by Beth Kephart
“Hey,” he says when he sees me.
“Hey.” I feel myself going hot, my heart going to flutters.
“Sophie Marks,” Miss Cloris says, “meet my friend Miss Helen. Found Sophie in her window and invited her in. Claims she’s not an interrupter.”
“That so?” Joey says, and I feel myself going hotter as Joey looks me up and down with that crooked smile on his face and Miss Helen stares at me with eyes so blue I think they’re green. Beside the stuffy chair, her wheelchair leans. Beyond the chair and Miss Helen, through a window screen, sits a strange silver thing, like a house on wheels that got stuck on the side of a road. It’s shiny as the bottom of a new pan. It has white twinkle lights hung around its rim. The lights are on, though it’s the middle of daytime. It looks rooted, like a tree.
“For when we take our cross-country,” Miss Cloris says when she sees what I am staring at, and I nod, not knowing what she means. I look back into the room, where the blue-sky walls are stenciled over with French fry–colored words.
“Our favorite authors,” Miss Cloris explains, as if she’s following every movement of my eyes. “Their very best words. We paint them here so we don’t forget them.”
“You know Willa?” Miss Helen asks me. Her voice is small, almost a whisper.
“She will soon,” Miss Cloris says.
“I Know Kipling,” I say. “I know Alcott.”
“Well,” Miss Helen says, “that’s a good-enough start.” Miss Cloris excuses herself and walks funny-toed to the kitchen. She returns with a tray of lemonades. “The party begins,” she says, giving one tall glass to each of us, and now she tells Joey to read from where he stopped off. She squats into the second stuffy chair, pulling me down with her. Her end of the cushion sinks fast; mine goes higher. Joey takes a swallow of his lemonade, then smashes his cap down harder and rubs an itch off his nose, his lips twisted up in a funny smile. Harvey whines from his locked room upstairs. Everything else is silent.
“ ‘Every conical hill was spotted with smaller cones of juniper, a uniform yellowish green, as the hills were a uniform red,’ ” Joey reads. “ ‘The hills thrust out of the ground so thickly that they seemed to be pushing each other, elbowing each other aside, tipping each other over.’ ”
“We’re in New Mexico,” Miss Helen whispers. “1851.”
“Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Miss Cloris says, trying to whisper, too, but it comes out strange. “Cather’s masterwork.”
I look from one to the other. They both blink. Sit there as if they’re expecting something smart to come from me, but I don’t know Cather and I’ve never been to New Mexico and this is 2004, and besides, I have sworn up and down that I am not an interrupter.
“We like going on adventures,” Miss Helen finally says. “Cather takes us along.”
“By way of Joey, our reader,” Miss Cloris says.
“Should I keep going, then?” Joey asks, and Miss Helen and Miss Cloris nod, like they’re the same person with the same mind, except they couldn’t be more different. Miss Cloris’s hair is as puffed up wild as the bow that’s stuck inside. Miss Helen’s is long and white and soft. I look from one to the other, and Joey reads, and I’m not really listening at first. I’m thinking how strange it is to be sitting here, in another’s house, and how the clock is ticking, and how the essay waits, and how my mother will kill me if she finds out, and how sweet and chill is this lemonade. She will kill me. But then, I think, I can always outrun my mother.
“ ‘Under his buckskin riding-coat he wore a black vest and the cravat and collar of a churchman,’ ” Joey reads. “ ‘A young priest, at his devotions; and a priest in a thousand, one knew at a glance. His bowed head was not that of an ordinary man,—it was built for the seat of a fine intelligence.’”
“One of literature’s finest creations,” Miss Cloris sighs, and just now, from down the hall, slinks the cat with its thick, silver-gray hair and its eyes blue-green as Miss Helen’s. Quiet, the big cat leaps and settles into the space between Miss Cloris and me, and Miss Cloris fits her hand to the cat’s head without saying a word. The cat’s heart hums, but the cat doesn’t speak. Joey reads on, and that’s all there is, except for my own heart, still beating.
