A draft takes my shriek and flings it against some far wall, where it ricochets and returns to us as a cackle.
Dobbs tells me to quit screaming. He tries to get me to step out farther onto the platform, which his flashlight means to assure me is solid, but I won’t be budged.
“There’s a railing.”
“No!” My insides are about to drop out of me. I squeeze my legs together, hold myself down there. Then, my legs give out. Crying’s no use. Pleading’s no use. Nothing’s no use.
“Okay. I guess we’ll have to do this another time.”
By the time he gets the door closed, it’s too late. Whatever horrors he meant to lock back in place, some of them have escaped.
He does not solicit my help. Instead, he insists I rest. I stand in the kitchen and watch him open a can of meat and spread it on bread along with something unidentifiable from a packet. He pours the contents of another can into a pot and puts it on the burner. He sets out two place mats, two cups of water, and a milk glass vase with fake daisies. By the time he is done, on the table are two bowls of mystery meat and a platter of sandwiches cut into triangles. He motions for me to sit like we’re at some fancy restaurant.
I’ve listened to his stories and taken the tour and paid attention, all reasonably well. Because he is smiling at me, I take it he agrees.
“Can I go home now?”
He stops chewing, puts his sandwich down.
“I really need to go home.”
He doesn’t have to shake his head. I can see it in his eyes. My voice rises, as do his hands, like he means to pat everything back into place.
“Settle down, now.”
“Please! Please just take me home! What have I ever done to you? I thought you were my friend! I trusted you!”
“Blythe—”
“No! I don’t want to hear any more of your stories! I just want to go home. You’re sick!”
He passes me a handkerchief. For a moment, I can’t think why. “Don’t cry. I hate to see you sad.”
I understand now that it is better to know. “Are you going to—?” I can’t say it. He must have the idea.
“Am I going to what?”
“Are you going to . . . Because . . .” I look at my hands. Sex can’t be as terrible as dying or being locked up. And if we get it over with, he can let me go. “Because, I’ll . . . let you.”
He scoots his chair back and marches to the wall where an old calendar hangs. It’s a picture of a red barn near a meadow full of longhorns. You’d think he was staring out a window. “You think I’d ever do anything to hurt you?”
I don’t know what the right answer is anymore. What does it take to please this man?
“You think I’m a monster. I understand why. You will see things differently in time. Everything you need, I’m going to take care of. You’ll see.”
I ball my hands into fists. If I still had fingernails, they’d be slicing open my palms.
He juts out his chin, moistens his rubbery lips. After scanning the ceiling, he locks his eyes on mine. Here it comes—here comes the explanation.
“It’s the hair, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Shaving you—that’s what’s got you so upset.” He goes over to the cubby.
It’s as though some invisible monster has come for me, some beastly slithery thing from the silo that a six-thousand-pound door can’t keep caged. It’s come up behind me, through the gap in the floor. I pivot around, but there is nothing there. Above me, then, because a tentacle dangles down and begins winding itself around my neck. I put my hands
to my neck, but there is nothing to yank away. Impossible to take a deep breath.
“I’ll get you a wig. Until then, I have just the thing.” His lips are moving, but the words have trouble catching up. I can’t hear because another tentacle has dropped down and stiffened into a knitting needle, and is poking itself into my ear. My head, skewered.
Dobbs is holding out a basket of scarves to me. “Pick whichever you like,” I think he says.
Another tentacle straps itself around my chest. I start to feel numb. My fingers tingle. I am having a heart attack. “I think—a doctor . . .”
Dobbs is digging around for just the right one. He lifts out a gray scarf with tiny yellow dots. I shake my head and tug at my collar.
“Will you allow me?” He intends to fasten it beneath my chin.
I shake my head. Can’t breathe. Black spots. Camera flashes.
“You’re all right. Just take a few breaths; it’ll pass.”
His face has gone funny.
Have to keep standing. Can’t sit. Can’t listen to him telling me how he’s bought it all for me.
There’s an old gumball machine in Mr. Minta’s store. You have to give it a good hard whack after you put in your quarter if you want a gumball to fall down the chute. It’s like the gumball’s just fallen down. I motion to the rack with the clothes on it.
“Yup, I bought those for you, too.”
I glance at the shoe rack.
“Guilty, Your Honor,” he says. He smiles. He is enjoying himself. “Take a look at the bookshelf.”
Brontë, Austen, Harper Lee, Louisa May Alcott. Not only my favorites but also books that are on next year’s reading list. I turn around. No longer is the room an arrangement of objects in a missile silo. It is some kind of a museum. Around me are relics from the part of my life I have yet to live.
I’m sure I am standing quite still; it’s only the question that keeps revolving.
With the shallowest of breaths, I ask, “How long have you been planning this?”
This is when he’s supposed to say, “Planned what? I haven’t planned anything.” This is when he’s supposed to say, “Don’t be crazy—I’m not going to
keep
you.”
This is what he says: “The part regarding you, about two years, give or take. All the rest, eighteen years.”
“How long . . .?”
“Well, I just told you.”
I shake my head. “How long are you going to keep me here?”
He shrugs, looks away.
It must be asked. “Forever?”
The monster sucks me all the way down to the bottom of the silo. It is a long way down, just as Dobbs said, but I still manage to hear every last word. “We are the Remnant, Blythe. After the End, you and I will rise up together. You and me—we will one day seed the new world.”
Y
OU NEED TO
quit thinking there’s any escape. You’ll only drive yourself mad,” Dobbs says.
He’s caught me staring up at the escape hatch again. I know the circular trapdoor in the ceiling goes nowhere. I’ve already pulled on that handle. Nothing but a forty-foot concrete plug. If this were 1960 and the silo still operational, a four-ton column of sand would be released, providing clear access to the surface.
“There’s no way out of here. You should know that by now. It’s been two months already.”
“Two months, three weeks, and two days.”
He looks at me like I’ve got maggots crawling out of my mouth. He rounds off weeks as though they don’t matter. That I keep strict records bothers him. The only time to be concerned about is the End of the World, he tells me. I tell him the End of the World has happened.
“All I’m saying is the sooner you think of this as home, the better off you’ll be.”
He exits through the door, walking backward, as is his custom now. He will come back in a few hours or a few days and enter the room just as cautiously. He is used to stumbling over tripwires, or putting his foot in a pot of hot water, or finding a chair poised above his head. It’s why he wears a helmet when he comes. Sometimes, he’ll have on the thickly padded false sleeve like the kind they use to train police dogs. The bite marks took a long time to heal.
Home.
It makes me angry that such a word can come out of his mouth. But I’m glad for the anger, because it’s the only way to fight time, which is trying so hard to make all this start to feel normal. This will never be home. I scream it, breathe it, protest it with every drop of sweat and every angry tear. He can keep me down here two lifetimes, and home’s still going to be the yellow clapboard house on Fall Leaf Road. Thinking about it is what keeps me from going mad.
It was Daddy’s idea to move us out of town. Before that, we’d lived in a rental behind Broken Arrow Park that looked like some fleshy thing had molted and scurried off leaving its crackled skin. “I just don’t see the point of moving kit and caboodle to the back of beyond,” was how Mama took to the idea, even though “back of beyond” was just three miles outside Eudora’s city limits.
