Saliva rushed into my mouth and I had to blink wetness from my eyes.
“Keep going,” he said.
“Leave him alone,” my mother said.
I looked down at my bowl, piled high. I blinked several times, then everything fell out of my mouth. Clumps, thinned with saliva, hit the table, my bowl, my lap.
“You can stop now.” My mother dragged her index finger across my forehead, sweeping my bangs out of my eyes. I shook them back in place where I liked them.
My father came around the table and grabbed my jaw. “Open.” I felt the pressure and strength of his hand. He stuffed a piece of egg into my mouth with his fingers.
“Get away from him,” she said.
“I have to teach him to eat. He doesn’t know how.”
She started clearing the table. She was sloppy with the stacking of bowls and dishes, clamping them together instead of nesting them. “Stop yelling.”
“Who’s yelling? Who’s yelling so loud she can’t hear herself?”
“One of us is yelling, and it’s not me.”
I spit the unchewed egg into my hand and eyed my escape route; I just had to make it to the kitchen counter, then follow it to the wide doorway of the den, through which I could see Pei-Pei on the couch and part of Natty’s legs where he lay on the floor.
When my mother clattered everything into the sink, I made a run for it.
“You’re not done,” my father said. He threw his newspaper section at me, but it only flapped onto my empty chair. He picked up the remaining stack and whipped it hard in my direction. It fluttered and multiplied as inserts and coupon pages fanned from it.
When I was safely at the doorway of the den, I turned and watched my mother bend down. She gathered the pages on her hands and knees.
Against the back wall of the den, Pei-Pei sat motionless on the couch, reading, her legs folded to the side. On the floor, Natty had pushed back the mess around him; he lay on his belly on a small clearing of carpet. Around him, like the ruins of a fortress, were stacks of books of varying heights; one stack had toppled, so that the books lay at a slant.
I settled myself on the far side of the couch.
From the kitchen, we heard my father say, “Leave it.”
I grabbed Pei-Pei’s elbow. “What are you reading?”
She shook her head. “You made them fight again.”
I opened my fist and dropped the clump of egg on her book. It was still wet with my spit. Pei-Pei brushed it to the floor and wiped her hand on her shirt, but there was a mark on the page where it had been.
“Tell me what you’re reading.”
“Read it yourself.” Pei-Pei tossed the book at me and got up.
I ran my fingers over the embossed, glossy cover, but I didn’t feel like reading. I felt like listening to her talk. I peeled the hardening rice off my sweatpants.
Pei-Pei headed up the stairs. Her footfalls were so light I heard only the first two or three, and then it was as though she had vanished. I stared at the top of Natty’s head. He flipped a page in a photo book.
“What are you looking at?” I asked, though I could see the whole thing from where I sat. Photos of solar flares—great splashes of fire leaping from the surface of the sun.
He didn’t reply. There were three of us, but it wasn’t enough. More and more, I had this sense—that we were insufficient. After Ruby died, I’d heard my father and his partner in the driveway. Hoyt said, “Good thing you had so many children.” The words kept coming back to me. Because we weren’t so many, we were so few.
* * *
MY MOTHER filled trash bag after trash bag in the attic. Pine cones, insulation that had hardened into crumbles, scraps of old tar paper, wood chips, nails, fragments of rib cages, bones as thin as the shafts of feathers. I also glimpsed a broken cup and a ceramic thimble. When Natty tried to dig through the bags, my mother shoved him away. It might have been the look on his face, the determination to find something in that trash.
After the attic was empty, she gathered old socks and torn shirts and doused them with ammonia. She stood on the ladder, and Pei-Pei and I passed the cloths to her. Using the end of a broom, she pushed each wad farther into the recesses of the attic. The ammonia seared the membranes of our noses and traveled upward to pickle our brains. Pei-Pei and I dared each other to take sniffs when my mother wasn’t looking. By the time she had shoved the whole lot in, we were stifling coughs and our eyes were leaking hot tears.
