Last Things (23 page)

When we got back to Windler, I rode my bike over to Edgar’s house. I brought the book on meditation back to give to him. His father answered the door and invited me in. He was a bald, sunburned man with tufts of hair in his ears. In one hand he held a tennis racket and in the other a drink. “Come in, Grace. You’re just in time for a surprise,” he said.

Edgar came downstairs, carrying a book on mold. When he saw me, he nodded hello. Then he went out on the porch to read.

“Not so fast, Mr. Silence,” his father said. He took Edgar’s arm and led him out back. In the driveway behind the house was a beautiful silver car. It had a black top and gleaming white tires. On the hood was a ribbon and a sign that said
All Yours
.

Edgar closed his eyes, then opened them again. He walked around the car, touching everything. He stopped in front of his father and made a small bow. Then he held out his hands for the keys.

His father laughed. He put the keys back in his pocket. “What do you say, Edgar?” he asked.

Edgar shook his head. He handed his father the silence card, but his father ripped it in two. “I said, What do you say?”

Edgar sat down cross-legged on the grass. He looked straight ahead and breathed slow, quick breaths. Then he switched to longer ones. These were the kind people who walked on hot coals used, the book said.

His father got in the car and honked the horn. He kept honking until Edgar put his hands to his ears. Then he got out and ran his hand along the gleaming hood. “It’s a beauty, don’t you think?” he said to me.

Edgar passed him a note.

“You have exactly one minute to make a decision,” his father said. “After that, I’m taking it back.” He got in the front seat and started to count.

Edgar looked at me, then he looked at the car again. His father was counting slowly, but he was already up to ten.

Edgar closed his eyes and stood on his head, with his legs bent. I followed along in the book. Queen, that one was called. He stretched out into King, then Downward Dog, then Snake, then Fish.

“I’m up to fifty-five,” his father said.

Edgar let out a tremendous sigh. He put a finger on one side of his nostrils, breathed in and out, then switched. This he did again and again. Sometimes he made a small hum like a machine.

“For Christ’s sake,” his father said. “Sixty, going once, twice, gone.” He took out the keys and started the car.

Edgar leapt to his feet. There were grass stains all over his white pants. His father turned off the engine and stared at him. “Well?” he said.

Edgar cleared his throat. I looked at him, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Thank you,” he said. His voice was hoarse from so much silence. There was grass in his hair and all over his clothes.

“That’s more like it,” his father said. He laughed and tossed him the keys. Then he went inside.

Edgar got in and started the car; then he turned it off again. He jumped out and ran into the house. When he came back, he had a backpack and a stack of letters tied with a piece of string. He handed the letters to me. They were creased as if they’d been folded in half, but none of them had been opened.

“Your mother’s mail,” Edgar said. “I’ve been saving it for her.” He threw his backpack into the car and got in. He rolled up the windows and turned the radio on. Then he backed carefully out of the driveway, around his father’s sailboat and his mother’s watering cans.

I put the letters he’d given me in my bike basket and rode along beside him to the street. “Where are you going?” I asked, but he wouldn’t say. He put on mirrored sunglasses and rolled up his sleeves. Suddenly I remembered the impostor. “Edgar?” I said. He paused at the end of the driveway, waiting for a car to pass. As soon as it did, he floored the gas and sped away.

I pedaled furiously on my bike, trying to catch up with him, but when I turned the corner, he was already gone.

When I got home, the blind girl was having a party.
You’re 12!
the banner over her driveway said. Her father drove up and unloaded a cake and a box of soda from the back of his car. I threw my bike in the garage and called Laika to come spy with me.

Around dinnertime, everyone started arriving. Cars pulled up and parked all along our street. I wasn’t invited to the party. Only kids from the blind school were. Some of them came with guide dogs. Others had canes or walked holding someone’s arm. From the bushes behind their house, Laika and I watched everyone. She growled a little when she saw the other dogs, but I held her mouth shut with my hands, so she got quiet again.

From my hiding place, I could see the blind girl opening her presents. Someone had given her a hula hoop and she was feeling her way around it, trying to guess what it was. After a while, her father put it over her head and explained how it worked. She laughed and tried to hula hoop, but it kept falling to the ground. “Like this, Becky,” her father said, holding it steady around her hips. For a moment, it caught and spun. Everyone clapped as it circled her hips.

Her mother turned on the porch light and sat under it. I could see now that not everyone at the party
was blind. The ones who were were touching one another’s hands and faces and standing in the dark corners of the lawn. The ones who weren’t were huddled on the steps beneath the only light.

For a moment, Becky stopped in front of the bushes where we were hidden. I held Laika’s mouth shut so she wouldn’t whine. Becky leaned over and tied her laces. She wore a rhinestone tiara that someone had given her, and when she moved, it caught the light. Laika whimpered and shifted her weight from one side to the other.

The blind girl hesitated, then took a step back. She held her hands out in front of her as if pushing someone away. “Hello? Is someone there?” she said.

Laika and I held our breath. Becky’s mother came out of the house and rang a bell. She announced a scavenger hunt and read the list aloud. A pocket knife, a dog’s dish, a fishing pole, a pair of skis. When she finished with the list, she rang the bell again. “Remember to choose a sighted partner,” she said.

I stepped out of the bushes and took Becky’s arm. “I’ll be your partner,” I told her.

“Oh,” she said, startled. “Is that Donna?” She raised her hand to touch my face. Laika ran off to chase something at the edge of the lawn.

“I’m Donna’s cousin.”

The blind girl smiled and asked my name. “It’s Anna,” I told her. “Come with me. I know where to find a dog’s dish.”

“Oh, good,” she said.

