by Markus Zusak
She struggled to hold a hand up.
She raised it to my face.
I could feel the hot-tin roof of it, as she ignited on top of the sheets; it was one of those oxymorons again—it cooked her from within.
She said, “Promise you’ll still keep reading.” She swallowed, like heavy machinery. “Promise me, promise, okay, kid?”
I said, “Of course,” and you should have seen her.
She caught fire, beside me, on the bed.
Her papery face was lit.
* * *
—
As for Michael Dunbar, in the kitchen, our dad did something strange.
He looked at the bills, then me.
Then he walked outside with his coffee cup, and hurled it toward the fence—but he’d somehow got the angle wrong, and it landed amongst the lawn.
When a minute went by, he’d collected it, and the cup remained unharmed.
* * *
—
From there the door was flung open, and death came in from everywhere; it marauded all that was hers.
But still, she wouldn’t allow it.
One of the best nights was late in February (nearly twenty-four months in total), when a voice arrived in the kitchen. It was hot and very humid. Even dishes on the rack were sweating, which meant a perfect night for Monopoly. Our parents were in the lounge, watching TV.
I was the top hat, Henry the car, Tommy the dog, Clay the thimble. Rory, as always, was the iron (which was the closest he’d get to actually using one), and he was winning, and rubbing it in.
Rory knew I hated cheaters, and gloaters more than anything—and he was doing both, way out in front, rummaging everyone’s hair, each time we had to pay him…till a few hours in, it started:
“Oi.”
That was me.
“What?”
That was Rory.
“You rolled nine but moved ten.”
Henry rubbed his hands together; this was going to be great.
“Ten? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Look. You were there, right? Leicester Square. So get your ironing arse back one spot to my railway and fork out twenty-five.”
Rory was incredulous.
“It was ten, I rolled ten!”
“If you don’t go back, I’m taking the iron and ejecting you from the game.”
“Ejecting me?”
We sweated like merchants and swindlers, and Rory struck out at himself for a change—a palm through the wire of his hair. His hands were already so hard by then. Those eyes gone even harder.
He smiled, like danger, toward me now. “You’re joking,” he said, “you’re kidding.”
But I had to see it through.
“Do I look like I’m Goddamn joking, Rory?”
“This is bullshit.”
“Right, that’s it.”
I reached for the iron, but not before Rory had his greasy, sweaty fingers on it, too, and we fought it out—no, we pinched it out, till coughing was heard from the lounge room.
We stopped.
Rory let go.
Henry went to see, and when he came back in with a nod of okay, he said, “Right, where were we, anyway?”
Tommy: “The iron.”
Henry: “Oh yeah—perfect, where is it?”
I was deadpan. “Gone.”
Rory searched the board in a frenzy. “Where?”
Now, even deader-pan. “I ate it.”
“No way.” Disbelief. He shouted. “You gotta be kidding me!” He started to stand, but Clay, in the corner, silenced him.
“He did,” he said. “I saw him.”
Henry was thrilled. “What? Really?”
Clay nodded. “Like a painkiller.”
“What? Down the hatch?” He burst forth with loudmouthed laughter—blond in the white-blond kitchen—as Rory turned fast, to face him.
“I’d shut up if I were you, Henry!” and he paused for a moment, then went out back, and returned with a rusty nail. He slammed it down on the proper square, paid his money, and glared at me. “There, you dirty bastard. Go try swallowing that.”
But, of course, I didn’t have to—for when the game started up again, and Tommy rolled the dice, we heard the voice from the adjoining room. It was Penny, part gone, part alive.
“Hey, Rory?”
Silence.
We all stopped.
“Yeah?”
And looking back, I love the way he called that now—how he stood, and was ready to go to her, to carry her or die for her if he had to; like the Greeks when called to arms.
And the rest of us sat, we were statue-like.
We were stilled, and remained alert.
God, that kitchen and its heat, and the dishes all looking nervous; and the voice came stumbling forward. It was on the board between us:
“Check his shirt….” We felt her smiling. “Left pocket,” and I had to let him. I let him reach over and in.
“I should give you a fucking nipple cripple while I’m at it, you bastard.”
But soon, he’d managed to find it.
His hand reached in, he produced the iron, and he shook his head and kissed it; tough lips on silver token.
Then he took it and stood in the doorway, and he was Rory and just young and untough for a moment, the metal gone soft in an instant. He smiled, and shouted his innocence, his voice gone up to the ceiling.
“Matthew’s bloody cheating again, Penny!” and the house all around us was shaking, and Rory was shaking with it—but soon he came back to the table, and placed the iron on top of my railway, then gave me a look that fell at me, then at Tommy and Henry and Clay.
