SOULS
At school the next day, Phoebe wore a fixed expression: a sealed, thin smile. It must have been hard for her to maintain that smile, because by the time English class came around, her chin was quivering from the strain. She was extremely quiet all day. She didn’t speak to anyone but me, and the only thing she said to me was, “Stay at my house tomorrow night.” It wasn’t a question; it was a command.
Mr. Birkway gave us a fifteen-second exercise. As fast as we could, without thinking, we were to draw something. He would tell us what we were to draw when everyone was ready. “Remember,” he said. “Don’t think. Just draw. Fifteen seconds. Ready? Draw your soul. Go.”
We all wasted five seconds staring blankly back at him. When we saw that he was serious and was watching the clock, our pencils hit the paper. I wasn’t thinking. There wasn’t time to think.
When Mr. Birkway called “Stop!” everyone looked up, dazed. Then we looked down at our papers, and a buzz went around the room. We were surprised at what had come out of our pencils.
Mr. Birkway zipped around, scooping up the papers. He shuffled them and tacked them up on the bulletin board. He said, “We now have everyone’s soul captured.” We all crowded around.
The first thing I noticed was that every single person had drawn a central shape—a heart, circle, square, or triangle. I thought that was unusual. I mean, no one drew a bus or a spaceship or a cow—they all drew these same shapes. Next, I noticed that inside each figure was a distinct design. At first it seemed that every one was different. There was a cross, a dark scribble, an eye, a mouth, a window.
There was one with a teardrop inside that I thought must be Phoebe’s.
Then Mary Lou said, “Look at that—two are exactly the same.” People were saying, “Geez” and “Wow” and “Whose are those?”
The duplicate designs were: a circle with a large maple leaf in the center, the tips of the leaf touching the sides of the circle. One of the maple leaf circles was mine. The other was Ben’s.
EVIDENCE
I spent the next night at Phoebe’s house, but I could hardly sleep. Phoebe kept saying, “Hear that noise?” and she would jump up to peer out the window in case it was the lunatic returning for the rest of us. Once she saw Mrs. Cadaver in her garden with a flashlight.
I must have fallen asleep after that, because I awoke to the sound of Phoebe crying in her sleep. When I woke her, she denied it. “I was not crying. I most certainly was not.”
In the morning, Phoebe refused to get up. Her father rushed into the room with two ties slung around his neck and his shoes in his hand. “Phoebe, you’re late.”
“I’m sick,” she said. “I have a fever and a stomachache.”
Her father placed his hand on her forehead, looked deep into her eyes and said, “I’m afraid you have to go to school.”
“I’m sick. Honest,” she said. “It might be cancer.”
“Phoebe, I know you’re worried, but there’s nothing we can do but wait. We have to go on with things. We can’t malinger.”
“We can’t what?” Phoebe said.
“Malinger. Here. Look it up.” He tossed her the dictionary from her desk and tore down the hall.
“My mother is missing, and my father hands me a dictionary,” Phoebe said. She looked up malinger and read the definition: “‘To pretend to be ill in order to escape duty or work.’” She slammed the book shut. “I am not malingering.”
Prudence was in a frenzy. “Where is my white blouse? Phoebe, have you seen—? I could have sworn—!” She pulled things out of her closet and flung them on the bed.
Phoebe reluctantly got dressed, pulling a wrinkled blouse and skirt from the closet. Downstairs, the kitchen table was bare. “No bowls of muesli,” Phoebe said. “No glasses of orange juice or whole wheat toast.” She touched a white sweater hanging on the back of a chair. “My mother’s favorite white cardigan,” she said. She snatched the sweater and waved it in front of her father. “Look at this! Would she leave this behind? Would she?”
He reached forward and touched its sleeve, rubbing the fabric between his fingers for a moment. “Phoebe, it’s an old sweater.” Phoebe put it on over her wrinkled blouse.
I was uneasy because everything that happened at Phoebe’s that morning reminded me of when my mother left. For weeks, my father and I fumbled around like ducks in a fit. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. The house took on a life of its own, hatching piles of dishes and laundry and newspapers and dust. My father must have said “I’ll be jiggered” three thousand times. The chickens were fidgety, the cows were skittish, and the pigs were sullen and glum. Our dog, Moody Blue, whimpered for hours on end.
