“What do you know about Nora?” I asked George.
George stopped writing and looked up at me. “Nothing really,” he said. “She doesn’t talk to me. She doesn’t look at me. I don’t know.”
“I get the feeling she doesn’t like me,” I said.
“She doesn’t like me either. She doesn’t like anyone except Rosemary.”
The light in the room was fading. Outside, the sky was turning gray with rain clouds. My head was hurting, and for a while I lay on my bed with my arm over my face. George started talking about needing twigs for a school project but that he didn’t want to go into the woods.
“I need five sticks, all different lengths,” he said. “Can you get them for me?”
“I’ve had a headache that keeps getting worse. Can’t you go?”
“I’d rather you go.”
“What is it about the woods that bothers you?”
He was writing something in his notebook. I waited for him to answer, but he chose not to.
Finally I went downstairs, expecting to find Rosemary, but she wasn’t there. Agnes was talking on the phone in the kitchen to someone in a low voice. Harold hadn’t gotten home from work yet. I put on my coat and went outside and walked to the woods alone. I stopped and picked up a rock and tossed it toward a tree. The rock hit a branch and fell. By the time I made it to the woods I happened to notice Rosemary up ahead. She was sitting on a stump, drawing. She looked up and saw me.
“I didn’t know you were here,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I like to come here to draw sometimes. It’s the quiet I like, and nature.”
“George needs some sticks for a project at school,” I said.
I stood close to her in the woods, in the cool, rising wind of an approaching storm. She sat on the stump with her skirt hiked high above her knees, the sketchbook in her lap. I started gathering twigs.
“You should make him do it himself,” she said.
“He wanted to be alone.”
“George always wants to be alone. He’ll go to extreme lengths to be by himself. He once made an entire map of places where he could be by himself.”
I knelt down to the ground and looked in the dirt. “He wants five sticks of different lengths. It’s hard to find good ones and my head hurts.”
“You have a headache?” she asked.
“I’ve been getting them lately. I don’t know. Maybe more water.”
“More water,” she said. “I used to get them a lot, too. I had an EEG done once to determine if I was having seizures. I saw flashes of light. I blacked out sometimes. It turned out to be anxiety and stress.”
She held her exposed knees together and scribbled in her sketchbook. She slouched, her hair tangled and covering part of her face as she drew. With the dim light slanting in on her through the trees, I could almost feel what it was like to be a part of her, inside her, not stifled in my own world, not confused but certain of purpose, sitting there entranced. Maybe in a weird way I wanted to be her.
“I have to pee,” she said. She looked up at me.
“I can go back,” I said.
She set the sketchbook beside her and stood. “I don’t care,” she said. “You can watch. Do you want to watch me pee?”
I watched her hike up her skirt and squat in the woods. She turned her head, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. A cold air hung in the shadows as her hands moved up her thighs. Dead leaves curled around her feet and the edges of the tree beside her, and I envisioned myself embracing her in that moment.
When she finished and stood I noticed how peculiarly innocent she appeared in her skirt, with a slim waist and broad hips. This is mostly how I remember her: pure in Indian blood, lovely, dressed in the late day sky. How well she knew this. And I was a young boy staring at her.
She hugged herself and shivered a moment. “It’s getting cold,” she said. “My hands are freezing. Come feel my hands.”
I walked to her and took her hands in mine. Her fingers were cold and fragile, like a child’s hands might feel. Taking her hands in mine made me feel stronger than her.
“You have leaves in your hair,” she said, pulling something out of my hair.
“Yeah, but I’m clean.”
She leaned in and studied me for a moment.
“You smell like duck feathers,” she said.
She laughed and I stepped back and looked down, where I saw a dead bird. Her laughter, I can still hear it. Her laughter came out of nowhere. Angry, I turned and walked back to the house. I kept walking without looking back at her. Dead leaves and twigs cracked under my feet and the wind blew in circular gusts. The sky had gone dead gray. What made me even angrier was that, as I walked away, she wasn’t calling after me.
Every night we ate dinner in silence, which seemed to be normal. I was used to eating in front of the TV or with other kids at the shelter laughing and being loud. During dinner, Harold stirred his Bloody Mary with his finger and stared into his glass. Then Agnes said to him, “Jim and Marjorie are having a get-together this weekend.”
“The swingers,” he said.
“They’re not swingers. Are they swingers? I don’t think they’re swingers.”
“I’m positive they’re swingers,” he said. “Burt was talking about it the other day at the gym.”
“Burt. What does Burt know? Marjorie’s son is going to France to study abroad.”
Harold spoke without looking at anyone. “France? Good for him. He’s the one with the seborrheic dermatitis?”
“Who has dermatitis?”
“And they’re having a party.”
“Jim called me today. We should take a bottle of wine. We need to go.”
Harold sipped his Bloody Mary. I saw the bits of pepper in his glass, tiny pieces of celery. “I need to fix that light fixture,” he said.
Agnes said, “Harold, I need you to listen to me.”
“The swingers, the swingers.”
