Klickitat

by Peter Rock

  He walked out of the store, down toward the highway, and I followed, at a distance, as he climbed the stairs up over the MAX tracks, down onto the platform. Henry didn’t look back, and there were people all around, waiting. When the train came, he got on, and I hurried to get on, too, one car behind him where he couldn’t see me.

  We headed into the city, toward the river. The train was crowded, people with suitcases coming back from the airport. At every stop I leaned close to the window, squinting out to see if Henry got off. He did not. We crossed the river, into downtown, past Pioneer Square. The stop after that, Henry did get off, and so did I.

  With all the people on the street, it was easier to stay hidden but it was also harder to keep track of Henry.

  There he was, buying a hot dog from a cart; that was a kind of food that we’d agreed not to eat, but he ate it as he walked, and I followed. Up the streets—10th, 11th, 12th—and turning right, going north—Flanders, Glisan, Hoyt. I practiced all the stalking techniques Audra had taught me, that I’d read about in the books, all the different walks.

  After a little while I could see that he was headed to Forest Park, toward the thick trees. Forest Park is more like a forest than a park. A gravel road cuts through it for miles and miles, up the middle, but away from that road it’s all thick and overgrown. Joggers and people on mountain bikes rushed close by. Henry didn’t look back at me, still a hundred feet behind him.

  If he turned, if he saw me, what could I say? I could only laugh, say I saw him and I was trying to catch up, that I needed some fresh air, that no one could stay under the house every day, all day, day after day. I would say that I was curious about him, that I wanted him to talk to me, to tell me about where he was from and where we were going, to talk about the messages in my notebook, to tell me why he needed me.

  I almost called out to him; I waited, I followed.

  Henry headed off on a side trail, into the shadows, and I had to hurry, to get closer. His white shirt flashed through the green leaves, his dark head rising and falling. The wind blew all through the branches up high and the trees groaned, rubbed against each other.

  We climbed along a little ridge, across a steep slope. I kicked a stone by mistake and it clattered down through the ivy. I stopped, moved sideways, hid in the thicker bushes. Henry didn’t turn. He was bent over, almost crawling now, heading off the path, up the slope. And then he stopped and bent down, and gradually—his legs, then his body, and then his head—he disappeared, down into the ground.

  Slowly, carefully, I moved closer. When I reached the spot where he had been, I saw that there was a hole, there. Wide enough that a person could fit inside. I lay on my stomach, looking in. There was a candy wrapper in the shadowy bottom, but Henry was nowhere to be seen. I shielded my eyes with my hand, trying to understand. Reaching into the hole, I felt all along the edge and realized that it was open along one side, a black tunnel slipping deeper underground. That was where he had gone.

  I sat up and swung my legs around and slid over the edge, my feet hitting bottom, loose dirt falling and settling around me. Only my head stuck out of the ground, the rest in the hole, neck deep in the ground. Before I started down the tunnel, I turned slowly, checking in every direction, and that’s when I saw him. Henry, again, heading off through the forest—he must have gone through the tunnel and come up from another hole. It wasn’t easy for me to climb out, but I did, stumbling in the bushes after him, trying not to lose him.

  I wasn’t as quiet as I wanted to be, but still he didn’t seem to hear me. He was looking up into the trees as he walked, and I was not far behind, carefully holding the bushes’ branches out of my way.

  I saw a ribbon, then, a blue ribbon, tied to one branch. I reached for it and at first I thought someone had grabbed my wrist—all at once my hand was jerked sideways, hard, up over my head. A thin cord ran from my wrist to the top of a tree, a sapling that had been bent back, sprung. As I tried to get loose, to twist free, I heard laughter behind me.

  Audra came out from where she’d been hiding, coming closer to help get me free.

  “It worked!” she said. “I caught you, Vivian. I tracked you and I snared you, too.”

  “You could have broken my arm,” I said, rubbing at the red circle around my wrist. “My shoulder hurts, too.”

  “You’ll be all right,” she said. “And I’m learning these skills for your own good.”

  Audra wore a light green dress, like a polo shirt, only longer. Her blond hair was in two braids, and her skin was pale and smooth. It had been a long time since I’d really seen her in the daylight.

  “What?” she said, turning around. “Why are you looking behind me?”

  “Henry,” I said. “I was following him, but I can’t see him anymore. Are you meeting him here?”

  “Henry?” she said. “I don’t think so. He’s supposed to be at work. Did he say something to you?”

  “I saw him go into a hole in the ground,” I said. “Into a tunnel.”

  “Vivian,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. And if he’s paying attention to you, that’s because he wants me to be happy, to make you feel like he wants you along, too—”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I followed him.”

  “You shouldn’t follow him,” she said. “You shouldn’t even be out here.”

  “I had to,” I said. “I can’t stay under the house all day, every day—”

  “Come on,” she said, taking my arm like I’d done something wrong. “This way. I want to show you something.”

  We walked along a small, overgrown path, Audra leading the way. She held one hand up in front of her face, clearing spiderwebs, and I could hear that we were closer to the main gravel road, the sound of distant voices through the leaves of the trees and bushes.

