someone had forgotten about boiling and boiling away.

  I walked around in the hallway until an older man, a guard with salt-and-pepper hair, said, "Can I help you?"

  "I'm looking for someone," I said staring at the floor tiles.

  "If you're looking for them down in those cracks, we're going to have to keep you in here." He put his hand on my shoulder and pointed me to an open doorway. "You got to go into the office and talk to the big gun."

  In the room, a large nurse with a sharp, clean white hat sat behind a counter, tapping on a humming electric typewriter. Walking behind her were more nurses dressed like her and student nurses with blue capes, and behind all of them, there were rows of filing cabinets, and shelves and shelves of glass jars full of pills.

  "I'm looking for someone," I said.

  She didn't slow down in her typing. "Not a visiting day today," she said. "Visiting days are Sundays."

  I was all turned around about what day it was. I kept staring at her.

  She stopped typing and looked at me. "It's a school day today, in case you didn't know it." She went back to typing.

  I felt all spent. I'd hardly slept the night before at the farm. I couldn't picture getting on the bus back to Banning. And when I did get back, Mr. D'Angelo might still be waiting for me on Slats's porch. There was a chair behind me. I sat down.

  The nurse looked up at me. "Just come back on Sunday."

  I stayed where I was and watched the doctors and nurses coming and going in the hallway, and the people pushing carts and wheelchairs. She got up from her desk and left the room. A while later she came back and stood in front of me.

  "You going to wait for it to turn Sunday?"

  I looked past her, out to the hallway. "Maybe if she's in here, she'll walk by."

  "Walk by? We got close to five hundred people in here." She went back behind the counter. "I don't even know how many people work here." The guard who'd led me to her came in and leaned against the wall. "How many people you think work here, Red?" she said to him.

  "Let's see." He pretended like he was counting. "Too many," he said. The nurse laughed like it was the best joke she'd heard all year.

  I stayed where I was, watching the hallway. I'd probably been sitting there for an hour or so when a young girl and a lady—her mother, I guessed—came in from outside. The older lady went up to the nurse, leaned nearly all the way over the typewriter, and started talking to her loud and fast.

  The girl sat next to me. She pulled a cigarette out of her purse. It was a clove cigarette, and as soon as she lit it, the room smelled like cinnamon and burning flowers. She didn't look much older than the girls in the high school.

  She leaned toward me. "I'd ask you if you want one of these, but she makes me pay for them myself." She nodded toward her mother. "I have to keep watch over them like they're the crown jewels." She was wearing a denim jacket with a sheepskin collar. She had green eyes with freckles scattered under them and a lot of long, black curly hair.

  I shrugged.

  She kept looking at me. "Seems like I know you. Are you from Luna?"

  My throat was all dry. I was too tired to talk and was half asleep. I shook my head.

  "Did you ever come to Luna to get an animal stuffed, you know, something you shot or a fish you caught or something?"

  I shook my head again.

  "Huh. You look familiar is all. My dad's the taxidermist, in Luna." She took a long breath of her cigarette. "He doesn't work anymore though, you know, now that he's cracked."

  I opened my eyes wide, to keep from falling asleep, but I guess she thought she'd scared me.

  "It's okay," she said. "He's not like that man who killed his wife with a blender, out in Mineral. That guy's in here too though, you know. I've seen him—"

  "Helen," her mother said. "You're going to disturb that boy."

  "He's already disturbed, Mum. What do you think he's doing here? He's checking himself in, that's what. He was just telling me about it. Came to fill out all the papers."

  The nurse leaned back from her desk. "Would you mind putting out that cigarette, young lady? It doesn't smell right."

  The girl's mother said, "That's what I tell her. Smells like burning garbage."

  She took the cigarette out of her mouth and looked at it. "I got a lot of precious smoke left here." She sto
od up. "Come outside with me."

  I didn't move.

  She said, "I don't like walking around here by myself. I might see someone crazy, you know, like dear old dad. Just walk me outside."

  I stood up. When we were sitting down, she'd seemed taller than I was, but we were the same height.

  "I shouldn't talk about Dad like that," she said when we got outside. "He's all right. Strictly speaking, if you were to make a study of it, the only cracked thing he does lately is talk to my brother Billy. Always telling him to stop hanging around the gas station with his friends. Or that he's going to have his fingertips stained for life if he doesn't quit rolling those cigarettes."

  I followed her down the steps and over to a rambling post fence that faced a long, story-high barn. She smashed her cigarette in the ground and tapped on it with her shoe. She took another one out of her purse and lit it. "Billy got shot in Vietnam. So he's dead. It's no use telling him anything anymore." She shrugged. "He was always putting things in his mouth, Billy was. Cigarettes, lollipops, toothpicks, chewing tobacco. And whenever I think of it happening, I think of the guy pointing the gun at him and then him grabbing the gun and kind of sticking it in his mouth . . . What do you think? Think that's how it happened?"

  My father had been just a little too old to get called up for Vietnam. Maybe if he would have gone over, it would have happened the same way it did at King, or almost the same way—he could have stepped on a mine, or walked under a bomb. It was better that it happened at King. Vietnam was so far away from us, but we could go over to King whenever we wanted and sit by the mine pond. We could walk over the hills and know he was under them, just under our feet. I didn't know if it would be the same with the mine closed.

  "They're shutting down King," I said. It came rushing out of me like I was spitting up something I ate.

  "Are they now? That's sad, isn't it?"

  "It's tapped."

  "Is that right?"

  "It's the last one left in Banning."

  "Well, that's too bad . . . The last what?"

  "Mine. King's a coal mine. What'd you think I was talking about?"