by Kim Fu
Wind battered the cave-world of her sleeping bag. Siobhan thought about a field trip her fourth grade class had taken to the local natural history museum. There had been an exhibit about early humans. The guide told them that even the most ancient societies, before recorded history, had honored their dead. One of her classmates had shot his hand up and asked, “But how can you know that, if they didn’t write anything down?”
Human skeletons have been found intentionally grouped and arranged, the guide explained, with the remains of flowers and other decorative items. The guide pointed to an unremarkable black-and-white photo of an archaeological dig, and beside it, an artist’s rendering of what the grave would have looked like.
The drawing had been done in a broad, cartoonish style, with unfinished outlines and only pale touches of color, probably to appear less disturbing to children. Vague human shapes laid in a naturally occurring crevice, covered in flowered stalks and wreaths.
Siobhan remembered all the Forevermore girls lounging around the dock, the beach, and the nearby grass during the swim tests. Many had tied daisies together into bracelets and necklaces. Dina had been covered in ones gifted to her. Some girls had plaited the white flowers into each other’s hair.
Siobhan poked her head out of the sleeping bag. The sky had cleared, the air washed clean, having unleashed its rain elsewhere. She felt dizzy and off-kilter, the pain in her ankle changing again, tightening like a fist. She touched her face. Her cheeks were so hot they seemed to scorch her fingertips.
She lay on her belly and ripped out all the wildflowers and blades of grass that were within reach. She knotted the ends together into long chains and loops, hanging them from her wrists and neck. The flowers had barely any fragrance. They were only faintly sweet, even with dozens of them laid against her throat and chest. She pictured an archaeologist sweeping the dusty earth from her bones, someday far in the future, a small girl skeleton that never had the chance to grow.
Siobhan heard the rest later, saw the footage: Nita, leading Andee and Dina, eventually stumbled upon a set of man-made steps, part of a hiking trail. The girls ran screaming and hollering all the way to the trailhead parking lot. No one was around, but two cars were parked in one corner, cars with the promise of people. Cars people would return to. They sat in the gravel beside the wheels to wait.
The three of them were on the local news that night. Wrapped in blankets from the big island’s volunteer fire department. Small and incoherent, filthy, hair matted and snarled, stained knees, lisping and stuttering as they struggled with the reporter’s questions. The reporter kneeled, her stick-and-ball microphone almost touching Nita’s lips. They were told that Isabel had been rescued and Jan’s body recovered. They were told that the search party had been looking in the wrong area, not expecting that the girls would have walked so far in the time they’d been missing, on so little food, on such little legs and lungs, and in the wrong direction—they’d been weaving first west- and then northward through the nature preserve and parkland, almost to the northernmost tip of the island, while the town hugged the southern coast. They looked up with the empty eyes of baby rabbits. They sounded stupid. They looked pathetic, utterly vulnerable. Condemned by secretive, dying Jan and criminally neglectful Forevermore, saved by pure chance. Anyone watching would think: Those poor girls! Thank goodness they were found.
When the flashlights came, the beams swinging back and forth and flickering behind the trees, an echoing chorus of voices calling Siobhan’s name, she was so certain they were angels that she didn’t bother to respond. Even when the town doctor opened up the island’s only clinic in the middle of the night, examined Siobhan, and pronounced her fine—her ankle was broken in two places, she’d torn a muscle in her upper back, she was dehydrated, she had abrasions all over, she was in shock, but she was fundamentally okay, she’d be all right—she still didn’t believe him. She’d known, as an unfamiliar adult form had reached down and plucked her from the grass, still wrapped in her sleeping bag and draped in flowers, that she’d been brought back from the dead.
Siobhan lived a quiet life, a typical life, of minor disappointments and ordinary loneliness. She became a researcher in child psychology. She spent her entire career in academia and avoided clinical work wherever possible. In the lab, she sent in her research assistants and collaborators while she observed from behind a two-way mirror. She offered to take on more than her share of the paperwork and computer analysis, so long as her co-researchers were the ones to actually talk to subjects, do the site visits, sit with the kids in their controlled rooms. More than once, a colleague or supervisor commented that, given her specialty, Siobhan should work on how awkward and stilted she was with children, especially one-on-one.