With the Crawford property up for sale, Daddy said he had a way to buy back land his family lost during the Great Depression. With Mama’s bridled consent, he plunked down a deposit, bought himself a John Deere, and walked around from then on like he were a rich man. Moving day was a community effort, much like a rummage sale or a funeral. By eight o’clock in the morning, just about every pickup in Eudora was parked outside our house. Flasks of coffee and packs of cigarettes were passed around, and it seemed like every wife came by just to pat Mama on the shoulder. “Picked the hottest day of the year to move, didn’t he?” they commiserated, as though Daddy hadn’t yet shouldered enough blame.
The moment my bare feet hit those creaky oak floorboards, I was home. The windows were warped, and some had been painted shut, and Gerhard would eventually put his hand through one of them trying to get it to open, but, oh, the view. Land—acres and acres of it. For the couple dozen or so disheveled rows of corn Daddy planted, a modern sprinkler system would have been just fine, but he called our place a farm and said any farm worth its salt had to have a well. Not quite a month after moving in, while I was helping Mama hang up the wash,
Mr. Walt Wallis pulled up in his Ford pickup. He was wearing standard bib overalls without a shirt, which meant you had to look the other way unless you wanted an eyeful of graying body hair and jiggly flesh. Mama waved at him when he called out his howdy and pointed to the toolshed where Daddy was fixing the plow.
The two men stood talking in the shade a while, until Mr. Wallis went over to the willow tree and indicated the place where Daddy’s hacksaw had to go to work. Mr. Wallis whittled the branch some with his pocketknife until it made the letter
Y
. Daddy flagged me over just as Mr. Wallis handed him his thick spectacles. The old man spat in each hand, rubbed his callused palms together, and then clapped them heartily. He looked at me. “You believe in magic, little lady?”
He took the ends of the fork in his hands and bent them till they looked like they were ready to snap. Mr. Wallis raised the branch to the level of his navel, so that the end of the Y stuck out in front of him like an arrow.
“All set!”
Set for what I couldn’t say, not with him zigzagging around the yard through a menace of gopher mounds and old tree stumps. Just when Mr. Wallis looked set to collide with the bird feeder, he made an abrupt turn and clomped through the thistles, sending fluff flying. He was making a beeline for Mama’s tomato plants. I could tell what Mama thought about this by the way she put down the clothespins, fastened her hands on her hips, and called Daddy by his first, middle, and last name.
At the last minute, Mr. Wallis made a sudden turn and went marching down the middle of the yard like he was leading Custer’s men. When he cried, “Geronimo!” we rushed over to where he came to a standstill. “Found your water, Hank.”
All I saw was a dry piece of dirt between two scuffed work boots, but Daddy might as well have been witnessing the parting of the Red Sea.
Mama scratched the back of her neck. “How can you be sure, Walt?”
“Haven’t been wrong about an underground stream but once in the last fifty-seven years, Mrs. Hallowell. Can’t say I know how these things
work—wish I could. All’s I can say is I guaran-darn-tee you, you’re going to find water. You got to go deep on this one, I’ll give you that.”
While Daddy and Mama commenced their arguing, Mr. Wallis winked at me.
“Magic. What’d I tell you?” He beckoned me out of earshot. “Come on, have a go.” He held out the green branch like it was a BB gun and I was at the shooting gallery on the midway. “It ain’t going to hurt you none.” Mr. Wallis wrapped my hands around the ends of that sweaty branch. “You got to keep it bent, like that. Keep the tension. You feel that?”
I nodded. All I felt was a useless piece of wood.
“Good. You just keep the end as level as you can. That’s it. Now start walking. Just keep going till the magic grabs hold.”
So as to get this silliness over as quick as possible, I double-timed it to the tractor tire. I did a quick loop, and when I turned to head back, the stick made a little jump. Of its own accord, the end of it started to tilt down. I tightened my grip on each handle and tried to rotate the tip back into its horizontal position. In response, it jerked itself downward with alarming force, as though an invisible hand had reached up out of the ground to snatch it from me. I fought to right the darn thing, but it wouldn’t budge. I squeezed my hands and turned my wrists, and felt the ends of the stick twisting in my palms, shearing off some of my skin with it. The stick began turning further, looping through the space between my arms.
I hollered, “Daddy!”
“Hold on, sweetie!” They came trotting toward me. I could see Daddy was worried, like maybe I’d found another patch of poison ivy and he was going to be skinned by Mama.
Mr. Wallis took one look at that unruly branch and said, over and over, “Well, I’ll be!”
“What do I do?”
“Keep walking, girl; keep walking!”
I took a few steps forward and the stick twisted a little more.
“Don’t drop it. Keep hold of it.”
Mr. Wallis made a rough sketch on the back of his cigarette box and then told me I could quit. I handed him his branch and that’s when we all saw how it was coated with blood. Daddy turned up my palms, raw where the reddened skin had bunched up.
Mr. Wallis passed me his kerchief. “Hank Hallowell, I do declare you’ve got yourself here a water witch.”
Daddy had them sink a borehole right where I had stood bleeding that day. They didn’t have to go but six feet for a geyser that gushed all afternoon.
Mr. Wallis said witching was a rare gift. He said it like it had singled me out, made me special. “You can divine water, ain’t no telling what other secrets will give themselves up to you.”
Besides me, there is another secret down here, and its name is Escape. If I can witch water from the dusty earth, I can witch my way out. If I can divine down, I can surely divine up. I can surely divine out.
And just like that, my head’s picturing that Y-shaped branch, not the one Mr. Wallis handed me, but the one stuffed in Dobbs’s steamer trunk. I rush over to his recliner and tip out the contents. Mr. I Think of Everything has overlooked something. I shuffle through spinning tops and die-cast tractors until I find it: a slingshot in perfect condition.
The only good thing about this place is the ample warning I get that Dobbs is about to make an entrance. The thud of the middle blast door and then the lock turning on this door gives me more than enough time to take my position.
“A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew show up at the Pearly Gates,” I hear him start, before he’s even got the door open all the way. Sometimes he brings food, sometimes he brings a book. Sometimes it’s this: a dumb joke. According to him, it’s because I always look so glum.
Dobbs stops when he sees me poised with the slingshot. He seems more confused than threatened.
“I want you to unclip the keys and slide them across the floor to me. Slowly.”
“Put that thing down, Blythe.”
“Do it!”
I’ve got the mothball lined up perfectly with his forehead.
He does as he’s told. The keys slide all the way and bump against my foot.
“Get back!”
Dobbs, having taken a step forward, lifts his hands in the air. “You can’t take aim at an unarmed man.” He starts smiling.
“Don’t move!”
He shrugs, then he folds his arms. “Go ahead. Pick them up.”
I now see what he finds so amusing. I can’t pick them up, not without losing my aim.
I hear him snort. Funny, is it? How about this? I pull back the sling till the tendon in my arm feels about ready to snap. And then I give my fingers the sweet relief they’ve been craving.
The ball catapults forward, whizzes through the air. Not laughing now, are you! It hits him in the throat. He doubles over, coughs.
I realize my mistake. I don’t have time to reload.
He crosses the space in one bound. The slingshot goes flying from my hand. My arm is too late in trying to break my fall. My shoulder hits the concrete floor first, then my head. Still, I manage to grab the keys. The weight of them. If the earth could be condensed to the size of a tennis ball, this is how heavy it would be.
