by Meg Donohue
We weren’t smiling at each other when Bear stumbled out of the house. We were just sitting with our books on our laps. But I had recently begun to suspect that what existed between Amir and I was something the world could sense if not entirely believe, like the mysterious blur of a falling star in the corner of your eye. It turned out I was right.
Later, I wondered if Bear threw Amir to the ground at that moment because he saw that Amir did not have his knife in his hand. Perhaps my brother sensed the depths of anger quietly roiling within Amir, the untold lengths he would go to protect his place at Horseshoe Cliff.
You’re disgusting. Dad would be disgusted by the two of you.
It had been years since I had cried; Bear had broken me of the habit. But that night I came as close to tears as I had in a long time. I felt my brother’s words poisoning my feelings for Amir. I hated Bear for making me feel ashamed.
What if, I wondered for the first time, the way I feel about Amir is less like a shooting star, bright with drama, and more like the strange glow of a distant planet, foreign and incomprehensible, a place where we are not meant to live?
I had tossed from side to side in my bed that night. We slept in separate rooms now—Bear had moved to my father’s room, the biggest of the three, and Amir slept in Bear’s old room. When at last I fell asleep, I dreamed of a red bird that peered down at me with a dry eye before turning and flying away.
ON THE BEACH, I gently touched the bruises on Amir’s arm. He looked down at my hand and didn’t speak. When I touched his arm, I felt a tremor run through me. I had never been kissed, but I wondered if this was a more intimate gesture, allowing someone to be so close that they touched your pain, shared it.
“We could run away,” I said. “Hitchhike to San Francisco.”
Amir’s gaze shifted to the horizon. “I don’t want to leave.”
I sighed. We had had this conversation so many times. “Don’t you want to get away from him?”
“This is our home. He can’t chase us from it.”
“He’s not chasing us if we’re running toward something. I love it here as much as you do. But there’s so much more I want to experience. You’ve lived in India and New York. Rei lived in Japan. The farthest I’ve been is Osha. We could go anywhere together. There’s no one to stop us.”
“With what money? Where would we stay?”
“My father came to San Francisco from Nebraska with no plans and next to nothing in his wallet. My mother did the same from New York. We’ll figure it out. You can sell your carvings. I can . . .” I thought about this. What could I do? I wasn’t so naive as to believe that there was a market for my stories. After writing, my next best skill was that I was a quick reader. My shoulders sank. “I don’t know. I don’t know! But I want to see more than this.” I gestured toward the ocean. Even as I said those words, my fickleness made me feel contrite. Horseshoe Cliff was my home and I loved it. Was I wrong to feel as I did?
Right then, as we both looked out at the ocean, a humpback whale rose from the water, its mouth gaping as it breached. It was close enough that we could see its teeth sparkling below the seawater that churned and poured from its mouth. And then it was gone. And then it returned. For nearly an hour we watched in silent awe as the whale surfaced and disappeared, surfaced and disappeared, until it had eaten its fill and moved on from our little cove.
AT THE TOP of the cliff path, when the noise of the waves faded, high-pitched yelping filled the air. I ran, the basket of seaweed banging against my leg. At the edge of the horse pasture, a coyote looked over his shoulder at me before loping away. The chickens in the coop darted and squawked. Feathers and dust filled the air. In front of the coop, Pal staggered and sunk onto a swath of dirt that was dark with blood and fur. His yelping abruptly quieted.
I dropped to the ground and pulled him onto my lap. “Oh, Pal.” His blood poured out of his wounds in a dark, warm rush, drenching my clothes. He closed his eyes. The weight of his body was too heavy, as though the spirit that had always lightened it had already left.
Amir crouched beside us and stroked Pal’s head with a shaking hand. “Pal,” he murmured. “Sweet, brave Pal. We’re here.”
I curled my body over Pal’s and felt his tongue lick my cheek. I pressed my face against his neck and sobbed, whispering his name over and over. “You did it, Pal,” I said. “You kept the chickens safe. What a good boy.” Amir’s arm was around me, his cheek against my shoulder, his tears falling with mine. After a length of time I would never know, Pal sighed and became still in my arms.
