All was still, and in the moonlight everything was shades of gray. Flickers of light caught my eye, like fireflies twirling — little fairies is how Sally and I used to think of them — dancing around in the air. The flickers were the meander, water flowing slowly in its bends and curves, moonlight reflected off it.
Jill saw that I was awake. Her two fingers did not stop moving on Sally’s head, smoothing and stroking the hair back. Back, and back, and back, Jill stroked the wisps of hair. Behind her the meander sparkled, as if it were something alive, something signaling to me in its own kind of water Morse code.
She looked at me. I couldn’t see what her eyes were saying in the darkness.
“Jill?” I whispered.
She tilted her head in a way that meant Yes?
There was so much to say, and there was nothing to say. Willie was going to die, sooner rather than later, and what would happen to Sally? Then a feeling came churning up from inside me, from farther down than I could have thought a feeling could come from, and it swept through me. I had felt glimpses of this feeling, shadows of it, when I had stood next to Jill at BJ’s and watched the old man’s hands, and the apples tumbling and rolling in all directions. I had felt more shadows of it all summer, when I had ridden my bike down 274 and there was no Willie tromping along with her green pail. Once, I had felt the shadow of this feeling when I was walking up the driveway to Sally’s house and had seen the outline of Willie pass behind the living-room window.
The name of the feeling was grief.
It came swarming up inside me and choked me. I saw my hand reaching to Jill. She left Sally and came over to me.
“Jill,” I whispered.
What could I say? How could I tell her what I was feeling, when the feeling was huge, choking me up inside? I looked up at her, silent Jill, whose eyes were shadowed in the darkness. Jill, who had stood beside me at BJ’s as the apples tumbled and rolled.
I watched as tears gathered themselves in Jill’s eyes and spilled down her cheeks, tiny bright trails in the moonlight. It came to me then that Jill was losing her mother.
“I know,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, like mine. She picked my hand up and held it between both of hers. Her fingers were warm. She put her head close to mine. Sally slept on.
Slender fingers of orange and pink began to glimmer in the eastern sky, and Jill got up. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched as she made her soundless way back to the cornfield, until the cornstalks had swallowed her up and the rustling sound of her passage grew too faint to hear.
I want to be not afraid.
But in reality I’m scared by many things.
The night sky scares me. I hate being scared of the night sky, because the night sky is beautiful, is a thing of beauty on a summer night in the Adirondacks when the stars are flung across the darkness like diamonds on black velvet.
My mother once woke me in the middle of the night when I was about four years old, long before the age of reason. She carried me downstairs and stood me up on the porch with her. She held my hand. Above us the sky pulsed with color: green and blue and red and yellow.
“It’s the aurora borealis,” my mother said.
I was so tired I could barely keep my eyes open, there on the porch, holding her hand, looking up at that unearthly sight, but I was not yet scared. It was only later that fear set in, fear of its mystery, its endlessness. The way it goes on forever, an infinity of miles past where breath can be taken, past where there is gravity and atmosphere and the sun that I so love watching come up, day after day after familiar day.
Fear came to me one night when we were camping down at the Cabin. I lay in my sleeping bag, looking up at the unlightness of the sky. Sally and I were pointing out constellations to each other: Orion, the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper. She knew Cassiopeia too. But every other star in that dark sky was unknown to me, and to Sally, and probably to most of the people in the world. After a while Sally and I stopped talking, and I could tell by the sound of her breath — deep and long and slow — that she was asleep.
A shooting star streaked across the blackness, and I shivered. It came to me that there was mystery not only beyond my own solar system but in my tiny ordinary life, down here on earth, where I lay stretched out on my back in my flannel-lined sleeping bag.
Why was I in this world?
The stars so far above me glittered on in their mute way and brought me no answers. Fear came to me in the feeling that for the rest of my life I would be asking this question, and that the answer might forever be unknowable.
We had never before had guests at the Cabin. They must have parked on the road up by William T. Jones’s house, held the barbed wire for each other, and made their way down the pasture toward where they knew the Cabin was even though they couldn’t see it behind the white pines, the white pines with their arching lofted branches.
It was early morning.
I didn’t see them until they were already close to the Cabin, making their way along the meander. Willie had her green pail in her hand and Jill held her arm. Their progress was slow. You could say they were ambling. Meandering, even.
The sunlight struck sparks off the water.
“Look,” I said, pointing them out to Sally.
Her face changed. She picked up her jump rope and moved off to the side of the Cabin. She started jumping, her back to me. She started with some cancans, then she started to practice her backward triple under. The backward triple under is the hardest trick. Only a few people at our school can do one.
“Sal?” I said. “Do you want to go out with me and meet them?”
The jump rope scurried around in the worn patch of dirt by the Cabin. I watched it twist and wiggle for a while, watched Sally’s face get tighter and more frowning with each failed attempt.
I dragged one of the red folding chairs out of the Cabin and set it up outside, in a patch of sun, near where Sally was practicing her backward triple under. Then I made sure that the planks over the meander were set tight into each mud wall. As they came closer, I saw that Willie was leaning on Jill’s arm. Her green pail didn’t bounce up and down the way it usually did, the way it used to, back when Willie tromped up and down Route 274 every day.
