Some Birds
Carla Panciera
Before she left for good, my mother told me I don’t know how to tell a story.
“You don’t know what to leave out,” she said.
She was looking for her car keys though that was not the moment she drove off and did not return. (She had practice runs – errands where she returned empty-handed hours later, weekends with friends we didn’t know she had, a work conference when she was between jobs.) She was rooting through a drawer full of take-out menus and picture hooks, outdated insurance cards. As messed up as we might have appeared, no one would have dropped the keys into that chaos, but whenever you looked for anything in our house, you checked that drawer. Maybe I don’t need to say this.
I had asked if she remembered the girl with the ducks.
“What girl?” she said.
“The rare ducks? The brother who died?”
“See? This is what I mean. I don’t have time for all the details. Just tell me what happens.” She checked her purse once more, raised the spare key, triumphant, left the door open on her way out. A month later, she was gone. Shortened ( i.e. preferred) version: Tough Mudder mania, professionally whitened teeth, twenty-eight year old roofer. Not necessarily in that order.
“What can I say?” she said, the night she left. She had cried a little, I’ll give her that. “He makes life so exciting.”
Since then, I’ve been practicing how to tell similarly abridged (i. e. less boring) stories. This is what I have so far.
February: Christmas lights blaze on our house.
(When the lights went on sale after the holiday, my father added more strings, bulbs melting nostrils in the snow on the hedges where he draped them.
“Why?” I asked, when I wanted to say, “What the fuck?” but he hadn’t stood up straight in months.
He shrugged and, hoping they made him happy in some weird non-alcoholic way, I said, “Unique luminescence,” so at least he’d think I was learning something at school.
Sasha says they look beautiful in the snow, and it is snowing like mad, but Sasha thinks November is beautiful, too, and old people’s knuckles. We’re eating a sleeve of Ritz crackers and channel surfing. Ten o’clock on a Friday night.
Speaking of school. During lunch some girl bumped into me, some freshman who had squirted herself into skinny jeans and a t-shirt with a store name written across it. Right. Details, but that shirt, that cheap t-shirt some Guatemalan kid made, cost more than my winter jacket. She was too busy calling back over her shoulders to a table full of her giggly friends to see that she almost knocked the tray out of my hand.
“Watch it,” I said. She jumped. I have a reputation: the new girl is mean. She’ll kick your ass just for looking at her. It’s a small school. This much, I think you need to know.
The custodian heard. (You can’t call him a janitor and, believe it or not, I wouldn’t.) He was leaning against the milk cooler (they lock it here) making sure everyone recycled. As if all the trash doesn’t get dumped in the same place. He asked my name and I cocked an eyebrow. Actually, it arches whenever someone calls me. Involuntary reflex. That and the f –word. The combination of the shove, the look, the f-bomb, landed me in the vice principal’s office where the secretary called my father at the toy warehouse. He appeared a half hour later, and sat beside me kneading the knees of his jeans in front of that big desk. When he learned what happened, he apologized all around, asked if there was anything else.
“Two day suspension,” the vice principal said. “Out of school.”
Then my father thanked everyone. Thanked them.
In the car, my dad said nothing. He wasn’t angry, just worried, as if he had no idea what came next. Which is why I never ask him about her. Because what could he say? He probably knows less than I do. Less than I do, or more. I know he wishes my mother would come home and raise me, though he won’t say it.
I tell Sasha he wasn’t mad, just worried. “Jesus, your dad is sweet. My dad would ground me for, like, a month.”
“Your dad? Isn’t he the kind of guy who would, like, put you up on his shoulders so you could see a parade better?”
“Well, yeah, he did that when we were younger, of course.” Of course. “But he can still be wicked strict. My mom would use the old: Sasha Marie, I’m very disappointed in you. And then she’d plop herself down on my bed for an hour or so trying to figure out where they went wrong, what I’m so angry about.”
Sasha realizes what she’s said and throws her arm around me. “Oh, Nola Baby.” Her breath smells like vinegar and cracker crumbs. “I shouldn’t have said that stuff about my mother. I’m sorry. You act all tough on the outside, but inside you’re such a marshmallow.”
“We?” My mother never sat on my bed in her life, by the way. Not even in her good years. Year.
But Sasha, crazy as she is, would never get into fights. She’s a smart girl who doesn’t look like one. Have a kid in your class no one else wants to work with? Sasha pairs up with her as if she can’t believe her luck (which is how we met). It’s my reputation that gets us both in trouble. It followed me from Wyassup Technical High School from which I was thrown out for burning a girl’s hair with a curling iron, for holding on, my teacher said, beyond all reason. I could’ve claimed it was an accident, but that girl, when we got partnered up, asked me if I had washed my hands.
Here at least one teacher has already pulled Sasha aside and reminded her of that birds of a feather thing, but Sasha assures them: “It’s an act. She’s very sweet.” Something no one has ever said about me and which even makes me doubt her judgment.
This is a small town where everyone else has lived their whole life. Our teachers are Sasha’s neighbors, someone her mother dated when she was in high school. My father and me? We moved here a year ago and I took a bus every morning for an hour to the tech. Now, every class feels like a family reunion, a family reunion plus The Mean Girl. I know no one except Sasha, but everyone knows me.
Tonight, we’re bored. Well, every night we’re bored, but tonight we’re also hungry and a little drunk. Sasha brought a bottle of red wine and, except for the sleeve of crackers and some potato chip crumbs we had to lick off our fingers, we haven’t eaten all day as I was thrown out of lunch before I touched my tray. Sasha never brings money for lunch and mine is paid for by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so I usually share it with her.
Sasha’s feet are propped on my coffee table. She’s wearing white socks whose bottoms are filthy. I stare out the window at the snow swirling through the rainbow lights and say, “Fuck it. This storm isn’t keeping us in. We’re going into town.”
Town is down the hill, less than a mile. It contains an art gallery that sells only things with crows on them, a tiny and ridiculously expensive health store, and several shops that have been in people’s family for generations. It also has four or five pizza joints and one of them must be open. Of course, all five of them could be open and it wouldn’t mean anything to us as we have no money. God forbid Sasha comes prepared for anything, but I am full of ideas.
“Let’s call Rope,” I say. Sasha has a big laugh which is only natural coming out of her head. It’s a bit oversized and can alarm you when you’ve been away from her for a while, especially if she has her hair pulled back, as she does now.
“User,” she says. “That boy loves you, and all you love is his money.”
“You could get a job,” I say.
“I will. In the summer.”
I don’t say, You could also ask your parents to throw you a few bills, but knowing Sasha, she came expecting we’d have cabinets full of food, that we’d actually have someone here who thought of groceries.
