Last Things (9 page)

What sort of thing, I’d asked my mother, and she’d said, “A perfect one, I suppose.”

The wind died down and it was quiet again. “Listen carefully,” Alec said.

“I’m no good at riddles.”

Alec ignored me. He began speaking in a strange whispery voice like the voice of an old man.

“Picture a locked room with ten-foot ceilings. Inside, a man has hung himself from the lighting fixture. The windows are closed and sealed shut from
within. There is no furniture in the room, not even a single chair. The only thing is a puddle of water on the floor below the dead man. The question is, how did the man hang himself?”

I tried to think. Why wasn’t there any furniture in the room, I wondered. This seemed a better riddle to me.

Alec banged on the roof with something hard. “Time’s up,” he said.

“The man was a giant?” I guessed.

Alec battered the roof fiercely. The sound was like a hundred stones falling. “Wrong,” he said. “Release denied.”

“Please,” I said. I wanted to cry, but I knew if I did, he would never let me out. No one will find me here, I thought, and I’ll starve to death like that old dog.

I curled up in a ball and closed my eyes. I could hear a plane passing overhead and the wind moving through the trees again. Nothing happened for a long time. Then I heard a small scratching at the door.

“Marvin?” I whispered.

“The answer is the man stood on a block of ice. As it melted, the noose tightened until it finally snapped his neck.”

I heard a click as Alec unlatched the door. “You’re free to go,” he said.

I backed out quickly before he could change his mind. Outside, the sky had turned from blue to black. Alec was nowhere to be found. In the distance, I could see my mother walking through the lighted
rooms of our house. She was carrying a vase of flowers in her hand.

I found Alec behind the shed, smoking. I hobbled toward him but he didn’t look up.

I sat down next to him. “That was a stupid trick. Now my leg’s asleep.”

He shrugged. “So hop,” he said.

Someone turned the porch light on. “Alec, Grace, come in!” my mother called. She couldn’t see us in the dark. Alec ran down the driveway and into the house, slamming the door behind him. “There you are,” my mother said. She sat on the back steps and waited for me. There was a glass in her hand that glinted in the light. “Guess what I am?” I asked, hopping toward her, and she guessed a flamingo, because she always guessed right.

The next morning, my aunt and uncle got up very early and packed the car. Alec convinced them to let him stay one more day. “I don’t mind driving him back,” my mother said. “There’s an old war monument along the route. Also the Museum of Cranberries.” She offered to take everyone on a tour of historical Windler, but Aunt Fe insisted they’d already overstayed.

After Alec’s parents left, my mother drove us to the lake. It was an overcast day and hardly anyone was there. As soon as we got to the beach, my mother wandered off to look at birds. Alec and I played a game he had invented the summer before. The game
was called New Worlds and it began with us standing apart from each other on distant rocks. Each time we played, it was exactly the same. Alec was the explorer and I was the native girl. The object was for him to reach the rock I was standing on before I finished counting to ten. If I reached ten before he got there, I could capture him and cook him in my cannibal pot.

I closed my eyes and began to count. On eight, I heard him reach my rock.

“I’ve conquered your country!” he yelled the moment his foot touched down. He whipped off his shirt and waved it like a flag. I had to give him my charm bracelet and my ring and all the money I had. “Prepare to be civilized,” he said.

Alec leapt across the water to the highest rock of all, then stood there for a long time surveying his land. The sun was setting. “Canada’s on fire,” he said, shading his eyes.

“Give me back my bracelet.”

“What’s that? I can’t understand your language.” Alec laughed and dangled my bracelet above the water. His hands looked black against the sky.

I picked my way across the rocks toward him. He didn’t move until I got within arm’s reach. Then he sidestepped me by jumping onto the next rock. He did this every time I got close enough to catch him. Finally, I lunged at him and caught his sleeve. He tried to twist away, but his foot slipped and he fell in.

I watched him go underwater, thinking it was one of his tricks. The day before, he’d told me how the great Houdini had been shackled in chains and tossed
in the sea. No one believed he’d escape, but of course he did.

I waited for a long time, but Alec didn’t appear. I ran to the shore and found my mother. When I told her what had happened, she dove into the lake with her binoculars still around her neck.

Alec wasn’t breathing when she pulled him from the water. She pumped his chest until water came out of his mouth and at last he sputtered out a breath. His hands were clenched into fists, but when he opened them my bracelet wasn’t there. My mother wrapped Alec in a towel and carried him to the car. He told her that he’d been trying to reach a bottle floating near the pier. Once my mother had told us a story about a woman who grew so small she could be fitted inside a bottle and sent to sea. Because of this, Alec and I sometimes walked along the shore, looking for bottles floating in on waves.

My mother said that before Alec drowned he was slow, but after he came back he was quick. It was as if her dead father’s spirit had touched him in those moments he was gone. Her father could speak twelve languages and curse in more. “He’s the one that looked after you, Alec,” my mother said.

That night, after dinner, my father sat in his red chair smoking a pipe. Alec jumped up on the footrest and pretended it was a rock. I made a sound like the wind. Alec toppled to the floor. For a moment he was a swimmer and then he was still. I rushed to him and breathed into his mouth. I pumped his chest again
and again. After a long time, Alec blinked and waved his arms. One hand fluttered through the air, then rested on his heart.

My father put down his pipe. He looked at Alec for a long time. “Did you see anything?” he asked finally. “Lights and beckoning figures, I suppose?” Alec shook his head. My mother appeared in the doorway. “What did you see?” my father said again. Alec stretched his arms out wide. He said that the last thing he saw was the wings of a great bird closing over his face. He looked at my mother, lovely in the doorway.