“They’ve taken Bix Littleton into custody.” When Dobbs is pleased, he preens. He rakes his fingers through his hair, then digs the wax out of his ears.
I try to concentrate on the outside world neatly arranged in two-inch columns. The article tells about a girl in Lawrence claiming my piano teacher’s son exposed himself to her in the grocery store parking lot. It says the police are questioning him in connection with my disappearance. It says I disappeared a few hours after my piano lesson, four months ago. Isn’t there anyone except me keeping track? Four months, one week, six days.
“Certainly looks the type.” Dobbs leaves a sticky mark where he taps Bix’s mug shot.
Mama began sending me for piano lessons every Saturday afternoon at two o’clock not for my own enrichment, but to help Mrs. Littleton when her husband up and died. Other mothers in Eudora signed up their kids for music lessons, too, and off we were marched to the little blue cottage on Maple Street because Mrs. Littleton was not one to accept charity. For fifteen dollars, however, she was willing to instruct even the most tone-deaf child for an hour.
During lessons, Mrs. Littleton’s son liked to park himself on an old stereo speaker in the far corner. He dressed like a soldier, in army
fatigues and boots caked with mud. I was told to call him Junior, which seemed silly given he was a grown man, so I called him nothing at all.
“You’re a quiet one,” he would say, putting his hand on my head. I can still feel it, the weight of it. Like it could have pushed me straight through the piano bench, through the floor to the basement below. I’ll never forget the last time he spoke to me. He stopped me in the hallway on my way out. “Girls like you don’t stand a chance.”
Maybe he’s right. How much of a chance do I stand when accusing fingers go pointing in all the wrong directions? They gave up pointing at Arlo as soon as his grandma gave him an alibi, but then they did the rounds of equally unlikely candidates. Mr. Walt Wallis; Gerhard’s friend Jimmy Perkins; the carnie who left his booth at the fair for several hours about the same time I disappeared. The fingers always swing back to Daddy, though. Dobbs says they always will. He feels not the least bit guilty about this. He holds the position that a more vigilant father wouldn’t have let this happen in the first place. In Dobbs’s opinion, everyone’s guilty, one way or another, even the Mayor, the Governor, and the President, who is the Biggest Criminal of All.
Why doesn’t Dobbs ever crop up on the list of suspects?
Dobbs has been quiet the whole time I’ve been reading. He can hold a silence as though it were a bag of water. I do to it what a pair of rusty scissors would.
“They’re going to find out eventually. They’re going to figure out you’re the one who’s kidnapped me. They’ll find me, and you’ll go to jail. You’ll get locked up and then you can see how you like it.”
He looks at me calmly. In the beginning I would never have dared talk to him like this, but fear and crushing loneliness make a person reckless. Like any second, you might just not give a damn.
He doesn’t say, “No, they’re not going to find you.” He doesn’t say, “I’m not going to jail.” He says, “I didn’t kidnap you.”
To define the terms by which I am here, he uses words like
delivered
and
rescued
and
saved
. I’ve developed a physical reaction to those words. Nauseated is how I get. Which is a problem now because he’s started to prepare a meal, which will lead to the same fight about me and my
hunger strike. I cannot control but two things down here: when I go to the bathroom, and when I eat.
“You should be thankful you’re not up there.” He’s round-shouldered, which makes him look like he’s cowering at his own words. He cranks his chin at the ceiling. “It’s only getting worse. Won’t be long before there’s a run on the banks. Washington’s throwing money it doesn’t have at the problem, and it’s not going to make a dime’s worth of difference. You wait. Wait till Europe goes belly-up. Wait till China goes belly-up. You’ll have the president declaring martial law and mobilizing the National Guard, but it will be too late. It’s the beginning of the end, no question. You’ll be thanking me one of these days, Blythe. You’ll be thanking your lucky stars you won’t have to put up with the anarchy. We’ve got order down here.”
What kind of evangelist proselytizes with a bunch of keys on his hip and a lock on the door?
“We’re preserving a way of life, don’t you see?
The
way of life. They’ll look back a hundred years from now and call you a saint. Imagine that. Imagine one day some kid praying to you.” He squirts some ketchup into a pot of runny swill.
“I chose this for you, granted, but I do believe, given enough time, you would have chosen it for yourself.” He goes on. “I can’t explain it, Blythe; you’re going to have to experience the truth for yourself. I thought with the books and all, you’d have understood by now.”
By books, Dobbs means the spiral-ring binders scribbled with his mumbo jumbo. He means the tracts he sets out for me to type up for him.
The Manifesto
, it’s called—the blueprint for the New World Order that he and I, the Remnant, will establish.
“Anyone in his—or her—right mind would choose this. You ever hear of the Tribulation? What they are about to see up top will make that look like a garden party. Do you want to be preserved or do you want to be part of the destruction? That’s the question. When it boils down to a simple choice like that, it’s not really a choice at all, is it? Thing is, though, the people up there, they’re insane. They just don’t know it. You try talking some sense, and they look at you like you’re the
one who needs to be thrown in the booby hatch! That’s how crazy it is. All you have to do is breathe one word about the end of the world and they think you’re some whacko from a street corner with a sandwich board and a bullhorn.
“But the world
is
ending; it is blowing up in our faces right this very minute. And what are we doing about it? We’re going out to Wal-Mart to buy stuff we don’t need!”
As soon as the table is set, Dobbs bows his head in silent prayer before taking up his spoon.
I watch him. He is precise about everything except eating. Juice runs down his chin. Listening to him eat makes it easy for me to swear off food.
He cocks his eyebrow at my plate. As has become my custom, I push it away.
When he’s finished his meal, he rinses his bowl and concludes his speech. “I chose you, Blythe. I
chose
you.”
I laugh, softly at first, but quickly the sound gathers itself into one hysterical ball.
I chose you.
It runs away with me, this laughter.
He reddens.
I should shut myself up, but it’s all just so funny. Being chosen. Like I’m Mary, the mother of God.
“You think this is a joke, do you?”
I nod.
“Starving yourself is a joke, too, I suppose? Your big plot to overthrow me?”
I quickly grow sober.
“How hard do you think it would be for me to replace you with someone else—your sister, say?”
He leaves the table, goes downstairs. I rush to the center column and try peeking through the gap between it and the floor, but I can’t make out what he’s up to.
When he returns, I quickly take my place at the table. He puts an old-fashioned doctor’s case on it. When he pulls out a strange-looking pair of pliers with a long screw on the end, I start shaking all over.
Next, he lifts out of the bag a long rubber pipe. “Do you know what this is?”
I shake my head. It looks like what Gerhard uses to siphon the water from his fish tank.
“It’s a feeding tube.”
I scoot back from the table.
“Don’t think I’ve overlooked anything.”
That’s all it takes for me to take a mouthful.
“Tastes good, doesn’t it?”
I can’t look at him. I only nod.
The time I’ve wasted. Waiting for them to come; waiting to see if Dobbs is going to skid out of control and do me in; waiting for Jesus. Add up all the hours spent waiting, and what do I have? Nothing! It might as well be ten thousand years that I’ve been down here. How am I going to put up with one more day?