I took her arm and led her across the street. It was dark out. On the lawn of Becky’s house, her mother was handing out flashlights and pairing everyone up. “Hurry,” I told her when we reached my yard. I took her around the shed to the old doghouse. It seemed smaller than I remembered. In the kitchen window, I could see my father fixing a drink. He stared out at the dark lawn, but he couldn’t see us.

I stopped in front of the doghouse and unlatched the door. “It’s inside,” I told Becky. “You have to go in and get it. I’m too big.”

“What is it?” she asked. When I told her it was a doghouse, she laughed and got down on her hands and knees. She laid her tiara beside me on the grass, then crawled in.

As soon as she was inside, I clicked the lock.

“I think I’ve got the dish,” she said.

I held my breath. My heart was beating too fast. I could hear her banging around inside the doghouse.

“Why did you close the door?” she asked. “I can’t find my way out.”

I sat down on the grass and waited.

“Anna?” the blind girl said. “Anna, are you still there?” Her voice sounded strange.

When I didn’t say anything, she banged on the door and yelled, but the thick wood muffled the sound. Finally, all the noise stopped and I could hear the ragged sound of her breathing. I tapped lightly on the door.

“Yes?” she said instantly. “Is that you, Anna?”

I didn’t answer. Instead, I spoke quietly to her in the voice of a bird about the monster that had swallowed her. “He will tear you to pieces if he hears you make a sound, but if you’re quiet through the night, he will let you go.”

The blind girl banged on the wall again. “Let me out, Anna,” she yelled. “Please. I promise not to tell.”

I checked the lock one more time to make sure it would hold. Then I went inside and fell asleep.

It was my father who found her. He went outside to get something he’d left in the yard and heard her crying in the dark.

After he took her home, he came into my room and shook me awake. “What’s gotten into you, Grace?” he said.

I explained about the spirit houses and how by morning she would have turned into a new thing.

My father shook his head. He went downstairs and called Aunt Fe. I sat on the top step and eavesdropped on him. “I think it might be best if she came to visit Mary and Alec for a while,” he said. When he came upstairs to tell me, I pretended to be asleep. He stood in the doorway a long time without saying anything. Then he turned off the light and went away.

When the crow fell, its wings jerked back once, then folded in. Alec started to cry and put down his new BB gun, which he had named Mr. Bang! and carried everywhere the day before. I cried too.

“If you didn’t want to kill it, why did you shoot it?” Mary said. She hated crows because they were dirty, thieving birds. She claimed one had stolen her silver anklet, the one with the tiny jingling bells, while she slept in the hammock out back. I remembered the way she had sulked when my father offered to buy her a new one. “He’s not fooling anyone with those colored contacts,” she said.

Later Alec and I went back to the field without Mary and put the dead crow in a box filled with marbles and Alec said, “I’m sorry, bird,” before hiding it in the hollow tree that was our secret place.

But the next day Alec had the gun again. “It was just a dumb bird,” he said, taking aim and pretending to shoot off Mary’s arms and legs one by one. Mary
was asleep in the sun and smelled like a coconut. I wanted to wake her up and make her look at the bird in its box, but I knew she wouldn’t want to.

I’d told Mary once about the birds’ alphabet, how they darted and swooped, spelling secret words in the sky. I showed her a flock of birds flying in a V, even though it was the one letter I hated for them to make, because other people knew it too. “That’s a Y,” Mary said. “Look, they’re spelling my name. Someday I’ll make my husband buy a jet and write our names in the sky.” Then she ran off to make a necklace for Laika, who was running around in circles on her chain.

Laika knew about the alphabet too. Sometimes I would take her for a walk down to the end of the dirt road and we’d sit quietly, watching the dark shiny birds dropping onto the field. After a while, I would let go of Laika’s collar so she could run under the fence toward them. When she ran, the birds flew up all at once, as if they were connected by string. The way they rose up reminded me of my mother throwing her hands in the air when she was mad.
I give up
, she’d say. You win. You win. After the birds were gone, Laika would lie in the middle of the field and watch them circling above her. She never barked at them, the way she did at everything else that moved. When the last ones flew out of sight, she would roll around and around in the grass and howl. I thought that Laika must be the smartest dog in the world, smart enough to be an astronaut like her namesake, the dog who’d starved to death orbiting the moon.

One day Alec said, “I bet my dad and your mom ran off together and she’s the one who writes those stupid postcards. He never used to talk like that.”

“But she’s dead,” I said. “She drowned in the lake.” Sometimes I dreamed of the car as a fish that had swallowed my mother.

“She could have faked that to run away. Did you ever see her close up when she was dead?”

I had to admit that I hadn’t, though my father had planted a tree in the backyard in her name.

Alec plucked two feathers from the bird and gave one to me. He pricked his arm with the feather’s quill until he drew blood. I did the same. We touched wrists. “Now we’re bird brothers,” he said. “If I wanted to, I could teach you how to fly.” But he didn’t want to.

Alec had found a secret cave in the woods and sometimes he let me go there with him. But he always took me on a complicated, doubling-back route so I couldn’t find it on my own. The opening to the cave was so small we had to crawl in on our hands and knees, but once inside we could stand up. Alec called it the Room of Everything Good and carefully monitored what was brought into it. So far, the only things he had allowed inside were three boxes of matches, deer bones, his father’s Swiss Army knife, my mother’s book of dreams, assorted rocks, a comic book about a murderous plant, coins from Africa, and an old zippered jacket that we were devoted to
because it was reversible. I wanted to bring the dead bird to the cave, but Alec said it would stink up everything. After a few days, he gave in and let me keep a fan made of its feathers and Scotch tape inside.

One time, near the cave but not inside it, we made a fire and burned the bad father’s postcards one by one.
It took two days to drive through the desert. I wish you could have seen the way the
 … I read before the paper went up in flames.