by Rhian Ellis
We didn’t, of course. But Peter would talk me to sleep some nights with these stories, at least when we first fell in love, and sometimes later, too, when we got depressed about the cold and being poor. I remember wanting to travel so badly it made me cry; I imagined my hands so full of lemons I’d have to fill my shirt with them, the load of them as heavy as a sleeping child against me.
I looked back up at Troy, smiling, my eyes filling with tears. “Maybe I should travel.”
“Oh, you should!” He slapped his hands on the table and leaned toward me, his face bright. “Europe! You’d love it. I can see you bicycling through Provence. You’d eat bread and cheese under poplar trees. Or trekking in Nepal! That seems to be what all the young people are doing, these days. You could bring me a yak-fur hat.”
“I would. I definitely would.”
He nodded. “I’m in my settling stage, myself. I had a fairly itinerant youth. Even the thought of packing a suitcase tires me out. I want my things, my people, around me.”
“Spirits, you mean?”
“No. They’re everywhere, of course—one can’t exactly escape them. I meant the solid folk. You know.”
I nodded, though I did wonder who he meant. My mother? He didn’t have any family, as far as I could tell. We ate quietly for a while, and when we were finished I stacked the plates and bowls and carried them back to the sink.
“Don’t you dare wash them!” cried Troy. “If I don’t do the washing up I won’t have any thinking time. I love my thinking time.”
“All right. Let me do something, though.”
“Go ahead and slice up the Snickers bars. They’re in the freezer behind the juice.”
While I hacked away at the rock-solid candy bars, Troy made coffee. “I meant what I said, you know. You shouldn’t be hanging around here with all of us golden-agers. You need to meet people.”
“I do meet people.”
“There’s that David character from the cafeteria. I’ve seen him looking at you. But I think you know what I mean. How do you know what’s out there unless you look? How do you even know if you like someone like Mr. David Cafeteria if you don’t have a nice array of men friends to compare him to? I’m sorry if I sound like your father. Or your grandfather, I suppose.”
“That’s all right. I’m sure you have a point.”
“You just gave me a shock, telling me you’re over thirty.” We carried the coffee and candy bars into the parlor, where the sound of cuckoo clocks was exploding from the walls. “Lately I’ve been setting all the cuckoo clocks to the same time. The racket is stimulating.”
I chewed on a piece of candy. “Thirty-one’s not that old, you know.”
“Of course not. Heaven forbid. It’s just another reminder that time is whistling by.”
“As if you need one!” I said, gesturing to the giant hourglass.
“Yes, indeed. The good thing about clocks is that they’re not linear. They go around and around and start fresh every day. It’s quite reassuring.” He put his coffee on the end table and clasped his hands on his knees. “I’m going to tell you something you might find shocking. Promise me you won’t run screaming from the house.”
I set my own coffee down. “Of course I won’t. What is it?” I braced myself.
“I’m in love with your mother. I might ask her to marry me. Umm, no. I will ask her. But I suppose I’m asking your permission.”
“Troy! But…you’ve known each other forever!”
Inside me, something was breaking into a thousand pieces. He wants to marry my mother. It was preposterous. He’s in love with her.
“Well, it hasn’t been quite forever. Anyway, things change, people change. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Troy, it’s…it’s.…I don’t know. It’s wonderful. You don’t need my permission, though. I am surprised.”
“I thought you would be.” He smiled: a relieved, bashful grin. “Galina’s been a little busy and preoccupied lately. I haven’t seen as much of her as I’m used to. And I miss her. I guess I only just realized how used to her I’ve become.” Embarrassed, he threw several chunks of candy bar into his mouth and chewed noisily.
“So…when?” I asked.
“When?” He looked startled.
“When are you going to ask her?”
“Oh. I’m not sure. We have a date on Friday—Pizza Village. Do you think that’ll be romantic enough? I’m afraid if we go to a white-linen-tablecloth sort of place I’ll be too nervous to say anything.”