Jason Roper has no more money than we do, but he does have a job at a plant store and receives tips for hauling shrubs and potting soil into lazy people’s cars, so lately, he can be counted on for cash. It isn’t exactly true he loves me. Though he might think he can get something off me. Another rumor: I am a slut. I wear black eye makeup in a school where no one wears anything fancier than dreadlocks and nose piercings. And, okay, I’m no virgin, but I have been more selective than people might think from looking at me, if they’re the kind of people who think like that about kids. And frankly, if they are, they’re fucking sketchy.
So my story so far, impatient-mother-version: It’s snowing, we’re bored and hungry.
My mother might be onto something here.
Rope responds to his text immediately. I feel bad that we only call him when we need money, but it’s not that I don’t like him. He’s weird the way kids in this town are weird -- you can never quite tell if someone’s on something or if they’re just fucking spacey – and legend has it he went to prom by himself and sort of hung out without talking to anyone, but he wasn’t unhappy about it. He didn’t even ask anyone to go because, if he had, the girls in this town are just freaky enough to have said yes. That was a bunch of years ago. He’s twenty-something and still doesn’t have his license, but he’s clean and not bad looking either. His father plays the ukulele with Sasha’s father in their garage and Rope hangs out listening some nights. The thing about Rope is that he doesn’t get things like sarcasm or exaggeration. If you tell him your head is killing you, for example, he’ll assume you have a fucking tumor.
“Meet us in front of Mocha’s,” I say, and Rope is in. No mention of the weather.
Sasha’s Birkenstocks smell like bleu cheese and collect wedges of snow beneath her heels before we’re even out of the driveway. The Christmas lights cast her in psychedelic acid trip colors. She has her head thrown back to catch snowflakes into that mouth of hers, and then she collapses on the street and makes a snow angel.
“Isn’t this the greatest you’ve ever felt in your life?” she says.
“You’re seriously messed up,” I say, refusing to join her. Snow angels? This is what happens when your parents are normal. You flop all over the planet like you own it.
My cheap sneakers are not exactly foul weather gear, either. We leave our jackets unzipped and, though we made an attempt to locate hats and mittens, we came up with only a tattered Red Sox cap and some oven mitts so I say what the hell. We’ll use our hoods and pockets.
“Christ it’s cold,” I say. Surprise, surprise, right? But seeing the snow fall and hearing the wind howl when you are inside is a lot different than being out in the shit. Then, I skate out into the street nearly cartwheeling into a snowdrift.
Once I right myself, Sasha hip-checks me into the drift anyway. I fall sideways, planting my ear into the stinging cold then come up fast and yank my arm away from her when she goes to pat it.
“Fucking A,” I say.
That stupid, barking laugh again. I am pissed. One side of my face feels as if it’s burning off from the cold, but even I have never swung at someone I consider a friend. When she finally stops laughing, she says, “Jesus, you can be scary. Let’s never fight, okay?”
She gets all serious and puts her arm around me again which feels okay at first. It’s warmer, at least, but walking when someone has her arm around your shoulder is like carrying a log along on the journey so finally, I shrug her off and say I can’t see to cross the street.
“You really think people are driving in this?” she says. “More maniacs like us who are too stupid to stay home?” She finds this hysterical.
“You’re drunk,” I say, and then I laugh, too. What the hell? We are maniacs. Freezing ourselves to death to bum pizza money off a guy who probably has brain damage.
Mocha’s, our fair trade coffee shop, is closed and this also cracks us up because the owner is Tibetan. You’d think someone from Tibet wouldn’t be turning away business just because it’s snowing, but there it is. When Rope finally ambles over to us, he stares at us without laughing and this makes us laugh even harder until we’re doubled over, stumbling down Main Street in search of food.
This town is also full of Greeks. The Greeks make great pizza and at least one family lives over its shop so we don’t have any trouble finding something that’s open. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Greeks get, like, no snow, right?) Anyway, the pizza is good, but we spend precious hot pizza time having a swirling cheese contest. Turns out, Rope is pretty good at this, gives himself a mustache, makes me a wedding band.
A couple weeks after my mother left, I went to a pawn shop in a nearby town – no need to pawn anything in this place – to see if she’d been cold enough, smart enough, to leave her band behind. It was only a little thing, thin as wire. I didn’t find it. Those were the days I went looking for the slamming door.
We save the cheesiest piece for last, the one with a hunk of mozzarella at its tip. Rope gets up to get a knife so he can slice it as even as possible.
“We’ll be good sharers,” Sasha says, leaning into me. I’m still cold and she’s so warm, I wish she’d stay like that for a minute and she does. She starts to sing in my ear, “When you love someone, really love someone . . .” Some creepy song from her parents’ record collection. That’s right. I said record.
We’re the only ones here and I imagine what we look like to everyone outside, sitting so close in a warm, bright space. And what do you know? We look like everyone else, only warmer.
“I knew this girl once who had a weird attachment to ducks,” I say.
She says, “Hmm,” which no one says seriously except her.
I start slow: “She was a rich girl who had no friends, but she had a brother. Both of them had something wrong with them.”
“What do you mean, wrong with them?”
So much for leaving out certain details. Except I can’t remember very clearly. So I make this up: “She couldn’t hear well so she talked funny. He had something wrong with his face. When he smiled, only some of his muscles worked.” I have to keep pausing to omit other details, however, like that I only knew them because my father had a job as their handyman for a while. That we stayed in an apartment over their garage that smelled like mouse shit and gasoline. “Anyway, the brother died one winter. No one knows how. The parents wouldn’t say and they were rich so they could keep that kind of stuff secret. The next summer, the girl got six ducks.”
Sasha would want to picture them, would want to think about picking them up, so I push on. I tell myself, if she stops listening, she stops listening. We have pizza now. We are dry. “Beautiful ducks – white necks with black bodies, speckled beaks. They let you hold them and when you did, their hearts beat beneath their feathers and they purred, like cats.” Though I never held them, only watched the girl stroke their sleek heads as she cradled them.
Rope searches bin after bin for knives until he finally asks someone behind the counter.
“They sound magical. No wonder she was so attached. Especially because she lost her brother.”
Before I can continue, Rope walks towards us, waving the plastic utensil like a light saber.
“Isn’t he terrific?” Sasha says. “You should marry him for real.”
Rope snorts and then gets a hopeful look on his face. But I curl my lip and say, “Never.” As in, I’m never getting married, not that I’d never marry Rope (though, of course, I wouldn’t) but, okay, I get how this might sound to the poor dumb kid. He sets the knife down on my placemat, then slouches in his seat and puts his hands on his lap.
