Zebra Forest (17 page)

I went out to tell him I was making her tomato-and-rice soup and found that Rew had come back down. He was clean and dressed in dry things, but he wasn’t sitting back on the stairs. He’d drawn a chair up to the couch, where he was watching Gran’s silent face, not two feet from Andrew Snow.

I stood looking at them from the kitchen door, and I realized that with all that had happened, there was just one thing I really wanted to know. I wondered, when he found Rew there beside Gran, who Rew had been calling.

G
ran opened her eyes just after dawn. The storm had gone, and outside, the rising sun caught in the lingering drops and sent sparks of light into the front room. Rew had fallen asleep in his chair, his head thrown back like a rag doll, but Andrew Snow still sat by Gran, unmoving.

I hadn’t slept, either, but had settled myself in a nest of towels and quilts on the floor, watching Andrew Snow watch Gran. So I saw when she stirred, groaning softly, and opened her eyes. She looked fuzzily up at Andrew Snow, sitting quiet there, and he gave her a little smile.

“You’re okay,” he said.

Gran’s eyes seemed to focus, and I thought she might try to sit up and run, remembering all that had happened. But instead she smiled back, a little, faint smile.

“Andrew,” she said, and her voice was her own again. And then all of a sudden her eyes filled, and her lip trembled. Her voice dropped to a whisper, so I had to strain to hear it. “I didn’t mean to take it all away,” she said. And then she added something I couldn’t hear.

Andrew Snow put his forehead down into his hand and rested it there for a while. Gran never took her eyes off him. Finally, he lifted his head, and I could see wet around his eyes. But he smiled at her again, anyway.

“Maybe it was better,” he said quietly. “That they got to grow a little without knowing —” But he didn’t finish what he was going to say. Instead, he looked out the window, at the edge of the Zebra. “Dad would have liked this place,” he said. “Lots of sunshine and trees.”

Gran smiled when he said that. A real smile, like before. And Andrew Snow put his hand gently on the quilt and patted her shoulder. He stayed that way for a long time, until she closed her eyes and dropped back to sleep.

After a while, Andrew Snow moved from the chair. The first thing he did was lift Rew and carry him upstairs. Then he came down and went to the kitchen, and soon I smelled pancakes cooking.

The smell must have woken Gran, because she opened her eyes, turned, and saw me there, on the floor. I got up, untangling myself from the quilts, and went to her, taking Andrew Snow’s place.

“Gran?” I asked.

“Hmm?”

“It’s me, Annie.”

“I know it is, beauty. I got hit on the head. Didn’t get my brains knocked out.”

I decided not to mention the phantom she’d become those past few weeks.

“Gran?”

“Yes?”

“You know Andrew Snow?”

Gran turned to look at me full in the face then, wincing a little as she did it. The cut on her head was dry now, but it must have hurt.

I couldn’t read her expression, but she said, “I know him.”

I wanted to ask her a lot of things. And tell her a few, too. But some stories are too well worn to be retold. Some lies have to be let be. And besides, I had missed Gran. So I didn’t start in with all that again. Instead, I said, “He makes good soup.”

And she smiled and said, “Yes, he always did.”

And then she went back to sleep.

T
he house grew quiet again after that. Not just because the rain had stopped hammering the windows and the wind had fallen away, either. The silence came from all of us now. But it wasn’t a bad silence, like before the storm. It was like the Zebra sometimes at midday, when the birds are just tired. Gran was no longer a phantom, but she was worn out. She lay on the couch and let Andrew Snow sit with her and bring her soup and find her the books she began, once again, to read.

As for Andrew Snow, he was in the kitchen or by Gran or sometimes just standing, looking out the back windows at the Zebra.

Then there was Rew. If Gran had come back to us, Rew had gone further away. He walked around without a word, and if I looked at him, he’d look somewhere else. He didn’t sit by me or Gran but perched again on the stairs, hands between his knees, for hours. I saw him watching Andrew Snow.

Another thing. We both went out back again. Our father didn’t tell us we could, but on the second day after the storm, Rew walked past him in the kitchen, opened the door, and went out. Andrew Snow didn’t say a word.

We didn’t go to the Zebra Forest, but after that, we went out behind the house, just to sit and look at it.

A few days after the storm, when Gran got up from the couch on her own for the first time and swayed and had to sit down again, Rew went out back and sat for a long time. Finally, I went to him. After the storm, I’d lost count of my days, and I’d forgotten how long the hostages had been in that embassy in Iran. But I knew that my father had been with us for more than a month.

It wasn’t much time, not enough for me to even grow half an inch, I thought, but when it came to Rew, it struck me that he looked different. Something in his face had set.

