Authors: Sara Shepard
T
hat night,
I stared at the way the light shifted on the flowered wallpaper, making each flower look like a macabre nipple. As I climbed out of bed, something moved on the floor beneath me. It was the unnamed dog, the one my father had picked up on the street. The Smitty dog. I had forgotten about her, since she’d spent all of her time outside with the other dogs. I wasn’t sure how she’d gotten in—I wasn’t even sure dogs were allowed in the house.
I felt the sides of the walls to get down the stairs safely. The dog followed me to the front door, where we both looked out the glass panels at the street. Light green pods covered our car. The moon was bloated and glowing. It didn’t take me long to get to the house at the end of the road. Most of the windows were dark and there was a nondescript Ford station wagon in the driveway. The same TV flickered.
The dog and I walked up to the same window I was at yesterday and looked inside. The TV cast ghostly blue shadows over the wood-paneled walls. An empty ashtray and a white coffee mug sat on the table. The TV was turned to that old PBS show
The Joy of Painting,
where the friendly, frizzy-haired guy blotted the canvas to create spiny trees and blurry clouds. I watched a shot of the canvas, then the painter’s lionlike face, then the palette.
“I thought I heard someone out here.”
I turned around, my heart leaping to my throat. Philip sat on the porch, hidden by the shadows. He looked at the dog curiously.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said back. “Summer, right?”
I nodded.
“I’m Philip,” he said. I almost said
I know,
but then he added, “What’s your dog’s name?”
“She doesn’t have one. My dad found her. She’s a Smitty dog.”
“Smitty dog?”
“Apparently it’s some local thing.”
He laughed and ducked his head bashfully. “Well, I’m not really a local.”
He wasn’t much taller than I was, but was wearing the clothes of someone who was about six-ten. His T-shirt fell past his crotch, and his shorts past his knees. He wore no shoes, only white gym socks.
“So you’re here visiting?” he asked.
“Yeah, remember, my grandmother died?” I reminded him. “We have to go to her funeral.”
“Right.” He scratched his nose. “Did you go yet?”
“No. Today we had to see the body.”
“What was that like?”
I paused. “She looked like she’d been in the freezer for a while.” I pointed to the window. “You watch
The Joy of Painting
.”
He brightened for a second, although his version of brightening was his mouth lifting just slightly, his muscles tightening. “You know it?”
“I used to watch it when I was little.”
“My dad used to paint along to the program,” he said. “He used to put his canvas right up against the TV and whatever Bob Ross did, he’d do, too. He wasn’t very good at it, though. All of his paintings just looked flat and empty.”
I wanted him to say more about his dad. When he didn’t, I asked, “So where are you from, if you’re not from here?”
“Michigan. You?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Brooklyn,” he repeated, nodding. Thankfully, he didn’t say
Brooklyn
in a tough-guy voice, as a couple of youngish older people at the
wake today had done, as if everyone from Brooklyn were in the Mafia. Philip pointed off toward my house. “How are the old ladies?”
“Well, there’s only one, now. But she’s okay.”
“I know Stella a little. She came over once.” I got a look at his eyes. They were dark and deep-set, so lovely.
“My grandmother is having a twenty-one-gun salute at her funeral,” I offered.
“Really.”
“And Aunt Stella, who you met, is living on another planet,” I went on. “And then Samantha…maybe you know her…she’s downright mean.”
“She’s all right. I was like that, too, when my mother was sick.”
The smell of pine was suddenly sharp in my nose. “Sick?”
“She had cancer,” he added.
He arched his back and looked up at the sky. I looked up, too. I thought that outside New York City, the sky would be perfect and bright and informative, with a legend key telling me which constellation was which. But tonight’s sky was murky and dense, the same sky as Brooklyn.
Philip shifted his weight. “Want to see something? It’s behind my house.”
“I don’t know. Do I?”
He thought for a moment. “Yes. You do.”
I followed him into his backyard. There were flowers planted neatly along the sides of the house, and a bag of Kmart-brand soil propped up at the back. At the back of the house was a huge garden. Everything was in bloom, dewy and green.
