Once, in a Town Called Moth

by Trilby Kent

  “OK. Great.”

  “Don’t sound so excited.” Mr. Peterson grinned, heaving himself off the desk. “Welcome to Walpole, Ana. I know it feels like it now, but it’s not a life sentence.”

  Faces are one thing; names are another. The names at school are a jumble to Ana’s ears, and she is too shy to test them on her tongue. Arman Mouradian, Narek Ishmaeli, Davit Seferjan, Crystal Gao, Melanie Xhang, Danton Washington, Kwame Aziz. Those are just the people who sit in front of her in homeroom; she’s embarrassed to turn to look at the other faces as hands are raised during attendance.

  At lunch, Suvi tries to help, but her attempts to conjure people from the names elude Ana too. Brodie Thomas is into parkour. “You know, free-running,” says Suvi. Ana nods. She does not know.

  Michaela Freeman always asks for extra credit assignments; she’s already decided that she wants to go to Yale. Mason Keeler can solve a Rubik’s Cube in under a minute. Sam Foster is a fact machine on anything to do with planes. Max Klaas is a pothead but he plays the ukulele really well, even when he’s stoned. Jaimie Leung is still into Pokémon.

  Then there are the groups. Skaters, jocks, drama geeks, hot Asians, Asian nerds, Banglas, Somalis, druggies, ADD kids, punks, goths, preps, gender benders, techies, cool honors kids, dorky honors kids, band geeks, arty kids, straight-up nerds…

  “Why so many groups?” Ana asked. Even in Colony Felicidad she had been an individual at school, known first as the student with the best penmanship and later, as she grew older, as the teacher’s helper tasked with helping the little ones with their letters and reading.

  “Human nature,” shrugged Suvi. “It just seems strange to you here because you’re new and on the outside. But I bet there were groups in your old school too.”

  Ana drew breath to disagree—of course there hadn’t been: their school had been too small, they had all worn the same clothes, half of the kids there had been related to each other, no one there had heard of goths or punks or LGBT or manga or ADD…but then she stopped.

  “There were a couple of mean girls,” she said. “And the ‘good boys’ and the ‘bad boys’—that’s what our parents called them.”

  “I bet the grown-ups had groups too,” said Suvi. “You probably just didn’t notice them because little kids don’t think to look for that sort of thing. You assume grown-ups are all the same.”

  Ana nodded so much that she wondered if the bones in her neck would wear out. She sipped milk from a carton and poked a piece of breaded, fried white meat that was probably chicken into a pool of red gloop that probably once had a passing relationship with a tomato. Usually she brought lunch from home, but today Suvi was treating her. She wondered if Suvi had a point about the grown-ups.

  In the school library there was a section labeled “English Learners.” It included books printed half in English and half in Arabic, or Chinese. There were books with CDs in plastic envelopes taped to the back cover. There were counting books, rhyming books, large print books. There were also some picture books, which were really meant for little kids but offered a comforting safe space away from vocabulary lists and learning targets.

  Ana discovered a book called A Bear Called Paddington. It was about a little bear who travels from Darkest Peru all the way to London, England, as a stowaway on a boat. He eats marmalade and is very polite. When he finds himself at a big, busy train station, he waits behind a bicycle rack until a kindly couple notice him. They decide that they can’t leave him there all alone, so they bring him home where their two children bathe him and feed him hot buttered toast and listen to his stories about life in the jungle.

  It was a story that made Ana smile on some days and double over with a gnawing loneliness on others. She loved Paddington and pitied him and envied him all at once. She veered between identifying with Judy, the girl who looked after Paddington, and Paddington himself, because he was foreign and easily confused by things.

  She made sure never to let Suvi see her reading a book meant for little children.

  There were two counselors working in the guidance office. There was a doctor too, who came in twice a week, and a nurse who had yet to encounter a malady that couldn’t be cured with Tylenol. On the wall outside the guidance office were four plaques with their names: Mrs. White and Miss Perigee to the left of the notice board, Dr. Mitchell and Nurse Jacobs to the right.

