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Children in the middle, parents on the outside. Our arrangement kept Pei-Pei from sneaking out at night. But I liked it exactly like this, pinned between Pei-Pei and Natty. Three stacked blankets weighed upon us. My father said we had to conserve what propane was left in the tank, so we turned the furnace on for two hours after dinner, and flipped it off again as we dug under the pile of blankets. It surprised me how warm Natty was, and I worried he was radiating more heat than he should, the smallest of us, giving away all he had.
In the morning, the sun assaulted us. The windows were naked, and the light blazed through. Someone stirred, shifting us all into wakefulness. My mother sat up with her hair thrust to one side, and Natty rolled back and forth over his spot in a fight to hold on to sleep. He peeped at us from two barely open eyes, then shut them tight. Wariness drew his features together.
School, with its orderliness, felt foreign. I wasn’t sure what Natty had said about our absence. Most likely nothing. But maybe his silence had been strange and thick. Mrs. Reardon, a third-grade social studies teacher who wore skirts above calves that curved outward, began to follow him around. She shuffled beside him to lunch or class or the buses.
In the evenings, Natty sometimes piped up to speak of her. “Winnie makes jelly from fireweed, and she’s going to bring us a jar to try.” He might have been the only student ever to call her Winnie in the history of our school, though she requested it every year, of every new batch of students. When they were together, Mrs. Reardon looked ecstatic, and Natty looked, amazingly, like any other kid—shoelaces untied, mouth moving as words tumbled out, scratching a dirty spot on his neck.
“Winnie says there used to be bears in our woods,” Natty said.
“She’s a loony,” I said. She wasn’t even his teacher, and I didn’t know what she was doing with him. That she would profess to know our woods—these depths we had entered daily and still did not know—irked me.
Still, he continued to speak of her. The sun was setting at seven, and we spent more time in the dark. My father didn’t like us to use the lights; he was afraid someone would see. Before bed we relied on flashlights, and when the batteries died, we used fat candles with tunnels melted down the center of them so that even when they were lit, they barely glowed. Anything Natty said in those hours seemed infected by another presence; his voice and face trembled, and he even occasionally laughed, a disembodied sound.
Eventually the candles ran out of wick and nights ran colder, especially by the windows. The old woodstove we’d never used, with its dual possibilities of light and warmth, rose to sudden prominence. After a few attempts that smoked us out of the house, my mother conquered it. We celebrated her triumph with genuine joy. Into the stove went the first of the firewood my mother had collected after the record storms in July. We made them last longer by also throwing in twisted newspapers, twigs, cardboard boxes, and anything that looked suggestible to the idea of burning.
The refrigerator was off, but we stored food in there anyway to keep out the ants. During the last hard rain, they had taken refuge indoors, teeming along our kitchen windowsill and the baseboards. We used to have a vacuum with a long plastic nozzle that I would point at trails of ants, and though they dispersed in all directions, I was good at chasing them down. Now our vacuum was gone, and Natty used his thumb instead, like a love stamp. He was too slow; more ants came. Pei-Pei and I were hyperaware of them, brushing off our arms when we felt the slightest tingle, jumping up and shaking out our legs for no real reason. When I gazed at the blank walls of the den, I saw crawling specks, but upon closer inspection, nothing was there at all—just the agitated ghosts of the ants Natty kept squashing one by one.
“I found where they’re coming in,” Pei-Pei said. “There’s a hole under the window that you can’t see unless you put your head right on the floor.”
“Who cares,” my mother said, “if they’re not biting. And even the biting ones won’t kill you.” She was in a good mood because she had overheard a conversation at the Qwik Stop. Septic tanks were mysteriously failing all over Anchorage, which meant work for my father.
“I care,” Pei-Pei said. “I’m getting out of here.”
“Take your brothers. They’re soft as boiled turnips.”
As we put on our shoes, Pei-Pei whispered to me, “Don’t think I’m going anywhere with you.”
“Are you going to find Collin?”
