“Five,” Oz said distinctly. “I have five candies. But I’m not showing them to you.” He shook the candy box with the feverish kind of possession little kids have.

“Fine,” I said. I wasn’t interested in his old candy anyway. A few months back I’d have told him that I didn’t need his old candy, because back then I had no less than fifty assorted pieces in a plastic sack, left over from Halloween and probably moldering away stashed in my closet. Only I’d eaten many of them after Eva got sick. Not all that much, just enough so that the hard sour taste of spoiled candy and the dry crumpled chocolates convinced me I’d expire from food poisoning. I hadn’t had the taste for them since.

To Oz this didn’t matter. My mother, for once, made no objections about my teaching him. My only guess is that she was too absorbed with caring for Eva. When Mama Regan wasn’t in her best moods, and sat dribbling cigar juice over the carpet and periodically battering away at the television with her black oak stick to keep herself entertained, the job of distracting her fell to me. I thought I’d buckle under it, but I surprised myself at how easy it seemed. So I distracted Mama Regan from her television and tried to keep her mind on reality, instead of dead folks, while Oz hopped around us, happily reciting whatever school task I gave him.

What with Eva and Mama Regan, no one had time for Oz. For a time he’d stayed with Pete Conroy, who didn’t mind him, and when he returned, he regaled us all with tales of his adventures.

“At Pete Conroy’s, there was ice cream seven times a day.”

“No, there wasn’t.”

Oz frowned. He clutched his pad of construction papers in both hands. I’d gotten them for him to draw with some of my money from collecting for Pete Conroy. “How come?”

“Because if there was,” I told him, folding a dish towel and giving it a snap, “ Mom would have his head. She’s convinced he’s a moonshiner as it is.”

“Watch how you say that,” warned Mama Regan. “It’s an honorable profession. That crazy ice cream man wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about it.”

“You like him, Mama Regan, remember?” Oz said.

“Ossian, I do not like the man, I tolerate him. It doesn’t mean the man’s sensible.”

After that, I had to write down the words tolerate, moonshiner, and head for Oz to copy. We only choose words he had an interest in, because he went at them with such enthusiasm, it was hard to believe he’d been held back. The school was going to be puzzled when he showed up to first grade with such words.

“You’re going to first grade, aren’t you?” Mama Regan asked. She already knew that’s where he was going. We had made it our goal. I was spending more spare time with Oz, even though Mom said it was no good, spending so much time with my little brother, since he wasn’t the same age. Besides, it distracted me from Eva.

*          *          *

Eva was mad as anything when I told her we were going out. “Who’s we?” she asked me, without her usual prissiness.

“Oz and me and Mama Regan,” I told her.

Eva nodded. There was nothing in her eyes. It scared me. I couldn’t see Eva looking out at me. I mean, princess Eva, the one Mom and Dad used to bend over backwards for. This Eva had a paleness about her, a transluceny, as if she wasn’t really there. This Eva had muddy-colored blonde hair and the manner of a wet hen.

She thrust her hands suddenly toward Mama Regan. “Tell my fortune. I’ll give you a quarter if you will.”

Mama Regan gazed at her. She didn’t take the offered hands, though she bent her head like the telling was about to begin. Then she shook her head, two quick times, like a person clearing their ears of bugs. “I’m sorry, Eva. Your hands aren’t working today. I can’t see anything.”

“That’s not right,” Eva told her. I waited for her to command. “It isn’t like a television reception.” She seemed desperate, and it was kind of sad. “You can’t just stop knowing people’s fortunes.”

“It’s cheating,” Oz added. I watched him. He had taken out his five candies again, sticky and tattered now from handling, and he tossed them with short clumsy motions from one hand to the other.

“Grace could show you her magic tricks,” Mama Regan said in consolation.

Eva shook her head. I knew she’d seen my magic tricks more than she cared to, especially when I practiced, and more so now I’d had an actual show in a basement. Thirty people showed up for it, and there was yellow cake and lemonade and milk, and Pete Conroy and Oz made paper decorations for it. Oz still bragged about his. He made a whole paper chain and a large banner. He told Pete Conroy what he wanted to say while Pete wrote it and Ossian scrawled his message below this. It was the longest sentence I’d ever seen Oz put together. Afterwards I folded the banner to put away in my room. I was very proud of him.

Mama Regan told us she’d wait outside for us, since her legs were speaking to her today.

I pestered Eva, but I didn’t have the heart for it, and neither did Eva. Her eyes didn’t glimmer. Finally I said, “You want a splinter from the mill?”

Oz caught hold of my hand, pulling downward until I winced. “Gracie, we aren’t supposed to go to the mill. We —“

“Shut up,” I said. Oz sat obediently on the edge of Eva’s bed and folded his hands. “Be quiet, okay?” I regretted that I’d said it hard like that.

“So how about it? You want it or not?”

I studied Eva’s face. Something hopeful had come into it, a glimmer of her former self. Eva never would have gone into the mill herself, though she would have enjoyed hearing everything. She was grounded, indefinitely, as it turned out, which Eva herself translated as until the snow turned blue.

Instead of mocking, Eva’s voice dropped to a whisper. “When?”

I shrugged, hoping it looked like bravado instead of deliberate indifference. “Whenever. When all of us go out I can…” I paused. A plan was forming in my mind, myself approaching the mill, like a movie. The mill, I knew, was full of security lights, even at night, and modern machinery to strip the jackets off logs the way you’d twirl shavings from a sharpened pencil. There was no fence surrounding the mill, however, there was a crochety ancient man called Eddie to guard the place. Eddie had entered the occupational folklore of the mill and its surrounding areas, being too skinny and deaf to be practical protection against any serious threat. As children, Eva and I pressed our noses against the mesh-covered windows of the guard shack until we wore a pertupetul wire cross hatching across our noses, the symbol of bravery among the elite in the playground. Our sole means of protection against Eddie was that he lacked the legs and wind to run fast, and that he was entirely without a great black oak stick like Mama Regan’s. A stick such as that, Eddie probably knew, was at its best as a missile of war against small children and had the added advantage of destroying televisions when you no longer had the patience to change the channel. “I can sneak past Eddie’s shack,” I finished, realizing I had no idea yet how I would accomplish this feat.

“That’s dumb,” Eva said with some of her usual sarcasm. I was pleased. “And if being stupid wasn’t enough, it’s illegal too.”

“You shouldn’t talk about illegal.” I had the satisfaction of seeing Eva’s face twist. Her mouth half-opened. However, she shut it fast enough, and not from being proper, either. I could tell.

Several uncomfortable minutes followed. I had what I’d come for, because Eva had some of her old spark back. I’d gotten a rise out of her.

“How will you know Grace got the splinter from the mill?” Oz asked. “She could just pick it up any old where, and you wouldn’t know.”

I wished he hadn’t said that. I was beginning to have second thoughts, and I could have easily faked it if Oz hadn’t spoken out. Lately he’d taken to telling his thoughts more. Not just to me, but Mom and Dad and teachers too. Even folks in our little store said they’d never seen the like. Mama Regan told them nothing the sort, that it wasn’t anything at all, it was my doing. And then she’d go on about me having green old-soul eyes – as if that meant something – when everyone knows green eyes are common enough.

I told Eva I’d think of a way to prove it to her, and then I pulled Oz out of there before he decided to share his opinion again. He put up a pretty good fuss about it, muttering unintelligibly, his mouth full to the brim with his five candies. Still, it was better than him having a temper tantrum right then and there, which, believe me, he would not have hestitated to do three months earlier.

“Good, Oz,” I muttered, “You’re patient.” The last thing I wanted was one of his fits. Oz didn’t get into them unless he was frustrated beyond fixing, but then he didn’t spare anything. Real screaming, throwing stuff, take-cover fits, these were. Everyone’s nerves were worn raw from Eva’s troubles, so Oz and I, the misfit children, were pretty left to do as we pleased. We decided we liked it this way.

Oz was good and quiet until we reached Mama Regan outside, when he ran straight to her. “Gracie shushes me too much,” he told her, sticking his tongue out in my direction.

Mama Regan studied her great oak stick. “Everyone has their troubles, now, Ossian.”

“Where we going?” Oz asked.

“Don’t know.”

“Can we stop by Kangaroo’s?” Oz yelled. I cringed at the noise, but I couldn’t very well tell him about using an outside voice, since we were outside.

The asphalt that served for our front yard burned my feet, so I had to hop from one to other. Oz joined me in this, although he wore a grubby pair of black sneakers with white patches over the toes.

Mama Regan shifted her stick in annoyance. “You have perfectly suitable shoes inside this house, Grace. Your father paid enough for them.”

“But it’s summer –“

“Now.”

I got the shoes. I barely used them except for school, and when I minded the store, where having barefoot employees didn’t look right. I didn’t like the shoes. They were nice enough, but they’d been bought with money from the Cadiallac Dad had sold, and I remembered the car too much not to think of it when I saw the shoes.

We did leave then, although none of us knew where we were headed. At Kangaroo’s, we found Kangaroo’s father out barbecueing. Sweat trickled through the bandanna tied round his head, and he wore a holey white undershirt and a pair of khaki cargo shorts. Mama Regan smiled at him. She knew my mother would have died if she encountered someone dressed like that.

“Is Kangaroo around?” I asked.

Mr. Fulton wiped his forehead with his left hand and jerked the thumb of the other toward the trailer. “There. Where else?”

I headed for the trailer door, but Oz beat me to it, and hollered for Kangaroo. He thought a lot of Kangaroo. He emerged from the dark coolness of the trailer towing Kangaroo by the hand.

“Doing computer work?” I asked.

Kangaroo pushed his glasses up and grinned, exposing a newly chipped tooth. “Is there anything else?”

“For people who aren’t moles, there is.”

“Moles,” Oz said. He fished his notebook from one of his pockets, and I wrote down the word mole for him, hoping he hadn’t put those candies on top of the notebook. I’d paid enough for the notebook.

“Is Eva still in confined in prison?”

“Sure is.” I said. “You know, sometimes I wonder about you. You have a funny way of saying things.”

“Well, it is, isn’t it? And if something is, I can’t help saying something about it, can I?”

We’d come to the main road by now. As always, we stood away from it and drank it in. You’d never think a road was a fine thing to look at, but this one was, for all the dust and grime and poorly painted lines on it. The road went somewhere, after all, and that was the main thing.

“There’s something I can’t figure about you,” Kangaroo itched the back of his head, making his hair stand up in stiff spikes. “How long you think you’ll keep minding the store?”

We kept walking. I kept my gaze focused on Oz while I struggled over an answer. I’d mind the store as long as needed, that was certain enough. I had no say in it, though the work wasn’t hard or even unpleasant. There were cricket noises, and the corn meal smell of their cage, and corn chips and coffee and the hard battered tortillas my father gave away free to the lumber workers. I grew used to the boredom after all these years.

“It’s being in jail, same as Eva,” Kangaroo said with an aimless kind of gesture, the way you would skip a stone. I wasn’t sure if he thought he’d convince me, but I know he believed what he said.

Mama Regan thrust her black stick at Kangaroo, who staggered, leaping nimbly backward before crashing into the weeds by the edge of the highway. After accomplishing this, she continued on in her halting steps without a word.

Oz shuffled over and offered a hand to Kangaroo. He pulled him to his feet, and I noticed Oz had grown stronger.

“It isn’t the same,” I told Kangaroo severely, and both of them stared at me.

“She — your grandmother,” Kangaroo gulped, white-faced and stammering, pushing his glasses up so rapidly that it resembled some kind of primitive jig, “She tried to kill me, and that’s all you can say?”

“Look,” I snapped. Mama Regan herself strolled far ahead of us, even with her stick, and we’d have a hard enough time catching up to her without discussing killing folks in the bargain. By the side of the road, no less, which was uncivilized. Good Lord, I was beginning to sound like my mother. “If she tried to kill you, which is unlikely —“

“She missed.”

Oz nodded agreement at this and I gave him a glare. He returned it.

“She’s an old witch-woman, anyway.” I could tell Kangaroo regretted this a second after he said it because he turned white. Milk-colored, only with pink along his mouth. Mama Regan might not have been out of earshot. His voice sank to a low insistent whisper, very fast. “I didn’t mean that, Grace. Honest. I only meant she –“

“I know what you meant.”

He looked down at his feet, wrenched his glasses off and strode after Mama Regan, though a good distance from her. I almost felt sorry for him. I couldn’t forgive what he said. I didn’t know why, exactly, because I hadn’t been in Mama Regan’s good graces yet. No one had, including Mom and Dad. At least he hadn’t started in on Eva. I couldn’t have that.

Up ahead, I could hear Oz telling Kangaroo all about our plan to take a splinter from the mill. He might be stronger and have less tantrums, but he still couldn’t keep his miserable mouth shut when it came to secrets.

*          *          *

Eva told everyone that night at dinner that she didn’t want to be called Eva anymore.

My father said he’d heard enough, that she ought to have been through this kind of stuff two years ago, and he for one was not going to stand for it.

“She’s sick,” Mom said. I pulled a face at Oz. The way my mother said that, you’d have thought Eva was off somewhere, dying honorably with a saint’s expression, just like those horrible kids in old movies.

Oz giggled at the face I pulled. Mama Regan’s stick was ever-ready beside the table and she rattled it. We all looked at her, in case she had something to add, but she only wanted the gravy passed, and when it was, that proved too slow for her.

“She’s coddled, that’s all,” said Dad, shoveling peas in his mouth and wiping his face with the cloth napkins Mom set out. “She’s had it too easy around here. A princess.” He stopped with a sudden sharp glance at Mom. “You have two other children or haven’t you noticed?”

Oz and I gaped at them both before Mama Regan banged her black oak stick against the floor. This got everyone’s attention, including Eva, who had said nothing during all this. If things had been normal, she’d have been turned about by now and left her dinner, but she seemed to have neither the inclination or energy for it.

“That’s enough.” Mama Regan said. I could hear her teeth rattle, a low sound like rain-soaked wind chimes. She swallowed to make the ancient ring of fat around her throat wobble. “Ossian, go ahead, child.”

“I wasn’t.”

“You weren’t, what?” I said.

Oz blinked. I searched his face for signs of nervousness, but the only expression he gave me was one of interest. “Saying,” he said. “I wasn’t saying anything.” After a minute he withdrew his notebook from his lap and flipped it to a new page. “Write down coddled, please.”

Eva spoke at last. She shouted, or at least something like it, except for her mouth being drawn up and her eyes tight against the light from above the table. “You see? She’s at again. They’re — they’re writing down every word, like — like spies. Oz doesn’t need to learn every word we say around here.”

I didn’t know Eva was going to be genuinuely upset. I don’t think anyone really expected anything other than her usual fuss. She always raised trouble over something or other gone wrong, and it had come to be background noise.

“No one ever notices me!” Eva said. “What if I’m tired of cheerleading? What then? What are my choices?”
I realized, startled, that Eva was the one nobody noticed. Not me or Oz. Eva. Because everyone always expected the perfect one, they never saw her.

“Young lady,” Mom was eating again, slowly and with the careful precision that meant she was angry, “because of what you’ve done, you don’t have many choices now. Later, maybe. But for now, your choices will be made.”

Silence came over the dinner table. We eat and swallowed but there was no chatter and even Oz was quiet. It wasn’t a meal at all.

*          *          *

I decided, more than ever now, that I needed to get the splinter for Eva. I don’t know why, really. The splinter stayed in front of me while I did my work around our little shop. I did the sweeping and fed the crickets their wet cardboard, and the whole time, that splinter dangled in my imagination, taunting me. The pneumatic drill Dad used for the cars hummed next door in the autobody shop, and at noon Dad came in for his noon glass of milk and slab of corned beef.

He ate these standing up by freezers where we kept the cold soda, the way he’d done ever since I could remember. First a bite of corned beef, then the milk, then the beef again, spacing this with glances around the shop to make sure everything was in its place.

I sat on the counter, cross legged, waiting until he’d finished.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, coming over to me. It didn’t take him long, not with our shop that small. “You didn’t have lunch with me.”

“I’m thinking.”

“About?”

“Oz. Eva and Mom. Things.”

“Things,” Dad said. He rubbed the top of his head. The grease from cars worked its way in around his part and drove him crazy with scratching. “Got a job for you. Work’s getting heavy over with the cars. You think you can handle this place here while I go on a business trip?”

I might have jumped at the chance. I thought it over carefully first, before answering. Kangaroo’s warning was still ringing in my ears. “How long?” I said.

Dad sighed. “Two weeks. Think it over. It’s awhile to mind the store by yourself.”

“I’ve done it before,” I said hotly, before I could catch myself.

Dad laughed. “That was short time. You’d believe different after weeks of waiting on these lumberjacks and fishermen.”

“How much?” I said cautiously.

“Who says I’d pay you?”

I glowered and he laughed again.

“Would seven an hour work?” he asked. When I shook my head, he said, “All right, baby, name your price.”

“I want time with Oz.” I said.

That was the last thing Dad expected. He blinked and brushed a hand over his stained work shirt and raggedy jeans. He gave no argument.

“Mom can’t bother us,” I continued. “Eva can’t either, unless she’ll do what I say.”

Dad frowned. “This isn’t a plan to con your sister into something, is it?”
I scowled. “No. And Eva doesn’t need conning. She’s smart enough. Look, I really want this for Oz.”

“You’re good for him, babe. Anyone can see that. But your mother has her own ideas about Oz’s schooling…”

“Well, it hasn’t worked so far, has it?” I said.

We stared at each other for a beat or two. Then Dad said he would see what could be done, but bargaining were not his speciality.

He’d said that before and things turned out well enough. So I ignored this. Dad brushed something white from his jacket before waving the same wave he did after lunch – striding towards the door he raised one hand and moved it side to side. He didn’t know it made him look silly. Today it didn’t strike me silly, though. It looked just about right.

The shop grew hot, and with heat came humidity. A muggy shop specializing in fishing bait is not a pleasant destination, not unless you get used to it or have your nose lopped off in an accident, which I hadn’t. And, since I’d never gotten used to the smell, I counted the holes in the ceiling and the scarred places where the floorboards were beginning to come up.

Business was steady all day, but slow. Two lumberjacks came in wanting boots, and Mrs. Trot from down on O street came in with two babies secured to her hip, but all she did was block the aisles and read magazines, and leave without anything. Oh, she took the two kids, all right – she’s never been known to leave them, though any judge inside this county would probably say she was justified if she did. Those two tossed a disaster area around that woman, and in back of her, too. Her path booby-trapped with cereal, her retreat blocked with spilled soda, at times it appeared to be a close call for Mrs. Trot. I sometimes imagined her, lost and preferably barricaded in with spilled merchandise, after lights out, to spare the town further inconvinence.

I reconsidered this. It might spare the town from the kids, but I’d be stuck in there with them too.

After she left, no one came in for a half hour, and then Pete Conroy knocked the door open so hard it slapped against one of Dad’s hunting pictures and right into the baked bean section.

He came right in, he didn’t even bother to say hello like a decent person. I figured then he looked like a moonshiner. Mom was right. And he hadn’t put on his fedora before going out.

“Grace!” Although both Pete’s hands settled on the counter, he leaned forward and bellowed.

“Yeah. Something you want?”

“I’d like that cousin of yours out of town on a rail, is what I want. Where is he?”

“What’d he do?”

“Oh, nothing. He just came right in and ordered a double-fudge with rum raisin on top of it, and when I told him the rum raisin was in the back, he says that’s fine, and when I went to get it, he rips me off fifty dollars from the register. That’s all.” He took a breath. I expected the bellowing to stop, but it didn’t. “And my rum raisin isn’t exactly on the menu. So I started thinking, how does he know about it?” He pointed a finger at me. “And then I thought, wait a minute – he’s Grace’s cousin.”

I tried hard to think of something that would make everything better. The only sentence I could come up with was, “How much did you have?”

Pete Conroy blinked. He didn’t look as if he’d heard. “Doesn’t matter. More than that.”

I gave him a bright smile. This didn’t make Pete Conroy’s disposition better. At least he stopped yelling. “Then he didn’t take everything, did he?”

“You’re as bad as he is! What kind of an answer is that to give a man?” He glanced my way sharply. “What about you? You ever take anything from me?”

“No,” I said.

“What about that Ossian of yours? He’s got odd enough ways about him.”

I stared at Pete Conroy until he ducked his chin down and looked at the counter like he’d never seen it before. Then he said, “I’m wrung out. Oz is all right with me. And you.”

Something about the conversation puzzled me. “He isn’t my Ossian,” I told Pete Conroy, and he gave a muffled laugh.

He leaned back from the counter to take in the broken ceiling tiles, false, all of them, and when he turned back he smiled at me. “He’s yours, if he’s anybody’s. That one will do whatever you tell him. You got a gift there.”

Now it was my turn to laugh. A gift with Ossian. My gift was being a magician, and, failing that, I wasn’t all that bad with calculating numbers in the shop. Playing with Oz was just something I did when there was nothing else to do.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“Shoot.”

“How exactly do you ride someone on a rail? Do they get thrown on a train or something?”

Pete Conroy laughed again. “Give you something to do. Read up on your westerns and you’ll know soon enough.” And he turned to go.

“I don’t know whether to be happy or sad if you find Cousin Jake,” I called after him, but he was gone already. The screen door slapped back, easy this time, and it made a nice hissing noise as it settled back in place.

*          *          *

If I didn’t know where Jake was, I had an idea where to start looking for him. After nightfall, I slipped out of bed and down the stairs. My back hurt a little, from standing at the counter so long, but I managed the walk down to the beach, hobbling over pebbles. I brought my new shoes, for all the good they did me. The soles too hard for off-road walking, the material too stiff to move without pinching, I soon discarded them entirely. I ran over the sand in bare feet. Luckily there wasn’t any glass or sticks in my way, and I reached Jake’s little driftwood hut. Still standing, scrawled with knife carvings from passing kids.

The fire was out, but the smell of it hung in the air. I stayed away from the hut enough to be safe, just in case someone other than Jake had moved in. I yelled for him from there.

He came out at last, a blanket thrown around both shoulders, bedraggled. He needed a shave and his toenails looked thickened, like a wild man’s. “Oh,” he breathed. “Eva? Is Eva alright?”

I meant to ask him how to break into the mill without being seen. I had it all planned out. Instead, I ended up sitting on the damp sand. “Eva’s fine.”

“Oh,” he said, sitting by me. “That’s good. I’m glad.”

I sounded like a little kid, like Oz did when he got scared. I hated it. “Why’d you do it, Jake?”

“Because the money was there –“

I shook my head. Everyone needed money. Dad, Jake, Pete Conroy. Money was beginning to be a real pain and I was sick of hearing about it. “About Eva…”

“God,” Jake leaned back and put his hands back of his head and looked up at the sky. It looked dark and threatening. He turned his head to look at me. “I don’t know. Because I’m the same screw-up I’ve always been, I guess. You know why magicians have all those illusions?”

“No.”

“Because they don’t want you to see who they really are. Real magic, now, that’s different – you just bend people’s perceptions of how things look until they think their seeing something real, only it’s not. Ask Mama Regan, she’ll tell you. It’s what you did when you learned double-dutch.”

I struggled with this. As far as I could tell, that meant Jake thought what Mama Regan taught me was a lie, something to make other people see me differently, and it wasn’t. I said nothing, and Jake went on.

“The family loves me, all right. They do. But you haven’t ever seen me at a birthday party, have you?” He laughed. It sounded low and half-bitter. “I’m not exactly birthday material. If I did show up, they probably wouldn’t have me.”

I had it on the tip of my tongue to ask him about the mill, but every time it seemed he had something else on his mind, or was just on the verge of saying something important.

About twenty minutes passed without either of us saying anything. Then Jake yawned and stretched out until his limbs popped. “You want to know how my mom died?”

I leaned forward. No one spoke of my mother’s sister, except when they said Jake was poor Mathilda’s child, even long after he was grown. If things were like storybooks, it would be a drug overdose, something like Eva’s.

“We were at the carnival. I was maybe ten. At the pony rides. And there was this white horse there. I wanted to ride it, but the woman who ran the ride, she said that horse wasn’t for me. It was a small bucking one with these big teeth. And Mom said no one was going to stop me riding it, and she’d ride first to tame it down for me.” He stopped and stared out toward the ocean. If you forgot to listen, you couldn’t hear it anymore. “So she did.”

“What happened?” I was interested. Mainly because Ossian always begged to go on the pony rides, on a white horse. My mother never let him.

Jake smiled, something between a grimace and a good memory. He told me he swore that horse transformed, right there, into something strange that shimmered all over. It looked like a blurred staticky TV reception. It looked like something trying to crawl out of the horse’s body. Like the horse tried to slough off used skin to change into something new and different. The woman, too, was no longer the same. Her short racy jacket stretched and grew loose until it flowed around her in a grayish material the texture of moth wings.

Jake told his mother not to. She was into it now, though, riding the horse. He saw something, but only half of the something. His mother laughed. She rode the horse in a slow trot around the enclosure. It was easy. She rode once around again.

She was halfway around for the third time when the horse bucked. It threw her against the metal railing of the enclosure, hard and fast like a thrown baseball. No one thought about internal bleeding.

“And that’s what killed her?” I asked.

Jake nodded soberly. “She shouldn’t have gotten off the horse. She touched the ground. That’s what killed her.” He stood up and with one swift motion he grabbed a fistful of my collar and yanked me up after him. He shook the sand from me very businesslike, thinking. “I don’t know why I told you. I couldn’t have seen what I saw. But anyway, that’s why I became a magician. To figure all that out.”

“And did you?” I squirmed, but he still had his hand at the back of my collar. It was funny.

Jake didn’t answer. He looked critically at me. “Why’d you come all the way out here?”

I had the sudden realization that he might not be sober like I’d thought. Before, I’d have known, but after that night with Eva I wasn’t certain. I wished I’d brought food snatched from the kitchen, so we could make a night of sitting out here, with the breeze from the ocean spitting salt at us. Eva and Oz and all, wrapped in blankets and sleeping over at Jake’s hut. It sounded nice. And I should have brought Jake’s magician jacket so I could give it back to him. He looked like he needed it. “I wanted to ask you…how do I get into the mill without being seen?”

Jake took his hand off my collar so fast my legs went out from under me. I dropped unceremoniously to the ground, and ended up with sand up my nose and in my mouth. I didn’t have long enough time to get used to it before Jake grabbed one arm, and there I was, facing him.

“What are you trying to prove?” He said that low and through his teeth.

“I’m just trying to get a splinter for Eva,” I told him.

Jake grinned like I wasn’t worth bothering with. He let go off my arm then, only to give me a shove toward the road. “Go home to bed,” he shouted. “And don’t any of you kids come here again.”

I set off, half-jogging. To show him he didn’t scare me, I shouted that to him. This caused him to swear and say I was a kid and tell me to get along home before he came after me and made me get. This was all very impolite and not the way I’d ever treated him when he came to visit, which just goes to show you how some people act. That’s something Mom says when folks are rude. When the loggers come in swearing and coughing out in front of the autobody, she says, well, that’s how some people act.

After that display, I figured I’d keep his old magician’s jacket. I’d earned it, and if old Jake wanted it, he could keep himself and get it.

I found my shoes along the highway, I don’t remember exactly where. The highway did that to you, made you think it was longer than it was. I wasn’t scared, I was disappointed by the time I rounded the autobody and reached the house. I hadn’t learned how to enter the mill properly. I hadn’t learned why Jake had let Eva get drugged up, not really. The only thing I’d learned was one stupid long story that made no sense at all and that Jake was still in town, worthless information that was. On our porch I thought I heard something while I was peeling my shoes off. The shoes were hot and my feet had sweat all over. They were sure to smell tomorrow.

“Jake,” I said, not very loud, so I wouldn’t wake anyone in the house.

No one answered me. The night was dark. A few cars went by on the highway from the sound of it, and the cavernous rollup doors of the autobody shop loomed over the house. Sure enough, someone skirted back around the corner of the autobody shop and down the alley.

“Goodnight, Gracie,” Jake called back.

I rolled my eyes. That sounded like a radio show. I hated that. I forgot all about keeping quiet and hollered after him, “You didn’t need to lurk after me! I could’ve gone home all by myself! You didn’t need to walk me home, Jake, you hear me?”

No one answered. Owls called and somewhere far away a car backfired. I smiled. There might be business tomorrow in the autobody shop. I picked up my shoes and got the spare key from saucer under the geranium plant, and went in to bed.

*          *          *

The next morning all anyone wanted to talk about at breakfast was Pete Conroy being burgled. It had got around town by that time. No one knew who did it, or where to find the burgler. Since these are all important things when investigating a crime, everyone was pretty well stumped. I said nothing about and went on eating my buttered toast.

Dad cleared his throat. “I’ve got news for you, Ossian.”

“News!” Oz repeated. He liked the rhythm of this so well, he beat it on the table and chanted. My mother sighed. She took Oz’s hands and set them in his lap.

Dad looked at me. I knew he was thinking, well, now she’s got herself into this, let’s see her refuse it. When I didn’t try and wriggle out of it, he grinned at Oz. “Instead of studied today, would you like to work with Grace?”

“Yes.”

“You have to study. You can’t just fool around.”

Oz nodded. He slid from his chair and in one motion was around the table pulling at me. “Now, Grace. Let’s go now.”

Dad smiled but Mom looked doubtful. She wasn’t sure Oz and I wouldn’t just play tag or something. Between Oz pulling me to the door and Mama Regan discussing the weather, I didn’t have a chance to ask if Eva could come along. It was strange to actually want her to come along. No one had said when her house arrest would end, and from the look of it, it might be school time before she was released. But no one would be so cruel as to forfeit summer altogether.

Once outside, Oz and I set to work. Dad hadn’t set limits on how we had to do things or where we could go, so Oz and I shouldered our gathering sacks and went out searching for stones for Pete Conroy. In addition to those wonders, we found granite, centipedes, oak logs, and magpies. Oz had me write all these for him in his notebook. I wasn’t certain how to make a lesson out of this, or if I wanted to. I lined up all our rocks neatly in a row.

“If Pete Conroy’s wife is making a mosaic or something, maybe she’d like all her rocks sorted.”

Oz went eagerly to this task to might have bored other folks. We both made small piles of blue, green grey, brown rocks. When we were finished Oz looked at our work with true admiration. “They’re nice, huh, Grace?” he said. “They look nice.”