  The only other person in the school who had his name on a plaque was the principal, Mr. Vasquez, and that didn’t hold as much fascination for Ana. It was seeing the women’s names that made her pause. Mrs. White was old enough to be someone’s grandmother, with an enormous bosom and gold-capped teeth, but there was her name etched in metal for the whole community to see. Miss Perigee couldn’t be much older than Maria, yet there she was too.

  Miss Perigee had asked to meet with Ana to make sure that she was settling in at school. Waiting to be called in to her office, Ana studied the posters neatly pinned around a big framed photograph of a tree blossoming with smiling faces.

  Thinking about suicide? read one. Think of us first. Beneath an image of a girl staring out a rain-streaked window was a phone number in big block numerals.

  Drinking and Driving: A Lethal Mix read another. Save a life: Call a cab. Here too a phone number.

  How about “Looking for your mother who you last saw in Bolivia almost ten years ago, who’s now somewhere at large in the second biggest country in the world and you don’t even have a phone?” thought Ana. That would be a good one.

  There was a whisper of a raincoat brushing the door as a tall woman strode in through the waiting room, satchel slung across one shoulder. She smiled at Ana as she passed. The keys were already in her hand as she approached the door to the doctor’s office. A casual turn of the handle, and she had disappeared inside.

  That wasn’t the nurse, thought Ana. Nurse Jacobs was short and squat and sharp-tongued. Then, realization dawned: the tall lady in the raincoat must have been Dr. Mitchell. Ana had assumed that Dr. Mitchell must be a man; there had been no women doctors back home, and Mitchell…well, now she thought about it, there was no reason that Mitchell shouldn’t be a woman’s surname as well as a man’s. How stupid could she be?

  “Ana?”

  Miss Perigee had stuck her head out of her office door. How long had she been waiting there? Had she called Ana’s name once already?

  “You were miles away,” she said, as Ana gathered her things. “Come on in.”

  Waiting for Suvi outside the basketball court, Ana counted the purple ribbons that still remained on the fence running the length of the block. There must have been fifteen, originally—when Faith Watson first went missing—one for every section. Now there were nine.

  A little blond boy careened into view, and Ana watched him jitterbug down the path toward the swings. He might have been three, more likely two, but steady enough on his legs to run pretty fast. When he tripped on a crack in the pavement, Ana jumped to her feet. The older girls in Colony Felicidad were like mothers to all the little ones, whether or not they were siblings or cousins or just neighbors, so Ana’s first instinct was to rush to pick him up, to brush the grit from his scarlet knee and smooth his sweaty head with her hand.

  She stopped short of doing so, though, standing lamely by as a nanny appeared with a stroller and another child, cooing and chastising the boy by turns, pulling a wet wipe from the stroller pocket and dabbing at the graze while his howls dwindled to sniffles.

  Invisible, Ana sat back down on the bench. Suvi had had to explain the concept of a nanny to her a few weeks ago. (“Babysitter” had been another new word: when Ana told Suvi that her parents would happily leave her, at four years old, alone inside the house while they went to work outside nearby, Suvi had nearly choked on her drink and said something about calling social services.) This nanny was Asian, maybe from the Philippines. Suvi and Mischa had shared a Filipina nanny as toddlers, apparently. Her name was Wendy, and she had left her three children and her husband to t
ravel halfway around the world to look after foreign children.

  Ana watched the little boy reach for his nanny’s hand and pull her on toward the swings. The nanny was wide-hipped and moved slowly, with a calm, gentle lilt. She was smiling, but her gaze seemed somewhere far away. Was she thinking about her own children, wondered Ana. About the mother that she would like to be to them? Ana’s thoughts drifted. Whose fault was it that this woman was here, and not there, at home? Someone must be to blame, but who?

  The nanny had stopped by the iron fence and now seemed to be considering one of the purple ribbons. She tested it between her fingers as if to prove to herself that it was real. Then, splaying her fingers, she widened the loops and pulled the tail ends straight. Ana watched her touch her knuckle to her forehead, chest, and each shoulder—left, right, left—before turning to call the little boy.

