I glanced around for help. Pei-Pei was giggling, and Natty had run off again.
I gave Collin a shove, but he barely moved. Though he was skinny, he still towered over me, and I made a note to go for his knees next time. If I could get them to buckle, he would go down. And I would step on his face.
“Just now I felt a little pinch,” he said to Pei-Pei.
In a fury I trampled off the path and regretted it instantly. We were due home soon, and in the late summer the understory was flourishing and high. I had to squeeze between shrubs, climb over fallen trunks, and mind the cow parsnips, and all the while I could hear Collin laughing with Pei-Pei, who grew stupider with his proximity.
There was one massive patch of cow parsnip I avoided by walking a huge half circle around it. Earlier in the summer, they had sprung clusters of miniature flowers—all angelic. Their toxins were dormant, activated by sunlight; once you had brushed the stems or the big, floppy leaves, they lay in wait until you ventured out from the shade. Then they scalded you. When Pei-Pei’s legs had broken out in blisters and curdling rashes, I had helped her rub them down with ice cubes.
I didn’t know where I was headed, and was not entirely sure I could find my way back to the path. For fifteen minutes I walked what felt like a straight line, as it grew darker and denser in the woods. I stopped to toe the exposed, sprawling roots of an ancient spruce. Piles of pine cones lay between them. Stripped of seeds and scales by squirrels, the cones were just bare cobs.
In the wind was a murmuring, and when I looked up, there was Natty, perhaps eight trees away to my right. He was gazing up at the crown of a spruce with a long, silvery scar, and the intonation of his voice suggested he was asking questions. I couldn’t make out his words. As I watched, he moved to another tree. He peered up, circled it, spoke in the same searching way, and moved on.
Even as I moved closer to him, his words stayed indistinct. I had the sense he was speaking in some veiled forest language of undertones and hums.
“Natty,” I said.
He paused and glanced over his shoulder at me. Among all those trees, he looked imperiled, something left behind, left to chance.
“It’s time to go home,” I said.
He began to make his way over, slogging across the spongy ground. He sank and rose as though climbing in and out of low ditches. When he was within arm’s reach, the laces of his sneakers caught on a thorned vine, and he stumbled a little toward me.
He stood on his toes and put his face very close to mine. As he spoke, his breath had a strange, adult kind of odor, as though something had been festering in his mouth. “I’m looking for Ruby,” he said. His eyes were huge. Maybe it was the angle of his face, turned up to gaze above my head. His thick lashes curved toward the sky. Both my mother and father had often said he was a very pretty boy. It was hard to turn away.
But I turned away. Everywhere, there were trees straining, driving themselves upward. They fought to break through the canopy, only to have their crowns beaten scraggly by the wind. I focused on my shoes, with their dirty laces neatly tied and tucked. In the darkening woods, you had to keep your gaze close, lest you catch a glimpse of something bigger than you could accept. Darkness in the woods was like a raw, grave wound. You wouldn’t want to look at it, you wouldn’t want to know how big it was.
“We’ve got to go,” I said.
“All right,” he said, and turned away. He began walking in the direction of the path, and I followed a few paces behind. He was only five, but then again, he was just a month away from six and knew the woods better than maybe any of us. He didn’t turn around to check on me and seemed to have forgotten I was there. Or he knew I was there, but it wasn’t of any consequence.
When we returned to the path, everyone was gone except Pei-Pei.
She fussed over us. “Look at you both. What is this stuff? Where have you been?” She smacked us all over the shoulders, back, and chest, making needles and bits of dry leaves jump from our clothing. “Come when I call,” she said, and rubbed the back of my head so that I would know she was sorry.
“We didn’t hear you,” I said.
“Then you went too far in.” She pivoted on one boot and raked her hair back with her hand. She sighed. “Homeward.”
As we started our last journey of the day, we were blasted by a wind. It carried the chill of the glaciers it had swept. Natty’s hand was light and dry in mine, like a piece of balsa wood.
