by Gin Phillips
The bottom of the concession castle seems pretty solid, but the farther up it goes, the more stones are missing. Sky and trees show through the holes. Kudzu has crept into the cracks, and pink buttercups are growing along the walls. Even though we know it’s just a place where people bought Cokes and popcorn, it still feels like some forgotten enchanted hiding place. Maybe not a place where kings and queens lived, but a place where you might find a talking bear or a family of gnomes.
“Can we get in?” I ask.
Lydia shrugs and starts around the left side of the building. “Don’t know,” she says. “I’ll go this way, and you look on the other side.”
I check around the left side, and I only see a small window too tall for me to reach. If there was ever glass in it, it’s long gone now. I hear Lydia’s voice calling me, and when I reach her, she’s holding a weathered piece of plywood propped against the wall. She grins and slides the wood back, and I can see that there’s a hole behind it. A hole wider than my shoulders and nearly as high as my waist.
“This sort of counts as a door,” says Lydia.
There’s something about squeezing through a small space that makes whatever’s on the other side seem more exciting somehow. Like how if you walk through an open gate into someone’s yard, it’s just a normal yard. But if you squeeze through a little hole in a fence, turning and twisting and trying not to cut yourself or rip your clothes, by the time you pop out the other side, you just expect to find something worth all that effort.
At first, though, as I stand up inside the stone walls, it seems like I might be disappointed. There’s a concrete floor and empty shelves on the walls. Grass is growing through the cracks in the concrete. And there’s a narrow wooden staircase that leads up to what was maybe a storage space. Now the storage space opens up to the sky. The roof of the building is totally gone.
Sunlight and shadows dance across the ground as I look up at the staircase. I look back at Lydia, who’s brushing a spiderweb out of her hair.
“Let’s go,” she says.
We’re careful as we go up the stairs. They creak and groan under our feet. Some of the railing is missing, and the wood is cracking like the old paint in our apartment. I wonder when the last pair of feet stepped on these stairs. But we get to the top stair without any catastrophes. Not only is the roof gone, but the walls are only a couple of feet high, with plenty of stones missing. The whole place is damp and dirty and sprinkled with bird poop.
Then we look over the edge of the walls, and it’s suddenly worth climbing the stairs. We’re looking onto a fat, smallish tree. It’s got pointy wide leaves, so maybe it’s a maple. And in the tree I can see at least a dozen birds’ nests. Some have white eggs, some have brown eggs, and some have blue speckled eggs. Some have grown-up birds perched in them, and a few of them look up and squawk at us. In one small nest near the top of the tree, I can see two baby birds, almost translucent, hardly any feathers at all. They stretch open their beaks and scream to be fed. The eggs, though, are peaceful and quiet. It’s like we’ve found a bird day-care center.
“It’s a whole city of nests,” I say.
“Maybe we can get a baby,” says Lydia.
“No way,” I say. “Not unless we have to. We are not doing that again.”
We found a baby bird in Lydia’s backyard once, and Marvin—the stepdad, not the dinosaur—told us to feed him milk with a medicine dropper. We made a little nest in a shoebox and tried to feed him twice a day. He never seemed to care for the milk much, so we dug for worms and grubs and tried those. But he just got weaker. Eventually he died and we had to bury him out by the honeysuckle tree. Mom told me that we should never have picked him up because his mother probably would have found him. She said you should never touch a baby bird because if you make the baby smell like a human, his mother won’t want him anymore. I think that’s lousy parenting. But I guess even a hard-to-please mother bird would have done a better job of raising that baby bird than we did. I still feel guilty when I remember how light it was in that shoebox, no more weight than the bow off a birthday present. How pale its skin was and how its heart pounded in its rib cage. He was ours to take care of, and we let him down.
I don’t want another baby bird. They weigh too heavy on me.
