I squatted in front of her and pulled on her arms until she was almost sitting, but when I released them, she fell back again like a stuffed doll. I wrapped her limp arms around my neck and tried to hoist her onto my back, but I couldn’t get her off the ground. I turned around and jammed my arms beneath her torso and legs, straining to lift her. She barely budged. She was too heavy; I was too small. Ringing in my head was the voice of my father: “You need to eat more. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I couldn’t move my sister. In the empty woods I had a long, wrecked cry. No one was watching, no one was listening. No one knew a thing about us.
The cold added resistance to my every movement. It was difficult even to bend my knees. I lowered myself gradually, like a decrepit man.
I sat beside Pei-Pei. I knew it would be hard to get up again. I closed my stiff eyelids and thought of home. Was anyone there? I thought of the clearing in front of our house. Natty wouldn’t have played there. He wouldn’t have fallen in.
I sat until my limbs grew heavy and numb. My head hung and I half slept. The wind blew and the leaves fluttered, and that was how I knew time was passing, though I didn’t care. Pei-Pei writhed once, digging her bare elbows into the wet detritus and curling up her whole body. If she had been pretending to be an animal, it might have been funny. Instead, it was frightening. She emitted a sound that, if I’d heard it out of context, I never would have guessed was human. Leaves slapped together somewhere behind us.
A great length of time passed, but it didn’t matter. A ringing or whistling began. Wind blew across my ears and pressure built in my skull. Then I heard a voice. Just a person. “Natty! Natty!” it called. A man’s voice, but not my father’s. I listened to it for a while as it drifted farther away and then closer and then farther again. Yes, Natty—my brother—was missing. People were searching for him. I opened my eyes and put my hands in front of my face. They had lost their outlines. I was blind.
I choked out some kind of sound. When there was no response, I screamed, “Here! Here! Here!”
As my eyes adjusted to the moonlight, a thin figure appeared over me. “It’s you,” he said. “What happened?” He crept to Pei-Pei and crouched low over her, bending forward and resting his hands on either side of her head—he looked like he would kiss her. It was Collin. I had answered his calls for my lost brother. I had wanted someone to come, anyone, and had tricked him into finding me. But he didn’t say anything about it. He put the back of his hand to Pei-Pei’s cheek, her neck, her arm.
He turned to me. “Can you get up?” he asked. Without waiting, he shoved his forearm beneath my armpit and helped me to stand. He let go and watched as I stood on my creaky legs. I tried to raise one foot off the ground. To my surprise, it worked.
Collin took off his coat, lifted Pei-Pei’s torso, and spread the coat beneath her. He slid each of her arms carefully through the long sleeves and reached into the wrist holes to find her hands. He zipped it all the way up. Then he scooped his arms beneath her, as I had tried to do. He staggered a little under her weight but managed to heave her off the ground.
“We have to get her home,” he said, and started to walk. He was firm, serious, efficient. Though he carried the weight of another person, it was hard to keep up with his long strides.
In the dark, he walked in a single direction, and I stumbled after him as quickly as I could, my soft legs paddling the soft ground. Below the canopy there were no stars to navigate by, but somehow he seemed to know where we were and where we were going. All of our time in the woods—they had opened to him in a way they had not for me.
“The lights,” I said. “Did you see them?”
“What lights?” he asked.
“Just a minute ago…” I said, but I trailed off. It might have been hours ago.
Collin had already forgotten my question. He was barreling ahead.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Your home,” he said.
Was my mother there? Could I face her without Natty? My joints ached, my knees buckled, and I fell behind.
“Wait for me,” I said.
Collin stopped. Without the rhythmic crinkling of the coat that Pei-Pei was wrapped in, I could finally hear how hard he was breathing.
“I have to go,” he said.
“No, wait,” I said.
He began to walk again, then stopped and turned. He lifted a knee, shifted Pei-Pei’s weight in his arms, and said, “I need to get her inside.” He readjusted her again.
I stepped up to them and put my hand on Pei-Pei’s calf. Her pants were soaked through.
