Zebra Forest (10 page)

After a while, Andrew Snow broke the silence again.

“Because I notice you don’t have a TV,” he said, as if I’d been in a conversation with him, as if the room weren’t dead silent unless he talked.

“So?” I said, not knowing what he wanted, really.

“So I guess you read, then,” he said. “And play outside?”

Andrew Snow was, I was beginning to see, as peculiar as Gran. Did he care that we played outside? I wondered suddenly if he wasn’t bored, too, maybe so bored he’d open the door and let us out. For some reason, I wanted suddenly to tell him about the Zebra, how in early spring, new oak leaves hung like tassels from the edge of each branch, so bright that when Rew had seen them once at dawn, he’d sworn they could glow in the dark. But then I thought better of it. It wasn’t his business, anyway. That’s what Rew would say.

When I didn’t answer, he shifted his attention to Rew.

“I read
Treasure Island
when I was a kid,” he said. “It was one of my favorites. Your gran got it for me.”

Rew stiffened.

I thought I might not have heard him right. And it must have been that I had such a habit of talking it over with Rew that before I could stop myself, I asked, “What part did you like best?”

Andrew Snow looked over at me, and he seemed almost happy, maybe because I didn’t ignore him. He said, “I like all the parts. The end, of course. Some people say it starts kind of slow, but I never thought so. I always liked that beginning, at the Admiral Benbow.”

I wasn’t about to tell him I didn’t know what he was talking about. And when I sneaked a glance at Rew, I saw him holding himself as still as a statue. Then he saw me looking at him, and without a word, he went upstairs.

S
ometimes in those early days with Andrew Snow, I’d sit on the couch, trying to imagine the Americans in Iran, wondering what they spent all those hours doing. Did they crouch on the floor in moldy cells, scratching out Morse-code messages to each other? Did they get bread and water through a rusty slot in the wall? Even hostages, I figured, had to have something to keep them busy.

I tried to interest Rew in the subject, but he only frowned and shook his head. He’d settled into his own kind of routine, spending part of each day staring out his bedroom window at the drive or ticking off the days it would take for someone to come.

“What about that man who tried to sell us a vacuum that time?” he asked me.

“He hasn’t been back since Gran said we prosecute trespassers,” I said.

Rew sighed. “Well, Adele Parks might show up.”

“If she’s not on vacation yet,” I said, getting uneasy.

He gritted his teeth. “It doesn’t matter. The police will catch him. Just wait until they see that letter.”

The thought satisfied him for a full day, but by the end of the first week, he’d taken to parking himself on the stairs and glaring at Andrew Snow, as if he could will the entire Sunshine police force up the road, guns drawn.

“What’s taking so long?” he asked me the afternoon of the eighth day. “They should be here by now.”

I could hear the desperation in his voice, and my stomach went liquidy, but I just shrugged, trying to find excuses.

“Maybe the mail’s slow,” I said. “Or maybe they thought it was a joke and ignored it.”

“They wouldn’t do that,” he said with heat in his voice. “They’ll come.”

And all the time, that letter sat hidden in my dresser upstairs, where I’d stuffed it after coming home. It made me sick to think of.

If things had been different, I might have sought out Gran, to see if she was in a talking mood. But Gran came down now only at night, and she never spoke. Sometimes she’d give me a little smile or brush my cheek with her hand when she passed. It was good to feel her there. But she’d never stay if I tried to say anything, and if Andrew Snow started up, she’d put her hands over her ears and rock or just turn and walk upstairs as if she hadn’t heard a thing.

Of all of us, the one who’d settled into the clearest pattern was Andrew Snow. Besides trying to talk to Gran and sitting quiet in his chair by the door, he’d begun to take an interest in our kitchen. Reading in the paper that only a handful of men had been caught seemed to give him energy, and after that first investigation of our cabinets, he’d turned the whole room into a project. He cleared the old cans and empty jars from the counter, lugging them down to the cellar in a big bag. Then he found the pots we’d buried under old papers and garbage in the broom closet.

With nothing better to do, I watched him at it. Besides, though he had threatened us and though he held us in the house, I was interested in Andrew Snow. I couldn’t help but be.

He wasn’t much like Rew really. True, he had the red hair and the light skin. And those big, round eyes so like my brother’s. But he had barely any freckles, and his eyes were brown, like mine.

After a few days with us, he’d found clothes for himself in a pile Gran had kept in the closet, or maybe in the large paper bags down in our smelly basement. When he came up, clean, in them for the first time, I was startled at how much he looked like a regular man; like anyone.

Sometimes after that, I’d try to imagine him in one of the stories I’d told Rew. Once or twice I could almost do it, but then Andrew Snow would look my way or Rew would shout at him, and it would disappear. And I would think how I hated Andrew Snow, the angry man.

Still, after a while, I found a few things I liked about him, even though I didn’t exactly want to. For one, I liked the way he talked.

When he was done threatening us and just talked of regular things — like what we’d have for supper — Andrew Snow’s voice had a steadiness to it. It didn’t sound like a voice that kept secrets. So I wasn’t so surprised when on day eight, Andrew Snow told a story. It was about my mother.

“You look like her” was how he began it. He’d been watching me flip through one of our old magazines, plenty of which could be found under our couch. I was peering at pictures of Fairfield County, where, according to
Life,
smart New Yorkers had their summer homes.

I looked up, startled. “Like who?” I asked.

“Like your mother,” he said. “Just like her. I should have realized it when I saw you first, but I never knew her that young.”

