From my left side, I felt a moving shadow fall across the sidewalk. I jumped and turned and there was our neighbor, Duncan, on his bike. He didn’t say anything. He rode slowly along beside me for a couple minutes, standing on his pedals, until the boys, who were younger than him, stopped barking. Then he sped up and kept going. Our lane was just ahead. I always went down the back lane to get home and so did Duncan. When I turned, the boys didn’t follow.
At the house, I unlatched the gate.
“Hey!” Duncan called. He was standing in his garage, his backpack on the old couch they had in there, and his drumsticks in his hand. “What’re you doing?”
“Nothing. I’m going in the house.”
“Your folks home yet?”
“No, not yet.”
“C’mhere.”
So I went in the garage as he squeezed behind his drum kit and sat down.
“You can sit there if you want.” He gestured to the couch. I moved his backpack and sat down. He tapped his sticks together a few times, made a kind of jump on his stool and lit into his drums like he was on fire. He went on like that, lifting off his seat, his mouth twisting and his head going back and forth with the rhythm for about ten minutes.
“Holy! What was that?” I said when he stopped.
“ ‘Sing, Sing, Sing.’ I’ll play you the record. Drummer named Gene Krupa. Guy was a genius drummer.” He stood up and pulled a record down from a shelf, put it on a turntable set up on the workbench behind him.
“Where’d you get the records?” I asked.
“Th-th-th…th-th-th…” He closed his eyes. Sometimes when I asked Duncan something, I wished I hadn’t, because I didn’t want him to feel the way I did when I froze. Then he said, “They were my grandpa’s. He was a drummer, too.”
He put the needle down carefully and we listened to the song and every once in a while, Duncan mimicked the drum part in the air but didn’t play it. When it was done, he lifted the needle off the record and said, “I’m going to go in now.”
I took my backpack and crossed the lane to our house. I let myself in and as I made myself a peanut butter sandwich, I thought that that was the nicest thing a boy had ever done for me, except for Dad. I knew he had called me in there just to make sure I was okay, and I realized too that I was okay. I felt better, like I was someone other than just the scared skinny redheaded girl I’d been on the sidewalk with the boys barking at me.
Disadvantage to being a redhead: it gives jerks an easy thing to tease you about. Advantage to being a redhead: I’ll let you know when I think of something. Carly claims she wishes she had red hair, but that’s only because she doesn’t have red hair.
Since then, Duncan has called me into the garage a few times to listen to things. I would never catch up to him to walk home from school, or even say hi to him away from the garage, because he’s usually with a bunch of his band friends and I figure he wouldn’t appreciate being seen talking to a girl my age. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that he saw me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
That night I slept with one eye on the sky. I found the Big Dipper and followed its curved handle to bright Arcturus, at the bottom of Boötes. Next to it, I picked out the seven stars in the necklace of the Corona Borealis. I could be in my own yard at home, looking at these same stars. Once in a while my eye caught the streaking of a meteor and by the time I registered what it was, it had melted into the throng of stars.
The red and white lights of an aircraft blinked across the sky. I watched them and sometimes the sound carried all the way down to me by my fire in the fir-branch lean-to. I was thinking how impossible it was that anybody on one of those airplanes could be thinking about me, or someone like me, or someplace like the place where I was, when they were up there, surrounded by artificial light and TV screens and little plastic trays of food. I was on an airplane once with Mom and Phoebe, to go to Ontario when Grandpa Fox died. That was Dad’s dad; he was already there. Mom said I could sit beside Phoebe, who was in the seat by the window, but Phoebe said, “No. I don’t want her here.” Mom tried to argue with her, but there were people in the aisle waiting to get past and so Mom sat down beside Phoebe and I sat in a seat next to a stranger. She was nice anyway, a pretty girl who smelled like oranges and who gave me a little bag of grapefruit jellybeans.