Before I can apologize – and I would have – the door opens and some kids walk in, dressed in big puffy coats and the kind of pants people wear skiing. They stomp their boots on the welcome mat and bump into each other, slurring and laughing, high as kites and I should know, though the kids here do some serious designer shit I’ve never tried. One of them, a really beautiful blonde who I’ve heard trades favors for mollies, flicks her eyes our way and then ignores us even though Rope raises his hand.
When the boys see us, however, they call out to both Rope and Sasha. One of them, a tall gawky kid with fierce red hair comes over and shakes Rope’s hand.
“What’s up, fellow storm orphans?” he says. Like I said, high as kites. His eyes are nearly shut, and his pants are so low slung, I’m eye level with one white slice of flat stomach and a trail of red pubes. Sasha giggles and says, “Sit with us. Please?”
The boy looks at me and half nods, half smiles, stupid with mind altering substances, dulled like the ground out nub of a pencil lead but not quite as entertaining. He pulls a chair over.
“This is my new best friend in the world: Nola,” Sasha says.
A minute ago, she’d been about to tell me off, but, okay, this is how it is. Same old story, short enough to please even my mother and also, perhaps, familiar to her: Women are fools for men. They give up everything -- every freakin’ thing -- for that kind of attention even if it’s from someone as ugly as this kid.
“Nice to meet you,” the kid says. “How’d you all get way out here?”
Sasha lives in a tiny house out near the water. A house that has been in her family since her Pilgrim ancestors dropped anchor here and started digging for clams.
“Nola lives on the hill,” she says. Then it occurs to her she can get even more specific: “Her house is the one with all the lights on it.”
Why tell him that? Why make me sound more like a freak? Because it doesn’t matter to her, how I feel. It only matters what she might say to impress him. Like this is the kind of introduction that would get me accepted into the world where Sasha lives most of the time. Who would want anything to do with a kid whose father refuses to take down his Christmas lights, especially if they knew he thinks they’ll act as some kind of Hallmark movie beacon to his wandering wife?
“That’s cool,” the redhead says. “Got your house all blinking and shit.”
There goes my eyebrow. “Fuck you,” I say.
But he laughs and plops himself down, legs splayed out so wide, he hits mine without registering it, and spins the pizza tray around.
“Nola, baby,” Sasha says. “It’s a compliment.”
Red raises his chin at the last piece.“You gonna eat that?”
Rope says he’s all set. Sasha says, “Take it.”
They talk for a while about kids I don’t know. So-and-so, famed for the yurt he built in his backyard, is snowboarding in Utah for the winter, So-and-So Number Two nannies for an ambassador’s family in Sweden or Norway or one of those countries where every other person commits suicide. They laugh so hard at nothing, I want to puke up my pizza. Either that or drink more of the wine, but the bottle is a) home, and b) empty.
His friends glance our way again and then the slutty blonde leads them to the table farthest from us. “William, you asshole,” she says, her back to him. “We’re not saving you a seat.”
He shakes his head, tips back in his chair as if he’s got all night.
Sasha says, “So, William, how about giving us a little something something?”
“Happiness, you mean?” he says, grinning. His teeth are as pointed as a fox’s. Rows of little tiny canines.
Rope looks back and forth, wondering if he should smile.
“Come home with us later. We’ll find something.”
Sasha says, “What do you think, Nola?” Rope nods.
The blonde looks back over her shoulder at me, slides her eyes away when I stare back. I know all about you, bitch, I want to say. People like you have been staring at me long before my father started advertising the freak show with a year-round light display. I am not spending ten seconds more with you and your pals. I was telling a story. We were having a contest. I can’t help it if Sasha’s memory is short, if everyone’s memory is, as brief and as stunning as the flash on one of those old-fashioned cameras where the photographer had to put his head under a black hood so he wouldn’t be blinded.
I stand up. “You go,” I say. “I’m out.”
Rope stands up too, which makes me hate him and then makes me wish I could love him. Things could be pretty fucking simple if you could just give up hoping for things you can’t even describe.
Red says, “You got some serious steam coming out your head, New Girl.”
“Don’t be mad, NoNo,” Sasha says. Like she’s from Georgia or something. “Sit down and finish your story. Rope and William love stories, don’t you guys?”
I shrug my worthless coat around my shoulders.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say and try to fling the door open, but it’s got one of those vacuum things. Natura-fucking-ly.
At first, the air feels good, like hitting the water might after a hot day’s dive off a rock face into the black surface of a quarry. But it doesn’t take long for the tips of my fingers, the rims of my ears, to ache. Rope comes up behind me and says nothing, only shuffles along making sloppy ski tracks in the snow.
“We should slow down,” he says and this makes me stop and glare at him. “I mean, for Sasha.” He tries whistling. He calls her name into the howling wind.
“What don’t you understand?” I say. “She’s not coming back. Even if you make a complete and total fool of yourself whistling like that, trying to get her attention, she’s gone. Why can’t you see that?”
Wind whips strands of sopping hair into my mouth, sticks them to my face. Great idea coming out into this maelstrom (I know some words, all right? And sometimes, I want to use them). Great idea thinking there’s any fun to be had in this town where people have so much time on their hands, they devise all kinds of ways to numb the boredom. And how can anyone blame them? Blame us?
I want to fling myself at Rope and knock him against the brick building behind him. He’d let me. He’d take it. But he gestures towards the pizza place. A square of piss-colored light reflects off the sidewalk and then the door opens, and Sasha spills out into it, calling: “Wait up, you nut jobs.”
I start walking faster but she catches up, grabs my arm and leans into me as if we’re in a cheesy girlfriends movie. Snow spits stinging crystals at our faces. “Were you just going to leave me there? That’s not very nice.”
“I thought you wanted to go with those assholes,” I say, staring hard at the ground so the snow doesn’t prick at my eyeballs. “You know, smoke dope, get laid?”
Sasha stops but I keep going. “Why do you say things like that?” she says. “Like you’re the asshole?”
I flip her off without looking back and this is enough, what with the ice and my numb legs and the plasticky soles of my stupid sneakers, to start me skiing again along the sidewalk, and this time, I can’t stop. Instead, my arms butterfly and the world pitches as my body launches itself towards a bank of newly plowed snow. Through my panic, I hear Rope: “Tuck and roll, Nola. Tuck and roll, dude.”
I land face first in the crusty pile and feel a searing pain in my nose. At first, the warmth soothes me and then I realize: blood, a spreading inkblot of it in the snow when I lift my head. I shake off someone’s hands and kneel there, cupping my hands over my face.
“I think you broke it,” Rope says, inexpressive as someone reading aloud the weather forecast for a day he plans to spend inside.
Sasha kneels beside me, her raw hands holding more snow up to the bleeding even though I shove her off the first time.
