Gretchen

by Shannon Kirk

  Jerry and Gretchen are wearing binoculars around their necks. I note Mom doesn’t mention she has her own top-of-the-line $2,500 Leica Noctivid birding binoculars in her purse. I note Mom is giving zero personal details.

  “Turkey’s shaved from Dyson’s downtown. They roast five whole turkeys every single day and then sell sandwiches and meat the next day. Every day they sell out. People drive here from all over. So get there early.”

  This is the best turkey club I’ve ever had. The turkey is moist and just-right salty and seems somewhat marinated in a delicious gravy. The bacon is obviously organic and smoked, and the cheese, Jerry told us, is aged cheddar from an actual Vermont cheesemaker, some guy with a long white beard. The lettuce is crisp, local butter lettuce, not disgusting field weeds they try to pass off as “mixed greens.” All these great ingredients are available at Dyson’s. I’m thinking I need to get down to Dyson’s to fill our fridge and maybe even get a job. I make a list in my mind of things to confirm permission for, a job being at the top.

  “Sub roll is from the baker next to Dyson’s, Scheppard’s Bakery and Gourmet Coffee. If you like bread and coffee, honestly, can’t find anything better. Not even in Boston’s North End. Again, people drive from all over to our little town for our foods. And Scheppard’s is packed all the time,” Jerry says.

  We’re walking down a grassy, sloped trail on the right side of the cattails. On the right side of the trail is a sea of lime and airy ground ferns. I’m sure a whole magical world of fairies lives in the fronds.

  Jerry stops, points his long index finger at me, and says, “Oh, and next to Scheppard’s, you have to hit Ferry Farm and Fudge, young lady. They might be known for their fudge, but their secret weapons are their fresh-baked snickerdoodles. If you stand at their back door at four a.m., you can buy a dozen, a limit of a dozen, straight out of the oven. Got to pay in cash. Line around the corner in the summer at four a.m., yep.”

  “Oh my God, the snickerdoodles are re-dic-you-lous,” Gretchen says, bugging her eyes on me. “We’ll ride bikes downtown today. I will show you.”

  I think the word is . . . yes, the word is presumptuous. Gretchen is presumptuous. And yet, I do want to ride bikes to town with her.

  I pretend my mouth is full and I’m chewing and do a little head nod. Riding bikes to town with Gretchen is now topic number one on my mind list to discuss with Mom; getting a job at Dyson’s has moved to number two.

  “Now,” Jerry says, stopping. We’re below the tall cattails, and having descended the winding trail off to the side of them, I can confirm there is a small pond here. Beyond the pond is that large summery, picnicky field in the out beyond and the beautiful trees with wind in their leaves. Jerry points to the field. “The field’s fine to go to, run around, no problem. But—” And here he pauses, drops his head, shifts a look to Gretchen, and breathes in. “Here,” he says, taking off his binoculars to hand to Mom. Gretchen does the same, handing me her binoculars. Three of us have to rewrap our subs and set them on the grassy trail to make the transfers.

  Gretchen points with her Coke hand, and Jerry points with a finger to a darker wedge of pine forest that creeps up to the airy trees along the summer field. This darker wedge widens and forms the backdrop up the hill and behind Jerry and Gretchen’s brick fortress house. Jerry is arcing his pointing finger from the wedge, up the hill, and all around their house.

  “Okay, if you take up those binoculars, focus on the line of pine. See those signs?”

  Mom and I take up our binoculars, and after a few seconds of dialing the image to focus and zooming in, sure enough, on almost every pine on the wedge that forms a boundary against the light, airy trees, and on all the ones heading up to Jerry and Gretchen’s house, and even beyond the house, I’m guessing—can’t really see from here—are orange signs.

  PRIVATE PROPERTY

  NO HUNTING

  NO TRESPASSING

  WARNING: ALARMS AND TRAPS

  ELECTRICAL FENCE

  SECOND AMENDMENT IN EFFECT

  Practically every single tree has this all-caps, glowing-orange sign. Beneath the signs, starting at what I think is chest high on a man and down to the ground, are several lines of metal wire, strung tree to tree to tree, creating, I presume, the electrical fence mentioned in the signs. Mom and I lower our binoculars, pick up our subs and drinks, and wait on Jerry to explain.