He was the boy with the scrap-metal eyes.
He cared nothing, at all, for anything.
But that look, so afraid, so despairing, and the words, like a boy in pieces:
“What’ll we do without her, Matthew? What the hell are we s’posed to do?”
We did it in early December.
We all just got in my car.
Clay could say what he wanted, about waiting until he was finished. All of us, we’d all had enough of it, and I took out my tools and work gear; we reached in and righted the seats. Rosy came with us, too. Tommy tried also for Hector, but we said to him don’t push your luck—and God, how we drove and thought of him.
Those reams of empty space.
We drove but hardly spoke.
* * *
—
In the meantime, the clouds were gathering, which meant one of two possibilities.
The storms would pass by, rainless; and they’d wait to be tested for years. Or the flood would come to them early, while they desperately worked to the finish.
Probably the greatest moment came when they took the molds out—the falsework—for the arches to stand alone. They were men of other terms then—of bridging as opposed to dying—and so they spoke of the strength of the spandrels, and the hopes they had for each keystone.
But then simplicity got the better of them, or of Michael, at least, in the riverbed:
“Let’s hope the bastards hold.”
It was like fins out in the ocean—you were sure they were only dolphins, but really, did you really know? Not till you saw them up close.
They knew in their hearts they’d done everything.
They’d done everything to make it perfect.
The sandstone gleamed in the mornings.
“You ready?” said Michael; Clay nodded.
As the truest of tests, he went below.
He said, “Clay, you stay there—stay out in the light,” and he performed the final dismantling, and the arches were true, still standing; and then came his smile, and the laughter:
“Come here,”
he said, “here, Clay, come under!”
They embraced like boys in the archway.
* * *
—
When we got there, I remember us seeing it.
The bridge looked totally finished, and the sandstone deck rendered smooth.
“Christ,” said Rory, “look at it.”
“Hey,” cried Henry, “there he is!”
He jumped from the moving car:
He stumbled and laughed, then ran and picked him up, and tackled him into the ground.
Again, just one more history.
How boys and brothers love.
* * *
—
In the evening we played football in the riverbed.
It was something that had to be done.
The mosquitoes could barely keep up with us.
The ground was brutally hard, and so we tackled, but held each other up.
There were also moments we stopped, though, and just looked, in amazement, at the bridge—at the monumental deck of it, and the arches, like twins, in front of us. It did stand like something religious, like a son’s and father’s cathedral; I stood by the left-hand arch.
And I knew it was made of him:
Of stone, but also of Clay.
What else could I make myself do?
There were still many things I didn’t know yet, and if I had, I might have called sooner—to where he stood between Rosy and Achilles.
* * *
—
“Hey!”
And again:
“Hey!” I called, and I nearly called Dad but said Michael instead, and he’d looked at me, down in the riverbed. “We need you to even the teams.”
And strangely, he’d looked to Clay.
This was Clay’s riverbed, Clay’s bridge; and hence it was also his football field, and he’d nodded and Michael soon came.
Did we have a good talk then, about uniting more strongly than ever, especially at times like these?
Of course not, we were Dunbar boys.
It was Henry who spoke to him next.
He gave him the list of instructions:
“You can run right through the arches, okay? And kick the ball over the top. You got it?”
“Got it”—and the Murderer smiled from years ago, if for only a split-second moment.
“And,” said Henry, to finish things, “tell Rory to stop fucking cheating—”
“I’m not cheating!”
We played in the blood of the sun.
The clock hit two years gracefully.
Then awfully, two and a half.
She went back to work as a substitute.
She said, “This dying shit is easy.”
(She’d just thrown up in the sink.)
When she did make it out to work, sometimes she wouldn’t come back, and we’d find her halfway home, or the last in her car, in the car park. Once she was out by the railway line, laid back in her seat near the station, and trains passed through on one side, and traffic went by on the other. We knocked on the window to wake her.
“Oh,” she’d said, “still alive, huh?”
Some mornings, she’d start to lecture us. “If any of you boys see death today, just send him over to me.” We knew she was flaunting her courage.
On days she was too sick to leave, she’d call us toward the piano.
“Come on, boys, put one here.”
We lined up to kiss her cheek.
Each time might have been the last.
Whenever there was lightness or buoyancy, you knew drowning wasn’t far.
* * *
—
As it turned out, the third Christmas was her last.
We sat at the kitchen table.
We went to a hell of an effort; we made pierogi, and unspeakable barszcz.
