* * *
ADA PUT OUT HER HAND. It was damp and cold from using the hose on her muddy sandals. “Come see,” she said. She tightened her grip, and her short, sharp nails dug into my palm. She led me around the shed to their trailer. “There,” she said.
The entire trailer pitched forward, as though searching for something it had dropped. In front of it was patchy grass and a browned, wastefully fat apple core. Paper grocery bags from Carrs were taped over the small windows.
“Climb up there,” Ada whispered. She pointed to the stack of cinder blocks that supported the back end of the trailer.
There was room on the block for only half my foot, but as I felt for the aluminum frame of the window, I discovered it was wide open. I wrapped my fingers around one edge to pull myself up.
One side of the brown paper had become untaped from the window, flapping gently. It was darker inside than out.
“Do you see?” Ada whispered from below. Her head touched my knee.
I leaned in. There was a smell in the trailer, like wet carpet or upholstery. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a small steel sink filled with trash—bottles, cans, wrappers, something like grapefruit peels. A bed, faced away. Skinny legs all mixed up. Pei-Pei’s hair like a tossed black towel.
I looked under my arm at Ada. She was grinning. “They’re always in there,” she whispered.
The wan light from the window made part of the mattress glow. Although there was junk piled on the floor around it, the mattress itself was completely bare, without a single sheet or pillow. Pei-Pei was naked. Shadows nestled in the dips of her body and underscored where it rose and lumped. Her hair was spreading, something spilled.
Collin shifted, and I saw he was propped on an elbow, saying something to her. He was bonier than he was in clothes, his skin less splotchy in the dimness, his face in profile soft and calm. They were awake—and not ashamed.
“You see them, right?” Ada whispered.
My throat clotted. They had a hideaway, where loneliness couldn’t nab them. They could rest. They could just rest.
I jumped off the cinder block. I started running, back across the huge, weedy yard to the path. The cotton grass was blooming. The seedpods would split open soon. Ada said how much cotton they released would tell you how much snow to expect come winter. I wanted the yard to explode in white. Ada was hollering behind me. In the woods, it was darker and stiller, and I streaked through it all. I wasn’t heading home, though I suppose I was. There was always just this one path, headed one way. I had no choice, really; I was always headed home.
* * *
WE SQUEEZED in single file through a section of trail where the understory was thick with thorns. Collin was so tall he had to push a drooping branch aside. Huge, barbed devil’s club stalks also jutted into the path, and we stepped onto a rotted log to avoid the spreading leaves, big as tennis rackets and spiked along the veins.
“Stop,” Ada said. She pointed with the toe of her sneaker to the backside of the log. Nearly hidden in a patch of stinging nettle was a squirrel tail. The hairs were completely matted and the tip was blackened. Collin prodded it with a stick.
“Is it dead?” Natty asked. There wasn’t enough room on the log for him, so he hung back.
Collin let loose a horse-like laugh. Using the end of the stick, he began to pick up the tail. When it slipped off, he reached for it with his bare hands.
He shook the tail experimentally, holding it by one end. He pinched the pale nub of something, a bone or tendon, and when he gave it a tug, the tail suddenly curled. My stomach coiled.
“I’ve brought it back to life for you,” Collin said to Natty. He dropped the tail so he could raise both arms slowly toward the treetops.
Natty gawked. The devil’s club leaves made an overhang above him, threatening to sink teeth into his scalp.
“I found another one near our mailbox,” Collin said. “Bigger than this one.”
All those tails. Detached. “Do you think it’s our squirrels?” I whispered to Pei-Pei. Being surrounded by so much stinging nettle and devil’s club made me itchy, and I scratched hard enough at my neck that dirt or skin collected under my nails.
She shrugged.
But I knew. We had chased the flying squirrels out of our house, and now they were dead.
We followed Collin and Ada all the way to their yard, where we circled their mailbox. A broken window screen leaned against the post. There was a hole in the screen and jagged mesh around the hole where something like a bird or fist had exited. We ruffled the grass to see if anything was hiding in it. Ada opened the mailbox—empty—and closed the dented door as far as it would go.
