Last Things (8 page)

My mother thought I would learn Annic if she spoke enough to me, but after a few months I knew only a few words.

On the board in the black room she wrote:

Z
NL
1: B
EVTVA BS GUR
Z
VYXL
J
NL
T
NYNKL

Bhe tnynkl vf pnyyrq gur Zvyxl Jnl. Vg vf znqr hc bs qhfg naq tnf naq fbzr gjb uhaqerq ovyyvba fgnef. Gbtrgure, gurl sbez gur fjveyvat cvajurry jr frr va gur fxl. Orgjrra gurfr fgnef yvr zvyrf naq zvyrf bs rzcgl fcnpr. Bhe Fha vf na bofpher fgne; vg yvrf ba gur sne bhgfxvegf bs gur tnynkl naq vf abg hahfhny va nal jnl. Rira gur Zvyxl Jnl, vzzrafr nf vg vf, vf bayl bar bs
nobhg bar uhaqerq ovyyvba tnynkvrf va gur pbfzbf. Rnpu tnynkl vf yvxr n terng juveyvat pvgl bs fgnef
.

When she finished, she read the words aloud to me. If I closed my eyes, it seemed she was speaking a language from a planet far away. The planet of Annic was purple, I decided, and surrounded by icy rings. Everything there was made of metal and it was always night, never day.

My mother rang the bell she kept on her desk. “Translate this by tomorrow,” she told me.

I copied what she’d written off the board. It took a long time to get all the words right. My mother grew restless, waiting for me. “It must be your father’s side that slows you down,” she said.

That night, I sat at my desk with my notebook and the decoder key. My mother lay on the floor playing solitaire. She was wearing my father’s pajamas and a headband we’d found in the woods. I wasn’t allowed to ask her anything. Outside, a dog was howling. “Dhvrg!” my mother said. I wrote out the decoder key at the top of the page and translated her sentences line by line. I tried not to guess what a word was until every letter was done. But some I could remember because they showed up again and again.
Gur
was “the,” for example, and
fgne
was “star.” Finally, I reached the end:

M
AY
1: O
RIGIN OF THE
M
ILKY
W
AY
G
ALAXY

Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. It is made up of dust and gas and some two hundred billion stars. Together, they form the swirling pinwheel we see in
the sky. Between these stars lie miles and miles of empty space. Our Sun is an obscure star; it lies on the far outskirts of the galaxy and is not unusual in any way. Even the Milky Way, immense as it is, is only one of about one hundred billion galaxies in the cosmos. Each galaxy is like a great whirling city of stars
.

“Yes, Grace, that’s exactly right,” my mother said.

In the spring, my father coached the track team at school. There were only five boys on the team and they hardly ever won. After practice, he came home smelling of cinder dust and drank a quart of water standing at the sink. Then he took a shower and went to bed.

On weekends, when he was away at meets, my mother and I slept all day and looked through the telescope at night. On clear nights, we took it down to the lake. My mother showed me how to find the Dog Star and the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. Some of the stars we saw were bright and others were very faint. My mother said that some of the stars we were looking at no longer existed. We were seeing them as they’d appeared many years before. This was because it took light time to travel through space to us. It was as if you took a photograph of yourself and had someone walk all the way to China with it. By the time the person arrived, the picture wouldn’t look like you.

At home, my mother drew a star on the blackboard with light streaming out. Then she surrounded it with other stars and crossed out each of them.

“We live in the Milky Way Galaxy,” she told me. “If I sent a letter to someone who lived in another galaxy, I would write my address like this:”

Anna Davitt

52 Larkspur Lane

Windler
,

Vermont

United States of America

Earth

Milky Way Galaxy

The Universe

My mother looked at me vaguely. She took an eraser and wiped her address away. “Our galaxy is so big that it takes light a hundred thousand years to go from one edge to the other,” she said. “Light travels through space at a speed of 186,282 miles per second.” She picked up the chalk and scribbled a series of equations on the board. By the time her letter reached its destination, my mother would have been dead for thousands of years.

