The Excellent Lombards (29 page)

Rivets were in short supply in the jungle. I kept reading.

“You seem so unhappy.”

I shut my eyes.

“I just wonder,” she went on, as if she was having a fun idea, “why you’re so hard on us. You walk around glaring at everyone. I wonder if you realize how combative you always seem. And negative. I wonder if you’re aware of it.”

I rolled to my side in order to look at her, not in a glaring sort of way but because of my astonishment at how little she understood me. If she had known me even somewhat she would have appreciated how full of love I was. She would have understood that in fact I was overtaken by love. Love, at a basic level, was all I had inside of myself. “I don’t walk around glaring,” I said.

“But you do. I’m trying to help you, Francie. I’m wondering why you’re so unhappy, first. And second, I’m telling you that in company you look somewhat murderous. When you’re talking to us.”

I’m full of love
, I wanted to yell.
Most of the time I love you. More than you deserve. I love everyone! I love our life!

But I didn’t shout. I didn’t even speak. Because to reveal that information would have been to invite a diagnosis that would sound like a line from a Lifetime movie.
That’s the trouble, Francie
, she would no doubt say.
You just can’t love the world as much as you do.

She next said, “I think you should consider going back to Dr. O’Connor.”

“I just had my appointment.”

“He might be able to give you something to feel better. An anti-depressant. And he could recommend someone for you to talk to, a therapist.” When I didn’t answer she said, “Francie?”

“No,” I said dully. “No, thank you.”

“Please don’t rule out—”

“I don’t need therapy. I don’t need birth control pills. I don’t need Prozac.”

There was no help for my condition. No help for the situation. Nothing to be done.

And still no help for it a week later when William was invited, along with a few other accepted bright stars, to meet with the Math and Computer Science Department professors at the College of His Choice. It was apparently a very special select weekend party, probably all-you-can-eat macaroni and cheese and garlic bread, fluffy French toast, starch and song, obeisance to Alan Turing, prayers and candle lighting, thanks be to Steve Jobs. My father, who so rarely had an outing, was going to drive him to Minnesota, the trip commencing on Friday at 2 p.m., the soonest William felt he could get away from his obligations at school. I was unwell that day, taking the opportunity to reread some of my old favorite books, impossible to get enough of Anne Boleyn’s capers with the king.

At about one o’clock, having been in bed long enough, I thought I might take some air. My father was over at the unheated apple barn, standing ready in his thick blue coveralls to wait on any customer who might happen by. My mother was as always at the library. I got the old picnic hamper and stocked it with apples, cheese, bread, water, cookies, and my books, along with a bag of other necessities. Off I headed into the woods in my parka with the fur-trimmed hood. It was a sunny December afternoon, mild for the season. Also, I had, in my pocket, the keys to the car. I went straight to our place of refuge, William’s and mine, that old gouge where the tree roots had been upended. In all the years since we’d first used it as our safe haven, that night when we’d been lost, no one had gotten around to cutting up the limbs for firewood.

I climbed into the cold damp chamber. It was considerably smaller than I remembered. A blanket and a duvet just fit, the blanket for the floor of the tomb, the duvet for wrapping up. Cozy, actually. A branch ledge for my basket, enough food to stave off starvation for a day or two. The headlamp in my pocket with the car key, so when it got dark I might read and not strain my eyes. The books beside me, my very old favorites, going way back to
The Baby-Sitter’s Little Sister
series and
The Boxcar Children
.

As I read about children who triumph I began to get angry, angrier than I had been in general. Why were children always heroic in literature? Why the brutish lies to us? How patronizing! No, evil, it was evil to deceive young life. Even—yes, it was true—even Kind Old Badger was statistically improbably successful, like a drug those happy endings, the parents feeding the tykes narcotics, so many zombies set out into the world. It was cold in the hole, it was loveless. I should have brought matches. Why hadn’t I brought matches to build a fire? It was everyone’s fault! And especially William’s, that I was freezing out in this hole. Why did he need to go and visit a place he already knew he liked? Why would professors invite high school students to campus when they had plenty of college boys to instruct? I was opening one of the
Baby-Sitter
books when a strange thing happened. The photographs that Stephen Lombard had taken years before, of William and me in the barn playing, those five black-and-white pictures that the spy had snapped, slipped from the pages.