I am so bored that I have measured out this space in inches. He says each level is six hundred square feet. In total, the space of an average-size house. Of course, I don’t get to use the lower level. It doesn’t matter. To me, the whole thing is a crate. It doesn’t help to rearrange the furniture or set up a little writing nook where my poems are blank pages stacked neatly on top of each other. It doesn’t help to hang my sketches on the outer wall or decorate with the plastic junk he brings from the Dollar Tree just as it wouldn’t help to go putting up paper lanterns in hell.
I sit on my cot and wait for him to get done downstairs and come for supper. When we are done eating, I will come back to my cot and wait for him to leave, and then I will go to sleep sitting up. When the
fluorescents kick on in the morning, I will straighten the quilt and then sit on the cot some more and wait for him to return or for somebody to come or for an idea about how to get the keys to drop into my head.
I’ve tried writing poems. Nothing comes of it. Sinking sand is how I’ve come to think of poetry. If I write about being in here or something about what I miss from out there, he’ll read it. Still, there is something soothing about a pen. Sometimes, to feel its comfort, I will pick a certain word or phrase and write it over and over again in as many different ways.
Tabasco
, for example. Or
odometer
or
100 percent cotton
. I’ll flip through the pages sometime later, and, for an instant, it will look as if many people wrote in my book. Sometimes, I’ll write every name I can think of that begins with the letter
D
for the same reason. Because I can’t do this all day long, I have agreed to type up his notes on the old Olivetti. The sound of clacking bars bolsters me. I like to watch the little bars punch the paper. They can be so fierce. Sometimes, they take their frustrations out on one another instead of the page, and I have to pry them apart. I have become a very accurate typist, but I like it when I make a mistake because then I have to pull the page out and put a new one in and start all over again. I never read the words. It’s always just one letter at a time,
click-bang-punch.
I get out Grandpa’s watch to check if it is time to start cooking.
Dobbs hears my cry from the lower level. “What’s wrong?” he calls up through the gap.
“Nothing.” But it’s not nothing. I keep winding it, and nothing happens. I have to sit down to bear it. I put the watch against my ear. Not a single tick. I swallow hard. Grandpa’s watch has stopped at a quarter to ten.
All those hours spent on a tractor in the hot sun were bound to make anyone loopy, was how Grandma accounted for what Grandpa had engraved. Grandpa argued that, loopy or not, the immortal words of Mr. Alexander Pope were to serve as a reminder that the shady spot out by the oak tree was where he intended to be buried, and God help him—or her—who got the notion that some flowery carved tombstone beside the very people he couldn’t stand in life was better. Grandma thought it
lowbred to talk of such things, meaning, the Everley family plot was bought and paid for. When he gave the watch to Mama for safekeeping, he made sure she understood it was his last will and testament. The watch has worn out, but I cry as if it’s Grandpa’s ticker that’s stopped.
I rush to the Olivetti and quickly feed in a fresh page. Grandpa, I type.
Grandpa, Grandpa, Grandpa
.
Dobbs comes up and pesters me to tell him why I am weeping, why I am typing the same word over and over again.
Because I can no longer carry the words inside me, I tell him. “There is nobody to protect me.”
He gets down on his haunches beside me. He looks so caring. “Protect you? All this—this is to protect you.”
To him, this structure is a fortress; to me, it is a monster. It’s not protecting me, it’s digesting me. The air is acid. All you have to do is look at my skin. Cracks everywhere. It flakes off.
“And I’m here to protect you. Nothing’s ever going to harm you. Ever.” He reaches out to pat my shoulder. It hurts, even before he touches me.
With his head resting on his folded arms, Dobbs looks as though he’s weeping. Except he isn’t. He’s snoring. Dobbs has never fallen asleep down here, not once. I wonder if he sleeps as soundly in his own bed as he does at this Formica table. I am about to make a study of his sleep when something hits me upside the head: This is it!
Suddenly, my heart starts racing. I start shaking. My thoughts jumble around so that I go to the counter, then to my cot, then back to the counter. Whack him first, then pack? Pack first, then whack? What’s to pack? Just hurry up, and whack!
With stealth, I move to where the dishes are drying. As quietly as I can, I lift the pot. I get a good grip on the handle with both hands. I tiptoe over to his side of the table. I stand and watch him, just to make sure he’s not faking. I move behind him. I raise the pot. His sleep is even and undisturbed, as though he’s found his patch of peace. Mustn’t think
about these things. Must steady my arms. I grip the handle even tighter. It has to be done in one blow. There won’t be a second chance.
Unarmed, asleep, dreaming of angels, perhaps.
Do it!
Are they robbers when they sleep, or do they become again the innocent?
Whack him, for pity’s sake!
Perhaps I should find another weapon. One of those scarves he expects me to wear. Maybe it would be easier if I just tied it around his neck real tight.
The pot. Smash it down on his head! How hard can it be?
I make my arms go tense. I take a big breath. I lift the pot as high as I can reach . . .
I can’t.
I consider waking him. If I could just look him in the eye.
I put the pot down. This is what I tell myself: I don’t have the physical strength to knock him out cold. I’d only hurt him, and what good would that do? He’d end up winning again. Better to get the keys. I tell myself this, and myself spits back, Weak!
The latch on his key ring looks simple enough. I’ve watched him use it a hundred times—one small click and a slight pull downward, and the ring will fall clean away from his belt. With a rag, I kneel beside his boots at an imaginary spill. Only five inches separate my face from the keys, then only four. I slow my breathing and lift my hand, expecting to have to steady it as I did with the pot. It trembles not even slightly now. The tip of my index finger locates the little stainless steel button, while my other hand cups just beneath the cluster of keys.
His breath snags.
Dear God, don’t let him wake up.
He shifts in his seat but then settles. The rhythmic pattern of his breathing starts up again.
There’s no click as the keys are released. There’s no jingling as my waiting hand closes around them. The only sound is that of victory, and it pounds in my ears. Freedom is clutched between my fingers.
I’ve done it! I’ve outsmarted him.
I straighten up. One step backward.
There’s a shift in the silence. His breathing—has it changed? What is that sound?
I hesitate, trying to figure it out. And then, it’s all too clear. The clack of his eyes moving.
It is over. There is nothing to do but wait and listen to his eyes move.
His arm slides out from under his head and swings across the table. His hand is cupped, waiting.
His hand is patient.
I drop the keys in it.
It closes into a fist.
His breath comes real shallow, while mine forgets even to sigh.
A ladybug caught a ride down here on Dobbs’s shirt once. I kept it hidden in a tin. When Dobbs was gone, I would take it out to play with it. It would just sit there after a while, not moving. I didn’t know what to feed it. I tried everything, but it still died. I cried for that ladybug like I still sometimes cry for Mama. Another time it was a trail of ants that came down the wall where Dobbs sat reading in his recliner. I wish they’d come in some other way. He sprayed the entire place, top to bottom, said he couldn’t be having an infestation eating up his archives.
He hasn’t seen the lizard, and it’s been weeks.
The lizard keeps his head still, the glassy ball of his eye fixed. I’ve learned moving isn’t the answer—how quickly companionship can become once again an empty place on the wall. Blinking he understands. We’ve established our own kind of Morse code of the eyelids. I send him a series of slow, long blinks. He responds with push-ups.
What is to become of me, I blink.