“She loves pizza.”
“That I am well aware of.”
I drank the coffee and rocked in my chair, gripping the mug tightly so that my hands wouldn’t shake. The last time my mother had gone on a date with a man, years ago, she came over to my house afterward to tell me about him—his thin mustache, his shiny narrow tie, how he wouldn’t shut up about his son’s new sports car—and we’d had a good long laugh about him. I felt a stirring nostalgia for that evening, a nostalgia so powerful my ears rang.
Now that he’d got his secret off his chest, Troy seemed more at peace. He fingered the doily on the end table and stared into space, saying nothing for a long while.
“I suppose I should be going,” I said. “Thank you for the mulligatawny. I’m warm all through, now.”
“Good, good!” He stood up quickly to walk me to the hallway, where I slid my shoes back on. “There’s one other thing I need to ask you, though.”
“Yes?”
“What do you think she’ll say? Do you think she’ll say yes?”
“Oh, Troy.” I took his hand—a thin and veiny old thing, the fingers yellowed from years and years of cigars. “Of course she’ll say yes.”
He gave my hand a squeeze. “Good,” he said again, nodding. “I’ve always wanted to be someone’s father.”
And with that, he shut the door behind me.
Already it was getting dark. I walked from Troy’s house to the lake, where bugs hovered and pricked the water’s skin. The air was clammy and smelled like mushrooms.
This is good, I told myself. Troy loves her, and now you are free of her.
But I did not want to be free of her. I wanted her to love me and no one else.
Out on the water, a small brown duck floated in circles. I picked up a pebble and threw it at the duck. It missed and dropped into the water with a tiny plop, and the duck didn’t seem to notice. It paddled around and around and around, and now and then I glimpsed the bright orange flash of its feet beneath the water. I wanted to affect it in some way, I wanted it to fly off or quack or dive under. It wouldn’t. I thought I might find a bigger rock, really pelt the thing, but I realized that was not what I wanted at all.
My empty heart was collapsing in on itself. A lonely life is a crime without witnesses, it is a movie playing in a locked theater; can you ever really be sure what happens in it? Can you be sure that it happens at all?
I am here! I am here! I wanted to yell at the duck. But there was no point in that. The duck was smart; it knew I did not matter, in the scheme of things.
11
premature burial
When I woke up the next morning, I felt inexplicably full of hope. There was no good reason for this, but the sunlight that came through my windows looked cheerful and kind, and my heart was light. As I washed and dressed and made up my bed, I planned my day with something close to relish—a morning of work, a good lunch at the cafeteria, more work, then Vivian. The previous morning’s scene with Officers Peterson and Ten Brink seemed distant and small, unworthy of the agony it had caused, like a childhood illness. I had survived it, and as far as I knew so had my mother. It was survivable.
And I did have a good day, though I was distracted while working by the sound of branches tapping insistently against the library windows, and by a restlessness I could not quite contain. I kept getting up, looking out at the lake, sitting down again, getting up. I left early for lunch. I bought a hot sandwich at the cafeteria, brought it down
to the lake, and ate it on the dock. The wind had picked up and the waves were tipped white.
Though it had begun to rain by the time I left to meet Vivian’s bus, I had enough of a good mood left not to mind that I was dressed poorly for the weather. Rain plastered my hair to my head and cascaded off the gatehouse roof. I stood a few yards away, under a large pine tree, and I began planning what Vivian and I would do that afternoon. We’d make popcorn, I thought, and work on the Vivian and Naomi paper dolls we’d cut out of tag board: our project before the witch costume debacle. I was designing a whole nineteenth-century wardrobe for mine, using the photographs in the library for inspiration, and Vivian was making a cheerleader’s outfit for hers. We spent hours decorating the clothes with crayons and colored pencils.
After ten minutes or so I heard the rattle and groan of the bus as it downshifted around the bend, but it didn’t stop. It slowed down, paused briefly, and then picked up speed and roared off over the bridge. I noticed, as it sped past, that someone had written FUK YEW in the steamed-over back window.