A few weeks later, a letter came for my mother. It was in a blue envelope with no return address. My mother turned it over and held it up to the light. She showed
me how there was just a smudge where the postmark should be. It could be from another galaxy, she said, but as soon as she opened the letter, I saw Mrs. Carr’s handwriting inside. Twice before, she had sent notes home with me. These notes I did not deliver, but kept in a shoe box under my bed. My mother sat down at the kitchen table and read the note aloud. In it, Mrs. Carr regretted to inform her that I was an incorrigible thief. She told how I had stolen the pennies our class had collected for the Ethiopians. Also a ruler, two finger puppets, thirty-four gold stars, and a box of paper clips.
Despite repeated explanations, Grace seems unable to grasp the concept of private property
, Mrs. Carr wrote. My mother laughed. “Grace, are you a Communist?” she said.

But that night, when my father came home from work, she asked to speak to him privately. They went upstairs and talked in the bedroom for a long time with the door closed. At first, I could hear them arguing, but when they came out, a decision had been made. There was good news and bad news, my mother said. The bad news was I had to give the pennies back to the Ethiopians. The good news was I didn’t have to go to school anymore. In the fall, I’d stay home and my mother would teach me. What would we study, I asked her. And she said the history of the world from beginning to end.

All summer, it never rained. My mother piled smooth stones in the backyard and called it a garden. Alec and I turned over the stones one by one, but there was never anything beneath them. My mother said that stones were last things and would be around long after people were gone. Other last things were oceans, metal, and crows. I thought that if I filled a birdbath with seawater and dropped a coin in it, I might glimpse the end of the world. My mother said that this was a sentimental notion. An example of another sentimental notion was my father’s idea that cockroaches would outlive us all.

My mother liked the names of these birds: thrush, swallow, nightjar, starling; and not the names of these: duck, swift, hummingbird, puffin. She said that if she ever discovered a new bird she wouldn’t tell anyone. She knew a man who had found a bird in Brazil with a tiny purple heart on its breast and he had sold it to an aviary where they piped in monkey calls and the sound of rain.

“Where are these secret birds?” I asked her. “Show me a secret bird.”

My mother laughed. “Silly girl,” she said. “There are no secret birds in America. Someone has seen them all.”

I believed that my mother kept a secret bird in our house, though I could never find it. Alec and I checked in the pantry and under her bed. We opened boxes slowly. Sometimes I expected to find an orange bird that could fit inside a thimble; other times, it seemed that my mother’s bird would have webbed feet and lay speckled eggs. Once I thought I heard the chirp of a bird inside the sound of the shower, but when I pulled back the curtain, my mother was empty-handed. Alec and I checked for feathers in the bathtub drain. Nights when I couldn’t sleep, my mother turned her hands into birds and made pictures on my wall.

Aunt Fe and Uncle Pete planned to visit for a week, but they ended up staying three. Every morning, my mother made them a picnic lunch and they drove to the lake to swim and sunbathe. When she saw their car coming back at the end of the day, my mother would roll her eyes and pretend to faint. “How are we ever going to get rid of your parents, Alec?” she asked. “You can stay, of course, but I’ve had quite enough of them.”

At the end of the third week, my mother had an idea. She would have a party and invite all the dullest people in town. Alec and I sat at the kitchen table and
helped her draw up a list. There was Mrs. Finley, who sold dolls made of cornhusks, and Mr. Gowen, who collected bells. Also a family of amateur cyclists, and the newly elected county clerk. My father added two Civil War enthusiasts and the Latin teacher from his school. I voted to invite Mary, but Alec said she was away all summer at ballerina camp.

The night of the party, Alec and I worked the crowd. I passed around cheese straws while he performed magic tricks. For his finale, Alec tore a card in half, then plucked it whole from behind a cyclist’s ear. “Mysterium fascinan,” the Latin teacher said.

