Zebra Forest (12 page)

When Andrew Snow saw me looking, he jumped up and backed away from the window, fast.

“Who’s that?” he wanted to know.

“That’s Adele Parks, a lady who visits us once in a while,” I said. “To see if we’re okay. She’s not coming here for you.”

“Who talks to her, usually?”

“I do.”

“And your brother?”

“Sometimes,” I said. “Not always. Not a lot.”

Before Rew could do anything, Andrew Snow grabbed him round the shoulders and put a hand over his mouth.

“Go talk to her, then,” he said, handing me the key and nodding toward the kitchen door. “Outside.”

I looked from Andrew Snow to Rew, whose eyes were more outraged than afraid. I think we knew by then that Andrew Snow wasn’t going to hurt anybody.

“What’re you going to do to him?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “But he’ll yell if I let him go. You just go talk to her till she goes away.”

I knew Rew would have told if he were me. Maybe if she’d come a few days earlier, I would have. But not anymore.

I went outside to meet her.

“Hello, Annie,” she said. “How’s summer treating you?”

I smiled nice and wide.

“Wonderful,” I said. “It’s great. You know I like vacation.”

“Anything fun doing? Reading anything? Did you get any summer work to do?”

I shrugged. “I don’t remember. Probably not. But I’m reading lots, you know. I just read
Robinson Crusoe.
That was interesting.” That was a lie. I’d read
Robinson Crusoe
the year before.

“There’s a summer reading program at the library in town,” she said. “Maybe you’ll come out to it.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Your grandmother around?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“And Rew?”

“Out back,” I said, jerking my head in the direction of the forest. “Building a tree house.”

In books I’ve read, kids always build tree houses. This is considered a good way to spend your time, and I thought Adele Parks would approve. She did.

“That’s good,” she said. “You tell your grandmother I stopped by, won’t you?”

I nodded. “I’ll walk you to your car,” I said.

Adele Parks and I had an unwritten pact. She knew Gran wasn’t maybe the fittest parent figure around, but she’d once told me, when I’d gotten a bit too elaborate in my lies to protect her, that she wasn’t going to take us away from her anyway.

“You can trust me, Annie,” she’d said then. “I’m not going to separate you from your grandmother. That wouldn’t be good for anyone. Just promise me that if anything was
really
wrong, you’d tell me.”

I’d always thought that was a decent promise to make, and one I could keep. But it turned out to be like a lot of my other promises: impossible. So I broke our pact and walked her back to the car, smiling and lying all the time.

W
hen I got back to the house, Andrew Snow was relieved, but Rew was furious. He couldn’t think of enough names to call me, and when he ran out of them, he rushed upstairs to his room and slammed the door.

I went upstairs to try and talk to him. If he’d have thought about it, he’d probably have locked me out, but Rew was too mad to think just then. I peeked into his room. He was lying on the bed, staring red-eyed at the ceiling.

“Don’t hate me,” I said. “Adele Parks isn’t the right one to tell. She’d just think about Gran and how bad she’s doing, don’t you see?”

Rew rolled over to look at me. “That’s not why you didn’t tell,” he said. “You don’t want them to take him away — that’s why.”

Then he sat up, and he looked at me hard, thinking. I got scared then. I should have left the room, but I wasn’t fast enough.

“Where’s the letter?” he asked me.

I tried to say I’d sent it. I wanted to blame it on the post office, but I was tired of lying to Rew. I hated it. So I didn’t answer him.

He looked at me, and I saw his face going red and white as his eyes widened.

“You said you sent it,” he whispered.

I looked away from him then. But he knew.

“I hate you, Annie,” he said, and he wasn’t shouting it, but he meant it — I could tell. “I
hate
you! Get out of my room. Go be with Andrew Snow if you love him so much.”

Rew turned his back on me then, just as he had with Andrew Snow. I stood there, blinking. Crying wouldn’t help me, I knew that. He wouldn’t care one bit if I cried now. Maybe he wouldn’t have cared right then if I’d jumped out the window. He might even have been happy.

I looked down at the floor, anywhere to take my eyes off Rew’s back. And there, beside his bed, I caught sight of
Treasure Island.
I leaned down to pick it up. The book fell apart in my hand. He’d torn it into three pieces.

I took it with me when I went downstairs. Now I really didn’t have anyone to talk to but Andrew Snow. I came down carrying that broken book, my throat so tight I could barely breathe, and sat down at the kitchen table.

Andrew Snow was busy at the stove when I came in. He glanced over at me. “You two okay?” he asked.

I stared at him. Did he think Rew had forgiven me just because he couldn’t hear the yelling downstairs? Did he think it was no big deal, what I’d just done?

Okay.
The word made my blood boil.

“No,” I said, my voice low. “No, we’re not
okay.
”

He turned to look at me then, holding the spoon so it would drip over the pot of soup he was making.

“Annie,” he said. “Give him a little time. He’ll get over it.”

He talked like he knew Rew. Like a real father would. But he didn’t know anything about him. Not about either of us. I wanted to throw something at him, but all I had was Rew’s broken book.

“What do
you
know?” I said. “You don’t know anything about it! You don’t know the first thing about Rew. Or don’t you remember that you haven’t ever been around here before?”

He frowned. “That’s not what I meant,” he said.