“Your radio,” my mother said, reaching out her hand. Her approach was twofold: change the environment with smell and noise, so that the squirrels would be frightened away—and antifreeze, for the ones who stayed.
“Don’t break it,” Pei-Pei said. She held her boom box by the handle, low by her side, away from my mother. She’d won it at a school raffle and listened to it only one or two hours a day, so as not to wear it out. Although Natty and I were forbidden to touch it, we opened and closed the tape deck in secret.
“Just give it here,” my mother said. She swooped an arm down to grab the boom box. When she turned it on, a nasally man’s voice said, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.” She wrenched the volume all the way up. Just as a song came on, she pushed it deep into the cavity.
We gazed up at the two exposed rafters and the square of dark attic space they framed. We couldn’t see the boom box, but it buzzed against the wood with each beat of the song. My mother snaked an extension cord up there, and from then on, music and the affected voices of advertisers came from the ceiling all day and night. As I drifted toward sleep, it became a kind of weather, like the pounding of rain, or a storm that whipped up static and swirled voices around like leaves, hurling branches that fell like drumbeats.
Then the smell came. Something like vomit and rot. Pei-Pei produced a peach-scented spray and proceeded to dispense the entire bottle in the room. She spritzed it at the carpet, the walls, our beds, then straight up so that when it fell, it misted our faces like light rain. Her glasses were speckled. When she wiped the lenses, they smeared. For a few hours, it was blissful, like living among piles of unwrapped candy. But soon our room smelled even worse, an unholy pairing of rancid flesh and artificial fruit.
When it was finally done, my mother stuffed batts of insulation between the rafters and later between the studs. Above our beds, the silence was cavernous. I knew there was only empty space up there, and a new swamp-yellow stuffing that smelled like pee.
“Doesn’t it feel strange?” I asked Pei-Pei.
“What’s strange?”
“There’s no sound from upstairs.”
“That’s called peace.”
Was it? A few weeks after the attic was silenced, Natty woke me with his urgent whispers. I crept to his bed. When I leaned in close, he was saying, “We have to make the chicken porridge. Ruby will come to dinner if we make the chicken porridge.”
“Don’t say things like that,” I said. But he was not in a responsive state. When I shook his arm, his body stayed still, as though his arm were not attached to him. I pinched him hard, and finally his eyes opened. As the night-light flickered by his feet, I saw his pupils were the darkest thing in the room, two machine-punched holes.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“Don’t say what?”
“Don’t say anything.”
“Anything,” he said, and giggled. “Anything, anything.”
We were quiet, and soon I heard the little sleep whistle of his nose. I said, “Ruby can’t come to dinner because she’s not lost. She’s not anything anymore except nothing, she’s nothing.”
I knew he was asleep. I was talking to ease the pang that had hit me—that pang of someone inhabiting the dark with you, then leaving you for sleep. In one lurch a person could be gone, just as if she had never been there, and the only thing that remained was your mind in the dark.
Ruby never stayed in her own bed; there was movement in these deep night hours. She drifted between our beds like a vagrant, favo
ring my parents’ and Natty’s. But once in a while she crawled under the covers with me. In the dark, she rooted in the folds of fabric; her fingers wriggled upward. We held hands under my pillow, and within seconds we were out.
7
In the last week of school, I grabbed the knotted end of the rope I had failed to climb all year and ran with it up the steep hill behind the tree. The rope grew heavier and heavier, resistant to straying. By the top I felt nauseous from the full-blown exertion. I gazed at the back of our school, where a few heated trailers had been towed in and dumped to accommodate the growing student population. It looked a mess.
I had asked to use the bathroom while everyone was in class. No one was outside, no one was watching. I wiped my hands and re-gripped the rope. Now was the time. I started running down the hill, just a jog, but the momentum took over. Soon I was pumping my legs as fast as they would go, giving it my all just to stay upright, on the cusp of scraping the whole hill with my face. When I lost every last thread of control, I jumped. I tucked my legs in and pinched my feet together above the knot. I was hurtling toward the school.