I lifted my head and howled with grief and rage.
When I finally looked around, the chickens were quiet, as though dazed. Amir wiped his eyes.
“I’ll get a blanket,” he said, standing slowly.
I kept Pal on my lap, my head hanging, until Amir returned. Then we wrapped him in the blanket. Amir handed me the shovel he had also brought from the shed and hoisted Pal into his arms.
“The grove?” he asked.
I nodded.
We buried him just off our favorite path. I placed three long sticks of the type that he liked to chew on top of the grave. It was difficult to believe that he had been alive that morning and now was gone, but I knew by then that this was the nature of death. I thought that it had taken Bear a long time to steal Pal from me, but in the end, that was what he had managed to do.
It was as we walked out of the grove that I thought of the sharp knife I had used to cut seaweed from the rocks. “Bear did this,” I said, quickening my step. “Pal was trying to protect the chickens. He could have fought off that coyote if Bear hadn’t hurt him.” When I wiped at my eyes, the dirt on my hands stung them. “I hate him,” I said. The words were hot in my mouth, and I spat them out.
When we reached the coop, the basket of seaweed was where I’d dropped it and bright sunlight reflected off the knife. Amir reached the basket first and picked it up. I could not stand to see how Pal’s blood darkened the dirt in every direction. I kept my eyes instead on the knife. I reached for the basket, but Amir swung it away from me.
“Merrow,” he said gently. “Let’s change our clothes. I have an idea.”
When my eyes met his, my anger gave way to sadness. I nodded mutely.
We changed our clothes and headed down the long dirt drive that led to the road. My body felt so heavy that I had the sensation I had stepped into someone else’s—someone slower, older. I was lost in my memories of Pal. It took me a moment to realize that we were on the road walking toward Osha. When a car passed, Amir stuck out his thumb. The car sped by in a thrum of dampened music and dust. I pulled Amir onto the scrub grass off the pavement.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting us started,” he answered. His dark hair fell in his eyes.
“Started on what?”
“Wait and see.”
When the next car approached, I stepped up to the side of the road and stuck out my thumb. A man with gray hair that curled below the back of his faded cap drove the car, and a woman with a long gray braid sat beside him.
She rolled down her mud-flecked window. “Everything okay? Need a ride to town?” A Grateful Dead song was on the radio—I didn’t know which one, but I recognized Jerry Garcia’s voice from the radio station my father used to play. It was music from another time.
Amir nodded, and we climbed into the backseat. Rei took us to Osha every few months, but we had never been there by ourselves. The woman looked over her shoulder. She had a kind smile and the sight of it made me worry that tears would rise to my eyes.
“Seat belts, please,” she said. Once we had buckled ourselves in, she nodded to the man beside her and he pulled the car back onto the road. No one spoke again after that. The music changed from one Grateful Dead song to another. The road south to Osha curved toward the ocean and then away from it toward the hills and then back toward the ocean again. Clouds sat up high in the bright blue sky, so perfectly white and still it was hard to imagine
they would ever break apart. I watched this all numbly.
The car stopped in front of the Osha co-op. Amir and I opened the door and climbed out.
“Thank you,” Amir said, as easily as if this were the sort of thing we did all the time.
“You got it,” the driver said, speaking for the first time. The woman just nodded at us and offered up that smile one last time and then they were off.
I looked at Amir. “Now what?”
“Are you hungry?”
I nodded. Instead of heading into the co-op, he started up the street away from the ocean. The main street in Osha ended on one end at the ocean, and on the other it climbed up the hillside, eventually forking and then forking again, growing narrower with each turn. We were unusually quiet. I was lost in thoughts of Pal and hardly noticed how far we walked. In town, houses were set on small parcels close enough for one neighbor to stand on his porch and stretch out his hand to touch his neighbor’s hand, but up on the hill the houses gathered distance between them, each one claiming a bit more land than the last. As we walked, Amir opened one house’s mailbox and then another and another. We kept walking.
