by Kathy Parks
On the other side of the stream and in among a sparse grove of pine trees is, finally, the family outhouse. And then I see something else. A narrow path that leads back down the mountain.
This is the way home.
Clara doesn’t seem to notice what’s caught my eye. She gives me a handful of leaves.
I look down at them. “I prefer Charmin, thank you,” I tell her.
I smile, and she smiles at my expression. My mind is whirling with the new information. Clara is small, a tiny slip of a girl. She couldn’t hold me back if I bolted into the woods. But first things first. I take the open outhouse door, prepared for the horrors within.
I’m pleasantly surprised that, though it consists of a low bench with a hole cut in it, I can actually detect nothing but a brisk pine odor. I’ve encountered far grosser bathrooms in my high school.
It’s awkward to go through this process with a broken arm. It makes everything more difficult. The leaves are not terribly absorbent. But I do the best I can. It takes me quite a while to get my pants up. I crouch by the door in the dimness, gathering the courage for my escape attempt.
Clara calls to me. “A-drum? A-drum?”
“Coming!” I call in English. I grab the rope that opens the door, take a deep breath, and burst out into the light.
I pull up fast, stopping in my tracks.
The younger brother stands next to his sister. He’s holding Sergei’s gun in his hands. He’s not pointing it at me, but the meaning is clear. I’m not going anywhere.
“A-drum!” Clara cries, seizing my hand in delight, but the brother does not look so delighted. Maybe he read my guilty expression, I don’t know.
We troop back together across the stream, into the clearing, and past the garden. I keep glancing at the younger brother. Under that beard, he really has a pleasant and even handsome face. Although he is carrying a weapon, his body language is rather shy.
He needs a name. I can’t keep calling him “the younger brother” or “the possibly non-murderous one.”
I’m going to name him Woody. It just feels right, something homemade and at home in the wilderness.
As we are walking toward the hut, we pass the older brother, busy at work with his pickax, and I glance down at the hole the men have been digging.
I gasp. My empty stomach clenches.
It’s not a hole. It’s a grave.
* * *
Yuri told me that the family was clearly starving, the father thinnest of all. Yuri could see his veins through his skin.
Dr. Daniel Westin
New York Times article
* * *
Thirteen
I’m back in my chair. Every nerve in my body on edge. Thoughts racing. Mouth dry.
It’s true, what Yuri said. They are planning to kill me, just as they were planning to kill him before he escaped. They are simply taking their time.
I watch the women prepare dinner. The fire inside the stove warms the boards of my homemade cast, but I take no comfort in the sensation. They’ve made a stew with some kind of meat I can’t identify and potatoes and onions, as well as some herbs and a few sliced carrots. The aroma of blood is strong. I wonder if whatever animal they are cooking died in fear.
Clara and her mother talk among themselves, occasionally throwing glances at me as though to make sure I’m still there. Each time they glance at me, I look away, afraid I will somehow antagonize them. Part of me wants to jump up at that very moment and run for it, but I can hear the voices of the brothers outside over the chopping of wood.
They are strong men. With sharp utensils. I don’t stand a chance. All I can do is wait for a chance to beg for my life, although even the Russian word for life escapes me. Tears and a pleading tone and a few words are all I have. Very primitive tools for such an urgent task.
Just as the hut begins to darken, the men come in, and I stiffen. Woody throws me an unreadable glance. The older one scowls, sets a torch in the middle of the hut, and lights it. The hut fills with an orange glow. I’m amazed to see the mother start ladling soup into small white bowls. It’s hard to imagine a family who looks and sounds this strange to be eating out of bowls that look very much like the ones in our house.
I watch the bowls. I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours. And yet, I count four bowls, and the amount of soup the mother ladles in hardly fills any of them more than half before the ladle makes a scraping sound against the bottom of the kettle. I notice, for the first time, how thin the mother’s arms are. I imagine that, like all mothers, she takes the smallest amount for herself.
The family gathers at the table. The mother sets down their bowls and then sits down herself. They bow their heads as the older brother leads what must be a prayer in a grim and gravelly voice.
I’ve heard prayers before. There seems to be no love in this prayer. Instead I hear a tone of grudging obedience, as though God were a father that the son secretly hates. I bow my head too, in case someone might glance over at me and take offense if I did not.
Thou shalt not kill.
As I listen to the grating Russian prayer, I whisper prayers of my own. I have to admit that my belief in God took a giant hit when my father died, but now I send out a prayer to that vague being out there to please let me live until the morning. When I finish, the brother is still praying, his voice full of resentment. I imagine his god getting tired of the prayer, rolling his eyes.
At last the older brother falls silent. His mother passes a tiny plate over to him with a tiny white packet on it. He breaks a small white packet over the plate as the family murmurs. I realize it’s one of the salt packets from my backpack. They are using this to flavor their meat. Will they use it to flavor my meat? I shudder. Whatever hunger I had earlier is gone now. I wouldn’t be able to take a single bite, even if they offered it to me.
They pass the tiny plate around, each of them gathering the smallest amount of salt with their fingers and sprinkling it on their stew, the rest of the family watching. I never thought much about salt or going through a lifetime deprived of it, but it seems to fascinate them.
