“It used to be they’d pre-dig graves in the spring and summer, then cover them with a sheet of plywood. But bums started sleeping in the pits for warmth.”
“Let them sleep,” I said.
“Good point,” Mr. Dolan said, “but it’s not just a hole in the ground. It means something to people.” He cut a slice of chicken with very precise motions of the knife. “Anyhow,” he said, “we know what it’s like to lose someone.”
Without looking up, I considered the warmth of the house, everything layered and soft. Mr. Dolan’s firm orb of a stomach, which looked like it would support you if you leaned on it. The expanse and heft of the wooden table, how there was so much space for a meal.
“How long has it been since your sister died? Almost a year? I wanted to tell you, we were sorry when we heard it. Everyone was. We would have paid a visit, but we didn’t know you then. We didn’t want to be a bother.”
Natty was sitting still with his hands palms-down on the table. I thought of him frozen under the basketball hoop at school. I was afraid he would find some kind of permanent stillness.
“My parents don’t want us to talk about it,” I said.
“Is that right,” Mr. Dolan said. Suddenly his skin looked thin and loose, as though he had released a drawstring somewhere behind an ear. Beneath that skin, I thought, was skull. Thick bone, empty sockets, teeth set in the jaw like kernels that had dried on the cob.
“Talking doesn’t usually hurt,” he said.
“It hurts me,” Collin said. He had cleaned his plate and was slumped on his elbows, mouth hanging open and his face slipping lower and lower between his hands.
“When their mother died,” Mr. Dolan said, “their aunt came to stay. Their mother’s sister. That was a good thing, too. You got family? Aunts and uncles and grandparents?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Who’ve you got?”
I didn’t know much about my father’s side. His mother had died young, and he didn’t have any siblings. His father had died of liver failure. And maybe also overexertion, my father said, which was his funny way of saying that he’d been beaten a lot as a child. There was only an aunt now on my mother’s side—one single living relative.
“We have an uncle in Texas,” I said. “And three aunts in Florida. And two grandparents in California. And cousins. Cousins in all those places.” As I went on, I saw the image of a U.S. map populating with our family members. I felt myself panting a little. There were so many of us. A pushpin here, a pushpin there, and yarn strung around to connect us. A big pin in Alaska, so that even though we were practically hanging off into the ocean, with a whip of islands trying to dash away, we were tethered, too, fastened to other people.
“Your family likes it hot,” Mr. Dolan said.
“What?”
“Florida, Texas, California. Those are hot places.”
“Yeah,” I said. I stabbed my fork into the remaining half of my potato. I was afraid to look at Ada.
“You been to any of them?”
“Florida,” I said.
“Never have been myself. Did you like it?”
I conjured up the hottest place I knew. On the last day of third grade, we had gone for a hike in the Chugach Mountains. The sun baked the rocks around us so that the ground radiated heat upward while the sun scorched us from above, and my classmates, it seemed, started going mad, like fish in an overheated tank. Someone picked up a stone and licked it, and someone else curled up on the ground and could not be budged. I stepped off the trail, and when I looked up, there was a Dall sheep perched on a ledge, staring down at me, its horns twisted into curlicues. It moved a black hoof. Rocks and loose dirt skidded down. I had the impression it had cursed me. And perhaps it had.
“I didn’t like it,” I said, and then stood up. “We need to go home.”
“Now?” Mr. Dolan said. He craned his head to check the clock beside the doorway. “It’s only six. You haven’t eaten much. There’s still dessert.”
“That’s okay,” I said.
“It’s chocolate cake.”
“No, thank you.”
“He says, ‘No, thank you,’ to chocolate cake.” Mr. Dolan shook his big, rueful head, his arms hanging limp on each side of his chair. “Another can of fizzy?”
“No, thank you.”
He rolled himself a little from side to side and pressed hard on the end of the table to thrust his whole mass upward. “Well, maybe you can take something home,” he said, and lumbered into the kitchen.
“I guess I’ll get my own dessert,” Collin said, scraping his chair all the way back to the wall before he followed his father out.
