by Meg Donohue
“But to have you—a single man—take on this responsibility. How could she ask this of you?”
“I must have been her only option.”
“That poor boy. He seems strong at least. Did you see the way he stuck on your horse? He is a determined child. I suppose that is what happens when your childhood is all death and dislocation. Eight years old and to have lived through so much already.” She was quiet for a moment. “And you . . . well, now you have another child to take care of on your own.”
“He’ll be fine. We’ll all be fine. We have land for him to run on and a perfectly nice bed for him to sleep on, thanks to you. He’ll go to school with Merrow. What more could a boy need?”
Rei said something I couldn’t make out.
“I know you will, Rei. You always do. You’re good to us.”
“True goodness,” she responded, “is shown by those who have nothing to give but what comes from their heart.”
Amir appeared in the open door of the bedroom. I lifted my finger to my lips and without any other encouragement he joined me in pressing his ear to the wall. I smelled the lemon bread on his breath, the dusty horse scent on his skin. His big eyes blinked inches from mine. They were not as dark as I’d thought them to be; there was honey within the brown, softening them.
My father and Rei must have moved closer to the house, because suddenly Rei’s voice was as clear as if she were in the room with us.
“But what about your health, Jacob? When did you last visit the doctor?”
I heard my father laugh.
“I’m serious,” Rei said. “I don’t want to embarrass you, but you were wheezing when you lifted that bed and—”
“Rei, I’m not a young man. I’m meant to huff and puff—”
“And if something happens to you? What will become of these kids then?”
Amir and I stared at each other. Despite the fact that he looked nothing like me, there was something about Amir’s face that made me feel as though I were peering into the dark water of a tide pool and seeing a different version of myself in the reflection. I knew how he felt in that moment listening as Rei speculated about our future; I felt the same way.
Rei said, “Just promise me that you’ll take care of yourself as well as you take care of these children. That’s all I ask.”
“Promises.” I knew my father was smiling; I could hear it, and it reassured me. “You know what I can promise, Rei? I can promise to cut myself an extra big slice of that lemon bread you made. How’s that?”
The sounds of the adults moving away from the window made us straighten.
“Poor Dad,” I said. “He doesn’t know that Bear took off with the rest of the lemon bread.”
I licked my thumb and used it to wipe away the blood on Amir’s elbow. I carefully pressed a bandage over his cut, the way I imagined Allison might have done for him, the way that my own mother might have done for Bear’s scrapes and skinned knees in the years before I was born.
AFTER A WEEK of evenings on the porch watching my father work on his tiny houses, Amir asked if he would teach him how to whittle.
I had learned from Amir’s first day at Little Earth that he was not a strong reader. He did not listen to Teacher Julie’s lessons with rapt attention as I did, but instead gazed toward the window. At home, though, Amir had taken great interest in my father’s work, following him around the garden and the orchard. He kept his face very still, but his eyes took in everything. He asked questions that I had never thought to ask. Teacher Julie always told us that there were no right questions, but I could see from the way that my father looked at Amir that Amir was asking the right questions. My father showed us every tool in the shed and explained how to use them. In the orchard, there was dusty soil below our boots and plump apples above our heads. Dad told us how our trees—trees that drank the coastal fog—grew deep roots in order to find moisture where they could, seeking out hidden reserves far below the dry surface soil.
Adversity makes them stronger, my father said. Heartier.
Now, my father opened the leather whittling kit his grandmother had given him and handed Amir a knife. I looked up from my book. Amir’s spine straightened. The blade caught the lantern’s light as he turned it in his hand. His expression was unreadable. Then he nodded at my father, ready.
