Lightspeed Magazine Issue 32

by Judith Berman

  “How did you get this into the camp? Les soldats are checking all vehicles.”

  Mom said, “I would think that whoever moved it here would want to keep their methods a secret, so les soldats could not stop the food.”

  Magrit opened and shut her mouth a few moments, then exhaled heavily. “There are women waiting for clinic hours. I will send them over, yes?”

  “Yes,” Mom said. “Merci beaucoup.”

  The women spoke Pashto and mostly it was “ma-nana” which I figured out pretty quick means, “Thanks.” Some of them asked “Ta la cherta rahg-ley?” Mom answered, “Ze la Canada.”

  Mostly, though, I tied a loose knot in the tops of the bags and passed them over, smiled, and bobbed my head. The word spread and by midmorning the line snaked around the compound formed by the clinic’s tents, and out into to the camp proper.

  I wasn’t the only one handing out the lentils. Five other women, recruited by Magrit, were filling bags and handing them out. The line was moving at a slow walk, but there was no end in sight.

  After a consultation with Magrit, a covey of young girls my age began carrying plastic bags outside the clinic to where a line started for men—orphaned boys, bachelors, or widowers—who couldn’t come into the compound. This line was small, though, because the camp was largely filled with women whose men had died in the fighting, or who had fled from their own husbands and fathers and the Taliban’s strict application of religious rule. “And also,” Magrit said, “they’re men. Some of them would rather be hungry than collect the food. Women’s work.”

  At one point Mom disappeared behind the screen and came back with a mug of hot tea, heavily sugared. She took over my job while I drank it behind the screen, grateful for the hot drink, and at the same time, ashamed. The women helping us wore extra clothes, shawls, men’s shirts, but they were still woefully underdressed for the temperature.

  “Let me bring some hot tea to them,” I said, pointing at our helpers.

  Mom reached out and tugged my chador forward, over my bangs. “Okay. There are Styrofoam cups over the sink. Oh, and while you’re there? Use the bathroom. I just saw the latrine and you don’t want to go anywhere near it.”

  Mom jumped me home from behind the screen. I put the large kettle on and, while it heated, used the bathroom and washed my hands multiple times. Mom got me inoculated for everything but as she’d pointed out, I’d brushed hands with hundreds of people just this morning.

  I brewed the tea in a plastic pitcher and sweetened it almost syrup thick. When I came out from behind the screen and began handing out cups, I think they thought I was bringing water, but when I tipped the pitcher steam rose in the air. They cradled the cups and breathed in the steam and smell. When one of them tasted it her cry of surprise started the others sipping.

  The line ran out before we ran out of lentils and Mom sighed in relief. She did a quick inventory and told Dr. Magrit, “Almost five hundred kilos left. For the next emergency.”

  Dr. Magrit nodded. “There is always another. But the army says they’re coming to deal with this latest problem with the militias. The UN has a large convoy waiting for their escort.”

  We tidied the tent, stacking the bags neatly, and when Magrit went to do rounds, Mom jumped us away.

  Dad came into the kitchen swearing. “The weld is still leaking. I have to get the part machined from scratch.”

  Mom and I were in our bathrobes. We’d used the hot tub on the upper deck to cook the chill from our bones. There’s something decadent about sitting in 110-degree water while fluffy, fat snowflakes are falling all around you. But this time it hadn’t been as good because of the noise and smell of the generator exhaust, which was way worse than the slight smell of sulfur that comes from the hot spring.

  When I thought about the girls and women in the refugee camp I felt really petty complaining, but I still said, “Can’t we go stay someplace else while that thing is running? It’s smelly and loud.”

  Dad and Mom looked at each other, then back at me. Mom looked sad and Dad looked grim. I knew his answer before he spoke.

  “No. We can turn off the generator at night, though. The fridge will be okay for seven hours.”

  Right. As if I cared about the refrigerator.

  We never slept anyplace else. We’d go places but we’d always come back quickly. I was trying to remember if there was ever a time that I’d spent the night away from home, even when Dad taught me survival camping. Sure we gathered and cooked our own food, but how real is it if you get tucked into your own bed every night?