We could hear their giant dog barking from the backyard.
“Baby’s chained up,” Ada whispered to me. “Because she left us. She ran away for a whole week.” She pressed a palm hard to her chest.
“Guess something made off with the tail,” Collin said. He kicked the window screen. It flopped softly onto the grass, and, maybe because it hadn’t made a satisfying sound, Collin stepped on the wooden frame until it snapped.
“Did you really see one?” Ada asked.
“I said I did.”
Natty dropped down and patted a spot in the grass. “It was here,” he said.
“Actually, it was,” Collin said.
A white van ground its way up the steep driveway and parked. Mr. Dolan heaved himself out of the driver’s seat.
“What’s doing this?” Pei-Pei asked. “Taking the squirrels and leaving the tails?”
“Some sick bastard,” Collin said.
“Is it you?” Pei-Pei asked, and they both laughed. Her giggle was soft and thin, almost unrecognizable. She looked strange, too, since she had pushed her glasses on top of her head like sunglasses. I had to think back: How long had she been wearing them like this? Wasn’t she nearly blind? I thought of her hunched over the kitchen table with my father at night, and how she had to keep nudging her glasses up the bridge of her nose to see the words on the page.
On his way in, Mr. Dolan paused by the front steps. He stared at Pei-Pei and then at me. A grocery bag hung off his forearm, and he palmed a head of cabbage in each hand.
“Hi, Mr. Dolan,” Pei-Pei said.
“Hi, Paige,” he said. He stood with his feet planted. “Should I ask what you kids are up to?”
“No,” Collin said.
Ada hurried to her father. “Collin found a squirrel tail. Just the tail by itself.”
Mr. Dolan gazed into the aspens shading us. “Probably the work of an owl.”
He shoved the cabbage heads into the crook of one arm and let the bag of groceries slide down to the concrete step. “Bring it over.” He smiled at me. “I’ll show you how to tan it. Pull out the tailbone and cure it with salt. Even table salt will do, so long as you’re not picky.”
“No, thank you,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s nice. Real soft.” He adjusted the cabbage heads, cradling them deeper in his huge arms. “I saw your mother the other day,” he said. “Must’ve been your mother.” He chuckled. “Unless it was some other Oriental lady.” He wore a thick sweatshirt that bunched in the armpits. Covered in that plush, heavyweight cotton, his arms and chest looked warm and soft—a place where cabbages would sleep well. “Come through the woods, I think,” he said. “I took a breather from the yard work, and there she was, standing right at the edge of our property.”
Pei-Pei stepped one foot on top of the other. “Ah,” she said. “My mother on the loose.”
“I called out. Must’ve startled her. She ran back into the woods so fast I thought maybe I’d seen a spirit. Think I frightened her?”
“No,” Pei-Pei said in a reasonable voice. “She might not have heard you. She’s losing her hearing.” She made her eyes crumple sorrowfully.
Mr. Dolan scratched his arm where the bag had left a groove. “Well, tell your mom to come say hello, next time she’s wandering by.”
“Not everyone wants to
stand here chatting with you,” Collin said. He pulled Pei-Pei away, across the yard and toward the woods. Natty trailed behind, wading through the grasses. But Ada dropped to the ground beside her father’s feet. Her pink knees pointed at me as she sat on her ankles. Mr. Dolan took a step toward the door, and Ada scooted to follow.
“Bye,” I said.
She gave me a crooked salute, a two-fingered arc that started by her ear and strayed toward her eyebrow.
“See you later,” I said.
She ran her hands over the tips of the grasses and nodded.
“Tomorrow?” I said.
“Okay.” She pinched a section of her hair and waved the end of it at me.
I slogged through their backyard. I had scanned every part of it. I knew where there was constant light and shade, and I imagined where the snow might pile high in the winter or thin away first come spring. A stand of leafy aspens grew to one side, their white trunks scarred. Beneath the aspens were ancient roots. That would be a good place. Was that where they had put her mother?