When my father said that my mother was not coming back, I refused to believe it. I brought all her postcards down from my room and said, “She wrote me all these, she must be coming back.” And just like Phoebe, who had waved her mother’s sweater in front of her father, I had brought a chicken in from the coop: “Would Mom leave her favorite chicken?” I demanded. “She loves this chicken.”
What I really meant was, “How can she not come back to me? She loves me.”
?
At school, Phoebe slammed her books on her desk. Beth Ann said, “Hey, Phoebe, your blouse is a little wrinkled—”
“My mother’s away,” Phoebe said.
“I iron my own clothes now,” Beth Ann said. “I even iron—”
To me, Phoebe whispered, “I think I’m having a genuine heart attack.”
I thought about a baby rabbit that our dog, Moody Blue, caught and carried around—she was not actually lunching on the rabbit, just playing. I finally coaxed Moody Blue to drop it, and when I picked up the rabbit, its heart was beating faster than anything. Faster and faster it went, and then all of a sudden its heart stopped.
I took the rabbit to my mother. She said, “It’s dead, Salamanca.”
“It can’t be dead,” I said. “It was alive just a minute ago.”
I wondered what would happen if all of a sudden Phoebe’s heart beat itself out like the rabbit’s, and she fell down and died right there at school. Her mother would not even know Phoebe was dead.
After homeroom, Mary Lou said to Phoebe, “Did I hear you say your mother is away—?”
Christy and Megan gathered around. “Is your mother on a business trip?” Christy said. “My mother’s always going to Paris on business trips. So where is your mother? On a business trip?”
Phoebe nodded.
“Where did she go?” Megan said. “Tokyo? Saudi Arabia?”
Phoebe said, “London.”
“Oh, London,” Christy said. “My mother’s been there.”
Phoebe turned to me with a puzzled expression on her face. I think that she was surprised at what she had said, but I knew exactly why she had lied. It was easier sometimes. I had done this myself when people asked about my mother. “Don’t worry, Phoebe,” I said.
She snapped, “I am not worried.”
I had done that too. Whenever anyone tried to console me about my mother, I had nearly chomped their heads off. I was a complete ornery old donkey. When my father would say, “You must feel terrible,” I denied it. “I don’t,” I told him. “I don’t feel anything at all.” But I did feel terrible. I didn’t want to wake up in the morning, and I was afraid to go to sleep at night.
?
By lunchtime, people were coming at Phoebe from all directions. “How long will your mother be in London?” Mary Lou asked. “Is she having tea with the queen?”
“Tell her to go to Convent Garden,” Christy said. “My mother just loves Convent Garden.”
“It’s Covent Garden, cabbage-head,” Mary Lou said.
“It isn’t,” Christy said. “I’m sure it’s Convent Garden.”
After school, we walked home with Ben and Mary Lou. Phoebe wouldn’t say a word. “Whatsa matter, Free Bee?” Ben asked. “Talk.”
Out of the blue, I said, “Everyone has his own agenda.” Ben tripped over the curb, and Mary Lou gave me a peculiar look. I kept hoping that Phoebe’s mother would be home. Even though the door was locked, I kept hoping. “Are you sure you want me to come in?” I said. “Maybe you want to be alone.”
Phoebe said, “I don’t want to be alone. Call your dad and see if you can stay for dinner again.”
Inside, Phoebe called, “Mom?” She walked through the house, looking in each room. “That’s it,” Phoebe said. “I’m going to search for clues, for evidence that the lunatic has been here and dragged my mother off.” I wanted to tell her that she was just fishing in the air and that probably her mother had not been kidnapped, but I knew that Phoebe didn’t want to hear it.
When my mother did not return, I imagined all sorts of things. Maybe she had cancer and didn’t want to tell us and was hiding in Idaho. Maybe she got knocked on the head and had amnesia and was wandering around Lewiston, not knowing who she really was, or thinking she was someone else. My father said, “She does not have cancer, Sal. She does not have amnesia. Those are fishes in the air.” But I didn’t believe him. Maybe he was trying to protect her—or me.
Phoebe prowled through the house, examining the walls and carpet, searching for bloodstains. She found several suspicious spots and unidentifiable hair strands. Phoebe marked the spots with pieces of adhesive tape and collected the hairs in an envelope.