Once I’d gotten started, I couldn’t seem to stop. I practically spat the words back at him. “You do a lot of things you don’t mean,” I said. “Like coming here. You didn’t mean that, either, but you did it, and you ruined everything! She was okay before you came! She was good!”

He flinched at that, and I could see his hand tighten on the spoon.

“Good?” he said, his voice low. He waved a hand to indicate the kitchen. “This was good?”

I glared at him. “It was
okay,
” I said. “And you came and messed it all up. That’s what you
do,
isn’t it? Mess things up? Is that what you did when I was little? Is that why my mother ran away?”

I saw the spoon drop into the pot, and in the same instant he was moving toward me, his face suddenly white. I flinched, pulling
Treasure Island
up to shield myself. But he didn’t hit me. He just stood there, an inch or so away, chest heaving, towering over me.

Slowly, I looked up into his face. He was standing there, lips pressed together, staring down at me. And the expression on his face confused me, because as I watched the color creep back into his cheeks, he looked more hurt than angry.

I pushed my chair back cautiously, and a piece of
Treasure Island
fell onto the floor between us. He looked down at it, then leaned over and picked it up.

For what seemed like a long time, he stared at the broken piece in his hand. Then he said, “I think I can fix it, if you want me to.”

I wasn’t sure I could get my voice to work just then, so I shrugged, but after a second, I laid the other pieces on the table. He picked them up gingerly.

“All it needs is some good tape,” he said. “There’s some downstairs. But you’re missing the front piece.”

When I finally got the words out, they were no louder than a whisper. “That was never there,” I said. “Those are the pieces we always had.”

Andrew Snow didn’t say anything. But he went downstairs, got the tape, and put Rew’s book back together. While he was doing it, I sat at the table, watching the soup boil in the pot.

A
ll afternoon, silence stopped up the air in the house. Rew hadn’t talked much in general since Andrew Snow came, but it was different knowing he
wouldn’t
talk to me, even if I wanted. By evening, I was ready to scream, just to hear the noise. Instead, I sat down with Andrew Snow for supper.

The soup he’d made was filled with all the rest of the vegetables in the bin. I’d never seen such lumpy soup.

“Why’d you put this in?” I asked him, making a pale, round ball duck and bob in my bowl.

“It’s a turnip,” he said. “They’re good in soup. Sweet.”

I watched Andrew Snow eat. I noticed he ate all the soupy part first and saved the vegetables for the end.

“We don’t usually get turnips,” I said.

“I don’t wonder,” he said. “Mom always hated them. She didn’t like any root vegetables much. I remember she once said she didn’t like eating things that grew with their heads in the dirt. We had a lot of tomatoes, though. My father used to come home, close his eyes, and guess what was for dinner before he came in the kitchen. If he was stumped, he’d say to me, ‘Well, at least I know we’re having tomatoes!’”

I smiled at that. I’d never known my grandpa was a funny man. Maybe that’s why Rew loved jokes so much.

“Your father,” I said when he got up to get me a second bowl. “What did he do?”

“He owned a shoe store,” he said. “A little one, in the city.”

“But he wanted to be a farmer?”

Andrew Snow smiled at that. “Maybe,” he said. “Or a woodsman. Who knows? He certainly loved the country. He took me to the mountains once, when I was nine or ten. Taught me how to find my way in the woods by the direction of the sun, and about the plants there, that sort of thing.”

“Like what?” I asked.

Andrew Snow stirred his soup. “Well,” he said, thinking, “like, there are kinds of mosses that can get totally dried out — they can look dead, even — and then they perk right up with the first rain. He loved that sort of thing. He loved knowledge in general. A big reader, my father.”

“He must have hated the shoe store, then,” I said.

Andrew Snow shook his head. “Oh, no, not at all. He liked people, too. Always reading and learning things and talking to the customers. He knew everything about feet, for example, and shoes. You know there are legends about shoes? He used to tell one about the emperor Vespasian, back in Rome. He said that Vespasian was a general laying siege to the Holy Land, and an old wise man came to talk to him there. While they were talking, Vespasian started putting on his shoes. He got one on, and a herald came in to tell him that back in Rome, the emperor had died, and he was to be the new one. After that, Vespasian couldn’t get on that second shoe. He didn’t know why until the sage told him that good news makes your feet swell. That’s the kind of thing my father loved. Stories like that.”

I studied Andrew Snow, eating his vegetables across the table. He hadn’t shaved since he’d come to us, and a light red stubble had come out on his face, the hint of a beard that would be almost the color of his hair. Behind him, through the window, the Zebra Forest was collecting shadows as it edged toward twilight. It was Gran’s favorite time out there, and I tried to picture her upstairs. Maybe she was watching it now, like she used to. On good summer nights, Gran liked to come out and sit on the old glider behind the house, a prize she’d hauled over from someone’s front yard in town, where they’d put it out for junk.

She’d sit there, rocking and picking at the rust on the seat, watching the darkness soften the edges of the Zebra. That’s what she called it — softening. It was a word I liked. Now I thought of her, upstairs, silent. She was different than I’d imagined, almost as different as the real Andrew Snow. She was a woman whose husband loved people, who sold shoes and talked and read, and who loved trees. She was a woman who made pancakes and loved tomatoes and had a son who went to the woods and learned about moss that could live, even without water.

Andrew Snow was watching me. I saw that when I looked his way again, from the window. He didn’t turn away, and I felt awkward a moment. So I asked, “What did you want to be, before? A woodsman, like your dad?”