Bat Summer (10 page)

I wind the line up some more, wondering where it will lead me.

“Is this what you're looking for, batbrain?” And, like magic, there's Lucy holding the kite at the side of the bridge.

“I knew bats lived here,” I say. Thank God she's all right! I don't know what to say next. I stand there half-naked, with this big goofy smile on my face.

Lucy has a green scarf tied around her head. She isn't one bit wet. I try to cover my chest with my arms.

“Is anyone with you?” she says.

“No. I was just flying a kite. You know…” It's no use trying to cover my chest. My arms are too skinny. It would be too obvious to put my shirt back on, too. I guess I'll just have to be naked.

“Did you get in trouble the other day?” she asks. She walks down toward me from the side of the bridge and hands me the kite. It's all wrecked, but you can still see the bat on it. I use it to cover my chest like some kind of shield.

“No. My cousin was there. She made like I was looking for her.” Lucy smiles. She doesn't smile that often. It's like someone turned a light on in her head.

We hear another a peal of thunder. It echoes under the bridge.

“Come on,” she says. I follow Lucy up the side of the bridge. She pushes aside a bush and I can see an arch under this part of the bridge. She crawls into it and looks back to make sure I'm with her.

It's dark in here, and it takes my eyes a while to adjust. I feel the wall with my hand. It's jagged where the bridge has worn away.

I hear Lucy light a match, and the whole cave lights up. I can see the iron work of the bridge above us. No bats, though. Well, none except Lucy.

The whole space is no bigger than my bathroom, with way less head room. I can't stand up. There's a sleeping bag in the corner with a bunch of blankets underneath it and a bunch of newspapers underneath that. Three boxes of emergency candles sit by the bed. The lit one sits in a crevice just above a full knapsack. At the foot of the bed is a huge pot with a lid on it and beside that is a plastic Loblaws bag full of chip wrappers and Coke cans. In the middle of the floor are two books: the one Lucy showed me about bats, and the one on kites that she got the Moran/midget story out of.

“Welcome to my home.” Lucy plops herself down on the bed. She's not wearing her bat sheet anymore. The candle makes long shadows of her legs on the wall.

“I'm surprised you found me,” she says. “But not really surprised. Bats have a great sense of smell. In a cave of a thousand bats, we can always find our friends. You probably found me because we click.” She starts clicking her tongue at me like it's supposed to mean something to me.

“I was looking for you, actually.” Lucy is jiggling her leg against the floor in that way that it would shake the whole floor if it were actually a floor and
not dirt. That green bandanna is really kooky. It could be some kind of bat thing. Maybe it's to keep the lice off her shoulders. “Everyone is looking for you, Lucy.”

“Did you hear me? Every bat has its own click. So even in an area of thousands of bats we still know —”

“The police are looking for you…”

“You must have heard my clicks, because otherwise you wouldn't be here, right? I saw the kite and I knew it was you. I mean, only bats know how to find each other with clicking. Only bats know how to hang tough together.” She is talking a mile a minute. She doesn't seem to hear what I told her about the police.

“Rico told me about your note. What did it say?” She looks at me like I'm speaking another language and starts clicking her tongue again. “You didn't say anything about Loblaws, did you? That's not why you left?” She shakes her head and brings her face right up into mine, clicking. I don't know what to do, so I pick up the bat book and start flipping through it.

She sits down beside me and pulls it away.

“I'm hiding from the enemy. I don't want to get my eyes poked out. I don't want to be locked in the dark with a bunch of owls.” Now she's talking crazy talk. She has these vibes coming off her like she's had too much coffee, all shivery and tense. I want to
put my arm around her, but I don't want her to think that I want her to be my girlfriend, even though she might be already. It seems like a better idea to let her be a bat for a while. She'll get tired of it.

Lucy takes the book from me.