I listened as my father talked about how to safely handle the knife, but I soon returned to the book I was reading. I’d finished Pippi Longstocking and had moved on to a book of Greek myths that I’d found at Little Earth. I loved the goddesses’ dresses, the way they flowed to the ground in silky folds and glittered with shells and pearls. In my entire life, I’d only worn clothes that had been worn first by other people. Without a television, I rarely caught glimpses of what people outside of our little corner of the world wore. It was only Rei, with her pretty bracelets and wide-brimmed hats, and the characters in the books that I read, who showed me that fancier clothes than mine existed.
I read to my father and Amir as they worked their knives. I noticed that my father smiled when he looked over at Amir’s progress; it made me happy to see him smiling during those hours around sunset when he usually fell quiet.
Amir surprised us with how quickly he became adept at carving. He looked at a piece of wood and saw something else within it. Wood turned into shells and flowers and animals in his hands. Except for a fairy that he’d made for me, he gave all his carvings to Rei to sell along with my father’s. The fairy he made for me had such wild hair and tiny toes and ornately detailed wings that I could not bear to tell him how swiftly I lost her.
The only one of us who was not taken with Amir was, of course, Bear. It seemed to me that the sight of the three of us happily sitting together on the porch each night drove him to an even darker place than he had been previously. My father asked him to join us, but he looked over at my father and Amir with those twin knives in their hands and refused.
Some nights, Bear shut the door to his room and turned on the radio that he had taken from the kitchen. Others, he would walk down the driveway and I’d watch the night close around him and wonder if he would come back. He fought with my father almost every day. It was clear to me that he hated Horseshoe Cliff, hated working the land and answering to my father. I didn’t understand why he stayed.
It wasn’t long after Amir arrived that I realized I’d stopped flinching when my brother approached. I was no longer his target. Amir took the brunt of my brother’s violence from the moment he came to live with us. Every time Bear shoved Amir, I cried out, expecting to hear Amir’s bones cracking as they hit the ground. But Amir seemed made of rubber. He’d once made the mistake of scrambling to his feet while Bear was still nearby, only to find Bear’s thick hands on his shoulders again, tossing him back down. After that encounter, Amir learned to wait where he’d landed until Bear was gone. When I yelled at my brother, he just swatted me away like I was nothing. I would kneel to the ground and wait with Amir until Bear was out of sight, my whole body throbbing in anger as though I’d been knocked down, too.
When my father was nearby, Bear ignored Amir. I waited for Amir to tell my father what was happening, but he never did. He seemed so content when Bear was not around, and took such obvious pleasure in life at Horseshoe Cliff, that it was almost possible to believe that he forgot Bear’s abuses as quickly as he was subjected to them. But there were nights when he groaned as he fell into bed, and I knew he was not sore from his chores. Without my father stepping in, I worried Bear’s aggression would only worsen.
“I’m going to tell my dad,” I said one night, blinking through the darkness toward Amir’s bed in the far corner of our bedroom. “Bear is hurting you.”
Amir sat up. “No. It doesn’t matter what Bear does to me. You can’t say anything to Jacob.”
The desperation in his voice surprised me. From across the room, the bedsprings complained as he lay down again. I heard him turning from side to side, restlessly.
“It’s quiet here,” he
said. “At the orphanage, I slept in a room with fourteen other children. Some of them would yell and cry in the night. It was hard to sleep. In the morning, I was always tired. I was small, and the bigger kids took my food. There was a courtyard to run and play ball in, and that was the best part of the day. A lot of the children were nice. Some were not. The man who watched us was not a good man. We called him Uncle. From one minute to the next, I didn’t know what might happen to me. Uncle didn’t like to hear us—singing, whispering, chewing our food. He didn’t like our smells. He laughed to Cook about how dirty and stupid we were, about how nobody wanted us or would ever want us because just look at us. We were disgusting. When we looked at him wrong, he took our food away. Or he hit us on the shoulder or the back of the head or behind the knee.
“One day, I convinced Cook to let me deliver Uncle’s lunch to his office. I was quick and quiet and I stood completely still outside Uncle’s door while he ate. When he called for his plate to be taken, I did so silently. After that, I delivered Uncle’s lunch every day. He never hit me again. His bowl always had a few bits of rice left in it when he was finished, but I never ate them.