Amir stopped in front of a brown-shingled house with yellow roses lining its walkway. The driveway was empty. When he opened the mailbox at the fence, I saw that it was stuffed full of mail.
“It’s not San Francisco,” he said, looking back at me. “But you wanted to see somewhere other than Horseshoe Cliff.” He headed down the driveway and disappeared behind the house. “Come on!” he called.
I was startled to hear how deep Amir’s voice sounded. Years earlier, Rei had told us about puberty, and about sex. She’d warned me that I would be shocked by my blood when I had my first menstruation, but when that time came, I had not been shocked. Blood was not particularly frightening to me by then. I welcomed my period as though it were an end marker to my childhood; I was ready for something more.
The back door of the house was locked. Amir bent down and lifted the doormat and laughed when he saw the key. I picked up the key and slid it into the door lock as though I’d been unlocking doors my whole life.
Inside, we found ourselves in a large kitchen. The lights were off; the house was silent. Amir walked to the sink and gulped water straight from the faucet. When he stopped, he looked at me and smiled, his chin gleaming and wet. The kitchen floor was covered with beautiful pale blue tile. I wished I were wearing socks so that I could skate on it.
The refrigerator, sadly, was empty but for the rows of condiments that lined the door. I picked out a jar with a dark green and gold label that declared itself honey mustard and proved to be delicious—sweet and spicy, just as my father used to describe me. Amir and I sat on stools at the edge of the kitchen counter and sunk our fingers into the jar until we had wiped it clean. Then he rifled through the cabinets and returned with an unopened bag of pretzels. When we finished the pretzels, Amir rolled the crinkling bag into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket.
Something knocked against the kitchen window, making our eyes widen. It was only a branch. We smiled at each other, relieved. The smile felt funny on my face, but I didn’t chase it away.
The living room had a thick gray carpet. I had never seen anything like it. I lay down and pressed my face against it, closing my eyes. I thought of Pal. When I stood, I saw that I’d left a smudge of dirt behind and felt a pang of regret.
Upstairs, we wandered silently through three bedrooms where beds were piled high with pillows and blankets. Pretty white drapes covered the windows. On a nightstand in the biggest bedroom there was a black-and-white photograph of a man and a woman on their wedding day. They were standing in front of a church, and the wind had pulled the bride’s veil straight up in the air. They were both laughing. I bent down close to the picture and saw that the sleeves of the woman’s gown were made of lace. She wore a diamond pendant on a chain so thin it was barely visible.
In one bathroom, when Amir flicked a switch, light seemed to glow from every surface, including the mirror that we made faces into. We didn’t quite look like ourselves in that mirror. The whites of our eyes seemed very white, and our brown skin seemed luminous.
In a child’s bedroom, a closet was full of colorful clothes. There was a red velvet dress that I imagined she wore only at Christmas, and a row of cotton dresses with delicately embroidered flowers and ribbon belts. On a shelf above the dresses, sweaters were neatly folded. On the floor of the closet, I saw a pair of silver sandals with small jewels on the straps. I tried to put them on, but my feet were too big; the girl who owned them was much younger than I was. I kept trying, though, pulling on the jeweled strap of the sandal until it broke. Amir had wandered off somewhere, but now he was returning; I heard his footsteps in the hall. When I looked over my shoulder, he was watching me. I ran my thumb over the jewels on the broken strap in my hand.
Amir crossed the room and sat beside me.
“I’m going to carve a new bird,” said Amir. “For Pal. Will you paint it?”
I nodded. After Rei had discovered that we were sleeping in the shed, we’d moved the nests to a ledge high in the back of a cave in the face of the cliff. It was our best hiding place yet, far better than the tree pockets in the grove where I’d put my treasures as a kid. I liked to imagine that sometime in the future an adventurous child would find the cave and recognize our birds as priceless clues to a mysterious and indelible past.
