Klickitat

by Peter Rock

  I sat there for a moment in Dad’s rolling office chair. His old jacket was on the back of the chair and I pulled it over my shoulders. I put my bare feet in his scratchy gray boot liners. And then I opened the logbook and looked at it. On one side were some sentences—Audra, gone 3/12 or 3/13. Spending nights somewhere lately. Skipping school. Unhappy?—and on the other side were call signs and names.

  I shut everything down, then climbed out of the basement. I walked around the empty house until it was time to go to school.

  NINE

  At school, kids whispered around me. They stopped calling me “Vivian Ritalin” or hissing “sweatshirt” to tease me in class. They treated me differently, and so did the teachers. Everyone knew that Audra had disappeared.

  I had stopped taking my pills by then, and I couldn’t tell if I felt any different. I couldn’t tell what my body might do as I sat there at my desk, looking out the window, surrounded by all these kids who weren’t my friends. It was the middle of the afternoon in my English class. Mrs. Morgan had put a piece of cardboard in front of the clock, so it wasn’t easy to tell what time it was, and I was hardly listening to her talk about The Catcher in the Rye. Instead, I looked out the window, over the sports fields, out to Grant Park, along Northeast 33rd. I could see the statues reflecting the sun there, the figures of Ramona and Henry and Ribsy. There was no Beezus, and no explanation for why there wasn’t. I remembered the part when Beezus admitted she didn’t love Ramona, even though everyone knew that’s what sisters were supposed to do.

  “Vivian Hanselman,” Mrs. Morgan said. “Are you daydreaming?”

  “No,” I said. “Yes.”

  Everyone laughed.

  The bell rang, and kids started closing their books, putting things away. Everyone went straight out the door, and I followed them, quickly enough that Mrs. Morgan wouldn’t try to stop me, to ask me how I was feeling.

  The first week or so after Audra was gone, Mom dropped me off and picked me up from school, careful like she didn’t want to lose me, too. But then slowly that stopped and I could ride my bike again.

  I unlocked it at the rack, rode out past the groups of kids. I felt someone’s eyes, someone watching me, somewhere, keeping track; I saw Audra’s face on bus shelters and telephone poles, the bright blue MISSING posters we’d hung up everywhere.

  There was an old picture of Audra at a track meet, smiling, not looking at all the way she did when she disappeared, and another of her face where the copier made her eyes and mouth so black and you couldn’t even see her nose.

  MISSING

  AUDRA HANSELMAN

  17 Y.O. 5'5" 115 LBS.

  HAIR BLACK EYES BROWN

  NOSE PIERCING

  CAMOUFLAGE CLOTHING

  COULD BE WITH PERSON

  OR PERSONS UNKNOWN

  I rode, the books in my pack shifting on my back as I swerved around the corner, as I coasted down Siskiyou Street.

  Audra’s footprints still showed dark on the front of our house, where she’d pushed off, when swinging. It was like she’d run up the side of our house and into the sky, or onto the rooftop, next to the window of her room. I stopped under the tree and looked up at her footprints. My handlebars knocked against the swing as I pushed my bike toward the garage.

  Inside the house, upstairs, I swung off my pack and set it on my desk chair, unzipped it. I took out my biology textbook, then the yellow notebook. There, just below where I had written my questions, new words:

  A wild bird can choose a person to follow,

  from place to place. A friend is a thing to

  learn how to be and always changing. A

  pencil sharpener, a paper clip, a stapler—

  now those are other weapons. The sea looks

  like metal, the sky like water. We saw

  you waiting for the bus with your sister,

  looking up and down the street with your

  hair in your face. That was a sweet sight,

  a pleasure to notice. Animals quickly take

  notice of white teeth and the whites of

  the eyes. During cold weather, the breath

  should be directed along the body, so the

  plumes of air are not visible to animals.

  Blindfolding increases children’s ability

  to travel at night. Wisely take advantage

  of new experiences. It’s important to push

  yourself beyond what you’ve done before.