Emmy
He comes not by the rails, but by the road—up the rubble of the nursery’s drive, unsteady on the turf. His gray hair is blowsy in the breeze. Streamers ripple from his handlebar’s cuffs. It’s a girl’s bike he has, with the fattest rubber wheels. Its seat is long and sparkly. The man at the nursery turns when Arlen rides by. He slips the cigarette out from between his lips and blows a smoke puff to the sky.
The ground rattles beneath my feet. “Train coming,” Arlen says. He skids to a stop and dismounts, knocks the kickstand down. He walks the little distance through the forest of tall grass and reaches for my hands, and right when he does, a train roars by, just as he promised.
“Where are we going?” he asks, watching the train disappear.
“Straight to the big station,” I tell him.
“That’s the plan?”
I nod. “That’s the plan, Arlen. Our first stop.”
“You won’t go home?” he asks again.
“No, I won’t,” I say.
He looks at me for a while without speaking. “We’re talking about some distance.”
The smoker keeps his eyes on us. Arlen gives me a tug, and I’m up. The slightest pressure and my ankle flashes fire. It’s hurting worse than it did in the night, but I don’t say it, because Arlen is feeling bad enough. I hop-walk to the bike with Arlen’s help, then he turns me around and lifts me up. Fits me onto the bike’s handlebar. Shows me where to wrap my fists. He steadies me; he steadies the bike.
“Back roads or direct roads?” Arlen asks when I’m fit, fixed and sure, into the handlebar’s curve. The kickstand is up; Arlen’s behind me.
“Fast as we can get there,” I say.
“You don’t mind us getting seen?”
“We’ve already been seen.” I nod across the distance to the gardener standing there. He blows another smoke puff high and salutes me, like a veteran.
“You’re sure?”
“I am.”
I feel Arlen putting everything he has against me—digging down into the pedals with his feet, steering the front wheel straight as he can steer it across the nursery driveway’s rubble. I squeeze so hard with my fists that my elbows hurt. I shift this way and that to keep my balance. Neither of us talk—not Arlen, not me—because going forward is taking everything we’ve got. Finally we make it out onto the street. Arlen stops the forward motion, stands behind me, panting.
“We’ve got the toughest part out of the way,” he says between hard, hoarse breaths.
“Arlen,” I say, “it just occurred to me. Today’s a workday and you’re missing work. I’m going to get you in trouble.”
“Taken care of that,” he says, still barely breathing.
“Already?”
“I left a note for my supervisor. Family emergency, I told him.”
I feel my face flushing pink and red. “You’re a sweet man, Arlen,” I tell him.
“Something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he says.
“Emmy,” I say. “My name. That what you wanted?”
“I suppose.”
I wish I could turn and see him, but that would throw our balance. I wish I could touch my hand to his in a way that would let him know I am grateful.
“Ready?” he asks after saying nothing for a spell, and I feel the bike budge and shift, cut and weave, until at last we find ourselves gliding smoothly. Arlen keeps to the sidewalk wherever he can. On the roads, he pedals straight down the margins. It’s still early enough that the traffic is light, and only three cars so far have honked at us crazy.
“You’re good at this,” I tell him.
“Holding on is its own talent,” he says.
It’s miles to the big station; I know as much. We’ve maybe gone one mile, and th
is is not your simple and easy. I try not to think of the hurricane eyes inside of Peter, the hurricane wrath. If I find Baby, Peter will forgive me. If I find Baby, finding Baby will be all that matters.
“You okay up there?” Arlen calls to me.
“Just fine,” I call back. The sun has come up like a squint on the horizon. Most everything we travel by is pink. The glass in the shops. The windshields on cars. The glint flecks in the sidewalks and on the streets. I haven’t seen a cop drive by. I’ve seen no posters on the trees. No one and nothing but me and Arlen searching for Baby. We take a ninety-degree angle hard and wobble our way back to a glide. My elbows hurt more than my fingers.
“How about you? You okay?” I call over my shoulder.