From the kitchen came the sounds of cabinet doors closing. I sat down again and ran the back of my spoon along the length of Natty’s bare forearm. He still didn’t move.
“Natty,” I said. “Get up. We’re going home.”
I stood up beside him and lifted the back of his chair to tip him off. But instead of catching himself, he fell to the floor, knocking the empty chair aside. The crash brought Mr. Dolan in. He was holding a half-full grocery bag.
“What happened?”
I held Natty up by the armpits. “Just a game that we play,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought something had happened.”
“I didn’t hurt him,” I said. “He’s fine.” Natty was getting heavy, so I let go of him, and to my relief he stayed standing.
Mr. Dolan glanced at Ada and then gave his bag a little shake. “This is just something for you to take home.” He was speaking quickly. “I’m almost done. Let me finish up here, and then we’ll get you on the road.”
Before I could respond, Mr. Dolan had wheeled around and reentered the kitchen. I heard Collin say, “You can’t just throw everything in.”
In the dining room, Ada and I couldn’t seem to find anything to say or do. I hoped desperately it was a symptom of her house and its hazy, yellow-lit rooms, and not a permanent shift between us, though it felt like one. She was looking at me very seriously, sucking on her upper lip. Ever since we had come back, I had often turned during class or at lunch to find her studying me or whatever I was holding, wearing, eating.
I walked over to peer at the porcelain elephants. Their ears and tails were taut, and their black eyes gleamed.
“Do you want one?” Ada asked.
I was appalled. The elephants formed a defensive huddle, and I imagined her mother had placed them carefully in that exact arrangement. Even to disturb them seemed profane.
“No,” I said.
“You can have one if you want,” Ada said. “No one will notice if you take one.”
Separate them? They understood loss. You could even see it in the incline of their heads, the droop of their trunks.
Mr. Dolan rustled in with a bulging grocery bag on one hip. Jutting out the top was a box of cereal and a bag of potato chips. “This is for you to take home,” he said.
Though I didn’t look at her, I could feel Ada leaning forward, sliding her elbows farther over the table. Had she asked him to do this?
“That’s all right,” I said. My cheeks flamed.
“Just go on and take it home,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said.
Mr. Dolan shifted the bag, and I saw a sleeve of Ritz crackers. I began to salivate at the thought of their salted surfaces.
“You might as well take it,” he said. “Otherwise I’d have to unpack it again.”
My hands hung loose in front of me. He wanted to give the bag to me, and I wanted to take it. But there was some kind of block.
“Well, I’ll just put it in the van,” he said.
He shambled toward the front door, and we followed him. With our shoes already on, we drifted easily from indoors to outdoors. Mr. Dolan slid the van door open for us with one hand, and after Ada, Natty, and I had climbed in, he set the grocery bag on an empty seat. He shook out his arms as though he had been carrying something much heavier, like a sack
of rubble.
When he started the engine, the radio came on. “Have you heard this?” Mr. Dolan asked, backing the van down the driveway. “The snow lottery. Five thousand dollars.”
Although dust covered the lower half of the van’s white frame, the interior was clean and empty. The seats were covered in beige velvet, with worn patches in the vague two-comma shape of rear ends. A canvas organizer hung from the back of the driver’s seat, but it held only a Kleenex box and no trash.
As we drove on, Mr. Dolan tapped the steering wheel and said, “Tickets are two dollars each. And I’ll tell you this for free—winter’s coming early this year. You can see it in the pine cones—they’re twice as big. And we got the termination dust weeks ago. The first real snowfall, it’s going to be early, it’s going to be this month. Consider that a free tip.”
He turned off the radio and told us about the snow lottery’s official machine: an arm with a bucket attached to it. When snow had filled the bucket to a certain weight, the arm would fall and trigger a clock to stop. It was all rigged up somewhere downtown, high enough that no one could mess with it.
We turned onto a dirt road. It was so narrow that if you didn’t take the turns just right, you would swipe a tree, maybe lose a side mirror. But Mr. Dolan followed the curves without apparent thought. A few branches clawed at the windows.
