by Peter Rock
While I was waiting, I tried to imagine what we were preparing for, what kind of family we would be. When I thought of the future, where we were going, all I could see was snow. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Long Winter, how Laura and Pa twisted straw into sticks because they had no firewood or coal to burn, no other way to keep warm.
I looked for clues to our future in the notebooks, but Audra and Henry wrote so few things down. Once, gathering dirty laundry, I did find a folded piece of paper, a note I kept and still have, something that Henry wrote:
THE SCOUT OBSERVES A ROUTINE,
FINDS THE WEAK POINT IN THAT
ROUTINE, AND THEN ENTERS THE
WEAK POINT AND MOVES WITH
IT, THUS BECOMING INVISIBLE
TO EVERYONE. THIS DEAD SPACE
EXISTS IN BOTH NATURE AND THE
CITY. EVEN THOSE PEOPLE WALKING
ALONE AT NIGHT, FEARFUL OF
ATTACK OR ROBBERY, FRIGHTENED
AND HYPERVIGILANT, STILL HAD
COUNTLESS DEAD SPACES IN WHICH
I COULD OPERATE. EVEN THOSE WHO
STALKED HAD THIS DEAD SPACE.
I’d read enough in Audra’s Tom Brown, Jr., survivalist books to recognize that’s where it came from. But Henry had copied it down, because it was important to him—he wanted to operate like Tom Brown, Jr., inside people’s routines, tracking them, where they wouldn’t expect and couldn’t see him. Henry knew that there was so much beyond what we can see, and how important these secret spaces can be.
I looked for other words, as I searched through the notebooks, I hoped for messages like I’d received before. None came. My yellow notebook had been left behind, back in my bedroom; still, I had to believe that the words, the voices, could find me without that notebook, wherever I was, wherever we were going.
Maybe the voices would be there, where we were going. I thought of the note that Henry had written to me, about the man who talked to people no one else could see—it made me think that Henry understood, maybe, that he recognized how I was different. We would go to a place where I would never become agitated, where I could do so many things and the people would know that they needed me.
Lying there, waiting for Henry and Audra to return, reading Journey to the Center of the Earth, I could hear the woman who lived in the house above us. Her footsteps, in bare feet and then shoes, crossing rooms, back and forth. The clatter of pans, the sound of water in the sink, the water then rushing away, down through the pipes near my head. Henry and Audra kept track of her schedule, too, so we could guess when she would be home and when she would not, when we could come and go.
Journey to the Center of the Earth is a story that happens in Iceland. A boy and his uncle go down through the mouth of an old volcano that is named Snæfell. All the way under there they find lakes of black water, where they see animals caught back in prehistoric times. There are winds in the darkness. All the plants and flowers and trees are there, only they are gray and brown and faded because they never feel the warmth and light of the sun. The ferns are like black hands. The flowers, none of them smell like anything at all.
FOURTEEN
Henry and Audra, they came and went, and I was trapped underneath the house, waiting and wondering. When it rained it wasn’t so bad, cuddling in my blanket and reading. In the corner of our space, down by my feet, water seeped in and puddled, muddy, but I kept my legs curled up, just listening to the rain against the wooden fence outside. When the sun shone was the worst, because I wanted to be out in it. Audra brought me vitamin D pills, and I didn’t want to take them. How come some pills were okay, but not others? And how can you tell if you’re feeling better, if you stop something that made you feel one way but every day you’re waiting, hiding somewhere where no one knows where you are, when you want to be out in the sun?
Left alone, I would try to figure out what would happen, to imagine it. I went through Henry’s things. He had almost no belongings, not many clothes. Just two pairs of pants that were exactly the same, and two white shirts, two pairs of socks. A black jacket. His work uniform.
One day in that first week, Henry came back early. He nodded to me, where I was reading; he spit-polished his black shoes, then set them aside. Next, he bent one leg up and twisted around to look behind him. He rested on his shoulders and pushed up with his feet, made his body bow upward, his stomach almost touching where the egg cartons were attached. He balanced on his hands, his knees on his elbows, his pale face turning red and his arms shaking.
I could hear him breathing as I read The Foxfire Book, looking at the pictures of the old women churning butter and weaving baskets, the toothless old men skinning rabbits, calling crows by blowing through special sticks. In one picture, a man and a black dog with a white chest were standing in front of an old shack. On the wooden wall of the shack a bear skin was nailed, and a fox skin, and four raccoon skins. I leaned in close, imagining that the raccoons were alive, only very flat, because the way they were hung there made it look like they were climbing.
I heard the scratch of a pen, Henry writing, but it took a moment to see that he was holding a folded piece of paper, a note, out to me. I felt him watching as I unfolded, as I read it.
EYES CAN TURN OUTWARD OR
INWARD
THERE IS A WORLD BEYOND THAT
OF THE FIVE SENSES
I folded the paper again and looked up at him.
“How do you know this?” I said.
“Be quieter.”
“Did you write that?” I said. “Not that, I mean. The messages, in the notebook?”
“No.”
“How?”
“I read the writing,” he said. “In the notebook, in your room…”
We were whispering, a loud kind of whispering.