“Time is of the essence,” Arlen says.
There’s breeze in my hair, in my heart. Baby, I think, I’m coming for you, because this is the logic best as I can calculate: whoever took her will disappear as quick as the first train out will take them. They wouldn’t leave last night, when the police and their big-nosed dogs were hunting. But they’d leave right now, under dawn’s smoky cover, when the police are still stirring into coffee.
“Arlen,” I say, “you are my hero.”
“Least I could do,” he says, puffing.
Sophie
“That’s it?” my mother asks. “That’s all you’ve written?”
She holds the single page as if it’s a smelly onion peel, shakes it as if it’s crumbs, knocks it down between her hamburger and the ketchup. Her name tilts on her uniform pocket. Her hair slips free from her bun. She had a misery day and I’ve worsened it plenty. “One page,” she says, “and not a single mention of the buckyball.”
I swallow the last of my chips and meet her eyes. I steal a look toward my essay, blooming grease spots.
“The buckyball, Sophie. The roundest round molecule, the most symmetrical large molecule of all.” She closes her eyes and sinks her face into the bones of her hands, and when the next piece of her hair falls loose, she sighs. Suddenly I wish I could tell Mother about Joey and his aunts, about the cat and the dog, about Father Latour and the red hills of New Mexico, the clover fields, the cottonwoods, the acacia. What, I asked, is acacia? Acacia, Miss Cloris answered. Some call them whistling thorns. Whistling thorns, I would say to my mother. why can’t we talk about that?
The light of the real day is gone. The lamplight is harsh. My mother’s hands are blue blooded and thin and heavy with her chin, and in the silence I remember her years ago, on the floor of a lost house, beside me. She’d bought a long roll of waxed white paper and pots of finger paints and said, “we’ll paint what we dream.” There wasn’t white in her hair. There wasn’t night beneath her eyes. She’d unrolled the paper across the width of the floor, and all afternoon we painted dreams. Hers were blue like sky. Mine were yellow-pink, like sun. Afterward, for the whole next week, her fingers were the color of the purple inside shadows.
“Mother,” I say now, “I’ll make it up to you. I promise.”
“How’s that?” she moans, her words mashed behind her hands.
“Tomorrow. You’ll see. I’ll surprise you.”
She lifts her eyes and squints against the lamplight. She straightens the name on her shirt. “I’m awfully tired,” she says. “Awfully so.” She puts her hands down flat and pushes herself up from the table. She wobbles a little, then stands.
“Getting late,” she says.
“I’ll clean up,” I tell her.
“Do some reading,” she tells me. “Take an interest.”
It’s a half-moon night. The clouds float low, skimming the rooftops, gauzing the street lamps, and down there, low, past the cradle of the tree, Miss Cloris and Miss Helen swing from the wooden porch chair that hangs from silver chains. The swing creak is an evening song, bigger than their talk, bigger than crow rustle, bigger even than the sound of my mother snoring, one floor below.
Perfection. Mother uses the word, but nothing ever is; it’s a false-hope word, an illusion. It’s sitting inside Joey’s house like I have a right to be there, like I won’t be erased from this neighborhood if Mother figures her way to the truth. I didn’t write my long essay because I didn’t give it proper time. I didn’t give it time because I didn’t want to. I wanted to stay with Joey and his aunts and the archbishop and the hills. I wanted to stay where the cat Minxy sleeps, where they slip orange slices in with the fresh-squeezed lemonade, where I’m not supposed to be.
“Hey,” I hear, and when I look up, I see the shadows that Joey makes, hanging out into the dark from his second-floor window.
“Joey,” I ask. “what are you doing?”
“Looking out,” he whisper-shouts, putting his hands up to his face. He blows the words across the alley of the yard and up so nobody else can hear them. I can’t see more than the blur of him, the flopped, funny wilderness of his uncapped hair.
“Me, too,” I say. “I’m looking out.”
“You see the moon?”
“Sliced right in half.”
“You see the crows?”
“They’re black as night.”
