Max lay with his legs tangled in my purple leggings, my grandfather’s T-shirt pulled up so I could see his belly button as it rose and fell with his breath. His arms were stretched out. His hair was wet and stuck to his head, just like his sister’s. His face seemed to glow red against the grandmother-white bedsheet.
For a moment, I just stared at Julia and Max. Then I remembered there were better things I could be doing.
Like airing out the room, now, when no one was going to run away, and emptying the bucket. I grabbed it and went outside, leaving the door of the blue house open at my back. I dumped it in the field and stood there, stock-still. I held my breath and listened. Were they near? Were there dogs barking in the distance? Was that the clattering of the helicopter? But all I could hear was a few birds twittering.
I went back into the house relieved, leaving the door open, and began to unload my backpack, almost in slow motion. First I took out the blue, green and turquoise picnic blanket and spread it on the dusty floor. Then I carefully laid out the things I had bought: the set of games and the magazines and the sweets and then the art supplies and the package of napkins. I folded up Max’s T-shirt and put it at the edge of the blanket. I set the nail polish down on Julia’s magazine. I unpacked the paper plates and bowls and laid a place at the picnic blanket for each of us. The bottles of lemonade were still cold. I felt glad about that.
The room still smelled from the bucket, but I realized I hadn’t really been able to wash it out properly. I went outside, picked some stalks of barley and threw some of them into the damp bucket.
Everything looked beautiful, like a table set for a birthday party. I wished I knew what the table at Julia and Max’s birthday parties had looked like. I wondered what you would give to children you spent most of your time hitting and shoving, and whether there would have been gifts. I thought I knew the answer, because it occurred to me that Julia and Max both wore brand-name clothing—at least most of the time, when they didn’t have to wear purple leggings from the sale bin. I was fairly sure—certain, in fact—that they didn’t have any reason to complain about not getting enough gifts for their birthdays.
Just as I was thinking that, Julia moved and sighed. I jumped up and gently shut the door. But she didn’t wake up, and I stood there with no idea what to do with myself. I went to the corner and sat down on the floor. My eyes fell on the picture in the gilded frame. I’d never really looked at the picture before, always focused on the frame, which seemed more beautiful than the painting itself.
The picture was nothing but sea and a tiny boat. Maybe the painter had been out of colors and had nothing but blue to work with. I imagined that if we were in a cartoon, the picture would tip on its side and the water would pour out into the room. I was on the verge of laughing at this when I remembered what was missing here—water—water to drink and water to wash with. As soon as the lemonade was warm, no one would want it anymore, and it couldn’t be used to wash with. It would only make everything stickier than before.
How stupid.
How stupid!
I had thought of everything except the most obvious thing. Julia and Max would never even consider my idea of going to the mill because they would be too thirsty and sticky. But no matter how hard I thought about it, no matter how difficult or complicated moving them was going be, I knew they had to leave this place. And they couldn’t go home. I’d heard yesterday what their father would do to them if they went back.
Then I remembered my cell phone.
My plan from before.
They wouldn’t believe it, they definitely wouldn’t, but it was still worth a try.
And just like she was reading my thoughts, Julia finally woke up. She sat up slowly and looked at me with wide-open but still sleepy eyes.
This was my chance.
Before Julia could say anything, I took the phone out of my pocket and said, “Good news! Look what your dad wrote. Your mother’s doing better.”
It took Julia all of a second and a half to come over to me and read her father’s text.
35
Everything ok. My wife better. Will be home soon. –cb
Julia read it aloud three times, never noticing the crucial detail I had stupidly overlooked and was hiding behind my thumb: the telephone number of the sender. I couldn’t tell if Julia believed the text or not.
“Everything okay,” she repeated, and then she spotted the picnic blanket and let out a small, surprised cry, which woke Max up, too. Julia was stunned and amazed and happy, all at once.
“Mascha. Mascha! What is all that? What is that?”
“It’s for you. It’s all for you.”
“But there’s so much. Where did it come from?”
“What do you mean? I bought it. I just bought it.”
“But where—where did you get the money?”
“Well, I saved it.”
Max rose from the mattress with a yawn, slowly went over to the picnic blanket and kneeled down between the car magazine and the marshmallows. He carefully picked up each of the boxes, bags and packages and turned them in his hands, scratching his head, like someone who didn’t understand what was happening. And really, it couldn’t have made very much sense to anyone who hadn’t been eavesdropping at the kitchen door as Trudy and my grandmother talked.
Max didn’t care if it made sense. He grabbed the pirate T-shirt and grunted as he pulled it on over my grandfather’s yellow one. Then he began to inspect and unwrap the hamburgers and fries in the plastic shopping bag. Slowly, without any help from us, he divided and arranged the food on the plates. He groaned quietly when a few fries fell onto the picnic blanket but continued with his work. He took several minutes to open the package of napkins, finally poking through the plastic with his finger.