Finally they are ready to eat. My hands unclench a little. Their focus is on the food for now at least. Clara, though, is not eating. She stares at her bowl. Suddenly she rises from the table with the bowl. The family stops eating. Her big brother calls to her sharply, but she ignores him.
To my horror, I realize that she is walking over to me to offer me her bowl of soup. A kind and honorable gesture, except when directed at someone who wants desperately to keep a low profile and not make a fuss. And apparently, this is making a fuss, because the entire family now is arguing some point I can’t understand. The older brother is especially angry. He jumps to his feet.
“Clara!” he calls sharply.
But she doesn’t pay him any mind. She’s reaching over to me now, handing me her bowl of soup, although I am shaking my head. “No, no, no, no!”
But she’s insisting with dove talk, pushing it on me so that finally I reach to take it, an action that so outrages the older brother that he barks out something suddenly just as my fingers touch the warm bowl.
My hand shakes. The bowl tips and falls to the floor. China shatters. Hot soup flies onto my bare feet and I shriek and jump out of my chair.
Silence falls for a second. Clara’s mouth hangs open. The family’s eyes are wide.
“I’m sorry!” I cry. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
I turn around and run out the door. My body’s gone rogue on me; it’s running away before I can stop it. I slam the door behind me. I know I have only a few seconds before that door flies open and I’m caught. In my desperation, I hurl myself at the nearest hiding place: the grave.
I lie, there, face to the night sky, the stars very sharp above me, as the door opens and the shouting family pours out. I hold my breath and curl my hands into fists, waiting and praying. Sweat pours down my face despite the chill in the air. Up in the sky, the same Big Dipper looks down on me as it did
during my nights camping in Colorado.
The older brother’s voice gets louder as he comes closer to me. I shiver, every muscle in my body tense, willing myself to put off no heat or sound. I want to be an object, a mold of something plastic, a baseball bat—anything but a living human being.
His voice gets louder. He’s almost here. He calls out something to his brother, then moves on. Their voices fade into the night.
“A-drum! A-drum!”
It’s Clara’s voice, calling to me from near the open door. She sounds wistful at first, then concerned, then sad. Her voice breaks. She sniffles. Then I hear the voice of her mother. Soft, reassuring. As though consoling her over some kind of dead or missing pet. I haven’t yet heard a sound this maternal coming from this woman, and it intrigues me even as I remain frozen, letting my breath out through my nose and then drawing back in so as not to draw attention.
Finally the voices cease. The door opens and closes. I wait another few moments. This grave fits me perfectly. An inch of room at my head and my feet. It fits me at the shoulders and the hips. It fits me so well that it could fit me forever.
I definitely need to go.
Cautiously, I raise my head out of the grave and look around. I gulp. Clara is nowhere to be seen, but her mother is still standing outside, her back to me. She’s taken off her kerchief and let down her long gray hair. A cool wind moves it as she stands there in her burlap dress, looking up at something in the trees.
I’m not sure whether I should wait or make a dash for the stream and the path beyond it. I decide to wait. I watch her as she raises an arm.
A sudden fluttering of wings. A winged creature dives from a branch and alights on her arm. I stare at it in wonder. It’s an owl.
She begins to murmur to the owl, something calm and friendly, a string of Russian words that have the cadence of a chant. The owl watches her and I lean forward, fascinated.
Just then the owl swivels its head and stares directly at me.
The mother swivels her head too. They both stare at me as I half crouch in the moonlight.
“Podozhdite!” she shouts.
I bolt out of the grave and run as fast as I can past the circle of stones, plunging into the field of sunflowers.
“Podozhite!” Again she screams the unfamiliar word. Far away past the stream, the older brother’s voice answers in the darkness.
“Mama?”
I turn and head toward the woods to my right, reversing course. I stumble, fall, get up, fight the darkness that prickles and dips and buzzes and shrieks and tears at my clothes, trampling the stalks of the sunflowers.
The mother cries out one more time, and then I hear a fluttering of wings as the owl swoops for me. I cover my head and charge straight into the thick forest, tearing through the brush as I struggle to get away. I battle things I can’t see, tangles of vines and branches and sticks and webs, all kinds of textures that rattle and break, pushing where the owl can’t follow me, squeezing between trees and crawling on rotted leaves, the stars blocked out by the dense treetops overhead. I’m the wildest thing out here, the most out of place, the least evolved. My arms and legs are stupid, useless. I need claws and teeth. But I keep lunging forward until there are no voices anymore; the owl is gone and the family is gone and I crouch completely out of breath, alone in the forest.
I lean back against a tree and try to gather myself.
There is no chance of rescue. No one will even know we are missing for another two weeks. And then what? Even if somehow a rescue party did make it this far, where would they look? I’m on my own. I have to use my wits to stay alive.
The woods are recovering from the shock of my intrusion. Night birds begin to call. Crickets start up again. Every now and then something skitters nearby, and I jump. Mosquitos bite my arms and face. I slap them away, making small wet splashes on my face with my own blood as their bodies explode.