“Maybe Uncle told my mother to choose me, or maybe she had no choice at all. One minute I lived in the orphanage, and the next I lived in a house with my mother and three other American women who were in India to help children like me. They said they had waited a long time to be able to take me in, and I still can’t understand that because all that time they were waiting, I was waiting, too. If we were all waiting, why couldn’t we have waited together, away from that man at the orphanage? I was six then, I think, but I don’t know. Maybe I was older and I lived even longer in the orphanage than I remember. I hope not. All I know is my mother and her friends cooked food that I had never had before. I grew bigger in that year but a part of me always thought it could not last because it did not feel real to live with them in that quiet house.
“I was right. When I was seven, my mother became sick. We moved to New York City. Her father didn’t want me to call him Grandfather. He didn’t like me in his home. He wrinkled his face when he saw me. I tried to stay out of his way so he could pretend that I wasn’t there. It was cold in New York, and then it was hot, and then it was cold again. And then my mother died, and I came here to live with you.”
I listened, astonished. It was the most Amir had said about his past. I understood that Bear’s treatment of me over the years was small compared to what Amir had been through. Even at eight years old I understood that I was listening to something profound. Bravery and strength had resided quietly within Amir the whole time that we’d been running around Horseshoe Cliff, exploring and laughing and playing.
And then I understood what he was trying to tell me.
“You love it here,” I said.
“Yes.”
“My father wouldn’t make you leave. He’s not like your grandfather.”
“Bear is his son. If he learns Bear doesn’t like me—”
“Bear doesn’t like anyone! And anyway, that doesn’t matter. My father wouldn’t send you away. I wouldn’t let him!” This was true. In that moment—and, really, from the moment I met him—I felt fiercely protective of Amir. It was why I felt the urge to step in front of him when Bear approached—I’d rather Bear hurt me than him. I was used to it, anyway. But I guessed what Amir was trying to tell me was that he was used to it, too.
But he was not done with his story. “In the orphanage,” he said, “there was a corner of the courtyard where bird droppings streaked the wall. Every day, I used a rock to scrape the poop from the wall onto a little slip of paper, and then I folded the paper and kept it in my pocket. Cook saw me do this. It was why he let me bring Uncle his lunch. Uncle always complained about Cook’s food. Every dog is a tiger in his own street, Cook used to say. I did not know if he meant Uncle was the dog believing he was a tiger, or if I was. When I dropped that bird poop into Uncle’s lunch each day, I felt like the tiger.”
I laughed until my cheeks ached. My body was still tingling with delight at Amir’s story when Bear’s face flashed in my mind. I thought of the irritated expression my brother wore when he skulked by the three of us sitting cozily on the porch.
“Did you ask my dad to teach you to whittle just to annoy Bear?”
Amir laughed. “I also wanted to learn to whittle. It wasn’t just to annoy Bear.”
I smiled. Amir might not read as well as I did, but he was clever in other ways.
“You won’t tell your father about Bear?” he asked.
“No. I promise.”
Amir was silent, the bedsprings still below him. “I’ve never had a friend like you, Merrow.”
I could not see him in the darkness of the room, but I knew he was smiling. I smiled back. “I’ve never had a friend like you, either, Amir.”
THE NEXT MORNING, before the sun rose, before my father could tell us not to, we put on bathing suits and grabbed towels and hurried outside. Fog hung in the cold air. Pal barked at our heels, nearly tripping us at every turn. We raced down the switchback path to the beach and straight into the ice-cold water.
Amir was ahead of me, but I’d already discovered that I was a faster swimmer and knew I would easily catch up. The water was black and freezing, and we kept moving so our limbs wouldn’t grow heavy with cold. All the while, Pal barked anxiously from the shore. The sea was calm, roiling gently around us. We dove along the surface of the water. Amir’s stroke was getting stronger, but I easily swam past him, grinning.