“I think my mother killed herself,” I said to Amir on the floor of that girl’s room. “I used to think that she just fell, that it was an accident. But my father told me that she had dark moods. I think he was trying to tell me the truth about what she’d done.”
Amir put his arm around me. I rested my head against his shoulder. His slow breath moved my hair. I did not worry about the owners of the house returning. I felt safe. We sat like that for a long time. Energy moved from his warm, lean body to mine, sinking into my skin like a balm.
“Imagine having all these clothes,” I said, looking up at the closet.
Amir shifted. After a beat of time he said, “It’s just a bunch of stuff.”
But it wasn’t just a bunch of stuff. Having that many beautiful things signified something. If you had enough beautiful things, they could never all be taken away from you. You might lose one or two, but the loss would never feel like much when you considered how much more you had. You could never be left with nothing.
I folded the broken, jeweled sandal strap and put it in my pocket.
I think I knew even then that a part of me would never be the same again. Something had shifted within me the moment I stepped into that house, grieving the loss of Pal, and saw that blue kitchen floor. A fissure of longing had opened and grew deeper by the day.
Chapter Nine
When I was fifteen, Rei handed me a thick workbook and told me I should begin studying for the GED.
“You have completed the required high school curriculum. I don’t see why you should wait. You can take the GED and apply to college. You’ll get a scholarship. I’m sure of it.”
Her words thrilled me, but I thought immediately of Amir. Schoolwork had never come easily to him. Rei had brought only one GED workbook.
“What about Amir?”
Rei sighed. Her face was etched with lines that reminded me of the cobwebs that appeared in the corners of my bedroom overnight.
“You and Amir are not one person,” Rei said. “He has his pace of learning and you have yours. He has his future and you have yours. Already, you spend too much time together.”
Her reproach made my cheeks grow warm. I knew that she felt our bond was unnatural. Siblings should not be so close, she had told me recently. But we aren’t siblings, I replied. This did not satisfy her. I remembered how Bear had said that our father would have thought that our relationship was disgusting. Amir and I were not supposed to have the feelings that we had for each other, feelings that I had become too ashamed to allow myself to linger on even in the privacy of my own mind
. I longed for him in a way that made me self-conscious; I worried that my desire for him was visible on my skin.
Whenever I looked at Amir’s lips and thought of kissing them, I felt a rush of humiliation that could be overcome only by convincing Amir to explore another house with me. Over the course of a year, we’d let ourselves into nearly a dozen houses. If anyone in Osha was aware that houses were being broken into, the news never reached us. And yet, though we never took anything more than snacks—and, that first time, a sandal strap—surely some owner along the way must have noticed something slightly off about his home upon his return. The half-eaten tub of ice cream? The throw blanket inexpertly refolded? The once delicately curved red lipstick now flattened within its golden tube after being pressed too hard to the lips of a girl who had never worn makeup? As far as we knew, no one was perturbed by these subtle trespasses.
In those houses, there were no consequences for our transgressions. And so, in those houses, I allowed myself to look at Amir with all the longing that I felt for him. I did not silently berate myself when he returned my gaze. In those strangers’ homes, my attraction to Amir felt untethered from the mortification that accompanied it at Horseshoe Cliff. When his hand, on occasion, grazed my skin, or mine his, I enjoyed the thrum of pleasure that ran down my spine.
Our touches grew more frequent, and it was difficult to say what would have happened between us if we had not, that summer, stumbled upon the house at which everything changed.
THE HOUSE WAS so high in the hills that we were out of breath by the time we found it. On some outings we never found a house to explore, and I had been beginning to feel a needle of disappointment that it might be one of those days. When I saw the small dark house nestled within the fog and trees, a flutter of excitement moved through my chest. The driveway was steep and curved and lined with tall plants that were dotted with bursts of orange flowers. There were no cars parked in front, no dogs barking from within, no lights glowing through the fog, and no security company stickers warning us away.