  “Probably I’ll just say the shocking part first and you’ll understand why we have to have boundaries,” Jerry says. Gretchen looks up at her father, almost as if a supplicant, awaiting atonement or wise words from a high priest. She nods, waiting. Or I’m misinterpreting everything and her nod was simply that she’s okay to hear whatever this shocking story is.

  Mom is squeezing her turkey sub so tight I fear the thing will sever and the front half will plop to our grassy trail. Maybe the pond snake I see floating will slither out and snatch it as soon as it hits the ground.

  Jerry’s still paused and looking at Gretchen, and I’m waiting for him to deliver his shocking news. A grass blade moves in a ground wind and tickles my ankle.

  “When Gretchen was four, her mother, my wife, was nine months pregnant with our baby son. She went for a walk in the woods behind our house, and a hunter shot her dead. An accident. Our boy had spontaneously birthed. He died soon after. Nobody was there to help. Hunter fled, never caught. Gretchen was there, but she was only four.”

  Mom drops her entire sub to the ground. But the pond snake has disappeared under the water, and I’m betting he’s as shocked as we are to hear this news, so he’s not slithering out of the pond to claim any bounty of food. I bet he, too, wants to disappear and hide and make all this sudden weirdness end. I bet he’d like the fairies in the fronds of the sea of ferns to swarm and spirit him away to the out beyond, like I do.

  Feels like a clot of turkey is stuck in my throat.

  My mouth is wide-open to hear such drastic candor, in front of a child, about that very child. Hell, Mom won’t give me even the biographical details of my own childhood.

  Gretchen winces. “I don’t remember much. I kinda remember sitting next to my mom and holding the baby and screaming,” she says. Her face is unreadable because she’s so hunched over, submissive or hiding or scared, who knows. All I know is this—no wonder the girl is a little awkward, a loner, drives her mind into constant wordplay and puzzles. I do this with books and painting. Also like me, she has just one parent.

  I imagine a four-year-old Gretchen, her white, moving skin pulsing in morphing blotches of red. I picture her holding her dead newborn brother in the woods next to her bloody mother. The newborn would still have an umbilical cord connected to his belly and to the placenta, and he would be covered in white, chalky birth goo—they showed us a live birth in sex ed this year. It would be normal for Gretchen to be screaming in this scenario. So although Jerry’s story is awful, I’m comforted to know Gretchen had a normal emotional response. And I’m not quite sure why my brain needs comfort about Gretchen’s emotional response right now.

  “Anyway, look. It’s terrible. I’m obviously skipping over all the emotions in all this. We’ve just met, I can’t burden you with the grief. Just trying to give you the facts here, for your safety, is all. Believe me, the tragedy guts us. We’ve, yes, been to many therapy sessions. But look, the hunters around here are fierce. They want deer, they want black bear. Some hunt legally, some illegally. And I don’t want any part of any of it. My land is prime for hunting. There’s a bear den. Land’s infested with deer. There’s a beaver dam. Wild rabbits. Wild turkeys. Coyotes. Raccoons. All kinds of creatures in there. So I’ve put an electrical fence all around. From the wedge of pine”—he’s pointing again—“to around the entire perimeter of my property, extending all the way to the highway. Five hundred acres of forest are surrounded by my electrical fence. Except for the gorge, but that’s a natural barrier. And alarms go off if any humans cross in or out around the perimeter of our house. And . . .”

&n
bsp; Gretchen coughs, apparently indicating she wants to tell the next part. “And,” she says, “Daddy designed a few traps, too, because when he started with the fence, hunters and teenagers kept coming in anyway, and he’d have to call the cops all the time. And a couple of people got zapped and tried to sue, but we’re within New Hampshire law to have that fence. So Daddy also added spring traps, like those nets in movies, where if you step there, bam, you’re flung up in the air in a net. Daddy had them put in all over.”

  “Look,” Jerry says, “I know it’s extreme. But it’s for everyone’s safety. Mine. Gretchen’s. Theirs. We don’t need any more hunting accidents. We don’t need any bear maulings. And the gorge. Whoo. The gorge has two facing walls of granite cliff. If you don’t know about the gorge, the way the trees clutter up to the edge, you can step right off and plummet a hundred and fifty feet.”