She was finally ready, by then, to sing “Sto Lat” again, and we sang for the love of Penelope; and for Waldek, the statue, and no countries. We sang only for the woman in front of us. We sang only for all her stories.
* * *
—
But soon, it had to happen.
She was given a final choice.
She could die in the hospital, or die at home.
She looked at Rory in the hospital ward, then me, and all the rest of us, and wondered who should talk.
If it had been Rory, he’d have gone, “Hey, you there—nurse! Yeah, you, that’s it—unhook her from all that shit.” If it was me, less rude, but blunt. Henry would be too confident, and Tommy wouldn’t speak—too young.
On short deliberation, she’d settled for Clay, and she called him close and whispered it, and he turned to the nurse and doctor; both women, both kind beyond measure.
“She says she’ll miss her kitchen here, and she wants to be home for us.” She gave him a jaundiced wink then. “And she has to keep playing the piano…and keep an eye on him.”
But it wasn’t Rory whom he’d pointed to, but the man with a hand on Tommy.
From the bed she spoke up outwardly.
She said, “Thank you both for everything.”
* * *
—
Clay had hit thirteen back then, his second year of high school.
He was called into a counselor’s classroom, after Henry had just walked out; he was asked if he needed to talk. Dark days before Claudia Kirkby.
His name was Mr. Fuller.
Like her, he wasn’t a psychologist, but a teacher given the job, and a good guy, but why would Clay want to talk to him? He didn’t see the point.
“You know,” the teacher said. He was quite young, in a light blue shirt. A tie with a pattern of frogs, and Clay was thinking, Frogs? “Sometimes it’s easier to talk to someone other than your family.”
“I’m okay.”
“Okay, well, you know. I’m here.”
“Thanks. Do I just go back to math?”
* * *
—
There were hard times, of course, there were terrible times, like when we found her on the bathroom floor, like a tern who couldn’t make the trip.
There was Penny and our dad in the hallway, and the way he helped her along. He was an idiot like that, our father, for he’d look at us then and mouth it—he’d go Look at this gorgeous girl!—but so careful not to bruise her.
Bruises, scratches. Lesions.
Nothing was worth the risk.
They should have stopped at the piano, for a break and a cigarette.
But there are no breaks for dying, I guess, it’s relentless, and unrelenting. Stupid, I know, to put it like that, but by then you don’t really care. It’s dying at twice the rate.
There was forcing herself to have breakfast sometimes, to sit at the kitchen table; she never could master the cornflakes.
There was Henry once, out in the garage:
He was punching like hell at a rolled-up rug, then saw me and fell to the ground.
I stood there, helpless, hingeless.
Then walked and held out a hand.
It was a minute before he took it, and we walked back out to the yard.
* * *
—
Sometimes we all stayed in their room.
On the bed, or sprawled on the carpet.
We were boys and bodies, laid out for her.
We lay like prisoners of war.
And of course—it was ourselves we imitated later, on the day of the anniversary, when I read for a while from The Odyssey.
Only now it was Michael who read to us:
The sounds of the sea and Ithaca.
He stood by the bedroom window.
* * *
—
At regular intervals, a nurse came by and checked on her. She surrendered her
to morphine, and made work of checking her pulse.
Or did she concentrate like that to forget?
Or to ignore what she was here for, and who and what she was:
The voice of letting go.
* * *
—
Our mother was certainly a marvel then, but a wonder of sad corruption.
She was a desert propped up on pillows.
Her lips so dry and arid.
Her body capsized in blankets.
Her hair was standing its ground.
Our father could read of the Achaeans, and the ships who were ready for launching.
But there was no more watery wilderness.
No more wine-dark sea.
Just a single boat gone rotten, but unable to sink completely.
* * *
—
But yes.
Yes, Goddamn it!
Sometimes there were good times, there were great times.
There was Rory and Henry, waiting outside Clay’s math class, or science, just coolly leaning:
The dark-rust hair.
The swerving smile.
“C’mon, Clay, let’s leave.”
They all ran home and sat with her, and Clay read, and Rory spoke: “I just don’t see why Achilles is being such a sook.”
It was the smallest sway of her lips then.
She still had gifts to give.
“Agamemnon stole his girlfriend.”
Our dad would drive them back again, lecturing at the windshield, but they could tell his heart wasn’t in it.
* * *
—
There were the nights when we stayed up late, on the couch, watching old movies, from The Birds to On the Waterfront to things you’d never expect from her, like Mad Max 1 and 2. Her favorites were still from the ’80s. In truth, those last two were the only ones both Rory and Henry abided; the rest were all too slow. She’d smile when they whined and moaned.