I nodded. They were nice. It was that simple. We counted the rocks, slowly, Oz stumbling over his as if they were names he’d forgotten. But he stayed calm and peaceful so long as there was no paper and pencil in front of him “to study with.” We wrote down the numbers of the rocks in Oz’s book too. Then we lay down on our stomachs with our legs up in the air.

After some time, Oz said carefully, “Gracie, do you think Mama Regan’s a witch?”

I considered this. “Some people say she is.”

He frowned. “Maybe she can help me.”

“How? Make you different, you mean?”

Oz nodded emphatically. He didn’t have to say why. I could feel it in him. He wanted to go to school. Not baby school, like kindergarden, but the first grade where you learned to read magical stories.

I didn’t know what to say for quite a while. I looked down at my fingers, my scarred fingers. I tried to blur them together so that I had all twelve of my fingers, so that I was whole again. Only the trick didn’t work anymore. My fingers stayed the same, ten of them just like everyone else. I wasn’t sure I wanted to make them blur, either. It wasn’t helping anything. I thought about what Jake said, about the horse that changed shape.

“I could ask her, Oz,” I said. “But sometimes magic takes a little while. It’s hard to get it working you know, ‘cause magic’s ancient. It might be real hard. Do you mind if it’s real hard?”

Oz shook his head no. He seemed serious about this. I breathed a sigh of relief. No tantrums at least not for now.

“Gracie,” Oz said. He breathed in so hard I could see his chest expand. “Can you help me write my name?”

“Sure.” I thought he knew by now.

On Oz’s notebook, I drew the letters that spelled his name. His nickname, not his real name, becaue Ossian was too complicated for most spellers.

When I handed the pen to Oz he gritted his teeth and held the pen so hard his arm shook. He studied the paper to make sure he got everything right and then he began.

It was a scrawl of lines.

Ossian studied this with battered hopefulness, his nose nearly touched the paper. “Is that my name?”

I didn’t say anything. We tried four more times, and each time turned out the same, and each time Oz looked more and more as if he were about to have a tantrum.

I had to take the pen away from him. “We aren’t going to write your name ever again,” I told him.

Oz shivered. He drew his arms around his knees and puckered up for a good bawl. He didn’t have a chance to get into it, though, because I spread the rocks out. Oz had to stop to watch. He blinked as I arranged the stones.

“Can you read it?” I said.

Oz didn’t answer at first. His mouth was open. Finally, he said, “It’s too close together, Gracie.”

So we arranged the two letters farther apart. Oz traced them with his hands. Then he built a second design underneath mine. He looked at me in a hurried manner, certain he had done it wrong. “How is it?”

“Perfect,” I said.

Oz grinned. He ran about the forest and tossed leaves into the air into the air.

Then we crossed the highway to give Pete Conroy his rocks.

Pete Conroy looked us over when Oz held these rocks back from the pile. Oz kept dropping them.

“These are name-spelling rocks,” he informed Pete Conroy.

“Are they? They aren’t giving-away rocks?”

“No!” Oz leaned forward secretively. “I can show these ones.”

“I can’t wait,” said Pete Conroy. After Oz showed him, he didn’t wait either. We got two double scoops of rum raisin right there, and Oz got a hug from Pete Conroy in the bargain. “Have you showed your folks yet?” he said.

I hesistated. “No. It isn’t writing.”

“Well, for a first day at studying, it’s something like.”

I looked doubtfully at the rocks. Sure, I thought they were writing, but all we were doing was playing around with things. That’s the way everyone else would see this anyhow. The rock seemed to hiss and murmur, like talking or the flow of a tide. I don’t why it did, and it made me think possibly I was as crazy as Oz was.

I shouldn’t have thought that. I regretted it all the way home, but Oz was so happy I couldn’t help but by happy with him. We took the writing stones back home with us. Oz balanced where the asphalt met the dirt along the roadside. He fell twice, toppling over, spilling his share of rocks, but we got home in one piece.

*          *          *

I didn’t tell anyone about the naming rocks. Oz kept them with him and played at stacking them all the next day. I watched him all that morning, but I didn’t try to teach him anything. The whole thing scared me. Not just the fact that, apparently, I was good at teaching Oz, which wasn’t exactly something I wanted to get known for, but the fact that Ossian’s eyes looked different. They were brighter and I could see intelligence there, an attention to everything, that must have been there but that I had missed. Everyone in town would know I was taking the trouble to teach Oz, and Grace Rainbird, the girl with scarred hands, would be permanently linked with Ossian, who did odd things.

Not only that, if I failed, Oz would know.

So I stayed away from him. Ever so often he looked over at me with expectation. I recognized the look I used to give Cousin Jake. It was the look that said you would be taken places. The look intrigued me – and I didn’t like it. Something terrified me that somebody wanted to follow me like I had followed Jake. It was too much, and I didn’t want the responsibility for it.

At noon Dad came out and told me that if all I was going to do was loaf around, he’d have me back working the counter. I decided then that today would be the day I’d get the splinter. Not today, but during the daylight. No one had attempted this before.

I went upstairs to pack a backpack. I had no idea what I would need, so I threw in a bit of everything – fishing line, a broken pocketknife, a flashlight, a walkie-talkie. I didn’t know why I brought that. There was no one I would have to talk to.

Eva appeared in the doorway. She’d kept to herself for the time she was grounded, except meals, and the confinement had changed her. Or if wasn’t that, maybe it was the drugs or the hospital visit – she seemed less excitable and more stable. She appeared before me and I was startled by how she acted. She wasn’t a princess anymore.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I don’t need you to go get the splinter.”

“I need to,” I said, though I couldn’t think why.

She didn’t challenge me after that. I looked about for Mama Regan, certain she’d appear just when I didn’t want her. She had a way of doing that. When there was no sign of her, I set off down the road with the backpack over one shoulder. I had Mama Regan’s malachite stone on one hand and my old worn jump rope slung over the other shoulder. I expected Eva might follow me, but she didn’t.

The mill wasn’t far from our house. It was close enough you could smell the burnt sawdust in the smoke stacks from it, before the fog burnt off in the mornings. I halted at the guard shack.

Eddie, the guard, was there, snoring. He didn’t wake up when I passed the chain link that partially surrounded the mill. Then I set my backpack down and studied the mill.

Eva hadn’t said whether her splinter should come from outside the mill or not, and I really didn’t want to break into the mill for fear of jail, or something worse. I hated the mill. I hated the fact that it had made Eva born a princess, and me with twelve fingers, and Oz born the way he was. Rationally, I suppose, we’d be that way wherever we lived. But I couldn’t see that. It was the mill that controlled how much work there was at the autobody shop. It didn’t matter that Dad had enough work now or that Oz and Eva and I were all changing in our own ways. What mattered was that the mill had caused it all to begin with.

I threw my jump rope at the windows of the mill. It was ineffective, as high as the window, but with no little force, so that it slapped uneventfully and fell to the ground. I was about to pick it up again when a voice called to me.

“Are you lost, child?”

It was Mama Regan. She was swinging her black oak stick toward me and hobbling in my direction.

I froze, and debating running, but we were alone, and Mama Regan alone is less embarrassing than Mama Regan in public. So I said, “No, I was just…picking up my rope.”

I knew from Mama Regan’s eyes, she didn’t believe me. “You have your malachite stone,” she said, “and you know how to fall. You have Jake’s magic tricks now, and you are teaching Ossian. If you’re trying for more than that, you are greedy.”

“So what if I am?” I didn’t see how any of that was being greedy, but I argued through habit.

“You let Eva go her way and you’ll go yours.”

“What does that mean?”

She shrugged. “It means what it means. Eva doesn’t need you doing things she doesn’t feel like doing herself.”

I wondered if she had seen any of this. I didn’t ask her though. Mama Regan didn’t handle any exploration of her witch-woman existence with tolerance. I said carefully, “If I went home with a splinter, what would happen?”

Mama Regan scratched her stick against the bare dirt. “Many things, child. Eva could brag she stole it. She could become a criminal, you could become a criminal. Your father won’t let you teach Oz anymore.”

I stopped. The jump rope swung back against my arm, mid-throw. It all seemed a bit extreme, and I suspected a morality lesson here, but then again, Mama Regan saw things and it wasn’t wise to go against the things she saw.

“And if I go home?”

“If you go home, you have the potential to become a great magician. Perhaps not with cards, but with people. Oz has learned a lot.”

I gaped at her. I hadn’t told anyone about the rocks, except Pete Conroy of course, and Kangaroo, who I’d sworn to secrecy.

Mama Regan smiled. “Maybe things aren’t as mysterious as you seem to think, Grace.” She turned and began to walk away, and soon I ran after her, my new shoes pinching my feet.

I didn’t know why I didn’t get the splinter at first. Only Eva was improving and changing without any magic, so a splinter would be useless. And if I was going to be Oz’s teacher, I suppose I’d better commit myself to it, whether Eva or anyone else objected. Eva’s interest in life at home had perked right up just from talking about the splinter. I didn’t need it to accomplish anything.

On the way home I asked Mama Regan if she was a witch woman. She drew her lips thin and gave me a light whack with the stick. It didn’t hurt. “You are, too, if you’d pay attention to what’s around you.”

I frowned. We barely associated if she was in public, though at home our relationship was different. I was rountinely embarrassed and fascinated by her, but it seemed like she hadn’t done anything that I’d paid attention to lately. Except for whacking a policeman over the head during a car trip, and surely she didn’t want me to imitate that kind of behavior.

“What do you want from me?” I asked. I thought of Oz, how he looked at trees and rocks and the sky with the same attention you would give living things. Something like that couldn’t be all that odd.

“Learn from everything,” Mama Regan told me. “Eva. Oz. Pete Conroy. That cousin of yours. That’s what I want from you. There’s magic and then there’s everyday magic, and they can get mixed up, child.”

I frowned. “So something I’m looking at could be magic instead of being ordinary?” I thought of Jake and the story of the white horse. “Do you know where Jake is?”

“Left town. Probably playing poker this very minute.”

I laughed. That sounded like Jake all right. But behind us, I thought I saw something move quickly in the window of the old mill, in the abandoned portion. It might have been a sweater or a bit of cards falling down. Or it might have mice. Or it might have been Jake.

I didn’t find the splinter, but I’d found Eva could live through things I’d thought she was too weak for, and that I cared about her. At least, some days, she wasn’t such a pain. I never expected to get worried over her, not enough to do something for her. She hadn’t even asked me to do it, I remembered, and then she had told me not to.

I smiled. I went home with Mama Regan and I made up my mind then that I would take Oz into the autobody shop that afternoon. There were pneumatic drills to count and write, and there were the naming rocks. I’d need more of those. And paint. Oz liked to paint. The possibilities for just ordinary magic were endless. After all, it overlapped with real magic, and blurred the real world a little, and that’s where I liked to be.

Copyright Dawn Wood 9/11/2005

 

For the longest time Mama Regan had said she wanted to go back to Ireland. “Ireland is so far, Mama,” my mother told her. But Mama Regan was relentless about it. She pulled Oz over to her side of things and had him whining about it, raising his voice at mealtimes over Ireland like a miniature embittered patriot.

“I bet you don’t even know where Ireland is,” Eva sneered one night after dinner. We had all crowded together inside the room Eva and I shared. There really wasn’t enough space for two people, let alone three – whenever anyone had to go into the hallway, the others had to press themselves against the wall and practically hold their breath to provide the space for it. But Oz didn’t take up much room at all, and if we told him often to shut up, he generally did just for the privilege of sitting with us. Eva had begged the money for some glitzy awful-looking mirror from Mom, and now she was always in front of it, arranging something or other. When she sneered, the effect was doubled by her reflection, so that Oz stared past her at the twisted image, as though a spirit rested there.

Poor Oz. There were times when I had such sympathy for him. Sitting cross-legged, he was carving designs into the carpet with his thumbnail. If my mother saw him, she would have accused him of wasted time. But Oz hardly ever wasted time, he only used his differently. “I do so know where it is,” he said, getting up and striding over to the lopsided globe that had been Eva’s and was now mine. Oz’s head was swelled up from the glory of being six, his mouth gaping from lost teeth, his pockets jingling with quarters from the tooth fairy. He spun the globe expertly until the countries blurred together into the color of rainbow sherbet, then jabbed a finger without looking. “Ireland!” he crowed triumphantly.

“He’s right,” Eva said. I could see she didn’t like being wrong. Her face became pinched thin and I saw with surprise that her bones looked long and suddenly like my mother’s. “You little cheat. Mama Regan showed you beforehand.”

“No, she didn’t! Nobody showed me. Nobody!”

“Eva,” I said. I could see danger signals. Oz’s face reddened and when I leaned over to touch his shoulders, his mouth puckered and opened wide and he began to scream. His feet jerked in a strange, rhythmic way, as though someone was pulled strings. There were no tears until I caught hold of him and shook him, then his eyes opened wide and he seemed to come back to himself. “Gracie,” he whispered.

“Yeah, Ossian. What happened to you?”

I heard a thumping sound, feet down the hallway. Dad flung open the door and demanded, “What in heaven’s name is going on in here?”

“Nothing,” Eva said.

“Nothing?” He peered at Oz, bent down by him. It wasn’t like Oz to have a tantrum, at least not one like this. There was something still strange and faraway about his eyes. Dad stayed there a long time, bent over, staring at Oz with something on his face I couldn’t read. Anger or disgust or sadness. “Hey,” he said. “What’s the problem?”

Oz gave a low whine and put both hands over his face. “March, April, June, July, August…”

“Okay,” Dad said. “You don’t have to talk about it now.” I followed him out to the hallway, just behind him, watched him lean up against the wall and rub one hand through his burr haircut. Dark grease tracks lay on whatever he touched. I never understood why he and Mom thought what Oz did was so bad. He sang, and danced in the rain and knew more songs than anyone I knew. He was kind and mostly polite and he treated everyone he met like they were his best friend. I couldn’t figure it out. This was a bad thing? He was doing all the things that were always set in front of us as good examples. Of course there were other times too, when Ossian was afraid to do the simplest things, when he could not cut paper figures, when he cried from trying to learn how to spell. But it was a puzzle to me how the good things in him got lost. No one saw he did all the childish, joyful things they had forgotten long ago.

“He’s alright,” I told Dad. He looked, absurdly, like someone who needed comforting.

“Sure he is.”

“He has room yet. To grow, I mean.”

Dad turned and eyed me, straight on, as if he didn’t know who I was. Then he smiled. “Well, you’re getting to be grown up.”

I nodded. I was really thinking out a plan. All the details weren’t clear, but I had the general idea. “What if,” I stammered, faltering over words, “what if we did go to Ireland?’

Air wheezed from Dad’s nose. He coughed and methodically wiped a blackened hand across his mouth while he thought about it. Finally he said, “Sweetheart, I’ve told you. You and everybody. It’s too far, and besides that, we don’t have the money or the time for a trip like that.”

“Pete Conroy can watch the store,” I said, ticking off items on my fingers. I talked fast so he would have to interrupt to say no. “He told me he has extra time after the ice cream shop closes. He said so. And he knows how to work on cars.” The lines in the corners of Dad’s mouth turned down, but he was quiet, still listening. Just the idea of someone else watching our little market and the autobody business, someone else bored out of their skull and counting the tiles in the ceiling seemed to intrigue him.

“Go on.”

“Maybe we don’t have to go to Ireland. Maybe we can say we are and just go to Tennessee. Mama Regan came from there too. Isn’t Tennessee just as good? Oz could be the navigator. He knows where all the states are and half the highways.”

“Are you finished?”

I nodded and crossed my fingers behind my back.

“Okay. To start with, I don’t like the idea of fooling your grandmother. She’ll know and have my head and yours. And traveling in a small car, she has better aim for throwing things at us. Secondly, Pete Conroy absolutely cannot come here to work.”

“Why not?”

Dad smiled. “Your mother has some strange notion he’s a moonshiner.”

That came from the rum raisin ice cream Pete dished. Mom found out about it, raising Cain and half the mothers in town, and might have succeeded in putting Pete out of business if Dad hadn’t somehow convinced her to stop. I think the fact that Pete was kind to us, and still paid Oz and I for junk shells and broken tumbled rocks from the beach had something to do with it. He didn’t mind Oz spinning on the ice cream stools half the day, either, so long as there weren’t other customers needing a seat. And the truth was, if anyone knew what a moonshiner looked like, it was probably Mom. Her father, Mama Regan’s husband Mody Rainbird, had a still up somewhere in the mountains until the police ran him off.

“And thirdly,” Dad said in the same even tone, making me wince, “I think it’s wonderful you’re trying to help your brother. I’ll talk to your mother about this Tennessee thing.”

“I’m not trying to help him. I’m trying to keep him out of my room.”

Something like a snicker came from Dad. “Of course.” He looked up at the ceiling, at the maze of electrical cables and raw wood joints that he’d been saying for years would be fixed any day now. “I said I would talk to your mother. But I make no promises.”

*      *      *

He must have done more than that, because a week later, Eva, Oz and I, sat at Pete Conroy’s, telling him everything that needed to be done at our house while we were gone. Oz had been freshly scrubbed, so he was tugging at his pink ears and scowling, and Eva gave him a shove and told him to quiet down.

“I wasn’t saying anything,” Oz growled.

Pete Conroy laughed. I always liked his laugh. When I was Oz’s age, people told me all the time that sounds didn’t have shapes, but sometimes I still thought they did. Pete Conroy had a big warm round laugh that made you feel good when you heard it. He looked over at Oz, took Oz’s hands away from his ears and set his own fedora over Oz’s head. My brother touched the hat carefully with the exploring fingers of a scientist, very careful in case the hat did something startling like falling to pieces. When nothing of the sort happened, he beamed, showing the wide spaces in his mouth. It was times like this I wondered two things: why people thought Oz was always reckless and why Pete had such genuine fondness for the same things that made other people’s mental radar go crazy about Oz.

“You’ve lost more teeth,” Pete Conroy said briskly. “Open up. Let me see.” With the skill of a dentist, he held Oz’s jaw and squinted at the remaining loosened teeth. “You’ve got some fine specimens. You think they’ll ever become fossils?”

Oz shook his head. The fedora slid over one side of his head. The hat was torn and threadbare. My mother would pitch a fit if she saw Oz wearing it, because of hair lice or worse things. Come to think of it, she was likely to complain about us being here anyway, even if she had reluctantly given permission.

“That’s what comes of eating so much ice cream,” Pete told Oz. I noticed his hands, thick and swollen around the knuckles. I didn’t know what it was that could do that to a person. There was a briskness to him now, almost like he was tired of us being near him. He wiped the counter with a rag and checked the drippy soda fountain. “You kids go on home. I’m closing up. I’ll see to your house. Good luck on that trip.”

“Where are you from, Pete?” Eva asked.

“What brought this on? I’m from nowhere.”

“You can’t be from nowhere,” Oz said matter-of-factly.

“I can.”

“Everyone is from somewhere,” Oz said.

Pete Conroy gave a long whistling kind of a sigh. “Ossian, believe me. I come from a place about three thousand miles from here so small it’s not even on the map. I know nowhere when I see it.” As he spoke, he reached over the counter and plucked his fedora from Oz’s head. My brother’s mouth formed a small “O,” like someone with the wind knocked out of them. His face held the longing of a hungry child too young to speak. I hadn’t seen him pay attention to something that closely for quite some time. Pete Conroy muttered to himself and took something from behind the counter, shut tight in his fist. He appraised Oz before he held out both fists. “Got something special for you. Which hand?”

Oz pressed his tongue between his teeth, closed his eyes and tapped one fist. There was nothing in it. Pete Conroy said, “Aha, try again,” and Oz did, but that hand, too, was empty. It held nothing but air. Ossian’s eyes swam with tears. “I don’t like people who lie to me,” he cried. “I don’t like people who lie to me.”

“Hey, sh. Ossian, this is something so very special you can’t even see it. It’s magical. It comes from a man who wrote a white horse.”

Oz huffed back a sob. “That’s my name.”

“That’s right. Ossian rode the white horse. And Ossian was an explorer, too, wasn’t he? He said you need to a good name to go about the country in.”

“A name.”

“Yes sir. A proud name that you can live up to. You have to act right with this name, though, because I heard you’re the map man on this trip, and a map man has to make sure everyone gets where they need to be. So.” Like someone with a great responsibility, Pete tapped Oz on the shoulder with a closed fist. “Your name is Ossian the Explorer.”

A glow appeared over Oz’s face. I could see him mouthing the name back, quietly, to himself. He liked the Explorer part best.

“All right. Now get out of here. Go on, all of you.”

Oz scrambled off the stool and raced out of the room, causing Pete’s screen door to slap back with a force that made us all wince. Eva followed, and I hung behind until Pete spoke to me without turning.

“Still here, Grace?”

I stood on my right foot gingerly, bending the left leg to get at a raw sore place where a mosquito had bitten me. Stork-like, I said, “What do you get out of this?”

I didn’t mean for it to come out harsh, an accusation, but once it was out, and tangible, I couldn’t shove the words down my throat again.

“Excuse me? What was that?”

“I mean, Dad must have told you something, otherwise you wouldn’t give Oz a name to make him behave. And you’re watching our house and giving us ice cream, so what do you get out of it?”

My skin crawled and grew hot when Pete stared at me, his face so stony that all the muscles stood out along his chin. I could see old whitened scars appear in the stubble on his throat. It felt stupid to stand, like a bird, waiting for an answer I knew wasn’t going to come.

“Eva put you up to this? No? Then I’ll tell you: I don’t want anything. I came from nowhere and I’m here in someplace that’s like nowhere, too, and I like it here because of the nice people. People who don’t ask prying little questions.”

“Okay,” I said. “All right,” and I kind of stumbled backward toward the door because I’d never seen Pete angry and I didn’t know what else to do. He called to me, quiet and like himself before I’d closed the screen behind me. I was surprised to see something in his eyes that startled me, as though he were looking at family. “Name a darn mountain after me or something. And watch that brother of yours around those cars. Maniacs drive wild up that way.”

*      *      *

It was late afternoon by the time we got everyone’s things thrown into the car – Oz’s coloring books and striped baseball shirt, Eva’s makeup kit and two huge sprawling suitcases full to bursting with the various outfits she’d picked out. Anything from sun to a raging blizzard wouldn’t have stopped Eva. I had untold amounts of excitement with Eva’s suitcases, literally slinging them about on top the fold-up chairs shoved into the very back of the car. Oz joined me, laughing in his funny way that always caught at the end, like someone who changed their mind in the middle of clearing their throat. He waved a hand in front of his mouth and danced a wild jig in his bare feet on the pavement until Mom came out of the house.

She took in the general disarray of the car and the two of us dancing around like madmen and shrugged. “You’re a bad influence, Grace,” she said, and, “If I ever catch whoever created vacations, I will personally strangle them with my bare hands.” I decided to try to make life easy for her. It looked like one of those days when she had a headache coming on.

Things got mighty interesting following this. My father locked the house and walked around the car, straightening the suitcases we had ever so carefully depositing, then he got in the car, leaned back in his seat, and said, “Boy, I need a drink.” My mother screamed for Eva, who never bothered herself with anything that broke her nails or stained her teeth, with the exception of eating ice cream, which sometimes did both depending on how fast she ate it. When Eva discovered the state of her things, and that I had done it, she grabbed up a brick with the sole intention of murdering me with it. She just might have managing it, too, only I knew she had perfectly terrible aim, and I didn’t gave her a chance. I had the car door wrenched open before she came up, screeching like a banshee, and I made it a full three laps around the entire car when I decided to make a break for the park two blocks away. I’ll say this for Eva, she kept up with me better than I thought she would.

Finally my father stood up out of the car and bellowed something that not a single one of us could understand. It had the vague quivering type of rage associated with someone whose mind is very near the breaking point, and it had the combined effect of getting all three of us kids into the car, buckled up, in the space of three minutes flat.

“We could go out for the Olympics,” Grace told me. Still red and panting, she grinned at me.

“Everyone, please,” my mother said, holding her head, while my father, cursing the maker of cars, the world in general, and that he was afflicted with such a family, wrenched our car from the driveway and down the road. Oz said he was fairly sure the speed we were going was illegal, the sign said so. Eva whispered back, that yes, he was right, and I asked if anyone wanted to launch rubber bands around the back seat. To do this, we would have to shoot them around the bulk of Mama Regan and her black oak stick, which stuck clear back into the window and which she had stubbornly refused to give up – but we assumed she wouldn’t mind a little entertainment.

“No,” Dad said with the hoarseness of a dying man. He gave us all the evil eye. “No one moves. No one so much as breathes.”

“What if we have to go to the bathroom?” Oz asked brightly.

“Learn to hold it.”

And so our vacation began.

*      *      *

 

We arrived at our first destination exhausted, irritable, and hungry, having eaten all the cream cheese sandwiches, drunk a gallon of water between all six of us, and used up every bit of civil conversation. Clearly, relaxing was not as easy as we thought. We were not the first explorers to have this dilemma.

The car came to a stop at a dry, dark black rock landscape that resembled nothing, unless you thought of the moon. Just watching it made your throat parched. Compared to the inside of the car, with its ruckus of Oz whining and Eva declaring new facts and Mama Regan’s tales, and my father’s sighs, which were somehow louder than everything put together, the outside was a blessing. I never went to a place where no sound existed. Here, everything including bugs was swallowed up by the black caverns, like decrepit mine shafts. Littered across the ground were crumbling coal black basalt exactly the shape and texture of redwood bark, and strange layers of brightly colored lichen over everything.

“I’m hungry,” Oz announced, still clutching the map with both hands. No one had been allowed to look at it since the beginning of the trip. This responsibility of navigator and explorer had put a determined expression in Ossian’s mouth. He read the map aloud in a ringing voice, spelling out the names of longer towns.

“We’re all hungry, you little twit,” said Eva. She’d abandoned her false kindness toward him and in the damp heat had become snippy and pointy-nosed. She was in a real funk ever since the heat made her hair stand on end.

“We are going,” my father proclaimed in an over-stressed voice, “to the Craters of the Moon…”

“The moon!”

“It’s not the real moon, Oz.” I said.

“It says so right here. Craters of the Moon.”

“It’s not real.”

 Oz didn’t answer. Not verbally, anyway, and for just a minute, I felt ashamed for pounding the truth into him. This only lasted a minute before the pamphlet landed directly in front of my eyes, with Oz dancing in front of it with a distraction technique worthy of the finest pickpocket. He jabbed his chubby thumb, the cuticles pink and wet from chewing, at the title and the picture beneath it. “See here? It says the moon!”

I stared at him, opened my mouth, caught a warning glance from Mom, and only sighed. All right, so we were at the moon. And we hadn’t taken a spaceship to get there. I decided right then and there that my whole entire family had collectively lost what wits we had ever possessed, and what can you do in a situation like that but go along with it. I climbed back into the car with as much dignity as I could, ignoring Oz, who catapaulted himself into the middle seat with the force of a cannonball, and doing my best to keep from shoving Eva, who decided her lipstick needed to be applied right this minute in order to keep her face from disintergrating. I once made the mistake of informing her that, given as much preservative as those lipsticks had, she might live to be two hundred. I still have the scar on my knee where she kicked me, when she was still immature enough to bear grudges.

“I’m hungry,” Oz told us before we had even pulled out.

In the front seat, my mother was trying in vain to shift the map around Mama Regan and her great black stick, which she clutched with both hands and which extended into the back seat enough that it impaired Oz’s ability to sit straight. My mother fretted constantly that he would have a crooked spine from our adventure. Mama Regan fretted constantly, too, and out loud, only her frets were different. Mama Regan was of the old-fashioned opinion that highway robbery was still common place on the diamond lanes of Interstates, and combating against this was her duty. As such, she swung the oak stick about in the car like an ancient axe murderer, poking it out of windows at people on bicycles and jabbering about how she was sure to be robbed of all worldly goods before we even reached Ireland. My father did plenty of muttering of his own while he dodged the black oak stick and drove, and his was a continous flood of expletives in creative combinations I am positive no one in our car had ever experienced before.

Somewhere along our ump-teenth U-turn, after Mama Regan nearly decapitated my father, a policeman pulled us over and inquired about my father’s driving state.

“You were driving rather erratically,” is the way he phrased it.

My father looked, I thought, like a cartoon. He had reached the point that consumes people on long trips, that kind of exhaustion and unwilling acceptance that finally makes a person emerge changed, pop-eyed and gibbering. Dad licked his lips once or twice and said something dumb about a black oak stick and a witch in the car, jabbing his thumb toward Mama Regan all the while.

“Ireland,” said Mama Regan distinctly. “We are driving to Ireland.”

“Driving?” gulped the policeman.

Oz, meanwhile, kept poking me in the ribs. “What does ‘erratic’ mean?”

“Crazy,” I told him.

Oz nodded. “I’m hungry,” he said.

“I need to pee,” Eva said.

“Edward, you’d better feed Ossian before he faints and get Eva to a restroom before she explodes,” commented my mother.

Dad, who was by then out of the car, moving one finger toward his nose and balancing on an imaginary line, stopped and growled, “Lydia, not now. I am busy.”

“Now wait just a minute…” said the policeman.

“I’ll stop him,” cried Mama Regan. I swear I am not making this up. I couldn’t be, because in a lie a real grandmother couldn’t have moved as fast as Mama Regan did. She rounded that front of the car like a small detrimined demon and before anyone thought to stop her, up came the black stick and the policeman crumpled.

In the silence came my mother’s voice.

“Oh, dear Lord!” she said. “You’ve killed him!”

Mama Regan stared doubtfully down at the body of the policeman and poked at him experimently with the end of stick. “No, I didn’t do it right. He’s coming around.”

Dad put his head in his hands and sat on the shoulder of the highway. “We are going to jail,” he said.

“I can’t go to jail,” Eva said.

“Why not?” Oz said.

“Because, you little twit, jail doesn’t have a mall.”

Mom stared at her and said something close to “Heaven help us.”

The policeman’s feet were beginning to twitch. I don’t know if he could see by then or not, but if he could, he would have seen Oz staring down into his face with a look of great interest, giving medical reports. “I’ve never seen a dead person before,” and “Look! He’s moving like a dead bug.”

“Don’t say dead,” whispered my father.

My father looked like someone already at a burial. His face was the color of just-mixed cement, wet with sweat, and his mouth was as slack as the policeman’s own.

“Passed away,” said Oz, diligently observing the man for signs of life. He looked hopefully at my father. “If he is dead, can we leave him here?”

