by Tara Conklin
I looked up from my notebook and nodded.
“Do you have a pet rabbit?”
I put down my pencil and closed the book. “She ran away,” I explained, “to be with her brothers and sisters.”
Ace began to laugh, great big peals. He held his stomach for effect and rolled over onto his back.
“Run away?” he said. “She didn’t run away. I took that rabbit.”
“But why?” I asked. I wasn’t angry yet, only confused.
“She was a mighty fine rabbit. Mighty. Fine.” Ace licked his lips with a slurping sound.
“Oh, stop it, Ace,” Nathan called. He was swimming, treading water as he listened. “Don’t tease Fiona.”
“I’m not teasing! I’m just telling the truth! ‘Don’t tease the girls, Ace. Don’t tell lies. Be a good boy like me.’” The last he said in a mocking, high voice. Nathan didn’t respond. He ducked his head beneath the water.
“You didn’t,” I said to Ace. “You did not.”
“I didn’t eat her, no. I’m just kidding. What I did was I took her over to the railroad tracks, down the other side of the hill, and played with her a little. I just left her there. On the tracks, I mean.”
Brown freckles marked the high point of Ace’s cheeks. They seemed to darken as he spoke.
“I tried to tie her to the track, put a rope around her leg,” he said. “I mean, so I could go back for her, bring her back to your house, but I think she must have gotten away. There was only a little bit of fur when I went to find her. Just a teeny scrap.”
My face grew hot, a pressure rose behind my eyes. I believed that Ace was lying, that he wanted to see me cry, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But I couldn’t help myself. I remembered Celeste and her clean fur, her twitching triangular nose.
Soft, lovely, new, alone.
Joe saw me crying. “What did you do to her?” he called across the grass to Ace. Joe’s voice was sharp. He was playing solitaire, the cards spread in front of him, half a deck still in his hands.
I wanted to say, I’m fine, Joe, but the words wouldn’t come. The humid air moved thickly through my lungs. And then Ace answered for me. He repeated everything he’d told me about Celeste and the train tracks. Joe’s face went still as Ace spoke. I remembered how Joe had loved the rabbit, too.
“You’re lying,” he said to Ace.
“I’m not,” Ace answered. Now everyone was listening. Renee had stayed home that day to bake a pie from the raspberries that grew like weeds in the alley behind our house, but the rest of us were there: me, Caroline, Nathan, and two of the Goats. At the pond the lack of parental oversight made us wild in one way but conservative in another. We did not swear or fight with one another. We avoided conflict. Only Ace seemed intent on something more destructive. This would be true his entire life.
Ace was shorter than Joe, but heavier and thicker. He played no sports; he seemed to exist only on cans of Orange Crush and cellophane packages of Hostess doughnuts he would eat in three bites, powdered sugar ghosting his mouth.
“What are you going to do?” Ace said. “Huh, Joe? Big strong Joe?”
We watched Joe: he was very tan, which made his eyes more blue and his hair more gold than brown. All the swimming and hiking up and down the hill had melted away his baby fat. You could see in Joe now the beginning of his broad, muscular shoulders, the athlete’s chest and stomach that years later he would rub with baby oil as a lifeguard at the Bexley rec center’s pool, surrounded always by a cadre of high-school girls who looked like women.
But today he was still a boy. At his eyebrow one slender muscle twitched.
Joe did what I remembered instantly Noni doing from before the Pause, before our father’s death, when she was still our mother and engaged in the task of taking care of us. Joe counted down.
“If you don’t take it back in five seconds,” Joe said, “you’ll be sorry.” He swallowed and flicked his cowlick back from his eyes. “Five. Four. Three. Two—”
Before Joe could finish, Ace turned and ran. His legs carried him up away from the bank and around to the slippery top of the dam where the water rushed over concrete gummed with green algae. He pranced along the top. “Come and get me, Joe,” he said.
Joe didn’t go to the top of the dam. None of us did. Renee told us it was too dangerous, we could fall, and we believed her. We all watched Ace jump on one leg, then the other, taunting Joe, daring him. Ace’s feet were wrapped in silver as the water rushed over them.