It’s only as we’re leaving that I notice the wall right at the edge of the staircase. I had my back turned to it as we were coming up to the turret. But I suddenly realize that maybe another pair of feet have walked up these stairs more recently than I thought. I see the same signs we saw in the aquarium and on the crape myrtle. Only this time it’s not painted—it’s a chalk drawing. A pale green arrow, lavender circles, and sky-blue dashes. We stop and stare at it, and Lydia runs her finger over the arrow. The tip of her finger comes away green.
“Nell, wouldn’t chalk wash off when it rains?” asks Lydia.
“Yeah,” I say. “I think.”
“And it rained last Friday, right? So somebody drew this since then?”
“Or maybe it’s a special kind of chalk,” I say, not believing it, but not wanting Lydia to start kickboxing again. “A kind that lasts for years.”
“Right,” she says. “Sure.”
I do not want anyone else to be here. I want this to be our own private kingdom. So I block out the Coke can and the chalk signs and refuse to think about them anymore. My mind is very good at blocking out unpleasant things.
When I get home that afternoon, Mom is sitting on the back patio—a little concrete square, but “patio” sounds better—in her light blue lounge chair. She’s got one knee bent, and she’s hunched over her toes with a bottle of nail polish in one hand.
“Bring out the other chair,” she says. “I’ll do yours, too.”
Lying in the sun is one of the things my mother really likes to do. Painting her nails while the sun beats down on her is maybe her favorite thing in the world. I don’t particularly like to sit in the sun—it’s too hot—and I don’t really care about doing my nails.
“That sounds fun,” I say, and go to pull the other chair from under the stairway.
If I didn’t say that—if I said something like, “I don’t really feel like it”—she’d say, “Okay.” But the way she’d say it, clipped and pinched, would make it obvious that it’s not okay. That I’ve hurt her feelings. Mom can be very sensitive when it comes to getting her feelings hurt. Lionel uses that word about her a lot, and he says it in a sort of complimentary way, like artists are sensitive and geniuses are sensitive.
“Left foot first,” Mom says, when I have my chair arranged. I stick my ankle toward her, and she props my foot on her knee.
“Relax,” she says. “Lie down.”
There’s a part of me that would like to tell her about my day. I’d like to try to explain how the sky looked like a blue ceiling over the stone walls and how some of the birds’ nests had little bits of colored cloth and string—red, yellow, and even a flash of purple—woven into them. I’d like to tell her what it’s like to roll down a hill so fast that I can’t feel my arms and legs anymore. I have these impulses occasionally—the need to talk and talk until she finally understands me. The need to describe what’s inside my head and hope that if I get the words right, she’ll finally know me and like me and really see me. I don’t say anything, though. Partly that’s because I know if I confess about the golf course, I’ll probably never get to set foot there again.
But the bigger reason is that if half of me wants to tell Mom about what I’ve found, the other half of me wants to never mention a word about anything I’ve seen in the last week. That part of me feels like I should put every single sight and sound and memory into a box, dig a hole, and make sure no one can ever touch any of it. Because it’s mine.
I hand over a lot of things when I’m home. Mom tells me she doesn’t like a shirt I want to buy, and I hand it over. Not the shirt itself, but my wish for that shirt.
I want to watch one television show and she wants to watch another one—I hand that over, too. It’s easier that way. I even hand over my toenails when she asks. But I think sometimes you need to put a thing in a box—even if the box is inside your head—and store it away for yourself.
When our toenails are done, Mom lies down, and it’s quiet for a while. She hums under her breath a little.
“Did you have a good day?” she asks.
“Pretty good,” I say.
“It’s not too bad there?”
“No,” I say. “It’s not bad.”
“I’m impressed that you haven’t complained once,” she says. “I’d have been a lot grumpier about summer school.”
This is why it’s worth acting happy about getting my toenails painted. Mom likes me when we’re lying like this, side by side, shiny-skinned. She’s smiling underneath her sweat mustache. I feel my shoulders relax, and I start to enjoy the stretchy feel of the chair underneath me. When she speaks, she turns her head to me without opening her eyes.