“No,” said my mother.

Mama Regan stood poised over the body with her stick. “If he isn’t, I can hit him again.”

“No hitting,” said my mother.

“I don’t want a dead person next to me in the back seat,” Oz whined.

My father only gurgled like a drowned man. Small, unintelligible sounds came from his throat. He seized Mama Regan’s black oak stick with one hand and flung it against the fake red stone fence at the far end of the shoulder.

“That came all the way from Ireland,” said Mama Regan reproachfully. She sounded like she was talking to a disobedient child.

“We aren’t going to Ireland,” said my father.

We all stared at him. I’d thought he would sound angry, but there was only tiredness now. He was looking at Mama Regan, who believed firmly in highway robbery, and at Oz, who thought everything was hilarious, and he stood there at the shoulder, impassable, his feet braced so firmly that it looked like they went down into the earth. I knew we weren’t going to Ireland, and Eva knew it, and my mother knew, too, but it felt different now. We’d gotten caught up in it all, going to the moon and driving to Ireland, and now everything was changed. Dad stood there looking at us all, and then he said, “I’ll get that stick for you,” and went and got it.

No one noticed the policeman get up. We were all watching my father, and I’m sure we would have taken the policeman to a hospital, but I was there and this is the order that it happened. The policeman got up. He must have wavered some at it, because by the time I turned and saw him, he was shaky on his feet. His teeth were set tight, and before I could think about it at all, he had come around near Oz and snatched up Oz’s map and torn it into a dozen ragged pieces.

This was enough to get everyone’s attention. It was an act of cruelty. Oz’s face had the stunned expression of someone kicked in the stomach. He whimpered and edged away from the policeman until I could put my arm around him.

“Now,” said the policeman, “all of you against the car. All of you,” he said, looking darkly at Mama Regan.

*      *      *

We never made it to Tennesee or Ireland or anywhere else except the jail. My father tried to explain the situation, how he was plagued with a stick-wielding senile old woman and three quarrelsome children, but the policeman with his sore head refused to listen. We went to jail, too, which interested Oz no end since so many movies were filmed there, but we stayed at the policeman’s desk, playing cards and trading jokes with the men.

“They ought to go to social services,” said our policeman, cradling his head.

“They ought to,” said another, “but their folks are getting bail together, and it’s too much trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“These kids are all right,” said the second one.

Our policeman disagreed. He said we were little demons, the whole bunch of us, the kind of people who laid in wait to ambush people just doing their job.

“Demons?” said the second one. He was a lanky old man, probably at least fifty, but it’s hard to tell with grown ups. There are so many of them. He was kind to let Oz explore his desk and Oz snatched up a photo on the desk and hugged it.

“Me!” he said.

“That’s right,” said the second policeman. “It does look like you.”

No one in our family looked like Oz, so I studied the photo hard. Oz was right. The boy in the photo looked more kin to him than I did. The boy had the same always-grinning face and strange fish-like eyes. It was surprising – I had not known anyone in the world was like Ossian. He was one of a kind.

The second policeman laughed and got out things for Oz – silent bribes to get the picture back – discarded sheets of white drawing paper, a pen, a new laminated map of the United States with California on the back side of it. Oz’s pockets bulged from the weight of these things and he was smiling so hard I could count the gaps where his teeth had gone. He released the picture to clutch this newest map to his chest.

“Say thank you, Oz,” said Eva. She was not adaptable to this environment and had hidden her face in case anyone who happened by knew her. I thought if anyone knew her in a police station, it was too bad for them, but I couldn’t say so.

“He doesn’t need to,” said the second policeman. “I have a little boy just like him at home.”

Oz beamed at the man. Oz could make friends for life over gifts like these. It’s needless to say he was beyond disappointed when Mom and Dad were released – he had come to see the police station as a friendly place full of gifts – but we went just the same. Not toward Tennessee, but away from it, back the way we came, along different roads. My father skirted the highways, taking back roads and avoiding the diamond lane at all costs in case Mama Regan decided a reenactment of the policeman’s demise was in order. No one spoke the whole way, God forbid, but somehow the travel time flew faster and we were back again at Pete Conroy’s, milkshakes in hand.

“I will never take care of your shop again,” Pete Conroy was saying for the fortieth time. None of us asked him what had happened during our absence, but Oz had disgraced us by blurting that we had been arrested and spilling the whole story right out there on the counter like it was an everyday thing.

“Don’t you go asking me for anymore favors,” Pete Conroy ordered.

Oz nodded. “I’m the Explorer,” he said, and then, “No more favors.”

“Good,” said Pete Conroy. “Glad to hear it.” He lifted his swollen knuckles and rapped at the counter. “Get along home before your mother comes in and sees me giving you that ice cream.”

Oz licked a white moustache from around his mouth. “She thinks you’re a moonshiner.”

I thought Pete Conroy might take offense at this. It isn’t, after all, something you can say to anybody. And if Pete Conroy took offense at us, after everything he’d done, watching our house and giving Oz and I dimes and quarters for broken pieces of rock and shells, enough money that we had to save it in a bank instead of underneath our shirts in dressers, that would be a shame. It would mean the loss of ice cream and everything else, especially for Oz, since Mom only allowed him to cross the highway with us to go to Pete Conroy’s. And Ossian had a love for the highway, for cars and roads and maps that rivaled his love for squirming bugs and dinosaurs.

Eva hissed at Oz. I didn’t hear it, only the noise, a flat sound like that of air from a tire and it succeeded in deflating Oz. His face crumpled into lines, but he did not have a tantrum this time. He quivered and gulped and his fists seized and released, and he did this for several minutes until he calmed down. He was, after all, Ossian the Explorer, descendent of the Ossian who traveled to the underworld, and he had responsibilities.

But Pete Conroy only laughed. “Lydia thinks everyone is a moonshiner. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was one herself.”

A picture of my mother entered my mind – Mom sneaking across borders with a trunk full of hooch in the back, Mom out in the woods with a shotgun and a still. Mom says I watch too much television, and that not all moonshiners were that way, and she should know considering that her daddy was one. But that’s what I thought of, just the same.

“Look,” Ossian said. He held both fists out to Pete Conroy in a perfect imitation of Pete’s earlier guessing game. And Pete went for it, there was no doubt about that. He hid a smile and tapped Oz’s hands, one after the other. Both were empty. I was surprised Oz had remembered. Even surrounded by magic tricks as we were, every spring when Cousin Jake used to come by the house, Ossian had never parroted those. Magic tricks tended to puzzle him. He loved them, of course, we all did, and he could ask for them again and again, but he could not successfully carry one out. He showed his hand too early in string tricks. He moved too slow to hide quarters, so that you could pick out the glint of metals between his fingers. He would, on request, show that all cards in a deck were the king of hearts. And the whole time he would grin as though he was the greatest magician in the world.

So I was surprised as anything that he would show Pete’s trick back to him like that. And I was proud, too, when Ossian laughed at Pete Conroy’s puzzled face. “Fooled you!” he hollered, delighted.

And then he withdrew from his pocket three small rocks the color of nighttime, that special kind of shivery reflectiveness that can turn peacock-colored in a minute. They looked something like coal, and I could not imagine where Ossian had found them. I wondered if he had plucked them whole from the shoulder of the highway, if they had been something lost in the weeds that I had missed.

Pete Conroy looked long and hard at the rocks, and it came to me that Oz’s trickery was a skill. “Where did you get those?”

“From the moon!”

“Aha,” said Pete Conroy. It was a different sort of “Aha!” than before.

Oz waved his whole arm at Eva and I, energetically, as though he was indicated a room of people. “I took them all to the moon.”

“I can see that. Are these for me?”

Ossian nodded so enthustically he bit his tongue. “Yes. A gift.”

“You give good gifts,” Pete Conroy told him. He took the scratchy iridescent things from Oz’s hands and set them with great ceremony on the shelf behind the counter. He stood looking at them for a long time, while Eva towed Oz outside. If we had let him, Oz could have spent all day at the ice cream shop, just doing nothing but talking to the folks who came in through the door. But I didn’t leave. I wanted to ask Pete Conroy what he got out of all this, again, but I didn’t considering what had happened the last time. I watched him fill out an index card and write something on it. Now the rocks were labeled. The sign said “Found by Ossian Rainbird, Explorer.”

“As good as a museum,” said Pete with satisfaction.

“Are they worth anything?”

“Not money, no. Not much. They’re just what’s left of volcano ash that’s processed just right.”

I looked again at the rocks. That place had seemed like such a dead country. But to Ossian, it must have been alive with things to do. I thought of the fish-eyed smiling boy who belonged to the second policeman. “You knew someone like Oz, didn’t you?”

It was quite awhile before Pete answered. The question didn’t anger him, but he took the time to say it right. Then he said, “Grace, I told you I came from a small place. My cousin did, too, and he was like Oz. I don’t know what was the matter with him. If you can call it that. Sometimes I wondered what was the matter with the rest of the town. I moved here to get away, and my cousin moved up north a bit, with my aunt. I see him at Christmas.”

I didn’t know what to say to this. It was good to know that I could talk of other things with him. None of us could talk to my mother about Oz or she would give over to hysterics.

When I turned to go, Pete Conroy shoved a five dollar bill into my hand. “Give that your brother.”

“It was a gift.”

“I know it. But give it to your brother. And watch out crossing the road with him. The maniacs drove crazy around here.”

I smiled. “Yes.”

Through the screen door, flecked with flies and dirt, I could see Oz straining against Eva’s hand, stomping his feet and staring out at the passing cars with large eyes. One shoulder of his coat had slipped off and hung over his arm. Even from there, even from inside the ice cream shop, I could hear him singing a song with the words mixed up, the kind of song people used to sing as they worked, an Irish song Mama Regan had taught him. It was a ribald one that made Eva tug at the arm with the fallen coat sleeve, tug at it and hide her face, but Oz sang on, singing high and getting the words right every now and then, just singing and singing for the pure joy of it.

 

Copyright Dawn Wood 1/9/2005

Kangaroo Fulton’s father said that there were spirits in the mountains. He meant the mountains that curved, the green weedy ones just past the beach, the ones so far I had never visited them, even on a bicycle. We were sitting in Kangaroo’s trailer, among the doilies and soft-looking worn furniture Kangaroo’s mother had bought second-hand before she died. Kangeroo and I were together as often as two people can be, from age two on, and I remembered his mother in childhood with the same fogginess as my own. I remembered that Kangaroo’s mother’s name was Alice. Alice Juniper. My mother said Alice Juniper had been the fastest dancer in these parts, but I don’t know anything about that. When I knew Alice Juniper, I only knew the greenness of the jacket she wore, and that she had a fondness for baking chocolate chip cookies with Kangaroo and I. “Ah, Alice, you’ll ruin that boy,” Kangaroo’s father would say.

“There is no such thing as spirits,” Kangaroo said firmly. There was a little catch at the end of his voice. I could tell by his eyes that he wanted to believe in it, but you’d never know it just from talking with him. Kangaroo was experatingly scientific. By the time he was nine, he knew all the botanical names of half the plants and bugs at the beach and the woods. It was no wonder he got along so well with Oz. There were times when I thought he was more Oz’s friend than mine.

I yawned and stretched. It was raining outside, pouring down so hard that the roof seemed to shake from the impact of it. The humidity inside Kangaroo’s trailer was unbearable, and we pretty much gone through every kind of civilized conversation and board game in the place. Out of boredom, and a sort of mean spitefulness, we had started up a contest to see who could pitch pillows the farthest down the narrow hallway. Kangaroo won. That is, he would have, but we didn’t intend on Kangaroo’s father coming out of his bedroom, bent over and rubbing his eyes, and catching the pillow on the top of his head. He gave a startled, strangled yipping noise, like a terrier dog, and his hands waved spasmodically around for several minutes while he debated whether this was a dream or real life. When he had decided he wasn’t being ambushed by spear heads, he’d rubbed his hair down flat again, sighed, and came into the living room with us. He said he was doing it to make sure we stayed out of his hair.

That was one of Kangaroo’s father’s favorite expressions – “Staying out of my hair.” He said it often, usually in reference to something Kangaroo and I had done, and he usually wore the fretful, cornered look of someone who knows something bad will be sure to befall him.

Kangaroo nudged me tiredly. All the sudden crabbiness from the damp was going out of him and he looked too weary to do anything interesting. “You owe me five dollars,” he said.

“No, I don’t. You didn’t make it down the hall.”

“Didn’t make it down the hall?” Kangaroo’s father said feverishly. “It bounced off my head, for Pete’s sake! I’m the one you ought to be paying.”

“We don’t have the five dollars anyway, Pop.” Kangaroo’s voice was soothing. I noticed he often took that tone with his father, as though it was Mr. Fulton who was the child.

“I don’t care about any five dollars. Just, for once, please, can’t you go outside and let me sleep?” Mr. Fulton sometimes worked the night shift at the lumber mill. He worked the machine that washed the bark straight off the logs, and sometimes they changed shifts on him down at the mill, suddenly, and didn’t tell him right away. He was a skinny man, all knees and elbows like the knots on a tree and he had a face that was brown, too, like burnt saddle leather. He was a jumpy person, too, and he was always saying Kangaroo would come to ruin the way he ran around unguided without someone to look out for him. That always made me smile, because for all his talk, there probably wasn’t a single soul in town who spoiled Kangaroo more than Mr. Fulton himself.

“Yessir, spirits on the mountain,” Mr. Fulton said. “I’ve seen ‘em, out there with crews cutting down trees. They sabotage machinery, cause accidents.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Pop. It’s gremlins that do that. And it’s airplanes.”

“Oh, is it? You’ve never been out there like I have.”

“All right, prove it,” I told him. Mr. Fulton stared at me blankly before his eyes slid past me and he shrugged.

“It’s not anything you can prove, Grace. It either is, or it isn’t. The only way I could show you would be to take you up there.”

Kangaroo jumped to his feet so sudden that I almost flinched. Behind his glasses, his eyes were wide and bright, his lips a swollen red from biting at them. He bent his wrist until it cracked double-jointed and Mr. Fulton winced like he always did at the sight. “That’s right, prove it, if it is true.”

I stared at Kangaroo. I had never seen him like this. He was speaking to an adult the way you would another child in a dare. It was an order, and everyone there knew it. Kangaroo sat down again, with his legs folded around him. His glasses slid down so that it looked like he had a array of miniscule eyes, like an ant. I’d once tried to wear his glasses when I was younger, but to my surprise, things only looked blurred and misshapen through them, not the magic I’d expected. It always drove me crazy that he didn’t push them up. A maze of bug bites covered his legs. He was wearing shorts despite the incessant rain.

I felt, suddenly, caught in the middle of a family squabble and I didn’t want to be there. “It’ll turn cold,” I told Kangaroo, gesturing at his shorts. “You might want to…”

“I don’t need your advice, Grace Rainbird,” he snapped. There it was. We’d all known the rain would lead to fighting, it was only a matter of time, but still I was taken aback by the venom in his voice, as though I was trying to force him to be something he wasn’t, to change his skin and become someone else.

We eyed each other until Kangaroo’s father clapped his hands together with such false cheerfulness that we both turned to stare at him. “A trip to the mountain. When do we start?”

*          *          *

We started the next week, after I’d disarmed my mother’s resistance to the idea and convinced her it would be a fine thing for me to be out of the house for awhile.

“I don’t know,” she said, slapping down plates for dinner. They weren’t the fancy plates she usually took out; those hadn’t been used since Cousin Jake’s last visit the fall before. I saw her looking up at them in the hutch cabenit, a look of longing across her face. It wasn’t the plates she wanted so much, I knew, it was Jake. She scanned the mail sometimes, too, with the same hungry glazed-over view that made me think maybe she didn’t saw them at all. I wanted to tell her it wasn’t any use, that Jake was long gone and it being near fall didn’t make a difference to him. But still she worried, no matter what anyone told her, worried about him the same as if he was our age, as though someone had carried him off. But the plates, anyway, put her old adage about presentability to rest. “We have to look presentable,” she used to hiss to Oz and I when we didn’t want to get the good plates from their shelf every year. “For pity’s sake, it wouldn’t hurt you to be presentable once in a while.”

“I don’t like this idea of the woods, Grace,” she told me, the slap of each cup and plate like a reproach. “Why don’t you take Oz with you?”

“She can’t be expected to take him everywhere,” Dad called from the living room. His burr haircut shone white from what I could see of it through the dining room door, and he had his feet up on the coffee table, one of the positions my mother forbade. I smirked, and right off Mom said, “What are you cackling about?”

“I can’t take Oz,” I said. I was trying to be thoughtful, so that she would know I had considered this reasonably. “He’ll scare away the fish.”

“Not fishing, too.” Her lips went thin. “You’ll drown, the whole bunch of you.” From the living room came the roar of a crowd during a football game and Dad’s shout. “Take Eva at least,” she told me. It was a weak gesture, and we both knew it. Eva would sooner have died than walk through the mountain with unidentifiable mud on her shoes. She said as much when the topic was brought up at the table. Oz’s face brightened when he heard about the mountain and I warded off any tears by saying I would bring him back something nice.

“A cow skull!” he blurted. Milk splatters littered the table in front of him. “A cow skull for my room, like the westerns!”

“I don’t think…” I started to say and my mother covered her face with one hand and something similar to, “Not this one too,” came from her. Mom always had a losing battle with ladylike behavior with me. After a minute, she recovered. “We haven’t even decided you can go yet.”

“It seems Grace has.”

This, from my father. He watched Mom’s face while he spooned green beans into his mouth without looking at them. Underneath the table, I could hear faintly the gentle thumping of his shoes tapping out a rhythm. Dad had been a drummer in the jazz band in high school and the feeling and drive for rhythms never left him. I tried to pick out the melody of the tune, but couldn’t manage. Mom huffed, her arms folded over her middle like a unpenetrable obstacle. Air pushed itself from out of her nose in a sigh. I waited for something, any protest, but she only sniffed and said, “Well, if you must.”

I packed a bag and wore Jake’s old magician’s jacket. I don’t know why I’d saved the thing. It was ratty old and patched and covered with cigarette burns and ancient stains. At first I kept it out of memory for Jake, and later because it was one of the things that drove Mom wild. Everytime I saw the jacket, a rush of loss and anger came over me so hard I couldn’t think. But still, it was the first thing I packed, creasing the soft folds and worn leather until a sense of comfort came.

When Eva came in I slapped the jacket hurriedly into the suitcase and latched it, waiting for Eva’s smart remarks about the jacket, but she said nothing. She had the tip of her tongue between her teeth and was nipping at it, her eyes bright. “I don’t want to come,” she said.

“Thank God for that.”

“It’s just –“ she paused, and I saw her eyes ticking back and forth, searching for suitable words, the right words that wouldn’t make Mom think we were fighting again. Eva was puzzling. She had briefly left her Holier-Than-Thou pedestal and seemed to be trying to be my friend, for no other reason I could see than maybe she felt sorry for me. Just the idea of that made me so mad I had to fight the urge to argue with her just for the spite of it. Mom told Dad I was wounded after Jake left. Mama Regan had helped me with being wounded before, but I could not go to her: she had of late taken to dozing more and more in front of the television, waking to 1929 and my grandfather’s house. In spite of everything, I had pretty much stopped beginning friends to the house because of the times when Mama Regan wanted to know where Mom had stashed Grandpa John. So she was bad enough but if anything Eva was worse. The older-sister deal she had going now was enough to make me sick. I wanted things to be normal again. I didn’t want Eva to be my friend; I wanted to make war with her.

Eva said, “You get to have all the fun.” I waited, but she didn’t finish the sentence all the way, didn’t say whether she wanted to go or not, which gave me relief. With narrowed eyes I watched her delicate hands threaded themselves together. For a minute, horrified, I thought she was about to beg me for something – something I couldn’t even begin to name, something deep and ancient. Companionship, possibly, but that was ridiculous. Eva had a whole posse of eternally giggling friends who trooped about the house in shirts and jeans that made my mother cover her face in shame. So of course such a thing as a friendship with me was out of the question.

Cradling the suitcase in one hand, I hoped I looked eager and ready for the trip to the woods. Jake’s jacket was really too warm for the house, let alone our small cramped room, and I was beginning to sweat buckets in it already, but pride and some kind of stubbornness made me keep it on. I made my way past Eva and out to the hall, where I announced to the assembled family that I was going. Dad smirked like he was laughing and Mom looked stern, the etched lines in her face standing out more from the effect she put into frowning. Just when Jake’s jacket was ready to melt me entirely and I was convinced that leaving at all for some crazy dare of Kangaroo’s was too much, Oz ran up. He ran with the speed of someone feverish, a breathless toddling run with both shoelaces undone and slapping dully against his ankles and the backs of his legs. The cowlick in his hair was standing up, so that he resembled some kind of minature troll-like beast. Before I could laugh at him or tease him, he pressed two things into my right hand.

“Gracie, wait,” he said, his small voice rising up shrill and insistent, the voice of an expert giving life-saving advice. “You need these.”

I rubbed the objects in my hand together. They felt familiar and an easy warmth came to me. I couldn’t tell at first what they were, even when I should have known. I opened the hand, palm up, and there were the green healing malachite stone that had once belonged to Mama Regan, and Oz’s own slingshot, cut from a tree limb in the park.

“For protection.” Oz told me. A thick hoarse cough came from Dad and I could see him struggling to hold in the laughter. Mom, on the other hand, looked even more pinched, and I knew she would soon be talking to Oz again about his imagination. But honestly, she couldn’t say very much, because Eva and I both realized Oz’s survival depended on it. He’d been stuck in a little closet classroom with five ear-pulling, eye-poking, delinquent wannabes of the Three Stooges and given those kind of odds, I’d have a runaway imagination too.

Oz stiffened a little when I pulled him toward me in a hug, but then he relaxed. His soft humming filled my ears. He was making up songs again, tuneless, repetitive songs that had their own kind of rhythm.

“Take good care of my slingshot, Gracie,” he called after me.

*          *          *

I’d expected a proper campground to make tents, but the place Kangaroo’s father led us could only be described as desolate. The grass was green, true enough, but the ground was pitted every second step with tiny chert stones and much of the grassland was taken up by dead fallen trees, thrown pick up sticks from a gigantic hand. I perked up some at the logs, seeing black beetles and many bugs for collection, but none of these pleased Kangaroo.

“You are the most stubborn person I know,” I told him. He already knew, and it didn’t get a rise out of him. I resolved in future to be more crafty. A earwick in his sleeping bag or a frog at the picnic table during breakfast might have better results. All that day, Kangaroo said nothing to his father except the things required by mere politeness. It seemed to make Mr. Fulton more determined than ever to show the spirits to Kangaroo. That night, after we’d pitched – three lopsided, moldy pup tents with bent rusty poles – we started a campfire and waited for the spirits.

“Oh, they’ll come alright,” said Mr. Fulton, all smiles between swigs of cocoa.

“Fire probably frightens them,” Kangaroo remarked in his most scientific voice. For much of the night, he seemed lost in the fire, taking in the shadows the flames threw and the red-hot designs of the coals. At one point, he’d looked very close to tears.

“Well, today being Wednesday, they’ll probably come. They like a good Wednesday.”

“A good Wednesday?”

A hard wind crackled through the trees, winging through them so fast they seemed to speak and I could have shown I heard a high quavering howl that matched the way Kangaroo looked. His glasses had slipped halfway off one ear and dangled there, swaying, and his face looked almost yellowish from the firelight, long and narrow as a tiny demon. I could have shown his eyes glowed amber.

The next day, he was a little better. Mr. Fulton was kind to him over breakfast, scalding bitter coffee and a hard biscuit in a firing pan. “I never was much of a cook,” Kangaroo’s father said in way of apology when he shoved the meal over to me. “It was Cora who was the cook in the house.”

Kangaroo did not respond at all, but I saw the bitter slant of his eyes, the methodical way he chewed. He took me fishing, afterwards, the two of us in a long canoe that had once been the owner of a lime green coat of paint, since peeling. I clung to the sides of the boat. It didn’t look all that seaworthy, let me tell you. We’d found it along the lake bed, choked with weeds and thoroughly abandoned, and Kangaroo had suggested we clean it up, which took the better part of the morning and left a muggy, ill-settled sky over us for the sailing portion.

“Do you remember my mother?” Kangaroo asked after a time.

“Sort of. She had red hair and a plaid apron and she said she was a slave to the kitchen.”

“That’s right.”

“You shouldn’t blame him,” I said. “He didn’t kill her.”

“No one killed her. She’s just dead. There’s a difference between killed and dead, don’t you know that?”

“Sure.” But really I didn’t. Dead was dead any way you looked at it, and I didn’t see why Kangaroo dwelled so much on it. “Why does it matter to you after all this time?” I didn’t mean to be callous, only Kangaroo stared at me.

My hand found the green malachite stone in my pocket. It felt cold and good against the humid heat of my hands. I took it out and flipped it back and forth until Kangaroo caught it with a quick, almost imperceptible snap of his wrist and flipped it into the water.

“Why does your precious cousin matter to you? He’s gone, isn’t he, and he doesn’t show any signs of coming back for you or anybody else.”

For a minute I couldn’t speak. Something was locked in my throat, a cold bit of hematite stone, and swallow hard as I could, I couldn’t choke it down. I wanted to shout at Kangaroo, to tell that was a cruel thing to say, and I could not have said myself why Jake mattered to me anymore than I could have explained the groupings of stars. He was like a big brother, somebody who shared the same soul I did. Or at least I had thought so once. Now I was not so sure, and this more than anything else made me resist the sudden urge to whack Kangaroo about the head with the canoe paddle.

I think Kangaroo was sorry. He didn’t say it, only when he spoke again the words were softer and they had lost their hard edge. “Look, Grace.”

I didn’t want to. I was still scanning the bottom of lake bed, a deep bright green the color of a child’s crayon. Still, I was almost certain I saw the stone resting against a wide brown rock, one of the only boulders at the bottom. A swarm of black crappies the shape and color of arrowheads were examining it to see if it was good to eat. I was sure I would know the place if I came across it again.

“Grace,” Kangaroo whispered, and I raised my head up just in time to see a grey blur that ran like a cat and reminded me of a dog, but to tell the truth, it was up and gone so fast I didn’t get a good look. It made me think of Mr. Fulton’s spirits on the mountain, even though that was silly. “A wolf,” Kangaroo was saying. His face had taken on a warm glow and for the first time he seemed like himself. “A grey one. They’re supposed to be rare up in these woods. The farmers hunt them down so the few that are left mainly hide out in caves, I think.” He pinched the edge of his nose and smiled at me, and I smiled back, relieved to see him. “It’s a sign.”

“A sign? From who?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Whoever it is who makes signs. But there it is.” He paused and bit his lip again, like someone experimenting with a thought they wanted to get right. Then he leaned forward. “It’s my mother. I felt her.”

I wanted to say, “Sure, you did,” but instead I held in a nervous laugh. Kangaroo reminded me so much of Oz, then, Oz who chanted numbers and words and could write as well as anyone if you only looked in the mirror at the words. It wasn’t like Kangaroo at all to act like Oz. He was always so practical. Instead I asked I asked why he felt so sure and how his mother had become a wolf, an odd reincarnation if ever there was one. But Kangaroo seemed to have sprung something inside him. Never the talkative sort, he was thrown into a spasm of words: how his mother had died on a Wednesday; how they had gone to the woods like this, how his father didn’t care or didn’t remember any of it. I tried to think back, to remember if Kangaroo had gone to the mountain before. He would have bragged to me about the going, if he had, but my mind was whirling, still searching for the green malachite stone under the water, even when I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t think of anything to say to Kangaroo. Then I knew.

“I don’t believe you,” I told him. “I don’t believe that she’s here. You said yourself there’s a difference in killed and plain dead. If there is, there’s sure a difference in where you go, isn’t there?”

Kangaroo licked his lips and shut his mouth. I folded both arms across my chest and rowed my oars so hard it was difficult for Kangaroo to keep up. Before the boat had even bumped against the shore, I was up and out of it, not with any kind of hurrying but quick, measured steps, beating out all the words I could not say with footsteps. I left everything, the rope untied, the oars knocking with dull hollow thumps against the side of the boat. I looked back only once before I found my way back to camp. Kangaroo was struggling to tie the boat to the dock, his thin bony knees sticking up ridiculously from his jeans, his fingers clumsy at the tying, a look of such calm on his face that I felt a sudden stab of envy.

*          *          *

Before the sun broke over the mountains the next morning I crept out of my sleeping bag and headed for the lake. I thought I had kept good tabs on it the day before, but it was hard going in the dark, and long before I got to the rough little shore my legs bore the scratches and stings of a half-dozen rocks and plants I couldn’t even begin to name. I’d thought the way would be easy but there was no sure path down to the lake, only a series of animal trails so tiny as to be invisible in the dark. There was one pine tree, a ponderosa, hung with offerings and prayers of a local Native American tribe. It’s branches were weighted with strips of braided grass and bright cloth covered bundles. My father had told me about these, once, these tangible prayers, and I was careful not to touch them when I steadied myself against the tree. The lower half of the tree was stripped bare of bark from an invasion of hungry porcupines, and in many places it wept a sap that smelled of vanilla. I tore the sap loose and chewed it with great concentration, the way Mama Regan had once instructed. At first it tasted of nothing at all, but later it was sweet and good. It settled me somehow, grounded me, took my mind off the boat and the stone and the finding of it until I was so close to the water I almost fell in. I jumped back from of the wetness, soaked and so disoriented that I had to squint hard through sudden fog to find the boat. It blended in well, and was so at home at the dock that I had to swear and grind my shoes into the dock boards to shove it out into the water.

There was no rain in the sky. Maybe it couldn’t rain with the fog so bad. But mostly I kept my gaze on the lake, searching for the brown boulder in that mass of green algae. I would know the smooth green of the stone, I’d had it so long. I hadn’t bet on the fog, though, and it hung close around me. After a long time, I don’t know how long, I thought I saw the malachite under the weight of water, that dark green, and I reached down for it. A shimmy came from the boat. All I remember is a brief terrifying shudder when the rotten boards under me split apart, dissolving, sinking down to the bottom of the lake.