I looked at George, who kept his head down, eating. He didn’t seem distracted by the conversation.
“Please,” Agnes said.
Harold looked at me, then at George. He looked at his food. He looked up at the light fixture. He looked at everything except Agnes.
“Look,” Agnes said.
“It doesn’t work,” Harold said, sipping his drink. He leaned back in his chair and squinted.
Agnes stood from the table and started taking the dishes into the kitchen. The three of us sat there, not saying anything.
“Can we go upstairs?” George asked, looking at his food.
“Of course,” Harold said.
George and I rushed from the table and hurried upstairs.
Later the thunderstorm hit, which made me sad. Thunderstorms still do this to me, years later, they tend to send me into a deep emptiness. As it rained I went to lie down on the bed. For a while I tried to read, but I had a headache. George came over and handed me a note. It said: You are very quiet.
“I’m reading,” I said. “Why don’t you just talk? Rosemary said you made a map of secret places. Can you show it to me?”
“They aren’t secret places, they’re quiet places. I can show you.”
He went to his dresser and got a notebook from the top drawer. He opened it to the page and brought it over to me. “There’s a bunch more on another page somewhere, but I lost it. Or maybe Agnes threw it away or someone stole it, I don’t know.”
The page showed an outline of the basement floor of the school, with an arrow pointing behind a staircase. I turned the page and saw a map of the public library, all three floors, with arrows pointing to tables in the corners of the rooms.
“Technically the library’s pretty quiet everywhere, but I have my favorite areas where you can disappear. The missing pages include maps of Birch Park and the u
nderground tunnels near Katachee Hill.”
“You like to be alone,” I said.
“People are mean,” he said.
“I know. They can be terrible.”
“What happened to your face?”
The abruptness of the question caught me off guard. I had assumed Harold or Agnes had already spoken to him about it, but evidently they hadn’t.
“It was an accident,” I said.
“Burned?”
“Yeah, hot grease was spilled. It was an accident.”
He was waiting for me to continue, to tell the story, but I didn’t want to. “I need some aspirin,” I said.
I went downstairs to the kitchen and took two aspirin. In the dining room, Harold and Agnes were now playing cards. Harold asked if I wanted to sit with them, so I did. They didn’t invite me to play—only to sit there and watch. Agnes seemed bothered by something. Harold studied his cards while Agnes stared at him.
“I’m waiting,” she said. “Harold.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m waiting for you to make a move, Harold.”
“I’m thinking about the swingers,” he told her.
Harold took a drink of his Bloody Mary and swished it around in his mouth. Agnes stared at him.
“Let’s just quit,” she finally said, and stood from the table.
“Take it easy,” Harold told her.
“Holy mother!” she yelled. “Go do whatever you want.” She walked out of the room.
I couldn’t bear to look at Harold, but I knew he was looking at me to see my response.
“It is what it is,” he said quietly.
It was the first time I’d seen Agnes angry. George had told me she kept her emotions hidden well, and that Harold and her made sure not to fight much in front of anyone. There were periods of time she spent alone in their bedroom. Other times she went for a drive. “I need alone time,” she sometimes said. It wasn’t every night, but it was frequent.
At the table, I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sat there. I knew this: I liked living there. I knew it was a safe place isolated in the country, near Snake River. I understood when I looked around the room and noticed how everything around me felt important. At the shelter everything had felt cold and dead and lonely. The rooms were hollow and held a sadness I couldn’t bear. There was no color anywhere. But the Troutts’ house felt alive. I looked at the pictures on the wall, pictures of Harold and Agnes, of a stream in the woods, a watercolor of geese flying low over water, and it felt hypnotic. I liked the open window, where I could see the land stretching outside. I liked the light blue curtains. I liked the arrangement of tulips in thin glass vases.
Harold was handsome the way he held his glass in front of his face and stared at it. He began talking about his father. It was his way of opening up to me, I guess. “My father never spent much time with me,” he said. “He worked as an editor for a university textbook publishing company and spent his days sitting alone in a small room in a very old building. Two nights a week he taught a class to undergraduates on methods of research. Dull. His office was dim and colorless and always had a strange odor that was difficult to define.”
He looked at me over his glass. “There was a 1950s décor with wood paneling on the walls and thin carpet on the floor,” he continued. “His desk was metal and stacked with papers, books and pamphlets and several sharpened pencils. What a dull space. The motorized grind of pencils sharpening in the electric pencil sharpener was the only sound my father ever heard in that office outside the ticking of the clock on the wall. The clock was the large kind typical of most classrooms, the only thing he had on the wall behind his desk. There was one family picture on his desk. Coworkers suggested he buy a radio, but that would’ve been a distraction. And my father was easily distracted. He was a dull man. He ate his lunch alone at his desk and only twice a day took a break to get up and walk upstairs to the watercooler. There, he occasionally spoke to coworkers, but only if prompted.”
I didn’t know how to respond, so I just nodded.
