by Laura McNeal
I could hear the leaves patting each other in the wind, and I tried to hear the water in the creek, but it made no sound as it drained and pooled and crept and slid. Amiel didn’t run away from me, but he stood forbiddingly still. I looked at his furious eyebrows and his mouth and the shoulders that inside the red plaid shirt were strong from picking and climbing and digging and hauling.
“This is America,” I said. “Right? In America, we’re the same. Equal.”
He didn’t answer me.
I considered the other reasons a boy might break away from kissing me, such as my weird eyeballs and lack of Greenie-size boobs. “What is it?” I asked him in a miserable voice, one that made me feel and sound like a kid who’s about to cry.
He stood like one of those Olympic gymnasts before a vault. He shook his head without letting me see his eyes.
I waited. I didn’t say, “Why not?” because I didn’t want to hear that the reason was not being attracted to me.
He turned then and walked back along the path the way he had come, and I had no choice but to go my own way home.
Thirty-two
This is what happened when I took the money to my aunt Agnès. I waited until Robby wasn’t home, of course. I found her standing at the kitchen island opening the mail while Robby’s dog, Snowy, nibbled dry food out of his red dish. Snowy sniffed at my shoes, then went back to nibbling.
“Amiel wanted me to give you this,” I said, and I set the stack of bills on the granite beside a glossy French magazine. The money looked frazzled and worn, as if it was too shabby to belong to her.
“What?” she asked. She wore a white ribbed sweater with short sleeves and a long necklace of pink stones that clicked when she moved. She was still studying a bill that she’d sliced open with a dashing silver letter opener. Every surface in the room—the granite, her oval fingernails, her short dark hair, the glasses in the cupboard—gleamed.
“Amiel wants to pay you back,” I said. “For the doctor.”
She wrinkled her perfect forehead and her sculpted mouth. “Pourquoi?” she asked. “He is our responsibility.”
“I guess he didn’t like being dependent,” I said, knowing also that he’d hurt himself juggling, which wasn’t her responsibility at all.
She adjusted the handle of her porcelain teacup, out of which steam curled gracefully. My aunt was a fan of fruit teas without sugar, and I thought I could smell sour pomegranate peel.
“Why did he give it to you?” she asked, her focus now changing in the way I’d feared it would.
I blushed, and she took a sip of her sour tea. “Do you want?” she asked, indicating the tea. I shook my head, and her look changed to sober consideration of me. “Where do you see him?” she asked.
“I don’t see him. Except for this. I ran into him, and he made me promise to give it to you.”
“Ah,” my aunt said. “I am not believing you.”
Snowy scrabbled in his dish.
“It’s true, though,” I said. “There is absolutely nothing between us.” I said it with enough misery in my face, I suppose, that she believed me. “I have to go,” I said.
“Come back later,” she said sympathetically, holding her thin teacup aloft but not taking a sip. “You and your mother should come for dinner now that you won’t have so much school. Come tonight.”
“Thank you,” I said, “but my mom already started something. It was in the Crock-Pot when I left.”
This wasn’t true, but it worked. When I left, the worn money was on the counter and my aunt was telling me that I was a very beautiful girl and I should let her take me shopping when school let out.
Thirty-three
I took exams and signed yearbooks and cleaned out my locker without another call from my father, my mother began working at the bookstore, and a single moth emerged from the nest of cocoons on my mother’s desk. The moth was white and ladylike and so still she might have been a pair of flower petals on a thick, furry stem. Although we checked every morning and every afternoon, anxiously expecting her mate, the other cocoons stayed whole and motionless. If you held one of them to the light, you could see a dark shape inside. The lady moth in her white dress waited a whole week, and then, as if she’d reached some final hour, she began to lay sterile eggs all over the nearest cocoons, embossing them with yellow unfertilized seeds. Then, imperceptibly, she died. Nothing changed about her appearance, but if you nudged her, you could tell she was gone.
“What are you going to do with her now?” I asked my mother.
