Boy, Snow, Bird: A Novel

by Oyeyemi, Helen

  Her hair was in her face, her eyes were closed, her nose was pressed to a coffee-brown page. “It’s been discussed,” she said.

  “And you said yes?”

  She wrote a number down on her notepad. Three figures, a pause, then she added another ninety-nine cents. “If you’re saying yes, then I’m saying yes.”

  “Really? Well . . . I am saying yes, Mom.”

  “That’s what I figured. Needless to say I’ll be watching her every move. Kidding, kidding . . .”

  She wasn’t kidding. I asked her what Snow had ever done to her, and she said it was a good question.

  5

  i never knew a Thanksgiving that took so long to come around. I guess Louis Chen got tired of hearing me repeat those words, because he said: “You know, the way you’re talking is getting kind of creepy.”

  Aunt Mia told me not to get my hopes up. Dad made chain mail, little scraps of knitted electrum with circles of blue crystal peeping through the links. He cut the crystals in deep Vs and the surfaces were dull until you tried to look down to the bottom of them and almost cooked your eyeballs. It wasn’t really jewelry—he couldn’t sell it, could only give it away. He handed me a piece and told me to hit my hopes right out of the ballpark.

  Mom stopped going to Grammy Olivia’s coffee hours. “The gloating,” she said to Aunt Mia.

  Everyone who remembered Snow seemed glad to hear she’d be back. “So pretty,” I kept hearing. “So well behaved.” No one said they’d missed her. Take Christina Morris who worked at the bakery—she’d been in Snow’s class at school, and when Dad told her Snow might look in on her, she said “Hurray!” just as if she’d been told Miss America was coming to town. It wasn’t the kind of reaction you’d give to news about someone who’d really been part of your life. I wanted to hear someone say they’d cried when they found out she wasn’t coming back to school. It would’ve been good to hear that somebody had done what I did last summer when Louis went away to summer camp. I went after him that very same afternoon, through fields and over low bridges in the direction I’d seen the bus take, running, then limping. I got as far as the fire station in Marstow, two towns over, then the sun set and I realized I didn’t know where to go next, so I walked back home with stones in my socks and was grounded for two weeks. I wanted somebody to say they’d done something like that because of Snow (who’s about a hundred times prettier than Louis, after all) but no one did.

  Louis’s birthday was on the same day as Connie Ross’s, right in the middle of September, and Mom loaned me her blanket-sized U.S. flag in exchange for my promise that I’d guard it with my life. My contribution to the picnic was a few perfectly ripe Bartlett pears and some soft cheese that had a long name and came wrapped in waxy brown paper. I wound the flag around the pears and the cheese, tied the whole package to a stick, and went through the woods with lunch over my shoulder. As I went I made a deal with myself not to talk about Snow or Thanksgiving anymore. Talking wasn’t bringing either subject of conversation any closer. Also I was getting angry. Angry about the things people were saying, the way they were making Snow sound like some kind of ornament just passing by . . . not even passing by, but being passed around. Everybody agreed that Snow was valuable, but she was far too valuable to have around for keeps. Nice to look at for an afternoon, but we’ll all breathe easier once she’s safely back at the museum. I was beginning to hate people because of the way they talked about my sister, because of the way they didn’t really want her. Even Miss Fairfax was doing it, telling Dad to just have one afternoon when Snow would be at home to all visitors so as to get all the visiting over with in one go.

  We sang “Happy Birthday” and Jerry Fallon started a food fight, running around the tree trunks whooping and throwing slices of luncheon meat. Later, once everything had been hurled or eaten, we washed the cheese and bread crumbs out of our hair and passed out in the sunshine, the six of us on Mom’s flag, which we’d spread out on the grass near Spooner’s Brook. I made everyone take their shoes off first. Jerry and Sam were back to back, and Connie and Ruth were top to toe, but we all had our arms around and over and under one another, warm skin and frosty violets (Ruth was wearing her mother’s perfume). Louis fell asleep with his head on my stomach. Once I was sure the others were asleep I laid my hand on his head. The boy was huffing and puffing the way he does when he’s having dreams; it made his hair dance. I didn’t sleep myself. I was just resting. Connie stood up and walked away—to pee, I thought. She didn’t make any effort to sneak away quietly. She walked normally, her feet crushing leaves.