Down, up, down.
Is there a way out?
Up.
Two long blinks, one short: Am I ever going to get out of here? Am I ever going to be free?
The lizard doesn’t reply. A hard question. Not a straight up-and-down question.
He scurries off as Dobbs enters the room.
In huge ways I’ve forgotten about the way things used to be, but in the small ways, too. Like round chocolate cakes. The one Dobbs plunks on the table has nuts all over it. In the middle is a white candle.
“What’s this?”
He laughs. “What does it look like?”
A trick, I’m tempted to say. A bribe.
He fishes out a cigarette lighter from his jeans pocket. “February second ring a bell?”
I run over to the wall calendar, alarmed. I haven’t turned the page. We’re still in January. Two days have slipped by my attention.
“Blow,” he says, when I come back.
I let the flame dance between us.
It’s my fifth birthday. We’re in the backyard, where Mama has set up the card table and covered it with her pretty lace tablecloth, the one she uses only when company comes to visit. On top of it is a tray of orange slices, a bowl of hard candy, and a chocolate cake with my name spelled out in goopy pink icing. Mama has to swat Gerhard’s finger from making more telltale swirls on it. Everyone gathers around the table: grandparents, Uncle Vernon and his girlfriend with the gap between her teeth, the twin cousins from Idaho who only ever play with each other.
Mama leans over to me. “Got your wish ready?” but I can’t answer
her because I’ve just sucked in a great big breath. She lights the candles, and everyone sings. I begin to panic. I suddenly can’t think what I want more than anything in the whole world, and it’s coming to that part, and my lungs are bursting. Finally, a wish comes and hovers just in front of my nose. I am in the process of choreographing wish and breath, when a gust of wind whips through the crowd and across the table, and snuffs out my candles.
The grown-ups all laugh, but I start to cry. Someone laughs even louder.
“Oh, now, Blythe,” Daddy says, but he’s on their side, trying to keep himself from laughing, too. He relights the candles, and I take another deep breath, but it’s not the same this time. It is hard to find my wish, even with the wind hushed and the faces bulging with smiles. “Hurry, Punkin.”
I look at Suzie. She mouths the word
goofball
and makes her eyes go squint.
“Blow, quickly!” Grandma says.
Mama leans in, the grin on her face so hard you could file your nails on it. Through her teeth, she whispers, “This is not the time for one of your hissy fits.”
I make a wish. It goes like this, “Go away, all of you. I wish you’d all go away!”
I got my wish, didn’t I? I did this. It’s my fault.
Dobbs is getting impatient. “You want me to blow it out for you?
“Fine.” Dobbs extinguishes the candle, takes it off the cake and sucks the icing at the bottom of it. “Sometimes, there’s just no making you happy, is there?”
He dishes out cake on two paper plates. He sits down, tucks his napkin into his collar, and forks a huge piece into his mouth.
“How old am I?”
He stops chewing to stare at me.
What, have I sprouted hair?
“Seventeen,” he says, as though it were an accusation.
He’s mistaken. I am turning into an old hag. The skin on my hands is
papery, like Grandma’s. A tooth has started to rot, and the pages in books are already starting to blur. I’m getting a crooked back, and my legs are so used to being folded they complain when they’re upright too long. I can’t be seventeen and this old, not after six and a half months in this hole.
“No cake for me.” I push the plate aside.
I know that look, so I explain. “I’m allergic to almonds.”
Oh God. He doesn’t believe me. Knowing full well he will employ the feeding tube if he has to, I take a small bite. It doesn’t satisfy him, so I take another bite.
“I brought you a present.”
In front of me is a gift. It’s wrapped in pearl-white paper and has a bow on it. The paper is not easy to tear. It’s the expensive kind, like the ones they sell in the school fund-raiser.
“You’re like my mother,” he says. “She always had to save the gift wrap.”
Aren’t we a happy family?
“Do you like it?”
It’s a mirror, an oval one in a fake gold frame. It takes me a moment to realize who the stranger in it is.
“Well? Is that a yes?”
I look like a cancer patient. I touch my scalp. It is pocked with red bumps and tiny scabs. He permits me to shave my own head, but keeps forgetting to bring a sharp razor—either that, or he doesn’t trust me with one. Running across my forehead are deep lines, and my jawbone looks as though it could slice through a T-bone steak. Follow the hollows and ridges, and there are two deep green wells where eyes used to be. No water down there. I frighten myself. This is me turned witch.
“Pretty as ever,” Dobbs says.
I put the mirror down.
He goes to the bathroom to prop it up on the narrow shelf. “Every lady needs a mirror. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me before. I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Got you something else.” From a paper sack he pulls a red wig. “It’s
not like the other one; this one’s real hair.” The jet-black wig Dobbs brought me months ago, which looks like it came from a Halloween store, is still in the brown paper sack under the sink. “Go on, try it out.”
“I’m not feeling very well.”
“Do you need some castor oil?” For Dobbs, there isn’t an ailment that castor oil won’t cure.
My throat starts to constrict. My lips start tingling.
“Here, it’ll make you feel better.” Before I can stop him, he puts the wig on my head. I feel like I’m wearing someone else’s scalp.
“Goodness! What’s going on with your face?”
I can feel it swelling. My lips about ready to burst. My tongue thickens. My gums start to itch. Then, everything starts to itch—the inside of my nose, my eyes, my skin. I start gasping.
“The nuts!” he yells, jumping up. He races over to the shelf with the cubbies and pulls out the first-aid box. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Dobbs like this. He tosses everything on the floor and finally finds what he’s looking for.
The EpiPen. He jabs it in my thigh. “I’m so sorry! I should’ve believed you.”
The effect is immediate.
He watches me closely, repeating over and over again how sorry he is. As soon as I can, I say, “I’d like to be alone, if you don’t mind.”
“But . . .” He’s taken aback.
“I want to be alone.” I look over at my cot. It has never looked quite so inviting.
He scoots his chair closer, puts his hand on my knee. “I can’t leave you like this.”
I push his hand away. In all the time I’ve been here, Dobbs has been careful about where he puts his hands. When he takes me for a walk to the entrapment vestibule or to the utility tunnel, he might fold his palm into the small of my back. If he brings me a book, he might lay his hand casually on my shoulder when I sit down and open it. But never this, such a show of affection.
“I’m really tired.”
There is a freshness to the silence, a clean margin around it.
Dobbs shrugs his giving-up. “Okay, then. You’ll probably fall asleep now anyway. I’ll drop by before I go to work tomorrow to see how you’re doing.”
He leaves. For the first time since I’ve been brought here, I’ve made him do something. A tiny piece of freedom. Now, that’s a birthday gift!
Instead of lying down on the bed, I go to the bathroom and pick up the mirror. Cancer girl is gone. A redheaded stranger is in her place. She fluffs her bangs, pulls a tendril of hair across her cheek.
“Hello,” I greet her.
“Hello,” she replies. She smiles. “I hear it’s your birthday.”
I nod, and she nods, like she knows all about it.
“Do you think my family remembers?”
“Oh, sure.”
I talk to the lady, even though the drugs have made me quite drowsy. I think my visitor just might keep the loneliness at bay.
“Will I ever see them again?” I eventually ask her.