I waited for a while, imagining that Vivian had missed her stop and was perhaps kneeling on the floor of the bus right now, gathering her dropped homework and lunch box and umbrella and booksack, and would stagger up to the front in a minute or two and have the bus driver drop her off down the road. But this did not transpire. I watched as the bus turned at Dean Road on the other side of the bridge, and then it disappeared over the hill.
This had happened before. Once, on the first day of second grade, Vivian had gotten onto the wrong bus, and it was only after a series of frantic phone calls to the school that she finally showed up on my doorstep, tearstained and exhausted. Another time, Vivian was home with hives, and Elaine had forgotten to call me. I decided that this had happened again, so I trudged back home and called Elaine’s real estate office. Water dripped off me and pooled on the linoleum as I waited for someone to answer.
“Thank you for calling Downtown Realty. None of our service representatives is available to come to the phone right now, but if you leave your name, number, and a brief message, we’ll call ya right back! Your call is so important to us!”
Hmm.
I called the school next. The school secretary couldn’t help and told me the teachers were in a staff meeting. But if I left my name and number, she said, Miss Strunk would call me as soon as she could. I said that would be fine.
So I made the popcorn and melted some butter and sat at the kitchen table eating it by myself, waiting for the phone to ring. Ron came in and joined me. He took a large handful of popcorn and chomped it down.
“Greazy,” he said, showing his shiny palm.
“I like it that way.”
“I do too, as a matter of fact. But, oh, Naomi, your poor heart!”
“I don’t care about my heart.”
He took another handful. “That’s not a very good attitude. Where, by the way, is Vivian?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t get off the bus. I’m waiting for someone to call and tell me why.”
“I always used to hate the school bus,” said Ron, shaking his head. “It was worse than the boys’ restroom. Did I ever tell you about the hell I went through in school?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I had thick glasses and an overbite and I was so skinny my pants hung off my hipbones—you wouldn’t believe the pictures of me then. They used to take me by the arm and the leg and throw me down the stairs.”
“Oh, Ron!”
“Ronald, then. I couldn’t walk down the aisle of the school bus without getting tripped. Most weeks something of mine would get tossed out the window. I’d have to get off at the next stop and search through the weeds for my hat or book or whatever it was, then walk the three, four, five miles home. I can’t tell you how happy I am to be an adult.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Do you think Vivian has that kind of trouble in school? Because she’s an odd one, you know. Those creeps can spot an odd one a mile off.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I really can’t tell. She doesn’t tell me much. I don’t think she’s very happy in general.”
He shook his head sadly. “The terrible part is, we can’t do a thing about it. Adults, I mean. We have no effect at all. My parents would sometimes call the school—if I came home so bloody and battered I couldn’t hide it from them—or, worse, they’d call someone else’s parents.” He rolled his eyes. “It just made it worse. Incalculably worse.”
I stood up and got some water from the faucet. “I don’t know. I like to think I make a difference to Vivian.”
“I’m sure you do,” he said, kindly. “It’s just that you won’t be able to take away her misery. No one can do that but Vivian.”
Ron had wandered out to the yard to work on his compost—he turned and watered it once a week, adding whatever substances he thought would hurry its decay—and I’d finished all the popcorn and washed the dishes before Miss Strunk called. She had a breathless, high-pitched voice.
“Miss Ash? I’m sorry to take so long to get back to you. Actually, I’m calling from my car. What a day!”
The line was dense with technological fuzz. “Sorry to bother you. I was just wondering if Vivian got on the bus this afternoon. She never showed up at this end.”
“She didn’t?” The signal vanished for a moment, and when it returned Miss Strunk sounded very far away. “…another bus, not her regular one. I think, anyway.”
“She got on a different bus? On purpose?”
“As far as I could tell. The bus drivers take care of all that, you know, the permission slips and all that. You should really call her parents. Sorry if I’m not much help.”
