Lamb

by Bonnie Nadzam

  The night was mild, the snow poured like still pools of white milk into the ditches and over the dirt road and in every crack and crevice until everything was blue-white in the dark. Lamb did not leave Linnie’s side all night, trusting his girl to sleep tight and warm in the shop. In the small hours the wind picked up again and swept all the snow clouds south and east and what snow had fallen piled up in drifts against the shop and cabin and across the road.

  It was only just past dark, very early in the morning, when they were both awakened by a knock at the door. Lamb pulled on his Levi’s and peeked out and opened the door. A fine smoke of snow blew in at foot level. When he opened the door the man spoke in a low voice, and it was for Lamb as though his head was filling up with snow, his thinking brain temporarily blanked out, eclipsed by the sudden flash of danger.

  “She had the fire built up good in the shed and swore she was all right,” the man said, indicating Tommie, “but she looked a little bugged out to me.”

  Tommie glanced up at Lamb, her face very still and her lips white. “My stomach hurts,” she said.

  Lamb stumbled as he opened the door wider, looking back into the room at Linnie, who was wrapped in the blanket and the rug. She sat up straight but could not move. She was not wearing any clothes. Unthinking, he opened his arms to the girl and she went to him, teary and dead silent.

  “Stomachache like you’ll throw up?”

  She shook her head in his flannel shirt.

  “Dad said you had a snowplow we might use. Didn’t think you’d be awake, thought I’d return it later this morning.”

  “Oh,” Lamb said, smiling and looking stupidly from the man to Linnie, ignoring the girl now. “Oh good. Yes, sure.”

  “Is she okay?” the man asked Lamb, and suddenly Linnie saw that, somehow, this child was Lamb’s and did not belong to the man at the door. She was the ghost, the dead girl, the girl swept off the swing set. Linnie’s mouth went sour and her limbs went hot and liquid and when she spoke she heard her voice as if it were coming from someone else, someone outside of her.

  “Who is that, David?”

  He made a sheepish face. “Linnie, this is my niece.”

  “Emily?”

  Lamb gave Linnie an odd smile. “That’s right.” Lamb raised his index finger at Linnie to shush her and turned to the man at the door. Linnie stood, the blankets and rug wrapped around her, and immediately sat down again. She looked at the child not with sympathy or concern but with rage. The girl did not look at Linnie.

  “It’s a not a shed,” the girl said. “There’s a whole bedroom.”

  Linnie stared at her.

  “That’s right,” Lamb said. “Bunk beds and books and blankets and snacks.” He looked down at the child and smiled at her, then winked at the man in the doorway.

  “Everything’s okay here, then?” the man asked again.

  “Sure, we’re great,” David said, and he wrapped Tommie in an afghan and sat her on the edge of the pull-out couch beside Linnie. The two did not look at each other. Tommie’s eyes were fixed to the cabin floor and Linnie’s upon Lamb.

  “What about you? Are you down at the Fosters’?”

  The man outside the door finally extended his hand. “I’m Emory Foster. My mother passed away day before yesterday.”

  “Oh.” David shifted his eyes and his weight. “I’m sorry to hear that. It must hurt.” He ignored Linnie and Tommie completely now, kept his eyes and attention entirely upon the man. “How is your father doing? Can we help?”

  “Well, actually he asked me if I’d come down here and just let you know. My wife’s up there with him now, and we’ll be expecting Doug Michaels—the county coroner—an old family friend. He’ll be along shortly.”

  “Okay.”

  “We just got a couple drifts in the drive and”—he looked out behind him at the road—“I think most of this will clear up through the day, but I can plow us a straight line from here to the house while I’m at it.”

  “Please. Go right ahead. Or”—he touched his chest—“do you want me to do it? Maybe you want to be inside with your father and wife?”

  “Oh, no. Little air will do me good. I’d appreciate it. I’ll bring back a second cleared line when I return the plow. Make it easier on Doug that way.”

