Last Things (6 page)

My mother turned away from the sign. “Follow me,” she said. She led everyone down the hall to a large glass case with two stuffed passenger pigeons inside. They were ordinary-looking birds, brownish gray with a spot of white on their chests.

My mother turned on the light that illuminated the case. The two birds inside had dull eyes and moth-eaten coats. They were sitting on a fake branch against a backdrop of trees. “Once the passenger pigeon was the most numerous bird in the world. When a flock of them flew past the sun, the sky darkened as if from an eclipse.” My mother paused and looked around the room. I wondered if she was going to tell about the great hunt that killed twenty thousand of them in one day. I was very little when she first told me about this, and afterwards I crawled under the back porch and hid there until it got dark. Just before the end of the story, when she got to the part about the birds burning in the trees, my father grabbed her wrist and said, “Can’t you see you’re scaring her, Anna?” but she told me the rest anyway.

But this time my mother trailed off in the middle of the story. She turned off the display light and went into the back room. When she returned, she was carrying a tray of feathers. She pointed out the different markings on them and explained how quills were made of keratin, just like fingernails. Then she passed them around for everyone to see. Some of the kids put feathers in their hair and tomahawked each other. Mrs. Carr sighed and shooed them away. Afterwards, she called for everyone to line up for the bus. I was allowed to stay behind since school got out at noon that day.

When everyone else was gone, my mother took out a handkerchief and wiped the case clean. On the wall beside the pigeons was a plaque that marked the date they’d gone extinct. Sept. 1, 1914. The last one’s name was Martha, it said, and she died of old age in the Cincinnati Zoo.

We went to the woods to pick out our Christmas tree. My father didn’t believe in Christmas, but still we celebrated it. It was like not believing in God but still you prayed. My mother said it was a shame to cut down a tree, so instead we chose one in the forest and tied a ribbon around it so we could find it again.

On Christmas morning, we got dressed in our warmest clothes and went to see our tree. My father pulled a sled behind him with all our presents on it and we had a picnic breakfast in the snow. Pine needles fell on the coffee cake my mother had made. We opened our presents all at once because it was too cold to take turns. My mother gave my father a telescope, an old map of Africa, and a woodworking set. My father gave her a bathrobe, an electric toothbrush, and a collapsible iron. My mother folded and unfolded the iron; then she ran it across the snow. “How marvelous,” she said. “What do you suppose its purpose is?”

I got the most presents of all, too many to count. The best one was a detective kit with fingerprinting powder and a potion that detected bloodstains. Also a magnifying glass and a roll of police-scene tape.

That night, I searched our house for evidence of a crime. I fingerprinted my parents and looked for bloodstains on the rug. In the living room, I found a dark spot that looked suspicious, but when I ran the test it came out negative. Check in your father’s study, my mother said.

On New Year’s Eve, Edgar came over to baby-sit. As soon as he arrived, I fingerprinted him. “Perhaps I should seek legal counsel,” he muttered. Then he went into the bathroom and washed his hands. Later my mother came downstairs wearing her mermaid dress and twirled around for him. “How do I look?” she asked. “As lovely as ever, Mrs. Davitt,” he said. The tips of his ears turned bright pink. He excused himself and went into the kitchen to get a glass of milk.

My mother sat down on the couch and put on her shoes. New Year’s Eve was my parents’ wedding anniversary and they were going to a restaurant in the next town. “Nine years, Grace,” my mother said. “That’s a nothing sort of number, don’t you think?” But when my father came down in his new suit she went to him and got down on bended knee. He laughed and held a hand to her cheek. “Marry me, Anna,” he said, and she agreed.

Edgar didn’t come out of the kitchen until after they’d left. Then he sat in my father’s chair reading a book called
The Story of Stupidity
. When I asked him what it was about, he told me it was an autobiography. “Whose autobiography?” I asked. “Oh, never mind,” he said.

It was snowing out and the only channel that would come in was the religious one. I watched a show about a Catholic priest who wandered around the world feeding hungry kids. Wherever he went, dirty children clung to him. He patted their heads and wiped their faces clean. My mother had once said that Edgar would make a good priest, but I couldn’t see why this was true. He never talked about God to me. Just once, he said he wished he were pure spirit, no body at all.

After the show, I asked Edgar questions about God, but he wouldn’t answer most of them. In my notebook, I kept a list of the questions he’d approved.
Does God have a face?
was a good one.
Is God ever bored?
was not.

The next morning, my mother woke me up at dawn. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. She opened the window and let the cold in. Outside, a few faint stars lingered like moths. My mother pulled the covers off my bed. Her hands were black and smelled of turpentine. I kept my eyes closed when she turned on the lights. “Rise and shine, little monster,” she said.

I got dressed and followed her down the hall. “What is it?” I asked her, but she wouldn’t say.

“Is it bigger than a bread box?”

My mother frowned. “Oh yes,” she said. “Much bigger.”

It was quiet in the house. In the distance, I could hear the rumble of a train passing by. “All aboard,” my mother said. We came to the spare room, where she kept her sewing things. Now that she’d stopped sewing, she kept it locked up with a key.

