by Meg Donohue
Amir seemed to have clamped his teeth together to stop himself from crying out at the pain of Bear’s weight on his chest. He narrowed his eyes and said nothing.
“You’re really hurting him!” I yelled.
Amir didn’t speak.
I sank my teeth into Bear’s arm and made him howl. He struck my neck and I sunk to the ground beside Amir, coughing and trying not to cry. My brother looked down at me. His face was twisted and dark.
“If he’s ever worth really hurting, believe me, he’ll know it.” Bear gave a funny-sounding laugh, lifted his foot from Amir’s chest, and walked off toward the house.
Amir sat up and rubbed his hand over his chest, watching Bear’s back. In his place, I would have been sobbing. I wondered if, like Bear, Amir didn’t cry, but then I remembered the tears I’d seen brim in his eyes on the night he’d arrived at Horseshoe Cliff.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He nodded, rising to his feet. He took my hand and helped me up. “Are you? You bit him!”
I shrugged. “Don’t listen to him, Amir. This is your home now.”
“I know it is. He knows it, too. That’s why he hates me so much.” Amir stroked Pal’s head. “What did he taste like?”
I thought for a moment. “Like a piece of raw pumpkin covered in horseshit.”
Our laughter rose up from us in such a rush that the leaves of the whole grove quivered.
“Did you mean what you said?” I asked. “Did you change your mind about telling my father how awful Bear is?”
Amir shook his head. “I was just trying to scare him.”
I smiled. I liked the idea of one of us scaring Bear for a change.
“Let’s get our eggs,” he said. “I’m starving.”
A look of hatred passed over his face when he glanced after my brother, who was still making his way toward the house and kicking at every stone in his path. I wasn’t surprised by Amir’s hatred, or frightened of it. Instead I felt drawn to it, envying the clarity of his emotion, its pureness. His hatred was as bright as a guiding star on a cloudless night. My own feelings for my brother were a murky sky that only left me moving in circles. I hated him. I felt sorry for him. I hated him. I loved him.
There was a frayed rope between us that would not break.
Chapter Six
For the next two years, Amir and I attended Little Earth and helped my father with the many chores assigned to us at Horseshoe Cliff. We spent our free time roaming the land by foot and horseback. We were late for school every morning because we lost the hours after dawn to building forts in the grove, or swimming out toward passing whales, or racing the horses along the bluff. We were inseparable. But while I read more books in a week than all of our classmates combined, at ten years old, Amir continued to struggle to make sense of the words on the page. I helped as best I could, but sometimes I wondered how much it mattered that Amir did not love school as I did—his talents were in the wood sculptures he created, his passion lay with our land.
We managed to avoid crossing paths with Bear for long stretches of time by exploring the areas of Horseshoe Cliff where we knew he was unlikely to wander. It seemed to us that our home protected us, and why wouldn’t it? We were sure it felt our love for it and returned the feeling.
There was the one Sunday when we wandered through the orchard, collecting apples that a windstorm the night before had knocked from the trees. Slight wisps of fog came and went. Stopping in a patch of sun, we unwrapped a pair of Rei’s gingersnap cookies. I heard Bear’s voice before I saw him. Amir and I froze, and as we did, the patch of sun in which we stood flooded with fog. We grabbed our bags of apples and darted silently away. The fog was so thick that we could not see even as far as the trees that stood within five feet of us. Amir reached for my hand. In all my life, I had never seen the weather change so suddenly. Why had the fog rushed through the orchard, if not to protect us? I slowed, pulling on Amir’s hand so that he slowed, too. We stopped. Though we could not see him, we heard Bear’s heavy footfalls nearby. He stumbled and released a gruff stream of curses that made my heartbeat thunder in my ears. He was so close that I was sure if I reached out, I would touch his shoulder. Silently, Amir and I stood together within that extraordinary, breathing mantle of fog. After a few moments, silence fell. Bear was gone.
