“No one died in our house,” says Bernard. “Psych.”
We follow Todd through some brush. “Five people died in your house,” says Todd. “One father, one mother, three kids.”
Cause of death: fire. “But it wasn’t the burning that did it,” says Todd. “In fact, they were hardly burned at all.”
“From what, then?” says Bernard.
“From the fire sucking their lungs out.”
“Super psych!” says Bernard. “Sure, Todd.”
“It’s the nature of fire,” Todd says. And he’s very calm as he describes the instantness of the vacuum caused by the fire sucking away all the oxygen. How you can’t escape—the fire will suck it out of you. It will suck it right out of your own mouth.
“You’re supposed to crawl on the floor!” says Bernard. “The stupids. Anybody knows that.”
“Wouldn’t matter where you crawled,” says Todd. “Not in this case.”
“Okay,” says Bernard, “so how come the house didn’t burn down?”
“It was a very special case,” says Todd.
And I remember the first day of moving in, the smell of burned wood that was so strong that Mom said not to bring it up. That we would get used to it faster if we didn’t mention it. Now I can hardly smell it at all, even if I try.
III.
Mrs. Popkin! says my mother that morning. Something is wrong with her eyes, and her hair is not quite combed right. People stare after her as she walks through the supermarket, stepping slightly too fast for normal.
Ooooh, Mrs. Poppy-kins! she says, and tries to pinch my cheek.
Which is almost too embarrassing to even think of it.
“There’s something wrong with you,” I say to my mother.
I don’t actually. But I think it.
Later, Mrs. Popkin and I are sitting at her kitchen table and I watch as she lights a row of pink candles that smell of rose perfume. On the biggest candle, in gold lettering, it says:
LORD, bless our door, that opens wide
To welcome those who come inside!
And bless our house, dear LORD above
That we may share YOUR peace and love!
Mrs. Popkin loves blessings, she says. Also angels, miracles, the works of God.
“I don’t believe in forcing my religion on people,” she says. “I’m not a holy roller like some of them.”
She puts the ham of her foot up on the edge of the table and flexes out her toes.
“Don’t tell your mother you saw me putting my foot up on the table like this,” she says. Smiles. Unscrews the cap of her nail polish.
I watch as she dips the brush into the nail polish and lifts it. She presses the hairs of the brush against the mouth of the nail polish bottle until the excess paint has squeezed off. Drip. Drip. Then she brings the applicator slowly toward her pinkie toe. I don’t say anything. In the kitchen doorway stands the girl Cecilia, with her weird small mouth and staring eyes. She is very still on the threshold, observing us, holding a rabbit in her arms like it’s a cat.
“I got my first baby when I was fifteen years old,” Mrs. Popkin tells me. “Only a few years older than you. That must seem so strange. Does it?”
“Not really,” I say.
I watch as Mrs. Popkin fans her toes with a letter, a piece of junk mail I guess, and Cecilia watches too. Very still, holding her rabbit and petting it in long slow strokes.
“It’s just old-fashioned,” Mrs. Popkin says. “That’s the way the people always used to do it. Back in the olden days, fifteen wasn’t even considered young. And I’m actually glad I started early because I love babies. Some women don’t like it, but I do.”
“That’s good,” I say, and Cecilia and I glance at each other. There is a little bit of smoke lifting up from the candle, vanishing before it gets very far. But when I look upward, I can see all the smoke stains running along the surface of the ceiling, gray-black smoke stains from that long-ago fire, I guess. The stains are like figures and shadows and branches. A thicket.
“Um,” Cecilia says, after there has been a little silence. “Todd, Bernard is looking for you.”
“Oh, Cecilia,” Mrs. Popkin says, and she leans toward me and gives a wink. “That girl. Always interrupting,” she whispers, as if she doesn’t want Cecilia to hear us.
IV.
The way Mom talks to him:
I am noticing their deal with each other where she talks to him like a person, like she talked at our before-house, when we still had cousins and aunts and uncles coming over, when she would tell people the door was always open, our door was always open.