  That was when Ana realized that she had no right to feel irritated. The nanny hadn’t left her. Presumably, coming all this way to look after someone else’s children was the only thing she could do for her own. Like the Central American families they had just read about in social studies class, who put their children on trains to Mexico, to the United States, just so they could escape being recruited into gangs. Not knowing where they would end up, hoping for the best. Desperate, but also somehow noble, that sacrifice.

  Had Ana’s mother made a similar one? Her mother, who had left in the middle of the night and lived here for ten years without so much as a letter sent home?

  What kind of mother did that, without a very good reason?

  “Turn your head a little—that way,” said Mischa, showing her with his pencil.

  They were sitting in Suvi’s room. Suvi was painting her toenails, and Ana, despite teasing from the others, was still trying to finish her French homework. Mischa was using a sheet of graph paper to sketch Ana’s portrait.

  “You really don’t have to,” Ana said.

  “Yes, Meesh, you do,” interjected Suvi, blowing on her toes. “Ana, trust me, you’ll love it.”

  Ana looked down at the worksheet in her lap, trying not to move her head. It hurt her eyes, trying to read like this. She already had a headache, and although she didn’t like to say anything, Suvi’s room felt hot and airless. The smell of nail polish wasn’t helping.

  “Can we open a window?” she said at last.

  “Sure. Hey, do you guys want something to eat? There’s sushi in the fridge. Julie got this bamboo mat and all these crazy little bento accessories from the Japanese supermarket and we’ve got, like, kawaii stuff coming out of our ears down there.”

  “Great!”

  “Ana?”

  “I’m not hungry, thanks.”

  “If you say so. I’ll be back.”

  When she had gone, Mischa looked up at Ana and paused.

  “Do you ever take your hair out?” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  He reached over to give her braid a playful tug, and she flinched. Something about that brief moment of contact made her shiver. She didn’t fancy Mischa in that way—plus, she suspected he wouldn’t be interested anyway—so the chill she had felt wasn’t all bad. And he was smiling. “Is it, like, really, really long?”

  “I guess so.” Ana felt herself grow even hotter. She swallowed dryly. It hurt her throat.

  “Can I see? I’ve finished the drawing already.”

  “Uh…jo, OK.” She untied both bands and loosened the coils with her fingers until her hair fell in loose curls down her back. Back in Colony Felicidad, a girl without braids would have been considered as good as naked, and she knew she was blushing.

  “Wow. Jeez, Ana, you should let it down like that for school.” Mischa flipped open a fresh page and began sketching. “It’s, like, Pre-Raphaelite.”

  Ana swallowed again. The room had started to contract to a beat. Her temples throbbed. Just then, the door opened and Suvi came in.

  “Whoa,” she said when she saw Ana. “Your hair!”

  “I know,” said Mischa. “Here, look.”

  He handed Ana the first sheet: a delicate profile in gray pencil tracing her high forehead, the clean line of her nose, slight overbite and long neck. Her ears were small, her eyes large and solemn. He had spent the most time on her braids—hundreds of hatch marks against the straight line of her center parting—and ended the sketch at her collarbone.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. Then, “Can I keep it?”

  “Of course. Here, this one too.” He handed her the second sheet. This sketch was more vague, and he had cheated on her face—he had drawn her smiling, although she had felt too weak all afternoon to smile much—but it showed her hair falling over her shoulders like an avalanche of silk.

  “Oh, my…”

  “See what I mean?”

  Suvi came over to look too.

  “Mischa, you’re amazing.”

  “I know.”

  “Hey, Ana, have you finished your French yet?” Suvi’s smile began to fade. “Dude, you’re really pale. Are you feeling OK?”

  “I’m fine. Maybe a drink of water?”

  “There’s a cup in the bathroom.”

  She hid the pictures in her math binder, which she shoved in her bag under the bed as soon as she got home. Just as well, as the room was dark by the time she heard her father calling her.

  “Ani?” He felt her forehead with the back of his hand. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “You weren’t home. I fell asleep.” Her throat felt as though it was stuffed with cotton wool. “It hurts here.”