“Come on, Joe,” he said. “You pussy.”
And then Ace slipped. One foot dropped over the far side of the dam. He landed heavily on a knee, which cracked with a sickening sound just before he slid off. For an instant Ace’s hands hung grasping onto the lip, water pushing into his face, but the force of it was too strong and the hands disappeared.
This happened so quickly that we barely registered his absence. Ace was there on the dam, and then he was gone. The still, hot air remained the same, the sound of rushing water, the buzz of a sapphire-blue dragonfly that started and stopped across the surface of the pond. It seemed possible that Ace would return, pop up again, that the thrust of those seconds would unfurl and bring us back to the start. But of course that can never happen.
Ace fell, and no one spoke, and then Joe ran up the path and into the woods surrounding the pond and down the hill on the other side. I heard the crash of underbrush, the thud of his feet. The drop on the other side of the dam was the distance of a three-story building to the ground. The pool into which the water fell was dark, rocky along the edges, and who knew how deep? The pool swiftly became a thin, roiling stream bordered by thick undergrowth and tall, shaggy trees. For us the pond marked the edge of our world. Beyond the pond, below the dam, stretched an unknown wilderness.
Joe called for Ace, his voice growing weaker as he traveled farther into the woods. Nathan began to follow Joe, and I stood, ready to join them, but Nathan told me harshly to sit down. “Joe and I can do it,” he said. “Girls stay here.” And then he, too, was gone, bounding into the brush.
Five hours after Ace fell from the dam, Joe stepped through the door of the gray house. He was sweaty, feet muddy, face and hands scratched from branches and brambles. Ace was fine, he told us, fished from the stream by Joe about half a mile from the pond. He’d swallowed some water, Joe said, and had been struggling when Joe found him.
“Was he drowned?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” Joe said. “He puked up half the pond once I pulled him out.” Joe was smiling, but his face was tight and nervous.
Ace’s ankle had twisted in the fall, the knee was grazed raw and swollen, but he was able to walk with Joe and Nathan half carrying him back up to the road and to his house. Only Ace’s mother had been home, Joe reported, a woman none of us had ever met. She was tall and skinny, and she didn’t look like Ace one bit. She was sitting on a flowered couch and smoking a cigarette when they pushed open the front door. Ace’s house looked shiny on the inside, and Joe had been afraid to touch anything or even to place his feet on the pale carpet and so they’d hovered half in, half out of the door, holding Ace.
Ace’s mother blew smoke from her nostrils like a dragon before asking, “What happened this time?”
Joe and Nathan deposited Ace onto the couch and then waited as Ace’s mother poked and prodded at the ankle.
“Just a sprain,” she declared, and gave Ace a bag of frozen peas and the TV remote control. She pulled two crisp dollar bills from her wallet, handed one to Joe, one to Nathan, and said, “Thank you for bringing him home. Run along now.” So they did.
It was another week before we saw Ace again. One morning he returned to the pond with a slight limp, his left ankle wrapped in a putty-colored bandage, the laces of his left sneaker loose. He sat beside me on a towel.
“Mom says I can’t go swimming for another week,” Ace told me. He pulled a deck of cards from his pocket. “Rummy?” he asked.
Soon it became clear that Ace had chan
ged. The challenge that he’d worn like a badge was gone. The bite of aggression between Ace and Joe evaporated. In its place was a new, cautious friendship. Joe treated Ace with kindness and some pity, almost as though he were a much younger child. Ace followed Joe, he courted him with a sort of stifled awe. Finally Ace understood, I thought, that Joe was special.
This continued for the rest of the summer, until we arrived back at our different schools, each of us locked in our own grade and class and routine. Sometimes during the winter, I’d catch a glimpse of Ace at the grocery store with his mother or gliding through town in the blue BMW his father drove, sleek and shiny as a slow-moving bullet. Always Ace looked small and shrunken beside his parents, who were both tall, graceful people. Later I understood how every day Ace disappointed his parents simply because of who he was: unambitious, easily distracted, petty-minded. Even then I recognized the signs of that disappointment: the way his mother did not look directly at her son. The way his father walked a pace in front. I found myself feeling sorry for Ace. I found myself unable to recall the Ace that once had seemed like a threat.
