Last Things

by Jenny Offill

  All summer, it never rained. My mother piled smooth stones in the backyard and called it a garden. Alec and I turned over the stones one by one, but there was never anything beneath them. My mother said that stones were last things and would be around long after people were gone. Other last things were oceans, metal, and crows. I thought that if I filled a birdbath with seawater and dropped a coin in it, I might glimpse the end of the world. My mother said that this was a sentimental notion. An example of another sentimental notion was my father’s idea that cockroaches would outlive us all.

  My mother liked the names of these birds: thrush, swallow, nightjar, starling; and not the names of these: duck, swift, hummingbird, puffin. She said that if she ever discovered a new bird she wouldn’t tell anyone. She knew a man who had found a bird in Brazil with a tiny purple heart on its breast and he had sold it to an aviary where they piped in monkey calls and the sound of rain.

  “Where are these secret birds?” I asked her. “Show me a secret bird.”

  My mother laughed. “Silly girl,” she said. “There are no secret birds in America. Someone has seen them all.”

  I believed that my mother kept a secret bird in our house, though I could never find it. Alec and I checked in the pantry and under her bed. We opened boxes slowly. Sometimes I expected to find an orange bird that could fit inside a thimble; other times, it seemed that my mother’s bird would have webbed feet and lay speckled eggs. Once I thought I heard the chirp of a bird inside the sound of the shower, but when I pulled back the curtain, my mother was empty-handed. Alec and I checked for feathers in the bathtub drain. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, my mother turned her hands into birds and made pictures on my wall.

  Aunt Fe and Uncle Pete planned to visit for a week, but they ended up staying three. Every morning, my mother made them a picnic lunch and they drove to the lake to swim and sunbathe. When she saw their car coming back at the end of the day, my mother would roll her eyes and pretend to faint. “How are we ever going to get rid of your parents, Alec?” she asked. “You can stay, of course, but I’ve had quite enough of them.”

  At the end of the third week, my mother had an idea. She would have a party and invite all the dullest people in town. Alec and I sat at the kitchen table and helped her draw up a list. There was Mrs. Finley, who sold dolls made of cornhusks, and Mr. Gowen, who collected bells. Also a family of amateur cyclists, and the newly elected county clerk. My father added two Civil War enthusiasts and the Latin teacher from his school. I voted to invite Mary, but Alec said she was away all summer at ballerina camp.

  The night of the party, Alec and I worked the crowd. I passed around cheese straws while he performed magic tricks. For his finale, Alec tore a card in half, then plucked it whole from behind a cyclist’s ear. “Mysterium fascinan,” the Latin teacher said.

  My mother called us into the kitchen. “It’s working like a charm, don’t you think?” In the next room, I could hear the county clerk telling my uncle the history of the Windler waterworks. My mother took out a platter of vegetables and dip. “I want to introduce Aunt Fe to the Civil War buffs,” she said.

  After she left, Alec picked up a carving knife and held it to my ribs. “I know a way to cut someone in half so there’s no blood. Want to see?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  We headed outside, but Aunt Fe saw the knife and took it away.

  “Motherfucking mother,” Alec said when we got to the backyard. “Now I can’t do my trick.”

  We sat down on the far side of the shed, out of sight of everyone. It was starting to get dark. The sky was the blue of just before night.

  Alec took out a cigarette and lit it. “I guess you could say I’m a nicotine fiend,” he said. He offered me a puff, but it made me cough. He took the cigarette away. “Sometimes I forget you’re still a baby,” he said. He laughed as if he’d made a joke. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a shadow in the corner of the yard.

  “A doghouse.”

  “Whose dog?”

  I shrugged. I had wondered about the doghouse too. It was in the backyard when we moved there. It looked just like a real house except that it was dog-sized. The funny thing was that it had a real door that could be locked from outside. Also, there was a tiny peephole cut into the wood so you could look in. It must have been a very bad dog, my mother said.

  Alec went over to look at the doghouse. I followed him. He latched and unlatched the lock. “I know a trick where I can break someone out of a room without ever unlocking the door,” he told me.

  I looked at him. His cape had a tear on one side where he’d snagged it on the garden hose. Marvin the Magnificent, he’d written on the collar inside.

  “How?” I said.

  “Get in and I’ll show you.”

  “No.”

  “Get in,” Alec said. He grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back.

  Someone came into the driveway and opened the car door. Alec dropped my arm and crouched in the shadows behind the doghouse. There was the sound of footsteps and then the door slammed shut again. “The Iceman cometh,” my father yelled to someone inside.

  “I bet they’re all drunk as skunks by now,” Alec said. He unlocked the latch to the doghouse and peered inside. I stood a little ways back.

  “Get in!” Alec said suddenly, yanking me toward the door by my hair. When I hesitated, he pulled harder. “I mean it, Grace.”

  I crawled into the doghouse on my hands and knees. The floor stank of old food. It was too dark to see anything, but I felt something soft underneath me. A blanket, I thought. The room was smaller than I’d imagined, too small to turn around. I started to back out, but Alec had already latched the lock.

