Nest (13 page)

The cars on Route 6 whiz by and make Bluebird shake. I have to not get stuck in the patches of sand. I have to keep my wheel straight and not wiggle out toward the cars. I have to not worry when a truck comes and the sound is like an angry yell, trying to knock me and Bluebird over.

Up ahead, Joey stops.

“We have to cross here,” he says.

“Joey?” I say.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He’s breathing hard and his cheeks are pink, and he’s definitely not a sad turkey anymore. I’m not a good Pilgrim, either, because I’m breaking an Orenstein family rule by crossing Route 6 on my bike. We wait until the coast is clear. When Joey starts screaming, “Go, Speed Racer! Go, Speed Racer! Go, Speed Racer, go-oh!” we race across.

Up and down a couple of little hills and now we’re on Seaview Drive. Even though there are summer houses and bluffs and the dunes between here and the ocean, I can hear the waves washing in and out. I can smell the salt water. The air is thicker and colder here than bayside. The ocean has lots of gray in it.

“Turn here!” Joey yells. It’s a dirt road with a sign that says
PRIVATE
. In our family,
private
means that if someone asks how Mom is, you stay polite but you don’t really say anything, for example,
Thanks for asking. We’re doing just fine. Private
means that when a teacher says something mean and stupid that makes you worry that everyone knows everything and what you want to do is scream
You don’t know anything about anything
, you just sit down and bow your head like a good Pilgrim.

I can barely pedal, because the dirt is mostly sand and my tires keep digging in. Joey’s weaving back and forth, trying to find the safe spots. There are handmade signs nailed to the trees where another dirt road branches off. I see plenty of plain old Cape Cod names, like Randall and Johnson and McIntyre, but there are Jewish names, too, like Goldberg and Leventhal and Blum, so I guess this is where some of the Jewish psychiatrists who come to the Cape in August stay. Everyone makes fun of them and calls them summer shrinks, like
Don’t even
try
getting a parking space at the beach today, because the summer shrinks have hogged all the spaces with their Mercedes and Volvos
.

Joey’s getting off his bike. He wheels it to the side of the road and pushes it down into the bramble. “Leave your bike here,” he says, so I push Bluebird down next to Joey’s bike. Joey walks a few steps and then
says, “Follow me,” and starts walking on a path that I never would have noticed, because the bayberry and bramble hide it. Branches hit my arms. Blackberry vines grab my ankles. Joey picks up a big stick. “On guard!” he says, and smacks everything that’s in our way, which makes walking much, much easier, and I get a sweet feeling inside, like when Mom blows on my soup to cool it off for me or Dad rushes into my room to close my windows before a thunderstorm.

“We’re almost there,” Joey says.

“Almost where?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer me, because he’s too busy shouting, “Take
that
! And
that
! And
that
!” This might be using bad judgment, since I don’t know where we’re going and I don’t know why we’re here and nobody knows where I am. Mom says examples of bad judgment are hanging out in the town center after dark with kids who drink beer or being in a deserted place where bad people might lurk, and I wonder if there were bad people lurking in the orphanage when she was a kid, but I can’t really ask her, because she almost never talks about that time and I don’t want to make her think about it if she doesn’t want to. Anyway, there’s no beer here, and Joey is with me, so it’s not deserted, so I guess everything is A-OK.

Joey stops at the end of the path and faces me. “Right this way,” he says.

He holds back the bushes and lets me walk
through. It’s a little house made of glass. The roof is glass and the sides are glass and the doors are glass. The wood in between the glass is rotten, and the glass is so dirty it looks black. The house is much smaller than a real house but a whole lot bigger than our toolshed.

“What is it?” I ask.

Joey shrugs.

“Whose is it?” I ask.

Joey shrugs. “It’s nobody’s.”

“It’s got to be somebody’s.”

“Shhhh,” he says, and starts walking around the glass house. I follow him, even though the blackberry thorns scratch my ankles. There’s an old metal garbage can filled with rusty water. There’s a dried-out hose that’s broken into pieces and looks like a heap of fat green spaghetti.

Joey stops and looks up. Just below the roof, there’s a row of broken windows. Some parts of the glass are busted all the way out. Other parts are only partway busted, and they’re beautiful, like the ice that freezes in the salt marsh when we have a wicked cold snap. “Mine,” Joey says, pointing to the broken windows.

He picks up a rock, dusts it off on his jean-jacket sleeve, and keeps walking. When he gets to the opposite side of the house, he looks up again.

“Top row, middle window,” he says. He backs up. “Get out of the way,” he says.

“Wait,” I say. “You’re not supposed to break windows.”

Joey laughs. “Well, you’re not supposed to have stupid teachers. You’re not supposed to have mean—” Joey looks at me. “Move!” he yells.

He’s got his arm up.

I run out of the way.

Joey throws the rock and the glass explodes. Tiny splinters of light shoot out like glowing fireflies. The sound is prettier than any bird I’ve ever heard. Joey picks up another rock. He dusts it off. He whips the rock. The glass flies.

“This is where I come when I’m mad,” he mumbles. “I mean, sometimes this is where I come when I’m mad.”

I pick up a rock. It’s cold and hard and feels good in my hand.

Joey looks at me. “You can have a window,” he says.

I shake my head. I’m a good girl. I don’t break windows.

“We came all the way out here,” Joey says. “I’ve never shown this place to anybody.”

I grip the rock tighter.

“This is my secret place. Don’t be a baby.” Joey kicks the ground.

“I’m not a baby.”

“Wah,”
Joey says.
“Wah. Wah. Wah.”

“Stop it!”

“Make me!”

I don’t know why he’s being mean to me. I don’t know why he brought me all the way to the glass house just to be mean to me when he could have been mean to me right in front of our houses, like his brothers.