“No.” She kicked me in the shin with the toe of her hard shoe. “You don’t know anything.” Though I managed to keep from wincing or rubbing the spot, I knew it would leave a bruise.
Outside, she hurried toward the gravel road.
“Where are you going?” I called.
She made a shooing motion.
I thought of following her, to see which way she would turn once she reached the big road. But I wanted to see Ada. It had been weeks since we’d played outside, such a long time. “Come on,” I said to Natty, who was struggling to pull the door closed. In the end, he left it ajar. We tramped the weeds down in the side and back yards, then found the subtle parting in the long grasses. As always, it invited us to enter the woods.
* * *
WHEN WE ARRIVED, we found Collin and Ada in their yard. Collin held Ada’s shoe high above her, and when he saw us, he threw the shoe onto the roof of the trailer. It landed upright on its rubber sole.
Their enormous dog, Baby, chomped on a flattened soccer ball. A mutt with some bullmastiff in her, she was as tall as Natty and probably three times his weight. Natty reached out, and Baby dropped the ball to lick the back of his hand. One taste seemed to make her a fanatic; she placed a paw on his shoulder and gave his face a rapid washing.
“She’s friendly,” Mr. Dolan said. “Don’t be scared.” Just a minute earlier, he had waved at us from the window. Now he had materialized in the cold grass in sandals and shorts that exposed his massive bare legs. His ankles were the size of coffee cans.
“He’s not scared,” I said.
“I meant you.” Mr. Dolan showed his small, neat teeth.
Ada stood on one foot, the other leg folded, like a waterbird.
“I saw your ma a few weeks ago,” Mr. Dolan said. “She came through the woods and out our side. She was holding a colander full of grass.”
“Chives,” I said.
“You really ate them?”
The way he asked it made me unable to say yes, so I rolled my feet from side to side.
Mr. Dolan planted his leather sandals in a wide stance. For the first time I noticed he was missing the outer two toes of his right foot. I stared at his incomplete foot.
“Vietnam,” he said.
I forced myself to focus on something else. Their sprawling dusty blue ranch house spun out a rope of smoke.
“Would you believe I lost the toes on two separate occasions?” He guffawed.
I made a noncommittal sound. Without Pei-Pei and her social graces, I didn’t know how to stop Mr. Dolan from nosing in with his distressing, unanswerable questions.
“You’re not Vietnamese, are you?”
I imagined him pointing a rifle at me. Perhaps he was imagining it, too.
“No,” I said. “Not even a little bit.”
“I didn’t think so.”
To avoid Mr. Dolan’s translucent eyes, I kept scanning the yard. A snowmobile with a shattered windshield was languishing in the grass. Collin picked up a broken table leg in the middle of the yard and swung it.
“You guys don’t have the build,” Mr. Dolan said. “It’s all about wiriness, like whether you could climb a tall fence and how fast. You guys are small and skinny, but you’re not wiry that way.”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you two stay for dinner? Let’s get you fed.”
Natty looked at me with his huge lashed eyes. Of course he wanted to stay. At home, our meals had turned the corner from unappetizing into something dancing on the edge of edible. Canned beans stir-fried with dried fish. The remn
ants of differently shaped pasta and noodle packages boiled together, with ketchup as sauce. My mother’s wrath when we stared at the food was silent but heavy in the air; we hunched under the weight of it.
“We just have to be home before dark,” I said.
“We eat at five-thirty,” Mr. Dolan said. “I’ll give you a lift home. Want me to give your folks a ring?”
“No,” I said. “No, no.”
At dinnertime, Mr. Dolan came out to fetch us. He said something nonsensical about letting meat take a rest, then led us around a small deck. Underneath it, in the shadows, was a pile of long wood planks and what appeared to be ten or fifteen ladders. I didn’t know why someone would need so many ladders. It wasn’t as though you could string them together and climb somewhere far away.