Chapter 3
The Pause could not go on forever. We knew this. There were dangers. We were children alone, the four of us, without protection or instruction, and while Renee played the part of quasi mother, she buckled under the weight. Unsustainable, I wrote later. Unsupportable, hazardous, perilous, unsafe.
The year that Renee turned thirteen, she grew high, round nubs on her chest and hair that went lank and greasy just days after her bath. She exuded a musty, earthy smell and was inhabited by a new atmosphere of churning activity like a spirit possessed. We had all seen the movie Poltergeist, and I thought that this was the only explanation for my sister: an otherworldly occupation.
One night Renee was late coming home. After cross-country practice, she always caught the late bus at five thirty, but it was now six fifty and dark, and still no sign of her. Joe and Caroline and I made ourselves cheese sandwiches for dinner and chewed silently on the couch, plates on our laps, watching the door. Twice Joe said he should call the school, but he hadn’t, not yet.
“What if she doesn’t come back?” Caroline said. She was ten years old and afraid of spiders, the kitchen garbage disposal, and the grrr sound Joe made only to frighten her. Nightmares still plagued Caroline and would well into her twenties.
I was undisturbed by Renee’s mysterious absence. Life without Renee was simply impossible. She made charts that listed our chores, homework, Joe’s baseball schedule, Caroline’s flute concerts, her own cross-country practices and meets. Renee ensured that we wore clean clothes to school, brushed our teeth, brushed our hair, caught the school bus, did our homework. Renee relit the pilot light on the furnace when it sputtered out. She forged Noni’s signature on checks and permission slips. She cooked spaghetti and frozen peas and pancakes from the Bisquick box. We had learned to exist without our mother, but we could not exist without Renee.
“Maybe,” Caroline said, “we should wake up Noni.” We hadn’t seen our mother today. We hadn’t seen her yesterday either.
“No,” said Joe. “I’ll go find Renee.” I saw in him the same air of responsibility, of taking charge, that he’d worn when Ace fell off the dam.
“I want to come,” I said.
Joe crouched down to look me in the eye. “Fiona, it’s better if I go alone. I’ll go faster. And you need to keep Caroline company. Keep her safe.”
I expected Caroline to dispute this, but she only nodded. “Yes, Fiona, stay with me. Please.” Caroline’s eyes were going red, her voice shook.
And so I stayed as Joe disappeared out the door, into the night. Caroline and I sat on the couch to wait. We did not talk or turn on the TV; we finished our sandwiches and listened intently for a sound, any sound, to come from Noni’s room.
Forty-five minutes passed, perhaps an hour, and at last the front door opened and Renee and Joe, both breathless and agitated, tumbled inside. Relief flooded me, a rush I had not known I was waiting for. Caroline burst into tears.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where were you?”
Renee pulled roughly at the curtains, clicked the lights off, and chased us all into the kitchen at the back of the house. Her manner was short and urgent. On her left cheek, there was a bloodied scrape, the skin swollen, and all at once, for the first time that night, I felt afraid.
“Sit down,” she ordered, and we sat at the kitchen table.
A car had been parked at the bus stop, Renee told us, a brown car with a man in the driver’s seat. An elbow out the window, sunglasses although it was dusk, the sun nearly gone.
“Baby,” he called to her. “I’ve seen you. Want a ride?”
It was a fifteen-minute walk from the bus stop to our house. Renee did not want a ride, not from this man, and she told him so, but he began to follow her, the car inching along the road. No other cars passed, and Renee felt cold and very weak.
“I didn’t think I could run fast enough,” she said. Renee, who was a natural runner, whose thighs were the circumference of my arm, who galloped along the rocky cross-country trail in meet after meet, winning medal after medal, the child of a mountain goat and a gazelle. She had never before said there was a race she couldn’t win.
“I didn’t know what to do,” she continued. “I was afraid he would follow me here, so I went down another street and then another, and then he stopped the car behind me, and I ran and hid in the Hunters’ backyard. There was a swing set with a slide—like in the yellow house, remember? I hid under the slide until I heard Joe calling for me.”