The way she pours him coffee. When she puts his cup down along with Coffee-mate and the sugar bowl and says, “You don’t have to drink it—it’s just that one cup of coffee looks so by-itself.” I am looking at Todd, the way he drinks it like a person. Not like a kid. If he was a midget, if he was like Romey, then okay. I would say okay. But he is for sure not a midget, although he slightly acts like it.
The way he doesn’t show his personality to her. Where with us he will talk about the people who died in our house and it makes you nervous but you still keep listening. Like how there was no screaming because with your oxygen sucked out, you can’t scream. You can only silent scream.
And that the silent scream is the worst scream of all.
But to Mom, he says he didn’t know the dead people that well when she asks if the house is more attractive inside now. He says he didn’t come inside all that much before because his mother didn’t like the old family, but he knows it was way darker because they kept their drapes shut.
Then later I walk up the hill—I will admit I wanted to spy on his house a little—but I did not expect his mom to instantly come out. I keep walking, but his mom says, “Are you a Popkin? Are you one of the Popkin brood?”
So I stop and she says, “You think your mother would trade me one of her big boys for my son? He seems to be over there enough. Think she could send over a boy to be infatuated with me?”
She laughs in the direction of my house. She says she saw we had rabbits and that she loves rabbit and Todd also loves rabbit and do we sell them cleaned?
We don’t sell them, I say.
She says to ask my mom if she would consider it. The people before us weren’t stingy with their rabbits and is Mom my natural mother? Because I don’t look like her at all and do I know there was a girl named Karen about my age who used to live there? And that Todd about died when that family moved away.
“He was so close to that Karen,” says Todd’s mom.
I say I have to go, but she keeps talking. I walk away and she follows. When I run, she laughs. “Oh, I don’t bite, for heaven’s sake!” she calls.
Later I’m with Todd and Bernard walking back to the cutoff.
I say to Todd: “Your mom said the people who lived in our house moved.”
He says: “They did. They moved to the cemetery.”
Bernard is laughing very hard at this. He says it’s a good one. “That’s a good one,” he says.
V.
When I walk back home up the hill, I think about how I could confront Mother. How dare you! I think about saying.
It is the sort of thing that Bernard makes fun of, like I’m trying to sound like some kind of professor or from England, he says, but I like the dignity of it. How dare you! I think, and I like the way the words feel, like the Statue of Liberty holding a torch aloft over the ocean. How dare you, Mother! How dare you tell lies to my friends!
But when I come in, she is asleep on the couch in that position, her knees pulled up and her shoulders hunched and her hands loosely covering her eyes. In my encyclopedia, there are pictures of the ancient Romans who died in Pompeii, cowering in such a position, turned to statues as the ashes covered them.
I go into the kitchen and make myself a peanut butter sandwich for dinner. Peanut butter on one piece of bread. Margarine on the other piece of bread. Slices of apple in the middle. I am making
this sandwich and pretending that I am building something.
But I can still hear her in the next room. Breathing, breathing.
When Karen and her family died, when their house burned and they died, my mother said, Oh, honey, please don’t be sad, please please don’t be sad. I was lying there facedown on the bed with the pillow against my eyes and she put her hand on my back and rubbed along my spine.
Do you know what I think? she said at last, very softly. I think that they moved away. That’s what I think. I think they moved away to someplace far away like—I don’t know—Washington or Oregon or California.
I felt her long fingernail trace its way up between my shoulder blades, up the back of my neck to the place where my spine connected to my skull. I didn’t move.
And even though they are gone, my mother said, even though they are gone and we will miss them, we know that they are having a good time in—Oregon. And we can write them a letter, if we want.
“That’s stupid,” I said. I whispered under my breath.
I have the address right here, she murmured. Karen’s mom left it for me. Here, I’ll write it on your back.
And I felt her tracing out the numbers and letters with her fingernail.