  “Let me out,” I yelled. It was hard to breathe in the bad air. I banged on the wall, but Alec didn’t answer. In the pitch black, my hand touched something cold and smooth and I thought it was the skull of a dog. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about the dark. I could hear the wind picking up outside. “Alec,” I called again. Still, no answer. I closed my eyes. I thought that when I opened them the trick would have happened and I’d find myself outside.

  I counted to ten and opened my eyes. Nothing. I could hear my heart beating. I thought this was what my mother meant when she said my father was in the doghouse.

  I kicked the door with my foot, but it didn’t budge. “Please, is anyone there?”

  “Yes,” he said as if he’d been there all along.

  “Let me out, Alec.”

  Silence.

  “Alec?”

  “There’s no Alec here.”

  “Marvin?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to let me out?”

  “Only if you can answer this riddle.”

  My knees hurt from kneeling. I tried to shift positions, but one of my legs had fallen asleep. I remembered a story my mother had told me once about Africa. When a child turned twelve, he was taken to a secret hut deep in the bush, she said. This was the spirit house and for three nights he was left alone there while demons spoke to him in the voices of wild animals. These demons told him that he had been swallowed by a monster and was in the belly of the beast. If he closed his eyes for even one minute, the monster would tear him to pieces, but if he survived until daylight, he would become a new thing.

  What sort of thing, I’d asked my mother, and she’d said, “A perfect one, I suppose.”

  The wind died down and it was quiet again. “Listen carefully,” Alec said.

  “I’m no good at riddles.”

  Alec ignored me. He began speaking in a strange whispery voice like the voice of an old man.

  “Picture a locked room with ten-foot ceilings. Inside, a man has hung himself from the lighting fixture. The windows are closed and sealed shut from within. There is no furniture in the room, not even a single chair. The only thing is a puddle of water on the floor below the dead man. The question is, how did the man hang himself?”

  I tried to think.
Why wasn’t there any furniture in the room, I wondered. This seemed a better riddle to me.

  Alec banged on the roof with something hard. “Time’s up,” he said.

  “The man was a giant?” I guessed.

  Alec battered the roof fiercely. The sound was like a hundred stones falling. “Wrong,” he said. “Release denied.”

  “Please,” I said. I wanted to cry, but I knew if I did, he would never let me out. No one will find me here, I thought, and I’ll starve to death like that old dog.

  I curled up in a ball and closed my eyes. I could hear a plane passing overhead and the wind moving through the trees again. Nothing happened for a long time. Then I heard a small scratching at the door.

  “Marvin?” I whispered.

  “The answer is the man stood on a block of ice. As it melted, the noose tightened until it finally snapped his neck.”

  I heard a click as Alec unlatched the door. “You’re free to go,” he said.

  I backed out quickly before he could change his mind. Outside, the sky had turned from blue to black. Alec was nowhere to be found. In the distance, I could see my mother walking through the lighted rooms of our house. She was carrying a vase of flowers in her hand.

  I found Alec behind the shed, smoking. I hobbled toward him but he didn’t look up.

  I sat down next to him. “That was a stupid trick. Now my leg’s asleep.”

  He shrugged. “So hop,” he said.

  Someone turned the porch light on. “Alec, Grace, come in!” my mother called. She couldn’t see us in the dark. Alec ran down the driveway and into the house, slamming the door behind him. “There you are,” my mother said. She sat on the back steps and waited for me. There was a glass in her hand that glinted in the light. “Guess what I am?” I asked, hopping toward her, and she guessed a flamingo, because she always guessed right.

  The next morning, my aunt and uncle got up very early and packed the car. Alec convinced them to let him stay one more day. “I don’t mind driving him back,” my mother said. “There’s an old war monument along the route. Also the Museum of Cranberries.” She offered to take everyone on a tour of historical Windler, but Aunt Fe insisted they’d already overstayed.

  After Alec’s parents left, my mother drove us to the lake. It was an overcast day and hardly anyone was there. As soon as we got to the beach, my mother wandered off to look at birds. Alec and I played a game he had invented the summer before. The game was called New Worlds and it began with us standing apart from each other on distant rocks. Each time we played, it was exactly the same. Alec was the explorer and I was the native girl. The object was for him to reach the rock I was standing on before I finished counting to ten. If I reached ten before he got there, I could capture him and cook him in my cannibal pot.

  I closed my eyes and began to count. On eight, I heard him reach my rock.

  “I’ve conquered your country!” he yelled the moment his foot touched down. He whipped off his shirt and waved it like a flag. I had to give him my charm bracelet and my ring and all the money I had. “Prepare to be civilized,” he said.

  Alec leapt across the water to the highest rock of all, then stood there for a long time surveying his land. The sun was setting. “Canada’s on fire,” he said, shading his eyes.

  “Give me back my bracelet.”

  “What’s that? I can’t understand your language.” Alec laughed and dangled my bracelet above the water. His hands looked black against the sky.

  I picked my way across the rocks toward him. He didn’t move until I got within arm’s reach. Then he sidestepped me by jumping onto the next rock. He did this every time I got close enough to catch him. Finally, I lunged at him and caught his sleeve. He tried to twist away, but his foot slipped and he fell in.