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I’m thinking.”
When my mother left for work, I went to the river. It didn’t belong to Amiel, I reasoned, and I found certain places on other banks where I felt completely alone. I read books I’d been meaning to read and books I’d read before. I ate peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and Corn Pops, but no more loquats. I took close-up photographs of the water, the bark, dead leaves, a molted lizard, and a dogface butterfly. I drew pictures of insects in a notebook and tried to identify them the way we’d been required to do in eighth grade, when I was forced to push pins through the bodies of beetles my father helped me catch with a Smucker’s jar full of poison. I drew pictures of plants, too, and this is how I learned to tell miner’s lettuce from black sage, virgin’s bower, and snakeweed. For the rest of June, the weather was mostly foggy and white, as still as the dead cocoons. Then July came and the sun burned yellow flowers called butter and eggs into brown straw, the dodder crept like orange Silly String over the poison ivy, and an insect I never saw made a continuous, furious ticking sound.
I don’t know how often Amiel watched me. In the daytime, I assumed he was away at work, but in the evenings or late afternoons, the whole canyon felt like a tunnel waiting for a train. I listened for him with my feet and my spine and my averted head, but to the hikers who cracked by with their sniffing, leaping dogs, it was just me and my Brontë book, me and my Pocket Field Guide, me and my Corn Pops. I was the hobo girl of Agua Prieta.
Greenie didn’t miss me because she and Hickey had entered a cocoon of their own. They were always together, and Hickey plainly didn’t want me there. Robby, too, had his preoccupations: a college prep class in Claremont that met five days a week for the first four weeks of summer, then a music camp slightly less prestigious than the one he’d failed to try out for in April. My father neither called nor wrote to ask if I’d changed my mind about Paris. My whole life reminded me of how it felt to ride, when Greenie and I were little, in the back of Greenie’s mother’s car, an ancient Pacer with a seat that faced backward and left us staring at places we’d already been and drivers who didn’t want to make eye contact. I was facing the wrong direction, but time still went forward, gliding toward destinations I couldn’t see or choose.
One week my mother decided to have it out with the cocoons. She followed directions from a guy who had his own silk business, and the first, most disgusting step was to extract the worms. Out they came, dead and yellow. Then she soaked the cocoons in hot water. She mushed them around, expecting the hard glue to just melt away, but soon she had a bunch of dented egg shapes that reminded me of Ping-Pong balls you’ve run over with a car. Still, she dried them in the sun, and the next day, right after breakfast, she picked at one until she’d teased out a strand of silk. One strand after another came off in her hands like foot-long hanks of spiderweb. I kept expecting her to give up, but she wrapped the webby bits around and around until she had a miniature ball of truly unimpressive silk. One down, eight to go.
“Now what?” I said.
My mother dumped the rest of the mashed, hollow cocoons in the kitchen trash, and the lid came down with a clap. She set the tiny ball of silk in the basket of random objects she kept on her desk. She took the corpse of the lady moth outside and set her on a gardenia bush. Then she came back inside.
“Sometimes,” she said slowly, as if she were still searching for a useful moral, “you’ve got to know when to give up.”
She left for work, and I hiked all the way to a series of boulders the size of cars that caused the river to flow fast and loud around them. You could stretch out your whole body on some of those rocks, but they were also prime real estate for taggers, who left giant black graffiti names like FZZZJ or PVVR! It was hot, though, really hot, and the coldest water swirled through those little rapids. I was wearing my swimsuit under my clothes, a one-piece from last summer that I’d never really liked. I soaked my hair and my face, and then I let the current push me to a shallow pool where I closed my eyes and pretended I was a piece of moss, hands on the grainy shore, legs floating free. I looked around, as I floated, for shells to add to my collection. There’s only one kind of shell at the river, a clam the color of Wite-Out that I like to rub with my thumb when I’m reading, and I’d been taking them home in my pockets and adding them to a jar I kept in Robby’s tree house.