Prudence was in a lather when she came home. “I made it!” she said. “I made it!” She was jumping all about. “I made cheerleading!” When Phoebe reminded her that their mother had been kidnapped, Prudence said, “Oh Phoebe, Mom wasn’t kidnapped.” She stopped jumping and looked around the kitchen. “So what are we supposed to have for dinner?”
Phoebe rummaged around in the cupboards. Prudence opened the freezer compartment and said, “Look at this.” For a terrible moment, I thought she had found some chopped-up body parts in there. Maybe, just maybe, Phoebe was right. Maybe a lunatic had done away with her mother. I couldn’t look. I could hear Prudence moving things in the freezer. At least she wasn’t screaming.
There were no body parts in the freezer. Instead, stacked neatly, were plastic containers, each with a note attached. “Broc-Len Cas, 350, 1 hr,” Prudence read, and “Mac Che, 325, 45 min,” on and on and on.
“What’s Broc-Len Cas?” I said.
Phoebe pried open the lid. Inside was a green and yellow hardened mass. “Broccoli and lentil casserole,” she said.
When their father came home and was surprised to see dinner on the table, Prudence showed him the freezer contents. “Hm,” he said. At dinner, we all ate quietly.
“I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything—from Mom?” Prudence asked her father.
“Not yet,” he said.
“I think we should call the police,” Phoebe said.
“Phoebe.”
“I’m serious. I found some suspicious spots.” Phoebe pointed toward two adhesive-taped areas beneath the dining room table.
“What’s that tape doing down there?” he asked.
Phoebe explained about the potential blood spots.
“Blood?” Prudence said. She stopped eating.
Phoebe pulled out the envelope and emptied the hair strands on the table. “Strange hairs,” Phoebe explained.
Prudence said, “Uck.”
Mr. Winterbottom tapped his fork against his knife. Then he stood up, took Phoebe’s arm, and said, “Follow me.” He went to the refrigerator, opened the freezer compartment, and indicated the plastic containers. “If your mother had been kidnapped by a lunatic, would she have had time to prepare all these meals? Would she have been able to say, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Lunatic, while I prepare ten or twenty meals for my family to eat while I am kidnapped?’”
“You don’t care,” Phoebe said. “Nobody cares. Everyone has his own idiot agenda.”
I left shortly after dinner. Mr. Winterbottom was in his study, phoning his wife’s friends to see if they had any idea of where she might have gone.
“At least,” Phoebe said to me, “he’s doing something, but I still think we should call the police.”
As I left Phoebe’s, the dead-leaf crackly voice of Margaret Cadaver called to me from her house next door. “Sal? Do you want to come in? Your father’s here—we’re having dessert. Join us.”
My father appeared behind her. “Come on, Sal,” he said. “Don’t be a goose.”
“I am not a goose,” I said. “I already had dessert, and I’m going home to work on my English report.”
My father turned to Margaret. “I’d better go with her. Sorry—”
Margaret didn’t say anything. She just stood there as my father retrieved his jacket and joined me. I knew it was mean, but I felt as if I had won a little victory over Margaret Cadaver.
On the way home, when Dad asked if Phoebe’s mother had come back yet, I said, “No. Phoebe thinks a lunatic has carried her off.”
“A lunatic? Isn’t that a bit farfetched?”
“That’s what I thought at first, but you never know, do you? I mean it could happen. There could actually be a lunatic who—”
“Sal.”
I was going to explain about the nervous young man and the mysterious messages, but my father would call me a goose. Instead, I said, “How do you know that someone—not exactly a lunatic, but just someone—didn’t make Mom go to Idaho? Maybe it was blackmail—”
“Sal. Your mother went because she wanted to go.”
“We should have stopped her.”
“A person isn’t a bird. You can’t cage a person.”
“She shouldn’t have gone. If she hadn’t gone—”
“Sal, I’m sure she intended to come back.” We had reached our house, but we didn’t go in. We sat on the porch steps. Dad said, “You can’t predict—a person can’t foresee—you never know—”
He looked away, and I felt miserable right along with him. I apologized for being ornery and for upsetting him. He put his arm around me and we sat there together on the porch, two people being completely pitiful and lost.
THE BADLANDS
Gramps said, “How’s your snake leg, gooseberry?” He was worried about Gram, but less about her leg than her raspy breathing. “We’ll stop in the Badlands, okay?” Gram merely nodded.