The last night of summer, it was too hot to sleep. Only my father could. He could sleep through anything, my mother claimed. To prove this, she knelt beside his bed and played a kazoo in his ear. “See?” she said when he snored through “God Bless America.”

In our nightgowns, we drove to the lake. It was quiet out. Just the trees and the dark night all around. At the edge of the water, my mother took off her clothes and dove in. The mouth of the lake closed over her. I was afraid, but I didn’t cry.
Shh
, I heard her say.
Don’t say a word
.

It was like that sometimes. Her voice in my head, quiet and blurred like a piece of a dream.
Shh
, she said.
Shh
. The wind moved across the lake. It made a sound like a slap when it hit the waves.
The monster lives here
, I thought. I watched the white balloon of my mother’s face bob to the surface. It slept at night like we did, she said.

The water was cool around my ankles. I waded in deeper and deeper until only my head showed. I
pretended I was a woman whose head had been cut off and was floating out to sea. My mother had told me about guillotines and about the black-hooded executioner who pulled the string. I let my head drift along the waves, singing a sad little song.
I’m dead, I’m just a head, I’m mean, I’m guillotined
, the song went.

My mother swam over to where I was. “I thought the monster got you,” she said. A piece of hair was plastered to her head like a question mark. The moon made her skin gleam. I hooked my arms around her neck and clung to her. The black lake of death, my mother called it when we went there at night.

She swam like a turtle with me on her back. There were just a few stars out. We swam out past the end of the pier, toward the darkness that was Canada. The sky was a dingy gray streaked with white. It looked as if someone had wrung all the color out. I thought of the monster asleep at the bottom of the lake. Was he lonely, I wondered. Did he think he was the only monster in the world?

My mother believed that the monster was a dinosaur left over from another time. Once in a blue moon, she said, a creature everyone thought was extinct was discovered in some remote corner of the world.

This happened once off the coast of Africa when two fishermen caught a strange gray fish. The fish had fierce-looking teeth and fins attached to leg-like stalks. Local fishermen were puzzled until a paleontologist
came to town. He identified their catch as a coelacanth, a primitive fish believed extinct for more than thirty million years.

My mother knew a lot of extinction stories, but this was the only one that ended happily.

There have been two great extinctions since the beginning of time, she told me. The first one happened 245 million years ago and wiped out almost every living thing. The second one killed the dinosaurs, but no one knows why.

When would the third extinction begin, I asked, but my mother said it already had and that it wouldn’t end until the last human being disappeared from Earth.

In the distance, the lights from the shore flickered and went out. There was a floating dock far out in the lake and this was what we swam toward. I tightened my grip around my mother’s neck. She was swimming more slowly than before. I was afraid she might fall asleep and sink.

I tugged on her hair. “I want to go home,” I said. “Right now, I want to.” My mother didn’t answer. She always said that one day she would swim to Canada and I worried that this was that day. I thought about how Alec had gone underwater and seen a secret bird. I made myself limp and slid off her back. I closed my eyes and tried to drop like a stone to the bottom of the lake. The water grew colder and colder the farther I sank. I pretended I was blind. I pretended I was a fish who could breathe through my skin. I thought that soon I’d touch the bottom of
the lake and it would be soft like moss. Then I could push myself back up to the surface and surprise my mother.

Something sharp scraped across my foot. The monster’s claw. I opened my mouth to scream and the water rushed in. It tasted of mud and silt and filled up my lungs until there was no air left. I tried to swim to the surface. The water felt like a stone on my chest.
You’re going to die, Grace Davitt
, I thought, but it was as if the voice came from somewhere outside me and whispered in my ear. Then I felt my mother’s arms around me and suddenly I was pulled out of the water and there was air again, cold and clean. My mother dragged me to the floating dock and hoisted me on top of it. Then she pounded me on the back until water flew out of my mouth in a dark stream. I had swallowed a small leaf and this seemed amazing to me. I picked it up from the dock and held it in my hand.

“Why did you do that?” my mother said. “What’s gotten into you?” Her face was red and the vein in her forehead was pulsing the way it did when she was mad.

“I fell asleep,” I said. “I woke up and I was underwater.” My mother turned away. When she was mad, she refused to look at me. If we’d been home, she would have told me to get out of her sight.

My throat hurt from all the water I had swallowed. I tried not to cough and remind her of what I’d done. It was almost light out. The sun was a thin red line in the sky like a piece of thread you could pull.

My mother dropped back into the water and I followed her. I put my arms around her neck again. “This time, hold tight,” she said.

We started back toward shore. Clouds covered the moon, but I didn’t care. I didn’t like to look at it anymore because my father had told me it was just a piece of rock in the sky, beautiful but dead. Nothing ever grew there and there was no weather, not even rain. “Poor moon,” my mother said when I told her what I’d learned.

When we reached the shallow part, my mother set me down. “If you ever try a stunt like that again, I’ll kill you,” she said. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. We walked down the beach to the spot where we’d left our things. We looked beside the pier where we’d put them, but they weren’t there.

“What in the world?” my mother said. She walked back and forth across the wet sand, looking for our clothes, but they were nowhere to be found. Nightgown thieves, she said.

The sky was the color of cement. I looked out at the lake. I had an idea that birds might have carried our clothes away. We stood there shivering in our underwear. My mother’s breasts were bare and in the gray light they looked as if they were made of stone. I was sorry now that I’d agreed to come to the lake. I thought of the monster gliding through the water, eyes wide open in the dark.

There was sand in my underwear. I took it off and threw it into the lake.