*          *          *

Mama Regan had carried stories from Ireland as a child, it was said. They were so old they contained the lives of lephrucans, and Finn McCool, the giant, and the small, shifty-eyed fairies the size of children who would trick you or murder you or save your life. Mama Regan carried these tales, bringing them out to dust them off, every now and then, limbering her tongue with the lilting words. Now about the only story she ever told was the one Oz took his name from. It was the tale of Ossian, friend of Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland who wasn’t Irish at all. But Ossian, now, rode a white horse to Tir Na Og, land of the ever-young and stayed three hundred long years. Some say the way to Tir Na Og lies under the hills, in the odd stone ruins of fairies, others say the true road is through the water. The ocean, in particular. It is said, too, that if you eat or drink in this land of fairies, you will be bound there forever and can never get home again.

It wasn’t that way for me. When I sank under the water, the coldness of it, crisp enough to make the veins in my neck stand up, shocked me into opening my eyes. The water was so clear and green it was like a special kind of glass, and the only thing I thought of was staying there, where I could see everything. I forgot all about Mama Regan’s stone. I forgot everything. My mind was blank and warm and I was suddenly very tired. I held my breath, but the water forced its way down my throat, tiny spears of it one after the other until I stopped kicking and relaxed. It was then I saw the eyes. I swear to you I am not making this up. They were there in front of me, yellowish dog’s eyes, and after a while the rest of the animal, a lanky wolf with scarred legs and strangely perfect ears appeared before me. Don’t ask me how the wolf breathed under water. It’s Mama Regan who’s the expert in these matters, not me. But there it was, just the same, and all I thought of was that a wolf with ears like that had never been in a brawl. Which is an odd thing to think of. My only excuse is that something had happened under water. I had a funny feeling that I needed to take Oz’s slingshot out. Not for protection, like he’d said, but more like an offering like the ones to spirits and ancient gods and the earth that rested in the branches of the pine tree. Maybe there are many ways of protection, I don’t know. I only know my fingers were too numb to hold the slingshot and it fell, too, down with the malachite. The wolf began licking at my face and hands with a force so hard it felt like blows.

“Grace!” someone was shouting. “Grace Rainbird!”

I wanted whoever it was to stop yelling. I could hear but moving my mouth was a different matter. The narrow muzzle of the wolf turned into Kangaroo’s thin mouth and low cheekbones. The yellow eyes turned into his glasses reflecting in the sun. Skinny double-jointed Kangaroo kept whacking me across the chest with a force I hadn’t thought he had in him, pinwheeling his arms like a windmill. He was energized, moving his hips, so excited that I doubt half his work hit where he wanted. It didn’t take all that long for me to sit up, cough up enough water to get air into my lungs and tell him to lay off.

Kangaroo stared at me. He sat up on his haunches and wiped his glasses off with the edge of a shirt striped like a stick of candy, and already filthy. “I thought you were gone,” he said.

I shook my head. “I lost Mama Regan’s rock.”

“What?”

“I lost that green rock. And Oz’s slingshot. I lost Oz’s slingshot. And I haven’t even found him a cow skull…”

“You don’t need it.”

“Yes, I do. I promised. He told me to take good care of it.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. You don’t need the rock. It isn’t going to give you anything you don’t already have.”

I considered this. It didn’t make an iota of sense. But then, not all that much did right at that moment. My head felt full of cotton fuzz. I think your body holds more than just visual memory; it still felt as though the wolf was licking me. The hair on my arms stood on end from it. Those great yellow eyes with a depth like nothing else were still in front of me, an after-image I couldn’t shake off. “Your mother,” I said.

Kangaroo’s mouth hung a little slack. I think it was from shock or something, but with Kangaroo it was hard to tell. He was the only person I knew who could go around every single day tinkering with discarded machinery and electronics and be completely content with it. I noticed strange small things about him I’d never noticed before. Maybe the lake sharpened my vision. I saw with wolf eyes the dark mottled impressions from gravel on his knees, a rip in those ugly grey dishtowel weave shorts he always liked to wear. Something had hold of him in a bad way. It made him shake until he raised his right hand to his mouth and bit down on the knuckles. “Gracie, don’t.”

“I know about your mother. She’s right here. I saw her. She’s a wolf.”

I thought he’d be pleased, but he just shook his head and held that hand up against his mouth like he was holding in a storm. “No.” The first word was whispered, the others came stronger. “She would have come talked to me. Dad brought me here to see the spirits.”

We were silent for a long time. Only a bird that called in a laughing voice made any sound. I couldn’t figure Kangaroo out. He was the one who tried so hard to convince me of the wolf in the beginning, and now he wouldn’t talk. He was still soaked when he went past me and drove back into the lake. It swallowed him up. I waited, holding my breath. When I counted to ten two times at least, Kangaroo surfaced again and came dripping and worn down over to me. “I owe you, all right?” he said. “I owe you this.”

When he opened his hand, Oz’s slingshot and the smooth edges of Mama Regan’s stone sat sparkling in the sun.

*          *          *

What Kangaroo had spoken of with such conviction, we never discussed with anyone else. Of course we had to tell Mr. Fulton about the lake and the almost-drowning, we couldn’t very well have gone into camp exhausted and pretend nothing at all happened. But the wolf, that was different, and special in its own way. A kind of sacred that had nothing to do with religion and more to do with the primitive oaths of children that can never be broken. It wasn’t as though Kangaroo and I swore to keep it secret, it was just a mutual agreement settled on without speaking when we took the long path back to the tent. Mr. Fulton said he was sorry he hadn’t been able to show us the spirits, and he seemed puzzled when Kangaroo spoke to him and didn’t scorn him for the dare. There was nothing to be done about telling my mother, and that brought trouble once I was home. She fussed, and forbade me to go out of the house or see Kangaroo for an endless amount of time. She took my temperature and fed me soup. Worse yet, she left me in the clutches of Oz, furious that I hadn’t toted home a whole cow skull like I’d said. Eva hovered between petty annoyances and proper gloating that my trip had been ruined. I guess her big sister thing was on the rebound again which was the way I liked it. I got fed up with it all after a week, tossed the covers off, threw a shoe at Eva and ran out of the house for Kangaroo’s before Mom could say a syllable.

Mr. Fulton was barbequing near the flaking picket fence and Kangaroo was sitting with his back to the steps of the trailer, flipping a fishing pole up and down.

“Hey,” I said,

“Hey.” He looked up and gave me one of his rare smiles. “If it isn’t Grace Rainbird.”

“You want to do something?

“There’s nothing remotely interesting.”

Mr. Fulton pointed with a spatula. “Break that fishing pole doing that, and things will get considerably less interesting.”

“On the other hand…”

We headed out in no particular direction whatsoever and ended up at the beach. We sat on the bank and pulled our legs up under us and said nothing for a long time. It was the most content I’d been since all that wildness that came with “being sick” around the house. “I want to…” I stopped, examined a sand crab burrowing its way out of its hole. Sand crabs, if you’ve never seen one, are grey and hard-shelled like a sow bug and ugly as sin. I shoveled sand over this one, watching it struggle to climb out of a mountain of sand that grew indefinitely.

“Stop,” Kangaroo told me, so I did.

“I want to…to thank you for…”

“Would you stop? Isn’t this something, the great Grace Rainbird humbling herself to lowly little me?”
Little was right. I seized a sudden detrimination to bury him whole in the sand and flung as much as I could at him while he weaved and dodged.

“You’d have towed me in if I fell in the lake,” he said, after we’d settled down, covered with sand.

“You’re too big for me to tow you.” In a way, this was the truth. He was taller than I was, but I’m told things are different in water, different when you panic.

Kangaroo told me in a low voice that things were back to normal for his father and him. It was easier now for him to talk to Mr. Fulton about his mother. I told him that Oz had his slingshot back and had, by now, shot dried peas in my direction so often that I had threatened to find a rather large puddle to drop his slingshot into. Kangaroo mentioned the wolf only once. “I have this dream at night,” he said, describing the eyes, the rough yet polished coat of the animal. He waited, expected me to tease him no doubt, and when I didn’t, he said it spoke with his mother’s voice. It told him the things he had waited to hear.

I couldn’t have teased him. But I didn’t tell him, either, that I had the same dream. Every night I watched the strange otherworldly eyes of the wolf circle around me. I never heard in coming, but you never do, with a wolf. It has something to do with the make-up of its paws, I believe. It spoke to me of the lake and the prayer tree, and all of these I could see clearly. But I always woke before I could manage to tell Eva about any of it, and when I woke, the wolf vanished. After it left, my hair always felt wet and clean, and I was lucky with a peaceful feeling and happy dreams.

 Copyright Dawn 9/11/2005

 

 

          Oz, Eva and I were playing out on the lawn. I was only there, mind you, because of being bored stiff, and Eva was there just to stand around and tell us we were doing everything wrong. But it wasn’t like we had all that many neighbors, and it wasn’t like the people who came to get their cars fixed were in an all-fire hurry to play games on the lawn, so there we were.

          Oz said he was the man from the moon.

          “You can’t be that,” Eva said.

          Oz was persistant. “I’m a man from the moon,” he repeated. I could see he trembled when he said it, not from fear, though. The only thing that ever frightened him was school. He just shook that way, started with his fists and working outward, until he grew pop-eyed and grimacing. Usually by then, too, he screamed in a tantrum. So Eva gave in and said he could be the man from the moon, and Oz got happy.

          He knelt in the soft asphalt in front of the autobody shop, whispering to himself in a sing-song voice, punctuated here and there with perfect animal mimicry. It always seemed to me that Oz really spoke a language nobody knew, and I just thought all he needed was a translator.

          There were only three people who understood him, I guess. One was me, the other was my friend Kangaroo, and the third one was Pete Conroy, the ice cream man. And Cousin Jake, but Jake understood all of us. Privately, I figure, we ought not to count Cousin Jake in that anymore. He’d been gone upwards of a year and six months, now, or thereabouts, and nobody from our side of town had heard word one from him since then.

          It isn’t often that Jake could sneak up on us, either. Not like that. No, when Jake came, something in me knew long before I saw him. That, and the news traveled through backyard fences, through bars and jails, through the train yard and trailers near the woods like Kangaroo’s – the news traveled all that way until it reached us.

          “Gracie, you’ll get your jacket dirty,” Eva told me. I stuck my tongue out at her. It wasn’t any business of hers if my jacket got dirty, since it was mine, and Jake’s before that. I had plans of becoming a great magician like Jake. I thought, considering the entertainment level in our town, that I could make proper money just from neighborhood shows in kids’ basements. I planned to do it, too, and soon, but preferably as far away from my mother as humanly possible.

          If you knew my mother, you wouldn’t need to guess why. Lydia Rainbird, the moonshiner’s daughter, is proper the way Eva is, except she’s in denial about our circumstances and Eva isn’t. If a pygmy performing goat and the entire midget acrobatics team showed up smack dab in the middle of our table in time for dinner, Mom would pretend everything was fine and ask for the peas and Eva would complain about the view and insist that the acrobatics not step on her plate while they went at it.

          Mama Regan would probably settle the matter with a few well-placed swings at the goat’s head with her cane. My grandmother has become famous for her eccenticitis, chief among these being that she holds conferences with the deceased, and tends to be a witch if she hasn’t gone off the deep end entirely for the afternoon.

          She poked her head out the screen door to shout something in our direction. We ignored her. When I was little, I used to think Mama Regan was kind of like Jake. She doesn’t do magic tricks or anything, but she can fix troubles fairly well and make you think, and on one or two cold foggy nights she’s given advice to the neighbors about who’ll they’ll marry and what color would be best for the baby’s room when they didn’t know they were expecting. She was handy to have around.

          Mama Regan hobbled out, placing one foot after the other in mincing steps that made me think of a ballerina, if she hadn’t been so thick around the middle and had underarms that swung like pendulums. “Ossian!” she bawled.

          Oz stopped. His whole leg was raised up, because anyone could see he was in the middle of walking down a ladder to the surface of the moon. He dusted both hands with great care, both sides of his pants, until he was striped asphalt black. Then he looked patiently at Mama Regan.

          “Lyddie wants you,” Mama Regan said. Her speech clipped off at the ends, with little huffs in between every sentence. She swung that black oak stick of hers toward Oz, and he stood there mesmerized. “She wants you for homework.”

          Oz stiffened. He had his leg down by now, and he used both of his legs to run the opposite way, vanishing into our little store before any one of us could say no to him. A minute later he emerged with two licorice whips in both fists and a half dozen candy bars stuffed in the pockets of his shorts. He ran off down the road, his face already red from the licorice, chomping down on more as he went.

          “That one is trouble,” Mama Regan murmured, staring after him.

          “He isn’t,” I said.

          “Maybe we’ll be lucky,” Eva said. “Maybe he’ll fall with all that in his mouth, and choke on it. That’d teach him.”

          I went over to her before she could move, and I had it in my mind to wrestle her to the ground, if need be, for what she said about Oz. It wasn’t easy, though, because Eva danced in front of me, and her cheerleading face wouldn’t have been much use to her if I’d gotten hold of her.

          Mama Regan stared at us with uncomprehension and the same calmness that made my mother think she wasn’t reacting enough. If it had been Mom there, she would have pulled us apart and then let us know for half an hour straight how we’d made people think we weren’t perfect. That was the trouble with Oz – not being perfect. It wasn’t as though Mom ever said anything like that, but we all knew. Mama Regan was different though. I believe she would have stood there while we fought it out, and so we quit.

          “What’s the matter with you, child?” Mama Regan said to me.

          I ddin’t know what she was talking about, and I told so.

          “You want something else.”

          I was quiet. Eva was quiet too. When Mama Regan told things, important things, things that would happen, it was the surest way to get us to listen. If she was interrupted, she could never recall what prophecy she would’ve revealed.

          “Magic with your hands,” Mama Regan said. She blinked her eyes and I knew she was finished. I stepped back and tried to look at what she’d said, which is what she’d taught me without saying it, that time I learned how to fall. I turned it around in my mind, but it didn’t make any more sense than something I already knew.

          “Yes, but how will I do that?” I asked her.

          “How you do it isn’t my concern.”

          Something Oz-like was in my by then, and I drank one of the glasses of lemonade Mom left for Mama Regan. It was on the porch railing. I drank it, and then I said, “But I already know –“

          “A different sort of magic.”

          I stopped. I tried to sort all the different magics. Cards, coins, birds, disappearing acts, illusions. I knew most of them. Those I hadn’t learned with Jake, I had practiced secretly at school during free time.

          “So,” Mama Regan said. “When is your magic show?”
I swallowed. “This Tuesday. After school. In Susie’s basement. Admission is a quarter.”

          “Forget that,” Eva ordered. “Tell my fortune now.”

          Mama Regan stared at Eva. At first I thought she was angry with her, and then Mama Regan’s eyes widened and she stood up, her black oak stick sliding on the polished porch wood. “I can’t see your fortune today. I’m sorry.”

          We stared after her, the way she had stared after Oz. “Well,” Eva mumbled at last, “I think it’s safe to say that old woman gets wackier every year.”

          I didn’t say anything. I wandered down the path toward Kangaroo Fulton’s trailer, wondering about the other kind of magic and why Eva had no fortune at all.

                                      *        *        *

 

Kangaroo wasn’t home. A tattered smeared bit of paper, ripped from a notebook and already beginning to fade announced this. I turned the paper over and read it again a few times before cramming it into the pocket of my jeans. Then I went to the horrible little fence that surrounded Kangaroo’s place and tried to straighten it. The fence wasn’t cemented to anything, just braced here and there with large stones and held in place with random gobs of cement clinging to the ground itself. It was such a miserable little construction that I doubted it would’ve kept anything out of the yard. Kangaroo didn’t have things worth stealing anyway.

Since Kangaroo’s note hadn’t said when he’d be back, I sat on the trailer’s front steps for a time, until their rotten swaying made me think I’d fall through. I braced my feet against the mealy wood enough to make my way into the trailer. Kangaroo never locked his doors.

By the time I made it inside, wind beat down on the trailer so hard I thought it might tip over. I closed all the windows I could find. I washed the dishes just to have something to do. It was too cold and windy now to go home.

I don’t know how long I stayed there, but Kangaroo didn’t come home. I wanted to tell somebody about Oz being a spaceman and Eva not having a fortune. It seemed important.

I left Kangaroo’s and went down the rest of the path to Pete Conroy’s place. By the time I got there, I was soaked and freezing and beginning to sneeze.

Pete Conroy knew it was me without turning. “Stomp your feet before you sit down, for once.”

I stomped my feet and got mud next to the counter. “I’ll sweep up before I go home,” I said.

          “You’d better.” Pete Conroy turned around and whistled very low. “Any particular reason you look like a drowned rat?”

          “You have a way with words.”

          He shoved a cup of something hot toward me. It was a change from the ice cream at least. I thought it was dark hot cider but when I tasted it, it was bitter enough that I spat it out.

          “I’ll have the health board in here,” Pete Conroy said, wiping off the counter. “Normal people sip first.”

          “Normally, you mean,” I corrected.

          Pete Conroy snorted. “Not in this case.”

          “Mom doesn’t let us have coffee.”

          “Put some sugar in it, it’ll go down better.”

          I did. The coffee was sweet and hot enough that it warmed up my feet and bones. I kicked the counter in my shoes. They were hard still and Pete Conroy’s counter was great for breaking them in.

          “Kick that again and you go right back outside,” Pete Conroy said without turning. “You got new shoes.”

          I nodded. I didn’t know whether to be happy about it or sad. “We had to sell the Cadillac to get them.”

          Pete Conroy said he had heard about that. He said he heard, too, that Oz and I had claimed the car. He said he heard I was good with Oz. He said he guessed I’d learned some patience.

          I frowned. He sounded proper like Mom, with what he said. But I didn’t tell him that. Everybody knew Oz was a nusience. It was just that he was a nusience I felt responsible for. It was a new thing.

          Pete Conroy said he had something to show me. He smiled. The thing he brought up from the counter was round like a wreath and covered with shells and rocks and sticks from the ocean. I recognized many of them. The smooth treasures Oz and I had plucked up from the ground on our walks. “That doodad the wife is making,” said Pete Conway in explanation. “What do you think of it?”

          “It’s beautiful.” I knew what my mother would say. She’d say it was ugly, something of the dust and the earth, crawling with mites. Dad would say it was a plain waste of time.

          “The wife has some crazy idea of selling them,” Pete Conroy said. “I told her if she does, you and Oz ought to get a percentage.”

          “You already pay us for collecting things.”

          “I’ll ask Oz, then.”

          I smiled. He knew Oz would dance and sing and say yes right away. “Okay,” I said. “We’ll do it.”

          Pete Conroy frowned. “Don’t cheat your brother on this. He gets the same as you.”

          I spun around on the counter stool, hopped off, stumbling and caught myself. “I never cheat Oz,” I said, even if that wasn’t true.

          I was the one who danced with Eva. The one who got to go outside to play, rain or shine, while Oz sweated over schoolwork. The one who teased Oz and hid things from him out of meanness.

Oz seemed happier than we ever were outside. Maybe that was why Pete Conroy had invented our walks.

          I cheated Oz every day. Even when I didn’t know I was doing it.

*        *        *

          I was home before I realized I hadn’t told Pete Conroy about Kangaroo being gone. He wouldn’t find that exciting, but Kangaroo was someone who stayed at home constantly. I think he thought he had to make certain his dad got home. Mr. Fulton worked in the mills. He got long hours sometimes, working the machinery that sliced boards from trees, the type of work that could kill you dead if you turned around for a doughnut. That’s why Kangaroo became good with computers, on account of being home all the time with nothing to do but wait. He’d already lost his mother. She’d died long ago when we were both little. But still, I think that’s why he waited for his father. So he wouldn’t lose him.

          I practiced my magic tricks that afternoon. I had to, because my performance was only two days away. It had to go right. I didn’t know whether I wanted to invite my parents or not. Mom would hate it. She was dead set on me being a cheerleader, and Dad was just as convinced that I’d take over our little store and the autobody shop. Sometimes I wondered if they’d get a divorce. They fought so much already over Oz that they didn’t need any trouble from me.

          Eva came up smiling her Eva smile, the one that curled up at the corners but not friendly. “What are you doing?”

          “What does it look like?”

          “Oh, that.”

          “Someday,” I said, flipping coins back and forth between my fingers so that they flashed and crept up my sleeve, “when I have a million dollars –“

          “When will that be?”

          “The same time you become a movie star.”

          Eva stared at the coins dancing up and down across my hands. “You should put those back. Dad will kill you if he knew you took them out of the cash register.”

          “If he’s going to teach me how to run the store, I don’t see why I can’t,” I said. I knew how to operate the door to the cash register. I knew exactly the money put in. I knew the money that came out, too. But these came from Pete Conroy, who didn’t have any money, just like us. He said they were a shell wreath his wife had sold.

          “Where’s Oz?” I asked. Oz needed half the money.

          “Captured,” Eva said. “Kicking and screaming into the house to do homework.” In a quick motion, she snatched the coins from me before they had made the rounds into my sleeves again.

          “Give those back!” I ordered, but Eva said she was sorry, she didn’t know what I was talking about.

          “If you tell Dad I took the money, I’ll tell him where you got it,” Eva said, smiling.

          “You’re a louse,” I told her. “And I got it from Pete Conroy. Half belongs to Oz.”

          “All belongs to me. If you tell Dad, I’ll tell him and Mom about your economic venture in Susie’s basement. Your magic tricks.”

          That stopped me. “You are slime, Eva, you realize that?”

          “Yes. But I’m rich slime.”

          After Eva had left, I sank down on the steps, contemplating separating Eva’s head from her body with the aid of my old jump rope. But that would be a messy business, and at any rate, there wasn’t time enough to think up any good lasting threats to Eva’s person, not before she either spent the money or planned her attack on the magic tricks in Susie’s basement.

          Still, I imagined how easy life would be if Eva was a normal person instead of a jerk. By the time I’d finished with that, Oz stood in front of me, his hair frightened by my mother’s comb into some semblance of order. The familiar yellow color of dissolved butterscotch candy already surrounded his mouth. His eyes held the scarred look of someone gone into regular battle.

          “How was school?” I asked him. I didn’t know how, or if. I was going to tell him about the money. I used to lie to Oz all the time. The difference was, it used to be easy.

          Oz shrugged. He made a rude noise with his mouth and flung what remained of his books into the far corners of the yard. If Oz had had better aim, I suspected it might have been to the ends of the earth.

          “I hate her,” he said. He meant Mom. He meant the way she pried him for answers to work all day long, homework and classwork, and extra work. He sank down by me, just like I was, dejected and furious. Then he said, “What made you change your mind about me?”

          “When?”

          “Before,” he said, taking a deep breath. “You used to hate me –“

          “I did not.”

          “— And how do I get Eva not to and Mom not to and –“

          “No one hates you,” I told him. I noticed a difference in him. Before he would have just screamed in frustration and now he spoke well. Those were long sentences for Oz.

          “You don’t?”

          “No,” I said. “It’s just sometimes you’re a doofus.” Oz looked miserable at this, so I nudged him until he looked at me. Maybe I’d changed, too. Everything was changing.

          “So how do I – not –“

          Things were breaking down in Oz, not upsetting things, just too much to concentrate on at once.

          “Look,” I said. “I was going to give you some money, only Eva took it.”

          Oz blinked. “Why?” Oz was a very moral person. A lot of people couldn’t see this, because moral people don’t shake and shout like he does sometimes. Oz understood about taking things, but lying he never could figure. He was crafty enough to avoid subjects he didn’t want anyone to know about, and that was lying. As far as he was concerned, he was so obvious about lying that anyone could see it. So if everyone could see everyone else’s lies, then he couldn’t understand at all why people went about doing it.

          “Because she’s a cruel rotten person,” I said, trying to cheer him up. Oz didn’t understand sarcasm either, though.

          Oz smiled anyway. “Jeremiah Fulton’s dad is a gyppo logger now,” he announced with importance. “His dad works for the company now, but just by himself.” He frowned, pulling so hard at the butterscotch candy in the corner of his mouth that I could see the outline of it. “Will he be the only person working there now?”

          I sighed. “Okay. That isn’t what that means. It just means he’s working as a contractor. He can work for any company.” That was probably where Kangaroo and his dad were now – at another company. Still, the picture of Kangaroo’s dad working every bit of logging machinery and the chainsaws too made me smile. The only person working in the whole place.

          Things had almost gotten like that around here. That was why Dad had to sell the Cadillac to make money. If anyone in the neighborhood had bought the Caddy, we’d have heard about it by now. Or seen it. Dad was nothing but business when it came to cars.

I don’t think he formed attachments to them like Oz and I did. It was something in him that was missing, as far as we figured.

It was funny. I’d always thought Eva and I would bury our differences, not Oz and I. He wasn’t the sort of person I figured I’d ever be friends with, even if he was my brother. But he was right about that. Gyppo loggers and everything.

Things were changing and it didn’t matter what anyone thought because no one could stop them.

*        *        *

 

          I didn’t see Eva again all that day and halfway into the next. I figured it was because she was avoiding me. With good reason. It was too hot to do anything – after all that cold rain the weather had gone crazy and couldn’t decide what it wanted to do. Neither could I. Kangaroo was still gone. His trailer felt empty. There was no one else my age who lived closer than ten miles. Oz and I had taken to pitching rocks into the ocean on our walks. Our walks got longer, stretching along the beach and deeper into the woods. My brother wasn’t ever somebody I thought I’d hang out with, but he wasn’t all that bad.

          “This old man,” Oz sang. “He played one.” He stomped hard on the ground, one-legged, like in a hopscotch game. “He played knack-knack on my thumb.”

          “You don’t it like that,” I said. “You don’t sing it like that.”

          “I’ll do it how I want to,” Oz said, so I let him.

          A shadow fell across our work. Oz stopped scribbling gleefully at the pavement with chalk. So far he’d colored the pavement bright red, for snow, even though snow wasn’t that way at all, and now he had his tongue between his teeth putting the finishing touches on a scribble, turning it into crude mountains and streams.

          We didn’t look up at first. It could have been anybody. Dad, come to tell me to mind the counter in the store, because he was tired of cricket and fish bait smell in his lungs and was going out for a bit. It could have been Mom, bent on mining a good respectable person out of Oz with schoolwork. Mama Regan, come to tell fortunes – Oz would be an entertainer and I would be a first class magician and Eva would take out people’s garbage for a living. Or mama Regan babbling about the dead and stumbling about.

          It could have anybody. And to our surprise it was.

          Cousin Jake.

          Standing there like he’d never been gone. Oz was on him in a second, clinging to his belt and making yipping sounds like a coyote, happy to see him. I hung back, watching him. There were things different about him, more of them this time. A newly-cleaned scrape across his cheek, still bloody around the edges. Scars like teeth up one arm. It looked like a rattlesnake had bit him, again and again. He wasn’t wearing his jacket, of course, because I was. He reached out to touch me, only I moved away.

          “What’s the matter,” he said. “don’t you trust me?”

          He didn’t sound too sure of it himself. I had the magician’s jacket now, and I would have fought to keep it. I don’t know why. It surprised me. If he’d arrived earlier, months earlier, and wanted it, I’d have given it back but now it was mine. My power. My skills. Soon, I’d have it for good, in my own magic show. I wanted to tell him that, brag about it. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. I knew I was either going to cuss him loud enough to bring people in from the beach or I was going to start crying.

          “I wanted to come back,” Jake said. “I wanted to say I was sorry.”

          “I’ll find Eva,” Oz yelped. He was hopping up and down, both feet now, the man from the moon, ready to yell for Eva.

          “Hush,” Cousin Jake said. And Oz did. Cousin Jake said Eva already knew, that it was Eva who’d found him by the beach, Eva who gave him mealy apples and cheese. “Just like we used to sneak out of the kitchen,” he said. “Eva’s a saint.”

          I knew he was lying. Eva had never been down by the river. She hadn’t wanted to collect things for Pete Conroy’s project. She hated dark wet slimy places.

          “Is that why she needed money?” I asked coldly.

          Jake laughed. He shook and I wondered if he was cold, but I didn’t ask and I decided I didn’t care. His laugh was different. More like somebody who knew things and seen things and who wasn’t just along for fun anymore.

          “Come on, Ossian. Let’s go find Eva.”

          “I don’t think you’re leaving here with him,” I said. I have no idea where the words came from. I didn’t know why I said them.

          “Eva understands this place is going nowhere,” Jake said. “What’s the matter with you, kid? You used to believe magic things happened.”

          “I still do,” I said. “I just don’t think they happen around you anymore.”

          I grabbed Ossian’s hand and we walked back to the house.

*        *        *

          I stayed inside all that day, and I kept Oz with me. It felt silly, like we were hiding out, but Oz never complained about it. He loved the attention. He had his Jack O’Lantern grin because I played cards with him on the living room carpet, while the persistant whine of Mama Regan’s soap operas filled the room.

          “You should teach him solitaire,” Mama Regan said. I hadn’t known she’d been listening. Her eyes lit up bright, so I knew it was one of her better days, the days of fortunes, not the ones where she cursed dead people. Sometimes she made me wonder who had died that was so all-fire important she had to talk to them that much. I mean, you’d think the dead could wait and all, being dead, and not having much to do of a Saturday morning. Sometimes I figured Mama Regan must have been like their soap opera, something always in the background.

          “Gracie doesn’t know solitaire.” Oz tried to bend himself with his head hanging down and hoisting his back up, his hands planted behind his head. Just like an acrobat. Even without being double-jointed like Kangaroo Fulton. Oz puts acrobatics to better use than Kangaroo does, anyhow. The only time Kangaroo ever gets double jointed is if I ask, or in the past, if we needed his mother to leave the room.

          “Not that type. Soltaire with marbles.”

I didn’t know which type Mama Regan meant.

“Wise man’s solitaire,” Mama Regan said. “Your father has a wooden board in his room, with holes in it. He plays solitaire on that all the time.”

“Why?” Oz asked. “Does it make you wise?”

She lowered her voice. “Because he wants to test something. Like an experiment.”

“That’s dumb, and why doesn’t he just ask you? You know everything.”

Mama Regan smiled at Oz. Then she turned to me. “Have you practiced your magic? I’m going to your show, and I want it to be good.”

“Look!” Oz yelped. “I can be an acrobat! Me and Gracie, we can both in the circus. We can be a team, can’t we, Grace?”

“Sure,” I said. I never thought I’d enjoy being with Oz. Out of desperation for something, anything, to do, I’d made letters out of oven baking clay before we played games. He had read them all. Oz made some more. He was eager, suddenly. He put faces and small eyes into his letters. He gave them names. All the names started with the right letter. He read them again. We worked on five letters for two hours. I expected him to scream and squint his eyes and shake, like my mother was used to, but he never did. He was smiling.