  I watched him go underwater, thinking it was one of his tricks. The day before, he’d told me how the great Houdini had been shackled in chains and tossed in the sea. No one believed he’d escape, but of course he did.

  I waited for a long time, but Alec didn’t appear. I ran to the shore and found my mother. When I told her what had happened, she dove into the lake with her binoculars still around her neck.

  Alec wasn’t breathing when she pulled him from the water. She pumped his chest until water came out of his mouth and at last he sputtered out a breath. His hands were clenched into fists, but when he opened them my bracelet wasn’t there. My mother wrapped Alec in a towel and carried him to the car. He told her that he’d been trying to reach a bottle floating near the pier. Once my mother had told us a story about a woman who grew so small she could be fitted inside a bottle and sent to sea. Because of this, Alec and I sometimes walked along the shore, looking for bottles floating in on waves.

  My mother said that before Alec drowned he was slow, but after he came back he was quick. It was as if her dead father’s spirit had touched him in those moments he was gone. Her father could speak twelve languages and curse in more. “He’s the one that looked after you, Alec,” my mother said.

  That night, after dinner, my father sat in his red chair smoking a pipe. Alec jumped up on the footrest and pretended it was a rock. I made a sound like the wind. Alec toppled to the floor. For a moment he was a swimmer and then he was still. I rushed to him and breathed into his mouth. I pumped his chest again and again. After a long time, Alec blinked and waved his arms. One hand fluttered through the air, then rested on his heart.

  My father put down his pipe. He looked at Alec for a long time. “Did you see anything?” he asked finally. “Lights and beckoning figures, I suppose?” Alec shook his head. My mother appeared in the doorway. “What did you see?” my father said again. Alec stretched his arms out wide. He said that the last thing he saw was the wings of a great bird closing over his face. He looked at my mother, lovely in the doorway.

  The last night of summer, it was too hot to sleep. Only my father could. He could sleep through anything, my mother claimed. To prove this, she knelt beside his bed and played a kazoo in his ear. “See?” she said when he snored through “God Bless America.”

  In our nightgowns, we drove to the lake. It was quiet out. Just the trees and the dark night all around. At the edge of the water, my mother took off her clothes and dove in. The mouth of the lake closed over her. I was afraid, but I didn’t cry. Shh, I heard her say. Don’t say a word.

  It was like that sometimes. Her voice in my head, quiet and blurred like a piece of a dream. Shh, she said. Shh. The wind moved across the lake. It made a sound like a slap when it hit the waves. The monster lives here, I thought. I watched the white balloon of my mother’s face bob to the surface. It slept at night like we did, she said.

  The water was cool around my ankles. I waded in deeper and deeper until only my head showed. I pretended I was a woman whose head had been cut off and was floating out to sea. My mother had told me about guillotines and about the black-hooded executioner who pulled the string. I let my head drift along the waves, singing a sad little song. I’m dead, I’m just a head, I’m mean, I’m guillotined, the song went.

  My mother swam over to where I was. “I thought the monster got you,” she said. A piece of hair was plastered to her head like a question mark. The moon made her skin gleam. I hooked my arms around her neck and clung to her. The black lake of death, my mother called it when we went there at night.

  She swam like a turtle with me on her back. There were just a few stars out. We swam out past the end of the pier, toward the darkness that was Canada. The sky was a dingy gray streaked with white. It looked as if someone had wrung all the color out. I thought of the monster asleep at the bottom of the lake. Was he lonely, I wondered. Did he think he was the only monster in the world?

  My mother believed that the monster was a dinosaur left over from another time. Once in a blue moon, she said, a creature everyone thought was extinct was discovered in some remote corner of the world.

  This happened once off the coast of Africa when two fishermen caught a strange gray fish. The fi
sh had fierce-looking teeth and fins attached to leg-like stalks. Local fishermen were puzzled until a paleontologist came to town. He identified their catch as a coelacanth, a primitive fish believed extinct for more than thirty million years.

  My mother knew a lot of extinction stories, but this was the only one that ended happily.

  There have been two great extinctions since the beginning of time, she told me. The first one happened 245 million years ago and wiped out almost every living thing. The second one killed the dinosaurs, but no one knows why.

  When would the third extinction begin, I asked, but my mother said it already had and that it wouldn’t end until the last human being disappeared from Earth.

  In the distance, the lights from the shore flickered and went out. There was a floating dock far out in the lake and this was what we swam toward. I tightened my grip around my mother’s neck. She was swimming more slowly than before. I was afraid she might fall asleep and sink.

  I tugged on her hair. “I want to go home,” I said. “Right now, I want to.” My mother didn’t answer. She always said that one day she would swim to Canada and I worried that this was that day. I thought about how Alec had gone underwater and seen a secret bird. I made myself limp and slid off her back. I closed my eyes and tried to drop like a stone to the bottom of the lake. The water grew colder and colder the farther I sank. I pretended I was blind. I pretended I was a fish who could breathe through my skin. I thought that soon I’d touch the bottom of the lake and it would be soft like moss. Then I could push myself back up to the surface and surprise my mother.