  Gretchen animates as her father talks. She uses her fingers to demonstrate a walking person falling off her palm and then blows all her fingers out straight, indicating the person’s body flying apart in the fall. She looks at me and shakes her head, indicating how awful she thinks such a death would be.

  “Ick,” she mouths.

  I cringe as my response, agreeing, obviously.

  Jerry continues talking as if his sidekick daughter has done this demented shtick with him a hundred times. “Oh gosh, over the years, before I put up the boundary fence and house perimeter alarms, and, yes, net traps, ankle snatchers, electrical gates, too, air and rescue retrieved the bodies of three trespassers—a hiker, a hunter, and a woman who had posed on the edge for a self-taken picture. Found the woman’s camera dangling in a tree halfway down. Lord knows how many people have gone off that ledge.”

  Gretchen’s skin is a busy switchboard of blinking, pulsing red.

  I can’t look over at Mom, because we would give away an entire conversation by the looks we’d give. So I watch a blue jay swoop from a low branch nearby toward that out-beyond field I crave. I want Mr. Blue Jay to pick me up by my shoulders with his talons and drop me way down there, way far away. This is a moment when I need Mom to say the right thing, because my mouth is full of stinging jellyfish, and my brain is drained of all speakable words. To sum up, Gretchen found her mother and newborn brother shot up in the woods, and now they have deadly boundaries, including a murderous gorge, to keep them safe. I don’t like horror movies.

  Mom has been pacing a circle ever since she collected her consciousness and picked her sub off the ground. Her expression is flat, giving nothing away.

  “I know it’s shocking. I know I’ve told you in an abrupt manner. Apologies,” Jerry says.

  “Just, wow,” Mom says, her face placid and her eyes raised. “Jerry, it was rather abrupt. I do appreciate you acknowledging that.” Mom scratches her head with a free finger, gracefully and precisely, and so although she’s also holding a bottle of water, not a drop spills. “And, Jerry, Gretchen, I am truly sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine. It’s just, and I don’t want to start off on the wrong foot, but I kind of try to shield Lucy from gruesome news. So maybe next time . . .”

  This is Mom, all right. Here’s a guy telling us about the horrible death of his wife and child, and the horror of his four-year-old screaming in the woods with those dead bodies, and Mom is thinking about our little duo. She is always only laser focused on us, which, in the last year, I’ve recognized more and more, and in that recognition, I’ve come to appreciate her crazy level of protection, but also to detest it. Mom’s obsession with protecting us is like a comforting, comfortable room sometimes, and others, a claustrophobic, windowless cell of steel air.

  Jerry holds up his hand. “Gosh, you’re right, Susan. Gretchen and I have grown too numb to the details. The counselors said she and I should talk openly about the whole event, but obviously they meant between us two. Apologies, Lucy,” he says, looking in my eyes, as if I’m another adult.

  “My mom is, like, being overprotective. I’m like fifteen, I can deal,” I say. I roll my eyes at Mom, and I know she knows this is all an act for Gretchen and Jerry, so as to take away all this burdensome tension, because I know Mom knows I despise when people pepper unnecessary likes in their speech. “Gretchen,” I say, “sorry about your mom.” She bounces her head in thanks.

  “Well, now, I am sorry, but there is one other important item we need to address, and this does concern Lucy. Do you mind walking up our driveway to the house? This concerns that rumor in town I mentioned.”

  “Any, you know, bad details, Jerry?” Mom asks, smiling, indicating she has removed her awkward warning about what Jerry can say in front of me.

  “Oh, ha, no gore. Just rumors and imaginations. I’ll explain. Probably better if you see what I’m referring to. Demystify what might look strange, so we have no curiosity later.” Jerry looks at Mom and me. “You know, from rumors Lucy will probably hear in school, when school starts back up in the fall. Or maybe before. Right? Maybe she’ll meet and hang with kids this summer, of course.”

  Gretchen shrinks herself and slows her pace, as if she wants to disappear. Her skin flares in pulses again. I’m guessing she’s recoiling, or embarrassed, at the idea of hanging out with other kids in the summer. I’m guessing that doesn’t happen for her.