“What’re you thinking about?” I asked him, sitting down beside him on the rusty glider. He didn’t look at me when I asked him but swung his legs and kicked at the chipping paint of the glider, and squinted into his knees.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I’m getting tired of ‘nothing,’” I said. “I’ve heard ‘nothing’ for half a week now. You want to be like Gran? Is that it?”

He shrugged, still looking away from me.

“I’m not like Gran,” he said, his voice husky. “I’m what she said all along. I’m like him.”

He dipped his head in the direction of the kitchen.

“Like Andrew Snow?” I said, taken aback. “Like him?”

Rew nodded. He looked down into his palms and swallowed, as if to keep the words back. But at last he said, “I hurt Gran, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t!” I protested.

“I did,” he answered back, fast this time. “I opened the door. I was angry, and I ran out, though I know better. I forgot. That’s how mad I was.”

“You didn’t hurt her,” I said again. “The branch did. The lightning.”

“Yes,” Rew said, and he was himself again, that reasonable, thoughtful kid who always won at chess. “But I opened the door. I knew better.”

“Not then,” I said.

“No,” he agreed. “Not right then.”

He was quiet once more, thinking, and I didn’t interrupt him. It struck me that Rew might be like Andrew Snow, but at least he wasn’t anything like our mother. He didn’t run away from things.

“One thing’s different,” he said after a while.

“What’s that?”

“You don’t go to jail for opening doors,” he said.

I didn’t have an answer for that.

After a long time, Rew got to his feet. He walked out into the yard and kept walking, all the way to the edge of the Zebra Forest, to the first blanched tree. He leaned against it, looking out into the shadows. I didn’t follow him. After a while, he came back toward the house. When we turned to go in together, we saw our father, watching from the back window.

T
wo days later, Andrew Snow announced that he was going back. Gran wasn’t there. He’d told her earlier and she’d disappeared upstairs, behind a barricade of magazines, to think about it, maybe, or to forget it. But he was waiting for us at the table for breakfast late in the morning, and he’d put on his washed prisoner’s uniform and looked pressed and ready to go.

Rew looked at him but didn’t say a word.

“Why?” I asked. “Why not Mexico? Or Canada?”

He shrugged. “I’m done running away,” he said. “If I go back, I’ll be done eventually.”

“But you didn’t mean to do it!” I protested. “You said so yourself! You’ve been there long enough!”

My father shook his head, but he didn’t answer. He looked away from us for a time. Finally, he said, “I didn’t mean to, but the fact is, I did do it. And I’ll pay for it. And then I’ll come back.”

He had a hard time looking at us. He studied the grain of the table and spaces in the kitchen he’d cleaned.

“Five years is a long time,” he said. “Will you . . . will you keep up here?”

I thought he must mean the kitchen. And the rest of the house. “I’ll try,” I said. “Gran likes to hold on to things, you know, but I’ll try.”

“I’d like to hear about it,” he said. “If you decide to visit.”

This hadn’t occurred to me. I looked at Rew, who was also studying the table grain. He made no move to answer. “I’ll visit,” I said. “I promise.”

“I’d like that,” he said. Then he stood. He shook my hand. Rew didn’t look at him, and he stood there a moment longer, waiting. Then he went to the door. At the last minute, Rew looked up.

“Thank you for carrying her back,” he said quietly. “Gran.”

Our father nodded. He looked at us both a minute longer, and then he sighed, opened the door, and was gone. We didn’t move from the table. We didn’t rush to the window to see him walk out across the yard, past the rusty glider, to the Zebra Forest. I don’t know what Rew was thinking, but I knew that I didn’t want to see him disappear between the trees.

Still, after a while we got up. We cleared the breakfast dishes. We washed them. We put them away. And Rew even swept the floor.

W
hen school began again, we both went. And I found that it wasn’t so bad to get up and go each morning. Beth came back from camp, and we had a good English teacher, Miss Penn, who seemed interesting. I wasn’t ready to tell anyone about my summer just yet. So when Miss Penn asked for the traditional end-of-summer essay, I wrote instead about my grandfather, the shoe-store owner who knew all about Vespasian.

I brought that essay home to Gran, and she read it on the couch, leaning over it, with her eyes close to the words. When she was done, she looked up at the stairs like she might run to them. I felt my shoulders pinch tight as I wondered what she’d do. But then she smiled at me, even though her eyes looked like they might cry.

“This is a good story, Annie B.,” she said. “Your grandfather was such a good, good man.” I let her keep my paper, and later I saw her put it in the drawer by her bed. Then we had lunch together and played cards.