They stared up at me, one after the next. There I am sitting way up high on a bale with the basket of kittens, splintered light coming through the cracks of the barn. The rope is hanging from a beam, the thick braid we used to swing from, that delirious long back-and-forth. Someone had removed it a few years before, May Hill, we’d thought. William is down below, making a pulley device to get water up to my perch, to save me. He’s wearing a junior tool belt, bent over his work. Even though in my hiding place darkness had not yet fallen I shone my light on the photographs. They seemed to have appeared out of creation or maybe years before I had stashed them in the book. However they’d materialized, I’d fallen straight down into the barn scene, MF Lombard no longer in her dugout. In one of the pictures William is looking up at me, the girl with the cats, as if he’s worried, as if it’s almost too late for the rescue, he knows he must hurry.

Stephen then occurred to me, Stephen himself standing in the door of the granary, watching us. Studying us no doubt for quite some time. Had he taken the photographs as a way to insert himself, just for a minute, into our childhood? Wanting to be us, to have us, trying somehow to—what? Could a grown man have such a hopeless wish, trying to get back
there
? Once I had that thought I scrambled to get out of the hole. I didn’t want to grow up. I didn’t want to someday have the hopeless wish, trying to get back, taking pictures—and longing. Longing, I couldn’t bear all the longing that was already in me. And to come, all of it to come. I was running at first and stumbling. As much as I knew our woods it was still possible to go astray in the thickets and so I went in circles.

As I walked and walked other questions came to mind, one prompting the next and the next. What if soon we were unable to pay the taxes on the four hundred acres? What if a multimillionaire bought the woods, the houses, razing the apples trees for piano key subdivisions? That little tin cup we’d once found long ago, the cup we’d discovered and reburied, cemented over for a garage, never again found by a boy and girl? I wouldn’t think of it, would not imagine the classic and lugubrious farm auction scene turning into our real and saddest of memories, the closing of the door for the last time, getting into the car, turning back to look. One more look. I had to bend over, couldn’t walk—one last look and going down the road. Nothing left but the Stephen Lombard photographs.

I don’t know how many minutes or if it was for hours I wandered like that. When I got back to my camp the light was fading. Was Philip our savior? Was it true, what my mother had said, that May Hill was providing for our future? I felt as if my mind might rupture—how long, how long was it going to take William to figure out where I was? I could already hear the scratchings of nighttime, voles scurrying, deer delicately making their way along their narrow routes, the plaintive cry of a little lost bird who had foolishly stayed behind in winter. And always, in the woods, there must be the call of the owl, the demanding
Who who?

Really, how long would it take William? It should not have been so difficult for him. If he wanted to go to Minnesota that badly he should think carefully about where MF Lombard was with the car keys. It made me so angry, again, that I’d had to resort to this kind of tactic. It should not have been necessary! And why had Gloria left us years before? She should start calling for me now, coming to find me, rather than living on Cortez Island with her own baby, a girl named Sophia.

Four o’clock had passed and five o’clock and six o’clock. Where was he? How dare he not find me. How dare he keep me waiting in the cold, doing the taxing job of holding my ire at the boiling point. It should have been a cinch to find me—how stupid could he be?

At six thirty I crawled out to do my business—
look what you’ve reduced me to
. Once again I tried to get comfortable, tried to get back the warmth I’d lost, and when I was sick, too, when I’d been so sick. But I would stay, I would stay the night, I’d stay for two nights if I had to, if William was so brainless he couldn’t find the car keys right in the hole in the woods. I was making my resolve when finally I heard the bushwhackers. Ten minutes past seven o’clock. It was my father who was calling. “Mar-lee-een. Mar-leeeeeeen! Are you out here?”