When we burst out of the forest into the blue-lit clearing of the yard, I suddenly saw how narrow our house was, just as Hoyt had said. Piled on the foundation that jutted out from the ground were two slim stories and a steep-roofed attic, like a block balanced on its end, waiting to be toppled.
The lights were all off. We banged on the sliding door. A minute later, my mother lifted the side of the curtain to peer through the glass at us. Or perhaps she was taking in her own reflection in the large pane of glass, tall enough to display her rumpled person, from her socks and slippers up to her puffy hair. When she tried to slide the door open, it caught on the tracks.
“I don’t want to go in,” Natty whispered.
Pei-Pei smirked. “I know what you mean.”
With no real hurry, my mother tried the door again, and it slid open just enough for us to squeeze through. “Come in,” she said. “My stray children.”
As we filed into our dark home, my mother tapped each of us on the shoulder, as though counting us. Pei-Pei, then me, then Natty, who flinched at her touch.
* * *
DAYS BEFORE SCHOOL BEGAN, we returned from the woods to find my mother digging by the sliding door. In late spring, a few old potatoes had sprouted in our cabinet, and she had chopped them up and planted them along the house. Stalks had grown out of the ground, unfurled leaves, and turned bushy. By late summer, the stalks had started to die.
She sank a long shovel behind each plant and stamped on the shoulder of the blade. She used it as a lever to turn up a great heap of earth, in which we could see pale gems—flashes of buttery potatoes churned into the black soil.
“They’re so small,” my mother said, kicking at a fallen plant. Sweat glued wisps of hair to the sides of her face. “What have they been doing all this time instead of growing?”
Natty and I knelt and collected the potatoes with our hands. Some were still attached to the roots, and others were hiding by themselves in the loose dirt, which simply had to be brushed away. They were the size of golf balls and shooter marbles, all miraculously whole, and we uncovered them like artifacts. I shivered at the thought of them growing in the ground, enlarging, quiet and unseen, until there were five or six to a plant.
My mother leaned on the shovel. “I received a letter,” she said. “Your grandfather is dead. He died almost four weeks ago.”
A letter? I would have been the one who brought it in from the mailbox—an envelope stashed with news of death.
Natty dropped two potatoes from as high as he could reach, and when they fell into the bucket, they sounded like rocks.
“So we can’t visit him anymore,” she said. “We waited too long.”
I stuck my hands into the dark, loose dirt.
“I missed my last phone call with him. And I couldn’t reach him after that. He wanted to hear your voices, but he didn’t get his wish.”
Natty wiped his neck with his dirty hand. “I dreamt that he came here.”
“Did you?” my mother said with a tremble of a smile. “That is a good dream.”
“Yes,” Natty said. “I showed him these potatoes.” He tilted the bucket toward us. Four potatoes rolled to the front.
“How wonderful for him,” my mother said.
I did not tell her that lately Natty had been calling certain kinds of thoughts dreams. Before we fell asleep now, Natty liked to inform me, “I’m dreaming I can hear my heart inside my ears. I’m dreaming I can’t turn it off.”
My mother released the shovel, and its handle disappeared in the grass. She be
nt over and let her head hang as she gazed through the space between her legs. The woods would have been flipped—trees stabbing down, nothing to step on but air. She sat and rolled an oblong potato between her hands. “But why are these so small? These lousy things. They won’t even feed us for a day.”
Natty swirled the plastic bucket around so it made a rumbling sound.
“It’s this place,” my mother said. “It’s not a place that allows them to grow the way they ought.”
I threw three potatoes at the bucket, and two of them went in. I reached for the lone potato in the grass, but halfway through gave up.