“Keep walking this way,” he said, and his voice was not unkind. But he had to leave me. I had to be left. “You’ll see the path soon enough,” he said.
Then I was on my own, careening through the dark, floundering in what I could only hope was the same direction. The cold pressed into my face. I had never wanted to get somewhere so urgently or dreaded it so much. Forces pushed and pulled me and I wondered if I was running in place. My heart was bucking around with fear and exertion. I had to come to a full stop and press both hands to my chest, to keep everything safely inside. But once I was still, I started to rattle in place, as though someone were grabbing my shoulders and trying to shake my bones out. So I ran again.
Finally, there. The path. The path. I almost wept again. Instead, I kept running. The familiar bends of the path gave me a surge. Even in the dark, I knew where I could just run straight, and where I had to slow for the curves.
As I burst out of the woods and onto our lawn, I saw with a shock that every light on the ground floor of our house was on, so that it glowed like a ship in the brine of darkness. But on approach, I saw no one. My footsteps became harder—more real; the ground near our house had frozen over. I slid the glass door open. It made a sound like a long sweep of a broom.
I walked into the den, where Collin was holding Pei-Pei’s wet shirt in the air. She was lying on the mattress with two blankets over her.
“Help me,” Collin said. “Make the fire. Make it a big one.”
I knelt in front of the woodstove and slid the last of the firewood in. I poked at the embers a little, watching out of the sides of my eyes as Collin rearranged Pei-Pei’s bare, limp arms next to her body and pulled the blankets up to her throat. All of his movements were slow and deliberate, as though she might be shattered from an accidental flick of his hand. It was a strange sight, his gentleness.
Collin rose on his knees and looked around the den for a place to put Pei-Pei’s soggy shirt and pants. With a dull ache in my chest I watched him notice everything. The sloppy bed in the middle of the room, the small piles of clean and dirty clothing along one side. In the wall itself were a series of nails that we were using as a drying rack near the stove. If he spoke to me, I would tell him—it hadn’t always looked like this; there had been a sofa and window blinds. But he didn’t speak. Instead, he spread Pei-Pei’s wet clothes on the carpet, then returned to her. He leaned over her with his ear very close to her mouth. He stayed so long I thought she must be awake and speaking. I leaned toward them to hear better, then realized he was only listening for her breath.
In the tight space behind the stove, I saw my father’s boots. The collars were stretched from wear; his ankles couldn’t possibly fill them. I reached out a hand. The outer leather was hot to the touch, and the soft collar was nearly dry.
The fire began to catch. Although I was right in front of the stove, it didn’t seem any warmer. I tried to stop shivering by holding tightly on to my feet.
“Do you have clean clothes?” Collin said.
“Me? They’re upstairs.”
“Change out of that wet stuff. It’s sucking the heat out of you.” He looked at me until, uncomfortable, I backed up to the doorway near the stairs. I preferred all the other versions of him I had ever met, including the one that tormented me. I didn’t know how to handle his concern, his seeing eyes.
For the second time that nig
ht, I made my way up to my room and left a pile of wet clothes on the carpet. This time around, everything was slower—the climb up the stairs, the peeling of the clothes, the search for dry socks, which I eventually abandoned. I tugged four separate shirts over my head, one after another, most of them dirty. They restricted how far I could swing my arms and I found I liked it, the constraint, as though someone were holding me back.
I stopped to use the bathroom, but the door was locked. I stood outside for a few moments as my heart raced. “Natty?” I said.
The doorknob clicked as it was unlocked from the inside. After a second or two of indecision, I opened the door and saw my father scurrying back toward the tub. He sat down, fully clothed, on the toilet lid. He still held the phone and the cleaver, one in each hand.
“Is Natty back?” he asked. His face was contorted. I glanced up and down his arms and legs and realized I was looking for blood. I wished he would put the cleaver down.
“No,” I said. “I don’t know where he is.”
My father rocked forward and back. “You can leave now,” he said.
