Last Things (2 page)

“They just wasted away,” my mother explained, “like a leg you never walk on.”

My mother kept a notebook too; hers was black with shiny rings. I had torn a page from it and hidden it under my bed. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I took the page out of its hiding place and read it:

Zero order—

Betwixt trumpeter pebbly complication vigorous tipple
careen obscure attractive consequence expedition unpunished prominence chest sweetly basin awake photographer ungrateful
.

First order—

Tea realizing most so the together home and for were wanted to concert I he her it the walked
.

Second order—

Sun was nice dormitory is I like chocolate cake but I think that book is he wants to school there
.

Third order—

Family was large dark animal came roaring down the middle of my friends love books passionately every kiss is fine
.

Fourth order—

Went to the movies with a man I used to go toward Harvard Square in Cambridge is mad fun for
.

Fifth order—

Road in the country was insane especially in dreary rooms where they have some books to buy for studying Greek
.

Sixth order—

Easy if you know how to crochet you can make a simple scarf if they knew the color that it
.

Prose text—

More attention has been paid to diet but mostly in relation to disease and to the growth of young children
.

A moth flew into the room and fluttered against the shade. I wondered if this might be the same moth that had tried to fly to a star. But that moth had died, I remembered, or maybe it was the moth who had stayed home and circled the street lamp. My mother had told me that story too and said the moral was that stars could not be trusted and moved farther away, the closer you came. “Poor moth,” I said again and again that day until my father put down the paper and asked me to stop. Later he explained that the nearest star was 93 million miles away and this made it unlikely that anyone, a person or a moth, would ever go there. When I asked what the name of the nearest star was, my father said, “The Sun, of course.”

But my mother said that that was only one way to think of it and that in some places (Africa, for instance) people knew how to leave their bodies and fly up to the edge of the sky, where they hovered like birds. The trick, she said, was not to look down at your body in the bed, or you might lose your nerve and fall.

I looked for the moth again, but it was gone. Outside my window, slow stars moved across the sky. I could feel myself falling asleep, into sleep, it seemed. This happened when the darkness in the corner pulled me to it like water to a drain. I closed my eyes and
waited. Around me, the night buzzed like a fluorescent light.
J’ai perdu mon chapeau
, I dreamed. Something brushed across my cheek and I thought it was the bat, but when I opened my eyes, there was only my mother, kneeling beside me with her hands like fur.

There was a lake in town that stretched all the way to Canada. This was my mother’s favorite place, except in the summer, when the city people came. Then it was useless, she said. It was hardly a lake at all. By day, the water swarmed with swimmers, and at night, fireworks hid the stars.

In the summer, I tried to forget the lake, but still it was there just beyond the trees, I knew. If I wanted to go, I had to get up very early and walk with my mother in the cold dark. She didn’t like to talk along the way. Instead, she shone her flashlight across the sand and to the trees. During the night, every footprint had vanished; only the tracks of birds remained. As soon as the sun came up, old men with metal detectors appeared.

These men combed the dirtiest part of the beach, just beyond the pier. There was a place there for bonfires, and charred wood spotted the shore. Half-eaten sandwiches floated in on waves. Birds dive-bombed
for the bread and for the Alka-Seltzer tablets kids lined up in rows along the sand. I’d been told that if a bird swallowed one, it would explode in midair, though I had never seen this happen. My mother picked up the tablets and put them in her pockets to throw away at home. Often she forgot, and once, in a rainstorm, her coat began to hiss and fizz.

In the fall, it was different. The lake was empty again and the birds circled high above, never touching down. Every day after school, my mother and I went down to the shore to collect shells and little stones. Orange stones were best, but these were hard to find. If I found one small enough, I put it under my tongue for safekeeping. The rest I collected in my silver pail. There was a little hole at the bottom of the pail where the metal had rusted through. If a stone fell out, I couldn’t pick it up again, no matter what color it was. This was a rule I had made that could never be broken. The best stone I’d ever found had been lost this way. It was small and orange with a black rim around it like the sun. Sometimes, just before I fell asleep, I thought about the way it had looked in my hand.

Often we walked to the end of the beach without talking. This was the silence game, the one my mother liked best. At first, it was hard to keep quiet, but soon I’d forget what I’d wanted to say. Instead, I pretended I was a wolf who had never said a word before and never would. I thought my mother might do this too
because of the way she liked to crouch and run along the shore. The lake was very dark and deep and sometimes when I was a wolf it whispered to me in a secret way. Lake, the voice said. Lake, Lake.

There was a monster in this lake, but I had never seen it. Only my mother and six other people had. She had seen the monster one afternoon when she was out boating with her first love. Her first love’s name was Michael and he was one of the seven people too. They had seen it in 1973, she said, when everyone else was inside watching TV. “The word for such a thing is ‘uncanny,’ ” she told me, and this meant that it was both familiar and strange at the same time, like the moon.

My mother always carried a newspaper clipping about that day with her. It was torn and yellow from being folded and refolded so many times. Whenever we went to the lake, she read it to me. I would have liked to hold the clipping and read it myself, but she never let me.

One day in early June 1973, Michael Maller and a friend were enjoying the tranquil beauty of Lake Champlain when they noticed the water begin to seethe. Then, to their disbelief, a head and a long willowy neck emerged, curving above a dark, floating mass. This, they realized, was no fish
.

