Klickitat (17 page)

Mom and Dad looked up and didn't move, didn't say anything at first. I set down my pack on the floor, my jacket.

“Vivian.”

When Dad stood, his chair fell over backward, bouncing with a crack on the floor. He didn't pick it up. It seemed like he wanted to step closer to me but didn't want to scare me away.

“Are you hungry, honey?” Mom said.

“Yes,” I said.

I ate three bowls of chili, sitting between them, and drank two glasses of milk. They watched me eat. They didn't say anything. Mom switched off her pyramid light and they just watched me, careful and tentative like I might suddenly stand up and bolt for the door, disappear again.

I didn't look straight at them, but I liked having their faces there, at the edge of my vision. I could imagine someone watching me, from out in the trees. I liked being in the warm kitchen again, the feeling of the fork in my hand, the sound of the refrigerator. I could see through the doorway, into the living room, where a new television rested on a stand.

“And Audra?” Mom said, her voice soft.

“I'm back,” I said. “I'm really here.”

“Where is she now?”

“It's too late for her,” I said.

“Can't you tell us something?”

Standing up, I wiped my mouth. “She's never coming back.”

“Stay,” Dad said. “You don't have to tell us everything right away. Wait.”

“All I want,” I said, “all I want is to take a shower and then to sleep in my bed.”

TWENTY-THREE

I slept almost until noon in my clean sheets,
and when I woke up I could hear Mom and Dad, downstairs in the kitchen. I couldn't tell what they were saying, but I liked the sound of their voices, mixed with the rain on the rooftop.

I lay there like that, listening, and then I got up and walked across the hall into Audra's room. It was just like the last time I'd seen it, and it still smelled like paint. The blue walls, the empty shelves. I sat down on her bed.

There were footsteps on the stairs, and then Mom stood in the doorway, watching me. I didn't look up, but she came in and sat down on the bed, too. She put her hand on my shoulder for a moment and set it down
on her lap again. There was only the sound of the rain.

After a little while, I could tell that she was crying.

“Are you going to work?” I said.

“No,” she said. “We'll stay home until we're sure you're okay. We'll need to get straight with school and the doctor and everything—”

“School?” I said.

“Not until you're ready,” she said. “Mostly we want to make sure you're all right.”

“I am,” I said. “I think I am. And I don't need the doctor. I'm fine.”

“Just a checkup.”

“I'm not taking the pills anymore,” I said.

“We'll see,” she said.

Around us, the blue walls looked perfectly smooth. The drawers of the desk were closed, and the door of Audra's closet.

“You changed everything in this room,” I said. “All her things.”

Out the window, the tree's wet leaves shone.

“We got your letter,” she said. “You said you were with Audra—”

“That was before,” I said.

“You said you were moving away. Where were you?”

“I can't—” I said. “I can't tell you that, about that, yet.” My fingers were itching, and my hands felt like they were about to start shaking.

“It's all right.” Mom touched me again, then stood up. “It's all right. It is. Are you hungry? Why don't you get dressed, then come down and have something to eat?”

“Sit down,” I said.

“What?”

“Just sit beside me for a little bit,” I said. “Sit with me. We don't have to talk.”

Mom sat down again and I could feel that she was close and smell her perfume, hear her breath. It was tender, and we stayed like that until Dad called up, saying he was making lunch.

When I went downstairs I put my shoes back on and walked outside, into the backyard. The rain had stopped, and I crossed the wet grass. I checked that my bike was still in the garage, and then I walked out to the edge of the yard, under the trees. I looked up into the empty branches where Henry had once hidden, that first night
I met him, when he came for me. I could feel Mom and Dad watching me from the house, their nervousness, even if I couldn't see them in the windows.

It was later on that first day after my return that I was drinking orange juice in the kitchen and heard Dad in the basement. There was the creak of his chair, the switching of switches.

He didn't notice me, at first, coming down the stairs, standing behind him. I pulled over a wooden chair, from next to the washing machine, and sat down next to him. Then he smiled, pulled the headset down, around his neck.

“You shaved your beard,” I said.

“I did.”

“Why?”

“I missed you,” he said. “I really missed you a lot. I was just telling some friends that you came back.” He reached his arm loosely around the back of my chair, then, and I could smell the dusty smell of his wool shirt that I liked, and could see the skin of his head through the tangle of his hair.

“My girl,” he said.

Sounds, words, buzzed in the round black earpieces
around his neck. In the lighted glass windows, the red needles jerked.

“I missed you, too,” I said, and before it got quiet I said, “You have a friend in Iceland?”

“Did I tell you that?”

“Yes. Is that her name?”

“I doubt it.” He laughed, scratched the side of his face. “That's what she calls herself, though, and from her call sign I can tell that's where she is. The numbers tell me.”