I backed away and closed the door softly. I headed down the stairs. Collin met me at the bottom.
“Can you get me the car keys?” he asked. “I’m thinking of driving her to the hospital.”
I took the few steps to the front door and looked out the narrow window. There was a strong, icy draft coming from the doorknob hole, and I tried to block it with my body so Collin wouldn’t notice. I squinted into the night. My father’s truck was parked diagonally in the driveway. A hubcap gleamed. His keys were always on him. My father. The man hiding upstairs, with his boots drying behind the stove. The shameful secret of it all. He hadn’t gone out to look for Natty.
Finally I said, “My dad has the keys.” It was a kind of truth. I asked what I had been holding in my mind like a hot coal. “Isn’t she okay?”
“Sure, she’s okay. But I think she’s hypothermic,” Collin said. He looked at me. “But she’s okay.” He leaned against the wall to gaze into the den where Pei-Pei was sleeping. “I’ll call my dad to take us. Where’s your phone?”
The phone. “Oh,” I said. I thought for a moment, but there seemed to be no way out. Resigned, I said, “It’s upstairs. I’ll go get it. You stay here.”
While Collin went back into the den, I climbed the stairs again. The bathroom door was still unlocked. I entered and found my father in the same huddled position on the toilet.
“I need that phone,” I said.
My father slowly extended his arm and held the receiver out to me. The cord dropped and flicked the floor.
I took it from him, and the plastic was very warm where he had been holding it all this time.
“Are you going to call the police?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“It’s okay if you do,” he said. He shook his head. “It’s the right thing to do.”
“I’m not going to call them.”
“Please call them,” he said.
“I said I’m not going to.” I pulled a towel from a rack and threw it over his lap so that it covered the cleaver in his hand. I thought about asking him for the keys to the truck, but I didn’t know how to explain their appearance to Collin. Pei-Pei was okay, though, he’d said. I shut the door. There was no denying I was my miserable father’s son.
Downstairs, Collin watched me plug the cord back into the base. I was grateful he asked no questions. He made a very short call, saying only, “No, it’s Paige. You need to come. She has to go to the hospital.” This was how they talked, I thought. Adults. Men. People who wanted something to happen and then made that very thing happen.
Collin rolled Pei-Pei up in two blankets. On one end, her mess of hair spilled out, and on the other end, I could see her bare ankles. Those ankles—just skin over nubs of bone. Some time later, Mr. Dolan pushed open the front door without knocking and helped Collin carry her out. I felt a passing itch of jealousy for Pei-Pei, wrapped up and looked after like that. Accompanied. “She’ll be just fine,” Mr. Dolan mumbled, patting the air in the vicinity of my head, and after that he barely glanced at me. I was glad for his largeness, the space he took up. He focused solely on maneuvering himself and then Pei-Pei through the front door and keeping the blankets from trailing. I closed the door behind them. In the den, I sat down on the bare mattress. The house was quiet again—and colder somehow, though the fire had grown luxurious. I got up and wandered around the kitchen. I lifted the lid on the cabbage soup. It was cold now, and tiny white discs of fat floated on top.
* * *
THE BACK DOOR slid open and Natty came in. He was nearly silent, and I only noticed him because I was sitting perfectly still at the table and facing the door. His face was very pale at the temples and flushed in the center of his cheeks, and a smear of dirt ran up his neck. His eyes were wide, hyperawake, and as he approached me I saw his lashes were stuck together into spikes.
He put a hand on the table near me. A pink, raised scratch started on his index finger and disappeared under the wrist of his coat sleeve. He smiled.
It unnerved me; I jumped out of my seat. “You’re back?” I said. I hadn’t meant it as a question. I cleared thickness from my throat. “And where were you? You caused a whole big mess.”
Natty grinned at me.
“What?” I said. “What?”
“Did someone show you the lights, too?”
“Oh, the lights!” I said, with more feeling than I’d intended, because I’d forgotten them.
