“I knew something would happen! We always thought it’d be Lily,” Mom says. “Lily always needed all the attention but it only makes sense that something would happen to Lauren.”
Doesn’t she know I’m here? I’m standing only a few feet away.
The more Mom talks the more excited she gets, and soon she’s speaking in . . . really . . . short . . . sentences.
The stranger rocks in place.
“Let her speak, Kit.”
Jesus slips His hand in mine, but I shake it off. I heard what Mom said, I know what she meant, but holding His hand doesn’t make it better. None of it.
“I’m sure Lauren is fine, Mrs. Asher.” The woman is smaller than I am, wears a short Mia Farrow haircut and a lime-green minidress. “I wanted to assure you that—”
“Hold on a minute. You mean you don’t know if she’s fine? She’s off in the woods and you don’t know if she’s okay?”
“Is Lauren dead?” Maybe SOG wanted to tell me something earlier.
All three adults suddenly look at me.
“The woods are our friend,” I say, meaning to calm Mom. I think of a book she used to read to Lauren and me, and its illustrations of baby animals on rainy days—fawns under giant ferns and raccoon cubs in the trunks of rotted fallen trees.
“Not now, Lily,” Dad says.
Sometimes I think my mouth belongs to someone else.
It starts to sprinkle. Is it raining where Lauren is?
The woman steps forward. “If I could come in, I’m sure we—”
“No,” Mom says. “I want to hear what happened. Right here. Right now.”
“For God’s sake, Kit.” Dad blushes, then whispers in her ear, “Did you take your happy pill this morning?”
The woman pauses before saying, “Lauren was unable to finish the hike—”
“Unable?”
“Blisters. I think it was her new boots,” says the woman quietly.
Mom freezes.
“So our Outdoor School counselors, Tad and Elizabeth, made the decision to leave her in a safe location along the trail. To rest. She had her jacket and sleeping bag, water and a candy bar, and they fully intended to return to her that afternoon, but,” she smiled uncomfortably, “they’re young themselves and it was their first year as counselors and, of course, their first full day with the kids, so they didn’t really know them. And I guess in all the excitement they forgot to count off every thirty minutes as they were instructed to do. And,” her smile drops, “one thing led to another . . .”
Mom tenses. She hates that expression. “They forgot her? Overnight? Alone in the woods?”
“Lauren will be here in a few minutes; I just wanted to be sure you were home. I’m sure she’s okay. Just a little . . . tired, maybe.”
* * *
Miss Marcus, my sister’s favorite teacher, brings Lauren home.
Lauren listed her as an emergency contact (which surprises Mom), and Miss Marcus got the phone call sometime around four a.m., tucked her pajamas into her jeans, and drove to the wilderness area immediately.
She pulls up behind the car belonging to the short woman in the lime-green minidress. The women soon leave, and while Dad carries Lauren inside and I clear off her stuffed animals and open the bed, Mom stands in the garage crying.
* * *
Lauren isn’t sick but Mom treats her like she is, buying her ice cream, making her macaroni and cheese and grape Kool-Aid (even though it isn’t summer). She carefully drapes a heating pad around her bare blistered feet. Every time Lauren needs to get up, she has to call Mom.
Mom doesn’t mind. She feels guilty for “not thoroughly reading Lauren’s list” that Dad said had “been on the fridge for a month.”
I sit on a chair beside Lauren’s bed and when she hands me the list, I read out loud: “Three: wear comfortable previously worn hiking boots. New footwear is prohibited.”
Yeah, it was right there.
“Four: new warm clothing is acceptable. Being warm, casual, and comfortable is paramount. A fashionable appearance is unimportant. The goal of Outdoor School is to acquaint student campers/hikers with Northwest flora and fauna and to challenge their outdoor skills.”
Number four is no problem, but nothing could have kept Lauren warm that night. With her back to a tree, too frightened to move or pee or even look behind her, imagining that every little twig snap or rustling leaf was a wild animal coming to eat her, she didn’t sleep, or cry either. Lauren’s muscles were so cramped from not moving that she fell to her knees when they first stood her up.
