As the snow accumulated, the tires made a crunching sound over the thicker spots. Everything was padded—by snow, by silence, by graveness. I wished Pei-Pei were not angry, so that she would chatter about the clothes she had seen or ask Natty if he could guess the number of trees in the world, or the color of fish urine, and then say, “Wrong, wrong, wrong.” But in the store she had wanted a skirt that was too expensive, and she and my mother had fought. Pei-Pei had come away with nothing. She sat beside me with her hand on the door handle, as though she might spring out and roll into the soft streets if we so much as glanced at her. The windshield wipers made the sound of a nervous heart beating.
When we turned up our driveway with a creak, we saw the yard was fluffed. The damage I had done had vanished, refreshed by the snowfall, and a feathery joy filled my chest.
“I want to play outside,” I said.
“It’s time for dinner,” my mother said.
“But you haven’t made anything yet.”
“It’s too dark.”
“Please,” I said.
“It’s too cold.”
“Please.”
My mother turned off the car and the headlights and whirled around. “I can’t do this anymore.”
Natty, Pei-Pei, and I sat still in the backseat. Snow silently struck the windows.
“You don’t know,” she said. “None of you know.” My mother breathed through her teeth. I wondered if there was enough air in the car for all of us. With the engine off, I could feel the heat dissipating.
We trudged through the garage and basement and up the stairs, and everything looked exactly as we had left it—junk, so much junk, like the store. Stacks of old blankets and twenty-pound bags of rice and dusty boxes of things we had bought on sale and never used. In the kitchen, there were pans covered with scratches and grease, and disposable cups that had been reused instead of disposed of, and all of it continued to give me that funny feeling. That we had replaced something important with this junk. That we had traded something for it.
As I kicked off my shoes, my mother said, “Well, go out and play in the dark. Isn’t that what you wanted? Do as you want.”
Outside the kitchen window, behind the reflections of our indoor lights, was the steady descent of snow, that constant downward drift. The falling clumps were like the sheddings of an immense white bird beating its wings above our house, distraught by something headed this way.
“I don’t feel like it anymore,” I said.
“Go play,” she said.
“It’s too cold.”
“I’m not stopping you.”
“I changed my mind,” I said.
“Don’t change your mind because of me.”
My mother kept standing there, spinning the plastic shopping bag so the top twisted tighter and tighter. I put my shoes back on and reached for the zipper on Pei-Pei’s jacket. I ran it from my knees all the way up to my throat and headed for the front door with a feeling of doom. A scattering of dry leaves fell off the ficus tree as I pushed by, and when I opened the door, the leaves swirled low along the linoleum tiles. Outside, the snow careened. I nudged the door closed behind me, sealing off the light and warmth, butting into the night. The sky was chock-full of snow, yet the night felt empty. I walked to the bottom of our drive. Across the gravel strip was the abandoned development project. Strange shapes had formed in it; snow had softened the tree stumps and filled the gaps between piled branches. White mounds, like the backs of huge sleeping animals, filled the clearing, and seemed almost to breathe.
I headed for the pond. It was a deep man-made crater, maybe the early stages of an old foundation. In winter and spring it was filled with ice and water, and all around it, leafless trees pricked at the sky. A single spruce leaned over the water at a forty-five-degree angle, testing gravity. When I got to the edge of the pond, I saw how smooth and black it was. There was no reflection of stars or moon; the snow had shaded them out.
I turned around and saw our little house with its honeyed windows, and the quiet abyss of snow and woods around it. This was what our home looked like when I was not inside. Dinner was on the stove, and my sister was sulking upstairs, filling the whole empty floor with her foul, reassuring presence. I felt hunger like a tiny seed of pain.
Suddenly the cold came, slamming me like a rogue wave. How long did my mother want me to stand here? Was it the beginning or end of my punishment?