“Go and get the board,” Mama Regan told him.

Oz got it. We could hear him skidding along the hallway until he emerged, holding the board carefully with both hands. “I’ve never seen this. Will Dad be angry if he sees us playing on it?”

“Not if I tell him it was my idea,” Mama Regan told him. She stared at the pieces so long I thought we would never play at all. I wondered if she saw something else behind them, something that moved and spoke, the reasons my father played the game in secret. I tried to picture this. Dad had never been one for games. He worked on cars and in the autobody shop, and he was certain to supply Oz with the pocketfuls of butterscotch candy, but beyond that there was little interesting about him. I wondered if this board was a magic trick, too. Something only my father knew about.

The board wasn’t dusty. It was clean and polished and smelled of oil, the dark brown of good chocolate. Small pegs dotted its landscape in the shape of a large plus sign.

“It’s defective,” Oz said. He pointed with one stubby finger at the hole at the center, the only one without a peg. Mama Regan said that this was all right, that we should jump the pegs, one over the other, and try to leave only one behind. We tried until my jaw cramped with frustration and Oz beamed, even though we weren’t winning. He studied the board closely and I thought, just maybe, Oz could find the pattern to the board.

“Why does Dad do this, again?” I asked. It had to be a test. Mama Regan never showed us anything that didn’t have thought to it.

“Your father always takes the easy way out.”

“No, he doesn’t!” Oz yelled.

I agreed. The game was anything but easy. I tried to think where Eva would be. Unless she was shopping, she wasn’t the type to stay gone this long. I wasn’t worried, just curious.

“My son was on a ship,” Mama Regan said. This startled me. I tried to think of Dad as somebody’s son, as a little boy. It was impossible. The only image that came to mind was an awkwardly built boy with a bulging stomach and yellow bristle hair, a miniature version of Dad watching over the little store.

“Did he throw a tantrum?” Oz asked. “Dad hates water. He doesn’t even go near the beach. He just stays here.”

That was true. Dad wouldn’t leave here, no matter how much my mother argued about better jobs elsewhere. He was a mechanic; it was what he did; he was good at it; end of story.

“Having you here is like having Jake here,” Oz said to Mama Regan. He yelped. “Grace poked me!”

“Don’t be silly,” I told him. “Dad was too old for a tantrum.” I wanted him to shut up about Jake, and fast, before Mom heard about it in the kitchen and straightened up the house, or worse still, wanted to know why we hadn’t told her.

Mama Regan said that was all for now. She told us to put away the game, right where we’d found it.

“No,” Oz said.

I glanced at him. His feet were planted and his mouth was set. Also different from the way Oz acted most of the time.

“More of the story,” Mama Regan’s eyes were half-shut as though she was tired. “More of the story is, your Dad was surrounded by water.”

“And then what happened?” Oz asked.

“And then the boat sank,” Mama Regan said. She straightened her back against the hard surface of the couch, and let out a small sigh. “And people drowned. Except your Dad.”

“Did Dad drown?” Oz asked.

I laughed. I didn’t mean to, and Mama Regan looked sharp at me, so I quieted down to hear her.

“He wasn’t any good at it. He lived and came home and had a family.”

“Oh,” Oz said. He stuck his tongue between his teeth, thinking. “And did the rest of them?”

“Come home? No. Every one of them is at the bottom of the ocean, I’d imagine. Leave me alone, now, child.”

We put away the board, Oz and I together. And then we went up to my room, where Oz bounced on the bed, trying to reach the ceiling. I sat on the floor, tracing patterns in the rug with one finger. There were still bean vines sprouting here and there, from when I’d spilled some from my collection into the rug.

It was an accident. I didn’t mean to do it.

I wondered if my father hadn’t meant it. Maybe he played that wise man’s solitaire every night to get a perspective on something. Finding out how hard it was, what he’d done. Living, when all others had died.

Downstairs, the steady hum of soap operas began again, a whine high-pitched enough for dogs and as grating to hear as crying.

*        *        *

          Eva’s bed was still empty the next morning. I stared at it. Oz came in and stood with me.

          “Should we go look for her?”

          “I think so.” I needed to practice my magic. It could wait. The magic show was tonight, in Susie’s basement. The whole neighborhood would be there. Admission was a dollar.

          We came downstairs avoiding the kitchen, because my mother was in there, banging about for the pots and pans. Every so often the clacking sound of the adding machine came, too, when she worked out another receipt from the little store. Dad couldn’t do the business end of the store, besides the actual buying and selling of things. The inventory was my mother’s problem.

          The whole thing reminded me of the last time Jake was here, when we snuck out with apples and buttermilk. A secret mission of children. I thought about that. Eva had brought these things – apples – to Jake while he was…where?

          “Where did Jake say he was?” I asked Oz. Oz was great for things like this. I swear he has a tape recorder where his ears should be. He may not understand some things, but he can repeat back everything anybody says for at least the past week. It’s a gift.

          “The beach.”       

We ran along the little winding path, the one that led away from the main road. We went past Kangaroo’s trailer. I didn’t stop to see if Kangaroo was there or not. I didn’t even think about it. But then Kangaroo was there beside us, running in his awkward way, his glasses hanging on by only one ear until they fell off and we had to stop.

Kangaroo bent double for his glasses, wheezing with the effort of running. “My dad,” he gasped, “is a – gyppo – now – but – we came back.”

“We’re looking for Eva,” Oz chirped brightly. “She’s lost.”

Kangaroo looked at me and pushed his glasses up. It left a wide white smear of grease across his lens. I took the glasses from him and wiped them on my shirt and he nodded thanks. “I didn’t think Eva ever went out, except for shopping. She doesn’t like the beach.”

“Neither does Dad. He was on a ship,” Oz said, and I said in a mean voice to Kangaroo, “That’s my sister you’re talking about.”

Everything we said was in a jumble. Kangaroo looked confused trying to sort it out. “Boy,” he said, “I leave for one week and things get exciting.”

I looked up across the horizon. I saw it then. A little mess of driftwood, in the row of driftwood the ocean piled up close to the little path. This one looked like a cross between a tipi and a hut, the branches and logs stuck in the ground, then stacked against one another and braced with the logs surrounding it. People made those all the time, for bonfires and that kind of thing, but this one felt different.

We approached with caution. You never knew who lived in huts like that. It was best to be careful. I held Oz’s hand with such force that he cried out and tried to pull away. I was thankful for Kangaroo, who picked up a branch and brandished it, even if he was the type who’d somehow manage to whack himself over the head instead of the person he was aiming for.

I called before we reached the hut. I called for Jake, and after a few minutes there he was, unshaven and squinting in the light, looking rumpled and surprised as anything to see us.

“Eva didn’t come to the house last night,” I told him. I wasn’t trying to do anything other than let him know. I thought maybe she’d been there.

Oz looked with curiosity at Jake’s hut. “You slept in that? You could have come to my room.”

“Hah,” Jake said. It didn’t sound like a word. He wiped a hand across that ugly beard he thought he was growing, and he looked older then. Ancient. Worn. Not like one of us. He scuffed his feet against the sand, and I saw then that his shoes were gone and his feet cut up from the glass around the beach. “Eva’s here,” he whispered.

Jake was lucky Kangaroo had the stick and I didn’t. I wanted Mama Regan’s black oak stick to hit Jake about the head. It was the first time I think I’d ever felt older than him. I knew something he didn’t. “You should have brought her back,” I said.

Jake made that strange noise again. With his free hand, the one that wasn’t stuck up in his stubble while he gnawed at the nails, he pulled back the thin red blanket that served as a door. I wondered if the blanket was one of ours, like the ones we used to sleep in the backyard in years past.

Eva was there all right. Only she wasn’t. I’d never thought of myself as luckier than Eva, but I did then. Her head was down and her hair looked stringy, unwashed, her eyes wandering and unfocused, like Mama Regan’s got when she talked to the dead. It scared me. I bent on my knees to hold Eva’s head up.

The place smelled. Sweat and incense and burnt-wood smell of bonefire. I should have looked for a barbecue when I came up, but I didn’t think about it then. I wanted to call Eva, too, except I couldn’t gather enough saliva to do it.

Oz frowned. He crawled into the hut with me, and he was the one who called Eva, in a sing-song voice, with one hand clutching mine. His thumb wasn’t in his mouth. I couldn’t tell if he was frightened, couldn’t tell if he saw this beyond Eva being sick. It scared me though.

Kangaroo peered in at us. At first he looked too close. The smallness of the hut did that. He turned to Jake and asked him what he did.

Jake coughed. He went at it, arching his back like a cat and hacking away until he spat a gob of something on to the sand. “I’m sorry, really I am. We had a party. Eva likes parties. She’s been bringing me things – food, blankets. She like parties. There was a bonfire. You could have seen it from the house if you’d looked.”

“What happened?” Kangaroo said again, mean this time.

Jake looked startled. Not grown-up startled, but like a kid. Open-mouthed that way, with his eyes wide and his teeth clenched like skinny Kangaroo was going to knock him over. For all I knew, he just might have. People didn’t think about Kangaroo so much as a fool anymore, not since he’d dragged me out of the water. Mom found out about that and so the whole town did. Kangaroo was stronger than he looked.

“I didn’t mean to,” Jake whispered. “We had a party. Somebody gave her something.” Kangaroo just stared, and Jake spoke faster. “A friend, okay? I don’t what it was, and I don’t know what time it was, and I don’t know where they got it, or why she took it.” He squeezed his eyes shut and when the words came they sounded babbling like he wanted to cry. “Except I know Eva likes parties.”

I stood up then. Oz took my place holding Eva’s head. He rubbed the top of her hair. Oz always was great when people were sick. I could hear him telling her all about the clay and me teaching him and how good at it I was. I didn’t feel good at it. I felt very light and hot and like I wanted to stand there knocking Jake all over town all day.

“I’ll…get my father,” Kangaroo said. He squeezed my shoulder. “Don’t kill him until I come back. Promise.”

“Okay.” I said, slow. My face burned. I hoped Jake saw this. I was agreeing to be patient. Once Kangaroo’s gyppo logger father got here, I figured, then I’d be able to swing at Jake. Right now, there was Oz to look after, and Eva to think about.

          “She’s talking now,” Oz announced. “She wants you here.”

          He was right. Eva was talking. It was a mess though. Coins. Magic tricks. Me. Oz. Sorry. Pete Conroy and his wreaths. She talked about all of it, but not in any way that made the least bit of sense. I remembered the money. Eva had taken it from me. She must have been here for those two days. She might have taken more than just what Jake’s friend gave her. And when she did, the friend would have wanted payment.

I shivered. By then, Kangaroo’s father and Kangaroo were coming up to us, running. Kangaroo’s father was taking over, shouting things. Ambulence. Up ahead. Now. My ears buzzed.

I crouched away from the rest near Jake’s pathetic excuse for a bonfire. Bonefire, I had thought before. I was right. A thin bone from the remains of a meal stuck out. I thumbed charcoal from the bone, turned an unsettling bluish color from the heat, greasy still, and crossed with darkish lines. A scapula, shoulder bone. Mama Regan had spoken of things like this once. Divination. The lines burned into bone were a means of telling the future. My stomach churned, and I gripped the bone, thinking of bad magic. What had happened here? Eva was crying, am unleashed animal keening that made me feel sick. Her bones hurt, she told us all. They burned and burned and she wanted it to stop.

Kangaroo’s father took Eva from me.

I remember her legs swinging down. He picked her up with arms supporting her back and her legs swinging. Like she dreamed of walking. Only I didn’t want her dreaming of it. I wanted her up and doing it. I swayed and stumbled and Oz caught my hand and pulled me along. It was funny. I was teaching Oz. I didn’t think of doing it. He was calm. I’m not sure what he understood about it all, but he was calm enough, and amid all the shouting and wailing of sirens, I was thankful for it.

Jake lagged behind all of us. He did not walk with us as a group. He walked like someone who didn’t know where he was going.

My father hated the ocean. He hated water and ships and he practiced the wise man’s solitaire at night, to test his chances. I think this is what made his face white and translucent and old, when Kangaroo told him. They would not let me or Kangaroo in the ambulance. I wanted to go – I was frightened of what would happen if I wasn’t there to see it. I understood my father’s chances now. Why he played the game.

In the end we all went. We sat in straight hard chairs in the hospital waiting room. My father, who did not form attachments to things, except the autobody shop, and who would not move from it, held Oz on his lap and rocked back and forth. Mama Regan sat by my mother, with her great black stick at the ready to trip nurses in the hall. Kangaroo and his father stayed, and I played cards with them, in a hurried unfocused sort of way.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to see Pete Conroy coming up the hall. I was anyway. I didn’t want him to say the words, but he did. He said, “Would somebody tell me what’s happened with Eva?”

*        *        *

          I went with Pete Conroy down to the water fountain for a glass of water. I didn’t want any, but Pete Conroy said he did and I ought to come with him.

          I looked back and my mother nodded. “What about Oz?” I said.

          “Oz is fine,” Pete Conroy said.

          That made me angry, because Oz was fine and how did he know what Oz thought. I jammed my thumb against the button when he told me to, and he brought a round flat bit of metal from his pocket. It gleamed in the light. I wondered what it was. When he unfolded it, it was a little cup that fit together.

          “I didn’t know they made cups like that.”

          “They must. I’ve got one. I’ll get you one sometime.”

          I stared at him. I didn’t like the fact that he wanted to give the cup. It wasn’t any of his business whether I had one or not. I couldn’t think of anything to say for awhile. “Why are you here?”

          Pete Conroy let out a big sigh. It sounded like something collapsing. “I heard something from some people at the ice cream shop.” He drank swallows of water, like an animal drinks, not like a person. “And your mom called me. She said I should get myself down here.” He smiled. “And when Lydia, the moonshiner’s daughter, tells me something, I’m not about to refuse.”

          I smiled. “She has that effect on people.”

          “That’s right. Like the army. I think she was high-ranking in her last life. What do you think?”

          “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Mama Regan. She’s the one who knows about past lives.”

          “That certainly is true. That old woman’s a witch.”

          I watched Pete Conroy. I thought maybe I should study him, because then I wouldn’t have to look down the hall. It was a good idea, but I felt guilty about it. Pete Conroy folded up his little cup and put it back in his pocket. “How old are you?” I asked him. I looked up, so I could see him better, and I relaxed a little.

          “About as old as Mama Regan, nearly.”

          “Did you know her when she was my age?”

          “No. She lived in Ireland then, didn’t she. And I lived where I lived. I met her the same time you did.”

          I realized that Jake had come in through the swinging doors at the end of the hall. My mother got up very calm, and went to meet him. By the time she got to where Jake was, I could hear the shouting from where I stood at the other end of the hall. My mother said a lot of swear words I didn’t figure she had in her vocabulary, and she tried to hit Jake a couple times over the head, only she was upset, so she couldn’t aim all that well. She only quit when one of the nurses grabbed her from behind. Another one had a hold of Jake, too, but that was unnecessary. He hadn’t raised his hands or moved at all.

          I stared at both of them. Mom was proper. The sun rose. The sun set. The earth revolved around it. And my mother was proper. That was the way things were. It was to be expected. She rarely raised her voice and I had never seen her try to attack anybody. It was childish, she said. It was what I would do.

          “Come on,” Pete Conroy told me. “Let’s take a walk.”

          I didn’t want to. I had, a minute ago. But now I wanted to watch. This was too good to walk away from.

A doctor in a white coat like the science teacher at school came out. I could hear the clicking of shoes. That was a bad sign. I wanted to tell Pete Conroy that. Then I realized Oz was gone. Kangaroo and his father were gone. It was only my parents and the doctor. Pete Conroy had tricked me. He’d as good as lied. And Pete Conroy didn’t lie. He was fun. He wasn’t like Mom or Dad or Mama Regan. But he’d conspired with all of them and pulled all of us away from each other and that was unfair.

I started walking quickly. I couldn’t hear what was said, without the shouting. I wanted to hear. It had brought Mom back from attacking Jake. The nurses still had not let go of her arms. They held her up. I wanted to watch and I didn’t want to watch. And I didn’t know I was going to move, but there I was doing it.

Pete Conroy caught me by the arm, easy, and I realized he was trying to stop me without scaring me. He should have known I don’t scare easy. He mentioned the walk again and I told him he could go but I wasn’t.

Then I was sitting up against the wall.

“Did you knock me down?” I asked him.

“No,” Pete Conroy said. “You just decided to slide down the wall here. And I decided I’d sit with you awhile.”

“You use a slide to slide,” I said.

“Sure you do,” Pete Conroy said. It sounded like something I’d tell Oz to keep him quiet and peaceful.

“I’m sorry,” I said after a time. “I don’t really know what’s going on.” Then I said, “Who’s taking care of your shop?”

“I’ve got a sign for times like this,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I could run get you some ice cream if you want it.”

I studied this a long time. It felt like one of Oz’s homework problems. “I don’t think I could eat it.”

“You’ll feel better later, sweetheart,” Pete Conroy said. He patted my shoulder kind of awkward. I thought I probably should mind about him calling me sweetheart, because it was a nice thing to say, and I didn’t want things to be nice like that. It felt like everyone was saying what was the matter with me. Mama Regan and Jake. And I didn’t know what was the matter with me. I wanted to tell Pete Conroy about that, and my magic show, but something happened when I opened my mouth. I started whining like Oz did, only Oz was grown out of it and here I was, doing it, and not caring what anybody thought, and Pete Conroy not saying anything one way or the other about it at all.

*        *        *

 

The next morning I slept late, and when I went to the kitchen, Pete Conroy was there already. I stared at him because I wasn’t used to seeing him in our house.

He said, “Morning, Grace,” and went back sipping his coffee.

I slopped cereal into a bowl. It spilled, but no one said anything. Mama Regan sat beside Pete Conroy, without arguing with him, and she watched me with the same look on her face. I poured milk over my cereal, carefully. My hands shook.

“You’re still tired,” Mama Regan told me. She leaned her stick against the table, and I was so surprised to see her turn that stick loose that I dropped my spoon.

“I’ll get you another,” Pete Conroy said.

“No!” Everyone stopped. I got another spoon. It was strange to eat with only two people. I kept searching for Oz. He had to be somewhere. And Eva. I didn’t know where Eva was. It scared me.

Finally I said, “Where’s my brother?”

Mama Regan said, “He’s out shopping. He doesn’t need to be here.”

A chill ran through me. “Eva’s dead, isn’t she?”

Everyone stopped talking. That scared me too. They should answer me. Mom and Dad were gone, too. It was like those old horror movies where everyone familiar vanishes. Mama Regan told me, no, Eva was fine, at the hospital, doing things. I could visit her in a little while. She might be in the hospital for some time.

They shouldn’t have done this. Seperated me and Oz and Eva. We should be together. We needed to be. It was only because we were kids that they thought we couldn’t understand and needed to be sheltered.

“Has anybody told Oz?” I asked.

Mama Regan said, “No, child. And don’t you tell him. It’s too heavy a matter for him.”

“He can understand,” I said. “He’s going to know Eva’s not here at home. You can’t just hide it from him.”

Pete Conroy opened his mouth, and I said quietly, “And you don’t live here, so you can’t tell me what to do.”

“Listen, young lady…” he began. But he could see by then that I wasn’t paying any attention. I heard, but that didn’t mean I planned to follow.

“I’m going to tell him.” I told them both. “And when we go to visit Eva, Oz is coming with me.”

“You can’t make these kinds of decisions. Wait till your folks come home.”

“Fair enough,” I said.

So I did. And then I told them the same thing. My mother was embarrassed and put up a fuss, but Mama Regan said that I ought to be allowed. That night I took Oz out to the autobody shop.

It was dark and cold out there, an eerie blue from security lights. Oz poked at the car Dad had up on the rack, and he would’ve crawled under the suspended car if I hadn’t pulled him back.

“Let me go, Gracie.”

“Oz.” I pulled him again and turned him around. His gaze wandered, looking at everything. “Look at me. Eva won’t be here for awhile.”

“She’s in the hospital. She got hurt.”

“That’s right. She’s okay, but she’ll have to stay there.”

“Forever?”

“Not forever.”

Oz frowned. “She should stay there. Then nobody’ll get mad at her.” He leaned forward confidently. “Everyone’s mad at her. If I got hurt, would they be mad at me?”

I shook my head. “No.”

Oz frowned and studied the underside of the car. “I – I don’t –“ He tried again. “Eva. I want –“

“I miss her, too.” I did miss her then, terribly. And that was funny strange, because Eva wasn’t the type of person I’d miss. But she was my sister. And I wasn’t like Dad, who couldn’t relate to anything except cars, or Oz, who liked everybody a whole lot, but didn’t have the vocabulary for it. I was only me. And I had only one way I knew to express myself. The magic show I didn’t get to have. Tomorrow I would visit Eva. And I’d bring Oz, even if I had to have a tug-of-war with my parents about it. Even if I had to sneak Oz in, I’d do it.

“Gracie,” Oz tugged at my arm. “I want to draw.”

“It’s your bedtime. If I keep you out much longer, everyone will have a fit.”

“I want to draw now.”

So we drew right then. I got pens and crayons and wide brown butcher paper. We drew pictures for Eva at the hospital and we drew banners for the magic show. I’d have that tomorrow, too, no matter what. We drew and drew until Dad came out into the autobody shop to check on us.

He stared with a numb expression at the rows of paper. “What’s this?”

“A magic show,” Oz yelled, throwing paper into the air.

“Grace,” said my father, “I’ve had just about enough of this magic business. One magician in the family is enough.”

“What’s the matter with it?” I asked.

“It’s disrespectful.” He strode over to the jumble of drawings. “You don’t even have the concern to be worried over your sister. I’d expect that from Jake, but not from you.”

I stared at him. I watched him the whole time he gathered papers into his arms and carried them outside.

“Where –“ Oz cried. He tugged at Dad’s arm, and my father brushed him aside.

“What do you think this is?” I asked him. He’d carried a bundle of papers to the spot where Cousin Jake and the rest had had our campout. The shed loomed ominously over us. “Do you think we’re cursing Eva? You think we don’t care just because we’re distracting ourselves?”

Oz was hopping up and down, his mouth flopping open and shut. He finally made enough movement to draw Dad’s attention. “You’re wrong!” Oz shouted. “These are my things! My things!”

Dad grabbed Oz by the arm. It must have hurt, because Ossian stopped talking. He stood stock still. Ossian’s arm was raised up like Dad was going to drag him off somewhere. His mouth was beginning to shake. “You’ve had things easy,” Dad told him. “You don’t know enough yet to let you say things like that. Just because Grace does, doesn’t mean —“

“My things!” Oz yelled. “My things!” Ossian’s face turned red and tears leaked out of his eyes. He wasn’t screaming yet, but that would be next. Dad slapped him across the shoulder and Ossian began to wail then, inarticulately waving his arms toward the pile.

I just stood there. I meant everything I said, but I had no idea how to begin doing what I wanted to, which was to drag Oz away. I wasn’t afraid, and I could see Dad felt as hopeless as I did, because he dropped his hold on Oz and bent awkwardly in front of him. Then he straightened and looked at us and said, “God, I need some sleep,” and went back into the house.

When the door slammed, Oz ran to me. If it had been a few months earlier, or in public, I’d have pushed him away. But tonight was different. Everyone seemed to think Ossian was a child. He was, but you know what I mean. He’d never tried to say anything that opposed anyone, and if he had, it would have been thought of as funny and ignored. The magic show had made differences in all of us.

I sat down and Oz crawled into my lap. I didn’t say anything. He had used up all his words and none came to him for a long time. No one came out of the house. I wanted them to, but no one came. They had their own worries.

Finally Oz stopped crying. “He hates me.”

“No. He’s just worried.” I realized that was true. It was an odd thing. I didn’t think Dad meant to hit him. That was an odd thing too, because before I’d thought adults hit kids because it happened to occur to them. Half the stuff we did seemed reasonable.

I let Oz talk, when he had the words. “He thinks I’m a baby.”

I knew what he meant. I pulled him away from me so I could see him in the darkness. For a minute, I was lost for words, which must be what Oz feels like all the time. Hunting for words and not having them come. I wondered where Jake was tonight. He might have been at the hospital, but I doubted it. Facing Mom again would have been too much to ask. I wanted to tell Oz Dad thought he was smart, but that might have been a lie. Ossian was smart. But few people saw this. So instead I said, “I think you’re great.”

Oz managed a feeble grin.

“Help me gather up these things.”

Oz clung to my legs. “Don’t –“

“We’ll hang them up. We’ll finish them. You can show Eva tomorrow.”

A longing to see if Eva was all right came over me. I didn’t expect it. Another thing that probably made Dad angry was the fact that Oz didn’t seem all that concerned about Eva. It wasn’t in him. If she had died, it would have been the same way, I realized, startled. It was too matter-of-fact. He missed her, of course, I knew that, but it was not the same for him as it was the rest of us. The ability to mourn was simply not in him.

In a way, I imagine this was easiest for Ossian.

*        *        *

We drew all the night, in the yard. No one came to get us. No one sent Oz to bed. I wouldn’t have let them anyway. Around two, when the birds had stopped their very last calls and gone to sleep, we finished. Ossian helped me carry in the things we had drawn. Oz drew happy faces but did little writing. I hauled him to his feet, and managed by pushing and carrying to get him into the house. He never did wake up completely.

The house was dark. The kitchen, too, was dark, and the plates from dinner hadn’t been cleared from the table. That was strange. The whole place was tense. I settled Oz on the couch and put his feet up and covered him. In the morning, we would see Eva.

I saw Mama Regan in the door frame. She wore an ancient dress and had the ever-present black oak stick, which she thrust in my path when I tried to pass her.

“You have no respect for anything.”

“Out of my way, old woman,” I imagine I sneered it, but I was too exhausted for thoughts of self-preservation.

Mama Regan’s nose twitched and seemed to sharpen. Something in her eyes, deep within, told me she had known this was coming.

          It should have hurt me to speak to her like that, but it only made me feel stronger. It must have been what Dad felt, battling Oz, fighting something less able even if it isn’t right.

          “Gracie –” Her words were quiet, grating with half-suppressed coughing. She tried to hand the stick to me to steady me, to give me magic. I didn’t like the idea of touching it. The stick was horrifying, now, where once it had been some comfort. If I touched it, I would know the truth, and I did not ever want to know that.

          Oz would wake up if we grew louder. This didn’t seem like an argument. “You knew,” I told her. “You wouldn’t tell Eva’s fortune.”

          Mama Regan looked down at her stick, smiling grimly. “It’s half fake, anyhow. I only do things to keep your mother annoyed.”

          “No, it isn’t. You’re just saying that.” I’d hoped some of Mama Regan’s magic would rub off for the magic show. It seemed like something that would happen far in the future. “If you can’t tell Eva, tell me.”

          “Tell you what?”

          “The fortune. Eva’s fortune.”

          This startled her, and she drew back as if afraid of me. “I can’t do that. It’s against the rules.” She sighed. “Child – it’s a matter of principle. I have to have the person in front of me, so I can read them. Like a book.”

          Lies. Like Jake had done. Magic was only what you made people want to see. Even if something in me wanted to believe her,

          Only Mama Regan told cards, too, and the lives of the dead. I wanted to ask her about these, because they were different from palm reading, but something glowing about the stick stopped me. If Mama Regan did have magic, I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know if Eva’s soul was one of those, floating about somewhere in the atmosphere, while Eva herself stayed in the hospital. The idea of having your soul, there, waiting, made me shiver.

          Everything fell apart when Eva entered the hospital. It was like having my second half, my enemy, taken away and having no one to argue with. Without fighting, I was lost. I hadn’t expected it, and I didn’t know what to do.

          “I take it back,” said Mama Regan. “You do have respect. You help your brother.” She settled herself, and the cane, groaning a little, into the armchair beside the couch. I sat beside her on the arm of the chair, both of us without speaking.

          I took the black oak stick when she offered it. The polished wood slid under my hands, and it helped settle me out, somehow, made me sure of my thoughts. At last, Mama Regan croaked, “Your hands will guide you.”

          I snorted. “They haven’t so far.”

          “You think so? Perhaps you’re wrong.”

          I stared down at my hands until they blurred. Maybe this is what she meant. Because I could see illusions, and had once had special things myself, it was easier for me to create illusions for others.

          “You will be a fine magician,” said Mama Regan. “Whatever you choose to do with it.”

          It was late. I stayed perched on the armchair like a child expected a story. I said, “Why do you have to be so vague? Why can’t you just say things straight out?”

          “I can’t help who I am, child. And neither can Eva.”

          Something about that frightened me and comforted me at the same time. We stayed up all that night, and slept off and on, the three of us walking each other up every so often, by accident. I did not dream. I didn’t want to know what my dreams meant. But I thought quite a bit about magic, and wise man’s solitaire, and whether your fortune and your past told anything about what would really happen in your future. I thought about my fortune, and Oz’s and Eva, who didn’t have one anymore. I wondered if Jake still had one, or if he had lost it somehow, one cold night, the way you lose a favorite nickel. I wondered if that was the way Eva’s fortune was lost – because she had bought it from Jake, and not from someone else, because her magic road was different from all of ours.

                   *        *        *

         

 

         

 

 

 

 

         

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember that their Dad does not form attachments, because of his ship. This could be brought back in during the interruption of Grace’s magic show. Maybe the Dad forms an attachment to oz, or maybe they can see he’s worried about where Eva is.

 

Eva maybe is collecting money for drugs? For a party Cousin Jake will take her to? Maybe drinking? Maybe someone at the party tries something? It all happens the night of Grace’s magic show, so maybe this gets forgotten – children have time for it, but even though the adults crash it and Mom throws a fit, this is forgotten because of Eva. Later, maybe one of the adults can admit she did a good job. Maybe her dad – her mom will take longer to win over.

         

 

         

 

 

My greatest feat in life so far consists of getting born on the Interstate during a traffic jam. You can see this as either an absurd sense of humor or just my family’s usual good fortune disguised as cursed events. My mother says I get my wildness from my grandmother. She says this seriously, but I have looked at Mama Regan when she’s playing solitaire on the TV tray in the living room, and no person in their right mind would see anything wild in her, except on the nights when she’s had too much Irish whisky and is taken to snapping at flies with her false teeth.