“Shit,” said Elizabeth, the new counselor, helping her to stand.
“That’s enough from you, young lady,” said a worried man in khakis and tennis shoes. Lauren figured he was the boss. “I’ll see you in my office.” Next to him stood a park ranger.
Once Miss Marcus arrived, she insisted the men carry Lauren out. “You can’t expect her to walk! Look at her feet! Poor thing!”
Lauren tells me the story.
When Miss Marcus arrived to drive her home, Lauren was happier to see her than she’d ever been to see anyone in her whole life. “Even Mom and Dad. Even them. Ever.”
Ever.
Lauren points at my notebook. “Write down that I want to be a teacher when I grow up, okay? I want to be just like Miss Marcus. Write it down.”
I do. Under Miscellaneous. I write down everything she said as quickly as I can, listing blame and responsibilities under Parents, Outdoor School, and SOG.
Jesus isn’t getting off this time. That was my sister out there.
That night, I stay in Lauren’s room, beside her on the floor in my sleeping bag. I write I love you in Helen Keller talk on the palm of her hand, and she does the same on mine.
At midnight I walk through the house checking doors and windows and cupboards, something I haven’t done in a while. Things get out if you’re not careful, things get in.
Mrs. Wiggins and I used to walk through the house together. I concentrate on feeling her wet nose on my bare leg but I can’t. I wish she were around to talk to. She watched over all of us—even, for a while, after she died. Now no one does—well, SOG does sometimes, I guess, but He needs watching over too. Sometimes I think the older I get, the younger He gets. Which is weird when somebody is almost two thousand years old.
Back on the floor in Lauren’s room, I hear Mom’s snores down the hall. She snores when she’s had too much to drink.
I hate her so much that night it keeps me awake; I hate both my parents. Maybe Dad feels it. He is up too; I ignore him when he peeks in Lauren’s room. Sometimes I think Dad’s the saddest one in the family. Maybe Jesus should have crawled through his window screen.
If Lauren moved into my room I could keep her safe. She’d never have to go to Outdoor School again, she’d never have to leave my room. And my bed is big enough for both of us.
I watch the clock and each minute ticking off: Ask her to move in, don’t ask her. Ask her, don’t ask her, like pulling petals off a daisy. Sometime after 3:17 I fall asleep.
The next morning, Lauren hobbles into the kitchen on Gramma’s crutches, stopping beside Mom at the stove to swing back and forth, her feet free of the floor. “It’s groovy, Lily,” she tells me. “Want to try it?”
“No thanks.”
I feel Mom looking at me, waiting for me to say something sweet and smart and older-sisterish to Lauren, something Lauren and I will treasure when we’re all grown up. Sisters are supposed to know each other better than anyone else and stay special to each other their entire lives, like in Little Women, but it wasn’t like that for Mom and Jamie and it isn’t like that for my sister and me either.
I want to say I’m sorry, but I can’t. The truth is, I love Jamie and SOG and Mrs. Wiggins as much as I love Lauren, and they’re already living in my room.
There isn’t space for Lauren.
I’m glad I didn’t ask her to move in.
I look down the hall at my room and see that
the door is cracked open.
A cold damp mist billows out around it, and inside owls hoot and twigs snap. Trees cha-cha in the wind and cold water rolls over mossy rocks.
A shadow passes over the hall rug.
SOG is back.
I can smell the woods from here and it smells good.
Chapter 14
Picasso’s Not Home
“Goodwill?” Mom says, pawing through my box. The brushes in her hair wiggle like insect antennas. “Are you sure you want to donate so many toys? Once they’re gone, they’re gone, you know.”
I know.
“Just because Judy gave everything away doesn’t mean you have to.”
A minute later I take the bulging cardboard box to the garage where Dad stands at the portable workbench he never uses, digging at something in his hand with a screwdriver.
“Hey, sweetie,” he says. His nose flares when he holds his hand under the lamp and pokes the screwdriver into the soft flat place where Jesus has His stigmata. He stiffens and spreads his fingers like the painted hand on the gypsy tent at the county fair.