“When?” I said.
“You were asleep. We sneaked into your house, so I could see you, so I could decide.”
“Decide what?”
“When I found the notebook, when I read those things, I could tell who you are, I could see that we needed you to come with us.”
“Did you show Audra?”
“No. She was doing other things, I didn’t tell her. Not yet. She can be jealous.”
“What do you mean?”
“Listen. I need Audra, we need Audra. And you—it’s like that man who talked to people no one could see, who I told you about. Not exactly, but something like that. You’re a special person. You pick up on things that other people don’t. We need a person like you. We will.”
“Why?” I asked.
There was a sound—footsteps, above—and he paused.
“We can’t,” he said. “This is too much talking.”
He pulled the wool blanket across, and I could hear by his breathing that he’d gone back to his yoga exercises. I tried to read The Foxfire Book, to focus, but my mind was imagining how it must have been that night in my bedroom: Henry reading all the messages with me asleep in my bed, so close, and Audra sitting at my desk and taking that cell phone apart, to show me that I hadn’t been forgotten.
A little later, the lattice slid aside, and Audra crawled in, under the house. She looked at Henry, then at me—she could tell something was happening, had happened. She’d brought a loaf of bread, some carrots that we chewed quietly; things settled a little, in the air between us.
Henry lugged the plastic bucket out through the opening, into the alleyway, when it was time to go out walking. He dumped the bucket out in a porta potty at a construction site, a couple of blocks away, then left the empty bucket with the lid snapped on hidden where we could find it, where we could get it on our way back.
As he walked he was checking out all the cars and trucks he passed. What he was looking for, Audra told me, were older ones, ones where the hood could be opened from the outside, ones that had no latch inside the car or truck. Old cars and trucks, those were the ones he could steal the batteries from. He’d take them out quickly and stash them and we’d pick them up
later, to use for electricity, beneath the house. She said you had to be careful, carrying them, since the acid inside could spill out and eat through your clothes, burn your skin. That made me think of my dad’s old ski jacket, the one he kept in the basement, its stuffing showing through.
Out in the night the windows were lit, it was like a show, in the neighborhoods. I saw an old woman watching TV who scratched her head and then took her hair, her wig, right off. Families playing, kids wearing pajamas, running up stairs where I couldn’t see them anymore. A fat man with black hair who seemed to be looking out but was only looking at his own reflection, his mouth moving like he was talking to himself or practicing saying something he wanted to say to someone. It was a little sad to see, I don’t know why.
The light was on inside a car, and I could see a woman’s head sliding through the night. Another woman fixing her lipstick in the rearview mirror, parked at a stoplight. A man with long hair in the car behind her, trying to read something on a strip of paper he held up in front of his face. If any of these people saw us, they would never know that we were together, the three of us, walking so spread out across the neighborhoods.
Audra drifted back and walked alongside me, Henry out ahead of us, a dark shape under the streetlights.
“Why don’t I ever walk with him?” I said.
“You wouldn’t have much to say to each other, anyway.”
“Because he’s your boyfriend?” I said. “Is that why?”
Audra laughed. “That’s such a high school word! We’re together, but I wouldn’t call it that. He came to find me, because I was the one, and now we’re together.”
We crossed a shadowy park, stopping for a moment to sit on the swings. Henry waited for us, watching, standing on a deserted basketball court at the bottom of a grassy slope.
“What about me?” I said.
“You know I’ll always take care of you.”
Our shadows blended into the larger shadows of trees, then slipped out the other side.
“Maybe,” I said, “maybe I don’t always want to be taken care of.”
“Vivian.”
“Maybe I want to take care of myself,” I said.
“You will,” she said. “Of course you will.”
The swings’ chains jangled above, behind us, as we kept walking. The moon was almost full; it cast our shadows out into the street, our legs bending over the curb, our bodies and legs long and thin and black.
We climbed out of the neighborhood, into Mount Tabor Park, up past the reservoir, under the dark trees where the ground was steep. Our shoes in our hands, barefoot, we practiced how to step without making a sound.
Audra had her rope, her nylon cord, and her braided fishing line. She bent back saplings, little trees, tied nooses that attached to trigger sticks on the ground—I’d seen the drawings in the book, and she knew how to do it. Even in the low light I could tell she was smiling, that this was what she wanted to, what she liked to do. The snare would jerk an animal into the air, break its neck, but she didn’t bait the traps, they were only practice. She took them apart, didn’t leave them behind.
We spent hours in the trees, practicing for times in the future that I didn’t know about. We raced to make shelters as quickly and quietly as possible; we played Blindfold Trap, where we had to set up a deadfall while blindfolded, where the trap always caught my hand.
The Rock Tool Game, the Throwing Stick Game, the Fast Fire Game.
Audra and I climbed high in the trees. We tied our hammocks to branches and swung there, close together. Below, Henry was working on his blind, a pile of brush he could hide inside. I’d read in the book where it said you had to let the blind sit for days, so the animals would get used to it, so they would forget that it had been any other way and return to their normal activities, but Henry was only practicing, keeping his skills sharp.
“Where did he learn how to do all this?” I said.