Up a short set of unfinished steps was the deck, which I had never set foot on before. It was overloaded with bikes and skateboards and snowshoes and other riches that had been shoved against the wood railings. Smaller items had tumbled to the floor, in the manner of a rockslide, and left only a little path to the sliding doors. Beside the glass doors, I couldn’t help but touch the polished curve of a helmet hanging on the end of a hockey stick, like a head on a spike. The helmet wobbled. Collin poked me in the back with the table leg before dropping it on the deck with a clatter. He pushed ahead of me and I heard him say to his father, “Do we really have enough food?” Behind me, Ada put her hand between my shoulder blades and gave me a tiny push in.
Upon stepping into the house, my skin prickled with the pleasure of the extravagant heat. It was so early—before dinner—and the woodstove was already ablaze. My arms and legs marinated in warmth. My nose began to run, and I kept sniffling, but I didn’t want to ask for a tissue.
A slight asphalt smell was overpowered by a food smell, a kind of soggy, squash-like odor, as though frozen vegetables had been steaming all day. The living room we had entered was carpeted, and on top of the carpet were two rugs, faded to dull pastels and trampled smooth. A fat sectional took up one side of the room, and immediately Ada flopped onto the center of it, sinking deeply into the cushions and blankets. She was still missing one shoe. On the bottom of her dirty sock was a heart.
As Mr. Dolan reached over to latch the door, I stepped out of his way into a loosely gathered curtain. I was afraid to walk onto the rug in my sneakers, and also afraid to take them off. I had to use the bathroom, but I didn’t want to ask where it was.
“Set the table,” Mr. Dolan said, and with a mumbled protest Collin walked through the doorway to the kitchen. A drawer rasped open and silverware chimed.
Mr. Dolan heaved himself onto the couch beside Ada, saying, “Well, I’ll just rest my legs for a second.” With a hiccup of the springs, he sank so far down that Ada tipped over into his lap.
On the other side of Ada, Natty took off his jacket, revealing an old T-shirt of mine with a coyote wailing at a crackled moon. Ada took hold of Natty’s bare arm and kneaded it. From where I stood, they looked like puppies, nuzzling each other, propped against the languid body of their mother. All three of them lay in a nest of soft, worn cushions and textiles, just a few feet away from the hot woodstove. I wanted to pile on top of them. I wanted them to pile on top of me.
“What are you doing?” Mr. Dolan asked. His hands were clasped atop his belly.
I stepped back and hit the glass door.
“Come on,” he said. “Join us.”
I stared at the waxy undersides of his arms. His sleeves were rolled up, and when he motioned at the couch, he turned one hand and revealed a pelt of hair growing on top of his forearm.
Collin came to the doorway and pointed at me with a serving spoon. “Table’s set,” he said.
With great effort, Mr. Dolan pushed himself back up. We followed him to the dining table, made of a rich, dark wood. Out on the deck everything was a jumble; inside the house, I began to understand, there was order and arrangement, a mind or presence—maybe their dead mother’s.
In the corner of the dining room was a cabinet displaying miniature porcelain animals. The glass door had its own lock, which impressed me. The back wall of the cabinet was a mirror, and in it, on the lowest shelf, I spied the reflection of three elephants facing one another, midconsultation, the largest no bigger than a quail egg.
Our class had gone to the Alaska Zoo last winter and watched two elephants playing. The little one, an orphan, kept swirling her trunk in the snow and then whipping it up, sending sprays of powder through the air. “Elephants grieve,” the docent had said, and I had studied them for signs of distress. Their skin was hatched and creased, and their large, thin ears hung from their skulls like tacked-on towels. Maggie had recently come from Zimbabwe, where her whole herd had been slaughtered. Annabelle, the older elephant, was the very first animal of the Alaska Zoo. Back in the sixties, a grocer had won her in a contest by selling the most Chiffon toilet paper.
I stood with my hand on the back of a chair while the Dolans settled into their seats. Would they let me hold the elephants? How would I go about asking such a thing? Were they very precious, to be locked behind that glass?
“No, not there,” Collin said.
I let go of the chair. I couldn’t tell if he was joking. He watched me without blinking. Even his legs, which always seemed to be kicking something, were still.