And then there was the time when an ocean current held Amir and would not let him go. Something stopped me from swimming back toward him. I scanned the beach and my eyes landed on a snakelike coil of bullwhip kelp. I grabbed it and stepped into the water only to my ankles, throwing one end to him. I sat down hard, digging my heels into the sand. Hand over hand, Amir pulled himself along the length of that rope of kelp toward me. I willed the kelp not to break. It should not have held his weight. But it did. At last, Amir sat beside me on the wet sand, his dark eyes round with the strangeness of the sea’s hold, the kelp’s strength. We leaned against each other. As our bodies connected, we lost ourselves to long, ragged gusts of laughter.
There was the night that we sat on the back porch as Rei read to us. She and my father often exchanged books, but on this night, he asked her to stay and read out loud. They sat in the two chairs and Amir and I sat on the steps. My father and Amir worked their knives; I could not yet tell what either was making. Rei had brought a book of stories about mythical islands because she knew how my father loved folklore of the sea. I rested my head against a stair rail and closed my eyes while I listened to her calm, crisp voice pick a careful path through the legends. She read to us of King Arthur’s elusive Isle of Avalon, where apple trees grew heavy with fruit and the shape-shifter Morgan changed from human to bird as she pleased. She read to us of Buyan, the magical center of the universe in Russian mythology, home to the sun and the winds, an oak tree that connected heaven to earth, and a white stone that granted healing and eternal happiness. It was when she was reading to us of Hy-Brasil, a bountiful island hidden within a shroud of mist off the western cliffs of Ireland, that I opened my eyes and looked out toward the horizon. Fog moved along the coast, suddenly parting.
“Look!”
The others followed my gaze. On the horizon, an island rose from the sea.
“It’s a cloud,” said Rei.
“It’s very still for a cloud,” said my father. I looked at him, unsure if he was teasing me. Though he kept his gaze on the horizon, I saw the smile hidden within his beard.
“It’s an island,” I said. I looked to Amir, expecting him to agree.
But after a thoughtful moment Amir said, “What if Horseshoe Cliff is the island hidden within the fog? And what we see out there is the rest of the world catching its first glimpse of us?”
I could tell by my father’s expression that he was as delighted by this idea as I was.
“If we’re the hidden island, let’s find the magical stone that grants healing!” I said. “We’ll use it to get rid of Dad’s cough.”
My father laughed. “Who needs to heal? On this island, we’re immortal!”
I scanned the sky for a red bird, hoping one would appear, but none did. I lowered my eyes to the horizon.
“It’s a cloud,” Rei said. She was looking out toward the sea, too, and sounded very sad. “It will be gone by morning.”
As it turned out, it was gone in the morning. But who could say if what we had seen was cloud or island? Or if Amir had been right and we were the ones who were, in fact, on an island? Wasn’t that the beauty of magic? Before you could be certain it existed, it slipped away, leaving you full of wonder.
THAT SPRING WE all became sick. The illness started with me and spread to Amir, then my father, and finally Bear. For a week we coughed and shivered and sweated and drank the spicy seaweed and noodle soups that Rei brought us. My father’s coughing fits had punctuated my childhood, but these seemed worse than ever before. I remembered the stories of his youth; how he’d spent so much time in bed because of illness. I waited for the sea air to cure him the way he’d told me it once had. I
wished for a magical stone of healing.
My father’s skin grew pale, and the arms of his shirt grew big. Still, every morning he shuffled out of the cottage with Bear trudging along behind him. Amir and I wanted to help, but my father wouldn’t allow it during the week. Our responsibilities were school, the chickens, and the horses. The garden withered; it was as though the land, too, had fallen sick. When Bear drove to Osha to exchange our fruits and vegetables for meat and dried goods at the co-op, the box he came home with was less full each time. Amir and I were quiet around the dinner table at night, our sparse conversation marked by my father’s coughs and the sounds of Bear slurping his soup out on the porch. He had not eaten a meal with us in years. He gave no excuse to our father, but he’d grumbled to me that he could not stomach watching Amir eat food that did not belong to him, food that should have been ours.