4
When the sun tunneled through in time for spring break, we played rapturously in the clearing, and each day was less muddy than the last. The pond settled, the water cleared, and the paste at its edges turned ashier by the hour. Out of the mess of stumps rose a few trees, preparing to leaf lushly over their fallen kin. A handful of abandoned logs not worth pulping had turned mealy, forming a massive, soft heap of slash. We buried our hands in this mush or jumped from stump to stump, or took turns standing still while the other two pelted the frozen one with chunks of gravel from the road. Natty was too small to aim well, but I was afraid of Pei-Pei’s arm; she threw with precision and without mercy.
Natty found an empty liquor bottle sitting with two beer cans on a stump. He filled the bottle with water from the pond and shoved a fistful of cotton grass in. The tips looked like scrubby old brushes, but in summertime they would turn white and silken and smear the clearing with a layer of gauze.
When he brought the vase home, my mother screamed, “Don’t touch that!”
The bottle hit the floor. Water pooled on the linoleum.
“Get away from it!”
Natty backed up to Pei-Pei.
“Where did you find that dirty bottle?” my mother asked him.
Pei-Pei said, “It doesn’t look dirty.”
“You can see germs with your eyes?” My mother’s gaze jumped between Pei-Pei and Natty without a glance at me, but at the mention of germs, I stiffened.
“It’s just a vase of grass,” Pei-Pei said.
None of us pointed out that both the bottle and the cans were the same brands my father drank. My father, who had come to the doorway of the den, retreated, so that all I saw was a flash of his tumbled hair and fearful eyes.
“That is a bad spot,” my mother said. “A spot where strangers drink by themselves is a very bad spot.” With that, we were forbidden from playing in the clearing.
Half of spring break remained, and we took to the deeper, more bewildering woods. Behind our house, we followed the faint path farther than we ever had, and found it went on and on through the endless white spruces that released a scent like damp cleaning rags. And making our way along the lumpy path was not unlike stamping through a giant spread of rags, for the ground was thickly cushioned with needles, soft branches, and crumbling trunks. The path faded out in a few stretches, but several days of bolder and bolder exploration brought a discovery: it ended in the yard of the Dolan house. It was a shortcut between our homes, which by car were nine or ten miles apart. The Dolans—that was something.
Ada Dolan was in my class at school. I sat right in front of her. She was partial to overalls and spent the day hooking and unhooking her shoulder straps, which made a secret snapping sound behind me. Once she reached out and tugged on my sweatpants until the waistband slid down my stomach and sat on my hips. “That’s how you wear it,” she said.
Her brother, Collin, was seventeen, but he talked to us anyway. The first thing he showed us was his garden of stolen street signs, a few still on their posts, planted into the dirt and leaning every which way like the drunken trees that grew in permafrost. HANDICAPPED PARKING, WOMEN, BEWARE OF DOG, GIVE MOOSE A BRAKE. When Pei-Pei complimented a highway sign lying on the grass, Collin beamed and lifted one side of it up to show her his real prize underneath: PLEASE DON’T CLIMB ON THE PIPELINE.
They lived with a monstrous dog named Baby and their father, a similarly large, slow-moving man whom we occasionally glimpsed ducking into the doorway of the shed or moving split logs around to adjust his enormous stockpile of firew
ood. Behind their shed was a trailer propped up on cinder blocks with rust streaks running down its broad face, so it looked to be grieving its loss of the open road.
Spring break came and went. After school, we continued to romp around until we forgot about nights, about walls, about homes. Along the trail, we broke off discs of fungus that grew along the live trunks or stirred at the spongy orange innards of a dead trunk with a good stick, trying to flick the ants at one another. Though he was three years older, Collin knew Pei-Pei from the high school and called her Paige. The first time, Pei-Pei had cocked an eyebrow at me, daring me to say anything. It vaguely reminded me of some trouble a couple of years back, when she had tried to pass herself off as an Athabascan native. I found myself mumbling, “What time do we have to be home, Paige?” and “Paige, I’m thirsty,” and she thought I was making fun of her, but I’d been trying to play along.