“It’s not broken, just bleeding. This will help.” Her face is so close to mine I can see how the snow has stuck her eyelashes together in dark arrows, but it shocks me when she kisses my cheek softly and says, “It’s okay to cry.”
We step into the parking garage of the publishing company that took over one of the old mills this town used to be known for before it became the home of pot smoking weavers, antique dealers, and coffee aficionados and their offspring. The wind still howls through the empty levels, but at least we can stay dry. We hunker down beside a car that looks like it’s been here a while. Sasha and Rope sit so close to me, it’s possible to feel some heat through my jeans even though they’ve begun to freeze against my leg.
Rope lights a cigarette and we pass it around which also makes us feel, like, half a degree warmer.
“For you,” Sasha says and blows smoke rings over my head. “Halos.”
Rope pokes them with Ichabod fingers. I choke on my first drag, my nose clogged with freezing blood and snot. Pretty, right?
“Tuck and fucking roll?” I say, and then even Rope laughs, our voices echoing in the spaces around us.
When we finally stop, Sasha says, “So the ducks purred like kittens?”
Rope wants to know what ducks and Sasha has settled in beside me and my nose is killing me even if it isn’t broken, so I catch Rope up. Even though it’s the second time in less than an hour that she’s heard the story, Sasha gets very still. The cold leaves me and for a minute I remember that might be a sign of hypothermia, but who cares? So we fall asleep here and die together? As if that’s the worst thing that can happen.
“It was the perfect place for ducks,” I say. “There’s a small pond that gets really loud in the spring from all those horny frogs. Birds love it, too. They make so much noise, no one can sleep in for miles around. But there’s also foxes. Sometimes it’s possible to see their kits romping all over the stonewalls and many nights, even over the pond noises, you can hear the coyotes.”
“Do they really howl like wolves?” Sasha asks, but Rope says, “They yip, like wicked happy dogs.” Then he imitates them and again the building fills with our noises. With details imagined and then, for that moment, experienced.
“The girl wasn’t really a girl,” I say. “She had gone to college already, but she lived at home and even though she lived in such a great place, she never came outside until she had the ducks. She bought them a plastic pool so they could swim in it.”
“What about the pond?” Sasha asks.
“She thought it wasn’t safe.” Total guess, but now that I’ve begun . . .“So her dad paid for someone to build a little island in the middle of it where the ducks could go if they were in danger. But every night, she would lock them in this shed. In the morning, when she opened the door, the ducks would waddle out. One day – they were big by then and didn’t have any more of those yellow and brown fuzzy feathers– she led them to the water’s edge, but they would only plop in if she put her feet in first and then, as soon as she came out, they’d follow her.”
“They thought she was their mother,” Sasha says, sounding sleepy which is also a sign of hypothermia. This reminds me to hurry up which also worries me because there really isn’t a story, not completely, and I have no idea why I’ve wanted to tell them this at all.
“Finally, she left them out at night.”
“Because they could go to the island.” This from Rope who pinches the cigarette in his hand and flicks it out before us where it sizzles for a second before being extinguished.
“Yes. She must have believed they’d be safe.” I try imagining how she fell asleep those nights listening for them. And how maybe sleep didn’t come. How maybe it never came completely to a house with that kind of loss in it.
“But it was strange, you know, and kind of sad, the way those ducks followed her and how much she loved them.”
My breath must be warming my nose because blood trickles out. I wipe it with the cuff of my coat and Sasha straightens up to check out what I’m doing.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Maybe we should get going.”
“In a minute,” she says. “What about the girl’s friends? Where were they?”
"She didn’t have any. Neither did her brother.”
Rope says, “Huh,” as if it’s never occurred to him. Friendlessness. Loneliness. Or maybe because it has.
“When the first duck disappeared and she asked if we’d seen it, no one said the obvious. We just looked around where we were standing like a bunch of idiots and said, ‘Gee, no, but if we do, we’ll let you know.’ And she looked relieved! She looked like she believed it could survive out there! Once, she even found feathers in the reeds along the edge of the pond, and every time another duck disappeared, she’d come to ask us to look for it. Some people had never heard her speak before. But the worst thing was, after we all went back inside, she would go out to the pond and the woods calling them.”
We sit as if listening for her but all we hear is the streetlights’ buzz.
“Did they all die?” Sasha asks so quietly, I wonder if she’s actually spoken.
I shake my head and the pain that ricochets up my nose makes my eyes water. “Not all of them. The ones that lived, she gave away. To a farm somewhere.”
“Why did she ever let them out?”
“How would she know any better? Her father said they’d be fine, and she believed him. I told you, something was not quite right with her.”
“She trusted him,” Rope says. “Even though he never told her the truth about her brother.”
Snowplows rumble through the street below, their swirling lights reaching the tops of our shoes before fanning away.
“Maybe she never asked about him,” I say. Because, really, what would be the point in knowing?
Rope stands up and reaches for our hands. “We got to get moving before we freeze to death,” he says. But instead of him leading us outside, we climb the stairs to the top level of the parking garage.
“I want to show you something,” he says and makes us close our eyes as he guides us forward, bumbling. Sasha laughs but I imagine us drawing closer to the roof edge and push down the terror. Once he has us in position, he stands behind us with his arms wrapped around us and says, “Surprise!”
We look out into a white city, striped with one gray street. Streetlights capture the canting snow, a blinking yellow light at the intersection, the security lights in shop windows in the safest town in America. It’s hard to tell where we are exactly, but we – even I, through my poor nose – can smell the salt of the nearby ocean through all this impossible white.
“Where are we?” I say.
Sasha says,“One minute I was beside that pond and the peepers were going crazy and the next thing I know --” She looks out at the space before us.
Rope is holding us tight so that there’s no way we can go over and maybe this is why I stand there and think: We will never die.
“You haven’t even seen the surprise yet,” he says into our ears and then we both look right at the same time, up the hill we still need to climb to reach home, and there it is: the kaleidoscope of lights that is my house.
My mother would like the story to end here. She would not understand how, when we left a few minutes later, speechless with cold, Sasha stumbled into the path of the one car on the road that night and, but for a split second reaction by Rope, would have gone under the sliding tires as easily as one of those ducks succumbing to a predator’s jaws. When she stood up, collapsing into Rope’s bony chest, she laughed as if it was the funniest thing in the world, as if we hadn’t just seen it – Rope and I – another way a world ends.
My mother also wouldn’t want me to say we were the happy family then. Those days when outside another of our rented houses, that girl’s calls only made us draw away from the windows, into the tighter knot of us, my father wrapping electrical tape around an extension cord so he could plug another fan in, me digging out an old crossword from the basket by the sofa and resigning myself to an afternoon indoors, my mother searching drawer after drawer for something she already had.