“I’m giving my old stuff to charity,” I tell him.
“Great. You’re old enough to appreciate sharing with those less fortunate, I’m proud of you.” The back of his neck is red. Whatever’s in there must be deep.
“I could get you some tweezers.”
“Thanks for the concern, kiddo,” he says, walking me toward the open garage door, “but I’m fine. You go play now, and let your old dad build something manly at his workbench.”
I’m too old to “go play” and I almost remind him of that when he pulls down the broken garage door. Three-quarters of the way down, it catches. “Like your new bike?” he asks through the garage window. His voice is muffled.
“Yeah.”
“Another year or so and you can study for your driver’s permit. Imagine that!”
He wants be alone, even if he’s hurting himself. I like to be alone too, so I draw giant chalk infinity loops in the driveway and practice going over them on my new ten-speed, getting to “know the bike before you take it on the street,” as Dad insisted. Red, my three-speed Schwinn with fat tires, is too small for me now.
Dad’s very protective of us.
And he’s smart, maybe too smart. They seem to need him at the office all the time these days. Late nights, sometimes even Saturday mornings.
Once, last month, our Sunday drive was canceled when he got a call from the office. Mom said it was a bookie at the track, but Dad said he was needed and had to go. Lauren still gets nervous when they leave her behind. The night in the woods was months ago now and I showed her how long on the paper-plate clock she made me in first grade. Imagining the minute hand as days and the hour hand as months, I turned back time until she said, “I thought you’d understand,” and stormed out of my room.
That night I heard Dad and Mom in their bedroom. “We should never have encouraged Lauren to go in the first place,” Dad said. “We bought her boots, and told her everything would be fine when we didn’t know a goddamn thing about Outdoor School. We let her down. We’re her parents and we put her in danger.”
Suddenly I heard him cry, tell Mom how he couldn’t protect us, how he couldn’t be the man she wanted him to be. How he had “one goddamn job” and even that he “can’t do right.”
Mom didn’t contradict him but said, “Shhh,” over and over instead, and after a few minutes turned off the light.
I wanted to go in there and tell him that he is doing a good job, but then he’d know I was listening. Eavesdropping: I like that word, it’s Old Norse.
* * *
I ride my new bike in smaller and smaller circles watching Dad through the Plexiglas window of the broken automatic garage door he calls a “goddamn waste of money.” He glances up at me occasionally but doesn’t stop digging.
I should do something. Mom would want me to stop him, wouldn’t she? He could get an infection or cut a nerve. He doesn’t react when I knock on the garage door window and shout, “Dad! Stop!” Why is he ignoring me? “Dad!”
He waves me off. “Go help your mother,” he calls out.
But lunch is over, and Mom shooed everyone out of the kitchen fifty-six minutes ago. Lauren walked to the store with Rusty, and I boxed up my old things. Dad headed to the garage with a bottle of beer; it’s still there beside him, he hasn’t touched it.
“Dad!” I yell.
He turns off the lamp.
Minutes later, I’m sitting in the family room flipping through TV stations, when I hear Dad lie to Mom.
“Shop accident,” he says, explaining the blood-soaked rag in the palm of his hand, but there was no sawing or hammering or nailing. At least not while I watched.
Mom is worried but she’s mad too and, after a scene on Rainy Saturday Movies where a barefoot princess with a lacy dunce cap and big boobs kisses Victor Mature, I hear her say something about Dad’s secretary who “seems to know everything, even why you would cut yourself, for God’s sake.”
Dad answers, “What the hell does Toni have to do with anything?”
And Mom replies, “Stop hurting yourself, we can work it out,” or something like that.
When I take my notebook out of my sweater pocket it’s to count how many times Victor’s muscles flex when he holds the princess by her arms, how many times she lets him kiss her before she slaps him. I sometimes practice long romantic kisses with my pillow; I want to do it right.
Dad’s pacing (I hear his pocket change) as Mom talks about “Portland Meadows,” and after a short quiet, he says, “Sure, until we need something for the house.”