* * *
ON THE NEXT MONDAY we woke to the anxious bleeps of the alarm clock, and with that small and sudden violence, school began. There were new classes, some new clothes in the halls, one or two faces I had not seen before. But it was the same trapped seats and the need to be wary. There were a few true differences in the sixth grade: in the classes where we were allowed to choose our own desks, Ada kicked her legs beside me. Also, I discovered I could run. As kids began to jog past me on the road that looped our school, my skin would flash hot and cool. Maybe it was my daily practice of sprinting all the way to the mailbox at the entrance of our gravel road. Or maybe I just learned how to put everything I had into it, the surge. I found I liked it there at the front, where I didn’t have to look at anyone. For a full minute or two, I was weightless. But the moment I finished, it all caught up with me. My legs hurt, my chest burned, and the air was too muddy for my lungs. When I made a sound like squeaky shoes, the gym teacher asked, “Are you having an asthma attack?” He sent me to the nurse, who said, “Just don’t run so fast.” Soon weeks had slid by.
It must have been different for Natty, for whom every small occurrence was new. The kindergarteners were assigned to one of the portable classrooms, a trailer decked out with thin carpet and faded posters. The room was vigorously heated, and if you looked in the windows, you could see a few rows of small, sweating, red-cheeked children. Beside this classroom was a set of portable bathrooms, and when I visited them on the way to the bus, I saw Natty outside, motionless on a half-court below a basketball hoop. The cracks in the concrete were newly patched, a web of gray filler spreading through the puddles from the morning rain. Natty stood with his foot on the edge of the web.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
As I spoke, three boys standing at the far sideline skittered away. From what I had glimpsed, they were a few years older than Natty. And much bigger, probably bigger than I was. Natty still didn’t move. A suffocating sadness landed somewhere between us, folding us both into it. I nudged him in the direction of the buses. He started to walk, the way a man who has never seen snow might wade through several feet of it, not knowing what it was or why it was impeding him.
I sat with him on the bus. At the Qwik Stop, I said, “Here we go,” and together we descended the rubber-lined steps and walked the ditch along the road. It was very warm and humid out, but I had to tell Natty to take off his jacket.
When we got home, there was a piece of paper taped to the door. At the top, the words “Notice to Quit” were printed. Who had noticed what, and who was quitting? I was afraid to touch it. The rain had pasted the entire sheet flat against the wood, and it looked as though it would disintegrate if I tried to peel it away. I scanned the clearing across from our house. Someone had stood right here, on our doorstep where so few had stood.
That night, lying on my stomach in the dark, when it felt like the house had taken an inhale and swelled on all sides, and there was more space in which to say things, I opened my mouth. “Pei,” I said, “someone taped a paper to our door.”
Pei-Pei’s blurry figure beside me shifted. “I know,” she said.
“Do you know what it means?”
“I know what I think it means.” Pei-Pei’s voice was more uncertain than it sounded during the day. There was a depth to her voice, of something suppressed.
“What?”
Instead of answering me, she rustled her way out of her blanket. As she sat up, the fabric fell away from her, so that she emerged from its soft, dark mass, stripped to her core.
“What does it mean?”
She reached over and put a hand on my forehead. It was a strange touch—not at all like my mother, who, when feeling for a fever over and over, made you sense she was beckoning one. Instead, it seemed as though Pei-Pei were passing something on to me, palm to forehead, some kind of immunity or resilience. It stilled me. I sank deeper into my mattress.
I was almost asleep when she said, “It’s happening soon.”
“What’s happening?”
“I think our house won’t be our house anymore.”
In the warm nest of our massive bed, formed from our three individual beds, I thought this a silly statement. At that moment we were burrowing deeper under our shared blankets—stowed away in our beds, in our room, in our house, which was filled with no one’s troubles but ours.
13
After my father had stacked my parents’ mattress, the kitchen table, a few folding chairs, and several suitcases and crates in the bed of the truck, he began shoving things into the foot wells. His packing became half-hearted. Nothing more would fit in the truck, and we’d sold the station wagon. In the den, my mother unbuttoned the canvas cover of a couch cushion and slipped her hand in to feel the velour. The glimpse of maroon was a shock; I had forgotten there was a different fabric underneath.
