Criss Cross (20 page)

A
bus was just pulling away from the curb into traffic as Hector walked past Jim’s Bargain Store, and he held off on breathing until he was out of range of its poisonous fumes.

Other than the bus farts, the air was clear and fresh. It had been washed by an overnight rain, which had also flooded many, many worms out of house and home. They were scattered all over the sidewalks, wondering what happened.

Many had already been stepped on.

They didn’t have to wonder anymore.

Hector avoided stepping on worms if he could help it, though if you weren’t paying attention you could do it without realizing it. He thought you would feel a squish. But maybe you wouldn’t.

He made up a song about the worms as he walked along. Not on purpose; it just happened. It was a country song. And it was a stupid song. He didn’t care. That’s the mood he was in. He was thinking maybe he would specialize in stupid songs. Probably he’d be really good at it.

He made up a verse about being stepped on that was very satisfying. Although he knew that he hadn’t actually been stepped on. He hadn’t been stepped on, but he still felt he had something in common with the worms.

W
hen Mrs. Bruning came home, she seemed small. Maybe it was the house that felt bigger. Debbie and Peter had put away or gotten rid of some of the stuff, and it was more spacious.

But she seemed smaller even within her house-dress, and her skin didn’t fit as snugly as it had before. Her brown eyes were still bright, though, under her thin white dandelion puff of hair.

The Brunings had hired a visiting nurse to come and check on her, and they had signed her up for Meals on Wheels. She would never have signed up for it herself, and she didn’t like walking able-bodied to the door and accepting food someone else had cooked, but it was part of the deal she had made with her children. And it made a change from having cereal for dinner, or canned soup.

She refused to have the housekeeper. She didn’t want some stranger in her house, handling and moving everything. She insisted that, with Debbie’s help, she could manage.

Debbie looked around to see if any of the neighbors were at home before going inside Mrs. Bruning’s. Once, while she thought Mrs. B. was elsewhere in the house, she picked up the phone in the kitchen to make sure there was a dial tone. Mrs. Bruning saw her listening, then carefully lowering the receiver onto the hook.

“I don’t blame you,” she said. “I’d check up on me, too.”

Mrs. Bruning also noticed that Debbie was going into the living room a lot. When she headed in there again, Mrs. B. waited a minute, then tiptoed after her. She wasn’t light on her feet, but she knew where the creaky spots were.

Standing in the shadowy hallway, she saw that Debbie was just dusting. Dusting the pictures on the mantelpiece.

Disappointed, she was about to sneak away again when Debbie did something that surprised her. Then didn’t surprise her. Debbie carried one of the framed pictures to a chair and sat down and looked at it. Louise Bruning couldn’t see the picture from where she was, but she knew by its size and shape and where it had been sitting that it was a photograph, a couple of years old, of her grandson Peter.

Just for the fun of seeing Debbie jump, she said softly, “I have a newer one. I’ll give it to you.”

Debbie’s reaction was satisfying. She looked up as if she had been caught stealing the silverware. Then she looked around for her dust rag, which she had left on the mantel. She jumped up and grabbed it and started dusting again.

“Come out to the kitchen,” said Mrs. Bruning. “I think that’s where I have it, in a drawer in there.”

D
ebbie sat cross-legged on her bed, leaning over a photo album. Just beyond the album were the two boxes from the closet.

The photograph of Peter that Mrs. Bruning had given her was propped up against the hatbox in such a way that someone opening the curtain and looking in her room wouldn’t see it. The photo album from her mother’s college years was opened to several photos of Helen Brandt and her friends posed on skis, laughing, on a sunny, snowy hillside, in swimsuits. All of them wore red lipstick and had wavy hair. They looked glamorous, in an old-fashioned way.

They didn’t look like they would ever feel awkward, would ever not know what to say, to a boy or to anyone else.

But photo albums aren’t a good place to look if you’re wondering about things like that.

Debbie wondered if it was true that there was only one person in the world for every person, and if she had already met him, and she either had to find a way to be around him again someday or always be alone. Romance-wise. She didn’t quite believe this. What seemed more likely was that there were at least five or six people scattered around the globe who you could bump into and, wham, it would be the right thing. The odds probably varied from person to person. For Chrisanne there were probably fifty or sixty, all in the continental U.S. Maybe even within the tristate area. Debbie’s handful were somewhere in the Himalayas, or the steppes of Russia, or passing her by in a crowd, unsuspecting.

So that if she thought she might have found one of them, she shouldn’t just give up. Should she?

Debbie heard footsteps, and she quickly stuffed the picture of Peter down between her bed and the wall. The curtain moved, and her mother’s head appeared.

“You have a letter,” she said. “From California.”

Debbie’s heart sprang up and bounded across the room in one jump. The rest of her sat in simulated calmness on her bed. She put an expression of surprised curiosity on her face and said, “I do?”

