When we were done, we twisted the papers tightly and threw them into the woodstove, where they flamed brightly, then blackened, joining the drifts of fine gray ash and unsettling clumps.
* * *
IN THE WOODS, the chill of the air was unmistakable, that sharp warning: winter. At our favorite spot, the tree I thought of as having saved Pei-Pei’s life—the squat spruce—continued to prop up the trunk of the fallen tree. But it was a changed thing, splitting down the center and abloom with thousands of pine cones. I didn’t recognize the display for what it was: a massive, last-ditch effort to shower down seeds. Death was at hand for the overburdened. In the sunlight, the cones were marvelous, gold or copper at times, like ornaments hung by a madman.
Ada said she’d looked out her bedroom window the night before and found a halo around the moon. Bad weather ahead. “We won’t be able to play tomorrow,” she said. “And maybe for a long time yet.”
Natty and I dug shallow holes, and Ada dropped her treasures inside: a hair elastic, a root beer candy, a piece of dried skin from her lip. Then we filled the holes back up with dirt, watching the offerings disappear. But Ada’s heart wasn’t in it. Her eyes kept twitching toward me and away. She wasn’t any good at it. Didn’t she know I was the one who had always done the watching? I noticed every one of her glances.
Natty stepped farther down the path, into a grove where the alders were thick and low. He knelt and stabbed a pointed rock into the dirt, and soon we could hear him scrubbing the ground.
Ada asked, “Are you all right?” Her knees pointed inward. I knew she was probing me about something larger than this moment in time. One of her barrettes was barely hanging on, dangling like a pull cord as she eyed me.
I swiped my face with my forearm and flicked my hood up to cut off part of her gaze. It made a plasticky crunching sound. Soon it would snow, and the woods would be too cold for us. Today might be the crossover day—the day before our long winter confinement. Were we doing enough with it? I scraped a stick into the earth and created a short, narrow trench.
“Is there anything you need?” she asked. “What do you need?”
“Oh, everything,” I said, and laughed—then winced at the grating sound. The wet air settled over our faces and shoulders, and we breathed the chill into our lungs. I pressed harder on my stick. It snapped, and I worked with the longer of the two pieces, using it like a pencil, rewriting the same line over and over.
Ada lowered herself to a squat beside me and studied the trench I was making. “You can keep digging if you want,” she said. She pulled the lining of her pockets out. The fabric was thin and nubby. “But I don’t have anything left.”
It made me sadder than it should have. I laid the stick down.
We fell into a clotted silence. The mist thickened and seemed to curdle above our heads. Finally Ada kicked the loose dirt. “Let’s go see what he’s doing,” she said, tossing her head in Natty’s direction. Thirty yards down the path, he was frantically digging below the alders as though on the brink of an archaeological find. He had put down his rock and was pawing. The only sound I could hear, apart from the hushed rustling of the woods, was the spattering of dirt and stray rocks on the leaves of the understory. I followed her.
The alders on this part of the path grew in the shape of wide funnels, muscling back the spruces that wanted to shade them out. We had to stoop, for the branches forked into one another, creating a low canopy of woven branches. They were encrusted with lichens, and through them I could see sky, or rather fog, moving like a conveyer belt.
At our feet was a small crater, nearly a gallon in size. Soil was backsliding into it. I wouldn’t have thought Natty could dig a hole this big, and so quickly. I stuck my hand in, pressing on the cool soil at the bottom of it. The hole gave me a strange feeling. That something belonged in it.
“It’s raining,” Ada said. She dabbed her forehead with her thumb and showed it to me, but all I saw was a fleck of dirt. Then a single droplet tapped the ground beside my feet.
“Winnie says it’s going to rain all weekend,” Natty offered.
“Or snow,” Ada said. She had inherited this from her father—premonitions about the weather, or at least an insistence that what she had were premonitions.
Natty paused to look at the sky. “Winnie says we shouldn’t eat snow.”
I lifted my hand from the hole, and the two of them worked on widening and deepening it. Ada hit a root and carefully scraped around it with Natty’s rock, then dusted it as though excavating a human bone. She ran the pad of her finger along its length.
Natty chattered. “This hole is getting big. Really big. What will we put in here?” He raised his eyes to me and rubbed his nose, smearing snot across his upper lip.
“No,” I said. I clenched my hands in my coat pockets. “I don’t know. How would I know?”
As he resumed his pawing, Natty said, “Dirt is made of dead plants and animals.”
I could hear Mrs. Reardon’s inflections in his voice—the melodramatic range of tones. It was an unnatural way for any child to talk, but for Natty, my detached, tight-lipped brother, it was sickening.
“Not just dead animals,” I said. “Dead people, too.”
He flicked his eyes at me. “Oh my,” he said mildly. Another of her phrases. That fake, liquid voice. It made me want to expose the part of him that was really him. The part that was soft and raw.
I stepped forward, just across the hole from him, and shoved him so hard he sprang backward and fell. Why had he dug a hole sized for Ruby’s urn? The very place for her to rest—he was right—it was here. I staggered off-path into the thickets. I thrashed at the leaves around me, sweeping my hands over the thorns and toxins and inviting the small dangers of the understory to come to me. I parted leaves and trampled stems and found myself in a tight clearing, encircled by shoulder-high weeds that appraised me.