Midway through the flight, Phoebe decided she wanted to switch seats with me, so she got the pretty girl and I got the window and Mom. I’d looked down and seen the shimmer of towns tucked into mountain passes and trails of car lights moving like ant highways and sometimes a lonely point of light in a sea of dark. Maybe someone did look down from that airplane window and see the glow of light my fire cast in all the darkness and maybe they wondered who was there.
The disappearing deer bones kept me awake for a while. A coyote or a wolf or a cougar could have carried them off. Maybe a different animal than the one that killed the deer in the first place. Maybe an eagle or ravens. There was no meanness to it. Whatever it was, I realized, it wasn’t trying to scare me. It wasn’t going to chase me down just for fun. Whatever it was, it was just like me, trying to survive.
Eventually, I closed both eyes and slept.
* * *
I didn’t want it to be the first thing in my head when I woke up. It’d been a thing I’d kept to the back of my mind, hovering like a mosquito in my room at night that I try to ignore, but that keeps ending up right by my ear no matter how much I swat at it. But there it was, smack in the front of my mind, first thing: Day Eight is Rescue Day. I know I said I had a rule—no more dreaming of rescue. And I know I hadn’t been very good at obeying it. Well, a rule is more of a goal, was the way I saw it. Something to aim for. And now it didn’t matter anyway because Day Eight was Rescue Day. Today, instead, the rule was to not think about not-rescue.
I didn’t need to rush to get up. Strangely, I was still not very hungry. I looked forward to my breakfast, but only because the tea would be hot and soothing. My Scotch mints were not going anywhere and also, it was still cold. It had been a clear night and the morning dew lay frosty on the grass and road and truck. I dug my matches from my pocket where I kept them to stay dry. I still had plenty, but I would not need plenty. Today, I could stop thinking that way.
What if she walked right out and never turned back?
Once, when we were camping, when Phoebe was still alive, we’d gone to bed in the tent in our usual way—Dad, who was snoring already, and next to him, Mom, then Phoebe next to her, also snoring in her light, bird-whistle way, then me. It was always me on the outside next to the tent wall. It had been deep dark and I’d been lying there listening to the night noises when a twig snapped loudly, close to the tent.
“Why does Phoebe always get to sleep beside you?” I whispered to Mom.
“I don’t have to worry about you,” Mom said. “You’re never afraid.”
“Yes I am,” I said.
“Oh, Francie. You should be proud of that.”
At first I was angry. But after a while I’d started to cry because it wasn’t fair I should be punished for not being afraid. I half-hoped Mom would hear me.
She didn’t. She was already asleep.
She could walk out to the road and she would never have to worry about me again.
I gave my head a shake. This was not the kind of thought to have on Rescue Day. It was what I’d just said I would not think. Instead, I worked on building my morning fire.
* * *
When the sun came over the treetops and began to warm up the day, I shrugged off my sleeping bag, gave my hands one more warming turn at the fire and went to gather more fir needles for my tea. That done, I chopped the needles with my jackknife and put the water on the little burner to boil. It would be another warm day; I could feel it coming in the air.
I didn’t like to just gobble down my breakfast of Scotch mints like I was swallow
ing vitamins. I made a little ritual of it, setting them out on a bark plate. I took a sip of tea and let it warm my insides. Then I took a mint off the plate and placed it on my tongue. It dissolved slowly. When the last of the sweetness had disappeared, I took a couple more sips of tea. A bald eagle wheeled overhead, tightening his circle. I was sure he saw me, was coming in for a closer look. I took another mint, placed it on my tongue.
Normally, I didn’t even like Scotch mints. I used to think they tasted like chalk, or what chalk would taste like if I had ever eaten it, which I hadn’t. I’d wondered how they could be Mom’s favorite candy. She also likes Rockets, the ones you get in rolls at Halloween. She buys a big bag and eats them for months afterward. Also chalky.
But now, I couldn’t believe how delicious the mints were, and how I’d never noticed. The way they melted softly with a tiny sweet fizz and the sugar became almost like icing.