The closer we got to the Badlands, the more wicked were the whispers in the air: Slow down, slow, slow, slow. “Maybe we shouldn’t go to the Badlands,” I suggested.
“What? Not go? Of course we should go,” Gramps said. “We’re almost there. It’s a national treasure.”
My mother must have traveled on this road. What was she thinking about when she saw that sign? Or that one? When she reached this spot in the road?
My mother did not drive. She was terrified of cars. “I don’t like all that speed,” she said. “I like to be in control of where I’m going and how fast I’m going.” When she said she was going all the way to Lewiston, Idaho, on a bus, my father and I were astonished.
I could not imagine why she had chosen Idaho. I thought perhaps she had opened an atlas and pointed a finger at any old spot, but later I learned that she had a cousin in Lewiston, Idaho. “I haven’t seen her for fifteen years,” my mother said, “and that’s good because she’ll tell me what I’m really like.”
“I could tell you that, Sugar,” my father said.
“No, I mean before I was a wife and a mother. I mean underneath, where I am Chanhassen.”
After driving for so long through the flat South Dakota prairie, it was a shock to come upon the Badlands. It was as if someone had ironed out all the rest of South Dakota and smooshed all the hills and valleys and rocks into this spot. Right smack in the middle of flat plains were jagged peaks and steep gorges. Above was the high blue sky and below were the pink and purple and black rocks. You can stand right on the edge of the gorges and see down, down into the most treacherous ravines, lined with sharp, rough outcroppings. You expect to see human skeletons dangling here and there.
Gram tried to say, “Huzza, huzza,” but she could not breathe well. “Huz—huz—” she rasped. Gramps placed a blanket on the ground so that she could sit and look.
My mother sent two postcards from the Badlands. One of them said, “Salamanca is my left arm. I miss my left arm.”
I told Gram and Gramps a story that my mother had told me about the high sky, which looked higher here than anywhere else I had been. Long ago, the sky was so low that you might bump your head on it if you were not careful, and so low that people sometimes disappeared right up into it. People got a little fed up with this, so they made long poles, and one day they all raised their poles and pushed. They pushed the sky as high as they could.
“And lookee there,” Gramps said. “They pushed so good, the sky stayed put.”
While I was telling this story, a pregnant woman stood nearby, dabbing at her face with a tissue. “That woman looks world-weary,” Gramps said. He asked her if she would like to rest on our blanket.
“I’ll go look around,” I said. Pregnant women frightened me.
When my mother first told me she was pregnant, she added, “At last! We really are going to fill this house up with children.” At first I didn’t like the idea. What was wrong with having just me? My mother, father, and I were our own little unit.
As the baby grew inside her, my mother let me listen to its heartbeat and feel it kicking against her, and I started looking forward to seeing this baby. I hoped it would be a girl, and I would have a sister. Together, my father, my mother, and I decorated the nursery. We painted it sparkling white and hung yellow curtains. My father stripped an old dresser and repainted it. People gave us the tiniest baby clothes. We washed and folded each shirt, each jumpsuit, each sleeper. We bought fresh new cloth diapers because my mother liked to see diapers hanging on the line outside.
The one thing we could not do was settle on a name. Nothing seemed quite right. Nothing was perfect enough for this baby. My father seemed more worried about this than my mother. “Something will come to us,” my mother said. “The perfect name will arrive in the air one day.”
Three weeks before the baby was due, I was out in the woods beyond the farthest field. My father was in town on errands; my mother was scrubbing the floors. She said that scrubbing the floors made her back feel better. My father didn’t like her to do this, but she insisted. My mother was not a fragile, sickly woman. It was normal for her to do this sort of thing.
In the woods, I climbed an oak, singing my mother’s song: Oh, don’t fall in love with a sailor boy, a sailor boy, a sailor boy—I climbed higher and higher. Don’t fall in love with a sailor boy—
Then the branch I stepped on snapped, and I grabbed out at another, but it was dead and came away in my hands. I fell down, down, as if I were in slow motion. I saw leaves. I knew I was falling.
When I came to, I was on the ground with my face pressed into the dirt. My right leg was twisted beneath me and when I tried to move, it felt as if sharp needles were shooting all up and down my leg. I tried to drag myself across the ground, but the needles shot up to my brain and made everything black. There was a walloping buzzing in my head.