“My thinking is the chances are pretty good. It’s not like the Ice Classic, where you haven’t got a real shot. That one’s got so many bets, they hire ninety people every winter just to sort them. Of course, the jackpot was almost two hundred thousand last year. You know about the Ice Classic, don’t you?”
“Uh,” I said. I turned to Ada, but she just sat beside me with her hands in her lap.
As we drove, I stared at my own hands in the last vestiges of light, the woods pulsating on one side of the road. My fingertips felt swollen. When you didn’t pee for a long time, my mother said, all that urine seeped into your blood and poisoned you.
By the time we turned onto our gravel road, Mr. Dolan had told us all about the huge lottery to guess when the Tanana River would melt. Every winter the town of Nenana built a huge tripod with a flag on it, and placed it in the middle of the frozen river. When the river broke up enough to carry the tripod one hundred feet downstream, a cable tied to the tripod would trigger a siren and trip a meat cleaver that cut a rope that pulled out a pin to stop an antique clock. And everyone would gather on the banks to celebrate.
“You can buy tickets at pretty much any bar,” he said. “Or Carrs.” The headlights swung to illuminate the pale crushed rock of our gravel road. The van bounced deep into a gully, then reared up over a hump.
“You can drop us off here,” I said.
But Mr. Dolan finished the turn. The front tires kicked up gravel. “I’ll take you up the driveway.”
The light was on in the back of the house; I could see the small glowing circle of the doorknob hole. I knew that if I crouched, I could look through the hole all the way to the kitchen, where my mother might be eating dinner. She would be contained perfectly in that circle. It was only when you opened the door that she would become life-sized. It was tempting to delay that moment.
When I jumped down to the driveway, Mr. Dolan put his hand on me. It covered my whole shoulder. “Tell your folks about the snow lottery. It’s smaller.”
“The chances are pretty good,” I said.
“That’s right.” With a jovial flourish, he shoved the grocery bag into my arms, while Ada hung halfway out the open van door and raised one somber hand. Her hair was tucked behind an ear on one side, and the other side hung straight. She looked neat and cautious and unrumpled, and I missed the other version of her. She pulled the door closed.
Natty and I stood thigh-deep in the grasses to watch Mr. Dolan back out of the driveway. The bag was so heavy it was slipping, and I let it slide to the ground. Mr. Dolan’s thick arm hung out of the open window, and he slapped the side of the van in farewell. As he turned, the headlights painted a yellow arc onto the colorless gray shrubs of the clearing.
I could barely get up the step. The groceries were cumbersome and my bladder was so full, the slightest movement caused a twinge. We entered the house to find my mother barreling toward us. I shoved the grocery bag into the stairwell—I didn’t want to explain it—then stepped into the entryway to meet her full-on.
“Where did you go? Who was that? Why didn’t you come home?” In my mother’s hands were a sneaker and a house slipper, though she herself was barefoot. “I waited hours for you,” she said. “Why didn’t you come home before dark?”
“Why do we have to?” I said.
“Don’t talk to me like that. Because you are a child.”
“I’m not.” My voice cracked as I said it. I didn’t feel like a child—what did that feel like?
She whirled blindly toward the open closet, where there was a small heap of shoes and coats, and above it, a bar. All of the clothes hangers had been taken away, along with any jackets we had left behind. “I didn’t know where any of my children were,” she said. She waved her arms into the empty space and grabbed at nothing. “Four children, I had once. Tonight I didn’t know where a single one was.”
I thought once more of how I alone knew Ruby’s location, and how cumbersome that knowledge was, big and waterlogged. “Here are two of us,” I said, swinging an arm to include Natty, who I saw just then was sitting on the second step, rummaging through the grocery bag out of my mother’s sight.
“Yes, yes, here you are,” my mother said. She rubbed her hands on the thighs of her corduroy pants, as though trying to calm herself, but her voice got higher and higher. “Nobody came home,” she said. “So I didn’t cook. I was just waiting.”
“We already ate,” I said.
“Where?”
“At a friend’s,” I said, the way Pei-Pei used to, as though she alone could know what that meant.