“You’ve been plenty of help,” I said.
Strunk, Strunk, Strunk, I thought when I hung up. It really was a terrible name.
I did, finally, manage to reach Elaine, after spending ten minutes on hold listening to the local talk radio station. A rerun of my mother’s show was on: The Mother Galina Psychic Hour, Encore Edition.
“Stop crying, dear. He’s with you all the time, he’s watching over you!”
“But I miss him!”
“No, you don’t, dear, you can’t, because he’s not gone. Now listen…”
“Oh, Mother Galina, I’m so lonely!”
This continued for some time. I was quite relieved when Elaine’s loud and chirpy voice came on.
“Hi, this is Elaine. How can I help you today?”
“Hi, Elaine, it’s Naomi. I’m calling because Vivian…”
“Oh, my goodness! I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! Oh, shame on me!”
“But what—”
“Oh, Naomi, I can’t believe it. We found another babysitter for Vivian. Much closer to home, on my way from work—it’s just so much more convenient! And there’ll be other kids there, and a snack…”
“Another babysitter?”
“Well, really, it’s a daycare center, but a small one. You know, intimate. And so close to work and home…”
“But Elaine…”
“And I figured, you know, with this investigation and all, you must have a lot on your mind…”
The investigation. Elaine chattered on, but I didn’t hear her. Instead I stared out the window, watching Ron dig at the compost with his yellow rubber gloves. He squatted on his heels, his frizzy head bent, picking through the rot to find what had refused to decay. He pulled out a root, a handful of pebbles.
Very gently, I hung up the phone.
I did not know what to do with myself. My first instinct was to call around, find out which daycare center Vivian was at, and then go get her. Of course, they wouldn’t let me do that, and besides, there probably was no such place. They couldn’t accept children on such short notice, could they? More likely Elaine had persuaded her husband to watch her for a few days while she looked for a new babysitter.
I walked around the house, pulling at my hair and imagining poor Vivian plunked down in f
ront of some Disney video, homework forgotten in her booksack.
When this all blows over, I thought, Elaine will come to her senses and give Vivian back, and everything will be back to normal.
But maybe it wouldn’t blow over. That was beginning to seem like a very real possibility. I needed to pull myself together and think.
My mother didn’t want to lend me the car, but I convinced her that I needed to get some things for the library from the office-supply store. She handed over the keys with a worried look.
“You’re not coming to Circles, then?”
“No,” I said.
The rain had mostly stopped, but the wind had picked up, hurling wet leaves into the windshield as I made my way around the lake. I set the wipers to intermittent. Along the shore, willow branches waved in the wind like skinny arms. The water itself was dark gray and cruel-looking, and sent waves over the bank and into the road.
I had mostly just wanted to drive around and think, but the closer I got to Wallamee the clearer it became to me that my real plan was to go see Vivian. I was pretty sure she’d be at home, and if not, perhaps her father would tell me where she was. I wanted to tell her not to worry; anything they’d said about me was wrong, that I still loved her and would be her babysitter again soon. It was not fair to uproot a child like this. And if I knew Elaine, she’d lied to Vivian, told her terrible things to make her comply.
But first I stopped at the office-supply store and bought enough sticky notes and labels and typewriter ribbon to last me out the decade.
Then I headed up the wide, bland avenues that made up the development where Elaine and her husband lived. There were no sidewalks, because there was no place to walk to from here, and the trees were no more than saplings clutching desperately to their green fertilized lawns. People here did unnatural things to shrubbery. Every house was flanked by an army of green bowling balls or cones or cylinders that looked like nothing else alive. It was Train Line’s opposite, the anti–Train Line. Elaine’s house, a low brick-and-stucco “home,” as she and her real estate cronies would call it, was nearly invisible behind its wall of evergreen. The driveway was black and smooth and freshly tarred, the lawn plush. From the outside, you’d never guess at the place’s dank, ill-furnished, cigarettey interior.