She preferred teaching college students. Looking out into a lecture hall of young adults, their laptop-lit faces recently arrived on the far shore of puberty, she felt relieved for them.
When Siobhan traveled for conferences, she sometimes woke in the middle of the night, and the unfamiliar hotel bed and outlines in the dark convinced her that she was still lying in that island clearing, still in her preadolescent body, a corpse wreathed in flowers. She had never left, and everything that had happened since was a dream, a girl’s fantasy of adulthood, a film reel in the afterlife.
Every now and then, she would linger at the bar of the hotel hosting the conference, or attend one of the evening parties where name tags adhered to their chests or swinging from lanyards advertised their academic titles and affiliations, the possibilities for career advancement and conflicts of interest they were accumulating drink by drink. She would guide a warm body up to her room as insurance against the nightmares.
On one such night, she ran into her former graduate supervisor. He hit on her the way he had when she was his student, and she was considering it, even though he remained thirty years her senior, and the gap at thirty-three and sixty-three seemed, oddly, wider than it had at twenty-five and fifty-five.
Over watery rye-and-Cokes, she confessed that she often felt like what they were doing as researchers was confirming what they already knew. He lectured her angrily: That’s the opposite of what we do! A scientist doesn’t chase preexisting biases and folk knowledge, a scientist follows the data wherever it leads, a scientist learns new things about the universe and mankind!
She agreed in the abstract, but went back to her room alone.
Siobhan spent her days behind the two-way glass in her laboratory, watching kids interact with their parents, with her co-workers, with one another, with the traps and miniature worlds she built for them. Her theses and designs shifted over the years, but she could never prove what she wanted to. What she knew they were truly capable of. She stared into their eyes from where they couldn’t look back at her.
Acknowledgments
Many thanks are due to my stupendous agent, Jackie Kaiser, and the whole team at Westwood Creative Artists; my editors Jennifer Lambert and Lauren Wein, for their deft touch and understanding, as well as to their colleagues at HarperCollins Canada and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, particularly Pilar Garcia-Brown, Lisa Glover, and Amy Edelman; the Writers’ Trust of Canada, the Berton House, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the kind, generous people of Dawson City, Yukon; the Ucross Foundation; the Wallace Stegner House and the Eastend Arts Council; my brilliant, wonderful, supportive friends, writers and non-writers, too numerous to list here (but I hope you know who you are); my family, particularly my parents and sisters, who will always be my role models for how to live; and andrea bennett, my first, best, and dearest reader, my collaborator and companion through a creative life. Finally, thanks to JP Lobos, my great love: you made them all possible, but especially this one.
1
Boy
WE CALLED THE wooden bleachers the Big Steps. They overlooked a pit of dust and gravel, generously called the field. I sat on the Big Steps and watched as two boys in my grade rooted around the edge of the field as though searching for a lost ball.
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br /> They emerged, each holding a long strip of wild grass. Ollie, the smaller of the two, didn’t have all his permanent teeth yet, so he wouldn’t give more than an unnerving, close-mouthed smile. Roger Foher, tall, ugly, and hulking, had ruddy-brown hair and a crooked nose.
I skipped down the Big Steps with some of the other boys. Half hidden around the corner, the playground teacher smoked and dropped ashes onto her gray dress, trying to set herself on fire. We formed a circle around Roger and Ollie. Another boy shoved me out of the way to get in close. He cheered with his fists balled.
Roger struck first, backhanding the grass in the circular sweep of a swordsman. I could still hear, over the shouting, the grass slicing through the air. It left a red welt on the milky skin of Ollie’s calf.