That cool, quiet hole. Ruby had always liked small spaces. More than once I’d opened the cabinet under the kitchen sink to find her hiding there, a bag of onions or potatoes in her arms, her short hair mussed. How long had she been waiting? Twenty minutes. Thirty, even. It wasn’t that she was unusually patient, but that she thrilled at being found—that sudden burst of light, that screaming rapture.
As I stumbled back toward the path, I saw Natty had not moved from where he had fallen. He lay supine with his hands spread open, as though trying to catch the rain that was falling more consistently now. Every five seconds or so there was a drop, on my shoulder, on the toe of my sneaker, in the exact center of my scalp, drilling into my skull.
He pressed himself up to sitting and looked at his palms. Damp soil clung to them but he didn’t wipe his hands. His eyelids looked dark, almost bruised.
“Get up,” I said.
He did, slowly and unsteadily.
“Ruby’s dead,” I said.
“I know,” he whispered.
“You know? What do you know?”
“Daddy carried her away. You were dead, too. I saw it. But then you came back. You came back without her.”
I felt the force of his accusation. It made me sway on my feet. It was worse than what he was saying. I hadn’t abandoned her, I’d killed her.
“She’s dust,” I said, spreading my fingers apart in the air. I wanted him to know—I wanted someone to know—that her ashes had stuck to my skin and worked into the weave of my clothes. “She’s nothing,” I said. “Dirt. Your dead animal dirt.”
In the gloom he stood frozen, crinkling his eyes at me.
“She can’t come back,” I said.
He squeezed his hands together, like a heart seizing.
“Not ever,” I hollered.
He pivoted on one boot and almost fell. Ada and I watched him shuffle down the path, his brown coat and brown pants becoming very small until he was gone. For a time she said nothing. Finally she said, unnecessarily, “It’s starting to rain.”
I felt myself deflating; what was left was guilt an
d shame. I could go after Natty, but he wouldn’t want me near him.
“Let’s wait it out,” I mumbled.
“All right,” Ada said, and scooted to a spot just off the path, where the alder branches overhead were thickest. She said nothing about my outburst.
I thought of her dissolved, haloed moon. I didn’t know why she stayed. I busied myself taking off my coat and spreading it on the ground. Though I tried to smooth it with the underside of my arm, it retained its clumps and ruts.
Once we sat, I examined the stinging yellow spines in my palms.
She took one of my hands in hers and angled it for a better view. “You have to get them all out,” she said. “You can’t leave bits in there.”
She adjusted my hand until it was three inches from her face and began to pinch the thorns with her dirty fingernails.
“Does it itch?”
“Maybe.”
“Does it or doesn’t it?”
“It didn’t until you asked.”
When she was done examining my palm, I leaned forward to hold my knees, and she brushed my back in a strange, slow rhythm. It was achingly sweet. The whole surface area of her palm swept back and forth across the drifts of my shoulder blades. I thought I recalled my grandfather—just a sliver of a memory. A hot, quiet night, a cupped hand thumping me hard on the back to loosen phlegm and make me cough. A buzz came from the dim fluorescent light, and I lay on my stomach in his lap. Or was it my father? It may have been my father, in a long-ago time. When things fell into place. When there was no fronting. When people said what they felt because what they felt was very easy to say.
Our legs didn’t fit on the small spread of coat, and when we moved, the pine needles piled up, as though we were making snow angels in it. There were stray bits in Ada’s hair. We smelled like wet earth.
Ada said, “I’m cold.” She pressed herself closer to me. Dampness was creeping from the dirt through my coat, which was too old to be completely waterproof. I felt it soaking into my pants. My skin prickled all over; I wanted to put my coat back on. But then we would have to stand instead of sit, and standing was a step away from leaving.
As the drops merged into streams and stirred up the understory, I gazed up at our roof of sticks. At our sides the alders were bushy, leafy, and spotted with catkins, but the branches above us were bald. There was no foliage to shroud us. Where was Natty now?
I thought of how we slept on the mattress in the den, all of us pressed into one another. Pei-Pei’s hair tangling around my fingers, her knee digging into my shin and creating a slow bruise. I often threw an arm to my side to check that Natty was there. But the solid feel of his ribs, the sharp point of his hip, the tendons of his wrist—it wasn’t enough. I was always checking and checking.
Ada wriggled beside me and her eyes were so close to mine, her irises looked textured, almost etched. I felt she was waiting for me to say something important, but I couldn’t manage it. A root or shard of rock dug into the side of my thigh. “Maybe it’ll stop soon,” I said.
Her thin sweatshirt was soggy. As she leaned further into me, I could tell that all of her muscles were clenched. She was knobby in the arms and legs but soft in the stomach. Behind her was a thick clump of ferns; raindrops clung to the feathery shoots.
“I don’t think so,” she said, wiping water off her face. More rain replaced it, running down her forehead, over her eyes and cheeks, dripping off the ends of her hair.
Even as she shivered, she asked, “Do you want me to stay?”