  “Well.” Lamb looked for the first time at Linnie and Tommie, then back to Emory. “Fact is we were all planning on shipping out today.”

  Tommie and Lamb glanced at each other.

  “We were just going to make a family breakfast the three of us and ship out.”

  Emory nodded. “Okay. Well, I’ll do this right away and get back case you need it too.” He looked back again, at the girl, and at Linnie. “Though I think it’ll clear up pretty quick.”

  “It’s a bright sun at this altitude.”

  “It is.”

  “Emory.” Lamb extended his hand again. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thanks.” He leaned into the house and waved. “Good to meet you, Emily. Hope you’re feeling better soon.”

  She looked at the man in the doorway but said nothing.

  Emory Foster pushed the snowplow from the drive up the road into the jewelry of early winter. Lamb stooped down and asked the child if she wanted hot chocolate, then asked if the fire was still going in the shed. Linnie sat frozen in place while Lamb put on his boots to walk Tommie outside. As he was stepping out into the snow, he turned back.

  “You want some hot chocolate too, Linnie?”

  “Sure. No. David?”

  “I’ll be right back. It’s a bit of an odd situation but everybody’s okay, I’ll tell you in a minute. I just want to see about her stomach and make sure she doesn’t have a fever. She’s been sick. I didn’t want you getting sick.”

  “You didn’t even say.”

  “It’s okay. Everybody’s okay. I’ll be right back.” And he pulled the door shut and went back out into the shop with Tommie.

  And they hadn’t a minute alone again—not David and Linnie nor Linnie and the girl. David explained he really should take the girl back to her mother, her fever had broken but she wasn’t well and the time they were going to spend out here fishing and camping had pretty much been snowed out. Her father—my little brother Nel, he explained—died years ago and it had fallen to Lamb to be the occasional father figure.

  “She never remarried?”

  “She tried once—twice, actually—but it was no good.”

  “Sad.”

  “It is. You would’ve liked Nel.”

  “How much younger was he?”

  “Four years.”

  “Oh.”

  “He was a blondie.”

  “I’m sorry, David. I didn’t know.”

  “Let’s reschedule this for … first of the year, you and me. We’ll rent something with big wheels and come back out, right? Drive through the nineteen feet of snow.”

  “I’d love that.”

  “This seems like a bad time doesn’t it. Emily sick, Foster’s wife suddenly gone, unexpected snow. Let’s all get home. I’ll take the girl back to her mother.”

  “It’s Chicago?”

  “Michigan. Muskegon.”

  “Ah.”

  “Her mother drove her to Chicago, but I’ll take her all the way back up.” Linnie nodded.

  “David.”

  “Lin.”

  “Why the story? About the kid who disappeared?”

  He lifted his chin, a thin-lipped smile on his face, as if to convince the day around him that he was smiling and not about to sob again like a boy. There’d been enough of that.

  “Now that we can be … you know … closer, you’ll learn more about my family.”

  “And you mine,” she said. “But I don’t understand.”

  “Be patient with me, Lin. Please. I need that from you.”

  She was quiet a moment and studied him. He smiled.

  “Excuse me just a minute, will you?”

  Lamb went to the girl in the shop
to help her gather up her own things while Linnie packed up her car.

  • • •

  “We get the afternoon together,” he told Tommie.

  “We do?”

  “And the night. And tomorrow. And the next day. Our last day.”

  “Three days?”

  “We’ll have you home on day twenty. That’s almost four times as long as we originally said.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you forgive me?”

  “I wanted to stay.”

  “It wasn’t my idea?”

  “It was our idea.”

  “Equal partners?”

  “Equal partners.”

  “Good. Sweetheart, listen. She’ll be gone within the hour. You stay put and I’ll get dressed.”