I ate another one. Then another, right from the bag, skipping the ritual. I think I had six or seven before I started to feel a little bit sick. As I twisted the bag closed, I realized something. Just because Mom had left the Scotch mints behind didn’t mean she’d left them for me. It didn’t mean anything. She’d also left the flashlight behind, her backpack, her sleeping bag, her warm clothes. She’d left everything behind.
What about her purse? Mom had brought her purse with her on this trip. She’d planned to leave it at home, because she said she’d just need to leave it in the truck for the hike, but at the last minute, she’d grabbed it. It was a black, soft-leather satchel like a horse’s feed bag. She sometimes called it the Black Hole, because when she put something in there, it was like dropping it into outer space. Even she didn’t know what was in there.
I took the bag of mints back to the truck and put them on the dashboard where they wouldn’t get accidentally spilled or eaten by mice. I checked the floor and the backseat and under the seats. Mom’s purse wasn’t there. I’d last seen it—when? It’d been on her shoulder when we went in the gas station to use the bathroom. I bent and stuck my hand under the passenger seat and my fingers touched something soft. It was wedged under there, stuck. I had to use both hands to pull it free.
I unzipped it, the leathery, dried-orange-peel, spearmint-gum smell wafting out. Her wallet, balled up Kleenex, several tubes of lip balm, different flavors, pens and pencils, sticky with lint, twelve of them altogether, two lipsticks, safety pins, bobby pins, hair elastics, a Cover Girl compact smudged with orange powder, a pair of sunglasses, another pair of sunglasses with one of the arms broken, several crinkled and faded receipts, a piece of gum, out of the wrapper and also sticky with lint, which I put in my pocket, a Midas Muffler keychain with no keys on it, a yellow sticky note with a list in her handwriting that said milk carrots toothpaste tea, three loose keys, one of those pocket calendars with a picture of a kitten on it. Dad and I had given it to her in her stocking two Christmases ago. The pages were all empty. And three plastic pill bottles, all empty.
I looked at the labels. The prescriptions had Mom’s name on them, Adele Fox, but on each one, part of the label had been neatly crossed out with a black felt marker. Who would have done that? And why?
That made me think of her special tobacco, and I knew. I knew like I knew the whining in my gut that Mom had taken her special tobacco with her. She had not taken her flashlight or her Scotch mints or her sleeping bag. She had not taken me. But she’d taken her tobacco.
My mind went down and down in a deep black hole like Mom’s purse and it took all my effort to pull it back up to the light of day.
Rescue Day. I had to keep busy.
I left Mom’s purse on the floor of the truck. It was warm enough to put on a T-shirt, so I got mine from my pack, and then I hiked into the woods looking for the perfect stick. I wanted a souvenir of this place, a walking stick I’d carve my initials into and someday when I was grown up, I’d give it to my child and tell him or her the story of my seven days on this road to nowhere.
I picked my way along through the trees, leaves crunching under my footsteps, sun on my shoulders. Every once in a while, I stopped to listen. Once I heard an airplane, lower than a jet, but not that low. Not low enough. No other engine sounds. Just birds peeping and the woodpecker drilling and the crunch of my own feet in the leaves. The day went slowly like that.
I watched some ants soldier along the base of a tree. I watched one drag a stick three times her size across the rusty fir needles. Worker ants are always female; I knew that from my grade-six ant project.
I tried not to, but I heard Mom’s scream.
I saw her there in the laundry room standing with the good tablecloth opened out in her two hands and a diamond-shaped hole the size of a paperback book cut out of it.
“Why would you do something like that?”
“I didn’t.”
“Of course you did—don’t lie to me on top of it.”
She was right. Of course I did it. I’d been doing my ant project at the dining room table, and I’d cut out the cardboard ant with scissors. I must have done it, but I’d pushed aside the tablecloth like she’d told me to and I didn’t understand how it happened, so I said again, “I didn’t.”
Her fingers gripped my arm as she pulled me down the hallway. She held me so hard she shook with it. She didn’t mean for it to hurt. It was the only family heirloom we had, the tablecloth. From Ireland, I think. It had been Grandma’s. We had the cabin too—that was an heirloom—but we didn’t go there anymore and that was my fault, too.