  “A lot of people live here,” she said. “It’s dangerous, it can be dangerous.”

  “Isn’t this where the girl lived?” I said. “The girl we tried to find, with her father.”

  “Yes,” Audra said. “Their camp wasn’t so far from here.”

  “Did you ever find out where she went?”

  “No,” she said.

  We walked silently for a while, farther from the road, staying close together.

  “Things are different,” I said. “The way we are together. It’s not the same.”

  “Of course not, Vivian.” Audra turned to face me. She put her hands on my shoulders, only for an instant. “It couldn’t stay the same, now could it? And remember, the way things are now isn’t how they’ll be. We’ll be able to talk anytime we want, and everything will be a lot better than now or before. You’ll feel better.”

  I felt like we were in an argument that I didn’t understand, that we hadn’t had before. We walked side by side, then single file when the way grew narrow.

  “But we’re living underneath a house,” I said. “I’m alone all the time, and you hurt my arm, and all we ever do is sneak around.”

  “That’s not all we do,” she said. “And it’s just for a little while longer.” She touched my shoulders again, turned me around to face the same direction as her. “You see that broken tree, and that green rock, there? It’s exactly between them. Here.”

  We were standing right next to the blind she’d made—bent sticks with moss and leaves woven in—and it was almost impossible to see it.

  “This is a safe place, in case anything happens.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “A safe place to come and stay,” she said, almost whispering. “And there’s a box buried inside, beneath it, with all the things in it we might need.”

  “In case we have to leave underneath the house or something?”

  “Right,” she said, “but it’s not good to stay too close, too long, now, when we don’t need it. Someone could see us, and wonder.”

  That afternoon Audra talked about awareness being th
e most important skill to have, and relaxation being the most important part of awareness. She waved her hands down over the distant city and talked about robots, about how unhappy people really were. She showed me some new things about tracking, and how to cup my hand around my ear, to make the shape of a deer’s ear around my own, so I could direct my hearing better.

  “Animals have acute senses,” she said, “but if an animal has strong sight its ears are weak, or its sense of smell—humans have the best combination, if we just remember how to use them.”

  She blindfolded me, so I would listen harder. She took off the blindfold and showed me how to use my wide-angle vision, to switch from only looking straight ahead to also see the edges, the far corners of the world around me.

  “Look out at the river,” she said, pointing through a clearing in the trees. “Pretend it’s a picture hanging on the wall, and push the frame out as far as you can, with your eyes.”

  “Is that a fishing boat down there,” I said, “by the bridge?”

  “No,” she said. “That’s a barge.”

  We stood there with our shoulders touching, looking out at the dark green river below, the pale blue sky above, the square reddish barge plowing through the water. I don’t know which one of us started singing the song:

  Out of my window, looking through the night,

  I can see the barges’ flickering lights

  Starboard shines green, and port is glowing red,

  I can see the barges far ahead

  Barges, I would love to go with you

  I would love to sail the ocean blue

  Barges, are there treasures in your hold?

  Do you fight with pirates, brave and bold?

  That was a song Mom used to sing to us, when we were little, when she was putting us to bed. Singing the song made me miss her, and I knew that Audra was thinking of her, too. She didn’t say so. She just leaned against me, and it was a little sad, but it was also a sweet time with my sister, standing close, singing with her.

  “Hearing that song makes me think of Mom,” I finally said.

  “I know,” Audra said.

  “I miss her.”

  “Sometimes I do, too,” Audra said. “That’s all right. We don’t have to forget her, it’s just that we can’t go back to how things were. We’ve made our choice, and we’re meant to go somewhere else.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I only looked out at the river, feeling my sister’s shoulder pressed against mine.

  “The little girl who wrote that song,” Audra said, “she was a girl in a wheelchair, who had some disease or some kind of accident, and she’d sit at her window and watch the barges and imagine all these adventures she couldn’t have herself.”

  And then Audra sang again, a verse I’d never heard:

  How my heart wants to sail away with you,

  As you sail across the ocean blue

  But I must stay beside my window clear,

  As the barges sail away from here

  Once it was dark we walked down out of the trees, across the city, Audra half a block ahead and across the street so it wouldn’t seem like we were together.

  Henry wasn’t under the house when we got there; he came back later, after I was already asleep.

  SIXTEEN

  The morning after I sang “Barges” with Audra, I woke up and listened to her and Henry heading off to work.

  Later, I slipped out again, into the day. Rain misted down. Rain is helpful, since people squint through it, they look at the ground, they hurry. They don’t stand or stare at something or someone they don’t understand, try to figure it out. A person will look at you and in an instant decide who you are, line you up next to a person they know or a certain kind of person, so it is easy enough to blend in, to look a certain way where people’s eyes slide right over you without snagging or hooking.

  In crowds or on the train I would even stand next to a lady so it looked as if she was my mother. Or I’d stand next to a group of kids that were horsing around so I looked like one of them. I watched and listened and smiled and I knew how to make my face light up a little like I knew them.

  But I only mixed in crowds of kids if I was far from my parents’ house, since I didn’t want anyone to recognize me, and so mostly I walked by myself as I headed toward the QFC, toward Henry, because that was next to my old school, my old neighborhood. He would finish work in half an hour, and I planned to wait, then follow him again, to talk to him, this time.