This statement fascinated me, and I put aside the certain knowledge that Rew would brand me a traitor for engaging in communication with the enemy.

“I do?” I said. “Wasn’t she pretty?”

He gave me a strange look. “She was,” he said. “Very pretty. That’s the first thing everyone said about her.”

All of a sudden, my head started buzzing again. I tried, but failed, to fix on the image of a pretty woman with brown hair like mine. Despite my better judgment, and knowing as I said it that I was breaking Gran’s rules, I asked:

“What was her name?”

It was his turn to look startled.

“You don’t know her name?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“It was Amanda,” he said. “Amanda White. We used to joke about the fact that she switched her name from White to Snow.”

I sat very still, letting this news settle. My mother’s name was Amanda. She was pretty. She laughed at jokes.

From nowhere, a hot wave of anger washed through me. “She didn’t,” I said.

Andrew Snow looked puzzled. “Didn’t what?” he asked me.

And I was confused again. Didn’t women who laughed at jokes leave their babies? Is that what I thought? I knew they did. They probably laughed lots of times. But it wasn’t a nice-sounding laugh, like he made it seem. It was an ugly laugh. Too loud. Unmannerly, as Gran would say.

Andrew Snow was watching me. I glared at him. “She left us, you know. She said we were all your idea.”

Something changed in Andrew Snow’s face then. His lips pressed together and made a hard little line, and he blinked his eyes fast, those round eyes that were too like Rew’s.

“She was high-spirited,” he said. “Funny and smart, but young. Too young, maybe, to have responsibilities. It’s true, I was the one who wanted kids.” He seemed about to say something else but stopped there. I looked at him, waiting. Angry as I was, I wanted to hear more about Amanda White, who was young and funny and didn’t want me.

But Andrew Snow stopped talking then. Stories about my family always seem to be short. I looked down into my lap and noticed I was crushing the picture of one of those pretty summer homes in Fairfield County.

A
ndrew Snow started in on Gran again that night. He marched upstairs, rattled her doorknob, and started talking.

“You can’t stay in there forever,” he said. “You’re going to have to answer me sometime.”

I came up behind him. “You don’t know Gran,” I said. “She’ll stay in there for as long as she wants. Just leave her alone. Can’t you?”

He looked at me, a sorry kind of a look, but then he rapped sharply on Gran’s door. “Just tell me the reason,” he said. “I just need to know the reason. Didn’t you think I’d ever come home? Is that it?”

Rew had been in his room across the hall with his door closed. He came out when he heard Andrew Snow.

“You’ve made her crazy,” he said in a strange, frozen voice. “She hates you. She wasn’t ever this bad before.”

Andrew Snow said nothing. But later, he found me in the kitchen, where I was trying to wipe off a sticky part of the counter so I could make myself a sandwich with the last of the bread and some chunky peanut butter.

“We’re going to need another supply run soon,” he said, looking into the cabinets. It made me queasy to think of, with that letter waiting upstairs. But I didn’t say anything.

For a minute, I thought he was wondering why I didn’t, but then he bit his lip and asked me a question I didn’t expect.

“Your gran,” he said. “What’s she like? Usually?”

I liked the word he used, so I said, “She’s better than this,
usually.
”

He seemed to think he needed to explain something to me as he looked round the kitchen. “I didn’t know this was how you lived,” he said. “I knew you were with her, but — I didn’t know she’d gotten this way after my dad died.”

It took me aback to think of him having a dad. And, for that matter, of Gran having a husband. She never spoke of him, but then, most of her stories about herself stopped when she was ten years old, and other than that, she talked about no one but the people in
Life
magazine, and me and Rew.

“She’s not this bad always,” I said again, feeling the need to defend her. “Lots of times — mostly — Gran is just a little bit funny. But she cooks for us and stuff, and we’re not hungry.”

Usually,
I said to myself. Besides, when she went into her bad times, I was big enough to shop and cook.

But Andrew Snow was looking round the kitchen again. “In prison,” he said — so matter-of-factly he might have said “at work” or “at the grocery store”—“I work in the kitchen.”

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“I mean that’s my job,” he said. And he sounded almost like he might laugh. “Over there. You didn’t think we sat around in tiny cells all day, did you?”

Actually, that’s exactly what I had thought, but I decided not to say it. I just looked at him. I was thinking that I’d always wondered what job he had. And all the time I’d imagined him flying planes or making secret treaties, he was just past the Zebra Forest, working in the kitchen.

It made me wonder for a second if my mother, Amanda White, was out somewhere walking around this very minute. Maybe in a store, shopping, or at the movies, carrying that brown purse of hers. The thought made me grit my teeth.

“It’s a good thing to keep kitchens clean and in order,” Andrew Snow was saying. “I learned that. It makes things easier. And you don’t get sick as often.”

“We don’t get sick,” I protested.

“Well, that’s good,” he said.

Andrew Snow was full of surprises. When he wasn’t threatening us, he was worried we might get sick eating off dirty plates.

“You could always clean it, if you care that much,” I said.

And Andrew Snow surprised me again. “I guess I will,” he said. And he found a towel and got started.

If I had been Rew, the minute our father turned his back to scrub the sink, maybe I’d have knocked him on the head with the nearest frying pan. But there was something nice about watching him work there, as if he planned to make us a meal and worried that we ate in an unhygienic environment, like Adele Parks did. And actually, once Rew did wake up, into the second hour of that four-hour cleanup, he didn’t run anywhere. He just stood in the kitchen doorway next to me, watching. Andrew Snow noticed him, too, but he didn’t say anything. He just kept on working.