Now I see how my mind went from the ants to the ant project to the tablecloth to the hallway, and I wish I could have stopped it right there, but it was like an ant on its trail back to the nest—it would go over anything to get there. My mind scurried back to my room, always back to my room in the dying-down day, the house silent and breathing with Mom’s anger.
“You’re going to stay here and give some thought to your actions. That’s your problem, Francie. You just don’t think about your actions—you’re lost in your own dream world.”
Which wasn’t true at all; I did nothing but think about my actions.
Mom’s anger seeped through the vents and filled my room, pinning me to the floor where I lay listening for a peep, a creak, a sign. The sound that came was Dad’s boots on the front step, and my heart bubbled a little. Then the front door squeaked open.
“Del! Francie? I’m home.”
I sat up, but didn’t dare call out. Water running in the bathroom, the toilet flushing. The silence tried to smother these normal sounds; it rushed back in, heavy, thick.
Then low voices. After a while, the smell of onions frying and a clink of silverware. Then voices in the hall:
“Don’t you dare go in there.” Mom’s voice.
“I just want to check on her.” Dad’s.
“She needs to learn there’s consequences.”
“It’s just a tablecloth, Del. I’m sure it was a mistake.”
“Sure. To you it’s nothing. Let her blunder through life thinking there is no price to pay. God knows I paid the price.”
“So did she. So did she, Del.”
And I knew they weren’t talking about tablecloths anymore. I didn’t hear what Dad said next, but I knew from the soft tone of his voice that he would not be coming to check on me. It would get dark, and it did, and I refused to turn on the light as I lay there on the hard floor listening to the rattle of supper dishes. I pulled my pillow and blanket to the floor, only allowing myself to move that much from where I’d dropped in my despair. When they peeked in at me later, they would see me there and feel sorry.
Then a deep TV voice said, “This is the National” and I knew it was time for the ten o’clock news. Dad and the news reporter went on with their routines, not knowing or caring about me lying on the cold floor in the dark. That’s when I turned on the light, gathered my blanket and pillow and got into b
ed. I picked up the book I had been reading, The Amazing Universe, and read about Chinese astronomer Yang Wei-Te, who on July 4, 1054, recorded the appearance of a “guest star,” a new star so bright he could see it in the daytime for twenty-three days. Today, I read, we can still see the Crab Nebula, which is a cloud of light left over from that exploding star. I turned off my light and looked out my window. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there.
* * *
A faint, faraway rumble brought me back to the stick I’d begun whittling. I looked at my watch. Four o’clock in the afternoon. I stood to listen to the rumble. It came from the west, the same area where I’d heard the engine rumble the other day. I ran to the truck and hopped up on the tailgate to see if I could spot anything. The sound grew a little louder and then I recognized the whomp-whomp-whomp of helicopter blades. I climbed onto the toolbox and used it to boost myself onto the roof.
“Hey!” I yelled, waving my arms madly.
That was useless and I knew it, since the helicopter was nowhere near me yet, but I was so excited that I couldn’t help it. It would be just like my fantasy: Mom and Dad jumping down, ducking and running toward me. They knew where I was; they couldn’t miss me. A road would not be a hard thing to find in a wilderness of trees.
I hurried to my fire, poked it to life and put on some green boughs, not too many this time. Blue-gray smoke twisted and billowed from it. I climbed back onto the roof of the truck.
The whomp of blades drifted into and out of earshot, like a dream that wouldn’t quite become real. At first I stood and waited for it to get closer. I’d wave my arms when it did. After a while, I sat on the roof with my arms around my knees and watched the sun disappear below the trees. As soon as it did, the chill dropped over me.
At six o’clock, I admitted to myself that the sound had faded altogether. At 6:30 I went and built up the fire again. I couldn’t make myself eat, if you could call it eating. I knew I’d feel better if I at least had a cup of tea, but I couldn’t make myself leave the heat and brightness of the fire and walk into that cold, shadowed dusk.
Red Fox Road Page 10