Philip pushed past some branches. We were behind the garden now, among a thick patch of trees. The air smelled earthy, like plants and soil and water. The light hit Philip dramatically, bouncing off the angles of his face, making him look romantic, like he was sitting for a portrait. I was hesitant to look at him directly, for fear he’d think I was staring.
“Check it out.” Philip pointed to a small patch of dirt on the ground. About twenty plants were in neat rows. Behind them were small stones. Each stone bore a name.
Clara. Jezebel. Rufus. Clive.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“They’re graves,” he answered.
“Of…
people
?”
He snorted. “
No.
Of birds. See? There’s a drawing of one.” He stooped down and wiped some dirt off one of the headstones; sure enough, there was a crude drawing of a sparrow. “There are hunters out in these woods. They’re hunting for deer, but a lot of times they miss and get a bird. They never collect them. These graves were here when we moved in, though. My mom and I just continued the tradition. Every time we find a bird, we bury it with the rest.”
“Really.”
“Uh-huh.”
I looked at the names on the headstones.
Laila. Tristan. Penelope.
Penelope was one of my father’s favorite names—it was what he wanted to name me, in fact, but my mother had staunchly refused. “So is your mom…better?”
“She eats now. She didn’t eat for a while. Everything tasted like metal.”
“Why?”
“Chemotherapy.”
“That must’ve been…” I floundered for a word. “Sucky.”
“I’d say it’s okay, but I’m sick of saying that, especially when it’s not true.”
I thought for a moment. “Maybe you could say some random word instead. Like
pickle
.”
“Pickle, huh?” He settled against the tree, curling his legs under him, gold stitching along the toe-line of his socks. I leaned up against a different tree about three feet from him. The rough bark cut up my back but I was afraid to move. Philip stared at me for a long time. It didn’t feel like an assault, though, just benign curiosity.
“Are your parents getting divorced now?” I blurted out.
He raised an eyebrow. “Why would they be divorced?”
“Someone told me the other day that marriage doesn’t work. That when something goes wrong, people usually bail out.”
Philip scratched his head. “Really?” He sounded hurt, maybe even
worried. I sucked in my stomach, wondering why I’d said something so mean. He’d probably hate me now. He’d probably throw a rock at my head.
“Brooklyn’s near the Bronx, right?” he said after a moment.
“Yeah. Close enough.”
“My mom grew up in the Bronx. I bet she’d like to meet you guys. To talk to someone about it.” He glanced at me. “It’s not like she and my dad come from the same background. He grew up in India. And he’s Sikh.” His laugh was bitter, embarrassed. “But you probably don’t know what that is, right?”
I wiped my hair out of my face. “No, I do. A neighbor of ours, Mr. Saluja, is that. Sikh, I mean.” It explained, of course, the turban Philip’s father wore—it was a religious thing, a religion completely different from Christianity or, more importantly, Islam. Something else occurred to me—Steven knew what it meant to be Sikh, too. He used to shovel Mr. Saluja’s front walk.
“Why did you show me this?” I asked, gesturing to the graves.
He blinked. “I thought you’d like it.”
“I do.” It was warm inside my jeans pockets, the denim all soft and worn-out.
“I’ve never shown it to anyone before.”
“Why?”
He paused, considering. “I don’t know. Most people don’t deserve to see it.”
And I do?
I thought, astounded.
The night seemed to grow darker, quieter, more serious. Philip let out a breath, sort of a sad laugh. Then he stepped forward. In one fluid motion, he touched my hand, and then kissed me. His lips were a quick bloom on mine and then gone. My veins filled with hot chocolate, and for a moment the world went white.
I must have had a startled expression on my face because Philip broke away fast. “Sorry. I don’t know why I just…” He trailed off and stared at the ground.
No, I liked it,
I protested in my head. But I felt like I was underwater. If I opened my mouth, I’d drown. There were locusts or crickets or
some chirping creatures back in the woods. I clenched and unclenched my hands, wondering if Philip had really kissed me just now, or if I’d dreamed it all up.
Suddenly I took a deep breath. “My mother left us a year and a half ago. We don’t know where she is.”