Maybe I was and maybe I wasn’t.

“Marlene!” A big sharp shout.

They were drawing closer. I burrowed deeper into the duvet. What was going to happen?—that secretly delightful question. Before I could entertain it further they were on the lip of the chasm, their headlamps blinding me.

“Jesus Christ.” William spit the name.

“It’s okay,” my father said to him. “Come on out, Marlene.”

Ho-hum, I acted as if I didn’t see them, as if they were not present. I opened my book since their headlamps were now providing me with perfectly adequate light.

“Frankie—!” William was too angry to say more.

“Oh, hallo,” I said.

“It would be considerate—” He was so worked up he was starting to cry, my brother. “It would be—” Not only had it taken him
forever
to find me, he also couldn’t manage to speak in complete sentences. How in the world did he think he was going to conduct himself at college? “Nice,” he hissed. “If you could give us the car keys.”

“Marlene,” my father said, “we’re all pretty tired.”

That was their problem, not mine. They wanted to be rested and happy, they had only to get a basket and come into the woods.

“Ma’s out of her head with worry,” my father added.

William just then began to pound, with his bare hands, on the gigantic upturned platter of roots and earth. Very melodramatic for anyone but for William especially surprising. Was he crying or choking? I couldn’t tell.

“So go away,” I remarked. To tell the truth, it was frightening, his display. I said, “Would you please just leave.” I meant it in a local way.

At that he sprang into the hole. “Ow!” I yelled. “Get off me! Stop it!” As I said, the hole was considerably smaller than it had been when we were five and six.

“GODDAMN IT, Imp!” He seemed to hover before he came down upon me. I suppose it happened quickly. The press of him, a darkness in my mind, my brother smothering me. Such weight, the boy himself in his padded canvas jacket. Before you knew it you could be snuffed out, you might surrender, one bright bloom in your head, the last flowering firework, almost a happiness to have everything over and done. I heard him cry out, “YOU ARE SUCH A—BABY.”

BABY
like an ugly word, like the worst curse. It was close to me, that word in the hole, and yet it didn’t matter, the canvas like an old chapped hand, William’s jacket covering my face and in my mouth. Before I could try to struggle, even as I was thinking to, my father was yanking William, my father with all his strength pulling his nearly grown son up out of the hiding place. All at once the light was back in my eyes, I was gasping for breath. There was noise, my father I think talking to William, maybe he was saying something, a confusion even though the main action had already taken place. I thought,
Okay, I am now going to climb out
. I could see that there was no reason to stay put. They had found me, I wasn’t dead from suffocation, perhaps my point had been made, time to go home. I couldn’t exactly think in the moment what the point was. But before I could get out, before I realized what was happening my father had also dragged me up and next I knew he somehow had hauled me over his shoulders. Wait! The duvet had fallen away, my father, as old and as tall as I was, my father adjusting me as if I were a sack of grain, as if he thought I wouldn’t come home with them, as if he thought I’d try to fight. I could still feel the weight of William, the jacket, that stuffing, in my mouth. I should tell my father that he could let me down but I couldn’t think of the words.
Baby.
That’s what I kept hearing.

We set off down the path. William was running ahead probably. I couldn’t hear him, didn’t think he was with us. I was not easy to carry, my father faltering. I imagined I was going to say
Let me down
and so I must have because he stopped. I was then walking beside him. He smelled of apples, the fragrance thick and sweet, the smell bonded deeply into his jacket and his coveralls, his hair, his skin. Even though I was no longer slumped over his back I felt as if I were being carried along in a dream, the night, my father, the two of us maybe walking forever. Where was William?—Oh yes, in the dream, remember he is gone? On we went until we came out of the woods. We walked down the dark drive of Volta and crossed the road to Velta.