I must have passed out again, because the next time I opened my eyes, the woods were darker and the air was cooler. I heard my mother calling. Her voice was distant and faint, coming, I thought, from near the barn. I answered, but my voice was caught in my chest.
My mother found me and carried me back through the woods, across the fields, and down the long hill to the house. She called my grandparents to come take us to the hospital. It took forever just to get a cast, and by the time we got home we were all exhausted. My father felt awful that he had been away and fussed over both of us constantly.
The baby came that night. I heard my father telephoning the doctor. “She won’t make it,” he said. “It’s happening now, right now.”
On my new crutches, I tottered down the hall. My mother was sunk into the pillow, sweating and groaning. “Something’s wrong,” she said to my father. She saw me standing there and said, “You shouldn’t watch. I don’t think I’m very good at this.”
In the hallway outside her room, I lowered myself to the floor. The doctor came. My mother screamed just once, one long, mournful wail, and then it was quiet.
When the doctor carried the baby out of the room, I asked to see it. It had a pale, bluish tinge and there were marks on its neck where the umbilical chord had strangled it. “It might have been dead for hours,” the doctor told my father. “I just can’t say exactly.”
“Was it a boy or a girl?” I asked.
The doctor whispered his answer, “A girl.”
I asked if I could touch her. She was still a little warm from being inside my mother. She looked so sweet and peaceful, all curled up, and I wanted to hold her, but the doctor said that was not a good idea. I thought maybe if I held her she would wake up.
My father looked shaken, but he didn’t seem concerned about the baby anymore. He kept going in and touching my mother. He said to me, “It wasn’t your fault, Sal—it wasn’t because she carried you. You mustn’t think that.”
I didn’t believe him. I hobbled into my mother’s room and crawled up on the bed beside her. She was staring at the ceiling.
“Let me hold it,” she said.
“Hold what?”
“The baby,” she said. Her voice was odd and silly.
My father came in and she asked him for the baby. He leaned down and said, “I wish—I wish—”
“The baby,” she said.
“It didn’t make it,” he said.
“I’ll hold the baby,” she said.
“It didn’t make it,” he repeated.
“It can’t be dead,” she said in that same singsong voice. “It was alive just a minute ago.”
I slept beside her until I heard her calling my father. When he turned on the light, I saw the blood spread out all across the bed. It had soaked the sheets and the blanket; it had soaked into the white plaster of my cast.
An ambulance came and took her and my father away. Gram and Gramps came to stay with me. Gram took all the sheets and boiled them. She scrubbed the blood from my cast as best she could, but a dark pink stain remained.
My father came home from the hospital briefly the next day. “We should name the baby anyway,” he said. “Do you have any suggestions?”
The name came to me from the air. “Tulip,” I said.
My father smiled. “Your mother will like that. We’ll bury the baby in the little cemetery near the aspen grove—where the tulips come up every spring.”
My mother had two operations in the next two days. She wouldn’t stop bleeding. Later, my mother said, “They took out all my equipment.” She would not have any more babies.
?
I sat on the edge of a gorge in the Badlands, looking back at Gram and Gramps and the pregnant woman on the blanket. I pretended that it was my mother sitting there and she would still have the baby and everything would be the way it was supposed to be. And then I tried to imagine my mother sitting here on her trip out to Lewiston, Idaho. Did all the people on the bus get out and walk around with her or did she sit by herself, like I was doing? Did she sit here in this spot and did she see that pink spire? Was she thinking about me?
I picked up a flat stone and sailed it across the gorge where it hit the far wall and plummeted down, down, careening off the jagged outcroppings. My mother once told me the Blackfoot story of Napi, the Old Man who created men and women. To decide if these new people should live forever or die, Napi selected a stone. “If the stone floats,” he said, “you will live forever. If it sinks, you will die.” Napi dropped the stone into the water. It sank. People die.
“Why did Napi use a stone?” I asked. “Why not a leaf?”
My mother shrugged. “If you had been there, you could have made the rock float,” she said. She was referring to my habit of skipping stones across the water.
I picked up another rock and sailed it across the gorge, and this one, too, hit the opposite wall and fell down and down and down. It was not a river. It was a hole. What did I expect?