“Everyone can,” Audra said, “where he’s from.”
“Does he tell you about it?”
“Yes,” she said. “Some things. He told me he has a boat for fishing that’s so camouflaged a helicopter flying over couldn’t see where it’s hidden. He told me there are places dug underground where the people go—places that no one could see, that no one could find unless they knew.”
“Are the people hiding?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I think it’s the weather, mostly. They’re only underground in the winter. There’s houses in the trees, too, for when it’s warm.”
“And there’s other people there?”
I peeked over, down below to where Henry was trying to move his whole blind; in the deep shadows, it looked like a bush was sliding along the ground by itself. Above, I heard the wings of birds, the wind in the trees. The branches were blacker against the darkness, but I couldn’t really see anything. Nothing moved at all.
“He said he had brothers,” I said. “So there must be people.”
“There are,” Audra said. “Only there used to be more and now there are very few.”
“And that’s why he needs us?”
“Well,” she said, “he came for me. I forget, sometimes, that you’ve never been with someone, the way I am with Henry. It’s hard to explain.”
“How? Because you’re in love or something?”
“You can call it that, if you want,” she said. “But it’s more, bigger—he needs me, I need him, so we can take care of ourselves and each other without all these people telling us what to do, how to be.”
It was silent, then, for a moment. I remembered that Henry told me I was special, and I wondered if he had told that to Audra, too. I felt her hand along my arm; she gave me a gentle push so we rocked together, high in the trees. Closer together, farther apart, slowly settling.
“I was thinking of,” she said, “I was remembering that time in Colorado, at Grandma and Grandpa’s, when their little dog, Sonny, got his paw caught on barbed wire. One of his pads was just dangling. Grandpa took a wire cutter and snipped it right off, part of that dog’s body. I picked it up and it was warm, rough on the side that had touched the ground.”
“I remember,” I said.
“He ran away, not long after that. Sonny did.”
“What made you think of that?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“I miss Mom and Dad.”
“We don’t have time for that. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“But—”
Below, there was a low whistle, Henry’s signal that it was time to go. We reached for the branches, we began unknotting our hammocks, then slid down, trying to land without making a sound.
The three of us moved silently out of the shadows, back down into the neighborhoods, the square windows of the houses shining against the night. Audra took Henry’s hand, glanced back at me.
“You follow now, Vivian.”
I did, along the dark streets, looking into the warm, shining windows of the houses we passed. In that moment, I wanted to be warm and dry, to walk through rooms. I wanted to open a refrigerator and have choices about what to eat. It had been so long since I had a glass of milk; I never thought I’d miss that. And there I was, cold, holding no one’s hand.
Ahead, Henry and Audra were talking, but I couldn’t even hear the sound of their voices. I felt very far away. I could tell that they were laughing, by the way their bodies moved.
I’d never seen Audra so happy; it made sense, her decision to be with him, to want to go away. She might not even have graduated from high school, if she’d stayed—even if she had graduated, the options weren’t interesting to her. She wanted a new start, a different world. Me, I didn’t know if the world I wanted was already hidden inside the one I knew.
FIFTEEN
The next morning, I lay listening to the woman walking around her kitchen, the scrape of a chair as she sat down, probably to eat lunch. It was Tuesday, around noon, and her schedule written in the blue notebook said
she’d be going out soon. I waited. I listened carefully. When I heard her front door slam, when I heard her car start, out on the street, rattling as it drove away, I sat up and reached for my shoes.
In the alley, I ducked low, careful of the other houses. No one could see me, and soon I was out in the neighborhood, and anyone who saw me wouldn’t recognize me. I usually wore my hood up, but by then we’d dyed my hair black, and Audra had cut it short, so I looked like a boy.
It felt strange to be out in the day, the brightness, to see all the colors and the edges of everything. I walked across town, back toward my school, my house, though that was not where I was going.
The lights were bright inside the QFC, all the colors of things to buy, the long aisles. I was looking in every direction, searching. Then, down an aisle, I saw Henry, stocking boxes of raisin bran. He wore his blue apron, a name tag that flashed in the light but that I couldn’t read from far away. He was sitting sideways and didn’t look over. His hands were fast, stacking those purple boxes, fitting them in tight.
I stood halfway into the aisle, watching him, not wanting him to see me, but he wasn’t even looking in my direction. He wore a leather holster on his belt, some kind of gun in it that printed price tags or read bar codes. It swung a little as he turned away, walked down the aisle in the other direction. I followed, carefully, shoppers and shopping carts between me and him.
Henry went past the meat, all red in its cold cases, under the lights, past the pharmacy and pharmacists in their white coats. He went through a door with an EMPLOYEES ONLY sign on it, leaving me to wait behind a round rack that held a hundred pairs of sunglasses. I could see my reflection in the lenses, so many of me with my short hair and everything. I hardly recognized myself.
When Henry came out of those doors—his blue apron off, pulling his white shirt untucked—he didn’t see me. Of course he wasn’t expecting me, and I followed as he began walking. What I wanted was to talk with him, and then also to see where he was going. I liked that he didn’t know that I was following.