I couldn’t climb the rope, but now I could fly, weightless and the owner of glory. At the end of the long arc, I jumped and soared. Finally I landed on my side, my whole body skidding across the grass. Things went dark for a second, and then they were too bright. I tried to breathe in, but I was trapped in an exhale.
“That,” said a voice, “nearly killed you.”
I rolled a few degrees to the right and saw Ada’s pale jeans. They were exactly the right length for her and hit the tops of her sneakers.
“I looked for you in the boys’ bathroom,” she said. “I opened all the stalls.” She offered her hands to pull me up to sitting.
I grinned at her even as her tugging motion caused a stabbing pain in my side. She had seen me sailing through the air. It was undeniable; it had happened. “How long was I up there?” I asked.
“Maybe five seconds?”
I tried to process this.
“I almost saw you die,” she said.
The Rogers Commission Report on the Challenger had come out that week. Long excerpts of it were reprinted in the paper. For days Pei-Pei had sat with my father at the kitchen table, and they went sentence by sentence, pausing so my father could underline certain phrases. “I don’t know what the aft field joint is,” she would say, “but I think it’s a piece that connects the segments of the booster rocket.” Slowly they pieced together the demise of the shuttle: two rubber seals had become brittle during the cold-weather launch. Hot gases leaked through the seals onto a tank full of liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Boom. Between liftoff and the explosion were seventy-three seconds. After the shuttle was torn apart, the crew compartment continued to ascend more than three miles into the sky before it began its long free fall into the Atlantic.
Ada sat down beside me. She pointed at the rope, which was still swinging.
I laughed but the pain in my lower ribs cut it short.
“Did you break something?” Ada asked.
“Nah,” I said.
“Good,” she said, and that single word with its fullness of meaning—I’m glad you’re not hurt—knocked me back down. The weight of happiness was too much. On my back, curled a little over my bruised ribs, I gazed into shredded clouds and thought of the summer about to unfold, all the long days ahead and the retreat of nights into their five-hour pens. It was finally here, summer, and the feeling that was the opposite of dread.
* * *
ON THOSE NIGHTS in early summer, I’d become accustomed to my father and Pei-Pei muttering over the Challenger report. But at some point, the aerospace terminology gave way to legal words. I didn’t notice the moment it shifted, only that their voices grew lower and quieter, until they seemed to be communicating like horses, with infinitesimal flicks of the head. If I snuck up to them, I could catch a mysterious fragment.
“Every time you see the word ‘aforesaid,’” she said, “just cross it out. Same with the words ‘direct and proximate.’”
“But what do they mean?” My father held the dictionary in his lap. “They must mean something.”
“They mean the writer’s a jerk.”
I remembered the day Pei-Pei had slapped an open thesaurus in the den, cackling that she’d found eight synonyms for the word “inexpressible.” Now she was hunched over the table, and the only thing that was moving was her eyes, ticking back and forth across the papers.
When I asked her about it in our bedroom, Pei-Pei started whispering in full force, like a faucet sputtering trapped air. “Something broke in one of the wells he built,” she said. “Stuff got into the water. Stuff that poisoned it—the family’s drinking water.”
The way she said “poison,” with a puff and a hiss, frightened me. I reared back and hit the frame of Pei-Pei’s bed.
“Did anyone die?”
“A boy got sick. They’re asking for money.”
“How sick?”
“Sick enough to ask for money.”
“How much?”
“Everything. All of it.”
When I didn’t continue my inquiry, Pei-Pei spread her fingers wide apart, a gesture of anguish or excitement. Gray triangles of diffuse light glowed between her fingers. “It’s bad,” she said. “But don’t worry.” She reached out and laid a cold hand on the side of my neck, and I tried not to flinch. “I’ll take care of us.” The thin light made her cheeks velvety, and she looked younger than her age.