  The next morning Dad went off to get his part made and Mom said, “Your room … clean it.”

  “Mom!”

  “It looks like a laundry and a library exploded. You have shelves, use them. Put up your clean laundry and start washing the dirty stuff, if you can tell which is which. They’re all jumbled together.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but she raised her hand. “Seriously. Do it. I’ve got some meetings so I won’t be back until this afternoon, but you should be done by then.”

  “I need more shelves.”

  “You need to cull your collection. If you’re not going to read it again, put it in a box. We’ll donate it to a reading program.”

  “Dad said I could have another shelf.” Dad has books all over the house. You don’t see him culling his collection.

  Mom sighed. “One more shelf isn’t going to do it. Okay—one more shelf unit, but you’ll have to move your boy-toy posters.”

  “No!”

  “It’s the only wall space left.”

  “We could put the shelf in front of one of the windows.”

  “Absolutely not!”

  “I don’t see why—”

  Mom jumped away.

  It’s not fair.

  Oh, yeah, I can see that we really shouldn’t put bookshelves in front of the windows. There’s a great view down the valley, and in the summer I would want it open. But jumping away in the middle of an argument really isn’t fair.

  Dad does it, too.

  If I could jump, it might be different. I’d fantasized about disappearing in the middle of one of their lectures often enough.

  When I was a little girl, maybe four years old, I would stand in front of my mother and say, “Mommy, I’m going to jump!”

  Mom would cover her eyes with both hands and I would quietly walk to another part of the room or into another room entirely and say, “Boom! I jumped!” And she would drop her hands, gasp in amazement, and say, “Wow, you jumped!” If I was in the room with her still, she would say. “There you are!” And if I’d left the room, she’d say, “Where did she go?”

  I wasn’t going anywhere. At this rate I would never go anywhere.

  I stomped up the stairs to my room. I was still in my pajamas: sweatpants and a T-shirt. I tried to slam the door but it caught on a pile of clothes, books, and DVD cases. I groaned. Bad enough that she left in the middle of the argument, but the fact that she was right about the room only made it worse.

  I kicked at the pile, trying to shove it aside, and jammed my toe on a book wedged up against the shelf by the door.

  “Shit!” I yelled, hopping around on the other foot. I didn’t care that I wasn’t supposed to say that. At that moment I wouldn’t have cared if Mom and Dad were standing there listening. It would be hard for them to bug out in the middle of that one emphatic word.

  The posters were old, dating back to when my idea of what a girl’s room should look like was based on girls’ rooms in movies and television shows. I don’t think I’d ever been inside an actual girl’s room. Mom’s mother lives in an apartment in one of those retirement communities now and though Mom once showed me the house she grew up in, we never saw inside. Even if we had, the room she’d had as a girl would’ve been different.

  Mom told me, though, that when she was my age, she had pictures of Rick Springfield, Andrew McCarthy, and Tom Cruise. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “But this was pre-Scient
ology, Risky Business Tom Cruise.”

  I had three posters: the Jonas Brothers, Zac Efron, and Rupert Grint. Rupert’s too old but that smile and those shoulders and that hair! I didn’t really care about the Jonas Brothers or Zac, not anymore, but when I was balancing on my desk chair to take Rupert down, the chair rolled sideways while one of the pushpins was still in. The poster ripped diagonally down through his face and I banged the jammed toe when I landed.

  “Fuck!” I yelled. It was so loud I imaginedit echoing through the mountain valley, the elk lifting their heads to listen. I ripped the rest of the glossy paper down and crumpled it into a ball. Then I did the same thing with the other two posters and slung the damn chair across the room where it knocked a lower shelf out of one of my bookcases and spilled more books across the floor.

  I started crying and this made me mad. Mom’s a family therapist by training. There no stigma attached to crying in our house, though it makes Dad uncomfortable, but I hated how it made my eyes puffy. Also, the thought of Mom comforting me or asking me those open-ended therapy questions while I was still mad at her really pissed me off.