When I came back to the rock, my book was still there. So was my dad’s old backpack. Nothing looked any different until I opened my paperback copy of Wuthering Heights and found, neatly folded like a bookmark, a piece of lined notebook paper.
On the outside was a drawing of an open oyster shell holding a pearl. I unfolded it and shivered. GO TO BLACK OAK, it said. I did a full-circle survey of the surrounding trees, heart pounding, but I didn’t see Amiel. I tugged my shirt and shorts back on over my wet swimsuit and walked to the only place I thought might be the black oak, a huge tree burned to volcanic rock by a fire a long time ago. It was hollow on the inside, so it made me think of elves and dwarves and leprechauns whenever I passed it. It now held a red bandanna tied to form a little bag. The bundle clacked when I opened the knot, and dozens of white shells spilled over the ground.
Carefully, I turned them all over.
“Olly olly in come free,” I said when I stood up, as if Amiel knew the rules of the game.
Nothing and no one.
“That means you can come out!” I said.
Someone brushed against a tree, but when I turned, it was just a hiker with a spaniel on a leash. “Hide-and-seek?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Maybe my Greta will sniff ’em out,” she said, and went striding along with Greta while I picked up my white shells and put them carefully back into the bandanna.
I looked everywhere as I walked back along the trail—up in the trees, down the eroded banks where roots tangled with stones and cobwebs, along the sandbars glittering in the sun. Finally I came to the crossing point. Amiel’s shore, as I thought of it. All I had to do was wade across to the grotto. Perhaps he was in there, his back to the wall, listening and waiting as I used to wait in my favorite hiding place at Greenie’s house, a warm spot between the propane tank and a pink hibiscus. It was that memory that coaxed me to remove my shoes and slosh over, to step with a hammering heart to the wall that was warm and slivery under my touch. I knew Amiel was too skilled at hiding not to hear my approach. I made myself count to ten, and then I sprang into his doorway.
No one.
“Amiel?” I said. All seemed to be in order, though I couldn’t be sure because the room was dark. I stepped in and heard a small sound, no louder than the frisking of a bird or a lizard in dry leaves. I turned around and there he was, seated on the floor beside the wall, waiting for me to spot him. He smiled the way you do when you’re glad to be found.
“You’re supposed to run now,” I said.
He shrugged and stayed where he was.
“Or you’re going to be it.”
I had no idea whether they played hide-and-seek in Mexico. Still, it was a game that let me be confident instead of self-conscious and confused, so I reached out my hand to touch the nearest part of him, which was his knee. “Tag,” I said. “You’re it.”
If he had run, I could have chased him and known what I was doing, because I know how to be eight, nine, ten, and eleven, but he stood up and looked as confused as I felt. He was holding a long, smooth stick in one hand and a knife that he folded and put in his pocket.
“Thank you,” I said, holding up the bandanna. “For the shells.”
He nodded.
He was two inches from me, and I could see the black stone disk between his collar bones rising and falling with his breath, so I found it hard to think. I wondered again how he bathed in the river because he smelled and looked clean, but the thought of him swimming naked in the river made my breathing more shallow still. I tried to focus on something other than his body, and what I found was the green and black tin box that I’d shamelessly opened on my first visit, the one with the old-fashioned lords and ladies on the outside. I picked it up and said, lamely, that it was pretty.
Amiel nodded and when I set the tin down, he picked it back up and tapped the photograph into his hand. He held it for me and pointed at the little boy, then at himself.
“Is that your mother?” I asked.
He nodded, so I asked if that was his house, and he nodded again.
“Do you write to her?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“May I sit down?” I asked.
This time, he didn’t immediately answer me with a nod or a shake. He leaned briefly against the wall, but then he offered me a kind of tree stump and went outside. I sat on the tree stump and waited, listening hard for clues to where he’d gone. I stared at the bags of ramen noodles and a can of black beans and wished I’d brought loquats again.