Joe had wandered the neighborhood, walking in circles away from our house, he told us, calling Renee’s name.
“But what about your cheek?” I asked. “Who hurt you?”
Renee gingerly touched the spot on her face as though discovering it for the first time. “Oh. I . . . um . . .”
“She scraped it on the slide,” said Joe. “She ran out so quickly she didn’t duck low enough. So she hit it.”
Renee nodded tentatively, then with more force. “Yes, that’s it,” she murmured, again touching her face. “The slide.”
The man who called Renee “baby” never returned. It was an isolated incident, but it infected us in a way I didn’t understand until much later. Renee stopped taking the late bus and would now wait until her coach was finished for the night and could drive her home. Caroline’s nightmares doubled in frequency and ferocity. I stopped roaming the neighborhood as freely as I once had. Perhaps this was for the best—a check on our behavior, a lean toward safety—but I remember it only as a chill up my spine, a dampness to my palms. The idea that someone was watching us. That we were unsafe.
The incident made us all feel vulnerable, although in different ways. For Joe it was fear of what might happen to us, his sisters. But for us, Joe’s sisters, it was fear for ourselves. The man might come again for Renee or for me or for Caroline, but he would not come for Joe. Only girls remained at the mercy of men with bad intentions. Men in cars that were brown or red or gray, who wore sunglasses or didn’t, who were young or old, white or black, strangers or known to us.
This fear uncovered the tenuousness of our position during the Pause. The cracks became evident, and I watched them widen. Caroline and Joe began to fight frequently, Renee to cry without reason, to serve us dinner with shaking hands. Joe spent more time with his friends, girls in particular. He was the tallest boy in fifth grade, and girls took a spirited, wholesome interest in him as though he were a fuzzy stuffed animal in need of cuddling. Kim, Ashley, Shannon, Julie. I remember their ponytails and squeaky Keds and sticker collections in hard-backed photo albums with plastic pages. In school they would tease Joe gently and give him the Oreos and juice boxes from their lunches. They refilled his water bottle at baseball practice. They told their mothers that their friend Joe needed a ride to the movies, or a new pencil case, or construction paper for the science report about mammals, and could they please help? Joe accepted
their attentions. He began to spend more time with these girls, away from the house and me.
In my notebook I wrote the words dust, dirty, drafty, alone, Gilligan, cold, island, tv, shipwrecked.
* * *
Not long after the man followed Renee, Joe took me to the old yellow house. It was only after the accident that I placed the two events together, not in the way of cause and effect but a more amorphous push-pull. A sense of growing unease. A secret interior turmoil finding its way into the open air.
The day we walked back to our old neighborhood was beautiful: sunshine and crisp air, clear sky, the rustle of flaming leaves underfoot. Autumn in full bloom. New people lived at the yellow house, a family with boys and girls, apparently. Joe and I stood for a spell on the sidewalk and surveyed the bikes, footballs, Frisbees and hula hoops that lay abandoned across the front lawn.
“There’s no car,” Joe said. He was holding my hand. “They must not be home.”
“But what about all this stuff?” I replied.
Joe shrugged. “Let’s go check.”
He led me around to the back door—down the side alley, past the garbage bins, turn left, cut across the lawn, over the patio, and there, the back door painted a bright white. I knew that door so well. It took my breath away to see it again.
“Maybe we could go in and look around,” Joe said.
“But, Joe . . .” I protested, though weakly. I wanted to go inside, too. I liked the idea of freely examining other people’s things, taking time to sort through the mother’s makeup bag, to check the Scrabble game for marked-up score sheets. Maybe I would find a journal, a notebook like the one I kept, filled with the secret thoughts of another girl. The possibility gave me a shiver of delight.
I followed Joe as he pushed open the back door and called “Hello! Hello!” We stood in the kitchen, our old kitchen, and listened to the quiet ticking of the clock, the silent settling of the house. The room looked the same, different only in small, frivolous ways. A new round table. Photos of unfamiliar faces pegged to the fridge. The smell was different, too, heavier than I remembered it, and more chemical.