  When Lamb was loading up Linnie’s rental, checking the air pressure in the tires and the oil for her, his shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, she went into the shop, rooted around in the cooler for a snack for the road, put a Little Debbie cake and a can of pineapple juice into her purse, walked over to the bunk room door, stood before it. Just a moment. Then she walked over to the woodstove and rubbed her hands before rejoining Lamb on the driveway, where she wrapped her arms around his waist from behind and kissed his neck.

  “Let’s move out here to live.”

  “How about we try a single week in the middle of winter and see how much you still like it?” He turned around to face her.

  “I can’t wait to see you in Chicago.”

  “You tell Wilson I’m doing good by you.”

  “You think he knows?”

  “You’re just a dumb kid sometimes.” He grinned, and they loaded her up. “The whole reason I invited you out here was so I’d be able to keep my job.” She started the engine and rolled down the window.

  “I’ll call you from the airport and leave you messages.”

  “I love your messages.”

  “I might have to whisper them, so turn up the volume on your phone.”

  He turned a dial near the side of his head. “All my ears are on.”

  “Mine too.”

  “Kiss me.”

  “See you in six days.”

  “Six days. Put your seat belt on.”

  • • • • •

  The girl was savage inside the bunk room.

  “And she’ll tell, and you’ll go to jail, and everyone will know, and I’ll get in so much trouble.”

  “Listen, listen. Tommie. Please.”

  “You didn’t keep us secret.”

  “Tommie,” he raised his voice. “Now I don’t want to yell but you’re not listening to me. I know Linnie better than you do, right? Please take your hands from your face.”

  “She’s going to tell.”

  “Please take your hands from your face, Tommie, I can’t understand you.”

  And she said something, and something, something, and took her hands from her face.

  “Look, Tommie, if she thought anything she would have told me. She would have probably been very upset. But I just sent her back into the world with plans to see her the day after I drop you at your mother’s.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. She went off smiling to the airport. She loves me.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you believe me?”

  “If you don’t like her, why are you going to see her?”

  “For us, Tom. For you and me. To keep us safe.”

  “Oh.”

  “Sometimes you just know a person, Tom. Linnie isn’t strong like us. She doesn’t always see the kinds of things we see. Do you understand? You want a little taste of whiskey from my mouth? Here. Come on. Let me scoop you up and carry you to the couch. We’ll hang out and catch up. You can tell me all the dreams you had while I was busy.”

  “Okay.”

  “This is the beginning of the part where we take you back home,” he said, kicking the shop door open with his boot and carrying the girl outside and into the cabin. “In light of all the promises we made to keep each other safe. The part where we take you back to Lombard and your mother who loves you, and I’ll come back here, and if Linnie ever says anything, or realizes she saw you, there’ll be no girl out here, right? No one for anybody to find. And you’ll be home safe.” He laid her down on the couch and put a pillow beneath her head.

  “But they’ll ask me where I was.”

  Lamb gave the girl a look of alarm. “But you won’t tell them?”

  She shook her head.

  He made like he was wiping sweat from his forehead. “I thought for a minute you’d just been setting me up this whole time.”

  • • • • •

  They set up a dinner camp on the river and the girl opened two cans of sliced potatoes and a can of corned beef hash. It hissed and snapped in the hot metal pan, and Lamb watched the girl turn it until all the pan was greased.

  “Watch the heat,” he said.

  “I am.”

  “Not too high.”

  “I know.”

  “Here. Move it here.”

  “I can do it.”

  They sat hip to hip in the dirt, the scrappy river trees hunching over them.

  “You’re turning into a fine little camping woman.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Ready for eggs?” He handed them to her, one at a time. “Don’t break those yolks.”

  “I won’t.”

  He sat very still to record the moment in his blood, to fill up his lungs, drink up the cold air and the smell of water and melting snow. Beside him the lines of her hands and skinny arms moving skillfully in the twilight.

  “Those are our last eggs.”

  “I know.”

  “Next time,” he said, “it’ll be potatoes, fried eggs, and fresh trout.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Your eighteenth birthday.”