One weekend, while we were arguing about whether Ada had in fact seen a black widow spider in a hollowed stump before it had skittered into shadow, there was an earth-rending crack and the arcing movement of a brittle crown high above us. A massive tree came to a slanted standstill against the trunk of another spruce. Its roots had wrested up a great clod of earth.
Ada broke the long silence that followed. “Did you see that?” She fell to her knees and squashed Natty’s face between her hands.
“I did,” Natty said.
“Tell me,” Ada said. She put her face right in front of his, practically touching noses. Her freckles ran together into whole dollops, and only very close-up could you make out the individual dots. “What did you see?” she asked.
Natty’s hair was pressed funny from the way Pei-Pei had held him against her stomach, and it rose up and gave him a defiant look as he said, “The tree. It fell.”
His pronouncement released us from our dumb fright.
“Motherfucker,” Collin said.
I kicked a damp mound of rotting needles, spraying them into the air.
Collin planted himself on the trail in front of Pei-Pei. “That tree almost fell on top of you.” It was true she had been standing most directly in the path of the tree. I studied the second tree, the one that had stopped it. It was squat. All its branches pointed downward, so it gave the impression of being burdened.
Pei-Pei said, “Didn’t you see I jumped away?”
“Not in time,” Collin said. He shook his head several times, and the bill of his cap sliced and resliced a line in the air. “If it wasn’t for that other tree, it would’ve been the end for you.”
“Maybe, maybe not.”
“It would’ve fallen on you for sure.”
“I’m faster than you think.”
“You wouldn’t have been fast enough. You would’ve been pancaked.” Collin smacked his palms together.
Had Pei-Pei almost died? No, it was impossible. She was laughing so hard she had to press a fist to her stomach to make herself stop.
“And we wouldn’t be able to get it off of you,” Collin added. “It’s too big to move.”
Pei-Pei quieted down and bent over to reroll a pant cuff. She nudged her glasses up with her wrist. “You could’ve tried to help me.”
“Help you?”
“You’re quick, anyway.”
Collin was a hockey player. Pei-Pei said he hovered over ice like a dragonfly over a pond. He shrugged—awfully slowly, I thought.
“No one’s quick enough for that. Anyway, what kind of idiot would I be if I jumped in front of a falling tree?” He lobbed a chunk of dead branch straight up. It rustled through several boughs as it came back down. The end of it just missed Pei-Pei’s shoulder. Collin giggled.
“Fuckwad.” Pei-Pei whipped a stray twig at him and took off down the path toward home.
“Come back,” I said. I couldn’t keep the whine out of my voice. I tried to decide whether to follow. It was an unspoken pact that we stay out until the last possible second. At home, my mother was bent over a spiral notebook at the kitchen table, a row of blue pens lined up beside her. Her knuckles dug into the paper. Beneath the nib of her pen bloomed precise Chinese characters with severe hooks and wild, unleashed strokes. Her list of good ideas, she called it. Ideas of jobs she might start, with no correlation to her skills or actual openings. “I could repair washing machines,” she would say. “Those guys, they charge whatever they want to charge.”
Collin ran and grabbed Pei-Pei by the elbow.
“Get off me,” she said.
“I didn’t mean to throw it at you.”
“I have to go home.” She shoved the whole mass of her hair to one side.
“I said I was sorry.”
“I have to make a phone call.”
“Who you running to call? When you got us?” Collin looked at Natty and me, then at Ada, who was sitting on the path, picking bits of forest floor from the knees of her pants.
“Let’s get out of here,” Collin said. “Let the kids play by themselves.”
“Pei,” I said.
She spun around, and I realized I’d used the wrong name. “Go home,” she said.
“It’s not time yet.”
“Then stay here. I don’t care.”
I tried to catch her gaze, but she was busy shaking the coins in her coat pockets.
“Come on,” Collin said.
“Where are we going?”
“Where we went last time.”
She zipped and unzipped her jacket just an inch at the throat.
When he gave her hair a flick, one side of her mouth twitched up. Collin began to walk, and Pei-Pei shuffled behind him.