As he wiped the sweat off his face, I thought I saw the beginning of a small smile on his lips. With a great sense of purpose, he folded three napkins into irregular triangles and laid one beside each plate. It looked even more beautiful than before and reminded me even more of a wonderful table set for a birthday party.
Max was so busy with what he was doing he didn’t seem to notice us, but once everything was arranged, he looked at me and asked in his rarely used voice, “Why just two?”
Only then did it occur to me that I hadn’t been planning to eat with them and hadn’t gotten a hamburger for myself. “Don’t worry about it, Max,” I said. “The fries will be enough for me. I don’t really like hamburgers.”
We all took our places at the picnic blanket, and I noticed that everything in the blue house felt calmer, more peaceful and almost good. We drank the cold lemonade. Max took a muffin and set it beside his plate. It seemed to taste good to him. Everything seemed to taste good to him. Now and then he would pick up one of the things I had bought, look at it as he chewed his food and then set it back down. Julia, too, kept looking at all the things, and occasionally, in between bites, with her mouth still full, she said, “Man, Mascha!”
36
So that’s the way it was.
It was wonderful.
It wasn’t a meal like any I ever had. Everything seemed light. The fries were soggy and cold, but they tasted delicious anyway. It might have gone on forever, for years, for decades, till we were old and wrinkled and still we would be eating cold fries.
When the paper plates were empty, we turned to the sweets, stuffing cotton candy in our mouths and following that with marshmallows. Max was eating large chunks of the chocolate, too. His mouth didn’t stay empty for more than a second at a time.
Every now and then, one of us would say, “All right, that’s it. I’m just going to have one more!” Just one more marshmallow or a few more gummy bears or a little more lemonade. Finally, Max washed down a mouthful of chocolate with too large a gulp of the lemonade and let out a belch so loud that I swear it shook the blue house.
That was ho
w it started.
First quietly. Very quietly.
But then we laughed so loud and hard that our eyes ran with tears and we had to hold our bellies. We rolled on the ground at the edge of the picnic blanket surrounded by magazines and chocolate wrappers and laughed and laughed and laughed. We couldn’t stop. We laughed so hard it hurt. Julia sat up, laughed some more and grabbed the bottle of nail polish. Color: plum purple. Smell: horrible. She couldn’t hold her fingers still because she was laughing so hard, but she didn’t care. She painted the edges of her fingers, and every time she looked down at her new plum-purple fingertips, she keeled over in a new fit of laughter.
Max took out the pens and began to color his fingers dark blue, though the color didn’t take very well on his nails. He laughed till his face was wet with sweat and tears, gasping in the breaks between laughing.
It felt so good.
The laughter.
Everything.
But since you couldn’t live if all you ever did was laugh, and because our laughter slowly made us tired, we laughed more and more quietly, till finally the moment had passed.
Once it was over, Julia opened one of the boxes, and we spent at least an hour playing games. Max took the paper and the pens and a bag of gummy bears and a bag of chips over to the mattress and left me and Julia by ourselves with the games and things, including the magazine I had bought for him.
The two of us sat on the picnic blanket and played Sorry! But we got tired of it after a while. I saw my music player sticking out of her pants pocket and I realized how much I missed listening to my music. I could have used some Leonard Cohen on all those trips I’d taken back and forth from the blue house and in all those moments when someone wanted me to answer a question—pretty much all the time, over the past day.
I didn’t know how to say it, how to ask her. It was embarrassing somehow. I didn’t want to seem like I was taking back a gift. That’s what adults did. But my music was important to me, and that won out, in the end.
“Julia,” I asked. “Do you still need that?”
“What, the music player? Yeah, I definitely need it.”
“But Julia. You know. I need the music, too. I get really depressed when I don’t have it.”
“I’ll give it back to you when we go home.”
“I—”
“You know, Mascha, the music, this music, it’s really good. I’m not listening to it that much, because the battery’s almost dead. I’m only listening a little. But this music is something good.”
“Yeah, I know. When you listen to it, you can do anything. You know what I mean? When I listen to those songs, my dad is here, and I’m older, and everyone listens to what I say. That’s how it is with me.”
“And no one can get you, right? When you’re listening, no one can get you. Isn’t that right, Mascha? The music is around you. It’s around me.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Julia stuffed the music player deeper into her pants pocket and began to open the beading kit. She peeled the tape off the packaging and carefully lifted up the lid. Right then, it seemed like the only thing that mattered to her were the beads. With a slight squint and a curl to her lip, she began to thread them with her plum-colored fingers. I looked over at Max, who was drawing happily away at his picture. I’d hardly noticed him the past half hour, except for the occasional sound of his markers moving across the paper. He seemed to be pleased with what he was drawing. Curious, I went over to him, and peeked over his shoulder at the pad. Everything was—
Everything was brown.
You could see that he had drawn something. A little bit of green showed through and a few blue lines, and some red here and there. But almost everything was hidden behind the brown. There was no way to tell what the picture had looked like, except for the fact that it clearly hadn’t been just houses and trees, or he wouldn’t have had to obliterate it.