“And what else?”

“About her?” he said. “You know, mostly we talk about the weather, or she asks me about you girls. She has two sons—she's very old, and they want to put her in an old folks' home, but she has some kind of a truck, with a radio setup, and she drives around from place to place like that.”

“In a truck, in Iceland?”

“That's what she told me.”

Dad wore those ragged felt boot liners, and sitting close to him it smelled like his wool shirt, and coffee. His dented thermos sat on the desk, his blue mug next to his logbook.

“Whatever happens in our family,” he said, “that's for us to figure out, to try to understand. We'll work it out the best way we can. It hasn't been easy for your mom, for any of us.”

It was quiet, then, and I wondered which one of us would stand up first, climb the stairs to the kitchen.

“How did you meet her?” I said.

“Your mom?” he said. “You know that story.”

“No,” I said, “this other lady. Iceland.”

“Oh, that was a couple of years ago. I was just listening in, on different channels, and I heard her talking about Number Stations, and that was interesting, she sounded interesting.”

“Why?”

“Here.” He pulled the headset from his neck and closed it down to make it smaller before putting it over my head, the black foam around my ears so I heard the sound of the ocean, my blood circling. And then he switched the switch and turned the dial. In the middle of the tiny window, the red needle lifted.

I heard a tone, a beeping like someone tapping the key of an electrical organ as fast as they could, then
someone whispering, then a woman counting in a language I didn't know. Dad reached out, switched the station, turned the dial. In my ears another woman said, “Mike, India, Whiskey, One, Delta, Four, Seven, Delta.” Static crowded around the voice, and she was serious like she was reading the numbers, trying to be sure that she got the numbers right, that she didn't get lost. “I say, Three, Two, Eight, Delta,” and then a buzzing, a machine behind her. The hairs came up on my arms, a chill inside, a kind of feeling that was like seeing something at night and not knowing what it is, or when a dog barks at you and you don't know if it's going to bite or lick your hand. I couldn't tell what it was. Dad turned the dials again, to another number, and then there was the woman again, speaking more quickly, sounding scared: “Nancy, Adam, Susan, Nancy, Adam, Susan.”

Dad watched me, listening. He switched off the radio and helped me take the headset off my ears.

“What was that?” I said.

“Just messages that were sent out.”

“Who sends them?” I said.

“No one knows,” he said. “They're a kind of code,
and they play at the same time every day, or some never stop. Some people think they're for spying, for spies and their secrets.”

“But Iceland understands them,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said. “I don't think so. She just thinks they're beautiful.”

He told me how the sounds and numbers and words stood in for letters, and that only two people had the code to make sense of the message. The sender, and the receiver. He showed me the chart on the wall, all the frequencies where the Number Stations were found. I put the headset back on and listened as he turned the dial. Static, and then a bugle. Buzzers speeding up, music playing too slow or fast or backward, the sound of a gong, and always people counting, men and women and children in different languages, in different orders, circling and circling around. They sent out their message for years and years, hoping that someone would understand them, that they would find the right person.

TWENTY-FOUR

Today I'm going to finish writing this. That
doesn't mean the story is over, or that there aren't other stories. I've written to the end of the blue notebook, then a green one, then red, and now into another blue one. I wanted to show what happened to my sister, and how I got from where I was to where I am. That's what it means to finish this.

The yellow notebook, the words slowed, but they haven't stopped. New words rose up in it, not long after I came home:

One single bolt or screw holds a scissors

together. Animals quickly take notice of

white teeth and the whites of the eyes
.

We can read the animals, and you pick

up on things others don't. Hello, we are

interested in you. Klickitat. Our bodies are

so fluid, they can hardly be called bodies
,

they are made for where we are. The words

and sentences we say still wait in the air;

words find their channels, traveling in

currents like at the bottom of the oceans
,

a channel cut to depths where the signals

can find you. Hello, it's your sister and

I am coming apart as I write you from

beyond. We will tell you the when and

the where, the what to do, but we must be

patient, all of us. We wait, always moving
,

never still, for the time. The time must be

ripe, right—not rife, that is a different

word, a disagreement. A disagreement

changes the air in a room for a time. Every

word means something different to every

person. We think we understand what

someone is saying, but we don't, not really
.

Sometimes we make sense and sometimes

we make no sense. I'm sorry and a current

underwater is a wind in the sky, we can

breathe, but it doesn't hurt. We are your

sister and more than your sister. The words

and sentences we say still wait in the air
,

even after the sound is gone, hoping someone

will come along and understand them
.

And words that we write down or read, too
,

are messages that we send out again and

again, trying to find the right person, the

person who will understand
.