She tucks her hair behind her ears. For some reason, she starts trying to braid it. I am about to tell her she’s going to need both hands for that when the mirror slips. It crashes to the floor. Come back! I bend down. The lady with the pretty red hair is gone. But she has left me a gift: a shard of glass in the shape of a dagger.
THERE IS ONLY
one way to get out.
Dobbs has been on the lower level ever since we finished dinner. Through the gap between the floor and the outer wall, I hear him ferreting about in his filing cabinets. I stand at just the right angle by the center column and catch a glimpse of him. “Dobbs, can I come down?”
Not a minute later, Dobbs unlocks the door and leads me to the control center. He is so pleased.
It’s only the second time I’ve been here. Upstairs, the room is open-plan except for the toilet, the supply closet, bookshelves and those two partitions, but this space is cut up into triangular little offices. We go into the first office, the one with the cabinets and the specimen jars. I remember this room being neat, but it is now a mess. Stacks of paper are strewn about. Filing cabinet drawers are too full to close, and boxes are stacked on top of one another so high they almost touch the ceiling.
“I’m looking for some papers I edited a few years back. I need to update them.”
“I can help.”
He studies my face for a minute. I pretend to be that nice lady from the mirror. So that he will not be suspect anything, I’m wearing a belted dress and a cardigan rather than my going-home clothes. The dagger I’ve made with the mirror shard and duct tape fits snug against my back.
“I didn’t think you cared about preparedness.”
“It’s better than sitting up there by myself.”
“My dad took that picture of us.”
“Where are you?”
“In our bunker.” He has spoken very little of his family before, but now he tells me all about States Hordin and how he came back from the Korean War with a missing leg only to realize he had a war to fight on the home front, too. I hear about the fallout shelter he built with his own two hands and how he supervised his family’s evacuation drills. Rather than taking camping trips, Dobbs says they’d spend vacations in their bunker preparing for a nuclear disaster.
“I was just like you, in the beginning.” Dobbs stares at the photo. “I hated being underground. We’d be playing dominoes, and all of a sudden I’d start hyperventilating. Tomfoolery is what Pa called it. Said the only cure was for me to spend some time down there by myself. He left me there a whole week. And guess what? I survived. Next time, I spent the entire summer in the shelter.”
“You didn’t get lonely?”
“Nope. I had all the companionship I needed in the Bible. The people in there, why, they just come to life in the dark.”
He digs out a photo album and shows me a picture of a towheaded boy with freckles and a missing front tooth, holding a jar. Dobbs explains how he’d sit for hours watching those tadpoles, hoping to catch the moment they’d change into frogs. “I kept all sorts of critters. Snapping turtles, cottontails, one time a catfish that got caught upstream when the crick dried up.” And now me.
I must get him to turn his back to me, get him bent over his files, distracted—quit talking about the boy. “What else do you keep in these files? Do you have any of those government pamphlets from the old days?”
He swings around. “Would you like to see the blueprints of this place?”
My hand stays behind me. “Sure.”
He rolls them out on the floor and has me crouch down next to him. “This shows the crib suspension system. To launch the missile, the hydraulic system had to deliver three thousand pounds per square inch of pressure. These are the two silo doors. Each weighs one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. If it didn’t take a boatload of money, I’d see about getting them operational again.”
I make all the right noises so he will keep talking. “Knees,” I say, so he won’t find anything suspicious about me getting into a standing position. I keep my hand behind my back, my grip tight. No hesitating this time. Straight between the shoulder blades.
“This is where I spent all my money.” He points to the level I live on, to a square with a long L-shape that goes straight up to the surface. “The ventilation system. One of these days, I’m going to have to get up in that pipe and change the filter. Miserable job.”
Did he just say, get in that pipe? I bend over the diagram again while he goes on about having had both the intake and exhaust vents modified because the original duct had been clogged with debris.
You can fit a person in there?
“What do you have behind your back?”
Dobbs isn’t looking at the blueprints any more. He’s staring at me.
“Nothing.”
He rises. I fumble with the dagger, try to wedge it back in the belt.
“You want something, you don’t have to steal it. You only need to ask.”
I can’t think of what to say. I wish I had stolen something from his precious collection.
He grabs my hand. It’s empty.
He swings me around, lifts up the sweater. Slowly, he slides the
dagger out from the belt. “This?” He holds the dagger. “This is what you’ve become?”
He puts on his coat and picks up the duffel bag, which has the dagger in it. I hand him the supply list, but he doesn’t take it.
“I won’t be back for a while.” He means to punish me, to remind me he doesn’t have to come here at all if he doesn’t want to. A while doesn’t scare me. I’ve got plans of my own.
I drag the kitchen table till it stands directly below the ventilation panel. I put a chair on top of it and then climb up. Still too short. The emptied supply cabinet and the kitchen chair do the job. The ventilation panel of the duct comes off easily. I stick my head and as much as my body inside, find a place to anchor my arms, and then spring up.
I’m in!
But there isn’t an inch of free space. I wedge myself farther into the duct and bang into a chilly blast of air. I worm my way forward. Only a few yards into the duct, the darkness becomes an assault. In retaliation, I crack the fluorescent stick. I’ve also had the presence of mind to bring the serving spoon for digging and a backup instrument in the form of a fondue fork.
The shaft is unbearably narrow. The sound of my shuffle runs ahead of me while my breath turns tail and runs the other way. I am afraid to make a noise. Dobbs might hear. What if he’s had a change of heart and is on his way back here to accept my apology? But there is something else that keeps me tight-lipped. The something with its wings folded around itself, hanging upside down from the I-beams, the something that slinks around in that tunnel. Sound is sure to rouse it. I keep my fear barred behind my ribs and my breathing behind sealed lips, and inch ahead.
It is a huge relief when I come to the vertical part of the shaft. I was beginning to think I’d gotten into the wrong tube. Reaching into the space, my hand locates a rusting pipe. It’s damp. I draw my fingers away,
put them to my lips. Tastes like Suzie’s hair spray. The vent is twice as big as the duct. It is a space big enough for two people. The only snag is that it goes straight up. No grade, no ladder, no footholds. I yank on the pipe. Unsure whether it will hold my weight, I pull myself up anyway. Three feet into this exercise, my arms about pop out of their sockets. There is only one other thing to try.
Keeping my back wedged against one wall and my feet pushed against the opposite one, I work my body upward. I shimmy and grunt, using my elbows as levers, my feet as gears, and my rear end as a stopper. What was easy at first becomes increasingly difficult.
Several feet into the exercise, the bottom disappears. I may as well be suspended in space. I look up and half expect to see stars. What I do see is just as surprising. In the darkness is a spark, a fissure of light. Is this the devil up to his old tricks? I work myself a little farther up the shaft, and the light changes from a spark to a silver vein. There is no mistaking it now: daylight. I press on.
If Dobbs comes now, it will be my absence that greets him. Will he picture me without chains, clearing farm fences, and crossing pastures? Because that’s how I am picturing me. I am giddy with the thought of running free. I start to giggle. It isn’t all nerves. Part of it is imagining Dobbs all alone with his papers and dead animals. A cackle sends the silence rolling up like a cartoon tongue. I keep rushing upward, toward the light, toward that punch line.
Which is farther than I thought.
Just keep laughing.