We stay quiet for a while, let the night songs sing.
“Joey?”
“Yeah?”
“You like school?”
“It’s okay enough.”
“You ever hear of Archimedean solids?”
“Not much.”
“I guess she’s right, then.”
“Who’s that?”
“My mother.”
“Right on what?”
“Homeschooling,” I say, and nothing more, and the night floats by, and Joey goes nowhere. After a while, he’s talking again.
“Bus comes round at seven o’clock,” he says.
“Yeah. I’ve seen it.”
“School’s not so far down the road.”
“That’s nice.”
“Funny things happen at school. You should take a ride, see the school from inside.”
“Can’t,” I say. That’s all. Because saying one thing will lead to another and another.
“You think you’ll ever go to school?”
“Maybe someday.”
“College?”
“College!”
“I’m aiming for college.”
“Well, good for you, Joey,” I say. “Good for you.” The skin beneath my eyes gets tight.
“Sorry we didn’t get around to the throwing lessons,” Joey says after a while.
“I didn’t mind.”
“Miss Helen needed a story.”
“I liked it fine.”
“You coming back?”
“I probably might.”
“You’re not mad or anything?”
“Not mad.”
“All right.”
“Moon’s going away. Getting higher.”
“I’m guessing it’s time.”
“All right. Night, Joey.”
“Night, Sophie.”
“See you tomorrow?”
“I will.”
Save the Cather for me, I want to say. Save Harvey. Save Minxy. And the moon is higher and his window goes hollow and I am left alone and lonesome. In most every house we’ve ever come to, the people who have lived ahead of us have left something behind. Maybe the kitchen table, for being too small, or the lamps, for being so ugly, or a painting, because it’s a reminder of something it might be good to forget. We’re takers, Mother and I, moving the left-behinds on—the birdcage nobody wanted, the picture frames that got abandoned, the painted dresser, the collection of knobs. “What will we do with the knobs?” I said. “They’ll find their purpose,” Mother told me. Renting is for people like us, Mother says. For collectors, for carrying forward.
The last people to live in this house left in a hurry. Left the stains still on the linoleum floor, the curtains still hanging, the shoe boxes toppled in the hallway closet. In the pantry they left cans of tomatoes, and rice. In the living room they left a torn-cushion rocker. They left drawi
ngs by little kids and a bag of blue marbles, a collection of dried ladybug wings, set out like beads. “We’ll get to it,” my mother said, but everything is still like it was—our things squeezed between their things, the library books in their tower, the boxes we carry from house to house stacked up in the closets or the basement.
“I’ll make it up to you,” I said. I promised, and I mean to, lying here on my borrowed bed, flipping through library pages on the genius of solids. It’s Kepler I keep coming back to, Kepler, who makes me remember my mother’s sighing smile, and the more I index back to Kepler, the more I’m sure: I will write my ode to him, which has to be better than writing five pages on an icosahedron—has to be. “From Nothing to Big Things” I’ll call it, starting with Kepler’s poor and sickly birth and heading straight through his laws of planetary motion, his honoring of the pinhole camera, his optics and the words he used to explain the moon and its pull on the tides. I can see, the more I read, why my mother was sighing over Kepler, his work on the Archimedean solids being pretty much the least of his greatness. “From Nothing to Big Things.” I write the title in fancy script across the top of the page and then I sit here and think. It is dark down the hall and down the stairs. Dark straight up to the high half-moon. My mother snores like a train coming through.
Emmy
Up a cut of curb, Arlen angles. Past the window streak of the old diner, beneath a sign for Kodachrome, down. We reach the west edge of the university, and Arlen pedals through—past the first of the early risers, a dog that doesn’t mind us. The station lies east in a haze, beneath a fidget of shadows, and the streets grow wider than they were before, less still and undercover. Cars drive by, and people pass. An old man with a dog. A lady shaped like a stick. A pair of boys with a pack of cards. No Baby. The walk beneath us is broken, snagged. My ankle is a bowl of glass, and with every bump and bang, it shatters.