When the house where Karen and her family lived caught on fire, my mother was in one of her manic states. She was up all night for several days, drawing pictures, trying out horrible recipes for things like aspic or haggis, making artworks from twigs and leaves and nature items that she found outside. She woke me up in the middle of the night and the light of the fire was flickering in my window. The wind had carried the bits of ash up the hill and it drifted through the air like the fluff from cottonwood trees.
“Todd,” my mother said, and she shook me awake; it must have been three thirty in the morning. “Todd—Todd—Todd—” she whispered.
I sat up in bed and she was already outside again, standing in the yard in her T-shirt with no pants on. She was doing a kind of dance, like she was a cheerleader, shaking her hands as if she had pom-poms in her fists. “Hi!” she called—up toward the sky, and skipped forward, then back. “Hi! Hi!” Like maybe she was saying hello to God, or the stars, or a UFO. Ash was coming down. “Hi!” she said rhythmically. “Hi! Hi!”
VI.
Mrs. Hotchkiss comes over in her Hotchkiss Farms station wagon and we all sit very still watching through the sheers as she looks around and calls hello.
Hello hello!
And it looks as if her eyes are right on us, but Mom says she can’t see a thing through the sheers during the day because they trap the shadows. Mrs. Hotchkiss reaches her hand in the driver’s window and taps the horn. Why doesn’t she just come to the door and knock?
Why doesn’t anyone come to the door? They just stand there until you come out. Except Todd. He knocks at the door. He knocks even though Mom has said he doesn’t need to. He is always welcome. But he likes to knock. He likes her opening the door for him.
Hello?
Old Lady Hotchkiss is about ready to leave, she is getting back in the station wagon, when Mom jumps up and opens the door and invites her in.
The coffeepot is heaving, they are at the table smoking, Mrs. Hotchkiss brought by her extra seed potatoes and tomato starts in case we could use them, and she wants us to know she could use berry pickers in about a week and she preferred girls—Dee sent her girl, Dee, the name of the lady, Dee, the former mom of this house, she assumes we’ve heard the story, and Mrs. Hotchkiss says history does repeat itself because here she is smoking in Dee’s kitchen again, and isn’t life a mystery? They know it wasn’t arson for a provable fact, but people still say that something feels not all the way right. Well, time marches on, and it’s good to have people here again and are you keeping rabbits just for enjoyment? Well, that’s a luxury! And then Todd knocking.
I’m going to answer the door and Mom does it instead.
“Why, Todd! Come in! Bernard’s around here somewhere. Cecilia, help Todd find Bernard.”
Todd looks disappointed as he follows me through the kitchen and out the back door.
I head down to the hutch to get Ivan.
Behind me is Dee’s Place. Mrs. Hotchkiss said we shouldn’t take it wrong if people called it Dee’s Place even now. I am thinking of the fire and holding Ivan and getting the shivers—a fire that killed the people but left the house standing, a fire at Dee’s Place.
And then Todd is there beside me saying, “What did Old Lady Hotchkiss tell you?”
Me: Nothing.
Todd: She tell you my mom set the fire?
Me: No.
Todd: What’d she tell you?
Me: That history repeats itself.
Todd: Better let that rabbit go, then. Better let all your rabbits go.
VII.
Bernard, Cecilia, and I walk along the banks of the creek, and Ivan the Rabbit lopes along beside us. I ask them what if he runs away and Cecilia says don’t worry, he won’t. It’s late morning on a Saturday and there are patches of clover that the rabbit stops to nibble in his quick, scared rabbity way, but he seems to keep an eye on us. When we begin to walk forward he quits eating the clover and follows us. He’s wearing a little blue sweater from one of Cecilia’s dolls.
We are looking for the cat I saw that night when I stayed over, the pale cat that must have come in through the open window while we slept. I was in the bedroom with Bernard and I woke up and everyone was asleep, and a cat was sitting on my chest, purring.
“We don’t have a cat,” Mrs. Popkin told me the next morning. “I can’t abide them.” The other kids were still asleep, and we sat at the kitchen table in silence.
“Don’t tell your mother you saw me taking down my curlers in my kitchen,” Mrs. Popkin said. “It’s unsanitary. But I like looking out this window.