“Sometimes I think we could just pack up the car and leave one day,” she says. “Just leave the furniture behind us, fill up the car with gas, and drive until we hit the ocean. Or the mountains. I could get a job waiting tables—because there’s always a restaurant needing waitresses—and when I wasn’t working, I’d lie on the beach. And I’d have a garden.”
Have I mentioned that my mom talks about escaping, too? She likes to think about how she could just walk away from her life and start a whole new one. Sometimes those conversations are sad and a little scary—does she really hate her life here so much?—but sometimes they’re sort of fun.
“We could get a dog,” she says. “You could pick him out.”
I smile. “A big one or a little one?”
“Whatever you wanted. As long as he doesn’t dig up my garden.”
I think about Saban running along the beach, and I think he’d be afraid of the waves. “I think I’ll get an Irish setter,” I say.
“Good choice,” she says. “I like Irish setters.”
When we’re lying like this, she thinks we’re the same.
“You can have space in the garden, too,” she says. “You can grow all the strawberries you want.”
“I’d like to grow corn,” I say. I have a picture in my mind of a corn maze, which I’ve read about. I’d like to be able to get lost in my rows of corn.
“Okay,” she says. “You might need to get a job, too, of course, when you’re old enough. You could wait tables and they’d give you great tips because you’re young and pretty.”
When her eyes are closed, she thinks I’m pretty. I am warm and sleepy and I think how I like the sound of her voice.
CHAPTER 9
A HANDFUL OF CHALK
For the next week or so, Lydia and I have a set routine. We drop off any odds and ends at the putt-putt course, and we hang out around Marvin or the rocket ship until about eleven o’clock, when the heat gets so bad we can’t stand it. We check the nests and see if anyone else has hatched. We eat our lunch somewhere shady, then we explore some more. The day we found the blackberry patch, we ate until our fingers were dyed purple. The day we found the two box turtles, we spent an hour trying to make them race. (Turtles are apparently not competitive animals.) Sometimes it’s a slow day and we wind up just playing cards or climbing trees, but, no matter what, in late afternoon we head over to Hole Four to watch the airplanes.
We’re into our second week of Lodema before we discover the clover field. We’ve just finished checking on the birds, and we decide to walk to the Chevron and treat ourselves to root beer. We usually stay on the cart path when we walk, but this time we veer across one of the long flat stretches of grass. And in the middle of that tall grass, we suddenly step into a huge patch of clover, as solid and dark as a big green swimming pool. Without a word we pull off our sandals and start wading barefoot into the field, the clover so cool and silky under our feet. I watch the clovers peek up between my toes, and I can’t help kneeling down in them and running my fingers over them. I start counting the leaves, hoping, when I hear Lydia yell.
“I found a four-leaf one!” she exclaims, and I look over and see she’s sitting cross-legged on the ground.
“Me, too!” I say, because as soon as she says it, I spot one myself. And next to my four-leaf clover, I see another four-leaf clover. And another. We keep looking and realize that about half of these clovers are four-leaf ones—it must be the luckiest spot in the world. We pick a handful each, but there’s really no point to hunting for them. It’s no challenge. But more than that, the only reason to pick a four-leaf clover is to make it yours. To claim it. We don’t have to claim these lucky clovers—they’re all ours. The whole wavy green field is ours. All of Lodema is ours.
We never make it to the Chevron for those root beers. We unpack our lunches in the middle of the clover field, and I lick ham sandwich off my hands as I bury my toes in clover. Lydia pulls off long strips of cheese and drops them into her mouth. I savor every one of my strawberries, and when I notice an ant crawling over my finger, I set her down near a bread crumb. She seems pretty excited about it. I watch her tear off a bread chunk and carry it off, making her way around giant stems and leaves that must seem like a forest of redwoods to her. When you watch an ant for a while, the world seems like an enormous place.