Philip turned his head a fraction, saying nothing.
“And then a couple months ago,” I continued, “we were eating dinner, and my dad took a snow globe that was sitting on our dining room table and threw it against the wall. And then he got up and picked up the biggest piece and drove it right into the center of his palm. Then he couldn’t get it out. It was stuck in there somehow. It just kept bleeding.”
“Was he…okay?” Philip’s voice was small and tentative.
“I guess. It’s healed and everything. The doctors said it was because of stress, but I don’t know. It was…awful. I’m kind of afraid he might do something like that again.”
I was afraid to say anything else for fear I’d either start crying or tell him the rest—that we took him to the emergency room, that he was screaming and crying the whole time, that he was in the psych ward for three days, that I had to visit him there. How I was certain that it was my fault, all of it, and if only I would’ve done something differently, it never would have happened. How, even deeper, I felt so angry, anger I had no idea what to do with or where to put.
I shut my eyes. “Pickle,” I recited. “Pickle, pickle, pickle.” I opened my eyes again. “I think it works.”
I looked at him and smiled. He smiled back, but it seemed weak, watered-down. I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Perhaps terror. Or disgust. Everything inside me felt like a garbage can tipped over, strewn on the forest floor.
Kiss me again,
I begged him silently.
Please.
A twig snapped. I looked over and saw a shadow in Philip’s driveway. It moved toward us quickly. Steven.
“Oh,” I whispered.
“Who’s that?” Philip asked.
“My brother.”
I took a step toward him. Steven stood with his hands on his hips.
“What do you want?” I called to him, my voice trembling.
“Come here,” Steven said, his voice a threat.
I glanced back at Philip. He stood in front of the bird graves, as if guarding them. The wind smelled like bug spray. The creek rushed angrily behind us.
“Get over here, Summer,” Steven repeated, impatient.
“I’m fine.” The words dissolved in the air space right outside my mouth. “Nothing’s wrong. We’re just hanging out.”
“Come. Here.”
Philip cocked his head, like a dog that heard a strange noise. “Maybe you should go.”
Steven’s shoulders were squared, his legs spread apart. He reminded me of the two-story cowboy statue we saw in front of a restaurant called Round ’Em Up Corral. It was somewhere on the highway, on the way in, and featured an all-you-can-eat buffet for $5.95.
I took a few steps more toward him. “Just stop it,” I hissed. “You’re embarrassing me.”
“Do you know who you’re talking to?” Steven answered, not quietly at all.
“Do
you
?” I asked. Steven blinked. “You don’t! You don’t know anything!”
“Summer.” He wrapped his hand around my wrist, guiding me backward.
“Why are you
doing
this?”
“Because…” He let out a small whine. It was a noise like a little kid would make, frustrated when he didn’t get his way. “You
know
why.”
I tried to shake him off, but he wrapped his arms around my waist and covered my mouth. I made a muffled cry, vaguely afraid. My brother’s body felt solid and warm, and for a second it was like we were embracing.
Steven continued to hold me to him, his breath hot on my neck. Tears sprang to my eyes. And then he released me, just like that. I spun across Philip’s yard. Ten feet away, Steven looked smaller. He held his arms out, staring at them as if he couldn’t believe they were his. And Philip was gone. I couldn’t feel Philip’s lips on mine anymore. When
I reached for the memory, I saw my grandmother’s dead face instead. The world smelled like driveway tar, thick and black, a smell I’d always hated.
“Summer.” Steven listed toward Philip’s mailbox, a cheap steel rectangle on a tattered post. “It’s just that—”
“Go away,” I said through my teeth.
He took another step, but I turned around and wheeled back for Stella’s house. “Just don’t,” I screamed over my shoulder, my voice piercing through the woods.
I
t was
raining at the cemetery, big fat drops plopping on the gazebo roof, on the crumbling headstones, on the threadbare mini American flags around the various grave sites. We huddled under an umbrella near the open plot, waiting for everyone to arrive from the funeral home.