“Why don’t you go play on that old tire swing,” Mrs. Popkin said. “It’ll give me something to watch while I’m doing my hair.”
We both looked out at it, turning in the breeze.
“Go on,” she said. “I’ll watch.”
It must have been a stray cat, Cecilia says now.
I do not tell them that it has occurred to me that the cat was a kind of ghostly manifestation.
I do not say that maybe it is a spirit connected in some way to Karen, who died in the fire, my friend Karen who suffocated, the oxygen sucked out of her so she couldn’t even make a sound.
Maybe it has kittens somewhere around here, Cecilia says.
I think about what it felt like to wake up with the weight of the cat on my chest. The cat had been sitting there looking down at me; its eyes were hooked onto my face as if it was waiting for a mouse to come out of my mouth.
Here, kitty, kitty, kitty, Bernard calls. Unless Todd’s psyching us.
Here, kitty, Cecilia says also, and then she glances over at me.
But personally, I am quiet. Up at the house, the older brothers have come home in the pickup, and I watch as they start unloading heavy rocks from the back, thick and trudging as mules. I don’t think I have ever seen them without a frown; I don’t think I’ve even heard them talk except to grunt at one another moodily. But Mrs. Popkin exclaims at them in her jolly way: It’s about time you boys got back! I was about to send out the search party!
For a while as we are walking along, we talk about the fire.
What did Old Lady Hotchkiss tell you? I ask. I can hear my own voice as if I am listening in another room. She tell you my mom set that fire?
I can feel my face getting red and my voice like something that a ventriloquist put inside of me. It’s just because my mom is a little eccentric, I tell them, people suspected her.
“What’s excentric?” Bernard says, and they both look at me. Bernard scrunches his round, freckled face, and Cecilia eyes me skeptically, fingering the plastic barrette in her short-cropped hair, and Ivan puts his ears back and I am reflected in his magenta eye.
“It means . . . ,” I say. “It just means different. Very, ver
y different from other people.
“She had to go down to the police station and take a lie-detector test,” I tell them, which actually isn’t true. They never took her down to the police station, though I wished they had.
“She passed the lie detector,” I tell them. “So that should have been the end of it but some people still gossip,” I say. “Certain people hate my mother.”
And that, at least, is true. I don’t really know if people like Old Lady Hotchkiss think that she started the fire at Karen’s house, but whenever we are in town I can see the way their eyes rest on us. They are suspicious of her, uncomfortable, and why shouldn’t they be? Even when she is trying to be normal, you can sense a force coming out of her in ripples, like radiation. Sometimes we are standing in line at the supermarket or the post office and I will feel it. Repellent.
We are repellent, and I feel my face getting hot just thinking of it. I put my hand on my chest because I can almost feel that cat sitting there, that weird kind of pressure.
We come at last to the place on the edge of the creek where Karen and I used to like to play. There is the crab-apple tree where we nailed wooden slats to the trunk so it was easier to climb up into the branches. There is the soft, loamy ground where we buried pieces of our old toys—a plastic tea set, Matchbox cars, GI Joe legs, a bent Slinky—because we liked to pretend that we were archaeologists and we were going to find a forgotten civilization. There is the place where Karen and I saw the poisonous mushrooms, the Destroying Angel, Amanita virosa is the Latin name of the mushroom. Once Karen and I had talked about putting some of those mushrooms into my mom’s food, and standing here now, I wonder what would have happened.
VIII.
Eating a rabbit. Todd has done it. My mom has done it. My brothers and even me. I am told when I was little I did not mind it. When Mawmaw fixed it, I ate it.
And I don’t remember it or the taste of it, but the thought of it is in my mouth and in my teeth and when Mom tells the story of how I loved Mawmaw’s stew before I knew what was in it and how I screamed bloody murder when I realized it—she always tells it in the same way and she does not skip a word when she tells Mrs. Hotchkiss—as I try to sneak off the back porch steps she says
Seize the Night Page 26