“Do you think a day seems longer to an ant?” I ask Lydia.
“Because it’s smaller than us?” asks Lydia.
“Maybe,” I say. “I mean, an inch seems longer to them. Maybe time is sort of like distance. It all seems bigger when you’re tiny.”
“I think they probably have no sense of time.”
“When we were smaller, time went slower,” I say. “Remember how long the summer used to seem? Or how long one afternoon could seem? When we were in kindergarten, nap time took forever. And holidays felt like they lasted for years. Now everything moves faster.”
“Would you rather it move slower?” asks Lydia.
I think about that. Normally I would say no. I spend most of my life wishing for time to pass as fast as it can, hoping I’ll speed along from one grade to another and finally be a grown-up, free to go wherever I want and do whatever I want. But sometimes when we’re out here with the wind blowing and the baby birds eep-eeping, I wouldn’t mind if I could stop it all and just sink into one perfect moment like a fizzy bubble bath and stay there for good.
“That would be a cool power to have,” says Lydia, like she’s reading my mind. “The power to freeze time. To make one single second last as long as you wanted. Like the first bite of homemade ice cream or a Krispy Kreme donut. Or sliding down a waterslide and sliding and sliding and sliding and never stopping.”
“Or rolling down the hill at Hole Six,” I say.
Lydia starts to say something else, when we hear a rustle in the grass off to our left. It’s so quiet that I think it’s the wind at first. But the rustle is coming closer, and it’s not a steady sound like the wind. It’s uneven and clumsy and sounds suspiciously like someone walking—no, stomping—through the grass. And then I hear a few words of a song.
“No matter how hard a prune may try, he’s always getting wrinkles,” sings a high voice. “A baby prune’s just like his dad, ’cept he don’t wrinkle half so bad.”
It’s a kid’s voice. A little kid, singing with total confidence like you do when you’re in the shower. Lydia and I look at each other and don’t move. I guess neither one of us knows where to go. And as we sit there, not making a sound, a little boy bursts through the tall grass into our clover patch.
And then he screams. Loud. Like he’s falling off a building or being attacked by bees. It’s one quick, panicked ahhhhh! Then he takes a breath and screams one long word, and it’s not a word we expected.
“Mo-ommmmmmmm!” he calls.
“It’s okay,”
Lydia says, sounding as panicked as he does. “It’s okay. Don’t be scared.”
“We just came to pick some clover,” I say.
He stares at us, not screaming anymore, which is good. I worry that maybe he’s just catching his breath to let loose again. I figure the kid is maybe six years old. He’s got short dark hair and big brown eyes and round cheeks. He’s wearing a Chicago Bulls T-shirt that’s faded but clean. And he seems to be going out of his way to keep one hand hidden behind his back. I cannot figure out what he’s doing in the middle of an abandoned golf course. Maybe he thinks the same thing about us.
“They’re lots of four-leaf ones here,” he announces, in a surprisingly calm voice. “I thought I was the only one who knew about them.”
He knew about them? I want to take a second and think about what that might mean, but I’m too afraid that he might start screaming again if I don’t keep him talking.
“We just found them today,” I say. “I’m Nell and this is Lydia. What’s your name?”
“Jakobe,” he says.
“Are you lost, Jakobe?”
“No,” he says. “Are you?”
“No,” we say at the same time.
“It’s okay if you are,” he says. “Don’t be embarrassed. I can show you the way out.”
“Are you here by yourself?” I ask.
“Well . . . ,” he says, then stops. “I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“That’s a good rule,” says Lydia. “But we introduced ourselves.”
“I found you hiding in my four-leaf clovers,” he says.
“We weren’t hiding,” I object.
He shakes his head. “You’re still strangers. And Mom says not to answer questions about us.”
“Why aren’t you supposed to answer questions?” I ask.
“That,” he says, wagging a finger at me, “is a question.”