“He was never a conversationalist,” he said. “He was polite and soft-spoken and took his work seriously. He wore a well-starched shirt with a breast pocket where he kept his favorite ballpoint pen. One day he got let go. They didn’t need him anymore. He became severely depressed. Then he opened up a little backdoor gambling place on the outskirts of town with his brother, and after that he was a new man. It was illegal, but the cops didn’t mind. Not out there. He took a chance and started doing what he wanted to do. I learned a lot from that.”
He had dark eyes and a manner about him that reminded me of a movie star from an old film from the 1950s or ’60s, and I found myself staring at him.
A moment later Rosemary came downstairs and sat next to Harold at the table. She glanced at me, but I turned away. I was still angry about her comment in the woods.
“I was looking for you,” she told Harold. He looked at his watch, and Rosemary rested her head against his shoulder. It was a very daughterly thing to do, I remember thinking, especially for a foster daughter. A simple gesture of affection. For a minute I sat there, looking at my hands.
“Agnes is in the other room praying,” she said.
“It is what it is,” Harold said.
It came to me that Rosemary had been listening to us, maybe the whole time, and now I could feel her watching me.
“Is your head feeling better?” she asked.
“What’s wrong with your head?” Harold said.
“He had a bad headache earlier,” Rosemary said.
I excused myself and went back upstairs. In our room, George was lying on his bed with the light off. I lay in my bed in the dark with my hands behind my head. The wind was blowing the tree outside my window. With the lights off, George and I must’ve looked gray as ghosts in the moonlit room. I could see the streetlight reflecting through the branches of the elm outside my window. George and I lay silent for a while until he finally sat up in bed and turned on his lamp.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I used to be afraid of the shed out back. It started last winter when we found rats in the shed. Harold put down poison and got rid of them, but I kept imagining a whole community of rats living below ground. Rats crawling around. Rats standing upright on their back legs, smoking pipes and watching the world above them, where we lived. Rats digging tunnels of their own, designing a whole underground transportation system. I thought the shed was their door to the human universe.”
“Weird,” I said.
“I know. It took going in there a bunch of times, but I’m better now. I started counting the bricks in the floor out there, which helped.”
We were quiet. I could hear the wind outside the window.
“I need to show you something tomorrow,” he said. “Something in the shed.”
“What is it? A rat?”
“No. I’d show you now but it’s too dark. Tomorrow. Okay?”
“All right,” I said.
A few minutes later Rosemary appeared at the door. She leaned against the doorjamb and crossed her arms. “Sorry about earlier,” she said.
She held my gaze, waiting for me to respond, and as she did I got the feeling she was accustomed to making these types of apologies and getting a response. And yet I couldn’t say anything, or maybe it wasn’t the right moment, so I looked back at my book until she walked away. It was hard to concentrate on reading, though, and for whatever reason I felt guilty for not accepting her apology.
After that I distracted myself with cleaning, spraying, and wiping the windows, dusting the bookshelf and dressers, picking up the clothes from the floor and carrying the hamper into the laundry room down the hall. In the bathroom I brushed my teeth and flossed until my gums bled. I gargled with green Listerine that burned so badly my eyes watered. Then I undressed and took a long shower until the bat
hroom filled with steam.
George was knocking on the door, asking if everything was okay. I called out that I was taking a shower. He knocked again, asking if I had a towel.
“I’m perfectly fine,” I shouted.
When I got out of the shower and wiped steam from the mirror, there was another knock, but this time it wasn’t George. It was Rosemary.
“Everything okay?”
Steam hung in the air. I looked at my smoky reflection in the mirror. “I’m fine,” I said.
“I’m just checking on you,” she said. “Come to my room later, Sequoyah.”
At the sound of my name I felt strangely, wildly moved.
Before my mother was locked up, the thought of being kidnapped intrigued me, and there was even a time when I lay in bed some nights, wanting someone to break into our house and take me. The thought never terrified me. Kidnappers were murderers in disguise, I knew this, yet my own kidnapper would be different. My own kidnapper would be some old person drugged on prescription painkillers, too weak or sad to really hurt me. Someone whose idea of comfort meant sitting in silence, staring at an old black-and-white movie on TV. I would be force-fed and not allowed to talk. I would have to watch my kidnapper sleep in a recliner while it rained outside. We would be far away from any city, in a rural area, just the two of us, but it wouldn’t be sexual or weird in any way. I would be allowed to walk around the house as I pleased. I would never be bound by rope or tied to any structure. At times he would let me hurt him, hit him with an object, just enough to bruise or draw blood. He would like being treated this way. The environment would feel dangerous only when I considered the police showing up to arrest my kidnapper, drawing their weapons and breaking down the door.
I became obsessed with this thought for a long time.
I’m not sure when, exactly, I became so preoccupied with Rosemary, but I learned more and more about her. I knew she usually wore her hair loose, with bangs, but sometimes she wore it in a ponytail, or back with a hair clip, depending on where she was going. I knew she liked to wear skirts. She liked her black boots. At the same time she could wear a sweater and look more studious. She maintained a mystery about her looks that I found intriguing.
Where the Dead Sit Talking Page 7