She does, too. I’ve seen her do it. It’s the only time the old woman gets to move quickly, when there’s a fly about the place. Then this gleam comes into her eyes and her hair gets all bushy like it’s standing on end, and she hits out with a flyswatter and both edges of her false teeth, and then whatever fly once existed doesn’t exist anymore. My mother says Mama Regan came from Ireland as a little girl, and when she was grown she fled Tennessee on horseback across a river because Grandpa was a bootlegger. She raised five kids waiting until he came back, and when he did, it was three months late and hungry for her cooking.

That’s the story Mom tells when she stirs oatmeal or grits or soup over the stove, the story of Grandma Regan. She never tells the story of me, born with cars packed bumper to bumper and taillights on. When she does mention me, her eyes kind of shift away and get misty. Everyone knows why.

“Lyddie gave you a strong name,” Dad said. “The name of a warrior queen.”

“Grace!” My brother, Ossian, was another one of Mom’s experiments in naming. The legend of Ossian has it that he rode a white horse to the land of the dead, and had the privilege of living hundreds of years. That is, until he set foot on the ground and turned straightaway to dust. Poor Oz didn’t know about his namesake yet. He was five, little, annoying and seemed to have about fifty hands where they shouldn’t have been.

“That’s right,” Dad said. He tilted his grease-stained hat back on his head and whistled up and down. “Grace. Legend has it she went sailing like a man and divorced her own husband.”

“Smart woman,” Mom said, cackling. She set a pot down on the table and went to get Mama Regan. Everyone could hear her murmuring away in the living room. Mama Regan has a bad habit of talking to folks long dead and gone and on top of that, she also tells fortunes and read palms every Wednesday before noon. I don’t see how I’m like her at all, and frankly I wouldn’t want to be if it means I’ll be some old woman setting spells to shrink people’s heads and bring back old lovers.

And if I were like her, you’d think I’d have some old lovers around, but sadly, no. It’s my sister, Eva, who has all the boyfriends and cars waiting on Friday nights. She’s the one my folks worry over and wonder about at all hours. Eva was lanky and thin without trying. She had long thin hands and that kind of fair skin that burns easily, and these haunting black eyes. She was the type of person people talked about after she was gone. Not me. I have reached a height of five foot even, and my hair isn’t straight, but curls and frizzes, and it’s dead black besides. I have an enormously long neck with a strawberry birthmark on it.

“Heavens, Gracie,” Mom said. She led Mama Regan to a chair and then sat herself. “It must be eighty outside.”

“What’s wrong with what I’m wearing?” I had on my usual grungy black high tops, inherited from Eva, who no longer deemed them fashionable enough to bother with. Also, a gray hooded sweatshirt advertising Rainbird’s Autobody Shop. Our house is right behind the shop, which isn’t a shop at all, really, just a greasy piece of asphalt with a service station squatted ominously on top it. There’s a cash register, a fully stocked ice cream freezer that my dad guards with his very life, and one or two racks of those little paperbacks that everyone starts but no one finishes. On good days, kids come down from the hills nearby on their bikes, but usually nothing happened there and anyone manning the counter got extremely good at counting specks on the ceiling. It was no wonder Mama Regan ate flies. Probably sheer intolerable boredom.

“Nothing’s wrong with it. It just…”

“It just looks a bit odd, sweetheart,” Dad told me, as if this was an entirely new idea to him.

I knew what they thought was odd. I was wearing a scarf instead of a turtleneck today, and you would never have known I had a birthmark underneath. “Well, I want to cover up something, and it couldn’t very well be my height unless I went out with a blanket over my head.”

“It looks fashionable,” said Mama Regan. I looked at her in surprise. We generally aren’t on speaking terms since the day she explored a neighbor’s embarrassingly detailed past lives when I brought some friends over for lunch. Mama Regan has some far-fetched idea that I’m an old soul reborn, seeing as how I have green eyes. I informed her that I have quite enough trouble being this soul, let alone an old one. That was the point when Oz asked her if the way his nose was meant anything. Thank God Oz has a snub nose that turns up at the end just like mine, or I’d feel like a real freak. Don’t hold the nose against me though. I’m beginning to get a theory that my parents must have had recessive genes or something oddball like that. You know, with genetic variability and everything, you can have two completely normal people breeding messed up kids. It’s true. This monk who’d been locked up for eons suddenly started breeding sweet peas and he’s the one that discovered the whole thing. He sounds like a member of my family.

Mama Regan reached across the table and traced the outline of my thumb. Her fingers were cold and I could feel the liver spots rubbing against my skin. The edges of the scars on my hands burned like she’d cut them, and I pulled away. “These,” she said gravelly, “these will guide you.”

“Stop it, Mama,” my mother cried. There was almost fright in her voice, and anger.

“I remember them being cut off,” I said. “My extra fingers. I remember.”

“No, sweetheart,” said my father quietly. “You couldn’t. They take the fingers off at birth.”

“She’s an old soul,” Mama Regan wore a thin smile, twisted at the edges. She spooned oatmeal from the pot and it dribbled over the table and her sweater.

I wiggled my remaining fingers gingerly. If you didn’t take notice of the scars along the thumbs, they weren’t all that bad looking. They were long and pink and had well-formed fingernails. These were usually covered in dirt and cobwebs, a fact that drove Mom deliciously crazy.

Mom wrinkled her nose. “Don’t crack your fingers that way, Gracie.”

“Go on, Grace,” Eva hooted. “Maybe you’ll end up like Cro-Magnon man, with a pea-sized brain and knuckles that hang below your knees.”

“Don’t talk about your sister that way.”

“Why not? She talks about me like that.”

That part was true. I was always bemoaning the fact that Eva wasn’t consistently fascinating like my best friend, Kangaroo Fulton. Kangaroo is double-jointed in all the right places and can bend his thumb down to his wrist without pain. It makes his mother queasy, which is one of its main advantages. If we want to watch movies or something, all Kangaroo has to do is contort himself into unnatural positions or bend both thumbs back, and the house is ours. I would trade my extra-finger scars any day for Kangaroo’s talent. At least it’s useful.

“Cro-Magnon man did not have a pea-sized brain,” Oz announced matter-of-factly. He considered himself the world’s primary expert on all things concerning dinosaurs and prehistory. The fact that he was still in kindergarten and didn’t cut straight with scissors yet didn’t seem to discourage him at all. He chewed his oatmeal with his mouth open and regarded my scarred hands with interest. “So did they chop off your hands in the traffic jam or after?”

“After,” I said. “They didn’t want to disturb the people in the cars.”

Oz beamed at me, and my father grimaced and pulled Oz onto his lap. The morning paper fell on the floor when he did, but no one noticed. “We told you this before, remember? We took Gracie to the hospital.”

“The hospital,” Oz repeated, turning pink with wonderment. “After the traffic jam.”

“Yes,” Dad said. I watched him closely, wondering how he was going to manage this one. “And they made sure she was all right. And then they tied her special fingers up with string.”

“And then what happened?”

“They fell off.”

Oz looked stricken. “They fell off?” He studied his own fingers and then the floor, as though my fingers might be down there.

“Very good, Edward,” Mom said. “You’ve terrorized him for life.”

“I try my best,” said my father, grinning. Oz demanded that Dad read the comics page. Eva and I decided it was best to leave and tried to beat each other to the door. Eva won. She stood outside, fighting to unlock her bike from the rack. We have to store our bikes in the common rack used by all the customers. All the bikes get tangled up and it takes half the day at least to get them sorted out. Once Eva got fed up with it all and cut a lock with Dad’s wire cutters and rode off on a bike. Then she found out it wasn’t hers. She tried to put it back, pulling and prying and swearing, but our bike rack is very temperamental.

“I’m telling you right now, Grace,” Eva said. “Right now, so you’re a witness.” She twisted up her face theatrically but it just looked like she was trying to spit and couldn’t quite go through the motions. “I’m never going to marry a garage-shop man. Mom was crazy to even agree to come live here.”

I considered this. “Not crazy. She’s the one with the fortune-teller mother, not him.” Besides, I liked the garage and the gas station. There was even a little beach if you wanted to risk life and limb cutting across the highway, and a little patch of woods was within biking distance. I was the only one who went there. Eva was one of those people born with a white-knuckle fear of snakes, and Oz was rarely interested in anything that didn’t have horns or a shell.

“No, seriously. It stinks here.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

“Well, not like you would. You drag home so much wild things, it’s a wonder your room hasn’t grown into a jungle.”

She was right about that. My room was the second smallest, a made-over linen closet right next to the kitchen. It was broiling in summer and too cold in winter, and the heavy smells of cooked grease and dust always hung around my blankets and clothes. In grade school, I brought home animal skeletons and learned about flesh-eating beetles, and then Mama Regan gave a battered paperback version of a book about taxidermy. After that, I was always curing skins and learning anatomy.

“Last week my carpet sprouted bean vines,” I said.

Eva smiled at me. It was the wide, perfect-teeth grin I’d seen her give her friends, and it surprised me. Being the oldest gave Eva the perfect-daughter syndrome. Believe me, she could do no wrong. It usually drove me nuts, but that wasn’t to say that Eva didn’t relish the fact that I drove Mom and Dad up the wall. That was the first only thing we ever agreed about.

“Ice cream?” Eva said.

“Like you have to ask,” I said. It was second thing Eva and I agreed about. We both had a passion for the rum raisin ice cream Pete Conroy ladled out at the ice cream shop. It was supposed to be this big secret, the alcoholic ice cream was, but if Pete got to know you as a regular, he would dole out any flavor you wanted so long as you had the bills to pay for it. It always helped that Eva was the one doing the asking, since no one during her whole life has ever refused her anything.

To get to the ice cream shop, we had to put our life in our hands crossing the highway, and then cut across the back lot where Kangaroo’s father keeps his trailer. Eva wrinkled up her nose where we passed there, like it stunk to high heaven. That was one of those things I didn’t like about Eva, the way she thinks she’s higher than everyone born sometimes. But I didn’t open my mouth. I knew it would spoil things if I did, and Pete was stingy on the ice cream with me. Besides, it was a rare thing to have Eva talking to me like an ordinary person.

“Why do you hang out with him?” Eva asked. She jerked her chin in the general direction of Kangaroo’s trailer. In the light that slanted down out of the trees, it looked all golden around there, bright and cheery. The sun lit up the rows of wash Kangaroo had hung up over the awning, and I saw someone’s grubby sneakers scattered by the door where they had kicked them off before going in. It seemed homey to me. Kangaroo’s place had the same cooking smells as any of the other houses. There was a smell of boiled ham hock and beans coming from there now, and my stomach rolled.

“We just ate,” Eva said. “How can you be hungry?”

“I am.”

“You’re crazy.”

“A person can’t help when they’re hungry,” I told her, but she was looking away down the road, toward the patch of woods and not listening to me in the least.

“Will you look at that,” Eva breathed. I thought she was harping on about Kangaroo’s trailer again, probably some socially-mortifying thing like Kangaroo’s father cooking at the grill in just his shorts. When I turned, Eva’s gaze was glued farther down the road. A line of dust was boiling up from around the tires of some car, only the sun was too bright facing that way for me to see what type of car it was. There was a flash of sunlight, and then all I saw was the world dancing bright blue and red across my vision. I rubbed at my eyes to try and get things right again. My eyes watered and stung. Eva wasn’t helping matters. She kept slapping me on the back as though I needed the Heimlich, and through it all she yelled right in my ear, “Did you that? Did you see?”

“It had better have been a movie star,” I growled. I shoved her a little so she’d quit pounding me on the back like the world was going to end.

“It wasn’t.”

“Big surprise there.”

“No. It was a 1952 Caddy.”

I whistled, and not just at the car. I was surprised Eva had picked up that much from the garage. She wasn’t the type to dirty her hands with oil, so I didn’t know she knew cars at all.

“And there was the handsomest man driving it!” Eva cried. She sounded like a banshee. That was the real reason for her shrieking.

“Is that all?”

“Well, yes.”

I snorted. “I can’t believe I’m related to you. Really.”

“Believe me, the feeling is mutual.” Eva went to work smoothing the dust from her dress. I guess she wouldn’t have dared appear in front of Pete the ice cream man in anything less than clean clothes. She drove me crazy. After she finished preening her hair and clothes from what the wind and dust had done to them, she practiced the art of driving me batty by only looking at me out of just the corners of her eyes and then looking away. I stood it for as long as I could.

“Try that once more and your life is mine.”

Eva looked at me, the picture of innocence. I wondered why she even bothered. No one was watching us. In fact, there wasn’t a soul out on the road, and no cars at all after the Cadillac she claimed to see. Eva’s mouth twitched into a twisted smile. I knew right then that our friendly time was pretty much used up for the day. “I know something you don’t.”

“Not much.”

She pinched her mouth tight and craned her neck. I think she was looking for another miraculous car to come over the horizon. When nothing came, she turned to me like a queen. “No one’s coming into the shop.”

“That’s your big secret? No one ever does.”

“No, less people. Hardly any. Dad says if it keeps up like this, he’s going to have to send us to Uncle Charlie until he finds a way to make money.”

“He wouldn’t.” I tried to calm myself. The largest part of she’d said I already knew because I’d listened in the shop and at home. From the few customers that came there was talk of a loss of jobs at the factories, the main employer in town. The wood mills chopped trees from the earth at the woods just by our house, but there were rumors in the newspaper and a hum at Mrs. McConnell’s store that they were allowing over-cutting. Everyone spoke in hushed voices, not just around kids, as though the thing they spoke of was too terrible to be said aloud. No jobs at the mill certainly meant no one would spend any extra dollar here and there for unnecessary repairs on their car. Through the old metal heating register I heard Mom and Dad talking about it at night. That, and Oz. The teacher made Oz repeat kindergarten last year because of his cutting, and it drove them nearly crazy, even though I told them it wasn’t like being held back was going to hurt Oz. I pictured men in prison talking:

“Why are you here?”

“I killed a man over a bag of potato chips.”

“I robbed.”

“I scammed.”

“I was held back in kindergarten.”

No one thought it was funny except me. And Oz was perfectly happy because he got to meet a whole new bunch of kids and he already knew where the paste was kept. But none of that stopped Mom and Dad talking about him late into the night, so late that the hum of their speech was the last thing I heard when I fell asleep.

“I don’t remember Uncle Charlie,” I said. I kicked at a rock and almost lost my balance. My lack of balance still caught me sometimes, wholly unexpected, even though you’d think by now I’d be used to it. “Was he the tall skinny one with the scratchy face?”

“No. That was another one. You remember Uncle Charlie. He was the short fat one with big hands and bad breath who used to toss you up and down.”

I nodded. I did remember now. That severity of stomach upset you don’t forget easily.

Up ahead, we could see the ice cream shop, squeezed in between the low square cracked-stucco bar where Mom told us never to go, and the bright blue Mexican-style farmer’s market where they sold brown sugar candy and hot chilies. Mom was afraid of so many things. She thought for certain we’d be snatched from out in front of the bar while we walked home licking ice cream. She thought we’d be flattened like the cartoons as we crossed the highway, struck down by a speeding car, and then she fussed because she was mortified to go to the hospital with our clothes in such a state. Mine, at least. Eva’s she didn’t have worry about as much, since she was the perfect little lady at everything. Never mind that this was the way clothes felt comfortable. They had to be worn down to a soft baggy stage, three or four years for the special ones, before they got status.

“Two vanillas it is,” Pete Conroy said when we came in. Then he winked and started ladling out the rum raisin.

“Two scoops each,” I said.

Pete frowned and paused with the ladle still gripped in one hand. Ice cream dribbled off the end of it, back into the container. Pete was so old he had lines all over his face, so old that he had served Mom and Dad ice cream. He had a wide moustache that drooped all over and saggy jowls. He looked like a bulldog, and to make people talk he wore the gold watch his sister gave him right out in public for everyone to see. And a brown felt fedora like I’d seen my grandfather wearing in old pictures. Pete wore it even indoors. With his white apron on for the ice cream it looked kind of strange but Pete said he didn’t care a hoot for what people said. I liked that. “It’ll be one scoop each or nothing. If your folks knew I was giving you this stuff I’d be out of business.”

“Everyone is going out of business these days,” said Eva importantly. Pete didn’t say a word to her, just gave her a glare over his glasses and went to work cleaning things behind the counter. It was a mean thing for her to say, because even if was eighty outside, there wasn’t a soul eating Pete’s ice cream besides us.

We ate in silence for a few minutes after Pete handed us the cones. It wasn’t an angry silence, only the type where you are so contented there is no need to talk. We licked around the edges of the cones so the ice cream wouldn’t melt on to our hands. After a time, Pete opened the little door in the counter and sat on a stool beside us. I realized he was staring with a twisted expression at my shoes. When he saw me looking back at him, he cleared his throat a couple of times and said, “Shoes look a bit tight there.”

I nodded. I tried to wiggle my toes and winced. The shoes were painfully too small. It wasn’t due to my choice of clothes this time, though, and I knew Pete knew it. It was the lack of jobs. There was no talk of new shoes yet, or jeans, or anything else for that matter. Dad said if things got rough we could live off the stock in the shop, but that was a last resort.

Pete must have sensed it was time to change the subject because he tapped his fingers on the counter. “Your brother,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was talking to Eva or to me or both of us in general. “I hear he has some free time on his hands. Why don’t you ask him if he wants to come work for me?”

“What, here?” Eva stared around the place, like there might be cockroaches underneath the chairs. “You know he’s five, don’t you?”

“I’m aware of it, yes. The health department wouldn’t let me have him here, but I’ve got some things needs to be collected out in the beach and the woods, see. I figure Oz could do that.”

“I could help, too!” I said, so excited I almost dropped the cone, but managed to drop most of my ice cream on a glowering Eva.

Pete smiled. “I suppose.” He turned away from us, and I saw he was trying not to laugh. “I can pay fifty cents for every shell you get that’s mostly whole. Twenty for the shiny pebbles or dead moss. Wife wants ‘em for some doodad she’s making. Think you could handle that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Not at all,” Eva said, and I could tell she hated the idea. That was fine by me. Oz and I could do it.

*          *          *

When we got home, the ’52 Cadillac Eva had seen was in the shop up on the rack and Dad was fiddling with its underneath feverishly. He waved when he saw us and said, “Hmm, you look happy.”

There was no sign of Eva’s handsome ghost driver. I teased her unmercifully about it until she slammed the door to our room. She wouldn’t come out at all except for dinner, and then it wasn’t fair because she pitched peas at me with her spoon when no one was looking.

With everything that had happened, I almost forgot to tell Oz about Pete’s offer. He almost knocked over his milk when I did, and right off Dad set down his fork and said he didn’t like it.

“Why not?” Oz said. I could tell from experience he was edging into a good whine.

Dad didn’t answer. He chewed his meat, and Oz mouthed how many times he chewed. Oz was always doing things like that. No one knew how to get him to quit. “Because you need to stay home and study.”

“Study?” Mom said. “Ed, he needs to go out and play. You can’t study cutting.”

“I can go with him,” I heard myself saying. “To the beach and the woods. He doesn’t have to go by himself.”

“He’d better not,” said Mama Regan.

Eva said I was Saint Gracie, patron saint of spoiled kindergarteners.

Dad said, “Quiet, Eva.” He set down his fork and looked at all of us, each one closely. “That Caddy out in the shop has a high price tacked on it. I don’t want anyone messing with that car except me.”

We all nodded. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing at the thought of Mama Regan out in the Caddy. But I kept quiet.

“Did you take the money first, Ed?” Mom’s voice quivered a bit. She thought Dad had a soft heart because he gave some of the neighbors free tune-ups and took things on credit sometimes.

“I did,” Dad said. “Half the payment up front.” He smiled. “Things will turn around, Lyddie, you just wait. This man has money, money, money.”

Oz rocked in his chair and parroted back everything he said. I saw Mom and Dad exchange looks but I couldn’t tell what they meant. All I knew was that Oz clapped his hands afterwards five times, because he counted each clap. When Mom put a hand on top his head, Oz put his hands in his pockets and for the rest of the meal, he didn’t say a single word.

*          *          *

I heard them arguing that night again. Eva was asleep and snoring. I put my ear clean against the heat register this time. Warm air blew into my ear, and dust, too, but I could hear better there. The register was ice cold and a mean draft slid around me so cold I was sure I’d freeze before I heard anything good. The sound came up slightly distorted, but I knew voices well enough to tell who was speaking. Mom was crying and Dad was saying something rather loudly about Oz. “Ossian is not going to be slowed down by this. He’s going to get things right this time.”

“Or what?” Mom said. I think she was crying, but I couldn’t be sure. “Or he won’t be your son anymore because he isn’t perfect, is that it? Good God, Ed, I don’t believe you.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dad said. He sounded sorry. “I didn’t say that. We can run him through those exercises again.” His voice rose. “Lyddie, there is something wrong with that kid and I want to find out what it is.”

“What are you doing?” Eva asked.

I jumped guiltily and scraped my ear against the register. “They’re fighting about Oz.”

Eva snorted. I could see full well she was sitting up, though, cross-legged out of habit because of those dresses she wore. Even in pajamas she managed to look pretty. “Like that’s anything new. Grace, they’re always fighting about Oz.”

“This is different,” I said.

The door creaked open and we both faked sleep, but it was only Oz from the sound of the footsteps. He shifted from foot to foot and gripped his teddy bear with both arms. His hair was standing up in the back and his face was streaked with tears. “Can I stay with you guys tonight?”

“Sure you can,” Eva said. She smoothed our quilt out and hauled Oz up on to the bed. Eva can be fairly nice sometimes. She didn’t say it was nothing to him like she had to me. He rattled off fifteen prime numbers and the days of Wednesday 15th and October 26^th 1986 before he fell asleep abruptly, with his arms spread out every-which-way and his hands cupped like he was holding on to something in dreams. Numbers and rituals calmed him. Besides, he was the only person I knew who could use both hands equally and write a whole sentence perfectly backwards. We always knew Oz was smart.

*          *          *

“It sure is a pretty car,” I said. I ran my hands over the Caddy’s paint job. We were standing just inside the shop. Eva and I were, at least. Oz was just outside it, trying his level best, as far as I could tell, to squash the daylights out of every ant unfortunate enough to be crossing the asphalt.

Eva swung around one of the poles that we suspended fans from, spinning around until I was dizzy watching her. “Dad says if the owner doesn’t come back, and he can’t reach him, he’s going to sell that. Dad’ll kill you, he sees you messing around with that thing.”

“Well, he’s isn’t here to see, is he?”

Eva shrugged. “Go ahead, then. Don’t see why you’re wasting time on that old car when there’s –”

“I know,” I said tiredly. Men. Eva was more in love with the phantom driver than anything else. It was stupid. Even when I told her he might be bald and ancient and have two wives in another town, it didn’t matter to her.

“Grace, I doubt very seriously he’s – what you said.” Eva frowned. I couldn’t figure out why she was spending time with me, in the shop, when she hated grease. “A pessimist.”

“That’s bigamist, dummy. A pessimist is somebody who thinks bad things will happen.”

“See, there you have it. If he has two wives, bad things will happen.” Eva glared at me because I was cracking up so hard I thought I’d wet my pants. “Besides, isn’t that illegal?”

“Not in Utah.”

“This isn’t Utah.”

“Very good. You learned your states.”

That was when she threw a brush at me. She must have missed by two feet, being a much worse shot than I was. I decided then would be a perfect time to leave and got Oz for our trip through the woods collecting things for Pete Conroy. Dad hadn’t agreed outright about it yet, but since he hadn’t exactly forbidden, either – at least, only on Sunday but not Monday or this Wednesday, we went anyway.

*          *          *

Oz and I collected two whole sacks of things for Pete Conroy and between us we made ten dollars. I split it with Oz, even though he’d driven me half crazy chanting numbers and snatches of songs throughout the day. He never heard them quite right, it seemed, because he confused them and mixed up the words, and never, ever, understood that he wasn’t singing them correctly. I must have felt sorry for him, to split my money like that. I thought I’d regret it, but I didn’t.

“Pete Conroy is funny,” Oz said. He’d counted the ten dollars half a dozen times before we’d gone two blocks, even when I told him he’d wear them thin or drop them. “When he asked if Dad let us collect stuff, you said yes and I said no, and Pete raised his eyebrows, and…”

“Quiet,” I said.

But Oz wasn’t. He’s one of those folks that make noise even when they’re not talking. He practiced walking backwards, very calculating, with his tongue sticking out of one corner of his mouth. He shot pebbles toward cars and giggled when they struck the ground.

“Listen,” I said, “how ‘bout you and I sit in that Caddy tonight? We can practice driving.”

Oz grinned widely. I could see the place where he’d lost a tooth recently. The one right next to it was chipped because once I pushed him away when he wouldn’t leave; only he fell on the tooth. I was sorry, after. Mom said she was dying for that one to fall out. “Driving?”

“Fake driving,” I said.

“Will Eva be there?”

“Not if I can help it,” I said, and Oz smiled.

*          *          *

But I was wrong. Eva was there the whole time with us, because even though normally she slept deeper than anyone, for some reason –  just to be inconvenient I’m sure – she woke up when I was sliding out of bed and asked me what I thought I was doing.

“I’m going out to get fabulously, incoherently plastered,” I said.

“You are not. You don’t even know what that word means.”

“I’m going out driving with Oz.”

Eva let out a screech so loud while I was slipping into my jeans I almost lost my balance. Lights snapped on and off in the hallway, and a sliver of pale, watery-looking light cut across both our faces. She was quiet while I explained in great detail and with a large amount of pantomime what I would do to her if she didn’t for God’s sake shut up. So she did.

When I tiptoed across the hall, minding the loose boards, Eva was right behind me. She hated the shop, but when I reminded her of it, she just grinned. “So what if I am? This is fun.”

Compared to me, I suppose, Eva had a boring life. She always did the same things: clothes, boys, school. She never had time to do anything else.

It was bitterly cold out in the shop, that type of cold that’s so crisp it feels metallic. Oz was already in the car, singing a list of numbers in a whisper to himself. We slid into the seat quietly beside him, Eva in the passenger seat and me being the driver. Oz put a hand out for the radio and hummed steadily before going into an announcer’s voice.

“You sound just like the radio,” I said in amazement. Oz beamed and spelled radio perfectly, except for an E at the end. “Why does it have an E?” I asked him. I huddled closer to him because of the cold, and he gave a contented sigh.

“Because I like E’s today, that’s why,” he said. That settled it.

I smiled, steadied my hands and pretended to drive, pretended there was an ancient strip of highway in front of me that stretched out forever. I stayed between the lines and my hands weren’t clumsy. In the car, when I concentrated, I didn’t feel off balance. I pressed the brake down and Oz provided the sound effects, his fingers tapping the dash.

“Turn here,” he said, so I twisted the wheel around. Eva grimaced. She had her feet up. “You two are gonna wreck this car. Dad said don’t touch it.”

“I don’t notice you getting out, Miss Priss.”

“I just think you’re being silly.”

Oz and I looked at her and cracked up. We laughed so hard, Eva went up upstairs in a huff. This left the car all for us. Oz spread himself out over the seat, making slow whispery car noises with his mouth, fingering the seat belts carefully. I thought he was almost asleep. I let go of the steering wheel and sat back, feeling the presence of the car. Dad had closed the roll-up doors to the shop, but through the low windows, I could see a sliver of a moon and the ghost tree across the street clutching air in its claws. It was a cold night. I heard a tiny gasp. Oz was looking up at me, his head still resting on the seat, his eyes open and blue as the sky.

“What is it?”

“I have to take a test,” he whimpered. “At school. To see how smart I am. A test, Gracie.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I told him. “You can come out here every night with me and we’ll work on things.”

“Really?”

“Sure thing.”

I was almost asleep when I remembered where I was and herded Oz to bed. I don’t think he knew what was going on by then. It must have been three in the morning.

*          *          *

After that, being in the car became a ritual at least for Oz and I. Eva swore she wasn’t going to get caught in it. But Oz and I kept at it like fiends, just like bandits on the old grainy TV shows we liked to watch, slipping out extra quiet nights, our feet sliding across the wooden floors, hushing each other until we reached the shop with only a flashlight to guide us. Cousin Jake had been right about secret places, I thought. The Caddy was ours. For a month, Dad complained about the Caddy by day and might have moved it out to the side yard, where it took up less space, if Oz and I hadn’t said it would bring a higher price left out of the sun. It wasn’t as though the Caddy took up room needed for other cars, because for weeks on end, no one came to the shop to have cars fixed or to buy food. Nothing could be done for my shoes. I patched the gaps in both soles with duct tape and glue and hoped I wouldn’t stick to the ground whenever I walked. During our secret expeditions into the woods and beach, I collected as much dirt and leaves on my shoes as anything else, and Mom complained bitterly about the state of the carpets in the house.

By then, I’d fallen in love with the feel of that car, the way it looked under hazy, wavering flashlights. Oz loved to make the sounds for the car, and Mom said he did better studying during the day. At night I quizzed him while we pretended to cruise along, and he answered every question in the announcer’s voice.

“What’s five and five?” I asked Oz one night.

He was fiddling with the dash and didn’t answer.

“Oz. Stop that.”

Oz looked over at me, his eyes stony. “You don’t own this car. You might think you do, but it’s mine, too. Why can’t I drive sometime?”

“Well, okay,” I allowed him to slid past me and he swung happily into the driver’s seat, his voice already the low hum of an engine. He slid the wheel too hard and had to jump down altogether to work the pedals at all, but there was a look of absolute happiness on his face, so I left him alone. It was unbelievably boring having only the dash to look at, and it was late again. It’s not much, but that’s my excuse. That was the night we both fell asleep until morning.

*          *          *

“What in the world d’you think you’re doing?”

I startled awake the next morning to Dad’s shouting. Oz came awake so hard and fast, he whacked his head against the door, and would have started howling if he hadn’t seen the look on Dad’s face and thought better of it.

“Didn’t I tell you two not to touch this car? Huh? What’d I say? I need to sell this car and I can’t do it if I have irresponsible –”

“We have money,” Oz blurted. “We sold shells to Pete Conroy. Will that buy the car?”

Dad stared at him and then he shook his head slowly. I think he forgot that he’d forbidden us to find shells because his face softened. “No, Ossian. I’m sorry. That’s not enough.” He lifted Oz out of the car and nodded in my direction. “Go on upstairs now, Gracie. I need to work down here.”