Carla Panciera
Before she left for good, my mother told me I don’t know how to tell a story.
“You don’t know what to leave out,” she said.
She was looking for her car keys though that was not the moment she drove off and did not return. (She had practice runs – errands where she returned empty-handed hours later, weekends with friends we didn’t know she had, a work conference when she was between jobs.) She was rooting through a drawer full of take-out menus and picture hooks, outdated insurance cards. As messed up as we might have appeared, no one would have dropped the keys into that chaos, but whenever you looked for anything in our house, you checked that drawer. Maybe I don’t need to say this.
I had asked if she remembered the girl with the ducks.
“What girl?” she said.
“The rare ducks? The brother who died?”
“See? This is what I mean. I don’t have time for all the details. Just tell me what happens.” She checked her purse once more, raised the spare key, triumphant, left the door open on her way out. A month later, she was gone. Shortened ( i.e. preferred) version: Tough Mudder mania, professionally whitened teeth, twenty-eight year old roofer. Not necessarily in that order.
“What can I say?” she said, the night she left. She had cried a little, I’ll give her that. “He makes life so exciting.”
Since then, I’ve been practicing how to tell similarly abridged (i. e. less boring) stories. This is what I have so far.
February: Christmas lights blaze on our house.
(When the lights went on sale after the holiday, my father added more strings, bulbs melting nostrils in the snow on the hedges where he draped them.
“Why?” I asked, when I wanted to say, “What the fuck?” but he hadn’t stood up straight in months.
He shrugged and, hoping they made him happy in some weird non-alcoholic way, I said, “Unique luminescence,” so at least he’d think I was learning something at school.
Sasha says they look beautiful in the snow, and it is snowing like mad, but Sasha thinks November is beautiful, too, and old people’s knuckles. We’re eating a sleeve of Ritz crackers and channel surfing. Ten o’clock on a Friday night.
Speaking of school. During lunch some girl bumped into me, some freshman who had squirted herself into skinny jeans and a t-shirt with a store name written across it. Right. Details, but that shirt, that cheap t-shirt some Guatemalan kid made, cost more than my winter jacket. She was too busy calling back over her shoulders to a table full of her giggly friends to see that she almost knocked the tray out of my hand.
“Watch it,” I said. She jumped. I have a reputation: the new girl is mean. She’ll kick your ass just for looking at her. It’s a small school. This much, I think you need to know.
The custodian heard. (You can’t call him a janitor and, believe it or not, I wouldn’t.) He was leaning against the milk cooler (they lock it here) making sure everyone recycled. As if all the trash doesn’t get dumped in the same place. He asked my name and I cocked an eyebrow. Actually, it arches whenever someone calls me. Involuntary reflex. That and the f –word. The combination of the shove, the look, the f-bomb, landed me in the vice principal’s office where the secretary called my father at the toy warehouse. He appeared a half hour later, and sat beside me kneading the knees of his jeans in front of that big desk. When he learned what happened, he apologized all around, asked if there was anything else.
“Two day suspension,” the vice principal said. “Out of school.”
Then my father thanked everyone. Thanked them.
In the car, my dad said nothing. He wasn’t angry, just worried, as if he had no idea what came next. Which is why I never ask him about her. Because what could he say? He probably knows less than I do. Less than I do, or more. I know he wishes my mother would come home and raise me, though he won’t say it.
I tell Sasha he wasn’t mad, just worried. “Jesus, your dad is sweet. My dad would ground me for, like, a month.”
“Your dad? Isn’t he the kind of guy who would, like, put you up on his shoulders so you could see a parade better?”
“Well, yeah, he did that when we were younger, of course.” Of course. “But he can still be wicked strict. My mom would use the old: Sasha Marie, I’m very disappointed in you. And then she’d plop herself down on my bed for an hour or so trying to figure out where they went wrong, what I’m so angry about.”
Sasha realizes what she’s said and throws her arm around me. “Oh, Nola Baby.” Her breath smells like vinegar and cracker crumbs. “I shouldn’t have said that stuff about my mother. I’m sorry. You act all tough on the outside, but inside you’re such a marshmallow.”
“We?” My mother never sat on my bed in her life, by the way. Not even in her good years. Year.
But Sasha, crazy as she is, would never get into fights. She’s a smart girl who doesn’t look like one. Have a kid in your class no one else wants to work with? Sasha pairs up with her as if she can’t believe her luck (which is how we met). It’s my reputation that gets us both in trouble. It followed me from Wyassup Technical High School from which I was thrown out for burning a girl’s hair with a curling iron, for holding on, my teacher said, beyond all reason. I could’ve claimed it was an accident, but that girl, when we got partnered up, asked me if I had washed my hands.
Here at least one teacher has already pulled Sasha aside and reminded her of that birds of a feather thing, but Sasha assures them: “It’s an act. She’s very sweet.” Something no one has ever said about me and which even makes me doubt her judgment.
This is a small town where everyone else has lived their whole life. Our teachers are Sasha’s neighbors, someone her mother dated when she was in high school. My father and me? We moved here a year ago and I took a bus every morning for an hour to the tech. Now, every class feels like a family reunion, a family reunion plus The Mean Girl. I know no one except Sasha, but everyone knows me.
Tonight, we’re bored. Well, every night we’re bored, but tonight we’re also hungry and a little drunk. Sasha brought a bottle of red wine and, except for the sleeve of crackers and some potato chip crumbs we had to lick off our fingers, we haven’t eaten all day as I was thrown out of lunch before I touched my tray. Sasha never brings money for lunch and mine is paid for by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts so I usually share it with her.
Sasha’s feet are propped on my coffee table. She’s wearing white socks whose bottoms are filthy. I stare out the window at the snow swirling through the rainbow lights and say, “Fuck it. This storm isn’t keeping us in. We’re going into town.”
Town is down the hill, less than a mile. It contains an art gallery that sells only things with crows on them, a tiny and ridiculously expensive health store, and several shops that have been in people’s family for generations. It also has four or five pizza joints and one of them must be open. Of course, all five of them could be open and it wouldn’t mean anything to us as we have no money. God forbid Sasha comes prepared for anything, but I am full of ideas.
“Let’s call Rope,” I say. Sasha has a big laugh which is only natural coming out of her head. It’s a bit oversized and can alarm you when you’ve been away from her for a while, especially if she has her hair pulled back, as she does now.
“User,” she says. “That boy loves you, and all you love is his money.”
“You could get a job,” I say.
“I will. In the summer.”
I don’t say, You could also ask your parents to throw you a few bills, but knowing Sasha, she came expecting we’d have cabinets full of food, that we’d actually have someone here who thought of groceries.