* * *
IN THE WOODS, Ada and I chewed on spruce tips plucked from nearby trees. Early in the summer the young needles had been lime-green and soft, newly emerged from their papery buds, but even as the needles became tougher to chew and more astringent, we kept on. I liked the way Ada looked, yanking on a small, prickly branch as she bit the end of it.
The tree that had fallen last spring left a hole in the canopy, and a beam of syrupy light streamed through. Summer afternoons, Ada and I liked to haunt this spot. The toppled tree leaned against the trunk of a stouter spruce, and Ada was fond of walking up and down the incline, which would have made for a long, fast slide. She thrust out her arms like a tightrope walker. When she was about ten feet off the ground, she lowered herself into a crouch, her skinny thighs trembling, and sat all the way down so her arms and legs dangled on either side. From that position she spit wads of spruce needles at my feet.
One day she leaned forward, resting her chin right on the bark, and said, “Did you know that my mother is dead?”
I tried to make out her expression, but the trunk blocked most of her face. “Yeah,” I said.
“She died seventeen days before my birthday.”
“Oh.”
“She’s in heaven.”
“Heaven?”
“She is,” Ada said.
When I didn’t reply, Ada said again, more loudly, “She is.”
It was misty out, the air heavy with recent rain that still lurked. Where we sat, it was brighter than the rest of the forest, but a frosted kind of bright. The old man’s beards that hung from the branches were heavy with dew, resembling nets that had been pulled up from the ocean.
“My mom had an accident. She didn’t mean it. Now she’s in heaven.”
“But where is her body?” I asked.
“In our yard.”
I gnawed on a single spruce needle, gently crushing it with my teeth so it released a small burst of flavor. There was a trace of citrus in it.
Ada lifted her head from the trunk and leaned to the side to get a good look at me. “Accidents don’t happen in the same place twice, so now our house is safe.” She kicked one foot. Even from the ground I could see the blue veins in her white legs, like trickles of watercolor paint.
“She’s in your yard?”
“The backyard.”
“She’s buried? Her whole body is buried?”
“Of course.”
I looked in the direction of her house. The fog had thickened
or sunk, sealing off the view down the path.
Ada peeled off a strip of bark and dropped it. We watched its long, twisted fall. “I have to go soon,” she said. “I’m eating meatballs tonight.”
“And spaghetti?”
“Just the meatballs. My dad says it’s okay.” She shimmied a few inches down the tree. “What are you having?”
Nothing I could think of was uninteresting enough. “Maybe some kind of soup,” I said. My mother spoke aloud now when she cooked. “Beef bones,” she might say, unlidding a pot that had been simmering all day. “The soft marrow. We’ll cook them until they crumble, until they release their animal souls.” When she went on like this, talking to someone we didn’t know, the air felt thinner in the room.
I began to crawl up the dead trunk. Ada was so high up, the fog was licking her head. The bark scratched my palms and knees, and bits of it flaked off as I climbed. The closer I got to her, the more slender and brittle the trunk became. But she scooted down to meet me. When I eased myself up to sitting, she leaned back on me. It was a good height, eight feet or so off the ground.
We kicked our feet in unison and watched the scrolling fog. Where there were clear patches, we could see the understory. We gazed over the tops of the same ferns and shrubs we had fought along the path. They seemed inconsequential from our height.
“Put your hand on my head,” she said.
I touched the side of her hair and took a furtive whiff. Candy and forest mushrooms.
“Not there,” she said, and rearranged my hand so I was palming the ridge where the back of her neck met her skull. She pulled up her legs, crouched, and with some effort maneuvered her whole body around to face me. “Push my head,” she said.
When I didn’t do anything, she pressed on my hand, driving her own head forward until her lips were smashed into mine. Her lower lip rolled open, and the inside of it was wet and sticky. I saw the freckled bridge of her nose, the skin around her heavily lashed eye, one pupil drilled into a gray-sea orb. I felt scared. We were too close—so close we couldn’t see each other.
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