Steven sniffed behind me. Last night, when I slipped back into the house, I found everyone in the kitchen. “Are you okay?” my father asked. “We couldn’t find you.” He was crying. In front of everyone, like he always did. Huge tears ran down his face. I hated him for crying. I hated that Samantha was standing there, an entertained little smile on her face, taking it all in. She’d seen where I’d gone and told Steven, I figured. She’d ruined everything just because she could.
And I hated that I said something to Philip. It seemed as if the whole world had heard. I was certain my father would next turn to me and say,
So you’re sure I’m going to pull another snow globe incident again, huh? Some daughter
you
are.
I hated all of them last night. After I kicked my shoes off, I sneered at my blubbering father. “Steven’s going to join the Marines,” I spat, tasting acid in my mouth. “So you’d better do something soon if you want to stop him.”
And then I went upstairs. Steven slid in well after I’d shut myself in my room, gotten into bed, and pulled up the covers. I heard his every step on the creaky, warped wood. He paused at my room, as if he
wanted to say something, but then he didn’t. Seconds later, the door to his room scraped shut.
One of the biddies that was at the wake floated over to us now, a crooked umbrella over her head. “It was a lovely service,” she croaked to my father, taking his hand.
“Yes. Absolutely,” my father answered. “Beautiful.”
Her whole body trembled. “She’s in God’s hands now.”
Something indescribable passed over my father’s face. “I’m sure.”
When the seven soldiers ascended the hill, Steven’s posture changed. They were dressed in blue suits and carried rifles over their shoulders. They all had hair and expressions exactly like Steven. I wondered where they’d come from—they didn’t seem particularly Cobaltian. More likely the funeral director had them bused in from a more official town nearby.
They reached us and fanned out in a line. The silence was absolute. Stella shook her head.
Spent every penny,
I bet she was thinking. My brother was rapt, watching as the head soldier or whatever barked out an order and a few of them gathered the flag off my grandmother’s coffin and started to fold it up. They folded and folded and folded until it was a compact triangle. Stella balled her fists and kept her eyes on the ground.
The soldiers handed the flag to my father. He took it, befuddled, and finally tucked it under his arm. Then the soldiers lined up again and started shooting. The noise of seven guns shooting all at once was ridiculously loud.
The funeral director hit a lever that lowered the coffin down into the ground, and everyone threw dirt on top of it. Stella tossed in a couple of lottery tickets. One of the biddies dropped a picture of Jesus. My brother threw a yellow ribbon. I threw nothing, and neither did my father. Samantha leaned down and dropped a picture of Frank Sinatra, one in which his eyes were tinted to look extra blue and his skin was all smooth and velvety. At that, Stella began to cry, big, fat tears rolling down her cheeks. Samantha put her hand on her back and walked Stella over to a tree. “It’s all right,” she murmured.
We paraded back down the hill to the car. There would be old
biddies coming over to my grandmother’s house for an after-funeral party, if you could call it that, and there would be cabbage rolls and various other things cooked in a Crock-Pot. Tomorrow morning we’d go back to Brooklyn and resume our normal lives of ignoring each other.
“So this is Cobalt,” my father said, sweeping his arm around. He sounded disappointed—maybe because we obviously didn’t love it. I walked a little closer to my father. He looked the same as he did before my mother vanished: his face was clean-shaven, his shoulders strong, his legs muscular from—years ago, now—cycling in Prospect Park. If he passed my mother on the street, she would still easily recognize him, but would he recognize her? What if she had really changed?
My father stopped in front of a tombstone. He made a small choking sound and stepped back. I looked down. The grave marker said
Kay Mulvaney, 1953–1970.
“That’s your friend’s girlfriend, isn’t it?” I whispered.
He nodded. The wind pushed up against our backs. My father crouched down and put his ear to the grass and whispered something I couldn’t hear. In a few seconds he stood back up and brushed the grass and dry dirt off his suit. “Come on,” he said to me.
I couldn’t rightly determine his expression. He started walking toward the others, but I stayed where I was.
“Dad?” I called quietly, my heart pounding. He stopped. “Why did you say you were separated?”
He stood very still.
“To that funeral director guy. He asked if you were married, and you said you were separated. Is that what’s going on?”