Jason Roper has no more money than we do, but he does have a job at a plant store and receives tips for hauling shrubs and potting soil into lazy people’s cars, so lately, he can be counted on for cash. It isn’t exactly true he loves me. Though he might think he can get something off me. Another rumor: I am a slut. I wear black eye makeup in a school where no one wears anything fancier than dreadlocks and nose piercings. And, okay, I’m no virgin, but I have been more selective than people might think from looking at me, if they’re the kind of people who think like that about kids. And frankly, if they are, they’re fucking sketchy.
So my story so far, impatient-mother-version: It’s snowing, we’re bored and hungry.
My mother might be onto something here.
Rope responds to his text immediately. I feel bad that we only call him when we need money, but it’s not that I don’t like him. He’s weird the way kids in this town are weird -- you can never quite tell if someone’s on something or if they’re just fucking spacey – and legend has it he went to prom by himself and sort of hung out without talking to anyone, but he wasn’t unhappy about it. He didn’t even ask anyone to go because, if he had, the girls in this town are just freaky enough to have said yes. That was a bunch of years ago. He’s twenty-something and still doesn’t have his license, but he’s clean and not bad looking either. His father plays the ukulele with Sasha’s father in their garage and Rope hangs out listening some nights. The thing about Rope is that he doesn’t get things like sarcasm or exaggeration. If you tell him your head is killing you, for example, he’ll assume you have a fucking tumor.
“Meet us in front of Mocha’s,” I say, and Rope is in. No mention of the weather.
Sasha’s Birkenstocks smell like bleu cheese and collect wedges of snow beneath her heels before we’re even out of the driveway. The Christmas lights cast her in psychedelic acid trip colors. She has her head thrown back to catch snowflakes into that mouth of hers, and then she collapses on the street and makes a snow angel.
“Isn’t this the greatest you’ve ever felt in your life?” she says.
“You’re seriously messed up,” I say, refusing to join her. Snow angels? This is what happens when your parents are normal. You flop all over the planet like you own it.
My cheap sneakers are not exactly foul weather gear, either. We leave our jackets unzipped and, though we made an attempt to locate hats and mittens, we came up with only a tattered Red Sox cap and some oven mitts so I say what the hell. We’ll use our hoods and pockets.
“Christ it’s cold,” I say. Surprise, surprise, right? But seeing the snow fall and hearing the wind howl when you are inside is a lot different than being out in the shit. Then, I skate out into the street nearly cartwheeling into a snowdrift.
Once I right myself, Sasha hip-checks me into the drift anyway. I fall sideways, planting my ear into the stinging cold then come up fast and yank my arm away from her when she goes to pat it.
“Fucking A,” I say.
That stupid, barking laugh again. I am pissed. One side of my face feels as if it’s burning off from the cold, but even I have never swung at someone I consider a friend. When she finally stops laughing, she says, “Jesus, you can be scary. Let’s never fight, okay?”
She gets all serious and puts her arm around me again which feels okay at first. It’s warmer, at least, but walking when someone has her arm around your shoulder is like carrying a log along on the journey so finally, I shrug her off and say I can’t see to cross the street.
“You really think people are driving in this?” she says. “More maniacs like us who are too stupid to stay home?” She finds this hysterical.
“You’re drunk,” I say, and then I laugh, too. What the hell? We are maniacs. Freezing ourselves to death to bum pizza money off a guy who probably has brain damage.
Mocha’s, our fair trade coffee shop, is closed and this also cracks us up because the owner is Tibetan. You’d think someone from Tibet wouldn’t be turning away business just because it’s snowing, but there it is. When Rope finally ambles over to us, he stares at us without laughing and this makes us laugh even harder until we’re doubled over, stumbling down Main Street in search of food.
This town is also full of Greeks. The Greeks make great pizza and at least one family lives over its shop so we don’t have any trouble finding something that’s open. (Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Greeks get, like, no snow, right?) Anyway, the pizza is good, but we spend precious hot pizza time having a swirling cheese contest. Turns out, Rope is pretty good at this, gives himself a mustache, makes me a wedding band.
A couple weeks after my mother left, I went to a pawn shop in a nearby town – no need to pawn anything in this place – to see if she’d been cold enough, smart enough, to leave her band behind. It was only a little thing, thin as wire. I didn’t find it. Those were the days I went looking for the slamming door.
We save the cheesiest piece for last, the one with a hunk of mozzarella at its tip. Rope gets up to get a knife so he can slice it as even as possible.
“We’ll be good sharers,” Sasha says, leaning into me. I’m still cold and she’s so warm, I wish she’d stay like that for a minute and she does. She starts to sing in my ear, “When you love someone, really love someone . . .” Some creepy song from her parents’ record collection. That’s right. I said record.
We’re the only ones here and I imagine what we look like to everyone outside, sitting so close in a warm, bright space. And what do you know? We look like everyone else, only warmer.
“I knew this girl once who had a weird attachment to ducks,” I say.
She says, “Hmm,” which no one says seriously except her.
I start slow: “She was a rich girl who had no friends, but she had a brother. Both of them had something wrong with them.”
“What do you mean, wrong with them?”
So much for leaving out certain details. Except I can’t remember very clearly. So I make this up: “She couldn’t hear well so she talked funny. He had something wrong with his face. When he smiled, only some of his muscles worked.” I have to keep pausing to omit other details, however, like that I only knew them because my father had a job as their handyman for a while. That we stayed in an apartment over their garage that smelled like mouse shit and gasoline. “Anyway, the brother died one winter. No one knows how. The parents wouldn’t say and they were rich so they could keep that kind of stuff secret. The next summer, the girl got six ducks.”
Sasha would want to picture them, would want to think about picking them up, so I push on. I tell myself, if she stops listening, she stops listening. We have pizza now. We are dry. “Beautiful ducks – white necks with black bodies, speckled beaks. They let you hold them and when you did, their hearts beat beneath their feathers and they purred, like cats.” Though I never held them, only watched the girl stroke their sleek heads as she cradled them.
Rope searches bin after bin for knives until he finally asks someone behind the counter.
“They sound magical. No wonder she was so attached. Especially because she lost her brother.”
Before I can continue, Rope walks towards us, waving the plastic utensil like a light saber.
“Isn’t he terrific?” Sasha says. “You should marry him for real.”
Rope snorts and then gets a hopeful look on his face. But I curl my lip and say, “Never.” As in, I’m never getting married, not that I’d never marry Rope (though, of course, I wouldn’t) but, okay, I get how this might sound to the poor dumb kid. He sets the knife down on my placemat, then slouches in his seat and puts his hands on his lap.