Almost paralyzed with fear, Maller nonetheless managed to aim his camera at the creature and take a quick snapshot. The result was a clear photograph of
an apparently animate object, gray-brown in color and with serpentine features
.

Some time later a public hearing was held in Montpelier to support the passage of legislation to protect the creature. Attending the session, Maller fervently declared: “I just want you to know that Champ is out there. Believe me, Champ is there!”

My mother always read the last part in a silly deep voice to make me laugh. Where was Michael now, I asked, but she didn’t know. She had only one photo of him, which she kept in her wallet inside a plastic sleeve. It had been taken on a honey farm in Texas, she said, the summer they drove across the country in just one week. She had shown me this picture so many times I could close my eyes and see it. There was a field full of white cabinets, each with four drawers. On top of each cabinet was a rock and around the field was a wire fence. The sky behind the fence was bright blue with a tear in the corner where the sun should be. A tall, dark-haired man stood by an open drawer, his beard covered in bees. And this was Michael.

That was the last picture ever taken of him. Five days later, he disappeared in the desert. By the time they found his car, heat had warped the vinyl roof. The windows were down and the floorboards were covered with sand. On the front seat was his driver’s license, a map of America, and a twenty-dollar bill. This had been in California, my mother said, in a place called Joshua Tree.

“Where did he go?” I asked, though she always said different things. (In the past, she had told me: Mexico, Milwaukee, the moon.)

My mother put the picture back inside its sleeve. “I think he became a cryptozoologist,” she said. “There was a monster in the Congo he was desperate to see.” She smoothed out the clipping in her hands. “Do Sea Serpents Have Rights?” the headline said.

Cryptozoologists were detectives who specialized in finding hidden animals, I knew. This was the sort of detective my mother wanted me to be. The people who investigated the Loch Ness monster were cryptozoologists, and so were the people in search of Bigfoot.

My mother had given me a book called
The Encyclopedia of the Unexplained
, which listed all the monsters of the world alphabetically. “A” was for the Abominable Snowman that lived in the mountains of Nepal and walked upright like a man. No bullet could kill it, the book said, though it yelped like a puppy when shot.

My mother said most cryptozoologists were really just hunters in disguise, but that there were some, a very few, who worked like secret agents in the wild. These were the ones who found lost animals and helped them hide.

“You see these men in the paper sometimes,” she said. “The secret ones. And they are always very sure of themselves, delighted to prove it’s all a hoax. It was no more than a moose, they say. Just a fallen log or
common bear. They’re very convincing, these men, but their smiles give them away. There’s not a man alive that smiles when he’s wrong.”

She took the Polaroid camera out of her purse and walked down to the water. Every time we came to the lake, she took a picture, just in case. The trick was to aim at something else so that you caught the monster by surprise.

She stood in the water and aimed at the far pier. There was a click and a whir as the picture came out. I looked at the lake. It was almost dark. In the distance, something shimmered and moved away. My mother turned the picture face-down and gave it to me. She never looked until the end, but I didn’t like to wait. In the beginning, everything was gray, then slowly this faded and dim shapes emerged. This was the moment when the monster might appear. A fin might rise to the surface or a hump or a head.

I waited, holding my breath. Then the water came in, and the sky and the pier. I held the picture up to the light, but there was nothing to see. Only the dark skin of the lake and the birds circling round. “One more for the drawer,” my mother said.

At home, we had a special drawer that we kept the pictures in. Inside were dozens of photographs, numbered and filed by date. Two years’ worth. Number 37 was the best. It showed a dark black spot hovering just above the lake. It could be the monster or it could be my mother’s thumb. Only an expert could tell for sure.

Sometimes my mother tired of looking for the monster and we’d go to the park instead. The rule about the park was that we could only go there if we went in disguise. Otherwise, men might stop and talk to us. Men were always trying to talk to my mother, it seemed. But, in disguise, we could travel incognito. That was the way spies traveled, she said.

My mother knew a lot about spies and sometimes hinted that she had been one once. She knew a way, for example, to make an umbrella shoot a poison dart. Also that the CIA had tried to kill the president of Cuba with an exploding clam. She showed me how to send secret messages by underlining words in a newspaper and dropping it on a bench.

Someone is after you
, was the message we left the man in the park who wore sharkskin boots and shooed the birds away.

Meet me on the moon
, we left for the old woman with the flowered hat and walking stick.

Many admire you
, we left for the one-eyed dog walker and his six basset hounds.

Sometimes I tried to guess which of my mother’s stories were true and which were not, but I was usually wrong. Even my father knew about the exploding clam, it turned out, though he grew vague when asked about the poisoned umbrella. “My wife, Mata Hari,” was all he’d say.

The day before Thanksgiving, there was a terrible storm. One moment there was a sharp chill in the air, and the next, ice fell down. All afternoon, my father peered out the window, checking the roads. That night they were going to a benefit to raise money for the raptor center where my mother worked.
This party’s for the birds!
the invitations said.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub and watched my mother put on her face. Outside, the trees were breaking themselves into pieces. Ice tapped against the glass. My mother went to the window and rubbed away the steam. “Listen, Grace,” she said, “I think someone’s speaking to us in code.” I looked out the window. There was nothing but the dark trees to see. My mother tapped twice on the glass, then cupped a hand to her ear. For a long time she stood like that, waiting. Then she gave up and walked away. I wanted to ask her if she had really been a spy, but I was too afraid. If I told you that, I’d have to kill you, she said once.