“Runts,” he said, showing us his pink palm, “catch you later.”
I shook an alder shrub and made the leaves slap one another. The catkins wobbled. When I looked up, Collin and Pei-Pei were past a large patch of cow parsnip thirty yards away, about to take a curve in the path.
I hurried over to Ada. “Should we follow them?” I asked.
“Nah,” she said.
“We could stay back so they don’t know we’re following.”
“Nah.”
I considered pointing out that if we kept playing here, she would have to walk home alone. But she seemed to think nothing of walking the entire length of the path on her own. Maybe, at ten years old, I should have been as brave. But it seemed to me the woods wanted something of us. And the farther you went into the woods, the bigger that thing was, and the more intensely it was wanted.
I gazed up for signs of beetles on the trees directly over us. They left their mark in the form of rust-colored boughs that scarred the blue-green woods. The boughs drooped and shed needles until they were nothing more than prickly netting. Then the netting disintegrated, and entire trees stood stripped and spindly, like the old tube brushes in my father’s plumbing box. Any gust of wind might topple these husks, and even from the house we could occasionally hear the splitting of bark, sounds of surrender.
Ada played with Natty’s hair, standing it up, wiggling it at the roots. She slapped her thigh. “I almost forgot! I saved this for you.” She worked something out of her pocket. A Tootsie Roll. When Natty opened the wrapper, we saw it was half eaten. Before I could say anything, he popped it into his mouth. I stared at him. He stared back, chewing. It was too late. The germs were in his body.
He squatted beside Ada on the path. His hair had gotten long. If he didn’t push it out of his face, it would cover his eyes and brush the tops of his cheeks. I scratched at my forehead, suddenly aware that my own hair was also the longest it had ever been. Ada and Natty bent their heads together. Ada had yanked a horsetail stem from the ground and broken it in half, and they were trying to piece it back together.
I rotated my watch; it was too big for my wrist and the heavy face always hung on the wrong side. Just past four o’clock. My mother was at the kitchen table making her list, talking out loud as she wrote. My father didn’t have a job today; we had left him in the den, digging in the crates for a book none of us remembered.
“The one with the photographs of the poisonous frogs,” he kept saying.
“It doesn’t exist,” Pei-Pei had said. “I’m the one who reads all those books, and I’m telling you it doesn’t exist.”
“You know,” he said, “with the shiny green frogs that have got tiger stripes on their legs. Or the blue frogs that look like they’ve been dipped in paint.”
“Did you dream this?” Pei-Pei said. “Is this from your sad childhood?”
“The book was in the house,” he said. “Who took it?”
“What do you want with it anyway?”
“I want to show Natty the frogs. Don’t you want to see the frogs?” my father asked.
“Yes,” Natty said. “But first I want to play outside.”
That was hours ago. It was possible my father was still looking for the book.
The days were longer now, but the woods would still dim. I wished I could stop the day from darkening, or the trees from leaning into the path, making you wonder what, in the thick of the forest, they were trying to escape.
“Let’s do tattoos,” Ada said. She plucked a few leaves from an alder shrub and worked on Natty’s arm. When she finished, she pointed a hooked finger at me. I knelt and held my arm out to her, ready to receive her gifts.
She turned my forearm up and pressed the underside of a jagged alder leaf to it. She rested my arm on her thigh, stacked her hands over the leaf, and leaned all of her weight on top. When she flipped my arm over, the leaf was pasted on. “This one will be good,” she said. She breathed out of her mouth. After she peeled the leaf off, she rubbed a handful of dirt into my arm, then brushed off the excess. Leaning low, she blew the last of the dust off. Her blond hair fell onto my arm, and her breath was cool yet not chilling like wind. “There,” she said, and wiped her hands on the front of her pants.
“It’s better than mine,” Natty said.
I examined my tattoo: the leaf and its branching veins, imprinted on my flesh. That night I would take care not to wash it off, so I could study it in the near-dark. What I had brought back from the woods.
The Unpassing Page 4