It was all very strange. I saw Dad pick up the phone at his desk beside the car, and the low rumble of his voice, though he spoke so low I couldn’t hear what he said. After awhile he noticed I was watching and motioned for me to go on. He looked slump shouldered and ancient, just the way I’d always joked Eva’s pessimist bigamist car owner would be.

*          *          *

That afternoon was long and dreadful. Around five Mom came into my room and asked to come down to talk with Mama Regan. I guess it was true what she said about me being like Mama Regan, because I felt power come to me, and I captured it with both hands open, and refused to go. Cars had been with me my whole life, from that first cry on the highway in a traffic jamb. And the Caddy belonged to me and to Oz and no one could see that.

Mom set a box in front of me. “From your dad,” she said, “and me, too. They’re shoes, Gracie. You need them.” When I was very careful to continue staring out the window, she said with weariness, “He has to sell, baby. We need the eating money.”

“I know.” I didn’t look at the box. I would go around barefoot if need be. But after the door closed softly behind her, I shucked off my broken tight sneakers and slipped on the new ones. They were soft and wide enough for growing room. Black with white rubber stripes. I wiggled my toes deliciously. New shoes always made you feel right.

Eva came in after that. She flopped down next to me on the bed enough to make me want to scream and sighed dramatically. “It’s a shame about your car.”

“Shut up,” I said fiercely. “You went in it, too, remember. You’re a traitor.”

“I was there one night, Grace, in a moment of weakness.”

I turned to stare at her. “Quit talking like the movies. You make me sick.”

There was a little silence and then Eva said, with something alarmingly close to desperation in her voice, “I really am sorry, Grace. Oz is downstairs and he just sits in the armchair and announces things in that radio voice of his. He’s really upset about this.”

“What do you care? He gets in your perfect way and you don’t care about him. He should be announcing if it calms him.”

Eva touched my shoulder and I stiffened. She swung me around to look at her and I saw there was patience in her eyes, the one thing I didn’t want. She kept her hand there while I fidgeted, and once, I think she may have tried to pat me on the shoulder but she stopped before it happened. “Don’t you know?” Her words were rounded, with grownup patience, syrupy warm with kindness. “There’s something wrong with Oz.”

That’s when I hit her. Not just a slap, either. I swung my arm out in an arch and drove it toward her knotted in a fist. Eva didn’t move – I honestly don’t think she had a chance – and it all seemed very separate from me. I heard her cry out and I think she had a bloody nose after that, and she looked at me with wounded eyes and because I couldn’t stand to see her like that, I tore off down the stairs. Mom called after me and hands tried to grip my arm, but I was too fast for all of them. I was the spitting image of my grandmother, and I was the feral child born in bumper to bumper traffic, the modern-day forest of highways. I was all these things.

I ran with my new shoes pounding the pavement, ran until I gulped air and had to walk for the pain against my feet from the new shoes biting at them. Maybe I was headed for the woods, the beach. It was true that I picked shells and colored stones, absurdly crouching beside the highway to pick them out of weeds. It was true that I heard, “Don’t you know? Something’s wrong with Oz,” and Oz’s announcer’s voice over again in my ears as I walked. Maybe it was true, too, that I ended up at Pete Conroy’s sometime around dark, just as he was closing. I remember bits of that, the way I dropped what I’d collected into his hands, the few crumpled broken clams and polished stones I’d been able to find. Most had been beaten to pieces in my pockets as I ran. Pete didn’t mind. He looked at me over his glasses and I gave him our number when he asked. He touched my shoulder and talked to someone on the end of the line for a long time. I was cold by then, shaking and half sick – not from the car being sold, but from what Eva had said about Oz, and all the arguments about him at night – and I remember that I slept against the door of his car while Pete drove me home. I felt oddly grateful, but my tongue stumbled over how to say it.

“Never mind that,” Pete said thickly, twisted his old felt fedora. “You’re home now. I’ll see you Monday with more shells and things for me. I’ll pay you the same for them, you and Oz.”

He left, then. Dad said he’d been wrong about letting us collect shells for Pete, and Mom said it was a kindness Pete did. But that was later. What I remember is my new shoes and their pounding close by the highway, the stretch of road that went on forever, the same one I’d seen with my foot pressed on the brake and Oz announcing beside me. The road the Caddy would take, its taillight blinking in the sun.

Copyright Dawn Wood 2004

Copyright Dawn Wood 9/11/2005

Learning to Fall

I was on my hands and knees, sifting through the greasy asphalt in front of Rainbird’s Auto Body Shop. Rainbird was my dad’s name. It was mine, too, and my mother’s, though everyone said my mother was wild Irish and had an entirely different name in the beginning, before she married Edward, who was my dad. But I wasn’t sure I believed this. After all, you are born with a name and it sticks to you just like that. And you can scrub your hands hard with soap and everything else, but you can’t make a name fall off you. A name is sticky as tar, sticky as the asphalt that goes gummy and soft in the heat. Yes. That’s the way a name is.

It was broiling so hot that my plastic shoes slipped in the grease. I bent down and scooped up a wad of asphalt and chewed it thoughtfully. I was searching for the perfect rock. Not too big and not too little, but just large enough for my hand. Just heavy enough to throw between finger and thumb. My mother was always harping about how I was too old at twelve now for jump rope, but Eva was two years older than me, and she did. Her age gave her a swelled up head and a license to boss me anytime she cared to. At least, that’s what Eva thought. You’d think those two years were a million the way she carried on about how horrible it was living with me and my babyish ways. Only I know a secret. Eva and her friends go off down the street, and I know for dead certain they play double dutch, so it can’t be all that babyish.

These things were important and not to be taken lightly. The perfect rock. I lifted my hand up and practiced pitching it, imagined twin ropes twisting, gliding around feet so fast they barely made a shadow. Down the street I could hear Eva and her friends calling. I strained and thought I heard the rhythmic slapping of the double-dutch rope. Considering that Eva was my sister, I thought she could have been kinder, but this morning like every morning when I asked to follow her, Eva’s face twisted and she said, “No, no, no, you can’t.” She emphasized the “no’s,” putting a little jab into each one.

Eva was so pretty, everybody said. Everybody in the whole neighborhood and the world. She had straight hair the color of yellow corn and blue eyes, and even at fourteen she had hips that twitched in a way Mom said would break hearts. Only hearts can’t break, because hearts are muscles just like arms and legs, and those don’t fall off.

I wiggled a tooth with my tongue. It was my last baby tooth, a late one, and it left Mom groaning about wisdom teeth coming in next. Mom was always saying don’t you wiggle it, it will come out in it’s own good time, but a good time was too long. I wasn’t the least bit like Eva. I had what Mom called my Irish hair, coal black and frizzy so that it went every-which-way and fought back under a comb. My nose turned up at the end, too, which would have been horrible if Ossian hadn’t had the same nose. I heard my mother say to Daddy, “I wasn’t born yesterday,” but Oz nearly was. He was almost seven years old. But I don’t think it did him any good. All he ever did was cry and whine. The family secret, which Dad told us never to let on to anybody, was that Oz had to repeat kindergarten. I personally think the family secret was that maybe he was dropped a good one on his head, but the last time I said that, Mom heard me and got furious. So I don’t say it anymore. Oz couldn’t even make faces well. I had tried him out at it, but he was useless. Most of the day he stayed inside at our little house in back of Rainbird’s.

Dad was minding the counter inside the shop. It wasn’t much of a shop, really, but it had a screen door with a wonderful squeak and hiss at the end of it. I slammed the door hard for good measure, just to hear it, and skipped over the counter. Mom says don’t skip, it’s unladylike, but I figure no one will see me doing it in the shop, except for a few old men buying bait and their wives, and I don’t imagine it will damage them to see it. I stretched up a hand for a jawbreaker, only Dad’s hand closed over mine and then I was swinging up high on to the counter. It was an extra high counter, and there were two steps up to it to get to the register. Mom says the architect who built our shop must have had insanity in his family.

“I wanted a jawbreaker.”

“One, then. Just one.”

“One.” I swung my legs hard against the counter and chose a black jawbreaker from the candy jar. It ballooned out my cheek and I sucked it hard, easing the ache in my loose tooth. I loved the smell of the shop: sawdust and car oil and cold plastic and ground-in dirt. It was an old place, all raw wood and high-up windows. The counter was painted red with signs for cigarettes all over it, and there was a whole freezer just for ice cream along the long wall toward the restroom. Besides that, the back wall had freezers with cold soda and ice, and the shelves around the shop were lined with every type of food, medicine or toy anyone could ever hope for. It was a marvel to me that people seldom ever came into the shop, and whenever somebody did, anyone minding the counter was supposed to yell, “Customer!” as loud as they could so everyone on the block would know.

“Have you been chewing tar again?”

I mumbled something, then shifted the jawbreaker. “Only a little.”

Daddy didn’t seem to hear, because he had his back to me with his hands fiddling under the counter.

“Only a little,” I repeated, louder, in case he hadn’t noticed. He didn’t look up, but he muttered something. Dad’s hair was yellow, like Eva’s, and it would have been straight as mine, too, if he hadn’t cropped it short so it stuck out all over his head like bristles. Eva said Daddy had wanted a boy after her, but instead all he got was a wild, scabby-kneed girl with a gap between her teeth and limbs so long they tangled and got in the way of everything. Especially her hands.

I stuck out my tongue to check that it was purple from the jawbreaker and lifted my hands up from the counter. They didn’t look all that bad, just darker with clean dirt and tar. But even with the darkness covering them, I could see the scars. Everyone could. Two of them, one curling around each thumb. The scars were what made me clumsy. A lack of balance, like those birds with water in them that drink from a glass. I’d been born with six fingers to each hand, just like the Manx cat my aunt owns. If I had my extra fingers back, I could swing from trees like a monkey and climb faster than anyone. Maybe my fingers would even grow long and I could reach over with no trouble at all and pinch Eva awake when she kicked in bed.

“I remember my other fingers,” I said.

Daddy looked up with a startled glance at me, as if this was a secret I shouldn’t know, and then he laughed. “No, baby, you couldn’t. They removed them at birth.”

I nodded expertly. Eva had explained this to me, years ago. Eva’s face had gone thin and pinched with suspense. “They tied up your fingers with string.”

“And then what happened?”
“They fell off.”

“They fell off?” Afterwards, I dreamed of bows on my arms and legs, of pieces dropping off when I stumbled against things. I swore I could remember the loss of my fingers, but I hardly ever talked about it now.

“When can I have my own room?”

Dad grunted and ran a hand across his face. “I wanted to talk to you about that. How would you like to move out?”
“Completely? Out of Eva’s room?”

“No. You and Eva. We can give you the storage room.” He stopped, watching my reaction. I waited. At last he continued, “How would you like Grandma to move in with us?”

“Mama Regan? Why doesn’t she move to the storage room?”

“That’s not polite.”

“She smells like mealy worms.” I waved a hand toward the bait section of the shop. Even at the counter I could hear the crickets singing in their milk cartons. I could almost taste the smooth sour corn-meal smell of the mealy worms.

“Well, she’s moving in,” Daddy said patiently. I stared at him, searching for the joke. When I couldn’t find it, I hopped down off the counter myself, half-falling. I landed spraddle-legged and stumbled upright on bruised knees so he wouldn’t see I was hurt. The jawbreaker was sour now, and there was a bloody taste around my teeth. I spat the jawbreaker into the garbage by the door and spun on my stinging legs. “I don’t want it anymore.”

*          *          *

            That night at dinner I couldn’t eat. My throat felt swollen closed. It hurt to swallow. I gulped down water, hoping the pain in my chest would leave, but it only grew worse. “I’m sick,” I told everyone.

“You’re not sick,” Eva said across the table. “You’re a faker.”

“Did he tell you, too?” I shouted at her. “Did he tell you we’re moving out of our room?”

“Of course I know,” Eva said. She flashed me a wide smile with all her teeth showing. I kicked her under the table and Eva’s pretty face dissolved into fury.

“Don’t kick,” Mom said. I looked at her. My mother’s face was lopsided, fractured, as though she didn’t have the strength to hold it up anymore. Her half-glasses that Daddy said made her look elegant had slipped down to the bump at the end of her nose and teetered there, ready to fall.

:”I know,” Oz parroted. “I know, I know.” He had already dumped half his meal on the floor and was getting ready to throw the second portion. I could see him eyeing distances and flexing his fingers.

            “When is Mama Regan moving in?” Eva asked. She narrowed her eyes at me. “Tell Grace not to bring that thing to the table. It’s disgusting.”

I stared beside my chair. The thing in question was a coiled up jump rope. It wasn’t anything pretty like Eva’s friends had. Their ropes were bright pink, red and yellow, bright colors that screamed to be picked up. My rope was ancient and careworn. Its threads had started to fray and had to be melted together with a match, so that there were hard black spots that rippled across it like the spots on a snake. The handles were scarred wood, held in place by bent nails that sometimes caught when I turned the rope. In other places, there were loops of duct tape. The rope itself was mottled grey and brown from tar and dirt. It had its own particular smell. I watched it carefully. Any minute now it would grow fangs and rise up, taller than Eva, and leave twin bite marks on her neck just like the Dracula movies no one allowed me to watch. All I had to do was wait.

All of a sudden I heard myself saying, “I’m going to win at double-dutch.”

“Not if you keep turning the rope the way you do. You drop it half the time.”

I nodded. Eva was right. She always was. I did drop the rope. My hands were weak. I never got the rhythm of the rope right. The rope would give a certain twitch and fly, twisting all wrong, wild and crazy, strangling the legs of Eva and her friends. No matter how many times I explained I hadn’t meant it, they never believed me. It was even worse when I was the jumper. My feet became someone else’s for a time. I liked them then, the way they beat out their own tune: “Dou-ble-Dutch, Dou-ble Dutch,” moving so fast they were a blur. Then my old lack of balance would return. I always felt myself tipping off to one side. My mouth would open and air would hiss out with the sounds of ropes, and my twisted scarred hands would reach out to catch myself before I hit the ground.

“Honey, you have to stop,” my mother said to me over the table. “Grace? You have to stop jumping rope. I’ve had enough split lips and scraped legs from you. You’ll hurt yourself if you keep on with it.”

“Leave her alone,” Daddy said. “Let her if she wants to. What else is there to do around here?”

My mother’s lips went thin and very pale, but she said nothing. She didn’t argue. There were few fights in our house, and those that came were mainly about the shop and car repair and the cost of keeping things operating. But these things cost nothing at all, so I thought this was a very silly thing to fight over. It wasn’t important the way finding a good pitching rock was or having a room to yourself in a house full of people.

*          *          *

Mama Regan arrived the next Tuesday. I saw her while I was standing by the bait section, holding a conversation with the crickets. Daddy’s car pulled up. He opened the door for Mama Regan and she got out of the car, slowly, planting each leg in front of her as though they were sticks. I had forgotten how ugly she was. Her face was puckered and her nose was turned up as though she had smelled something bad. Her skin sagged in all the wrong places. She appeared shrunken and shriveled beside Daddy. At every step she thrust a huge black oak stick ahead of her.

I drew back into the shadows of the bait section, a hollow between the cricket container and the canned meat. I buried my head in my arms and swallowed. My stomach hurt terribly. When I placed both hands firmly on the window ledge and pulled up, I could peek over and see Eva. Eva the toad was happily scampering about carrying bags and boxes for Mama Regan. Eva had been strangely, annoyingly, happy about the move into the storage room. It was larger, she said, and had more room for her things. My things were still piled where I had thrown them. I didn’t have as many things as Eva. Most were found on the beach across the highway and in the nearby woods a mile down. My most prized possessions, aside from the jump rope, were a bird’s nest in a state of decay, part of a raccoon tail and an animal tooth I had found one day after school along the road.

My throat gave a throb. I rubbed it with both hands. Mama Regan was only a distant memory, a woman with flabby arms and bad breath, who had tossed me up and down overhead and caught me. That was all. She was an ogre. She even had the witch’s black walking stick from all those fairy tales. I checked again just to make sure. That stick was a fearsome thing, as black as my hair and polished to a shine. It made the hackles on the back of my neck stand up, just the sight of it. Maybe it was a magic walking stick. Maybe Mama Regan could wave it around and cast spells.

I slid down next to the wall again, my hands resting on my knees. Mama Regan didn’t know me yet. Maybe she didn’t remember. Maybe she didn’t know. I wasn’t the least bit like Eva. Not pretty and graceful. I’d been named wrong. There was no grace in me. Mama Regan probably thought I had two whole hands. Soon she would know the truth. If Eva didn’t tell her first, she would know with her squinty eyes when she caught sight of me. The scars would stand out, marking me. There was no need for words. The scars knew and they would tell everything.

I stood up hastily. My right shoe bent and the thin plastic strap cut into my ankle. It was ready to break. There were be a trip to the store for more bright five-dollar shoes. There was nothing to do but go and meet Mama Regan. The hot wind hit me full force when I opened the door and the little bell jingled. I slipped out, hopping on one foot and then the other across the asphalt, trailing my jump rope behind me. Mama Regan and everyone else were already by the house, sipping lemonade and laughing on the porch.

“Gracie, sweetheart,” Mom said. She pulled the end of the jump rope from my fingers and placed it on the ground. My hand stayed curled in the same position, hungry for the feel of the rope. My mother wiped off my hands and then my face with a damp rag that felt cool in the heat. I squirmed away to prove a point. I felt my mother’s fingers on both shoulders, cold and hard, through my T-shirt. “This is Grace.”

“Grace, sweetheart,” said Eva with a mocking smile.

“Well,” said my grandmother. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Come here.” She beckoned with the black oak stick.

I swallowed. My foot betrayed me and stepped forward obediently. Another step. The spells were beginning already. It was the stick that caused them. I stood in front of Mama Regan. Up close now I could see Mama Regan’s eyes were blue as Eva’s, that shocking, aching blue that made people on the street stop to look into it. I felt rough hands holding my chin and it was all I could do not to twist away and run.

“So, this is Grace,” said Mama Regan. “Hmm. You have green eyes. Green eyes mean an old soul reborn.”

I said, “They do?”

Daddy said, “This nonsense again,” at the same time.

“I have trouble enough being this soul, thank you.”

Mama Regan laughed. She had a gold tooth on the right side of her mouth and a grey tooth on the other side. Daddy had cautioned us some of Mama Regan’s teeth were dead. It came, he said, of not brushing in Ireland. I admired the way Mama Regan laughed. She didn’t try to hold it in like all the other grownups. Instead, it came out of her, shaking her stomach and arms all over. When she was finished, she explained, even though I hadn’t asked. “An old soul means you’re experienced in the ways of the world.”

“She’s experienced in grease,” said Eva. “She’s experienced in spending all day searching for rocks.”

“Yes, Grace,” Mom said. She sighed. “I’ll admit you could find a more productive use of your time.”

“Rocks? Why are you looking for rocks?”

“She wants a rock to pitch in for double-dutch,” Eva shrieked.

I went red. I twisted my head around so no one could see my face. I whistled with my tongue twitching in my mouth, a warbling bird-song, so they wouldn’t think I minded. It was no use explaining about the perfect rock. And at last, my mother said, “Go on, then, girls,” and Eva ran ahead of me outside. I stumbled along behind. I was peculiarly off balance again, and my hands felt numb and useless. Down the street, I could hear Eva and her friends already turning ropes.

Lincoln, Lincoln, I been thinkin’

What the heck have you been drinkin’?

            The slapping sound mocked me. And too late I realized my own rope was still on the porch, on the floor beside my mother. There was no way to retrieve it with any dignity. So I left it there.

*          *          *

            By two weeks later, Mama Regan and I had settled into an uneasy truce. We talked to each other, more or less, only because Dad was often working in the store, Mom was working in the house and Eva was too busy for anyone.

Mama Regan handed me my rope and watched me stumble over it several tries before she said anything. “We’re a lot alike, you and I.”

“We are?” I was practiced at pretending not to be interested. Our porch faced the back yard instead the front like most folk’s did, because Mom said she wasn’t about to look at people’s greasy old cars all day. A sow bug was crawling across the boards of the porch, working its way carefully across each one of the splinters. I pinched it carefully between finger and thumb. The sow bug rolled up immediately.

“Don’t squash him, honey,” Mama Regan’s voice was gravelly as though she had something in her mouth. “He hasn’t done anything to you. And yes, we’re a lot alike. You’re too young to be bothered with and I’m too old.”

I watched Mama Regan out of the corner of one eye. When I saw she wasn’t joking, I edged closer. “I fall,” I found myself saying, “At double-dutch. I tip over. It’s my hands. They make me off-balance.”

“Bring them here,” Mama ordered. I wasn’t sure whether she meant the sow bug, or my hands, or the jump rope still coiled on the porch, but I came. I remembered those old Westerns we watched with Dad. I was thinking particularly of cattle branding scenes because that’s what it felt like when Mama Regan gripped both my hands. They were swallowed up in her liver spotted ones with such strength I wondered why she had had to come stay with us at all. They tingled under her grasp, and the whole time she stared at me intently. I think she was checking to see if I would yelp, but I set my teeth and hated her and everyone involved in bringing her here, and it gave me power. After a time I realized she’d let go of me when I wasn’t paying attention. There was a calm smile on her face, almost serene, just as if she was a regular old lady and not a horrible witch with a black oak stick.

“Good,” she said. “You’re an old soul and you have endurance. That’s good. Now why do you think your hands don’t work when you want them to?”

“Because you squeezed the circulation out of them, for one,” I snapped.

“No, think.”

I thought, but nothing important came to me. I went back to watching the line of sow bugs again. There was nothing else the least productive to do. It was so hot my skin itched. I was sorry now I’d even begun talking. “I lose balance suddenly,” I said.

“That’s the result. What’s the reason?” When I only blinked at her, Mama Regan gave a soft grunt and hauled herself to her feet. She put weight on that stick of hers and when she thrust it toward me I stumbled backward. The only thing I could think of was she meant to whack me over the head with it. I was thinking of fairy tales again. The stick seemed to be humming; a faint dizzying sound, but it was probably only the cicadas crying by the porch light. “Go on, child, take hold of it,” she barked.

I closed my eyes and bit my lip and seized the stick. Not up by the top, where Mama Regan gripped it, but below her hands, swaying a little until we each found our balance. Just as I’d thought, the stick was worn smooth, and under my fingers I felt the scars on it, the paths of long-deceased beetles, most likely, remaining silent as bones. It came to me that Mama Regan’s stick was like my jump rope in many ways.

“Now,” she said, surprisingly quietly, “this is a physics lesson. Do you feel less lopsided holding this?”

I didn’t say anything. I still had my eyes shut. There was power, a steadiness, coming through my hands from the stick. It was magic.

“I take it you do,” Mama Regan muttered. I felt her shift and tap my shoulder. “Quit that. Open your eyes and see the world. It’s the fear of falling that’s your problem. So to cure that you need to learn how to fall.”

I stared at her. It seemed simple when she said it. The strange thing was that I never felt afraid when I was jumping rope. Maybe the fear made my legs seize up and get tangled. Maybe that was it.

“Bring me a mattress. We’ll start today.”

“What?”

She glared at me. “I’ll teach to fall, child. I’ve done it many times myself.”

I ran to get a mattress. There was only one in the house so ratty that no one slept on it. To get to it I had to climb the wooden ladder into the loft in the garage. The mattress smelled strangely like wood chips. The loft looked speckled with gold dust, but that was only on account of the sunlight coming in through the cracks in the walls. I nearly fell down the ladder trying to get the mattress to the floor. I dragged it outside, two-fisted. Mama Regan’s face twisted when she looked at the trail I’d made in the dirt.

“Suppose it’ll do,” she mumbled. I noticed she only seemed to use one side of her mouth. The other side slanted, the way my mother looked when she was unhappy. I wondered if it was a lifetime of unhappiness that had made Mama Regan’s mouth the way it was. “Stop staring at me and go stand on that piece of junk.”

I did what she said. The mattress gave way under my shoes. It felt like the strap at the back of my ankles was on fire.

“Stop that,” the old witch said. “Stand straight. Now when I say, ‘fall,’ you fall over. Sideways, backwards, doesn’t matter. The way you normally fall.”

I didn’t know the way I normally fell, but she had me do it anyway. It was easy for that old lady. All she did while she gave orders was drink lemonade in her chair and watch me for mistakes. There were several. Mistakes, I mean. Although, there were several lemonades, too. My mother had stocked Mama Regan up with enough lemonade glasses to see her to the end of the world. Most of them were covered with a delicate layer of floating ants. Mama Regan swept these off with her fingers before drinking. Mom said Mama Regan was “inconsistent,” which was apparently the reason for the hundred glasses of lemonade, but I will tell you now that it didn’t seem to improve her any. She was as inconsistent-tempered when she ordered me to get the mattress as she was at the end of the day, when dusk was settling over the autobody shop and the smell of old oil was strongest. I think it had to do with the sourness of the lemonade. Eva was mean to me, too, but I decided against giving her lemonade to cure it. It obviously didn’t work.

“All right,” Mama Regan said at the end of the day. “That’ll do. Tomorrow we start the hard things.”

I nodded and swallowed. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth and I was so amazingly thirsty, I swept ants off one of the lemonade glasses and drank it down in two gulps. Mama Regan said that was fine and I should have more. I did, not caring about the ants or the fact that the lemonade baked in the sun all day. I’d fallen on the mattress more times than I could count. My mind felt numb. My limbs trembled when I tried to make them do anything. Besides that, both hips had bruises and there was a bloodied scrape on my leg. I was miserable and exhausted and I wanted to curl up in bed.

“Come here,” Mama Regan said.

I stood where I was. “I have a name.”

“What?”

“Grace.

She coughed and made a throwaway gesture. “Grace. Alright, Grace, you sure you want to continue this?”

“Yes.”

Mama Regan smiled. “Tomorrow, then. It’ll give us both something productive to do.”

*          *          *

            The next morning I gobbled my food so fast Mom had to tell me three times to slow down. I didn’t say what I was doing that day. No one asked, least of all Eva, who was busy most of time shrieking with her friends over the phone.

After breakfast, I found Mom in the kitchen. Our kitchen was clean because she said just because we lived in back of the autobody shop didn’t mean we had to live like pigs. She was down on her hands and knees, wiping up mik Ossian had spilled, but when she saw me, she lifted her head, squeezing the milk off the rag into the sink.

“That Oz. You’d think he was born in the woods.”

“Oz just hasn’t grown into himself yet.”

Mom gave me a studying frown. Then she laughed for a long time. “Where in this wide world did you hear that?”

“From Mama Regan.”

The rag paused in Mom’s hands. It went very still. I looked and saw there was a trembling in it. I thought maybe she was tired from scrubbing the floor, the way I’d been after falling on mattresses all day yesterday. When she spoke, it was almost a whisper, a hushed thing no one was meant to hear. “Maybe you shouldn’t listen quite so much to what Mama Regan says.”

“Why not?”

Mom dumped the rag in the sink. Her earrings swung back and forth. They were thin horse earrings I remembered begging to wear when I was younger. “She’s old, Grace. She’s superstitious, she has ways and beliefs that aren’t practical now.”

“She’s teaching me to fall,” I said.

“What?”

“On a mattress. She says it will help me win at double-dutch if I don’t lose my balance.”

“Oh, honey,” Mom said. She turned around and I thought for a minute she was going to hug me, but she just stood there looking at me with something in her eyes I couldn’t understand. It was like she thought I was a squashed bug, a mealy worm, a sow bug, something small underfoot that had lost its life in pursuit of simple things. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, in a murmur. There was a bit of crying in her voice too, the noise of treefrogs, and I didn’t understand that either.

“She says if she teaches me to fall I won’t be afraid anymore, and if I’m not afraid, I won’t be clumsy so much, and no one will notice my hands and…” I rambled on and on, talking fast because I understood if I ever stopped she would never let me start again. Everything spilled out of me. Eva and her friends down the street playing double-dutch. The way my things were still piled in the room I shared with Eva. Everything.

My mother didn’t interrupt, but when I was done, she told me in the same tone of voice she used when Oz colored on the walls that we would have to go and tell my father. She meant me, but she went with me to the autobody shop. He’d just jacked up some man’s car. He listened while I rambled on, and before I got to the end he stopped me with the wrench in his hand.

The man who owned the car wasn’t pleased. He yelled, “Hey, buddy, I’m paying you to work!”

“I’ll just be a minute,” Dad shouted back. “I’m talking with my daughter.” He sighed. To me, he said very quietly, “Is that what she told you?”

“Yes.”

“I see. Well, it’s your cerebellum in your head that controls balance. You’ll grow out of it if you give it time.”

“I don’t want to,” I said. “I want things now.”

Dad straightened and began tightened bolts on the underneath of the car again. The edges of his burr haircut were coated with oil dripping from the car. It looked oddly striped like a piece of stick candy. “No more falling lessons. You hear me? You’ll hurt yourself worse tripping around on that soggy mattress than you will if you just wait.”

I nodded, but secretly I knew there was little they could do if they never saw me, and Mama Regan was so old no one paid much attention to what she did. On the outside, I was as obedient as Eva, but in the mornings I went with Mama Regan to the shed in the back yard. We had stowed the mattress in there, and it was there that Mama Regan had me hold her stick before beginning each time.

“I’m going to teach you how to fall now like you have crutches,” she said.

“But I don’t.”

She looked at me with her twisted odd smile and lopsided doughy face. “Don’t interrupt me. You won’t hurt yourself this way.”

So I learned to fall a new way, twisting my body like a cat, letting my arms loosen to shield the impact and catching myself on my palms. I fall like this again and again until Mama Regan said my muscles had learned it. It was a slow process, three months for me at least. Mama Regan said I’d done well. I could fall now on command or without it and catch myself. She was right. I was no longer terrified of falling.

“Get over here,” Mama Regan ordered. She gestured me forward with her black oak stick. I was no longer scared of her. She told me to hold out my hand, and when I did I noticed the difference between her hands and mine again. My hands had grown stronger, the viens standing out more thickly against the skin. Mama Regan took out something from a leather bag around her neck. She folded my hands over whatever-it-was. It was cold, I noticed, like rainwater, and smooth, with small ridges. And round.

I heard her laugh. “Well, go on. Take a look at it.”

It was a small, slightly irregular round rock, the polished sort you can buy at any store for only a little money. It seemed extra heavy. The color was a deep shimmering green like my eyes.