Before I can apologize – and I would have – the door opens and some kids walk in, dressed in big puffy coats and the kind of pants people wear skiing. They stomp their boots on the welcome mat and bump into each other, slurring and laughing, high as kites and I should know, though the kids here do some serious designer shit I’ve never tried. One of them, a really beautiful blonde who I’ve heard trades favors for mollies, flicks her eyes our way and then ignores us even though Rope raises his hand.
When the boys see us, however, they call out to both Rope and Sasha. One of them, a tall gawky kid with fierce red hair comes over and shakes Rope’s hand.
“What’s up, fellow storm orphans?” he says. Like I said, high as kites. His eyes are nearly shut, and his pants are so low slung, I’m eye level with one white slice of flat stomach and a trail of red pubes. Sasha giggles and says, “Sit with us. Please?”
The boy looks at me and half nods, half smiles, stupid with mind altering substances, dulled like the ground out nub of a pencil lead but not quite as entertaining. He pulls a chair over.
“This is my new best friend in the world: Nola,” Sasha says.
A minute ago, she’d been about to tell me off, but, okay, this is how it is. Same old story, short enough to please even my mother and also, perhaps, familiar to her: Women are fools for men. They give up everything -- every freakin’ thing -- for that kind of attention even if it’s from someone as ugly as this kid.
“Nice to meet you,” the kid says. “How’d you all get way out here?”
Sasha lives in a tiny house out near the water. A house that has been in her family since her Pilgrim ancestors dropped anchor here and started digging for clams.
“Nola lives on the hill,” she says. Then it occurs to her she can get even more specific: “Her house is the one with all the lights on it.”
Why tell him that? Why make me sound more like a freak? Because it doesn’t matter to her, how I feel. It only matters what she might say to impress him. Like this is the kind of introduction that would get me accepted into the world where Sasha lives most of the time. Who would want anything to do with a kid whose father refuses to take down his Christmas lights, especially if they knew he thinks they’ll act as some kind of Hallmark movie beacon to his wandering wife?
“That’s cool,” the redhead says. “Got your house all blinking and shit.”
There goes my eyebrow. “Fuck you,” I say.
But he laughs and plops himself down, legs splayed out so wide, he hits mine without registering it, and spins the pizza tray around.
“Nola, baby,” Sasha says. “It’s a compliment.”
Red raises his chin at the last piece.“You gonna eat that?”
Rope says he’s all set. Sasha says, “Take it.”
They talk for a while about kids I don’t know. So-and-so, famed for the yurt he built in his backyard, is snowboarding in Utah for the winter, So-and-So Number Two nannies for an ambassador’s family in Sweden or Norway or one of those countries where every other person commits suicide. They laugh so hard at nothing, I want to puke up my pizza. Either that or drink more of the wine, but the bottle is a) home, and b) empty.
His friends glance our way again and then the slutty blonde leads them to the table farthest from us. “William, you asshole,” she says, her back to him. “We’re not saving you a seat.”
He shakes his head, tips back in his chair as if he’s got all night.
Sasha says, “So, William, how about giving us a little something something?”
“Happiness, you mean?” he says, grinning. His teeth are as pointed as a fox’s. Rows of little tiny canines.
Rope looks back and forth, wondering if he should smile.
“Come home with us later. We’ll find something.”
Sasha says, “What do you think, Nola?” Rope nods.
The blonde looks back over her shoulder at me, slides her eyes away when I stare back. I know all about you, bitch, I want to say. People like you have been staring at me long before my father started advertising the freak show with a year-round light display. I am not spending ten seconds more with you and your pals. I was telling a story. We were having a contest. I can’t help it if Sasha’s memory is short, if everyone’s memory is, as brief and as stunning as the flash on one of those old-fashioned cameras where the photographer had to put his head under a black hood so he wouldn’t be blinded.
I stand up. “You go,” I say. “I’m out.”
Rope stands up too, which makes me hate him and then makes me wish I could love him. Things could be pretty fucking simple if you could just give up hoping for things you can’t even describe.
Red says, “You got some serious steam coming out your head, New Girl.”
“Don’t be mad, NoNo,” Sasha says. Like she’s from Georgia or something. “Sit down and finish your story. Rope and William love stories, don’t you guys?”
I shrug my worthless coat around my shoulders.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say and try to fling the door open, but it’s got one of those vacuum things. Natura-fucking-ly.
At first, the air feels good, like hitting the water might after a hot day’s dive off a rock face into the black surface of a quarry. But it doesn’t take long for the tips of my fingers, the rims of my ears, to ache. Rope comes up behind me and says nothing, only shuffles along making sloppy ski tracks in the snow.
“We should slow down,” he says and this makes me stop and glare at him. “I mean, for Sasha.” He tries whistling. He calls her name into the howling wind.
“What don’t you understand?” I say. “She’s not coming back. Even if you make a complete and total fool of yourself whistling like that, trying to get her attention, she’s gone. Why can’t you see that?”
Wind whips strands of sopping hair into my mouth, sticks them to my face. Great idea coming out into this maelstrom (I know some words, all right? And sometimes, I want to use them). Great idea thinking there’s any fun to be had in this town where people have so much time on their hands, they devise all kinds of ways to numb the boredom. And how can anyone blame them? Blame us?
I want to fling myself at Rope and knock him against the brick building behind him. He’d let me. He’d take it. But he gestures towards the pizza place. A square of piss-colored light reflects off the sidewalk and then the door opens, and Sasha spills out into it, calling: “Wait up, you nut jobs.”
I start walking faster but she catches up, grabs my arm and leans into me as if we’re in a cheesy girlfriends movie. Snow spits stinging crystals at our faces. “Were you just going to leave me there? That’s not very nice.”
“I thought you wanted to go with those assholes,” I say, staring hard at the ground so the snow doesn’t prick at my eyeballs. “You know, smoke dope, get laid?”
Sasha stops but I keep going. “Why do you say things like that?” she says. “Like you’re the asshole?”
I flip her off without looking back and this is enough, what with the ice and my numb legs and the plasticky soles of my stupid sneakers, to start me skiing again along the sidewalk, and this time, I can’t stop. Instead, my arms butterfly and the world pitches as my body launches itself towards a bank of newly plowed snow. Through my panic, I hear Rope: “Tuck and roll, Nola. Tuck and roll, dude.”
I land face first in the crusty pile and feel a searing pain in my nose. At first, the warmth soothes me and then I realize: blood, a spreading inkblot of it in the snow when I lift my head. I shake off someone’s hands and kneel there, cupping my hands over my face.
“I think you broke it,” Rope says, inexpressive as someone reading aloud the weather forecast for a day he plans to spend inside.
Sasha kneels beside me, her raw hands holding more snow up to the bleeding even though I shove her off the first time.