  On the way, I passed my old street. I stood there, at the end of our block. It was the middle of the day, a time my parents wouldn’t be home, and so I decided to walk past. I had my hood up, and I didn’t walk like myself. I scuffed my shoes along, like a boy.

  The house looked the same from outside. The round window in the front door, the antennas sticking up from the roof, Audra’s dark footprints high up on the wall, where she kicked when she was swinging.

  There was no one on the street. Slowly, kind of walking backward to make sure no one was watching, I went down the driveway, around back. The cars were gone, all the windows were dark. I found the hidden key where it was always hidden, under the planter on the step of the back porch. You have to pull the back door toward you to get the key to turn, and I did that, then quietly pushed the door open.

  And then, just like that, I was standing in our kitchen. It didn’t smell right. The air felt sharper, cleaner, like chemicals. The kitchen looked the same, though, dirty breakfast dishes stacked in the sink. I walked through it, upstairs.

  The smell was mostly coming out of Audra’s room, where the door was open, and when I stepped inside, I realized that part of the smell was paint. All the walls were blue, now, the outlines of the hands painted over. The bed was pushed into the middle of the room, the mattress bare. The floor shone in the light from the window, like it had been scrubbed. The shelves were empty, the closet. I pulled open all the drawers and there was nothing in them.

  My things were still in my room. My old books, some of my clothes that I had almost forgotten, the orange blanket on my bed. First I opened the drawer, took out the knife Audra had left for me, put it in my pocket. Next I found the yellow notebook, in its hidden spot, tight in the bookshelf. I pulled it out, my hands trembling; I opened it up, paged through to find the new writing:

  Suddenly we came upon a series of low

  subterranean tunnels that looked like beaver

  holes, or the work of foxes—through

  whose narrow and winding ways we had

  to literally crawl! Our bodies are so fluid,

  they can hardly be called bodies, they are

  made for where we are, and your body is

  changing. You are a special girl and will

  learn to camouflage your body, but also

  your mind and spirit so a person looking

  directly at you will not see you. Your sister

  can see you, is watching you, your body,

  mind, and spirit. The tunnels drift underground

  like clouds in the sky, they travel

  and cross each other. Will sisters travel,

  cross each other? Hello again, calling

  you! If you’re caught in a situation with

  wet shirt or denims, you can still warm

  yourself by stuffing your shirt and pants

  with leaves, grass, moss, fir branches. You

  can also fashion emergency clothing items

  from materials such as bark, rushes, and

  cattail stalks.

  I slapped the notebook shut, put it under my arm. I didn’t want any of the other things in my room; I didn’t miss them at all except for sleeping in my bed, just a little, and to be able to walk right across the hall to the bathroom, whenever I wanted to, having a toilet instead of a bucket with a tight snapped lid.

  I crossed the hall, sat down on the toilet. The sound of me peeing was loud in the house. Above the sink in the holder were only two toothbrushes, blue and green, my p
arents’. Mine and Audra’s had been put somewhere else, or thrown away.

  After I finished, I sat there for a moment, and all at once heard a noise, a car outside. I stood to one side of the window, careful not to show myself. What would it mean, if Mom or Dad came home, found me there? Could I settle back in? Would I want to? I couldn’t leave Audra, and Henry, who needed me; it wasn’t as if we could have asked Mom and Dad, anyway, as if they’d let us go. We had made our choice.

  The car passed, it wasn’t our car—I could see the driveway and it was empty. I washed my hands, turned the water on and off again, then walked out past my parents’ room. The door was open and inside it was all the same. The desk and a new computer, the same books on the bedside tables, my dad’s asthma inhaler. If I was Audra I would have broken the computer screen, but I did not. Instead, I lay down on their bed for a moment, rolling my head onto one pillow, then the other, smelling how they smelled, so I would remember.

  Downstairs again, in the kitchen, I took a pen from the cup next to the phone. I wrote a little letter, in my yellow notebook, then tore it loose:

  I want you to know that we are

  together and we’re doing fine.

  We’re happy. Don’t worry about

  us, and don’t try to find us. You

  couldn’t find us because we’ve

  moved far away to a place you

  couldn’t think of or guess. Thank

  you for all your help in helping

  us grow up.

  Yours sincerely,

  Vivian

  Once I finished it, I realized that I couldn’t just leave it there on the counter, since they’d know I had been there, and when. They’d know that I couldn’t be too far away. So I found an envelope in the drawer and wrote the address of our house on it, and then I found a stamp. Only I couldn’t put it in the mail slot because it wouldn’t have a postmark on it and still they’d know how close I’d been. I slid the letter into my yellow notebook and then I went downstairs, into the basement.

  When I turned on the radio switches, the lights came on in the tiny windows and the red needles bounced and settled. I put on the headset and had to close it down to make it smaller because it was adjusted for Dad’s head. It made me miss him, sitting there in his chair with his old wool shirt on the back of the chair. The shirt smelled like him, its arms hanging down like they might lift up to hug me.