Aboveground, aspens grew and died, but deep below, where our footsteps had no impact, the roots just kept on living, sending up the new trees we saw. The roots were thousands of years old, practically immortal. Wouldn’t they have buried her there? But there were no markings I could see.
I entered the woods. Under the cover of trees, the light was paltry, with a cold, briny-blue cast. Natty was tromping alone at the front. Pei-Pei had her arm snaked around Collin’s waist and her whole hand shoved into his front pocket. Stuck together, they stumbled along the uneven trail.
Pei-Pei turned around. “Take Natty home.”
“You said we were all going home,” I said.
“I did say that, didn’t I?”
Collin grinned. He took off his cap, scratched hard at his scalp, and put it back on.
I reached up and made a swipe at Pei-Pei’s head, knocking her glasses down her face, then dashed away to join Natty. I was leaving her; I would not be left.
Beside me, Natty was practically marching, raising his feet high to clear the thick forest floor. I was grateful for all the noise he made. The scant light began to intensify, and finally we cleared the last thirty yards. We walked along the border of the woods, which had become less distinct as vines and branches grasped at our yard and grasses spurted to the height of Natty’s neck. He stopped at the pile of rocks my father had dumped after a job. For landscaping, my father had said.
“Look,” Natty said. He crouched over a small, deep well he had formed in the rocks. Resting in it were squirrel tails. A mass of them, or maybe only three or four. I couldn’t look for long.
“Did you put those there?” I asked. “Did you touch them with your hands?”
“Yup,” Natty said.
“You went by yourself all the way across the woods?”
“Yup.”
“When?”
“Yesterday,” Natty said.
The day before, Pei-Pei had disappeared with Collin, and Ada and I had made a game of plucking off all the green spruce cones we could reach. After we’d counted them, she dropped her face into her hands and said, “Now they won’t grow into trees.”
I gripped Natty’s forearm. “Don’t do that anymore,” I said. “Not by yourself.”
By the time we approached the house, it was dark—and dark, in June, meant very late. Past dinnertime. Yet what we had done to be so late, I couldn’t have said. Time changed texture quickly in the summer.
The kitchen window glowed. My mother was off-center, standing in front of the sink, and she was examining something in her hands. My father could not be seen. We had left them alone together, for an entire meal and more. What ruin had we caused?
Natty bounded to the sliding door. Watching him, you could believe he wanted to be inside. He banged on the glass and called, “It’s locked. You locked us out.” No one came to the door.
I stepped to his side and shouted, “Let me in!” We kept pounding, drumming on the glass. Natty was hollering, “It’s me! It’s me!” When we stopped for a moment, I could hear the sink water running. If we could hear the water, then surely she could hear our racket. But for a long time, no one came to the door.
8
The night-light in our bedroom had burned out, but I could still see my brother and sister in their beds and even study the way they breathed, the slight rise of their bodies against the stillness. In the summer, the sun never really slipped away. Even in the darkest hours there remained a low gray glow, a residue of light like a whisper.
After Natty fell asleep, Pei-Pei occasionally painted her nails in that faint wash of light, or in the sliver of hallway light that jetted through the cracked-open door.
“Can you tell me about heaven?” I panted. My teeth were brushed and minty, and the words I had been holding back for days were cool in my mouth.
Pei-Pei and I were sitting on the floor against her bed. An acrid odor clung to the air around us. She sighed out of her mouth instead of her nose, impatient but not weary. “What do you want to know?”
“What heaven is.”
“It’s a place church people go after they die.”
“Can you tell me about church?”
“It’s a place you go to believe in heaven.” She tilted a pinky nail to get at an unpainted strip. “How when we die, we don’t really die.”
I leaned forward to hold on to my knees, and she pushed me back. “You’re blocking my light.”
“We don’t really die?”