  “So on to rumors, then,” Mom says, and I know she is being her best sarcastic self.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  We walk back up the grassy trail between the cattail patch and the fairies’ fern garden in a single-file line: Jerry limping in the lead, short Gretchen in her apple-print dress behind him, then Mom, then towering me. As we ascend into the higher lime grass and the height of the cattails, we are surrounded on all sides by various shades of green. I pretend we’re in a tropical jungle. Two hummingbirds and several yellow-and-black dragonflies skitter above and around us. When that lovely wind washes out the sound of our feet on the ground, I pause to breathe in a scent I’d call Country Clean. This is the magic I first sensed when we pulled in, and now I’m renewed in my wish to stay. I force myself to forget Jerry’s horror story about the dark woods behind their house.

  We’re passing through the parking area, past our brown Volvo, and along the long, low KEEP OUT shed. At the far end, nearest the dirt road that leads up to their brick house, Gretchen points. “There’s the ten-speed the old renter left. You can use that when we go to town for snickerdoodles.”

  I had forgotten about the snickerdoodles at Ferry Farm & Fudge. After what we’re experiencing with Jerry and Gretchen, I know Mom and I will have to have a long talk before I go anywhere with Gretchen.

  In a trash barrel at the far edge of our rental property, we throw away the remains of our subs and our empty drinks and set off to walking up the dirt road toward the brick house. The gnarly pine forest is on the left, and the mounds of holly and blueberry bushes are on the right, the berry hillside being the one behind the low, long shed on our property, which is below us. As we come out of a bend in the road, I note Gretchen and Jerry have a circular parking area. The far end of their house has an attached garage, the white garage doors solid and closed. And at our end, about twenty feet from this side of the house, there’s a tall structure made of four wood poles, on top of which is a green aluminum roof, under which is a yellow Caterpillar construction thingie, the kind to dig deep holes with the long arm and scooping bucket with teeth. Jerry sees me eyeing it.

  “Had a pool crew up here a couple years ago. Came and set up all their equipment. Marked all the spots behind the house. And the day they were going to start digging, feds shut down the pool company in a tax-fraud raid. Nobody’s come to collect this mini hydraulic excavator. How weird is that?” Jerry says to my mom.

  “Very weird, Jerry,” Mom says.

  “Anyway, no pool now. Lost a deposit of twenty-five grand. Can you believe it?”

  “People are horrible, Jerry,” Mom says. And this, this is her authentic self. She really does think most people are horrible. “Why not sell their scooper, then? Get som
e money back?”

  “Yeah, I thought about it. Probably should,” Jerry says. But I can tell in the way his voice trails, he does not intend to go through the trouble. So to sum up, for a couple of years, Jerry has kept this excavator—not a “scooper,” Mom, God—on his property, and he’s going to do nothing.

  This time Mom does sneak in a screwed face to me, and I know she knows we’re both thinking the same thing. The word lame comes to mind, but also so does strange.

  We follow Gretchen and Jerry as they lead us behind their big brick house. Up closer, the structure is huge. A two-story rectangle, but each story is tall. I’m guessing inside the ceilings are at least fifteen feet high, each floor. The front door is solid and black. Eight tiny windows on the front, four up top, four below, seem more like squinting eyes than windows for seeing in or out; the placement and size of the windows are oddly minimal, almost like they’re slits in those tall bunker monuments out of which soldiers shot muzzle-loaded guns during US wars. The windows aren’t wider than those slits, truly, and given the yards and yards of bricks on the front face of this house, the scale of the windows is way off, way too small. Around the front door are three metal circles, one above the door and two on the knob side; they look to be armor shields bolted to the brick around the door as some weird military ornamentation or armory decor—I have no idea. Never seen anything like them.

  When we pass the front of the house, I look down along the edge. Around the slit windows there appear to be newer bricks. Almost like correct-size windows were here at one point, but they were removed, and these slit windows put in. Why?

  Jerry and Gretchen continue along the side of the house, and I crane my neck up and down to see if the side and back have bigger windows. Nope. Still the same slit windows with newer bricks around the casings. I’m wondering if Mom is noticing these construction or renovation—I don’t know—details, but she’s staring straight ahead, watching Jerry’s every limping step. So I do too. Something has her attention in full, and she’s set her eyes to analysis mode.