Ollie raised the grass over his head like a lion tamer with a whip. He cracked it on the shoulder of Roger’s T-shirt. The sound—the impact—was muffled by the fabric, and Roger laughed. Ollie stayed grim and silent; the first boy to cry out or bleed lost the game.
Roger struck the same spot again, crossing the welt into an X. Ollie’s grass wrapped limply around Roger’s side. Roger turned the X into an asterisk. Ollie got one solid hit, on the fleshy part of Roger’s upper arm. Roger continued to crisscross the same spot on Ollie’s leg.
I could smell the teacher’s cigarette, see its muted red dot against the gray sky. The boy beside me stamped his feet, stirring up the dust around us, throwing gravel against the back of my legs.
It was Roger’s turn. He paused, expectant, like an animal when it hears movement in the brush. Squinting his eyes, he pointed at Ollie’s leg. The jagged ladder of skin peaked in a spot too bright to be just a mark.
Roger raised his arms and spun around. Champion of the world. The other boys were quiet. The strong had beaten the weak; there was nothing exciting about that. The boy who had shoved me went to walk Ollie off the field. Ollie shoved him away.
The boys dispersed. I stuck around. Roger noticed me. “You played before?” he said, gesturing with his strand of grass, green and impotent now. I shook my head. “You should try it. It’ll make a man out of you.”
Two years earlier, in the first grade, we did all of our assignments in a slim composition book to be collected at the end of the year. I couldn’t imagine consequences that far away. Maybe I’d be dead by then, or living on the moon.
One of our assignments was What I Want to Be When I Grow Up. Our teacher had written several suggestions on the board: doctor, astronaut, policeman, scientist, businessman, and Mommy. Mommy was the only one with a capital letter.
Working in studious silence, I drew myself as a Mommy. I thought of the mommies in magazine ads and picture books, always bending at the waist over their tied aprons with their breasts on display—serving pancakes, wrapping presents, patting the heads of puppies, vacuuming sparkling-clean floors. I drew myself with a stiff halo of hair, swaddled babies around my feet. A satisfied smile from ear to ear. “I want to be a Mommy.”
Two days later, I found my notebook lying open on my bed. That page was ripped out. I asked Bonnie, my younger sister, if she’d done it. The evidence didn’t point to Bonnie: she could hardly have ripped so neatly, right from the staples, making it seem as though the page had never been there to begin with. There was no one else in the family I was willing to confront.
The year I became friends with Roger, we were asked again. I said fireman. A picture was optional. I worked furiously on mine. The fireman had an ax in one hand and a woman in the other, and his muscles were as bulbous as snow peas. Flames danced all around. I could imagine only being the woman, my arms around the thick neck of my savior, a high-heeled shoe dangling from my raised foot. I left my notebook open on the coffee table when I went to bed.
My father came into the room I shared with Bonnie after we were supposed to be asleep. I watched his shape swoop down like a bird to kiss Bonnie on the forehead. He stopped near my bed and saw the whites of my eyes. He patted me on the foot through the blanket. The door clicked shut. I stayed awake for a long time afterward, wiggling my warmed toes.
Ollie and I waited at the base of the Big Steps for Roger. I asked Ollie about his leg and he gave me a withering look, like I had asked something overly intimate. I tried to think of a topic that would interest him. I was used to talking with my sisters. “How did Roger break his nose?”
Ollie pointed to the end of the field, where Roger was jogging toward us. “One time, he said it was in a fight with his cousin, who lives across town. Another time, he said he tried to skateboard off his roof. Some girl asked him yesterday and he said he got struck by lightning.”
The boy who’d shoved me the day before came to join us. “Hey, Lester,” said Ollie. They nodded to each other.
“Hi, Peter,” Lester said. I gave him the same knowing nod and crossed my arms over my chest the way they did.
We didn’t speak until Roger arrived. “New game,” he said.
No fear crossed Ollie’s and Lester’s faces.
“I put three big rocks at the other end of the field,” Roger went on. “Last guy there gets them all thrown at him.”