  “Deal.”

  “But maybe you won’t want to leave your life to come and see me. I’ll be really, really old. What if I’m dying in a small, stale hospital room all alone?”

  “I’ll sneak you out.”

  They ate with forks, huffing the eggs and hash around in their mouths and lifting their chins and laughing at each other. Balancing the hash and a bit of yellow-soaked egg in each bite. Competing between them for the perfect forkful. By the time they’d finished their hands were sticky and the mess kits gritty with dirt and blackened by fire. The girl had her legs and feet tucked beneath her in the grass. He patted her little belly.

  “All those boys are going to be crowding you when you get back and they see how you’ve changed.” He put the tin plates and cups inside the metal pan and fitted all the mess kit together and tightened the red canvas strap. The sky was luminous behind his head. “I don’t think I could stand seeing you in Chicago again, Tom. You’ll lose interest in your old friend and I couldn’t bear that. I don’t think I could stand even being in the same city as you. If you know what I mean.”

  Tommie lay back and looked up at cold white stars caught up in the tree branches, corn-colored leaves caught up in her hair, her white teeth blue in the new dark, while he set everything in his pack and carried river water in his hands to the fire to put it out. When they were back at the cabin he took a pen and piece of paper from the glove compartment of the truck and leaned over the hood. She watched him write. “Forget I’m doing this, okay?” Then he walked her, holding her hand, down among the rotted fence posts. “Watch your feet. We’ll just be a minute.” He took her hand and put it on the jagged splintered top of a fence post as if she were blind. “Feel that? Memorize that. It’s the fourteenth one from the house. Fourteenth fence post on the fourteenth day. Can you remember that?”

  “Why?”

  “I’m going to leave this fence post up, right? No matter how rotted it gets. No matter how much home improvement happens around it. The fourteenth fencepost will always stand here for you.” He drove the tiny folded piece of paper deep into the split wood of the post. “Tur
n around,” he said. “Turn around and look at our little house. And the waving grass, and the silver moon. You see? It’s ours, right?” He put his finger beneath her chin and turned her head up to his. “I will it to you, Tommie. It’s yours. It is maybe more yours than it was ever mine. You’ll come back here after I’m gone, won’t you? And move right in. I’ll have written you letters. I’ll write you half a dozen letters every day for the rest of my life, and I’ll hide them everywhere. In the mugs and in old socks. You’ll have to go through everything and piece them all together in a line. You can hang each one with a clothespin out in the sun and they’ll tell the story of my love for you. If you have a husband, you’ll have to leave him behind until you’ve sorted through it all, right? All these messages from me. Messages from the dead.”

  “I don’t want to go back.”

  “Ssh. Feel that?” He pressed his thumb between her breasts. “That pressure right there? That’s the world calling you.” He picked her up like a child, up on his hip, and carried her to the bottom bunk. She breathed into the cloth of his shirt. He knew she was picturing his love notes out on a clothesline in the bright wind. He knew she was picturing him dead.

  • • • • •

  It’s the kind of thing a guy like David Lamb might tell himself again and again, how she’d lifted her head, the little crinkles and puckers in her chin and neck as she looked down at him and that absolutely terrified and wide-open face, white in the dark, and shadows from the oil lamp shrinking and stretching like live arms. And him telling her God, God, you’re sweet, you have freckles everywhere. And how he’d choked up telling her he was so honored to see so many of them, and were they his? Could they say they were his? Such an expensive gift. So dear. And listen to me: he knew it.

  Watching her load up the truck the next morning in her miniature parka, he saw her in her purple tube top, pushed around by those stupid girls. All her body and inner world had come awake by his hand. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose were bright pink in the cold. She sniffled and ran her sleeve above her lip.

  “Emily Tom. Before we go. Will you lie with me in the deer beds by the water?”

  “Okay.”

  “Can I ask you something?”