I get up where the light pours in, thick as a running faucet. Thirsty for daylight, I turn my face and open my mouth.
I am close enough for the light to cast a shadow. My shadow! How I’ve missed you. I get so excited, the tension in my legs lets up. I slip a little.
I push against the side till my muscles in my legs are burning. My hands are so slippery with sweat, I have to keep drying them against my pants. I keep scuttling up. My back screams in pain. And finally, I’ve gone as far as there is to go. I’ve reached the light.
“Shut up!” I tell the voices. “This
is
going to work. It’s just going to take a little patience.”
Years of crud and moisture have sealed the edges of the grate. Getting myself into the most bracing position possible, I have a go at them with the end of the spoon. Bits of dirt fall in my eyes. I scrape all around the edges, scrape some more and then give another whack. The grate budges not an inch. I jam the handle in the crack and try wiggling it, but the spoon bends. As for the grate—nothing.
An angle. That’s what’s called for. I reposition myself and give the grate a decisive thump to make it give way. Nothing.
My back might as well have a white-hot poker rammed through it. Tremors run through my legs so hard it’s only a matter of time before they get to my feet and dislodge them. There’s not much holding me up other than sheer determination.
I put the fondue fork to work and hack at the light. It gets even by snapping off the tip. My grip keeps slipping. I cannot give up. Another bang, and the fork slips clear out of my hand. A mocking clink comes up at me from the depths.
“Damn you!” I yell at the stupid light. I pummel the grate. “I’m not giving in!” I slam my fist against the grate and hear rather than feel the gristle in my knuckles give way. The light is not the least bit moved. I thrash some more. There is stuff dripping from my hand. I will not give the light the satisfaction. So what if it’s blood? I put my mouth against the wound. Defeat has a saltiness to it.
I scream up through the holes. “Help! Somebody! Help!” How far does the sound of a scream travel?
“Help!”
No one helps.
I’ve lost track of the days. May, he said a little while back. I’m not doing very well with the calendar now that it’s on its second round, so there’s no way to know if it’s actually been ten months or if he’s lying. Instead of day and night, there is Lights On and Lights Out. Instead of Monday, instead of month, hour, and minute, there is only Sleep and Awake. Two seasons, I’ll say that much. Despair, a packed-down bitter cold, and Memory. Memory doesn’t pester me to do my exercises or read a book the way Despair does. Instead, it draws me away to some forgotten thing—the field where Daddy and I sometimes used to go for walks, say. I’ll be drifting among the big bluestem, listening to the wind moving across the prairie. Wading deeper into the field, I’ll suddenly get the feeling that I’m drowning, like I need to tread water to keep my
head from going under. That’s how it is with Memory—a two-faced, double-crossing backstabber. The stalks will start to fold over me until I can’t stand it anymore. I’ll have to turn around and run as fast as I can. It’ll be closing in on me, the invisible thing, and I’ll clear the last line of bluestem just in time. And then I’ll open my eyes and look around and see the circular walls have moved in another inch. A memory like that, and I’ll have to get up in that ventilation shaft and climb up to the grate just so I can gulp air.
Can’t say I have much control over my thoughts. If I did, they wouldn’t be all about giving in. Just so they don’t always get the better of me, I have my notes to remind me. They are taped everywhere. Every cupboard, chair, pipe, door reminds me.
THEY ARE COMING. YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN. YOU ARE THE CHILD OF HANK AND IRENE HALLOWELL, NOT THE PUPPET OF DOBBS HORDIN.
You’d think he’d mind, the things I write, but he doesn’t. He’s near impossible to provoke. He says it’s a creative outlet. He says he likes to read them so he knows what’s going on with me.
HOMEWARD BOUND
is the sticker I’ve taped to the seat of his chair.
But what if they aren’t coming? What if they think I’m dead?
I tear out a strip of paper from my notebook. After writing on it, I tape it to my chair.
I AM NOT CRAZY
.
Because the lizard is gone, and the lady in the mirror, too, I rehash conversations from the past. Some I finish; some I embellish; some I invent. I talk to Mercy the most. Sometimes to Arlo. I can’t bear to ask him if he has another girl, so I pretend I’m still his girl. Mostly, Arlo’s too busy to talk because he’s out looking for me. I talk to Theo, who must be a big boy by now; to Grandpa; to Mrs. Littleton, who says there is really no excuse for not practicing piano. Anyone will do when the silence starts to hurt. It’s like having someone scream in your ear, then quit. That gap, when your eardrums are still vibrating from shock—that’s what it sounds like. I have to talk, just for the sake of ears. I think I’ll talk to Mama today—it’s been a while.
But out of nowhere steps Bernice.
One spring afternoon, when thunderheads were barreling across the
plains and dumping enough water to make the rivers go on rampages, Mama found in Daddy’s trouser pocket a love letter. We all knew it was a love letter because Mama anchored it to the kitchen counter with the sugar bowl and seemed not to mind the little procession that passed by and read it.
The note said:
Call. Anytime. Bernice XOXO.
At the bottom was a phone number with a little heart around it.
The fight went on for days, even though what Mama said to Daddy lasted less than a TV commercial and what Daddy said to Mama was shorter than a knock-knock joke.
“It’s nothing, Irene,” was how he put it.
But it wasn’t nothing, because Mama couldn’t pass through the kitchen without making something clatter or crash, couldn’t pass by a door without testing its hinges with a good slam, couldn’t do the wash without a great deal of wringing and sheet slapping. Mama’s anger was like a boil that just kept getting bigger and bigger. Instead of having the good sense to let it be, Daddy kept poking at it. With shaving cream on his face, he’d walk down the hallway to deliver another of his oneline speeches. “You sure are enjoying this, Irene,” he’d say.
Bang, bang, slam,
would come her answer. Or with a wrench in his hand, he’d storm through the back door. “Irene, give it up, would you please?”
Smash,
would go another pitcher.
To offer Mama our support, we kids whipped ourselves into a flurry of domesticity. Suzie ironed Daddy’s forsaken shirts, Gerhard cleaned his room without being asked, and I took Theo for long walks in his stroller down the rutted country road. Our family rearranged its habits so thoroughly we were barely recognizable to one another.
Just when we thought their fight would go on forever, Daddy came home one evening and asked Mama to take a walk with him. We watched them go down the road, Mama with her arms crossed, Daddy quick-stepping to keep pace with her. When they came back a couple of hours later, Mama’s arms hung somewhat stiffly at her sides. Daddy, red-eyed, kept blowing his nose and talking about his allergies acting up. We all sat down and had dinner together that night. Daddy came home early
every day after that. Instead of calling each other by their first names, our parents went back to using their pet names. Eventually, Mama started rolling her eyes at Daddy’s jokes, and Daddy stopped asking her permission for everything. Gerhard went back to being a slob, and Suzie stopped trying to garner sympathy at school by telling everyone our parents were getting divorced. It was meant to look as if the fight hadn’t happened. But it had, and I had the note to prove it.
Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was spite, maybe it was because spring had used itself up in just two weeks and we were headed into a long summer and that was somehow her fault, too. Whatever the reason, I unfolded the note, picked up the phone and dialed the number.
It rang. Somehow, I’d not expected that. I promptly hung up.