  “I’m calling a doctor—no, no, you stay put.”

  It took less than a day for the news to spread through her class.

  Ana’s got mumps.

  What?

  Mumps. We won’t get it because we were vaccinated.

  Only kids in third world countries get mumps.

  My dad says if she wasn’t vaccinated for mumps she wasn’t vaccinated for measles, either.

  You know kids die from measles?

  I hope they’ve locked her up somewhere safe.

  The doctor gave her painkillers for the pain in her neck and head and told her to drink lots of liquids. The swelling under her ears on either side of her face would go down in a few days, he said. For now, she’d just have to get used to looking like a hamster and get as much rest as she could.

  That evening, a note dropped through the letterbox from Suvi:

  Sean’s telling everyone you’re delirious and seeing monkeys and you’ve started saying you’re the Wrath of God. Don’t worry, I punched him when I heard. He’s such a douche!

  The Wrath of God had something to do with a movie Sean’s brother had shown him by a famous director called Werner Herzog. Ana remembered the name because she had to tell him it was pronounced Verner, not Werner. The movie was about a group of conquistadores traveling down the Amazon River in search of El Dorado, led by a tyrannical madman. They all end up either shot by arrows, or starved, or delirious with fever, and in the final scene their raft is overrun by monkeys and the madman keeps saying, “I am the Wrath of God!” and promises to found a pure line of rulers with his own daughter and reign over the continent with her.

  For some reason Sean thought this was really funny and he’d taken to whispering “Wrath of God!” whenever Ana was nearby. “Dodged any poison arrows today?” he’d ask her in front of his friends. She’d told him that the Amazon didn’t actually go through Bolivia, but Sean didn’t seem to care.

  Ana rolled onto her side. No matter how much water she drank, her mouth remained as dry as sandpaper. She closed her eyes and counted the throbbing in her temples: one-two, three-four, five-six…

  There is a long table, set with goblets and salvers, in the middle of a field. Scrubland: dry, yellow, studded with prickly pear. Wine topples from one of the goblets, staining the ground red. A vulture has landed; it grabs a piece of bread with its talons, enormous wings beating hard. Plates smash, the tablecloth tears. Another vulture, an
d another. They are enormous, black with white ruffs around their necks, like the noblemen in the old painting reproduced outside the history classroom at school. Their heads are bald, flat, and the rough skin is a dull pink.

  With hooked beaks they tear at the meat, working in greedy silence. They will have spotted the table from afar, drifting on motionless outspread wings high overhead, circling, circling anything that might be carrion. Farmers in the eastern lowlands dread them. They can strip a cow of its flesh in minutes. Sometimes they go for days without eating, then they gorge.

  Through the open bedroom door, Ana could hear voices downstairs: her father’s and another man’s. She could tell by the rhythm and cadence of their speech that they were speaking Plautdietsch.

  You can see on her birth certificate, here, her father said. You see, parents’ names—there, and there.

  Miloh. Helena.

  Sometimes she went by Lena, you said?

  Yes.

  More words, obscured by the movement of bodies and shuffling of paper. They walked from the kitchen to the front hallway. Don’t go, she thinks in a haze. Don’t leave. If her father left, she would be totally alone in this strange city, this strange country. Totally alone in all the world.

  Dankscheen.

  Bitscheen.

  She lapses between the voices and her dream. The vultures at the table, feathered old men, Papa at the door saying, “Come, Anneli, we must go quickly,” and Colony Felicidad receding behind them, smaller and smaller until it is a blur on the horizon, evaporating into nothingness on the trembling, arid air.

  A week later, Suvi dropped her backpack on the floor and sat herself at the foot of Ana’s bed.

  “Feeling better?”

  “Yes. Much.”

  “You look better.” She reached into her bag. “I’m supposed to give this to you and say not to worry about getting it all done before you come back. It’s just to keep you in the loop. Readings, worksheets and stuff.” She paused, her mouth curling into a smirk. “And you have a message from Hot Tom Peterson.”