“It says here that this Italian scientist, Lazzaro Spallanzani, sealed all these bats and owls together in a dark room to see how they would fly in the dark. The owls bashed into everything, but the bats could find their way around no problem. So then Spallanzani blindfolds the bats to see if they can still get around, and, of course they do, because we use echoes to find out where everything is. Like we yell like this: OOOOOOOOOO.” She hollers so loud, I'm sure the cars on the bridge can hear. Somebody's gonna find us if she goes on like that. I want to put my hand over her mouth, but she lifts up her finger and stops. “Did you hear that?”

“How could I not hear that?”

“I mean the echo, Terence.” She looks at me for a second and then dives back into the book. “Spallanzani didn't know about echoes and how we can tell how close something is just by yelling at it and hearing the sound bounce off it. You shouldn't put blindfolds on animals. I don't think you should try to make anything blind that isn't already. Anyway, it didn't work, did it? But Spallanzani couldn't leave it at that. He goes and pokes our bat
eyes out and then sends us out into the night to see if we can find our way home. And we did find our way home and he still wasn't happy. He murdered a bunch of us bats — ones with eyes, ones without eyes, didn't matter to him. He murdered us and cut open our stomachs to see if the bats with eyes ate the same amount as the bats without eyes. And you know what he found?”

I have a picture in my head of gutted, blinded bats and this guy, Spallanzani, leaning over them with blood on his hands.

“What?”

“Nothing. The bats with eyes and the bats without eyes ate the same amount. He killed them for nothing. How could he do that? How could he poke their eyes out and cut their stomachs open? He shouldn't have done that.”

I see a drop fall on the book. At first I look up at the ceiling to see if there is a leak. Then I realize it's Lucy crying. I put my arm around her shoulder.

“What a Moran,” I say. She looks at me and gives a half-smile.

“He's worse than a Moran. He's a Spallanzani. Those owls in that dark room, they bumped into everything and he didn't do anything to them. It's not fair to be picked on because you're smart like a bat.” Lucy tugs on the end of the bandanna on her head and wipes her eye with a corner of it. I take my
shirt from around my waist and give it to her to cry into. I can still hear the rain rustling the bush outside.

“You want some spaghetti?” she asks.

“I didn't know bats ate spaghetti.”

“This bat does.” Lucy moves over to where the pot is. She puts it between us and lifts up the lid. There's a whole pot full of spaghetti in there. She digs a fork out of her knapsack and hands it to me. I shouldn't really eat her food.

“Why did you run away?” I know it's a dangerous question. She might start clicking again.

“I didn't run away. I migrated. Bats migrate when it gets too cold where they are. That apartment was freezing. We can't fly unless we're at the right temperature.”

It's almost August. The whole city's stinking hot. Last year, Tom and me tried to fry an egg on the sidewalk — and it almost worked.

“Is that what you said in the note? That you were migrating?”

“What are you so obsessed with that note for? It wasn't about you. Everybody always thinks everything is about them. All I said was that I had to go away for a while until things warmed up. I couldn't stand listening to everything freezing up like that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, we did all that work cleaning the apartment
and nobody said anything. It's like the whole place doesn't even exist.”

I think I know what she means. It's like when I asked Mom about going to canoe camp with Tom and she said maybe, and then never mentioned it again. And now it's summer and Tom is gone and I'm still here — all without anybody saying anything.

At least I have Elys to take care of me. Nobody takes care of Lucy. Except maybe me.

She's not going to be able to live long on this spaghetti.

“You should come to my house,” I say. I take a forkful of spaghetti. I'm starving. If she comes home with me, I'll make her some wieners and macaroni. “We've got an extra bedroom. I'm sure it'd be okay with my mom.”

Her eyes fill with tears again. I wonder if bats cry. This one does. Too much.

“I can't. I can't.”

“Why not?”

Lucy crosses over to the bed. She turns her back to me and unwraps the bandanna from around her head.

My heart does something it's never done before. It flops over four full times, like a fish fresh out of water.

Lucy is bald. She's shaved her head. And I can tell
she had a hard time doing it because there are a few nicks by her ear and at the base of her neck. She must have done it to get rid of the lice.