Seconds later, our phone rang and I jumped as though a porcupine had readied its quills. I let it ring. But the answering machine was about to click on, and Daddy’s voice was about to proclaim this the Hallowell household, and who knew what that woman was apt to say?
I snatched up the receiver. “Hello.”
“Hi there. You just called.”
“Yes.”
“Who is this?”
Dreadful at lying, I sputtered. “Suzie.” I thought it might be a good time to hang up. There had to be a thousand Suzies in Douglas County, any number of whom could have dialed the wrong number, but she said, “Hank know you’re calling me, Suzie?”
“No.”
“Well, then. What’s on your mind?”
I should have given her what for. I should have explained how thin Mama had become, how cautious she’d grown in her moods, as though she couldn’t quite trust herself with anything other than lukewarm emotion.
“Suzie, you still there, hon?”
I wanted to say, “We’re all different now.” I wanted to say, “Happy now?”
“Are you married?” I asked instead.
“That’s awful personal.”
After a long pause, she said, “I was married once, a long time ago.”
“Do you have any children?”
“I do. I have a boy.”
“How old is he?”
“Come the twenty-second, he’ll be three months.”
I felt my legs go numb.
“Suzie, honey, he ain’t your daddy’s.”
So strong was the relief that I started to cry.
“Oh, now, honey, it’s all right.”
I tried to stop, but it just kept coming. I cried for Mama and Daddy and all us kids, even Bernice’s baby growing up without a father, for how he, too, would have to go through the wringer and come out the other side flat as a pancake and be expected to get up and take on living some more.
Eventually, I settled down. “What’s your son’s name?”
“Elijah.”
“Like the prophet?”
“Like the prophet. I suppose you might say this boy’s going to keep me on the straight and narrow.”
Must be nice, I thought, having your own prophet to keep you headed in the right direction.
She said, “You aren’t Hank’s oldest girl, are you?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Blythe, then.”
“Yes.”
“Well, Blythe, before I let you go, I want you to know you kids is all he ever talked about. And that’s
all
we ever did. Talk.” To my recollection, that’s where the conversation ended.
Somehow, her voice finds its way underground, and the conversation picks up where we left off so long ago. Now, Bernice says to me, “You’ve got your head screwed on straight. You’re a deep one, a thinker. It’s going to serve you well one of these days.”
“Has my dad forgotten about me?” I ask her.
My eardrums start vibrating again.
She takes her time in replying. “Sometimes it feels like the end of the world, what we go through. But it’s not. I promise you that. I’m not saying there ain’t going to be storms. I’m saying you got to look for the rainbows. If you don’t find any, you got to make your own.” And then, Bernice is gone.
I look around. There is so little color down here. Everything is muted. Even my skin is losing its pigment. I pinch myself to see if it can still muster a bruise. How am I supposed to make a rainbow?
I get an idea. I race around the room, pulling from all the food supplies and craft supplies and garments those items least faded. I arrange them in piles according to their colors. Purple balls of yarn beside red tins of spaghetti sauce, yellow rain ponchos still in their packaging beside the orange hazard cone, a dozen blue boxes of toothpaste beside green Excedrin bottles. Merging blue into violet into red is almost as reassuring as hearing another human voice. Across the floor, I blend tins, boxes, wigs, and scarves into a rainbow.
Dobbs is stumped by what’s happening on the floor. Puzzlement quickly gives way to vexation—nothing rankles him more than disorder. “What’s all this about?”
“You keep saying this place is the Ark. Well, every ark needs a rainbow.”
“Put those things back where they belong. How do you expect to find something when you need it?”
“I like it like this.” I like
me
like this, is what I really mean.
“Don’t test me, young lady. I’m not in the mood for one of your episodes today.” He hoists the duffel bag onto the counter. Instead of packing away the groceries, I add the cans to my rainbow on the floor.
Dobbs kneels down next to me. Sometimes the smell of disinfectant on him is so strong I can’t help but gag. “You heard me, I said put this all back. Before one of us trips and breaks a neck.”
Dobbs grabs the box from my hand. “What has gotten into you?”
What has gotten into me is Bernice. The next package—a blue one—is flour.
“No!”
But he’s too late. I give the package a vigorous shake, then make a dash for the pancake mix.
Dobbs knocks the box out of my hand. “Stop it! Stop!” he shouts, as twenty-four servings of pancakes go flying.
I reach for sugar. No reason why trapped air shouldn’t taste sweet.
This time, Dobbs throws his weight at my back and I hear the soft poof of air go out of my lungs when I land. Were it water and not concrete, this would be a belly flop worthy of cheers.
He turns me over. It feels good not to breathe. I watch the white dust coat his hair. In seconds, he ages twenty years. And I must surely be an old woman, too. Perhaps old-lady breath will never figure a way back into my lungs, and I will not be robbed of dying an old woman after all.
Color seems to seep out of the irises of Dobb’s eyes, muddying up the whites. He looks bilious. “Oh geez!” he says. “Breathe!”
The last time I saw Daddy was when he was parking the truck at the Horse Thieves Picnic. Good-bye, Daddy, I might have thought to say, if I hadn’t been in such a big hurry to meet Arlo. I might have paused to listen to what he had to tell me. I keep giving him words. “Hey, Punkin, we love you and we miss you, and wherever you are, we’ll find you.” Not this time. Now, I see a shadow across Daddy’s face. I wait for him to tell me to be brave, to hang in there, but nothing comes out of his mouth. My father looks me square in the face and says nothing.
“Come on, breathe!” I hear Dobbs insisting from someplace far off. He’s shaking my shoulders.
Daddy’s not looking at me, I realize. He’s looking through me. This is why Bernice didn’t answer my question. It’s too late. If they were going to come for me, they would have been here by now.
“Why are you doing this?” he cries.
As soon as Dobbs threatens mouth-to-mouth, I try to wrestle away from him. He pins me on my back, pegs my legs down by stretching himself on me. He holds my hands above my head.
“I don’t know why you got to be this way.” His voice is screechy and high. “I don’t like hurting you.”
He’s damp, always damp. Because we are exactly the same height, we are face-to-face. Only he’s about three times bigger than me. I can’t stand him this close. The pores of his skin are open, giving off a coppery smell, like a wet match against a strike pad.
I don’t like the way his weight has shifted. I glare at him to let him know I know what’s happening.
His eyes roll, one eyelid droops. He knows what’s happening, too, and this time he’s not going to stop himself.
My tailbone feels as though it is about to shatter. “You’re hurting me!”
His gaze moves up to an area with which I am well acquainted. If you close your eyes just so and peer through your lashes, the circular wall forms the horizon on the other end of Clinton Lake. Look long enough, and a boat just might go sailing by. You can hear the voices of children, smell the sunblock on their faces. There’s the other smell, too, the stench of stagnant water at the inlet. That part of the shoreline you’ve not explored before. You turn toward the sound coming from the underbrush. A deer, perhaps. You walk tenderly, hoping you won’t startle it, because just once you want to see something rare. Instead, you pick out human sounds and you think what everyone thinks when they hear human sounds coming from a clearing in the thicket. But it is not a lovers’ embrace you come upon. It is a man bending over a large flat rock, gutting a fish. The severed head is positioned in such a way that it has to watch its own slaughter.
The lake retreats, and the voices fade, and everything compresses into that one gray edge and becomes again the edge of the ceiling.