The memory of the mother and the wild owl play on my nerves. I don’t think the owl can get to me now, or the mother. And the sons must be looking in the wrong direction. Unless the mother is truly a witch and drifting through the trees to me right now, her feet barely touching the ground.
I shake the thought away and decide to stay where I am and wait, and let some time pass by before I attempt to make a move. In the meantime, I think about my father. Think about the outline of the Big Dipper I saw from my own open grave. I look up and can barely make out a patch of night sky between the trees.
“Dad, are you up there?” I whisper.
He didn’t die immediately. It took him twelve days. In that time period I invoked my ten-year-old magic, praying to a variety of gods, casting spells, even burying my marble collection in the backyard as a sacrifice. A candle flame burned my nose when I tried to chant into it. I walked around the neighborhood, retracing his last route, stopped in the place where the tire marks still hadn’t been scrubbed, and stared beseechingly up at the sky, as though the sight of my sad ten-year-old face would move some celestial court into action. Look at that kid. Let’s wake up her father.
My mother explained, in that quavery voice that meant she was trying to be strong for me, that they were doing tests on his brain, and that machines were helping him breathe. He was here, and he wasn’t here. Dead and alive. Present and absent. Not quite of the earth anymore but hovering somewhere above it, in the part of the atmosphere that is neither cold nor hot, above the treetops, below the weather balloons.
Somehow I was still supposed to go to school and come home to a sitter who would make my dinner and help me with homework while my mother stayed at my father’s side in the ICU.
The sitter, whose name was Heather, was an older girl, nineteen or twenty, who lived down the street and moved back in with her parents after flunking out of college. She was large and heavy footed and made a lot of noise on our floors. She’d make the same dinner every night—Hamburger Helper—and we’d eat it while she stared at the Travel Channel.
“I’m going to go there,” she’d say to just about everything, in a voice that sounded spacey.
I watched with her: the dreamy islands, the ice-blue sky spilling off glaciers, the rain forests of Ecuador.
I didn’t want to go to any of those places. I wanted to go to the hospital.
One night Heather peered at me, studying me. “So your father got run over.”
I didn’t know how to respond. Having it put that way, so casually, made him sound like a dog or a squirrel. But then again, my mother told me Heather had trouble communicating with people. I didn’t really care. I just wanted her to keep her snout in her Hamburger Helper and mind her own business. “He was hit by a car,” I said.
“That’s tough,” she said.
“I’m praying a lot,” I said. “To a bunch of different people. Do you want to pray with me?”
“Prayer’s bullshit,” she said.
That night when Mom got home, I told her what Heather said, and the next night, some girl named Samantha had taken her place.
I kept up the spells, the magic. Samantha helped me light candles and bury toys. I saw my father in a dream one night, and he told me he was going to make it. When I told my mother this the next morning when she was cooking me breakfast, she didn’t answer but gave me a pancake that wasn’t done in the middle and went to her room.
She let me visit him only once in ICU, on the eighth day. He looked very normal, and the ICU room looked more like a cleared-out storage closet. I expected everything to be dramatic, like the ICUs on TV shows, but everything just seemed very neat and clean and calm, a few tubes running in and out of him, a monitor over his head, and the breathing machine.
I had a gift for him: a pinecone I’d saved from one of our hikes and spray-painted gold in a special healing ceremony I’d thought up myself. I put it on the table next to him as I left and said, “I’ll see you, Daddy,” starting out very casually but crying by the time I reached the end of the sentence.
It was all over on a Saturday.
Samantha and I were watching River Monsters when my mother came through the door with a strange expression on her face and handed Samantha her money and said, “That’s it for us, dear. You don’t need to come back.” Samantha’s face studied hers, and by the time the meaning sank into her, it had sunk into me and I said, “No, wait,” as if Samantha being handed the money was what would actually kill him and I had to stop it.
My dad didn’t want to be buried. He wanted to be cremated, and my mother respected his wishes. There was no big funeral, just a ceremony out on the mountain with some of his running buddies and his lawyer friends and our grandparents, who were too old to climb the mountain and so we moved everything to the base, which made sense to me, actually, because that’s where every trip begins and ends.
My mother washed and dried his jogging shirt and shorts and ironed them and kept them in his drawer, as if he’d be back some day needing to look really sharp and collected on his next run. There were a lot of things to decide: like, what to do with the half-finished Scotch that he liked and Mom didn’t, and where to put his clothes and his rowing machine, and what to do with the failed magic of the pinecone that the nurses thoughtfully wrapped up for us, and how to live without him. The entire event, from the night the door shut when my father went jogging until the day after the funeral, seemed to have taken place in the blink of an eye, just long enough for the house to be lifted up and have its parts twisted around like a Rubik’s Cube and set down with none of the colors matching.
For a while, I’d make my mother drive me to the mountains where his ashes were scattered just to see if maybe I could catch a glimpse of him. She took me a half dozen times until her grief counselor, right or wrong, told her to stop. But I never saw even a glimpse of him. I stopped believing then, in magic spells and wishful thinking and dreams that mean something. I didn’t even believe in God. I believed in what I saw and what was true. I had no more belief left for anything.