Amiel returned with another log roughly the same size and set it down. Our knees were almost but not quite touching, and I felt the way the sea looks in the afternoon, when every wave glows.
“How long ago did you first come here?” I asked.
He drew in the dirt with the stick that looked like it had been whittled smooth and then charred in a fire. He wrote the numeral four.
For some reason, the way he was writing in the dirt reminded me of the way Greenie and I would talk to each other in church. For a while, her family took me with them to services and during the long sermons we would write on each other’s backs with a fingertip and the other person would try to guess the word.
“Where do you cook?” I asked.
He seemed glad to stand up and go somewhere else. I followed him out to a path that led through willows so thick and low that you’d think it wasn’t worth it to swat your way through. Then we came to a huge mangled sycamore growing half under and half over a hollowed-out bank. The roots formed a sort of ladder that he climbed, reaching down to give me his hand at the top.
Once I stopped feeling the terrific buzz of his hand on mine, I could look around. We were standing on a strange little plateau where someone had once built a little house out of river rock and stucco. The house still had a doorway but no door, four windows but no glass, a chimney but no roof, and a concrete floor. All around the ruined house the trees were near enough and tall enough so that they formed a sort of blind, and I thought you probably couldn’t see it at all from nearby hills.
Inside the house, near the hearth, Amiel had built a sort of fire pit with rocks. It was a safer place to cook than most campsites, really, because there was concrete all around, and I longed to be there when he had a fire going, when we could be cowgirl and cowboy and pretend we weren’t a few miles from two million people. We stood in the sunlit, roofless house and looked down at the charred rocks.
“I love it here,” I said.
Amiel poked at the coals with the stick he’d used to write on the dirt floor of his other house. His sore hand had only a small bandage on it and I reached out to touch it.
“It’s better, I guess?” I said.
Amiel wrote SI with the black end of the stick, each stroke reminding me of the skin-writing game with Greenie.
“Good,” I said.
He balanced the stick on one palm while standing still and then while walking in a circle. He tossed it so that it whirled several times in the air, then caught it.
“Let me try,” I said. He handed me the stick, and I
balanced it for a few seconds on my palm. I tried again, chasing after it as it wobbled and fell. Everything seemed perfect. “Can I come back here?”
His face was unsettled.
“Give me your hand,” I said in a teasing voice, and he held out his flat palm as if waiting for me to balance the stick there, but I left the stick where it fell and pulled on his arm until it was outstretched. I felt him tremble a little as I wrote with my finger in the palm of his hand, P. Then, on his wrist and forearm, I wrote the rest of the word, PLEASE.
When Greenie and I played the game, we almost never managed to guess each other’s words. Letters, yes, but long words took repetition. Amiel closed his hand over the letter P on my second try and withdrew his arm. Then he turned around and faced the empty walls of the ruined house. He crouched down in front of the dead fire and poked at the crumbs of black wood. He refused to look at me, and he shook his head.
I had nothing else to say or do, so I turned and walked through the doorless door of the roofless house, and when I had picked my way down the root-twisted bank, I couldn’t wait for the open trail so that I could run and run and run.
Thirty-four
A few days later, I resumed my old habits of reading and swimming, but I stayed away from Amiel’s part of the river. The days were pale green and flat, like water that got stuck in the reeds and went nowhere. I could have opened my eyes underwater and seen my life as a sunken object, floating and trapped, green with algae.
I was so used to my stagnation that when I found another note from him that said BLACK OAK, I went as far as the tree, picked up the small dark-blue bottle with a white flower poking out of the top, and then just put it in my backpack. I didn’t go looking for Amiel because whatever we were doing, it wasn’t hide-and-seek. Twice more he left notes and twice more I followed them. I collected the pair of acorns joined like the chambers of a heart. The small papery man made from corn-husks. I set them all with the jar of shells on the windowsill of Robby’s tree house, where, I figured, my mother wouldn’t see them but Amiel, who still worked in my uncle’s grove on Fridays, might walk through the grove and see the silent progress of his gifts.