“It’s only for believers,” she said. “You and me, we won’t ever believe. It’s too late. You can’t suddenly believe after you don’t believe, because you’ll always know that you’re trying to believe, and that’s a completely different thing from just believing.”
I glanced at Natty’s bed. He was sprawled across the top half of it, both feet hanging off the mattress. “We won’t go to heaven?” I whispered.
“Nah.”
“Is Ruby there?”
Pei-Pei twisted the brush back into the bottle before answering. “No.”
I held out my hands. I wanted her to cut my nails and use the file on the back of the clippers. I liked the back-and-forth scrape of the grainy metal, that steady, gradual wearing down.
“Wait till these dry.” When she blew across her fingers, I smelled toothpaste and something like gasoline.
I picked up the nail clippers and snipped at carpet tufts. “What time is Dad coming home?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why doesn’t he eat with us anymore?” I ran the pad of my finger over the metal file. It felt gritty, like a kind of rock you could find in our yard that flaked when you hit it with another rock.
Our door was flung against the solid stopper. My mother appeared in the light, severe and statuesque. She took a sharp breath and grew even taller.
“Where did you get that? Who gave it to you?” she asked.
Pei-Pei didn’t answer. Natty stirred and made a breathy sound. Something, his hand or foot, knocked into the window beside the bed.
“I know you have it. I smelled it in the hallway. Where is it? The paint for your fingernails. Give it to me.” My mother’s voice was getting louder and more strained.
“Why?”
“Don’t speak to me like that.” My mother dropped down and swept the carpet with her arm until she found the small bottle. She closed a fist around it. “Tomorrow we’ll talk about this,” she said. Although she straightened outside the beam of hallway light, I could see the cords of her neck.
“We never talk,” Pei-Pei said.
“We’ll talk about why you’re this way.”
“What way?” Pei-Pei said.
After my mother left, Pei-Pei grabbed my wrist. She uncurled the fingers of my hand and started clipping my nails, sloppily and rapidly. “What way am I?” she said. “What way should I be?” She was laughing and cutting past the white on my fingernails.
When she was done, she threw the clipper
s into the corner and whipped off her glasses. She thrust them in my face. They reflected two gray stripes of light; there were fingerprints all over the lenses. “Are these ugly? Tell me, are these ugly or nice?”
“Ugly,” I said.
“Right? Anyone can see that. It’s not a matter of not knowing. She knows. She knows exactly. She found the ugliest ones in the whole store, and wouldn’t buy me any other pair.”
It hadn’t hurt at first, but now the air felt like wires strung into my fingers. I rushed to my bed and pressed my face into my pillow. I thought about crying. But then I heard the crackle of a wrapper. And then a louder crackle.
“I want some,” Natty said. His voice was wide awake.
“Me, too,” I said.
There was the snap of Pei-Pei breaking her chocolate bar. She came around to our beds. She felt for my hands beneath my covers and thrust a good-sized chunk into them.
We lay on our backs, nibbling chocolate in the dark. My mother had turned off the hallway light, returning us to the low-lit night. I barely noticed the nail polish smell anymore—there was only the wash of sweetness in my mouth. How long had it been since I’d enjoyed any kind of food? It left a coating on my newly brushed teeth.
* * *
I WOKE to the tips of my fingers throbbing. In the bathroom, I ran cold water over them and tried to numb them. I watched the water envelop my hands before surging into the drain. When I turned around for the towel, Natty was standing in the hallway.
“You’re dripping,” he said.
I slapped the towel. “Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“I got up.” He walked the few steps to my parents’ bedroom and placed his palm on the door. It opened a little.
“Are you going to sleep in there? With them?”
“No,” Natty said, “I’m just going to look at them.” He opened the door wider and stepped in, and then closed it so it rested without latching.
Even though I could see in the hazy gray light, I felt my way down the stairs to the den. It seemed necessary to touch something at all times—the wall, the railing, the doorframe, the sofa. At night things shifted and were unmoored.
The Unpassing Page 8