“It’s not broken, just bleeding. This will help.” Her face is so close to mine I can see how the snow has stuck her eyelashes together in dark arrows, but it shocks me when she kisses my cheek softly and says, “It’s okay to cry.”
We step into the parking garage of the publishing company that took over one of the old mills this town used to be known for before it became the home of pot smoking weavers, antique dealers, and coffee aficionados and their offspring. The wind still howls through the empty levels, but at least we can stay dry. We hunker down beside a car that looks like it’s been here a while. Sasha and Rope sit so close to me, it’s possible to feel some heat through my jeans even though they’ve begun to freeze against my leg.
Rope lights a cigarette and we pass it around which also makes us feel, like, half a degree warmer.
“For you,” Sasha says and blows smoke rings over my head. “Halos.”
Rope pokes them with Ichabod fingers. I choke on my first drag, my nose clogged with freezing blood and snot. Pretty, right?
“Tuck and fucking roll?” I say, and then even Rope laughs, our voices echoing in the spaces around us.
When we finally stop, Sasha says, “So the ducks purred like kittens?”
Rope wants to know what ducks and Sasha has settled in beside me and my nose is killing me even if it isn’t broken, so I catch Rope up. Even though it’s the second time in less than an hour that she’s heard the story, Sasha gets very still. The cold leaves me and for a minute I remember that might be a sign of hypothermia, but who cares? So we fall asleep here and die together? As if that’s the worst thing that can happen.
“It was the perfect place for ducks,” I say. “There’s a small pond that gets really loud in the spring from all those horny frogs. Birds love it, too. They make so much noise, no one can sleep in for miles around. But there’s also foxes. Sometimes it’s possible to see their kits romping all over the stonewalls and many nights, even over the pond noises, you can hear the coyotes.”
“Do they really howl like wolves?” Sasha asks, but Rope says, “They yip, like wicked happy dogs.” Then he imitates them and again the building fills with our noises. With details imagined and then, for that moment, experienced.
“The girl wasn’t really a girl,” I say. “She had gone to college already, but she lived at home and even though she lived in such a great place, she never came outside until she had the ducks. She bought them a plastic pool so they could swim in it.”
“What about the pond?” Sasha asks.
“She thought it wasn’t safe.” Total guess, but now that I’ve begun . . .“So her dad paid for someone to build a little island in the middle of it where the ducks could go if they were in danger. But every night, she would lock them in this shed. In the morning, when she opened the door, the ducks would waddle out. One day – they were big by then and didn’t have any more of those yellow and brown fuzzy feathers– she led them to the water’s edge, but they would only plop in if she put her feet in first and then, as soon as she came out, they’d follow her.”
“They thought she was their mother,” Sasha says, sounding sleepy which is also a sign of hypothermia. This reminds me to hurry up which also worries me because there really isn’t a story, not completely, and I have no idea why I’ve wanted to tell them this at all.
“Finally, she left them out at night.”
“Because they could go to the island.” This from Rope who pinches the cigarette in his hand and flicks it out before us where it sizzles for a second before being extinguished.
“Yes. She must have believed they’d be safe.” I try imagining how she fell asleep those nights listening for them. And how maybe sleep didn’t come. How maybe it never came completely to a house with that kind of loss in it.
“But it was strange, you know, and kind of sad, the way those ducks followed her and how much she loved them.”
My breath must be warming my nose because blood trickles out. I wipe it with the cuff of my coat and Sasha straightens up to check out what I’m doing.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Maybe we should get going.”
“In a minute,” she says. “What about the girl’s friends? Where were they?”
"She didn’t have any. Neither did her brother.”
Rope says, “Huh,” as if it’s never occurred to him. Friendlessness. Loneliness. Or maybe because it has.
“When the first duck disappeared and she asked if we’d seen it, no one said the obvious. We just looked around where we were standing like a bunch of idiots and said, ‘Gee, no, but if we do, we’ll let you know.’ And she looked relieved! She looked like she believed it could survive out there! Once, she even found feathers in the reeds along the edge of the pond, and every time another duck disappeared, she’d come to ask us to look for it. Some people had never heard her speak before. But the worst thing was, after we all went back inside, she would go out to the pond and the woods calling them.”
We sit as if listening for her but all we hear is the streetlights’ buzz.
“Did they all die?” Sasha asks so quietly, I wonder if she’s actually spoken.
I shake my head and the pain that ricochets up my nose makes my eyes water. “Not all of them. The ones that lived, she gave away. To a farm somewhere.”
“Why did she ever let them out?”
“How would she know any better? Her father said they’d be fine, and she believed him. I told you, something was not quite right with her.”
“She trusted him,” Rope says. “Even though he never told her the truth about her brother.”
Snowplows rumble through the street below, their swirling lights reaching the tops of our shoes before fanning away.
“Maybe she never asked about him,” I say. Because, really, what would be the point in knowing?
Rope stands up and reaches for our hands. “We got to get moving before we freeze to death,” he says. But instead of him leading us outside, we climb the stairs to the top level of the parking garage.
“I want to show you something,” he says and makes us close our eyes as he guides us forward, bumbling. Sasha laughs but I imagine us drawing closer to the roof edge and push down the terror. Once he has us in position, he stands behind us with his arms wrapped around us and says, “Surprise!”
We look out into a white city, striped with one gray street. Streetlights capture the canting snow, a blinking yellow light at the intersection, the security lights in shop windows in the safest town in America. It’s hard to tell where we are exactly, but we – even I, through my poor nose – can smell the salt of the nearby ocean through all this impossible white.
“Where are we?” I say.
Sasha says,“One minute I was beside that pond and the peepers were going crazy and the next thing I know --” She looks out at the space before us.
Rope is holding us tight so that there’s no way we can go over and maybe this is why I stand there and think: We will never die.
“You haven’t even seen the surprise yet,” he says into our ears and then we both look right at the same time, up the hill we still need to climb to reach home, and there it is: the kaleidoscope of lights that is my house.
My mother would like the story to end here. She would not understand how, when we left a few minutes later, speechless with cold, Sasha stumbled into the path of the one car on the road that night and, but for a split second reaction by Rope, would have gone under the sliding tires as easily as one of those ducks succumbing to a predator’s jaws. When she stood up, collapsing into Rope’s bony chest, she laughed as if it was the funniest thing in the world, as if we hadn’t just seen it – Rope and I – another way a world ends.
My mother also wouldn’t want me to say we were the happy family then. Those days when outside another of our rented houses, that girl’s calls only made us draw away from the windows, into the tighter knot of us, my father wrapping electrical tape around an extension cord so he could plug another fan in, me digging out an old crossword from the basket by the sofa and resigning myself to an afternoon indoors, my mother searching drawer after drawer for something she already had.