Ollie and Lester nodded. I looked back. Behind us, I could see the yard teacher chastising a girl for chewing gum. There was no reason to bother with us. This was what boys did.
“Okay. Go!”
Ollie shot off immediately. Lester and Roger were close on his heels, and I followed. We broke right through some kids who were kicking a ball back and forth. Their shouts fell behind us.
My lungs seized up. I ran as fast as I could. The distance between me and their backs grew, became unbridgeable. As I watched Ollie crash into the fence with his arms out, and Lester and Roger slow to a stop, I considered turning and running the other way.
By the time I reached the end of the field, each of the boys held a stone in his hands. Roger tossed his back and forth between his palms. I doubled over, my hands on my thighs, and stared through my knees. I could hear a jump-rope rhyme coming from somewhere—musical voices, an even meter.
“Straighten up,” Roger said.
I tried to stand tall, but the moment they drew their arms back, I instinctively crouched and threw my hands over my face. With my eyes closed, I heard the stones hit: Thump. Thump. Thump.
They’d all missed.
Roger barked, “Peter! Stand still!”
They gathered up their stones again. Ollie caught my eye and quickly looked away. He was enjoying this—the victor at last, his fast, mousy frame good for something.
I couldn’t help myself. The stones left their hands and I dropped instantly down. The stones flew over my head.
“This isn’t working,” Lester said.
Roger’s even gaze told me I should have stood still. What happened next was my own fault. “Lie down on your stomach.”
Gravel dug into my face, my palms, my knees. The boys stood over me. I stared at Ollie’s white shoelaces, the hole at the toe of his sneaker. The dust stung my eyes. I closed them. The girls were still jumping rope somewhere, under the watchful gaze of the gray dress and the whistle. Singsong patterns.
I sank down. All my weight toward the center of the earth.
The first stone fell from above, like rain. It struck me high up on my back, just left of my spine. The second landed on the flat of my tailbone. The last one landed on the ground by my ear, loud as thunder. Someone had aimed for my head.
“You’re a good man, Peter,” Roger said.
One afternoon back when I was in first grade, my sisters and I came home from school and the house reeked of boiling sugar. My mother was making white-fungus soup. She said her mother used to make it.
Father lifted the pot from the stove, went outside without his shoes, and dumped it on the lawn. It wasn’t because of the smell. The sweet broth sank into the earth, leaving behind a heap of frilly white. On the first day, it looked like a girl had stripped off her nightgown and abandoned it there. On the second day, like a pile of bleached bone
s.
The next night, she made split-pea soup with ham. The six members of my family crowded around our table meant for four, and my sisters worked dutifully through the sludge. I put a spoonful in my mouth and retched. The soup ran out the sides of my mouth and back into the bowl.
My father stood up and came over to me. His head blocked the overhead light, like an eclipse. He took my hands in his. He shaped them into an upturned bowl, as though I were begging.
He looked at my sisters and my mother. I followed his gaze. Adele, Helen, and Bonnie: the same black eyes, so dark that the iris blended into the pupil. My father put my soup bowl in my hands. “Drink.”
My own saliva pooled clear on top of the dense slime.
“Drink, or eat nothing tomorrow,” he said. No anger in his voice.
Trying to make the soup skip my tongue, I inhaled it like air, straight into the back of my mouth. It left a slug’s trail down my throat. Fleshy, pink chunks remained at the bottom of my bowl. My father sat down again.
He turned to my mother, lifting his spoonful of ham. “It’s good.”
We followed Roger farther and farther from the playground. We had to sprint back to class when the bell rang, while Roger just sauntered in tardy. I wasn’t in his class. He claimed to have flipped off his teacher when she called him out for being late.
Ollie had to explain the gesture to me. Lester, Ollie, Roger, and I sat in the grass ditch for the field’s rain runoff, below the sightline of the playground. A long drought had dried out the ground. The grass the boys used to whip each other was starting to yellow and sprout. “It’s like swearing.”