  Sometimes we’re blindfolded without

  knowing it, like horses we wear blinders.

  There is a world beyond that of the five

  senses, different than the realm of the

  imagination. It is unseen, the world of

  spirit and vision. It is a dimension of life

  that very few people of today are aware

  of, or perhaps care to know, one that even

  fewer can access.

  It was a relief to see those words, to know they hadn’t stopped, and it made me feel good, too, because whoever sent them believed that I could be aware of the unseen world. I didn’t know what that meant, but I wanted to believe that, too. It reminded me of the things Iceland had said; she had called me “special,” which can be a compliment but sometimes it is a nice way of saying you’re different, unable to do the things other people can do.

  I felt different—I didn’t need the messages to tell me that. I needed the way I was different to help me, to find my sister, to see things and understand things. I wanted instructions and information. What I was getting instead were riddles.

  TEN

  Without my pills, it was harder to fall asleep. I turned over one way, then the other. The house was quiet except for Mom sighing, in her bedroom, and the soft scrape of an antenna shifting on the rooftop, pointing across the sky to somewhere, someone else.

  I opened my eyes, closed them, opened them again. Through a gap in the curtains I could see the tall trees across the backyard, the tops of them leaning back and forth in the moonlight. And there was another sound, then, a tight sound, a kind of rubbing. The swing in the front yard, it had to be, the rope where it was knotted around the branch, where it slipped a little and slid and squeaked when someone was on it.

  Quietly, I pulled the covers aside and stood up. Barefoot, I crossed the hall, into Audra’s empty room. I didn’t turn on the light as I stepped close to the window. Below, outside, the black circle of the tire swing cut back and forth, back and forth, but there was no one on it.

  I stood there watching. The moon was full, so the swing’s shadow was another black circle, sliding along the grass, slower and slower, the swing finally coming to a rest, the shadow a still black puddle beneath it.

  In bed again, I lay flat on my back, even though I can’t sleep on my back; I didn’t want one of my ears to be pushed into the pillow. I wanted them both listening. And what I heard, after a while, I wasn’t sure if it was anything, but then I thought it sounded like a scratching, a soft slap, then silence, then another sound. What it sounded like was someone trying to climb our house, the wall of it, right under my window.

  I stood up, next to my bed, not moving for a moment, listening. The sounds stopped, or I thought they stopped. My blood rushed around and around. I stepped closer to the window. My hand was shaking as I pushed one edge of the curtain aside, as I leaned in. There was no one looking in at me. My forehead against the cool window, I could see no one on the wall, no one close against the house. But then a shadow slid out across the yard, away from the house, so smooth and fast, startling me as it disappeared into the blackness under the trees.

  I pulled the curtains closed again, just a sliver between them so I could see out, so someone out there could not see me. I watched, and at first there was nothing, or the way that everything was so still made it hard to see the pale face lit by the moonlight, surrounded by all the dark trees and shadows. Bluish white, turned up to the moon. I knew right away that it wasn’t Audra—the body was too stocky,
too thick. Then a hand came up, bare and white, waving and slowly motioning for me to come outside. It was a person, standing there, waiting for me.

  I stepped away from the window, into the hallway; careful of the floor where it squeaks at the top of the stairs, I went down into the kitchen. My jacket was on its hook, my rain boots by the back door. I put them on, then slowly opened the door and stepped outside. It wasn’t too cold, and the moonlight shone down, making the grass look soft silver as I went, my black shadow dragging alongside me.

  When I reached the darkness beneath the trees, I turned in a circle, squinting, alone.

  “Vivian.” The voice was a whisper, a man’s whisper, and I couldn’t tell where it came from. “Vivian.”

  The second time, just as I figured it out, he slid silently down from a tree, ten feet away, and stepped close to me.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “We need to get away from here,” he said.

  “If I scream, my dad will come. Their room is right there.”