Yes, I wanted that. The rain and mist, they hid us away. “You can go,” I said.
I watched as she crawled away from me to straighten in the tallest part of the bower. Her sneakers squelched. Her pale face gleamed in the constricted light. Watching her lift one foot and then another, hunched in vain against the cold, made me convulse in recognition. Cold—she was cold, and I was cold, too.
“Storm’s coming,” she said. “Go. I’ll send Natty on home when I see him.” She waved at me by scratching the air with her fingers. With that, she set off, for that warm place of hers, full of lived-in smells and those soft, overlapping rugs, where adults tried to lighten your burdens. She scrambled away.
* * *
I WAITED for ten or fifteen minutes, but Natty didn’t come, so I trudged on home through the corridor of trees. The spruces offered some protection, but where the rain splattered through the boughs I got pummeled. Breathless and dripping, I slid the back door open and found our house empty. I closed the glass door and stood perfectly still, and soon I could distinguish the sound of rain from the water running through the pipes; my mother was taking one of her swift evening showers.
Upstairs, I peeled off all of my clothes and stood shivering in the empty bedroom. I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave wet things on the carpet, but it hardly seemed to matter. I found my long johns in a heap in the closet, put them on, and pulled a dry sweatshirt on top. When I looked out the window at our cheerless, washed driveway, I still felt cold.
I waited for Natty in the kitchen. I toed the small puddles I had brought in. Through the water-smeared glass of the sliding door, and the yard full of rain, the visibility was so low I couldn’t even see the woods. I focused on a spot just a few feet away; surely Natty would appear there any moment, charging toward me with his small hands shielding his big head.
When my mother flipped on the light, I had to put my face right up to the glass to see anything outside. Behind me, she toweled off her hair, commented on the thick rain, and started dinner. She chopped cabbage on a little plastic board and simmered the leftover bone of a pork shank. When it was boiling, she dumped in a cup of rice and handful after handful of cabbage. The house filled with steam—a warmer dampness than before—and an earthy, meaty fragrance, with just a hint of sourness that reminded me of decay in the woods. The lid rattled on the pot, and the window above the sink fogged over. My nose started to run. At six o’clock she said, “Go get your brother.”
“Dad’s not home yet,” I said.
“We’re going to eat first, just us. Go get your brother.”
I shook my head.
She slapped the backs of her wet hands on her pants and jerked her head to aim a look of threat at me. “Go.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“What are you saying?”
“Natty’s not home.”
She shook her head. “But he came home with you.”
“No.”
“What?” She jammed a hand into her hair. “But it’s raining,” she said. “And it’s dark.”
I didn’t respond, and in the silence we listened to the rain drumming on the roof and aluminum gutters, flicking the windows, assaulting the already sodden ground.
Suddenly my mother grabbed me roughly, her fingers finding the soft parts of my shoulders. “Is it the truth? Really? You left him alone out there?”
“No, he left me.”
“How long? How many hours?”
“I don’t know.”
“One? Two?”
“One,” I said, thinking it was definitely more than two.
“Where is he?”
“In the woods, maybe. Or at Ada’s house.” The second possibility had just occurred to me, and I latched on to it. “Ada said she was going to send him home, but he must have stayed over there because it was raining so hard.”
“Tell me her phone number.” My mother bumped the sack of rice on the counter as she moved toward the phone, and kernels scattered across the floor. It was not unlike the sound of the rain. I had a sudden image of hope: instead of rain, seeds were falling outside—a downpour of tiny, dry seeds.
“Her number,” my mother said.
It stunned me that she thought I might know anyone’s phone number. “I don’t have it,” I said, ashamed.
My mother knelt to dig in the lower cabinet where we used to keep the phone books, but of course it was empty; like much in our house, they had been taken.
“Your father has
the truck,” my mother said. She sat at the kitchen table to think. “He should be home soon.”
The soup cooled on the stove. The window above the sink unfogged, and a viewing circle into our dark yard expanded. I stayed in front of the glass door imagining the scene that would unfold at the Dolans’ house—my mother banging on their door in her corduroy pants with the faded knees, a coat three sizes too big zipped to her throat, her hands lost but gesturing inside the sleeves. Without any kind of greeting, she would stick her head into the house and shout for Natty, a strident, jay-like call.
As we waited, my mother spoke to me only to say, “Your brother, your little brother.”
I glanced at my ugly reflection in the glass, then leaned forward until my forehead touched it and I could see the dark rain again.
When my father came home, my mother sprang up and said, “What took so long?”
He had nudged the front door open and was stamping his muddy boots on the concrete step. His hood was up, but his face was wet. His gray pants had turned black. He squinted at my mother in surprise, and then at me. “I just finished,” he said. He had found a small job working on a small septic tank, and my mother had been all relief—a job, a job.
“Don’t take your shoes off,” my mother said.
She grabbed my shoulder again and said, “And you. You’ll stay here.”
I nodded. I certainly didn’t want to go with them to the Dolans’ house.
My mother said to my father, “Natty is gone. We think he’s on the other side of the woods.”
My father rearranged his hood and his face retreated into it. “Why?” he asked.
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