“Greetings!” I called. I scissored my arms the way Willie used to when she saw our school bus pass by. “Welcome, all ye who enter here!”
Willie looked down at the planks.
“Excellent construction,” she said. “Aesthetically pleasing and useful at the same time. A triumph of form and function.”
Sally was still practicing her backward triple under in the jump-rope dirt patch. She didn’t look over at us. She didn’t come running over to see what was in the pail, which were doughnuts in a white waxed paper bag from Jewell’s.
I picked an overgrown rhubarb leaf to serve as a plate for the doughnuts. It was a precarious arrangement. One sudden tremble of a wrist and the whole thing would come tumbling down. I held it out to Willie.
“Doughnut?” I said.
She looked up at me from the red folding chair, the seat of honor, in an appraising way.
“Excuse me,” I said. “What I mean to say is, Willie, would you like a doughnut?”
“No thank you, Eddie,” she said.
I have tried to train myself into calling Willie Willie. I have snapped and snapped and snapped my blue rubber band. But it’s not always easy. It needs to begin in the mind, retraining your brain to substitute a different word for the word you’ve used for so long.
“Sally,” Willie called. “Treat for you!”
Sally came over. Still, she wouldn’t look at her grandmother or Jill. I held out the rhubarb-leaf plate of doughnuts to her, but she shook her head.
“Are you sure?” I said.
She shook her head.
“If you have one, I’ll have one,” Willie said.
Shake.
Then Willie, the anti-sugarist, did something I had never seen her do. She plucked one of the s
prinkle doughnuts off the rhubarb leaf and took a bite. She closed her eyes and held her face up to the sun.
“Mmm,” she said. “Delectable.”
Sally stood there, holding her jump rope. Willie held the bitten doughnut toward her.
“Bite? They’re your favorite food.”
“Used to be,” Sally said.
She wiggled the jump rope so that it looked like a blue-and-green snake dancing in the dirt. Willie took another bite.
“Sugar’s bad for you,” Sally said. “That’s what you’ve always told me.”
“Sugar might be bad for you,” Willie said. “I’ve always held that opinion, it’s true. But lately it’s come to me that if an opportunity for sweetness presents itself, who am I to refuse?”
Willie took another bite. I wondered how sugar on the tongue of an anti-sugarist, after so long without sugar, tasted. Was it good? I thought of all the Sunday mornings in the past when Sally and I had sat at the kitchen table with Willie and Willie had laughed and shaken her head when we teased her, trying to get her to take a bite of one of our sprinkle doughnuts. I watched her now, chewing and swallowing. Was she thinking about those Sunday mornings too? Did she regret them now, all the sugar she had missed out on?
Not long ago Sally and I were sitting in her kitchen, eating doughnuts. My mother had just told me about the disease that was harming Willie’s blood. Willie and Jill were standing outside in the sunshine, next to the little red storage shed where they keep the lawn mower and the wheelbarrow. Jill’s head was bent, and Willie’s arms moved as she talked. Jill was the listener and Willie, the talker.
Jill’s head was bent and Willie leaned toward her. I could tell from the careful way Willie’s hands moved, and the slow curve of her back, that her voice was quiet. Maybe she used to hold Jill on her lap when Jill was a little girl, the same way that Sally now sat on her lap. Maybe she had braided Jill’s hair too, tied ribbons on the end the way they were tied in the one school picture of Jill that Sally had once shown me.
Willie’s hands had moved in the sunlight, describing slow circles and shapes that I couldn’t define. Was she telling Jill how to make spaghetti sauce with the secret V8 ingredient, the way Sally and I like it, the way we’ve had it a thousand times at their house? Was she telling Jill how to fold Sally’s shirts when they come out of the dryer or, in the summer, off the line? Because Sally’s fussy about shirts.
Was it possible that Willie had been showing Jill how to braid Sally’s hair? Maybe Jill didn’t know how to braid and Willie was trying to explain it to her, how you separate a river of hair into three tributaries and weave them together, over and under, over and under, until they have become a river again, but a different kind of river, not smooth and straight as once it was, but beautiful in a different kind of way.
Maybe Willie had been showing Jill how to do Sally’s hair, for the time when she herself couldn’t do it anymore.
The rhubarb leaf lay next to the meander, Willie’s half-eaten doughnut resting upon it. I lay down beside it, on my back, and looked up at the morning sky. The moon hung high above me, barely noticeable, a slender curve of white. My nursery school teacher told us that a daylight moon is known as the children’s moon.
I thought about Willie. I thought about how we all carry rivers within us, streams and meanders and tributaries of blood, how it’s a miraculous thing, bringing us life every minute of every day.
I reached out and stroked my finger along the edge of the rhubarb leaf, then licked it. Anyone watching me might have thought that I was a girl greedy for more doughnut, eager for the last crumb of colored sprinkle. But that’s not what I was doing. Can you imagine it yourself, the taste of the first doughnut hole I ever ate, and how it felt on my tongue, on that late-summer day in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains?