Natty grabbed my wrists. Maybe it was his face, so close to mine and so elated, but his touch was electrifying, and I thought of the charged silence of the colored lights that had skated across the sky. We had both seen something from another world. We had been marked.
“You’re home,” I whispered. The relief hit me, hard, and I shook myself loose from him to grab the table edge with both hands. It was solid, the table, so solid.
“It was Ruby,” Natty said.
“Yes, Ruby,” I said. I would have agreed to anything in that moment.
Natty smiled again. Though he was rumpled, wet, and dirty, he looked fine. More than fine.
“Where were you hiding?” I asked.
“I wasn’t hiding,” he said.
I took him upstairs to change. We stopped outside the bathroom.
“Natty’s home,” I shouted at the door.
It opened. My father stared at us. He said, “Oh, Natty,” and took three careening steps forward. He patted Natty all over. He couldn’t seem to stop. Then it was towels—the one I had thrown at my father and two more from the bathroom. My father used them to smother Natty. When Natty shook them off, my father started again, laying one across his shoulder and tucking it here and there, and then adding one across the other shoulder. It made me think of the way we used to wrap rice in lotus leaves, folding the long strips tightly so that the rice was pressed into the shape of a pyramid.
“Enough towels,” I said. “He’s about to change out of these clothes.”
“Yes,” my father said, and followed us. He left the cleaver in the bathroom sink.
When the three of us made it downstairs again, my mother was in the den. One by one, our family was returning.
“Look,” I said. “Look. Natty’s back.”
She could barely look at him. And she couldn’t seem to speak. Her face got stuck in a grimace for a few long seconds, and she waved her hands in front of herself, trying to unstick it. Suddenly all of her muscles went lax, and she said in a mangy voice, in Natty’s direction, “I’ll never let you out of the house again.” She turned away from him and worked her mouth.
Here we were, then. All standing beside the communal bed in the den. But there was something else still lurking, something I hadn’t yet dissipated into the air. “Pei-Pei,” I said, and for a moment all I could see was the image of her lying in the forest with her arms spread open to the cold. The next words rushed out. “She’s in the hospital. Mr. Dolan to
ok her there.”
My mother whirled back around. Her mouth opened and she pursed her lips. She clamped them shut again. She said, “Why would she go to the hospital?”
“I think she got too cold,” I said. “Hypothermia.”
“Hypothermia!” my father said. He began to rub the back of one hand.
My mother fixed her eyes on a nail in the wall. Her chest was fluttering with shallow breaths.
“I’ll drive to the hospital,” my father said. “I’ll just change out of these clothes and go.” He gestured at his work clothes and gave one of his belt loops a nervous tug.
“Yes, go,” my mother said. “Change your clothes and go, and then don’t come back.” The raggedness of her voice frightened me. She looked straight at my father. “Don’t you come back.”
My father stood there empty-handed with a silly expression on his face.
I wanted to tell him: She meant don’t come back without Pei-Pei.
My father swiped at the carpet with his socked foot. We had tromped in and out of the den all night and tracked mud everywhere, and some of it had dried into clods. My father kept rubbing hard at three of his fingers.
“Hypothermia,” I said. “Not frostbite.”
“I mean it,” my mother said.
My father gave me an uneven smile. I sensed he wanted me to look away, so I pulled up my layered sleeves and examined the waffle print that was embedded on my wrist. My mother barked, “Go. I told you to go.” My father’s footsteps drifted up the stairs.
“When will this stop?” my mother asked.
I shook my head.
“Everything that’s gone wrong—it’s been your father.”
I clenched and opened my hands and kept my face very still.
“We can’t live like this,” she said.
I wished she would stop talking. Everything she said in that cracked voice caused strange vibrations in my spine.
“We can’t survive.”
When my father returned, he was wearing a button-up shirt tucked carefully into clean, belted jeans. Over his arm was his damp coat. He dropped a soft canvas bag on the floor. Unzipped, it gaped open, and I saw too many socks and all of the towels from our bathroom and a great deal of empty space.
The Unpassing Page 20