“Don’t sit there. Can’t you see there’s no place setting?”
“Try this one,” Mr. Dolan said, nudging a chair out with his foot. When I was slow to move, he said, “No one’s sat in that chair for years.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s all right,” Mr. Dolan said. “Chairs are meant to be sat in. Only, there’s a place for you over there.”
“He can sit wherever he wants,” Ada said.
“Yeah?” Mr. Dolan said.
She turned to me. “You can sit there,” she said. She spoke in a slow, high-pitched voice, like an older child speaking to a younger one, or someone healthy speaking to someone sick. She lifted a large tumbler to her face so that I could see only the edges of her jaws, her temples, her forehead. The glass was completely full of water, but she drank it all without stopping. Her throat pulsed.
I wrapped my fingers around the back of the chair. I didn’t know what was taking me so long to get settled, except that I was a little frightened of the food on the table. A whole roasted chicken with shining skin, a bowl of softened vegetables—green beans like smashed fingers, baked potatoes half unwrapped from their foil casings and exposing their freckled skin. I knew I wasn’t up to the task before me. Natty was already reaching for the largest potato. Three Dolans sat across the table, watching me with their identical blue eyes, clear as cellophane.
* * *
DURING THE MEAL, the small window in the dining room darkened quickly, obscuring the view out. Soon it reflected the small chandelier, whose five or six spots of light gleamed wetly in the glass. The window looked like a porthole, holding back an entire black ocean, and I had to pee.
“What do you usually eat for dinner?” Mr. Dolan asked.
“Oh,” I said, “the same thing.”
“Chicken?”
“Yes, chicken.”
“How often do you eat chicken?”
I shrugged.
“Every day or once a week?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“What kinds of vegetables?”
“All kinds.”
“You eat three times a day?” Mr. Dolan asked. He kept wiping his hands on the same paper towel, which softened as he worried it.
When I didn’t answer, Collin offered, “Paige doesn’t eat lunch.”
“She eats lunch,” I said.
“She just sits by herself and doesn’t eat anything or do anything.”
That didn’t seem right to me, though it was impossible for me to contradict him in his own house. But Pei-Pei had her friends.
Collin shoved a huge forkful of chicken into one side of his mouth and gave me a lops
ided grin.
“You still go to school?” I said, even though I knew he did.
“He had to repeat,” Mr. Dolan said.
Collin scratched his neck, and his nails left red lines on his skin.
“What do you eat for lunch?” Mr. Dolan asked.
“Bread,” I said.
“Bread?”
“A sandwich.”
Ada waved a drumstick bone in front of Baby.
“Don’t tease her,” her father said. “You know she can’t eat that.”
The dog’s drool splattered onto the floor. She extended a massive tongue that was pink on top and almost purple on the underside. I felt my stomach lurch.
“Ada loves that stupid dog,” Mr. Dolan said. “Named her herself when she was three.”
“She’s a guard dog, for Christ’s sake,” said Collin. “You should’ve let me name her.”
“When their mother died,” Mr. Dolan said, “Ada slept in the basement with her.” He rubbed her head. “Didn’t you? Right on the floor.”
Ada adjusted an elastic in her hair. She gave me a strange, molded smile, like a curved line drawn in mud. I thought of our intimate whispered conversations in the forest, her face so close to mine I could feel the little gusts of her breath.
“For weeks I had to bring food down there,” Mr. Dolan said. “And a space heater. Because it was November.”
Collin leaned back and stretched his legs out. His nostrils flared. “It was November, so they put our mom’s body in a freezer.”
“That’s a joke,” I said. I took too big a gulp of soda. The bubbles hissed at the base of my throat.
“It’s true,” Mr. Dolan said. “They even close the cemetery from November to May. The ground’s too hard to dig.”
I tried to burp, but nothing came out. I wondered if Mr. Dolan would really drive us home, or if we would have to take the woods, which would be inky now. I sat on my hands and tried to forget the woods, as well as the wringing pressure of my bladder.
The Unpassing Page 16