Oh, Lucy. I can see her neck muscles tighten. I swear, I can see her brain thinking. She lets her face fall in her hands.

I can't catch my breath. I remember the color of her hair. How I once thought it was spiky and stringy, and also how it burned like fire. And also, how I touched it.

“Lucy.” I don't know what to say. “Lucy. It'll grow back, Lucy.”

She shakes her head in her hands. She can't face me. I don't blame her. I go over to her and slowly, slowly, put my hand on her head. I feel her relax under me. She lets out a sob that sounds like the tip of a tidal wave of tears. She buries her face in the sleeping bag and sobs like the end of the world is coming. I sit beside her and pat her back.

I say, “Shh, shh.”

We sit like that for a long time. I listen to the rain outside. I listen to myself say “shh.” The candle burns down a bit. I think about how stupid it is to worry about having a weenie chest or getting caught smoking. I think about how those ketchup magazines under my mattress are so fake. I think about Tom's dog Steel and how he farts up a storm and the whole house stinks and how they love that dog anyway.
And I think about how it must feel to be so lonely like Lucy and how, I guess, sometimes I feel that way.

I almost feel like crying, too. Only, I also have the feeling that the rain is crying for me and Lucy both. I feel like the whole day is a crying day.

The candle goes out. I have no idea what time it is. Lucy is asleep. I should let her sleep. I sit there in the dark until my eyes adjust to the light.

I can make out the edges of Lucy's face. Her head looks so small without hair.
She
looks so much smaller when she's asleep. She almost looks like a normal girl, except without hair.

Tom might not think that Lucy is pretty. Her nose is too long and pointy, and her eyes are set deep in her head so that her cheeks seem to bloom out of them. Her eyebrows are slightly knotted together, as if she were trying to balance something on top of her head. Her bald head.

I see the marker lying on the ground by the books. I crawl over and get it. I rip a piece off the kite and write Lucy a note.

“Dear Lucy Bat, I will be back later with food. Please stay here.” I was going to sign it “Terence Bat,” but the marker finally gave out.

I crawl out into the ravine and scramble up the other side of the bridge. I don't want to go back through the park. I don't want to have to talk to the
police if they are still there, Rico will probably tell them I don't know anything anyway.

All the way home I think about what I could make to take to Lucy. I'll have to give Elys some lame excuse for going out again. She'll let me, though. She trusts me not to get into trouble. I think I'll make Lucy a bunch of cheese sandwiches with those simulated cheese flats. Those things'll last forever — however long that is.

When I get home, Mom is sitting on the sofa with her feet up on the coffee table.

“Where have you been?” she asks. Her voice is calm but I get the feeling like something has happened.

“I was at the park,” I say. She takes her feet off the coffee table and leans forward on her elbows. Something has definitely happened.

“Just tell me where you were, Terence. I know you weren't at the park.” I wonder if she went looking for me. That's odd. I think of something else.

“What time is it?”

“Answer the question.” I go and sit in the rocking chair.

“Where's Elys?”

“Terence!” She's standing up now. I haven't seen her this angry in a long time. She must have found the magazines. Or maybe Elys told her about the smoking. “I'll ask you again. Where were you?”

“I was in the park. I swear it.”

“No, you weren't. Try again.”

“Not Wells Hill Park, Mom. The other one. The ravine. Up by Spadina. I was flying a kite.”

She seems to deflate a little.

“In the rain? That's dangerous.”

“I know, but…”

“God, I was so worried. The police were here, you know. They were looking for some girl. What's her name?”

“Lucy.”

“That's right. Do you know her?”

“Kind of…you're home early today.”

“It's past eight, Terence. I've been home for two hours already. I don't want you out this late alone, all right? We don't know what happened to that girl.”

She
doesn't know what happened to that girl.

“I want you home at five o'clock every day. I know it's a bummer, but I can't have you tooling about the neighborhood on your own if there's some freak out there. I'm going to be coming home a lot earlier and I want you to be here.”