  My bed is chest high with a reading nook underneath, with cushions and a light. It’s been my hiding place, my crying place, my safe place since I was little. I hadn’t used it in months but I wanted to crawl into it and bury myself in the cushions. I even crouched to do so but then I saw my snowboarding pants lying across the entrance, where I’d kicked them off the day before.

  “To hell with this,” I said, and got dressed instead.

  There’s a covered walkway at the back of the house that becomes more of a tunnel in the winter. It’s mostly used to reach the springhouse but it continues up the mountain from there, a steep stairway, steps of squared timbers set into the ground. I use it for exercise, when the house gets to be too much, pushing the snow off to the sides until it’s banked high enough to keep even the blizzard-driven snow out. The stairway leads to a pavilion fifteen feet square, a hundred yards up the slope, where the mountain shelves a bit and the black spruces and sub-Alpine fir thin out. It’s glorious there in the long summer days, if there’s a breeze to keep the mosquitoes away. In the dead of winter it’s lethal, especially when the wind blows. But now, in the fall, the temperatures were still above zero, though the snow was piling deep.

  The pavilion marks the top of my snowboard run, which curves north, down a gully, through a birch grove, and down a natural half-pipe that’s a series of short waterfalls in the summer. At the bottom it winds down one more steep slope before curving around to the valley floor, a hundred yards below the house.

  I’m not supposed to snowboard unless Dad has checked the run, making sure all the rocky areas are deep under snow and there’s nothing dangerous around. All of the Yukon is grizzly territory and they like to hibernate near the tree line. Despite the snow, this was early enough in the year for grizzlies to still be active.

  So, too early, and you can run into grizzlies. Too late, and the temperatures get to forty below zero. Fahrenheit or centigrade. Doesn’t matter. That’s the place where it means the same thing on both scales. Do the math—Dad made me do it.

  I hauled my board up the stairs, kicking through some of the newer drifts, my coat open and my hat off. I knew I’d be sweating by the time I reached the top. The snow was even deeper than I’d expected, since the freak storm we’d had back in September dumped three feet and the temperature had never risen high enough for it to melt.

  I took the first run slowly. I was breaking so many rules. Dad hadn’t checked the run. I was supposed to be cleaning my room. And I wasn’t wearing a helmet.

  Dad would stroke if he saw me.

  I only had one biff, not really a boomph, when I buttslid out of a carved turn, cutting up short to avoid a rock sticking out of the snow. The rest of the run was clean, and now that I’d marked the rock in my head I could shred the whole thing at speed. There was even a cornice to the left after I exited the pipe that would let me bust huge air above the last steep pitch down into the valley.

  I didn’t even look in the windows as I climbed up past the house. Dad might think I was with Mom and vice versa, but if either of them saw me or realized my board was gone from the back hall, I was busted anyway.

  I was gasping by the time I reached the top again and I sat until my breathing slowed and I was feeling the chill. I buttoned up and snapped my bindings over my boots and started down the slope, aggressive, keeping closer to the fall line. I hit air twice in the pipe and remembered to cut hard at the bottom so I could catch the cornice. To hit the right part of the slope below I had to cut hard, right before the lip, and under the pressure of the turn I felt something shift below my board. I was airborne when I heard a deep thudding sound overlaid with a sharp crack.

  I hit the steep slope below, my knees bending to absorb the landing shock, and risked a glance upslope.

  The entire cornice, fifty yards across, had let go. As avalanches went it was small, but it filled the last slope, funneled even tighter by the near-vertical cliffs on each side. I couldn’t cut sideways out of its path.

  My only hope was to get down before it caught me. I steered straight down the fall line and leaned forward, putting my arms behind, slipstreaming.

  I might have made it but a slight bump in the slope concealed a loop of willow branch. It wasn’t thick but it was ropy tough, and even though it broke, it took me down, tumbling, to fetch up against another drift just in time to watch tons of snow bear down on me.

  “Sorry, Dad,” was all I had time to say.