“Why are you being mean to me?”

“Is the baby gonna cry?”

“Shut up!” I yell. Suddenly I’m so mad I could blow the whole stupid glass house down in one breath. “Leave me alone! You can’t bring me all the way out here just to be mean to me. I tried to get you out of being the turkey. You think I wanted to be the stupid turkey? I was being nice to you! It’s your fault that Miss Gallagher said what she did in front of everyone!” I want to pull his blond hair. I want to say things that are so mean his heart will stop beating.

I look down at the rock in my hand. I’m a good girl. I pull my arm back. I’m a good girl. I look around. No Mom. No Dad. No Miss Gallagher. Just Joey. My heart is pounding. I’m a good girl.

“Any window you want,” Joey says. I throw the rock as hard as I can. When the glass explodes and the splinters scatter, I yell like a crazy lady.
“Yaaaaaaaaa!”
Now Joey’s throwing, too.

“Crap!” he yells.

“Yaaaaaaa!”
I yell.

“Crap!”

“Yaaaaaa!”

“Crap!”

“Yaaaaaa!”

All this breaking makes me feel like something’s getting fixed inside me.

When Joey says, “Okay, stop now,” I don’t hassle him. I know he wants to save some glass for another day. I dump my rocks in a pile on the ground. Joey dumps his rocks next to my rocks. We ride all the way home without saying anything, not one word at all, just a long, cold, peaceful ride.

W
E
’
VE FINISHED OUR SUGAR
cookies and pink punch, and Dad is trying to steer us out of the classroom, but people keep getting in our way, like Mrs. Paganelli, Lori’s mother, who just let us know that the world is full of things to be thankful for if we only keep our eyes open to God’s glory.

“God bless you,” she says to Dad with a huge smile. She looks like she’s about to hug him, too, but Dad says, “Happy Thanksgiving,” and walks away fast.
“Oy vey,”
he whispers to me and Rachel, and the three of us start giggling, because we’re uncomfortable with the Christian talk, being the only Jews in the room, as always.

Now Miss Gallagher is walking toward us.

“Nice to see you, Dr. Orenstein,” she says, reaching
out and shaking Dad’s hand. “I hope you enjoyed the play. What are your plans for the holiday?”

Dad says, “It was terrific. Thanks for all of your effort. We’ll be visiting with family in Boston.”

Miss Gallagher says, “Nice, nice,” but she has a little weird smile that could be a sign that she knows
family in Boston
means
Mom in the nuthouse
. Could Dad have told her? Wouldn’t he have said something to me if he had? Anyway, he says he’s proud that we’re managing just fine, the three of us. If we’re managing just fine, why would he need to share our private problems with my teacher, who he barely knows?

We’ve got our coats on and we’ve thrown away our paper plates and we’re almost at the door and Rachel’s whispering, “Let’s go, let’s get out of here,” when Mrs. Paganelli claps her hands and says, “I just had an inspiration. Before ending this lovely evening, why don’t we gather around and take just a quick moment to share our words of thanks?” Her question sounds more like a command, and everyone starts moving into a circle. Dad looks at us and we look at Dad, and even though we really, really don’t want to stay, it feels like there’s a magnet pulling us into the circle with everyone else, and unless we want to be even more different than we already are, we’d better just give in.

“Of course, we won’t call this prayer, but as this special holiday of Thanksgiving approaches, let us
consider our numerous blessings and offer up our words of thanks.” Mrs. Paganelli takes a loud breath. She closes her eyes. She opens her eyes. She still has that smile. “Who would like to begin the sharing? What are we thankful for?”

No one says anything for a really long time. I can hear Rachel breathing. I’m thinking that I’m thankful Joey was absent today, so he didn’t have to get teased or maybe even beat up by his brothers for being a turkey, and I didn’t mind being the turkey, because I got to demonstrate all three of my leaps and everyone clapped hard when I curtsied, and also I didn’t have to fake-pray, but I don’t know if what Mrs. Paganelli wants us to share is big things, like ending the war and having enough food to eat, and before I can decide if I should brave it and be the first thankful volunteer, Miss Gallagher jumps in and says, “I’m thankful for these wonderful children, who worked hard and did such a good job in the Thanksgiving play.”

“Yes,” Mrs. Barker says. “Bravo!” She pats Dawn on the back and Dawn takes a little bow, as if peas were the only food on the Thanksgiving table.

Mrs. Paganelli says, “I’m thankful for this wonderful community and for my health and the health and love of my family, and I could go on and on with my bounty of blessings, but I don’t want to hog the show,” and then she laughs all snorty, like she’s watching the
episode of
I Love Lucy
where Lucy and Ethel work in a chocolate factory and the conveyor belt is going way too fast and they start shoveling chocolates into their mouths and down their shirts and into their hats.

There’s a really long silence again. Most of the kids are looking at their feet. Most of the parents are looking into space. I want someone to start talking so no one will remember that the last time we all went around the room and talked was at back-to-school night, when Mom had her supersonic eye.

I check out Dad and he’s staring at Mrs. Paganelli with a really strange expression, and suddenly I realize that he’s about to cry. I’ve never seen Dad cry before. He makes a snuffling sound in his nose and shakes his head hard, and just one tear slips out of his eye and down his cheek, which isn’t enough for anyone to notice. I take Dad’s hand and he grabs my hand back, hard. It’s almost too hard, but I don’t let go, because Dad needs me. Mom needs me, too, but there’s nothing I can do for her right now, which is probably what Dad’s thinking:
Hannah is all alone in this exact moment at McLean Hospital without Chirp’s Thanksgiving play and without pink punch and sugar cookies and without Mrs. Paganelli’s bounty of blessings and there’s nothing, not one thing at all, I can do about it
.