Her mother handed her the letter and leaned on the doorway, waiting to see what it said. She thought it might be a thank-you note, though it felt thicker.

Debbie opened the envelope and pulled out a letter and a photo. She couldn’t help smiling a little; it was the same picture she already had.

She explained to her mother that the letter was from Mrs. Bruning’s grandson. The one who had been there the day Mrs. Bruning went to the hospital, the one she had worked with on Mrs. Bruning’s house for those few days. She wanted to let her mother know that he was more than that to her, a lot more, so she said offhandedly, “He was really nice. He was fun to be with.”

Her mother didn’t hear the hidden message, which was, It was amazing and perfect to be with him and now my life seems dull and empty.

Debbie showed her the photo, thinking, this will explain everything; now she will understand. It was a school picture of a boy with chin-length blond hair, parted down the middle and tucked behind his ears. He wore wire-rimmed glasses, a T-shirt, a denim jacket.

So often in books, or in movies, one character looks at another character and understands in a precise way what that person is feeling. So often in real life, one person wants to be understood, but obscures her feelings with completely unrelated words and facial expressions, while the other person is trying to remember whether she did or didn’t turn off the burner under the hard-boiled eggs.

Helen did sense something, an undercurrent. She thought that Debbie probably had a crush on this boy. But California was pretty far away, and she couldn’t have gotten to know him very well in such a short time. Maybe they would exchange a few letters.

“He looks very nice,” she said. “He’s a cute boy.”

“He is nice,” said Debbie.

It was as close as she could come to saying, “I need to go to California. Can I?”

But it wasn’t very close, not close enough. Her mother had no way of knowing that this would have been a good time to tell her daughter that she had once known a boy who went away. A boy who had made a game of finding little figures of dogs, and giving them to her. They might have talked then about how that felt, and what you did next. But their secrets inadvertently sidestepped each other, unaware, like blindfolded elephants crossing the tiny room.

was, “Maybe I could go work for Mrs. Bruning, too.”

W
alking around Seldem with a letter in your pocket was different than walking around Seldem with no letter. Debbie stopped to look at a pile of dirt with pipes coming out of it. She didn’t know what it was there for, but it looked like at any moment the pipes could organize themselves into the legs of a giant mechanical tarantula and rise up from the dirt.

The old nun at Our Lady of Victory was watering the roses that grew outside the convent, with a hose. Or rather, she was standing near the roses, playing with the hose. She squeezed the trigger rhythmically, releasing temporary nebulas of droplets that rose together, catching the sunlight in a hundred synchronized sparkles, then fell together and landed on nothing in particular. She seemed to be having a good time.

A little farther on Debbie leaned on an overgrown chain-link fence. A flash of red had caught her eye, and she wanted to see what it was. It was an immense woodpecker, bigger than her forearm, that had flown into a dappled grove of honey locusts. After a minute he flew off. Debbie saw that a tiny creek flowed through the grove and, on an impulse, fished a dime from her pocket, tossed it in, and made a wish. The splash startled a small, furry animal she hadn’t noticed, and it scurried into the shadows.

Seldem felt like someone had plugged it in. Like someone you’ve always known who has suddenly revealed hidden depths. Not deep dark depths. Just depths. Texture.

But when she returned home, she felt ordinary again. Maybe even less than ordinary. She felt for the letter in her back pocket. It was there, but it might as well have been a grocery list. It wasn’t working anymore. Maybe she had used it up.

All evening she felt ordinary. She sat on the couch in the basement feeling ordinary. She went upstairs to take a shower, and when she had undressed, she looked in the mirror. Ordinary, ordinary, less than ordinary. She had taken her glasses off, so she was squinting a little. It made her look mildly fierce. Her hair, usually pulled back, fell to her shoulders in an unbrushed mass, curling and frizzing in the humid air. She frowned at her squinting, frizzing, ordinary reflection. Why did she think something good could happen to her?

But then something did. Something good and mysterious. It’s hard to explain why, but she started to laugh. She laughed at her fierce naked self, frowning into the mirror. And she liked the girl who was laughing.

It was a small piece of her Buddha self, snapping into place.

I
t wasn’t the first time Dan Persik had seen the man with the missing legs. But it was the first time he had spoken to him. Dan was sitting on a bench waiting for a bus when the guy came vaulting along the sidewalk. Dan, being an athlete, observed his technique and his equipment, the leather encasement held on by industrial strength suspenders and the gloves. His own practiced muscles imagined performing in this same event. The man without legs arrived at Dan’s bench, placed his hands on it, lifted himself up, and turned himself around so he was facing the right way. He obviously had tremendous upper-body strength. Dan admired this, and he respected the guts it took to haul yourself all over town this way.