  “Audra’s waiting.” He wore a black sweatshirt, black pants, so only his face and hands were easy to see.

  “Where?” I said. “Why is she not here?”

  “Come,” he said, still whispering. “We have everything you need. Follow me, but not too close.”

  I followed him under the trees, almost tripping on bushes and roots, and then between two houses, onto the street a block away from ours, Klickitat Street.

  The sidewalks glowed, the moon bright and round above. We walked like that, with him half a block ahead, like we didn’t know each other, until we were far from our neighborhood, on streets I didn’t know. No one was out at all, in the middle of the night, no one driving their cars or anything. I had been waiting for this—I felt it, I realized it. I wasn’t really thinking about what I was leaving behind, I was mostly just ready to start, to be with Audra again, to see what she’d found. And then the man turned and stopped walking and waited for me to catch up, so we could walk together, side by side.

  “Okay,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is good,” he said. “Don’t worry. I know about you, I have a feeling—”

  “What do you know about me?”

  “I’m just really happy you’re with me,” he said. “You’re going to help us.” He wasn’t whispering anymore, and his voice was low, gravelly, lower than any voice I’d heard. Like it should belong to a man three times bigger.

  “Where are we going?” I said. “Where’s my sister?”

  “Don’t be afraid.”

  “I’m not.”

  As we walked, for a moment there was only the sound of my boots on the sidewalk. I saw that he was barefoot, and walked on the lawns of the houses that we passed, right along the edge of the cement. His dark hair was cut short, his skin pale in the moonlight, his nose thin and sharp. He probably weighed more than I did, even though he was shorter. It wasn’t just that I was wearing boots and he was barefoot. His arms were longer than mine, though, swinging with his hands that looked too big on the end of his arms.

  “In Audra’s room,” I said, “are those your hands that are traced on the wall?”

  “Yes, they are,” he said. “This way.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Henry,” he said. “She never mentioned me?”

  “Not your name.”

  “Well, the important thing is that we’re together—the three of us.”

  “Where is she?”

  “We’re getting close, now,” he said.

  “Close to where?”

  “When we get there, we can’t talk, not at all. As we approach. Do you understand? This moon can make things more difficult.”

  I followed as we went down a side street that wasn’t paved, that was only dirt with potholes, puddles shining like silver windows in the moonlight. Then he touched my elbow and tugged at my boots, the tops of them, so I knew to take them off. Carrying them, I crouched down low like he did, followed him off to the right, a narrow gap between two wooden fences.

  As we got closer to a tall, dark house, we came to a place in the fence where the lower edges were not nailed in. He pulled them up, held them that way. My back scratched a little on the wood above, behind me, as I slipped through.

  He followed, silent as he moved around me, as he kneeled down close to the side of the house. There was crisscrossing wood there that I learned is called lattice, that blocked off the space between the ground and the bottom of the house. He lifted a section of lattice away and set it down, and then waved for me to get down, pointed into the dark square opening beneath the house.

  A face looked out at me, pale and smiling. It was Audra.

  I was quickly down there, inside in that total darkness. I felt Audra’s fingers brush my arm as I reached out. I got hold of her. I was trying to slow it, to breathe. I couldn’t tell if I was becoming agitated or if I was only so excited. My head hit something hard as we slid over. Her hair in my face, sweet. My legs wrapped around her body and my ankles hooked each other like I could squeeze her in two. I felt her hands rubbing my arms, my face. I heard her breathing, a whisper, felt tears when she turned her head.

  And then my hold slowly loosened, and I began to feel the blankets beneath me, the foam rubber padding.

  “Okay,” Audra said. “It’s all right, now. Klickitat. Everything’s fine.”

  I heard a click and then a pale light came on, a little lamp with masking tape wrapped around the bulb to make it dim. I saw then that Audra’s hair was bleached, that it was blond.

  “Try to breathe more quietly,” she said. “You’re gasping. Take it slow, Vivian.”