Mom bursts into tears. Her tears are loud and angry when she races down the hall and throws open the cupboard under the bathroom sink where the medical supplies are stored. Running by me again, she carries gauze, tape, and hydrogen peroxide.
But Dad’s already in the car. Heading out to “catch up at work,” he yells from the car window, even though it’s Saturday on Thanksgiving vacation and he promised he’d be around all weekend.
All.
Weekend.
“At least let me disinfect it!” Mom calls. “Come on, Paul!”
But he’s pulling out of the driveway, and all she can do is light a cigarette and shake her head.
I stand behind her, back to back, and grab her wrists, waving her arms up and down like wings. She relaxes her body and lets me do it; we’ve done it before. Her burning cigarette flies into the air, landing in a rain puddle. Mom’s skin is cold, and her wrists are smaller than mine. How tall will I be when I finally stop growing?
“Look!” I call out as we sail above the stone streets and columned buildings of an ancient city in Turkey or Greece. No, it’s Rome. Of course! “We’re flying over . . . the Roman Forum! What’s-his-name is stabbing Caesar! Look, Mom, they just released the lions into the Coliseum!”
I wait for her to tell me what she sees. Usually it’s camels and pyramids, white sandy beaches or an exhausted Humphrey Bogart dragging The African Queen through mosquito-infested backwaters.
“It’s okay, Lily,” she says instead. “He’ll be back.”
Portland Meadows is where Judy said Dad won money for the new binoculars, redwood fence, and dishwasher. It’s where Shannon Overbeck’s father said my father plays the dogs.
“What kind of dogs?” I asked her. In Lauren’s school production of Peter Pan, the shortest kid played Nana the sheepdog.
“Greyhounds,” Shannon explained. “You know, gambling?”
I guess, but if I didn’t she’d beat me up before she’d explain it anyway. Shannon’s the tallest girl in school, even taller than I am; she’s been held back twice, and she’s mad at everybody.
Playing the dogs.
I remember how the neighborhood dogs ran through Crawford Woods once, knocking my family into the bushes. How I felt the dogs’ strong fast muscles in my legs and how, for just a minute, I ran with them. It really happened, didn’t it? The night
Lauren fell into the quarry pit and the sky was full of stars and comets and imagined constellations, racing dogs, and flying carpets?
* * *
Dad’s been gone five hours.
The beef Stroganoff is good, but we don’t eat much.
“I have a surprise,” Mom says, drumming her fingers on the evening newspaper. Lauren and I perk up. “I think we’ve waited long enough for your father.” She opens it to the Home and Arts section and spreads it wide. She points at the headline.
“Artistic Housewife Wins Contest,” I read aloud. Underneath it is a photograph of an attractive woman in a baggy paint-splattered work shirt and long slim legs, seated at her easel.
“That’s you!” Lauren squeals. “What’d you win?”
“Three months of personal instruction, each Wednesday morning, with the Portland Art Museum’s new wunderkind, Mark, Marcus something-or-other. Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Congratulations,” I smile. “Now everyone will know you’re an artist.”
Mom looks toward the front door.
“Asher’s painting Si-BI-you Four,” I read out loud (the number is in Roman numerals; I love Roman numerals), “is her first venture into impressionism.”
Lauren leans over the paper. “It explores the emotional legacy of being a child in Eastern Europe, during the war.”
“That’s Sibiu. See-Bee-You Four,” Mom says softly.
Four? Does that mean there were three other paintings before this one? I’ve never seen them. Did she throw them away? Were there children in the windows of the houses she painted? Was Mom one of them?
“Proud of me, girls?” she says, and we nod our heads enthusiastically.
“Does Dad know?” Lauren asks.
Mom touches her arm. “Check the phone, will you, sweetheart? It’s been acting up lately.”
The dial tone is loud and clear.
* * *
The Rifleman reruns are on TV and Lucas McCain and his son Mark have come into town for supplies. While they load up the week’s staples, the old sheriff tells them about the new gunslinger in town.
I point at the tall bearded bad guy with the crazy eyes. “That’s Bruce Dern,” I tell my sister. “He’s on all the westerns: Wagon Train, Bonanza.”
The Shark Curtain Page 17