Even when the rattling sound in my father’s chest grew worse, the idea that he might not recover from his illness never occurred to me. Through all the death that had moved through Horseshoe Cliff, my father had been untouched. Mothers died, animals died . . . But fathers? I believed that fathers remained.
One morning we arrived back at the cottage after feeding the horses to find that the truck was gone. My father was not in his usual chair on the porch waiting to take us to school. The sight of that empty chair made my stomach clench.
I remembered now that my father’s cough had seemed particularly relentless the night before. Why hadn’t I checked on him before I ran out to feed the animals? Inside the cottage, the noises of the land and the ocean fell away, revealing an unsettling quiet. All the windows were shut, the air thick with the smell of dust.
We hurried to my father’s room. He lay in his bed and opened his eyes at the sound of our approach. I chewed my lip. His skin was sticky looking. Sweat beaded on his brow, but his bed was piled high with all the blankets in the house, including the ones from my bed and also Amir’s. Bear must have walked around and collected them. This possibility surprised me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked my father. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Is your fever back?”
One corner of his mouth attempted to move toward a smile. “Nothing that Doctor Clark can’t fix. Bear went to get him.”
It was difficult to imagine that little gray-haired Doctor Clark from town with his table full of coloring books and wooden puzzles could fix a man as big and strong as my father. I thought the doctor only saw children whose fevers wouldn’t go away or children who felt like rocks were lodged in their throats or children who had cuts so deep they needed sewing. My hand, still resting on my father’s shoulder, began to tremble.
Amir stepped up to the other side of my father’s bed. “Would you like some water?” he asked. When my father nodded, he ran to the kitchen.
I held my father’s hand and decided I would not let go until he was well again. I lifted his hand to my lips and kissed it.
“Sugar-and-Spice,” he said. It was his nickname for me. His eyes were locked on mine, but his voice was nearly swallowed by the wind that suddenly rubbed the sides of the house. His breath was loud and ragged.
Amir returned with the water. He stood on the other side of the bed, but when my father didn’t reach for the cup, Amir held it to his lips. Some of the water spilled down my father’s cheeks. It didn’t seem to me that he had managed to drink any. I dried his cheeks with the sleeve of my shirt, leaving behind a shadow of dirt. When I tried to rub the dirt away, my father closed his eyes, but seemed restless, his eyelids moving and flickering.
He licked his lips and spoke. “I haven’t done this for years,” he said in that strange, croaky, new voice. “When I was a kid, I used to lie in bed for weeks. My breathing was always bad then. I was born early, my mother said. Weak lungs.”
A shiver moved down my spine. I didn’t like hearing him use the word weak to describe any part of himself. I thought of how he worked outside from sunrise to sunset. I thought of our walks together, the beat of our footsteps on the land, the songs we sang.
I began to sing the songs that my father loved, the ones he always sang while striding around Horseshoe Cliff. Amir sang, too. He knew the words now, and our voices sounded nice tangled together, sweet and high.
Eventually we heard the truck rumbling up the dirt drive, the squeal of the brakes as it stopped in front of the house, but we didn’t stop singing until Bear and Doctor Clark entered the room. Without a word, Bear pushed Amir from his place beside the bed.
My father opened his eyes and stared up at the doctor. His breathing made a wet, whistling noise.
“Hello, Jacob,” Doctor Clark said. He always seemed weary and today he looked no different, his shoulders slumped as though his exhaustion were a heavy coat.
My father moved his lips, but I couldn’t make out his words.
Doctor Clark pressed his listening tool to my father’s chest. After a few moments, he put his hand on the side of my father’s neck, and then his wrist. “I don’t like the sound of those lungs of yours.”
“He’s had that cough for years,” said Bear.
I looked sharply toward my brother. Was he nervous? I took a step closer to my father. I had not let go of his hand. My heart was beating so fast that it felt as though it were preparing for flight.
“And the fever? When did that spike?”