“That’s good,” my mother said. “I don’t need to cook.” She had put one slipper on and begun an odd, injured shuffle into the kitchen. She called over her shoulder as an afterthought, “Close the door.” I heard the sink water come on.
As I pulled the door in, I could see back through the doorknob hole to our dark yard and the gravel road, and beyond it, the clearing that was softened with a layer of seed heads suspended over the tall grasses. Where had Pei-Pei gone?
A warmth spread around my crotch and down my legs and the relief was so immense that I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—stop. When I was done, the smell of urine was unmistakable, and a puddle on the floor was spreading with a mind of its own.
I stepped into the closet and took off my pants, underwear, and socks, then thought in the dark about the question of laundry. For a long while I stayed there, squatting on our coats, mustering willpower. Then I streaked out, past Natty who was putting a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup in his mouth, up the stairs, and into the hallway bathroom, where I threw my clothes under running water in the bathtub. I went to find new pants, then returned to finish the washing job.
While I was wringing my sweatpants out over the tub, Pei-Pei stepped into the hallway and wrapped her fingers around the doorframe. “What are you doing?” she asked.
She had come in so quietly that my mother had not heard. Without the knob and latch, the front door was very quiet—it made only a soft swoosh upon opening. No car had dropped her off, or at least I hadn’t heard tires on the gravel, or an engine cutting out or starting.
“Mom’s looking for you,” I said. “She’s mad.”
“Mad or”—Pei-Pei pulled all the skin around her eyes back with a spread of her fingers, and her eyes popped—“mad?”
“Both.”
“But why is it wet downstairs?”
I looked at my sweatpants, twisted in my hands, and was too tired to make up a story. “I peed on the floor.”
Pei-Pei nodded slowly. “What’s with the cookies on the stairs?”
“From the Dolans.”
The reminder of the groceries made me sag and sit down on the cold, hard side of the tub.
“I’m going to dig in.”
“Didn’t you eat dinner?”
“No.” Pei-Pei leaned farther through the doorway. “But I found a job.” Her cheeks were flushed. “It’s a lot easier to find one in the summer than now, but I managed anyway. I did it.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Four dollars an hour,” she said. “Four hours a day, six days a week—that’s ninety-six dollars a week.” She was swinging from the doorframe.
“What’s the job?”
“I’m a helper.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, what does it sound like?”
“You don’t know what the job is,” I said.
She shrugged. “I know it means helping people.”
“Help me,” I said.
“All right,” she said, and entered the bathroom. I thought she was going to sit beside me and flick my face, or elbow me in the stomach. Instead, she took my pants, wrung them out further, and spread them over a towel to dry. “There,” she said, and patted me on the chest. And I did feel helped.
17
The first dusting of snow came in October. It vanished in a day and was replaced by a cold mist. Pei-Pei began her after-school job—watching over a man who forgot things. It was easy, she said. She sat next to him on the couch, and together they flipped through his hunting magazines. She read to him about caribou and ptarmigan and rifles with equally pretty names. When he wandered toward the front door, she ran ahead of him and politely blocked the exit. Meanwhile, his wife picked up the cellophane candy wrappers he trailed in his wake and cooked dinner by dumping jars into pots. The three of them ate in front of the TV, usually pasta without any meat. Every day was a repeat, Pei-Pei said, enchanted.
It sometimes seemed on long afternoons that Pei-Pei had left our house for good. But every night ended with Pei-Pei bringing home the Anchorage Daily, rescued from the trash. We pored over it by the stove, the words so dim they melted into the gray paper. There were treasures to be found: a traffic dispute that escalated until one man beat another with a twenty-six-inch auger drill bit, or a sidewalk encounter that left a man shot between the ribs with a crossbow. Big, crucial chunks of information were missing, and later we filled them in. Pei-Pei whispered reenactments of the brawls as we lay beside each other, wide awake in our family nest on the floor. “I know you stole my musk ox,” she said, squirming closer to me, speaking so softly only I could hear. Prodding me with a finger, she said, “Who you calling a girl when I’ve seen you sit down to pee?”
The Unpassing Page 17