My mother pushed open the door. Suddenly it seemed we had stepped outside. The room was completely black. The walls, the doors, even the ceiling had been painted. Everywhere I looked, there were glow-in-the-dark stars.

My mother wiped her hands on her skirt. In one corner was a desk and a small blackboard. On the wall behind them, my mother had painted some words in white. “It’s the cosmic calendar,” she said. “Everything that’s happened since the beginning of time compressed into just one year.” She pointed to a neatly lettered sign above the doorway.

One billion years of real time = 24 days on the cosmic calendar
. And then on the wall next to it:

THE COSMIC CALENDAR

Jan. 1: Big Bang

May 1: Origin of the Milky Way Galaxy

Sept. 9: Origin of the Solar System

Sept. 14: Formation of the Earth

Sept. 25: Origin of life on Earth

Oct. 2: Formation of the oldest rocks known on Earth

Oct. 9: Date of the oldest fossils known to man

Nov. 1: Invention of sex (by microorganisms)

Dec. 16: First worms

Dec. 19: First fish

Dec. 21: First insects

Dec. 22: First amphibians

Dec. 24: First dinosaurs

Dec. 26: First mammals

Dec. 27: First birds

Dec. 29: First primates

Dec. 30: First hominids

Dec. 31: First humans

On the blackboard, my mother had written:
If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds
.

I copied this into my green notebook. My mother wiped the chalk off on her skirt. “I just thought you should know,” she said. “I wasn’t sure you did.”

Outside, a car started up. Then a sound like thunder far away. My mother drew a tiny dot on the board. “We will start at the very beginning,” she said. “Then continue on until we reach the end.”

J
AN
. 1: B
IG
B
ANG

In the beginning, the universe was very small. Everything in it fit into a space no bigger than a dot. There
were no planets in the beginning. No galaxies or stars. There was only this tiny dot, infinitely dense and hotter than a thousand suns. Then one day a great explosion occurred. The dot burst into a million pieces, streaming into space. These fragments sped through space at incredible speeds. Within minutes, they had traveled many light-years away. They traveled to the edge of what is known, and then beyond. They expanded to fill the emptiness of space, forming galaxies and, slowly, stars. Later came the sun and the planets and our blue home, the Earth. And this became the universe
.

I went upstairs and woke my father up. I told him that there was a surprise in the sewing room, but he didn’t want to see.

“Let me sleep, Grace,” he mumbled, pulling the covers over his head. Later he came down for breakfast and I showed him the black room. He touched the paint gingerly, but it was already dry. “Dec. 16: First worms,” he said, running his finger across the line.

My mother came in. “It’s the history of the world,” she told him. “I used the paint left over from the shed.”

My father cleared his throat. “The history of the world, you say?”

“I thought I would teach it to Grace in real time. I wrote it out last night while you slept.” She pointed to the dot she had drawn on the board. Beside this, she wrote:
Jan. 1: Big Bang
.

My father murmured something and checked his watch. “I’m going to the office to do some grading,” he told her. “If you need me, I’ll be in the ninth circle of hell.”

This was what my father said each day before he went to work. For six years now, he had taught chemistry at Windler Academy, but he was always threatening to quit. The boys who went there were made of money, he said. They came to class in cashmere sweaters and busied themselves blowing things up. The year before, one of them had singed off his eyebrows and penciled them in with yellow crayon.

My father kissed me goodbye. “Listen to your mother,” he said. After he left, she drew a cartoon of him on the board. “I am in the ninth circle of hell,” the caption read.

My mother got an ordinary calendar out of the closet and tacked it up on the wall next to the cosmic one. She flipped through the pages until she reached May, then put an X on the first day of the month. “Nothing happens in the world until then,” she explained.

I looked at the cosmic calendar. My mother erased the dot that had started everything. Then she opened the door and let the stars fade. We wouldn’t be back in the black room for four months, she told me. We had to wait for our galaxy to form.

There were only a few other houses on my block, and a blind girl lived in one of them. As soon as the weather got warm, she’d come outside and play on the sidewalk in front of her house. I liked to walk at a distance behind her, matching my footsteps to hers, stopping when she did. Sometimes she paused and moved her cane through the air. Who is it? she’d say. I can hear you walking.

In the afternoons, I hid in the prickly bushes behind her house and spied on her. She had a funny sideways way of walking, like a crab. In the yard, she didn’t have to use her cane because she knew where everything was. There was a chair she liked to sit in and a wheelbarrow filled with dirt where flowers grew. Whenever she came into the yard, she would go to the wheelbarrow and smell the flowers one by one. There were five flowers, all red, and she always smelled them left to right, exactly the same way. Then she’d sit in the chair and turn her face to the sun.
Sometimes she read a book, using only her fingers to see. I wanted to invite her over to play, but I wasn’t sure how she’d get across the street. What if she stopped in the middle when a car was coming and wouldn’t get out of the way? What if she fell in a pothole or slipped on a rock? I had an idea that I could put a leash on her and lead her like a dog, but I didn’t think she would agree to this.

When spring came, she worked in the garden with her father, planting things. He was small and fat and wore yellow rain boots even though it hardly ever rained. He planted rows and rows of flowers and the blind girl watered them. Here, Becky, he’d say, moving her hands over blossoms and leaves.