At the store, Pei-Pei and I had been allowed to choose the couch from two options. My parents had eased it into the house with newspapers wedged between the rails and the tight doorway. My father held one end inside the front door, and my mother was outside, and for a long time they were frozen in that halfway state for fear of damaging it. From behind the stack of cushions in her arms, Pei-Pei kept saying, “Just push it,” like a taunt. When finally it was in, and set in its place, we fought to sit on it, to see how different it felt in our home than at the store. It did feel different. Then all six of us managed to squeeze onto it, someone holding Ruby, and probably Natty, too, and Pei-Pei declared that our house was all right.
“Are we going on vacation?” I asked.
From the doorway my father whispered, “Yes, vacation.”
Pei-Pei grabbed my hand and yanked me around the corner. In the kitchen, the cupboards and pantry were open, and two brown grocery bags squatted on the floor, nearly splitting, jammed with cereals in rolled-up bags, stale pretzels, and other half-consumed snacks that had been languishing in the recesses of the cupboards.
“Have we ever been on vacation?” she asked.
“No.”
“Use your head.”
“My head says vacation.”
For two weekends every summer, the Dolans drove to the Kenai Peninsula and came home with coolers full of fish to stock their freezer through winter. It got hot down there, Ada said. Not the river water, which was iced by glaciers, but the air. It heated you past your skin. I wondered where the weather took this turn—maybe where the highway hooked around the tip of Turnagain Arm. We had driven south along the inlet before, but only up to the ghost forests. The coastline there had sunk during the Good Friday earthquake, and the spruce forests had guzzled salt water and died. Decades later, the silvery skeletons of those trees still stood, petrified by salt and leaning drunkenly, some nearly horizontal. It might be there, in the bewitched space where trees defied time and gravity, that the world shifted.
“I want to go fishing,” I said.
“When has anyone in this whole house ever mentioned fishing?”
“I just want to go.”
Pei-Pei shook my arm so my whole body wobbled. “What’s wrong with you?”
My father leaned against one side of the doorway and said, “Don’t fight today.”
“It’s not my fault,” Pei-Pei said. “When people are idiots, we don’t do them any favors by pretending they’re not.”
“Don’t call your brother an
idiot,” my father said, in a voice so weary it suggested he believed I was an idiot, too. But then he asked me, “Where do you want to go on vacation?”
“Fiji,” Pei-Pei said.
“Kenai,” I said. “Seward.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll go.”
Pei-Pei’s nostrils shrank and flared as she contemplated my father. Finally she said, “I’m done with you,” and pushed past him. She kicked the closet door on the way to the stairs. We heard her rapid, ascending thumps.
My father’s neck was shining with sweat. He wiped the side of it with his wrist, then did it again and again. With Pei-Pei, just a certain phrasing, a certain inflection, could make you wonder what was so repulsive about yourself, and how to get rid of it.
“Where are we going?” Natty asked. He had come in from the front yard, where he’d silently watched the procession of furniture and crates to the truck. “I don’t want to go anywhere.”
“A little vacation,” my father said. “You know what that means? It means we’re leaving home to have fun.”
“I want to stay here.”
“Well,” my father said, “you’ve never been anywhere else, but you’ll see.” He put his hand on Natty’s head.
“No,” Natty said. “I won’t leave.”
My father scooped him up and tipped him sideways. Natty was too old to be held like that, and I waited for him to kick his way down. But he turned limp. With the pad of his thumb, my father rubbed a spot in the very center of Natty’s forehead. I could almost feel the pressure, or the memory of that pressure, on my own head. I turned away from their exchange.
In our bedroom, Pei-Pei was kneeling on her bed with her face smashed into the mattress. She took deep breaths, as though trying to smell something all the way on the other side of the bed, underneath it.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
She jerked up. “I forgot to grab this.” She jammed her loose, lumpy pillow into her lap. Her whole face was red from how hard she had pressed it, practically suffocating herself. She turned away and began to sort through scraps of paper at the foot of her bed—notes from her friends, saved school programs, candy wrappers with some kind of meaning. I did not have such things, whose worth was a thrilling shared secret.
The Unpassing Page 13