I wanted to ask him what he was doing, but suddenly Julia shouted, “Crap! Crap! Crap!”
When I turned to her I saw that all her beads had come undone. Her face was bright red and she was throwing the beads with all her might at the picture in the gilded frame. And when she got to maybe the forty-ninth bead, she hissed, without looking at me, “Let me tell you something: My father has never in his life said the word okay. And he doesn’t send text messages. He says texting is for idiots.”
37
And then.
And then she screamed.
Without any sort of warning.
She screamed and screamed and screamed, she screamed everything out. “I want to get out of here,” she yelled. “I want to get out of here now. Let me out!” She ran around the room like a crazy person, trampling the games and the sweets and the greasy plates. “Mascha!” she screamed. “You stupid cow, you stupid, stupid cow. Why are you keeping us here?” She rattled the door and the grate on the window, but they didn’t give, and Julia just got angrier. “We stink, can’t you smell it? We’re sweaty and filthy and there’s no bathroom. Do you realize how horrible this is? What have we ever done to you?”
Although Julia’s voice was unbelievably loud, I could clearly hear Max’s quiet voice beneath it. He had rolled himself up on the mattress and was stroking his own cheek. He looked like he was trying to soothe himself. I realized he was allowing his imaginary friend, Pablo, to calm him down.
I was standing there looking at this ghostly scene with Max when suddenly Julia reared up and shoved me so hard I fell backward on the picnic blanket. I hadn’t expected that, and I began to cry. I tried to stand up, but my hand had fallen on a plate with ketchup all over it, and then Julia shoved me down again.
“Come on, Mascha,” she shouted with a fierce look on her face. “Tell us what you think you’re doing here.”
I mean, Julia was nine. And I was thirteen. She was smaller than I was and thinner. But still I was afraid of her as I lay there on the ground and she stood above me with her terrible rage. More and more tears ran down my face, and I heard her say, “Come on,” as if from far away, “it’s not true is it, about Mama and how you’re supposed to watch us?”
“It is true,” I screamed. “You’re wrong. It’s true.” Louder and louder, I screamed, “You’re wrong. It’s true. You’re wrong. It’s true. You’re right, it’s not true.”
“What did you just say, Mascha?”
My voice got quieter with my last few words, and I hadn’t meant to say what I said. The words just fell out of my mouth and lay beside me on the picnic blanket. I felt so helpless, but I also felt something else: relief. At least I wouldn’t have to lie to them anymore. I could save my lies for the grown-ups.
Julia squatted down and asked me again, “What did you just say?”
I had no idea how to explain everything. I couldn’t figure out where to start. So I began by standing up from the sticky picnic blanket. Julia didn’t help me, but she didn’t shove me back down either. She stood up at the same time I did and glared at me with her angry eyes.
“So?” she said.
“So,” I said. “So, it’s like this.”
38
I couldn’t stand it anymore, Julia. What they were doing to you. I wanted to stop them.”
“They? What do you mean, they? Only Daddy does it. And he doesn’t really do anything. He doesn’t do a thing!”
“But—I’ve seen it. I’ve seen your stomach, and I saw when Max landed against the picture frame.”
“You’re lying again! You haven’t seen anything! Nothing at all! Nothing is wrong! We want to go home, we want to go home right now!”
“Julia! You told me about it yourself!”
“I never said anything.”
“Someone said your arm—your arm was actually broken once.”
“That’s not true. Daddy never pushed me off the tree house. He didn’t!”
“Tree house? Wha
t tree house?”
“He ripped it down.”
“But Julia, what about everything you said? This morning you told me—”
“Because Daddy doesn’t do anything to us, does he, Max?”
But Max didn’t respond. He was not being soothed anymore. I guess Pablo could come and go as he pleased. Instead, Max was sobbing on the mattress. Julia asked him again, “Does he?”
I said, “Julia, if he doesn’t do anything to you, then show me your arms and your belly.”
She was suddenly terrified. In a panic, she grasped the ends of her long-sleeved shirt tightly between her thumbs and index fingers and yelled, “You’ll be sorry if you do anything!”
I could have shouted back at her, but instead I used my normal voice. I thought it would make her understand that I wanted to help her.
“Julia, you can’t go back to your house. Your father will beat you. I know. And no one else will help you. Everyone says—”
“Mascha, you promised us you wouldn’t—”
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t say anything. To anyone. But don’t you get it? You can’t go back to your house! Julia! Don’t you get it?”
“You locked us in? You locked us in here? You must be crazy.”
“But Julia, I haven’t locked you in! It’s just—”
“What?”
“Julia, listen . . . Tonight, we’ve got to get—”
“Tonight? Tonight? You need to let us out of here right now! Max, come on! Stand up!”
When Max didn’t move, Julia went over to him and said, “Come on, we’re going home!”
He wasn’t rolled up in a ball anymore. He was sitting stiffly with his legs stretched out on the mattress, staring straight ahead. Julia reached her hand to her brother, but he stared past it, still sitting. Julia tugged his arm, and he began to strike at her wildly and scream.
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