“What is it?”

Mama Regan chuckled. “It’s a pitching stone. I heard your daddy say you was aching for the right one. That one is malachite. Copper. Healing stone.”

I rolled the stone between finger and thumb for testing. It fit easily and felt the right weight, a little larger than a marble. I stroked it gently as though it were alive. “It’s wonderful.”

“Don’t gush.” Mama Regan smiled. “Tomorrow, get your rope,” she said, “and go out to play with Eva’s friends.”

I did. Eva was particularly unhappy to see me. “What do you want?”

“I’m going to jump.”

My gaze followed the ropes, watching them twist and lengthen; these bright colored ropes that belonged to Eva’s friends. When the slap of the ropes sounded right, I gripped the pitching stone in one hand. Its coldness seemed to burn me and I rubbed it once for luck before tossing it. I jumped in, keeping my eyes off my feet, listening for the pounding of my footfalls. They sang, “doub-le dut-ch. Then I fell. The ropes got tangled over me, and there was silence except for Eva yelling, “Oh God, you see, Grace? Mom and Dad are going to kill me. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I pushed myself up with my hands. I’m sure Eva expected a split lip or a bruised eye, but I’d caught myself and there was nothing.

I continued jumping. Eva jumped with me, singing the cadence songs that go with the slap of the ropes. I watched the sky, thin wispy clouds that looked painted on up there. Just in front of us was the highway, cars whisking past us blaring rock and roll, hip-hop, country, each lending their own rhythm to new twists and dances between the ropes. By noon, it was too intolerably hot to warrant staying, and Eva and I walked home. My rope swung at my side, comfortably.

“Maybe you should get a new rope,” Eva said. “A bright one.”

“I like this one,” I said. “It’s been good to me.”

“A rope can’t be good to you.”

“This one is,” I told her.

Then I ran ahead around the autobody, around Oz with his toy trucks playing in the dirt in the side yard, and all the way up to the porch where Mama Regan sat with her glasses of lemonade lined up in a row like shotgun targets. The green healing stone sat like a weight in my pocket, swinging as I ran.

Copyright Dawn Wood 2/11/2005

When fall came, fewer people came to the store, and only those who were stranded on the nearby highway came to get help with their cars. “Harebrained idiots,” my father called them, even though anyone could get stuck along a shoulder. He would sigh, roll up his sleeves and tow their car back to our autobody shop.

My mother didn’t concern herself with the store during fall. Instead, she always enlisted us in cleaning house. We straightened rugs and polished floors with wax until they shone. Mom cleaned the year’s grease from the sides of the stove and had Eva lug the garbage to the alley. She took it, holding the top of the bag between pinched fingers. I snickered because Eva grunted just like a normal person and forgot about acting dignified.

“Stop it, Grace,” Eva snarled when she returned. She grimaced, wiping her hands deliberately slowly on her dress. Eva was like that, the type of person to wear a dress and silver hoop earrings to take out the garbage. Me, I’m different. You couldn’t have pried me out of a pair of jeans and into a dress if you tried. And believe me, Mom tried. She had this idea she was going to have two little ladies, even though I personally thought Eva was enough of a little lady for both of us. There was no need for me to get tortured in one of those dresses too.

“You’re the only one I know who gets dressed up to be a garbageman,” I told Eva. I was bent over, off guard dusting under my bed. There were enough dust bunnies there for a regular army.

“You shut up.”

“Ooh, really good. You should –“

“Girls, please,” Mom said. We both turned and looked at her. Her face was blotched red from tiredness. She pinched the tip of her nose, a sign of a headache, and shoved her half glasses in place firmly. When we didn’t say anything, she left us in peace again. Or as close to peace as Eva and I ever got.

“I’m only doing this because Cousin Jake is coming,” Eva said. She talked in that simpering, sing-song way that drove me wild.

Fall time was special because of Cousin Jake. Everyone at school became excited at first leaf-fall because it was that much closer to Christmas, but I counted down the days until Cousin Jake would come. He was my dead aunt’s oldest child, the blessing of the family, people always said. No one knew why. He was much older than Eva and I, in his thirties. “Down on his luck all his life,” my father always said. The truth of it was Jake drifted from relative to relative, welcomed with warm bread and stories told late into the night. No one minded if he stayed on for months at a time. In fact, everyone treasured it. No one I ever knew could stay angry with Jake for long.

My earliest memories are of Jake’s stories, the ones he told me when the other kids were sleeping. They weren’t the easy stories he told over dinner, but there was something soothing about the tales of his pretty wife who laughed when he came in from his job; how fast he drove the blue sports car he owned; the large house with rambling rooms and a board swing out front he promised he would take me to see someday.

When I got home from school Monday, he was there, standing in the kitchen, warming his feet by the stove. His face wasn’t all angles like my father’s. It was warm and round with a too-big nose. When he saw me, he broke into the teasing grin I remembered. Most people were serious around me, but Jake never was. He swore his red hair gave him luck, and if anything it looked wilder than ever. It wasn’t combed down straight or forced under a hat like the men who came into the store. He had a cowlick and wild tufts poking out all around his head.

“You’re here!” I yelped.

“My favorite person.” He winked, just for me, smiling so that his back teeth showed. He slouched in a chair with his feet thrust out. My mother would have had a conniption fit if anyone else did that. But even she thought Jake was special. “Where’s Eva?”

“She went out shopping or something.” I sat next to Jake. My mother watched us, fixing dinner at the counter. The sound of her knife hitting the cutting board was a background noise to our talking.

“Eva’s loss, then.” Jake reached a hand below my ear and then he gave a quick trilling whistle. Just like that, there was a string of colored cloth, four at least, all tied together. He piled them on my lap. I fingered them gently, afraid for some reason that they would fall to pieces. They weren’t silk, only the kind of thin cloth cheap T-shirts are made from, but they were bright.

“She’s too old for that sort of thing,” Mom said, without turning. Her hair twirled gently every time she swung the knife down. Her hair was the same coal black as mine, but it looked better on her in a way I couldn’t have named. “Too old, Jake.”

He yawned. “Maybe, maybe not.”

“Will you teach me that one?”

Jake put a hand on my shoulder. “Tonight. You and Eva. How’s that pitching arm?”

I held up my left hand. He knew I didn’t pitch baseball. I wouldn’t have dared. My hands were only beginning to be less clumsy. Jake pulled my fingers open. His hands were warm, but a slight purplish color. They were heavy square hands, not the sort you’d expect to do magic tricks. He rubbed my hand gently, especially over the scars. It made me forget, for a time, that they were there. Only when I did Jake’s magic tricks did my hands feel purposeful. They glided smoothly when they retrieved hidden pennies from underneath tables and chopped string in two, to be magically mended. When I was much smaller, I’d thought Jake must have been rich with all the money he pulled from the air. I knew better now.

“Dinner.” Mom sent me over to the autobody shop to get Dad. Eva arrived, breathless with running, and slid into her seat, but Mom told her to call Mama Regan to the table. Oz jogged in from a basketball game in the park. When we were all seated, the questions began.

Dad spooned casserole onto his plate, chewing thoughtfully. “Where’s your car, Jake?”

Jake eyed him, then dropped his gaze to his plate, looking so sorrowful even Mama Regan stopped eating for a moment. “Lost it. In a poker game, if you want to know the truth.” He turned to face my mother, working his mouth open and shut, exactly like a child caught at something. I wondered if he thought she was the only who needed to hear the truth. But then, she was his mother’s sister, so maybe he felt she was due more. “Look, I know you told me not to gamble, Lyddie, and I swear to you I’m quitting. Knowing some fool in Idaho has my car is just eating me up. I paid good money for that.” Jake gulped water and ice cracked in the glass. He winced, swiping a sleeve across his mouth. “By God, even the water’s colder here.”

“You sold that car?” Everyone turned to look at Oz. He was sitting bolt upright in his chair. “I liked that car.”

“I didn’t sell it,” Jake said. He put his fork down and looked Oz in the eye. “I wouldn’t lie to you, bud. I gambled it away. I didn’t sell it.”

“Tell Oz to change shirts,” Eva said. Her words rang out louder than she meant, I’m sure. The table had gone suddenly quiet. “He stinks.”

“Eva.” Dad gave her a look. Eva reddened. I could hear the snap of her teeth when she closed her mouth.

“A man needs to go out and get wild every now and then.” Jake smiled at Oz. There would be stories later, I thought, when I saw that. Jake would show us new things he’d learned, new tricks to steady my hands.

“How’d you get here?” I asked.

Jake looked startled. His knife clattered against his plate and would have fallen if he hadn’t been fast at catching it. He grabbed a napkin from the center of the table without asking someone to pass it to him, something Mom wouldn’t have allowed. She said nothing to Jake about it. Of course, he always was the favored one in all the family. He wiped his mouth with the napkin, first one side, then the other. I noticed he forgot the front entirely and there was spinach stuck on his lip. But he looked so strange that I didn’t say anything. When he put the napkin down and cleared his throat, he looked all right again, except for being very white around the eyes. “What?”

“If you didn’t have a car, how’d you get here?” I’m like that. I never know when it’s best to keep quiet.

I got a frown for my trouble. I thought I saw something distant and horrifyingly grownup in the back of Jake’s eyes. It frightened me. If he hadn’t answered me, I wouldn’t have minded, but he did. The words came slowly, as though he was pulling them from some far off place inside him. “Maybe you are too old,” he said. He opened his mouth, but didn’t put bread inside it; it stayed open, narrow and surprised, as though I’d winded him. “I took the train.”

“Which one?”

“Never you mind.”

I couldn’t have been more stung if he’d insulted me. Everything tasted like ashes after that. Afterwards, I went off to the living room where I could be alone. I heard the low murmur of talking, and every now and then, the sharp sound of laughter. The smell of coffee being poured drifted from the kitchen. I was almost hungry again. The living room was too warm. When I crouched on the rug I could see the alternating stripes where Mom vacuumed. I traced lines in the carpet with my finger, waiting for Jake. At last the talking tapered down to nothing. Everything was said.

Oz and Eva gathered beside me on the couch, jostling for the best spots. When Jake came in he turned the lights down and showed the scarf trick. He was humming a simple song I didn’t know the name of. In the dim light I could see more easily how his clothes hung from him. The threads in his old aviator jacket stuck out along the seams. I wondered if someone had pulled his sleeves until the seams popped. Maybe the man who won his car gambling did it. I tried to picture someone shaking Jake until his teeth rattled, until the threads in his jacket went loose, but the picture wouldn’t come. I wanted to ask, but then I remembered how he’d snapped at me and kept quiet.

“Gracie, are you listening?”

I nodded and Jake gave me a crooked smile.

“Alright, then. I need volunteers. You,” he said to Oz. He fished a thin folded comic book from somewhere in the folds of his jacket and presented with a flourish. For Eva, a string of green beads that simmered even in dim light. Jake paused when he came to me. “I don’t have anything now for you,” he said, so gently I didn’t mind. “Later, though, I will. I promise.”

“Sure,” I said. I was filled up with something. Everyone else was, too. We all were. Everything with Jake seemed different. Wilder, somehow, exciting and new, as though we were enlisted in a secret mission, even if it was only snatching mealy apples, peanut butter and crackers from the kitchen. With Jake, we ate like hideaway bandits, only small snacks and only the type of food that seemed strangely odd and forbidden. With Jake, it seemed like the finest meal we could hope for.

“Come on now,” he whispered. “Outside. Away from listening ears.”

We followed him around the corner of the house until the ground turned to soft dust beneath our feet. We sat cross-legged where there were no weeds. No one had a flashlight. Oz clutched his comic book, and Eva expertly tied a knot in her string of beads and placing them over her neck. There was nothing for me, but I didn’t mind.

“The world is full of secret places,” Jake handed Eva a carton of buttermilk. I never saw him take it from the fridge. I expected Eva to complain, but she only gulped it straight from the carton, wiped her mouth and passed it on.

“Is this a secret place?” In the darkness, Oz’s eyes were huge. It was quieter here. I could hear the wind whipping the tree branches above our heads. The sound of the highway began to fade. It was the buttermilk, I thought. The sour taste didn’t appeal to me, but I seized it and drank like the rest. It tasted just right with the apples. Jake pulled a pocketknife from his aviator jacket and sliced another apple.

I noticed he didn’t cut it in half first like my mother did. He spread his jacket out and moved the apple with his thumb after each cut. Four, five, six cuts, and then two strokes with the knife and the apple was sliced into pieces. It was done faster than it takes time to tell it. Oz and I spread our jackets on the ground in front of us and filled them with the apples and crackers. Eva smoothed her dress over her knees and caught hers in her lap. We dipped our apples straight in the jar of peanut butter, laughing at the thought of how Mom would hate it.

“This can be your place,” Jake munched on his apples.

To the right, our shed cast shadows over the house. Everyone I knew except Dad was afraid to go in it. The floor was covered with dead leaves tracked in on shoes, and besides that, there were spiders and all sorts of creepy crawly things too horrible to mention.

We slept out in the weeds with nothing but our jackets to cover us. The wind came up. Sometime during the night I woke up when leaves blew against my face. The sky was the color of washed stones and the birds had all gone to bed. Jake was up, though, hunched over with his jacket flung up around his shoulders. He was whistling between his teeth, no tune this time, just the short, tight whistling a person makes when they’re trying to distract themselves. I wanted to call out to him, but something told me he wouldn’t like it. I pulled my jacket around me. Jake saw me before I could close my eyes. He would’ve known I was faking sleep, though. Jake knew everything.

“Gracie.” No tone of reproach in his voice, nothing at all, really. The seriousness was back in his eyes and it made me cold. I sat up. From the look on his face, I expected something bad, some news of relatives sick or dying. I braced myself for it. “You asked me how I got here.”

“You flew in a rocket ship. You came by bus around the world.”

He waved one hand, his mouth set in a grim smile. “No. No games now. You were right to ask, Grace. You’re smart. You see things. So I’ll tell you. I rode the trains here.” Jake took a ragged breath that ended with a squeak. He winced. Behind him, the empty arms of his jackets flew in the wind. “Don’t interrupt me, okay? Just listen. That’s what I need right now.”

“Okay.” I would have promised anything if it meant this awful seriousness would leave him.

“Shh. I didn’t pay for a ticket, Grace. I don’t have the money. I pretend I do, but I don’t. I need the work with your dad to get me to my next stop.”

“Will you gamble again?”

“What’d I say? You get talkier whenever I see you. I rode here in a boxcar. Awful place. There were always these guys that were on a drunk. They were mean suckers.” I saw him reach over and pull the buttermilk carton from the grass. After he’d taken a drink I could see the white ring from it around his mouth. When I nodded at him, he wiped at his face. In the distance came the roar of cars, a hiss like the ocean.

I realized I didn’t care anymore how his jacket got ripped. If a hundred people had shaken him I didn’t care. I stared until my eyes grew hot, enough that Jake touched my shoulder. “Did you lie to me, too?” I asked him. I was close to shouting. The only thing that stopped me was Oz and Eva asleep next to us.

He blinked a few times. “Excuse me?” He looked just like an adult then. It didn’t frighten me this time. I was disgusted, but something in me started to shake. “Gracie,” Jake said, “Oh, buddy, listen. I never lied to you. Everything I’ve told you is the truth. I swear on Oz’s comic books.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

I believed him. Heaven help me, I took what he said as the absolute truth, straight from a man who created optical illusions and could make birds appear in his hands from the air.

I should have known better.

The next morning I woke aching on the ground to a washed out sky and birds singing so loud it was impossible to sleep. Eva and Oz were already gone, their blankets strewn over the ground, sopping from the mist that had settled down around the grass. I stumbled on half-frozen legs to the kitchen, where I sipped hot tea by the stove and tried to wake up. There was no sign of Eva or Oz, which relieved me because I could have peace and quiet. No one else was in the room except Mom, and she was too occupied banging pan lids to notice me beyond a nod.

“Jake’s gone,” she snapped. She set a plate of eggs in front of me hard. I stared down at yolks bleeding from between pieces of egg white. The pattern of the plate showed, distorted, underneath them. I felt sick and pushed the plate away.

Mom’s movements were quick and angry, but I felt a hand against my forehead. She retrieved my tea from the stove where I’d forgotten it. “Eat something, baby,” she murmured. “You’ll feel better after you’ve swallowed.”

My mother had my black hair, but her eyes weren’t green old-soul eyes like mine. They were brown. I stared into them. I can’t remember what I was thinking about, then or at any time that morning, at least not with anything resembling clarity. Because she’d told me to, I swallowed eggs, gulping everything down with slurps of tea. We were eating off her best plates, the special ones she brought out for Easter, Christmas and Jake’s visits.

I heard the click-click-click of Mom’s heels against the linoleum. Then running water. I knew without turning she was washing the dishes. A sharp noise of breaking glass came and she gave a muffled cry. By the time I looked up, startled, she’d wrapped a dishtowel around the cut on her hand already.

“Does it hurt much?” I asked in a low voice.

Mom shook her head, biting her lip so hard it was white. I wondered if that was why there were tears pooling in the corners of her eyes. I lowered my head and attacked breakfast. I was hungry now, without meaning to be, and the pain in my stomach had lessened.

“He left something for you,” Mom’s voice was choked. The back of my chair creaked, and I felt a pulling, the weight of hands against the wood, like a gravitational force keeping me in place. “Oz is upstairs crying like the world’s about to end and I don’t even know where Eva’s got to. Your dad’s in the shop just like usual.”

“I don’t want it,” I felt surprisingly calm, even though the tension in the room strangled me. “Whatever he left me, I don’t want it. He said he needed to stay to work and he left. He didn’t even tell me goodbye.”

“That’s the way he comes, too,” my mother murmured. Her voice held something I couldn’t read. I realized I didn’t want to know what she thought about this. I slid from my chair and she didn’t call me back. When I slammed the screen door against the side of the house, I could hear water running again. I knew she was washing my dishes. I did not have it in me to be ashamed.

The highway curved by our house, filled with choices. Once you crossed the highway, the beach road led away to the left, a wild cut deer used before it became the trail to the ocean. Further ahead, to the right, was the little road leading through town, dark pavement and yellow lines that extended to the edge of the world. Small dusty weed flowers ran along the sides of both paths. I flexed my legs, deciding which path I would take. I thought for a long time, five minutes at least, that I’d take to the road the way Jake did. Even though I’d eaten breakfast, I was hungry again. It felt like I wasn’t any drier than I’d been when I woke up. Low clouds were settled above in the sky, and to make things worse the wind was brewing up so bad I was sure there would be a storm. That suited me fine.

In the end I took the beach path, too hungry to bother with finding Jake or anything else. I was headed for Jeremiah Fulton’s trailer. I think the only reason was because his father loved to barbecue and the smell from their fire reached me there.

Everyone in town knew Jeremiah. They said he was a fool, but he was my friend. I didn’t think he was a fool, though it was certainly true he had a way of looking at you with his head cocked to one side that made you sure he was completely loony. This was mainly due to his glasses, the kind newcasters wore in the fifties, black and with heavy rims. The arms of his glasses had been broken years before in a tussle with his brother, so they hung crooked over his nose. On top of that, he’d outgrown them, too, so that his head looked too large and thin. Jeremiah was twelve, like me, but getting near six feet tall so that he towered over everyone and people took him for grown. Only his folks called him Jeremiah, every now and then, when they forgot what his real name was.

Jeremiah’s nickname was Kangaroo. You might think this was because of his size, but he was named after the wild kangaroo rats. They ran the countryside all around town, and could leap six feet straight up in the air and were the only animal known to live on salt water. Like them, Kangaroo knew the beach better than anyone. Once, he’d stayed there for hours, quietly hidden in a clump of weeds, to capture a bunch of kangeroo rats and release them in the movie theater. He might have done it, too, if Mrs. Simpkins, who ran the projector, hadn’t spotted one and fainted dead away. Since Jeremiah was only five then, no one could say very much, but after something like that, he should have known the name would stick to him.

Kangaroo spotted me with his quick eyes just as I was rounding the corner of his trailer.

“Hey, you.” He was the one doing the barbecuing it turned out, not his father, and he flipped burgers excellently. The smell coming from them made my mouth water. Kangeroo laughed. “Come on in if you want lunch.”

“Isn’t a bit early for lunch?”

“Not here. Here we eat when we’re hungry.”

Kangaroo’s father had a small white picket fence around his trailer. It looked strange until you got used to it. It was a dirty off-white, littered all around with bits of trash people threw from cars as they passed along the highway. Every morning Kangaroo tidied up the yard, and by afternoon it was in the same state.

I kicked trash out of my way and sat at their picnic table, marveling at how fun it must be to live with no rules the way Kangaroo did. I ate the burger he gave me, and another before he’d even finished half of his. Then I rambled about Jake leaving and how he’d promised me a gift and lied to everyone but me.

Kangaroo put his hamburger down, watching me closely with his head tilted, studying me, I suppose, for things I knew but didn’t want to believe. “We could find him,” he said.

“How? We can’t even drive.”

“Maybe you can’t,” Kangaroo said thoughtfully, “but Dad taught me. That wasn’t what I was thinking of, though.”

“Well, what were you thinking?” I demanded. I can be as bossy as Eva when the mood hits me right, and right then I was dead tired of having mysteries put in front of me.

Kangaroo turned off the barbecue and beckoned me inside the trailer. His father may have worked long hours and lived in a trailer, but I’ll see this for him: He kept a house well. Afghans sprawled over the chairs and couch, and some kind of lace doily thing that Kangaroo’s mother had knitted crowned the television. The doily was so old it gathered dust, but I’d never seen anyone move it. Kangaroo had an ancient computer which ran fast. I knew he had some skill as a hacker, but I wasn’t in a state to think clearly then.

I watched him numbly, thinking of Jake lying to everyone. The computer would prove he hadn’t lied to me. There was silence for a long time, except for Kangaroo’s fingers clicking against keys. When he turned to face me, his glasses slipped farther off his nose. I wanted to push them up for him because they were annoying dangling like that. “I’m sorry, Grace. I really am. There are no records.”

I felt something cold grip me, the same thing that made my stomach clench when Jake had looked at me with grown up eyes. Something close to panic. I fought it off. “But there has to be. Everyone has records.” An image of Dad doing taxes flashed through my mind, saying it all went into a file. “His car. Try the DMV. He has a blue sports car.”

Kangaroo sighed when I told him the name of the car and the license plate. I can memorize most strings of large numbers, rattling them off like a song in my head. Dad got me starting doing it because he could never remember the phone numbers of the customers who bought milk and antifreeze from us at the store. Working at the cash register gives you a good head for figures. “This is illegal, Grace,” Kangaroo said quietly. “Did you know that? Illegal.”

“Don’t tell me that. I know what’s illegal.”

“Well, alright then.” Kangaroo shrugged and hacked into the DMV. This took quite awhile and several codes I couldn’t begin to understand. I sat on his bed, turning the quilt between my fingers, watching the way he whistled out of the side of his mouth. He did it different from the way Jake did, even though I couldn’t have told you exactly how. He had a gap between his teeth that was great for it. That, and it gave him the ability to spit water farther than anyone at school. I saw a group of numbers fly past on the screen, like flocks of birds. I watched them closely. I couldn’t see straight. The world looked blurry.

I knew before Kangaroo told me. I could see it in his face. He was all lit up blue by the screen, thinner somehow. He looked the sorriest I’d ever seen him. “There’s not even a car registered in Jake’s name.”

“Okay.” I was very calm. “I’m going home.”

“Maybe you should give up, Grace Rainbird. Maybe this is something you don’t want to find. Do you want it?”

“Yes,” My nose was running. “No.”

He walked me to the gate. I could feel his eyes burning into me until I reached the beach path that led to the highway.

*          *          *

By next morning, I’d made up my mind. It had stormed all through the night, a heavy driving rain that set my teeth on edge and kept me awake. I was aching for sunlight and too restless to stay home. Kangaroo was wrong. Everyone alive had written records, unless you were something horrible like a convict or out-of-luck like a street person, and even then, your name should be somewhere. I didn’t say what I was doing to anyone. Mom would’ve said Jake was coming back next fall, but at any rate, she was far too busy getting Oz to concentrate on homework.

Or she should have been. Oz was an escape artist like no other. Some big idiot had left their wide bicycle right next to mine in the common bike rack in front of the store, which meant as I pulled at it from all angles, wrenching and cussing and getting red in the face – and looking more undignified than usual — I was close enough to the house still to hear Mom calling for Oz. After the screen door rasped shut again, Oz appeared suddenly in front of me, sucking on a butterscotch candy. I knew it was butterscotch because he ate them like today was his last day on earth. He fished one out of his pocket and held it out to me with one grubby hand.

“No thanks,” I said. I wasn’t pleased to see him, but too worried about finding where Jake went to waste effort on an insult war.

“I put mine under the porch,” Oz stated thoughtfully.

“Your candy?”

Oz laughed. “No. My bike. It’s easier.”

With a mighty pull, I managed to free the bike only to have it jump me and entangle its vicious, hungry little wheels around my person. You’d think Oz would’ve helped out, with me in such a fix, but he just laughed so hard his nose turned bright red and his eyes watered. I made a mental note to personally see that he found worms in his bed the next morning.

But really, Oz wasn’t such a bad little brother to have. He wasn’t anything like Matilda Gilman’s, who was a snitch and a blackmailer to boot. The only thing really awful about Oz was the way he tagged along everywhere. After a few minutes I began to regret the decision about the worms.

“Teach me Jake’s magic tricks.”

“No. You’re not coming. It’s cold. You’ll get sick again.”

“Why? Are you going to see Kangaroo? K-I-S-S–”

I jabbed Oz in the ribs and mercifully he shut up. I changed my mind again and began to wish fervently that something would wipe him off the face of the earth, a freak storm, say, or a man-eating saber tooth tiger, but I didn’t say anything when he emerged from under the porch with his own bike.

It was some time before Oz spoke, all the way to town actually. It must have been some kind of record for him. Our courthouse is a big white building with twenty steps (Oz counted them every time) and there’s a place underneath in the basement where Eva says they used to chain prisoners up until it was court time. I don’t know what to think about that, but Eva swears it’s the truth. Last year Dad had to file something and he took me with him to Records in the courthouse to do it, so I knew where it was. I could see Oz’s lips moving, counting each step, and I could hear him quietly working away at his butterscotch candy.

Records consisted of a wide desk and an important-looking woman with hair that looked like steel wool. She ignored us for a long time, until Oz marched right up to the desk and dropped one of his candies into her hand.

“You have twenty steps right outside,” he told her brightly.

The woman smiled at him. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“No. We’re looking for Cousin Jake.”

“For his records,” I added.

The woman stopped smiling while I told the address of Jake’s house. She gave me an odd look but she entered the information, twice, while I gave Oz a magazine, which he folded meticulously into paper airplanes. After the last try, she shook her head and I thought she looked more like someone’s grandmother. The words came softly out of her mouth. “I’m sorry. He doesn’t own any property. Here. Maybe you got the name wrong…”

“I didn’t get the name wrong!” I yelled. My voice went all shaky. “It’s Jacob Riley Newton. My aunt named him that after – after her brother, and he…” I stopped. I was making a scene in the middle of Records, downtown in a courthouse full of people with better things to do. Maybe Jake’s name was the only thing I really knew. Everything was collapsing slowly. He didn’t own a sports car, or a house with a swing out front that I could visit someday. He probably didn’t even have a pretty wife.

I felt a tug on my arm. Oz was looking up at me, his eyes serious. I noticed absurdly that he had a paper airplane in his right hand. He kept creasing the pages. “Gracie, I want to go home. Can you teach me Jake’s magic tricks?”

“No!” I was screaming at him. I didn’t mean to, really, but I couldn’t seem to stop. I twisted the paper airplane out his hand so hard he yelped. “Don’t you know anything? There’s no such thing as magic tricks! They’re all just lies!”

Jake was only the blessing of the family because of the stories he told, the person he made you believe he was. Someone who created himself. What he told about gambling and money and boxcars was probably the only time he told anyone the truth. At least I could be grateful about that.

Gradually, my breathing slowed. I tried to help Oz pick up the pages of the magazine, but he wouldn’t let me. He picked them up himself, without reading them, counting each piece quietly like a ritual. He put them into two piles, the pictures and words in separate places, not touching. Oz was like that. I sat down on one of the hard office chairs next to the wall and swallowed until I didn’t feel wild anymore. I closed my eyes but opened them when Oz tapped me on the arm. His face was an inch or so away from mine, and he was kneeling on the chair next to mine peering into my eyes. “Gracie, are you sick?”

I felt shame wash over me. “No,” I said. “No. I’m okay.”

The woman from the desk was standing by Oz. I’d forgotten all about her. “Are you in some trouble?” she asked. “Is there someone I should call?”

Oz rattled off our phone number before I answered. He didn’t even mix up the numbers the way he usually did. While she dialed he held my hand.

*          *          *

“I’m sorry.” Oz said this most of the way home, though I didn’t know what he had to be sorry about, and didn’t care. He tried to get me to talk to him after Dad put our bikes in the back of the car. Dad kept saying it was alright, that he’d done good calling home for me, but I think Oz was beyond listening to anyone. He tugged at my arm and when I won’t look at him, his face dissolved into tears.

Dad picked him up out of the car and carried him to the house. I trudged after them, watching Oz’s feet dangling. “Your mother’s cleaning the house like a wild woman,” Dad said, with one hand across the back of Oz’s neck. “Kangaroo came by looking for you.”

He was right. The living room was warm from bodies. Kangaroo and his father, Mom, various neighbors, children of all sizes. Dad sat Oz down on the couch. Eva looked at me primly. “Everyone was looking for you.”

“She was looking for a secret place,” Oz snapped, and Mom said, “Oz, honey.”

Dad cleared his throat. He held a flat box out to me. This was the present Jake had left, the one for only me. In the box was Jake’s old aviator jacket, the seams looking even more tattered. I took it out and hugged it, thinking of Jake’s stories.

“Tricks, Gracie,” Oz said.

I didn’t object this time. Slowly, I put on the magician’s jacket carefully. Kangaroo watched me with his glasses to one side; everyone watched me. It no longer mattered that Jake had lied. Things are what you believe. My hands steadied with the jacket, became sure. I showed them the quarter trick, the scarves, the disappearing penny. Every trick I knew. Jake would come back in the fall with his stories and his brags. But for now I didn’t need to search. I had the art of disappearing just the same.