He lowered his arms to his side and walked back to me. I watched a hawk circle twice around the graves before he responded. “What was I supposed to tell him, Summer? The truth?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s like when someone says, ‘How are you?’ Do you say, ‘Well, my head hurts and I’m lonely and depressed and I’m worried about everything and the world is collapsing and full of evil’? Or do you say, ‘I’m fine’?”
I couldn’t help but smile. “You usually go for the longer version.”
He paused. “I suppose I do, yes.”
“You could’ve just said pickle.”
“What?”
I closed my eyes, aching again. The memory of the time I’d spent with Philip was slipping further and further away with every passing minute. “Nothing.”
The rain finally stopped. Our feet sank into the wet, loamy grass. We passed a whole section for the Elkerson family. I tilted my head to the sky, expecting to see the thick black smoke from the soldiers’ rifles. Instead, I saw a rainbow.
“I got a letter from her,” my father said quietly. “Two weeks ago.”
I gaped at him.
“It said…it said she was all right. She asked about you.”
“Where does she live? What is she doing? Are you going to
respond
?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.” He picked at a loose thread on his jacket. “She mentioned a divorce, though. Said she could make it very easy. It’s probably the best thing.”
“Did she tell you where she lives? Did she give you a return address?”
He kicked at the grass. “Long Island. East Hampton. Do you know where that is?”
“The beach, right?”
He nodded. “But it was only a post office box. It doesn’t mean anything. She could have things forwarded from there.”
“Did you tell Steven?”
“No. But I’m going to. When all this is done.”
A hot, bitter taste rose to the back of my throat. “Dad, I’m sorry.”
He looked at me curiously. “What are
you
sorry for?”
I thought of the spiny, crackling snaps under my skin the day I yelled at him and slammed my bedroom door. How his face had crumpled, how he’d looked so devastated. I shook my head, afraid to say more.
After the snow globe incident, when my father was in the psych
ward, he wore a nightgown that stopped at his knees, and then, later, pale green hospital scrub pants. He said his roommate smacked his lips in his sleep. In the ward’s lobby was a bulletin board with construction-paper balloons pinned to it. Someone had printed each patient’s name in the middle of each balloon. I didn’t cry when I saw my dad’s hospital bracelet, or the curled-up, mumbling woman in the corner, or the jagged scar on my father’s palm. I didn’t cry when I asked him what it felt like, suffering with whatever had befallen him, and he replied, “It’s something that’s been inside me for a long time. And you fight and fight and fight against it for so long, but then it just crashes over you and pulls you down.” But when I saw his name written in one of those construction-paper balloons,
Richard,
optimistically, innocently, I had to turn away from him, duck my head to the water fountain as if I desperately needed a drink.
We sat in the common room and he pulled a hand-drawn card from the scrub pants’ small back pocket. “Here,” he said. It was a gelatinous map of the world; he’d penciled in each individual country, body of water, mountain range, and even added some fish in the oceans and birds in the sky—birds, come to think of it, that looked a lot like the drawings on the graves in Philip’s backyard. Everything on the map was right: France was next to Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland. Japan was to the right of Korea. He even got all of the newly independent Soviet Union countries in the right places, Belarus and Estonia and Uzbekistan. Somewhat arbitrarily, he’d drawn a stick person over Spain, and another over Australia. There was a line between the two of them, linking them together. Inside, the card said,
Me and You.
We walked now in silence, catching up with the others. “Hey,” my father said, stopping short halfway down the cemetery’s wildflower-strewn hill. “You know what’s over there?” He pointed to a house.
“What?” I asked.
“Old man Cross’s trampoline.” He shaded his eyes. “I wonder if it’s still there.”
“It is,” Pete answered. “I drove by before you got here the other day.”
They exchanged a glance. “You want to go?” my dad asked.
“Sure,” Pete said.
“Summer? Steven?” My father looked at us. Suddenly he could have been eighteen, the age when he left Cobalt for good. Pete giggled beside him.
“Nah,” Steven said quickly.
“I’ll go,” I offered.
“Of course you will,” my father said, and took my hand.