We dragged ourselves out of the water and collapsed breathless onto the sand, teeth chattering. The moon and the sun were both in the sky. The speckled sea stretched out before us like a frost-covered meadow. Glossy ribbons of purple seaweed hung from the rocks, a gift that would be taken back as the tide rose. I pulled off a piece and ate it. Amir watched, wide-eyed, then did the same.
“Salty,” he said. He yanked off another piece and handed half of it to me. We chewed and looked out at the water.
“It’s beautiful here.” Amir pulled his towel tighter around his narrow shoulders.
I nodded. I felt very proud of Horseshoe Cliff and was happy to share it with him. We dug in the sand for a while, building a web of rivers around a fortress with windows of broken white shells. I knew it would be time to leave for school soon, but with the sounds of the waves filling the air, and the sand slowly warming below me, and Amir for company, I did not feel like moving. Amir sat back on his heels and looked up. I watched his eyes follow the curve of the cliff that hugged the cove.
“That’s where my mother died,” I told him.
His mouth opened. “She fell?”
“Or maybe the cliff crumbled beneath her feet.” It did not pain me to talk about her. My father had told me that the dead never really left us, and I had taken his words to heart. “I feel her watching me when I’m on the beach. Bear hates to come down here. I think it makes him sad. But it makes me happy. Anyway, Bear will never follow us here.”
As the sun lifted in the sky, it hit Amir’s ears and made them glow. I looked at him and smiled.
When our hunger set in, we trudged back up the path. We decided we would fry eggs for our breakfast. But when we approached the chicken coop, Bear was standing outside the pen. He held one of the chickens.
The blank look on his face made me feel as though I’d swallowed a fistful of stinging nettle. On Bear, whose expression seemed so often shadowed by sullenness, that blank stare took on a semblance of pleasure. The muscles of his arms bulged. The chicken was silent and still in my brother’s grip, frightened into a kind of trance.
Suddenly, the hen released a panicked squawk and began to writhe. Bear must have been squeezing her, but his blank expression did not change.
I took a step forward, intending to intervene, but Amir’s hand on my arm stopped me.
“Hey!” he yelled to Bear.
Bear blinked and looked in our direction. His lips twitched oddly. When he threw the chicken
away from him and she landed safely on the dirt, I felt a moment of relief. But then I saw that my brother was walking toward us, and he had those knives in his eyes. Without a word, we dropped our towels and ran. I was faster than Amir on land, too, and I led the way, racing toward the eucalyptus grove. I knew each turn in the path, each knot of exposed root below. Pal ran along at my side. I could hear Amir running behind me, and behind him, the heavy steps of Bear.
And then Amir was gone.
I turned and saw that he lay on his back with Bear heaving above him. I raced back to them.
Bear had one foot pressed into Amir’s chest. Amir squirmed like a cucumber beetle flipped onto its back.
“Let him go!”
My brother ignored me. I rammed my body into his, but he didn’t move. Pal’s hair stood on end and he barked frantically, looking between us in confusion.
I pulled Bear’s arm. “Let him go!” I yelled again.
“Why should I?” Bear shoved me so hard that I stumbled backward.
“Because if you don’t,” came Amir’s voice from below, as cold as the ocean we’d just swum in, “I’ll tell your father how you hit me.”
I looked down at him, surprised.
Bear’s lips curled toward a smile. “And?”
“And I’m not the one who complains about my chores. I don’t eat much. I don’t steal his beer.”
Amir’s words, coolly delivered, hung in the air. I wondered how he managed to radiate so much anger while appearing so calm.
“Don’t fool yourself,” said Bear. He ground his heel into Amir’s chest. “This isn’t your home. Who are you? Some strange Indian kid with no parents.” He bent down, pushing his face near Amir’s. His lips curled. “I’m his son.”