  Sam went next, then Jerry, I think—I’m not sure of the order because I didn’t open my eyes—then Ruth, their footsteps promising that they’d be back in a few seconds. They didn’t come back. When Louis got up, I opened my eyes. I was on my own beside the brook and the splash of the water was like fast, soft hand claps, keeping time with my heart. I sat up and the flag rolled up around me. I didn’t pull it up around my shoulders, it tucked itself around them. I looked over my shoulder, hoping I’d see the others in the distance, perched up in the trees grinning ghoulishly. They weren’t there. But as I breathed I felt a hand crumpling my shirt, fingers and thumb spread wide across my back. My eyes were open, and I looked right at him, the owner of the hand. But I couldn’t see anyone. He was there all right, but somehow it was like trying to see all of the sky at once. That was nonsense, so I tried to turn and look at him again, but an arm crossed my other shoulder and held me still. He wasn’t playing rough, whoever he was; it was more like he was shy, or just teasing me.

  I was still trying to decide whether it’s smarter to scream before you start getting scared when he touched his lips to the back of my neck. Five times, maybe more, each kiss a little lower down. Slow, light, soft. All I saw was red, white, and blue above us, the flag streaming high as fountain jets. When he stopped, I shuddered and was breathless and warm all over. The flag lay flat and after a few minutes I felt tough enough to run my hands along the cotton, checking, but nothing moved inside it.

  It wasn’t Louis who kissed me. It was a boy, as far as I could tell. Those arms, still a little unsure of their own strength. I don’t know who he was. He smelled of lemon peel, and I don’t know any boys who go around smelling of lemon peel. Louis doesn’t need to know about it, either. I doubt those kisses were even meant for me. They must belong to Mom. You know when you put on someone else’s coat and old train tickets fall out of the pockets? I think maybe it was like that. Not really anything to do with me at all. Mom looked the flag over very closely when I brought it back to her, even held the seams up to the light. Once she was sure there was no damage she said I could borrow it anytime. I said thanks. And thought: But no, thanks. We were Whitmans. That was how I liked it—that n I sometimes add to my name doesn’t mean much after all, it’s just a frill—and that must have been how Mom liked it too, because she talks as if Flax Hill is where her memory begins. Whenever we’re out of town, she compares everything to Flax Hill. Parks, stores, fountains. If that changed, I’d really have to wonder why.

  It was the following Saturday that a man with an un-American accent phoned the house and asked to speak to Boy Novak. “Sorry,” I said. “No Novaks around here.” I thought it was a prank call, somebody calling from “deepest Transylvania” to remind me that an ancient prophecy was supposed to come true tonight. There’d been a storm going on for hours—a dark sky with lightning jumping across it, and rain coming down so hard you couldn’t see exactly who was coming toward you on the street; it turned your friends into tall, damp figures scurrying around on secret business. Dad and Louis had decided it was perfect weather to grab a baseball glove and go play catch in the backyard. For everyone else the weather was right for staying home and making stupid phone calls.

  “Who is this?” the man asked, in a hollow, B-movie-sorcerer voice. I told him it was the Queen of Sheba and hung up.

  But that was really the w
ay he talked. The next day Gee-Ma Agnes came round for breakfast and brought a pan of hominy pudding with her, brimming with lemons and cream. Phoebe had made it and it was so good that nobody even said anything when I licked my bowl. When Gee-Ma threatened to take me to church, Dad told her I’d go if she could catch me; it must’ve been the pudding that made him think it was all right to just give away a chunk of your daughter’s Sunday like that. Gee-Ma made a grab at me and I ran out of the house and along the riverbank with my hula hoop, a desperate heathen in polka-dotted rubber boots, yelling Keep laughing, Dad. You’re gonna pay for this. Gee-Ma was a lot faster than I’d expected, but she ran out of steam about ten steps away from a tree I’d planned to climb to escape her.

  “I’m gonna pray for your soul, Bird Whitman,” she puffed. She bent over and put her hands on her knees, letting her breath find its way back to her.