  In the shadows, as my eyes adjusted, I could see that the lamp was wired somehow into a square black box, the battery from a car, and I could see other car batteries stacked up against the brick foundation that was one wall of the space down there. The other three were lattice, but the inside of the lattice was covered in black plastic, so light didn’t shine out.

  Other cords stretched from the batteries, plugged into blankets, electric blankets, to a white-faced clock that hung from the wall. There were notebooks, there were Audra’s books, library books. The ceiling was low—sitting there, I could reach up and touch it, close to the top of my head—and empty egg cartons and pink insulation were tacked to it, to muffle any sound we might make.

  Beneath the twisted blankets were foam rubber mats, and a wool blanket hung down, separating the space. On the other side was my bed, my area, my clothes stacked there, waiting, even my orange life jacket, all the things that had been collected for me.

  “I didn’t panic,” I said.

  “I knew you wouldn’t.”

  “I got the knife you left, but I left it, forgot it. I didn’t know.”

  “We have plenty of knives,” she said.

  “I’m so happy,” I said, hugging her.

  “Enough,” Henry said, behind us. “That’s enough talk for now. We generally don’t talk, here. And we don’t use the lamp, really, unless it’s an emergency.” In that dim light he looked like he might be our age, or he might be ten years older, or even more. Somewhere between a boy and a man.

  Audra reached out then, and touched his hand, just before he switched off the lamp, and the blackness was thick around me. In the darkness, I felt Audra shift past me, and then I heard a rattle, then a sound, the soft scratching of her writing, as she began to explain to me, writing down how things would be.

  ELEVEN

  That first morning I could already hear the two of them when I opened my eyes, the rustle of them on the other side of the wool blanket. I pushed it back and Audra was sitting there wearing only a black bra, a beige skirt. Henry sat next to her in a white uniform shirt with a patch from the QFC supermarket on his chest. He put on a blue apron, his black shoes in his hands.

  “Audra,” I said, and right away her hand was on my mouth, pressed against my teeth, and they were both looking at me like I�
��d done something wrong.

  Then Audra took her hand off my mouth and picked up a spiral notebook—the one with the blue cover, one I still have, so now I can just copy down the conversation we wrote. She took a pencil from a jar, licked its black tip with her tongue.

  Good morning, she wrote. We’re about to go to work.

  She handed the pencil to me, then pulled a blue blouse over her head while I wrote. She buttoned the blouse, pulled on a gray sweater.

  I wrote: Work? What am I supposed to do?

  Wait. We’ll be back in the afternoon. Sleep all you can. There’s a lot to read, to get ready for. I’m so happy we’re together.

  I can come with you. Where do you work?

  Wait. Trust me.

  But what am I supposed to do?

  Trust us.

  Henry had put on his shoes, now, tied the thin black laces. Audra pointed to a white plastic bucket with a lid snapped on, and then she wrote again.

  That bucket is the toilet. There’s food, everything. Just look around.

  So I just wait?

  Yes.

  When she finished writing that, she didn’t hand me the pencil. Instead, she put it in the jar, and reached for a pair of black shoes. Leaning close, she kissed me on the cheek. Behind her, Henry had moved the lattice aside, and she turned and crawled out after him. There was a glimpse of the bright morning, her hand waving, and then the lattice slid back across and I was left in the dimness, my eyes adjusting.

  I opened the blue notebook. On the first two pages were the questions and answers between me and Audra that I’d already written down, and then more words, which she must have written after I fell asleep.

  Vivian, we have been living in this place a short time and will live here a short time longer. We need to work to make money so we can leave, so we can move far, far away from here. We’ll live in the wilderness. We’ll be our own kind of family. You’ll see we can trust Henry. He knows so many things that we don’t know.

  In the notebook’s wire spiral were white snakes of paper where pages had been torn out. Pages where maybe Audra and Henry had written to each other, back and forth, but now they were gone, words I’ll never know.