Bear shrugged. “We were all sick. It was just a cold. Something he brought home from school,” he said, tossing his chin toward Amir.
This wasn’t true, though he said it as though he believed it. “I was the one who was sick first,” I said. I’d been the first to get the cold and the first to recover. Amir moved to my side of the bed.
Doctor Clark’s eyes softened when he looked at me. “Well, everyone gets sick at school—especially in the spring when the weather goes one way and then another. Why don’t you two head outside for a bit and let me chat with your dad and brother?”
It didn’t seem to me that my father was up for much of a chat. I held tight to his hand and shook my head.
“We don’t want to go outside,” said Amir.
Doctor Clark looked to Bear, but Bear just shrugged. The doctor sighed. “Fine, then.” He took his listening tool from his neck and put it back into his bag before addressing my father.
“Jacob, my guess is you have pneumonia. I won’t know the severity of the infection until I see an X-ray of your lungs. That means a visit to the hospital.”
The hospital! I waited for my father to protest, but he only nodded.
“We’ll come with you,” I said quickly.
“No, you won’t,” said Bear. He’d been slouched against the wall, but now he straightened.
Doctor Clark looked at Bear. “I don’t know how long your father will be there,” he warned. “It could be days . . . or longer.”
“They’ll be fine here,” Bear said.
The doctor’s brow furrowed. “How old are you now, Merrow?” he asked. It occurred to me that he’d hardly glanced in Amir’s direction.
“Ten.”
“Well, that’s older than you look, but it’s still young to be left home alone.”
“I’ll call Rei Ishikawa when we get to the hospital,” Bear said. “She’ll keep an eye on them. Anyway, someone needs to stay here to mind the animals.”
“No,” I said. “I want to be with Dad.”
“No one cares what you want, Merrow. I don’t need to be watching the two of you and looking after Dad at the hospital. You’re staying here.”
The doctor shot Bear a look and walked around the bed to where I stood. He put his hand on my shoulder. “There, there,” he said. “Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying.”
“Don’t cry, little one,” my father said, blinking up at me.
“I’m not crying,” I insisted again, but now I was crying. Hot tears rolled down my cheeks. Bear’s jaw grew tense, and he turned away from me. I was shocked at how easily Bear and the doctor lifted my father from his bed,
my father who had always seemed so large to me. I lost my grip on my father’s hand as they lifted him, but in the moment we lost touch, Amir took my other hand in his. He held my hand as my father was carried out of the house and placed in the backseat of the doctor’s car, and he held my hand as the doctor drove my father away, and he held my hand as Bear got into his truck without another word to us, leaving behind only dust and the faint sounds of the chickens squabbling and, farther away, the surf breaking over and over against the rocks.
REI DID NOT come for two days. We never knew if Bear had forgotten to call her or if his neglect was intentional. Either way, by then we really were old enough to fend for ourselves. We ate tomatoes and greens from the garden and we scrambled eggs with beans from the cans in the cupboard. We did our best to look after the animals and the garden. At night, I could not hold my tears any longer, and Amir sat beside me on my bed and patted my back. Pal whined and shivered and looked back and forth between us for an answer we could not give.
The second day was longer than the first, and still no one came. Amir and I did not venture far from each other. The view of the ocean from the back porch might have given us comfort, but for the first time I preferred the front porch with its view of the driveway. I wanted to see my father the moment he returned.
When a car finally came toward us down the long drive, my father wasn’t in it.
If we hadn’t known the shiny white car belonged to Rei, we might not have recognized her. She looked so much older than she had when we’d seen her earlier in the week. Her perfect posture was broken in a way that looked irreversible, her shoulders sagging so heavily they seemed to pull her spine. She did not have on her usual sun hat, and the sight of the thick gray streaks in her black hair made my eyes sting.
Amir and I stood from our chairs. We were so close to each other that our elbows touched. We did not speak.
Rei walked up the front steps and grasped us both in her embrace. I twisted my body so that I could look up at her. Her black eyes glistened in the shade of the porch, and then tears were running down her cheeks.