  “Don’t chase me, Gee-Ma,” I said. “I’m not worth it.” I threw my hula hoop into the air a few times until it found a branch to spin around. Then I scrambled up into the heart of that old tree. It was a linden tree, and it didn’t mind being climbed—its bark had little pegs in it, pegs that held steady beneath the sole of your foot. There’s a lot of privacy up there too, with the green leaves pouring down all around you. I was cold; the mist kept creeping in under my clothes. “It’s not natural to flee like that when you’re offered a chance to praise the Lord,” Gee-Ma said. “You come down from there!”

  “I can’t, Gee-Ma. I’m stuck. Hey, look at all this mud.”

  The rainstorm had swollen the water level. I forget how tall water can be until I see it standing above earth, lifting leaves and stones off the grass and floating them away. Gee-Ma stayed back because she didn’t dare get wet all the way up to her knees. My hula hoop was close by, but I didn’t start swirling it around my ankle until she realized she’d be late for church and went away. That’s what the man who’d phoned our house must have seen as he walked under the trees talking to himself in that B-movie voice of his (I heard him before I saw him). He must’ve been following us. He must’ve looked up and seen a hot-pink circle working its way from one end of a branch to the other, slowly, like it was searching for something. I knew he’d seen me because he stopped talking to himself. I think he was in the middle of a sentence, but he stopped. A second later he knocked the hula hoop into the mud. At first I thought he’d thrown a stone, but it was a walking stick he struck out with—he struck out more than once, more than twice, and by the time I realized that knocking my hula hoop out of the tree was only the first stage of his plan, he’d hooked the handle of the walking stick around my ankle and was pulling, pulling—

  “Who are you?” he asked, real loud, as if he was scared, as if he was in my place and I was in his. I reached up, or down, it was hard to tell because my head slammed against the tree trunk and I saw my feet swinging in the air above me—my body was twisted around the branch and I locked my hands around it and held tight. The wood pushed through my skin, I said “Vvvahhhh,” or something like that, my teeth chopping at my tongue, the branch groaned, it wasn’t going to hold me, it was coming away from the tree. I’d fall six feet or more. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t. Please. Please.”

  He stopped pulling. “Get down here.”

  I climbed down without answering him, hands and feet slipping in bloodied mud, and my knees gave out as soon as I was back on the ground. He put an arm around my neck and made me get up. We walked backward into the bushes. I was crying, but he didn’t care. What he held flat against my hip bone was scarier than a knife—it was a syringe filled with clear liquid. The needle. There was a plastic cap on it, but light flashed along it as I struggled to breathe. “Control yourself,” he said. His mouth was right against my ear, and his lips were wet. There was liquor on his breath. Some kids walked past, arguing, laughing. The girls were trying to teach the boys pig Latin. I turned my head so I was looking right at the man with his hand over my mouth—he pushed my face away from him, but I waited and then turned my head toward him again.

  “Ha, looks like Bird lost her dumb hula hoop,” Fat Kenneth Young said. I heard a splash—I think he kicked at it.

  The man asked me what I was staring at. He was a white man, clean-shaven. Ultra-clean-shaven; not a single cut. He had a round nose and wide-awake blue-green eyes and his white hair went up into a peak above his forehead; if we’d met some other way, I might have looked at him and thought, Weird, it’s a dolphin-man, or a man-dolphin, in a plaid shirt and jeans. He looks nice, maybe Gee-Ma would like him.

  “Please let me go home,” I said, in a calm, completely fake voice. “My mom and dad are expecting me and—”

  “Shut up,” he whispered. “Who are you? I’ve seen you with Boy. At her job. And you try to boss her around at the grocery store. Queen of Sheba my ass.”

  (We haven’t seen you.)

  “I’m Bird.”

  He said: “You are Bird.”

  “Yeah. I’m—Boy’s my mom, that’s why I’m with her a lot.”

  The other kids’ voices faded into the distance, and he let go of me once we were alone again. I never saw what he did with the syringe. I don’t think he dropped it. Hands shaking, he fumbled around in the top pocket of his shirt, pulled out a pair of eyeglasses, put them on, and looked at me. Then he took the eyeglasses off and muttered: “Well. What can I do?”