  It’s the air in front that hits you first, driven by the snow. The blast popped me into the air and then the snow was all around and pushing me down, down, down … and then I hit something and everything was dark.

  I wasn’t unconscious so the darkness surprised me a little. I’d fallen in deep powder and the snow conducts the light surprisingly well, but not this time. I thought there must be tons of snow above me, but I didn’t feel any pressure. I’d wrapped my arms around my face, to keep an air pocket, which is one of the things they say you should do. Now I thrust forward, hard, trying to make the air space bigger while the snow was still soft. But the snow gave way and my hand hit something hard and smooth. I kept thrusting, pushing the snow … and then there was light coming in from where the snow had cascaded away from me, and I saw a stretch of carpet, a stack of underwear, and six paperback books.

  I was in the reading nook under my bed with about two cubic yards of snow.

  I’d jumped.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Davy: Wet Dream

  Davy had the dream, again, the one where the scars on his chest were fresh, and if he tapped just below his right collarbone, there was a solid disk-shaped lump under the skin. In the dream he felt the tingle in his throat, the coughing, followed almost immediately by the nausea—the titanic heaving of his stomach muscles as he vomited—and he woke up on a steeply pitched roof on the south shore of Martha’s Vineyard in ice-cold, driving rain.

  The vomit, at least this time, was only in the dream and once fully awake, he flinched back to their bathroom, swearing loudly. Despite being awake now, he couldn’t stop his fingers from probing the old scar below his right collarbone, but the old device had not magically reappeared below the skin.

  Millie sat up in bed, abruptly, a sharp intake of breath. “Davy?”

  In the dim illumination that leaked from the bathroom nightlight, Davy saw her patting the bed beside her, searching for him.

  “Here,” he said. “It’s all right. Had the dream again.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Just the dream?”

  “No, dammit.” He took off his wet pajamas and groped for a towel. “They’re having a northeaster on the Vineyard.”

  “You haven’t done that in a while.” Millie sank back against her pillow. “So, on the rooftop in the rain? That’s good.”

  He snarled at her through the towel.

  She laughed. “Sorry. I mean that if it
’s unpleasant enough, we stand a chance of getting rid of the compulsion. They spent so much time making it unpleasant everywhere else. It’s good to counter that.”

  Davy picked up the wet pajamas and threw them violently into the laundry bin. “Too bad they replaced the building, then. Falling to the foundations from three stories up would be really unpleasant.”

  “At least they didn’t rebuild it exactly. You wouldn’t want to reappear in someone’s bedroom.” Millie said reasonably.

  The current owners of the property had torn down the flood-damaged old mansion sixteen years before and replaced it with a two-story beach house.

  “I’m going to soak in the springhouse,” he said. “Chilled.” Come with me? He didn’t voice the thought. It wasn’t fair to wake her up in the middle of the night as it was.

  “Come back to bed soon,” she said. Her voice trailed to a whisper by the last and she smacked her lips and closed her eyes.

  She was breathing deeply, sound asleep, when he came back. He was thoroughly warmed by the hot spring, overheated in fact. He toweled dry, put on dry pajamas, then slipped between the sheets carefully. She made an “mm” sound and resumed her deep breathing.

  He stared at the ceiling until dawn.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Cent: “I thought Dad was the ruthless one.”

  The second time was like this:

  “Why is there a water stain on the library ceiling?” Dad asked.

  Shit. I had an answer ready but I hadn’t expected that particular question.

  “I was cleaning my room and I took some water in to scrub out a stain in the carpet. I’m sorry, I tipped over the bucket.”

  The question I’d been expecting was “Why is your carpet wet?”

  I’d disposed of the snow in the bathtub, running the shower hot to melt it. My room never looked better. I’d gotten to the books soon enough to keep them from getting soaked but, as noted, a substantial amount of snow melted into the rug—more than I’d realized.

  I’d run three loads through the laundry. Mom was right. The dirty clothes were mixed up with the clean and all of it was wet. Also the cushions in the reading nook. Between loads, I’d also culled three cartons of books that I would never read again.