Sally picked up her meander stick and dragged it over to the place where she takes her measurements. Her hair was tangled down her back, and the sight of it, messy and uncared-for, hurt me. I sat next to her and tried to follow the sight line of her hazel eyes, her eyes that wouldn’t look at me.
“Sally, you know the blue bicycle?” I said. “It isn’t a blue bicycle any longer. It’s changed into something else. It’s evolved.”
She angled her head farther away from me.
“My whole life, I’ve walked by that tree and looked up to see the blue bicycle,” I said. “And now I walk by and it’s not a bike anymore, but it’s not a tree either.”
She didn’t make any indication that she had heard me.
“It must have been changing all this time,” I said. “All these years, it’s been turning into something else.”
I looked at her not looking at me, and I remembered the first time I saw her, with her braids, back at the hedgehog table. I felt for the purple rubber band on my wrist.
“Sally,” I said.
I was almost crying. I remembered the way she used to bend her head over her workbook when we were practicing uppercase and lowercase, how she used to stroke Hedgy’s fur with the tip of one finger, and how I used to look at her hair, her beautiful hair in its Willie braids.
She wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t look at me, wouldn’t.
“My mother remembers the first day of second grade,” I said suddenly. “Way in the back by the hedgehog cage. She was there; she came to pick me up, and she remembers you being there.”
Sally laughed.
“She’s lying,” she said.
“My mother never lies.”
“She’s got a lousy memory, then,” she said. “Just like you.”
My eyes hurt. Throbbed with the tears that wanted to come out, that I wouldn’t let come out.
“Or maybe she needs glasses too.”
Sally reached out and snapped my purple band.
Then she snapped them all.
Hard.
“You and your lists!” she said. “Like you think you can actually control anything that’s going to happen to you.”
“Why are you doing this?” I said.
“Doing what?”
“Lying.”
“Who’s lying, Edwina?”
Edwina. Sally had never called me Edwina. From that very first day, Sally had always called me Eddie. Eddie’s my name.
“You are,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’m not lying.”
Sally’s head was tipped up into the air so that her chin stuck straight toward me. I could see that she was going to say no to every single question I asked her, and it was useless to ask her anything, anything about our entire lives together, but I couldn’t stop. I kept on going.
“Is your hair long?”
“No.”
“Is your T-shirt green?”
“No.”
“Is your mother’s name Jill?”
“No.”
I stood there in the sunshine, watching the light play off the red strands in Sally’s beautiful hair, her hair that I had always wanted for myself, and I watched as her chin never tilted downward and her eyes stared back at me with that look in them.
“Does your grandmother do your hair every day?”
“My grandmother never does my hair.”
“Have I been your friend since second grade?”
She smiled.
“Do I even know you?” she said.
I saw the meander stick out of the corner of my eye and it reminded me of Willie, and the keep-away-the-dogs sticks she used to carry, and the way she used to swing down the road as if it were her own road.
“Sally Hobart, is your grandmother sick?”
Sally stood there in the sun, with her chin in the air. I will see her that way forever. Behind her the Adirondacks rose up, blue gray in the afternoon sunshine.
“Is your grandmother never going to get better?”
There she stood, with her hair quivering about her neck as if it were alive.
My voice was quiet, and it was slow. It was nearly a whisper.
“Is you
r grandmother dying?”
“No,” Sally said.
But it wasn’t Sally’s voice. It wasn’t the voice that I thought of as Sally’s, her voice with its hoarse sound that I was so used to. It is possible to love someone very much and know that if you say a certain thing in a certain way, it will hurt her terribly, and yet you say it anyway.
Sally stayed next to the meander the rest of that day, that long day, without words. Late in the afternoon I went inside the Cabin and stayed there for quite a while, holding the salt and pepper shakers, one in each hand. Out the paneless window to the west, the last of the sun was stroking the shoulders of the foothills. The curtains we made so long ago out of one of Sally’s old polka-dot sheets hung limply on their nails.
I put the salt and pepper shakers back in the exact middle of the table and went outside. Sally was still next to the meander.
Sally is right. Lists go only so far.
Take Sally herself, in simple list form.
Name: Sally Wilmarth Hobart.
Nickname: None.
Home: North Sterns, New York, in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains.
Family: Grandmother, Willie. Mother, Jill.
Grade: Passed sixth, heading into seventh.
Pets: None.
Favorite season: Spring.
Favorite color: White.
Best friend: Eddie Beckey.
Would someone reading this list know Sally? As an outline, maybe. But a chalk outline of a person is not a person. Nothing is filled in.
Looking at the pets category, someone might think that Sally doesn’t care about pets. That person reading the list would not be able to picture Sally stroking Hedgy, the way she used to keep her fingers gentle and light so as not to hurt him.
That person would have no idea how much Sally wants a dog, no idea that she used to have an imaginary dog named Roscoe, an imaginary dog that she used to lead around with her jump rope as its leash.
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