  He looked sick to his stomach. He tried to hide it, but he couldn’t. His skin turned a little gray and his cheeks puffed out. I could have stood there for hours, watching him turn to stone, watching the gargoyle appear. That was his real face. Or do people only turn ugly for as long as they’re looking at something ugly? I played dumb. I said: “Uh . . . what’s wrong? What did I say?”

  He answered me so quietly I pretty much had to lip-read. “I came to meet with my granddaughter, and you are her.”

  I dried my eyes on my sleeve and sighed. I didn’t want it to be true, would have given a lot for it not to be true, so it had to be true.

  He raised his voice. “You are slow or something? You didn’t hear me?”

  “I heard you.”

  “Well?”

  “Well.”

  “What has your mother told you about me?”

  “Nothing.”

  He rubbed his chin. “You hungry?”

  “What?”

  He offered to buy me a cheeseburger. I said I’d eat at home, but changed my mind and went to the Mitchell Street diner with him after he promised to tell me how to catch rats, and also what Mom had been like as a kid.

  “Do you really want to know how to catch rats?”

  “Yeah.”

  “They just want the rats to go away. They believe that they should not have to think about the rats that sneak out of their garbage and into their walls, they should not have to see how those disgusting creatures die. That’s what I’m paid for. I’m supposed to catch my rats and hold my tongue and let it all be like magic.”

  “Well, tell me about it.”

  “You are not squeamish?”

  “Yeah, I am. But I still want to know.”

  “I shouldn’t have treated you this way that I have treated you. I’m sorry.”

  I didn’t believe him and I walked behind him so I’d have fair warning if he went for me again. I guess I wanted to have something to tell Snow.

  We took a booth at the Mitchell Street diner. Susie Conlin handed him a menu before she took me to the restroom and soaked my hands in a basin. She dabbed disinfectant on the cuts the linden tree gave me. There were seven. She counted them aloud and made me count along with her. She was my regular babysitter for about a year and a half, so she still talks down to me something awful, and maybe always will. I don’t mind her doing it, though. She just likes looking after people. Dad’s making her a tiny rainbow stud for the piercing she just got in her nose.

  —

  i ate m
y cheeseburger with a knife and fork so it wouldn’t taste of disinfectant. But Frank thought I was trying to be ladylike. “Your father teach you that?” He grinned, and I did the same. I just took what was in his grin and gave it right back to him. He choked on a french fry and I passed him a napkin.

  When he really started talking, I borrowed a pad and pen from Susie and took notes. Taking notes meant I didn’t hear his tone of voice as much.

  FRANK NOVAK

  He was flattered that I was writing down what he said. Flattered or he felt he had a message to give. He spoke slowly and repeated himself so I could get it all down.

  He wanted to know if I was going to call the police on him. “Good luck getting them to believe you.”

  “You are not adopted?” he asked, hopefully.

  How can he be Mom’s dad? There’s no trace of her in him, or vice versa. And that’s weird, because he’s a forceful man. For instance, I couldn’t push back against his accent. My vowels started to copy his—he thought I was making fun of him. Mom would’ve had to be really careful and deliberate in her decisions not to do anything the way he did it. No moving her hands through the air in an almost musical way as she speaks, no pursing her lips, no excitement, calm, always calm. Maybe he noticed what she was doing. I’ll bet he hated that.

  When he talked about rats, his forehead tightened and he looked lost. It was as if the words he was saying didn’t mean anything to him, they’d decided to say themselves and he was hoping they’d leave him alone if he just cooperated. He didn’t tell me how to catch rats in the end. He kept working up to it, then he’d say: “It’s all I know. Maybe you shouldn’t say everything you know. Maybe it leaves you empty-headed, eh?”

  I asked him about the syringe, what the liquid in it was. He said: “What syringe?” (What did he do with it? If I’d called the police, would they have found it on him? I went back to the linden tree with Louis a couple of days later and we searched for hours. If he’d dropped it, we would have found it. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Acting? I half believe I could dream up a syringe. But only half.)