My mother called us into the kitchen. “It’s working like a charm, don’t you think?” In the next room, I could hear the county clerk telling my uncle the history of the Windler waterworks. My mother took out a platter of vegetables and dip. “I want to introduce Aunt Fe to the Civil War buffs,” she said.

After she left, Alec picked up a carving knife and held it to my ribs. “I know a way to cut someone in half so there’s no blood. Want to see?”

“Okay,” I said.

We headed outside, but Aunt Fe saw the knife and took it away.

“Motherfucking mother,” Alec said when we got to the backyard. “Now I can’t do my trick.”

We sat down on the far side of the shed, out of sight of everyone. It was starting to get dark. The sky was the blue of just before night.

Alec took out a cigarette and lit it. “I guess you could say I’m a nicotine fiend,” he said. He offered
me a puff, but it made me cough. He took the cigarette away. “Sometimes I forget you’re still a baby,” he said. He laughed as if he’d made a joke. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to a shadow in the corner of the yard.

“A doghouse.”

“Whose dog?”

I shrugged. I had wondered about the doghouse too. It was in the backyard when we moved there. It looked just like a real house except that it was dog-sized. The funny thing was that it had a real door that could be locked from outside. Also, there was a tiny peephole cut into the wood so you could look in. It must have been a very bad dog, my mother said.

Alec went over to look at the doghouse. I followed him. He latched and unlatched the lock. “I know a trick where I can break someone out of a room without ever unlocking the door,” he told me.

I looked at him. His cape had a tear on one side where he’d snagged it on the garden hose. Marvin the Magnificent, he’d written on the collar inside.

“How?” I said.

“Get in and I’ll show you.”

“No.”

“Get in,” Alec said. He grabbed my arm and twisted it behind my back.

Someone came into the driveway and opened the car door. Alec dropped my arm and crouched in the shadows behind the doghouse. There was the sound of footsteps and then the door slammed shut again.
“The Iceman cometh,” my father yelled to someone inside.

“I bet they’re all drunk as skunks by now,” Alec said. He unlocked the latch to the doghouse and peered inside. I stood a little ways back.

“Get in!” Alec said suddenly, yanking me toward the door by my hair. When I hesitated, he pulled harder. “I mean it, Grace.”

I crawled into the doghouse on my hands and knees. The floor stank of old food. It was too dark to see anything, but I felt something soft underneath me. A blanket, I thought. The room was smaller than I’d imagined, too small to turn around. I started to back out, but Alec had already latched the lock.

“Let me out,” I yelled. It was hard to breathe in the bad air. I banged on the wall, but Alec didn’t answer. In the pitch black, my hand touched something cold and smooth and I thought it was the skull of a dog. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about the dark. I could hear the wind picking up outside. “Alec,” I called again. Still, no answer. I closed my eyes. I thought that when I opened them the trick would have happened and I’d find myself outside.

I counted to ten and opened my eyes. Nothing. I could hear my heart beating. I thought this was what my mother meant when she said my father was in the doghouse.

I kicked the door with my foot, but it didn’t budge. “Please, is anyone there?”

“Yes,” he said as if he’d been there all along.

“Let me out, Alec.”

Silence.

“Alec?”

“There’s no Alec here.”

“Marvin?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Are you going to let me out?”

“Only if you can answer this riddle.”

My knees hurt from kneeling. I tried to shift positions, but one of my legs had fallen asleep. I remembered a story my mother had told me once about Africa. When a child turned twelve, he was taken to a secret hut deep in the bush, she said. This was the spirit house and for three nights he was left alone there while demons spoke to him in the voices of wild animals. These demons told him that he had been swallowed by a monster and was in the belly of the beast. If he closed his eyes for even one minute, the monster would tear him to pieces, but if he survived until daylight, he would become a new thing.