Boy, Snow, Bird (28 page)

• He was flattered that I was writing down what he said. Flattered or he felt he had a message to give. He spoke slowly and repeated himself so I could get it all down.
  
• He wanted to know if I was going to call the police on him. “Good luck getting them to believe you.”
  
• “You are not adopted?” he asked, hopefully.
  
• How can he be Mom’s dad? There’s no trace of her in him, or vice versa. And that’s weird, because he’s a forceful man. For instance, I couldn’t push back against his accent. My vowels started to copy his—he thought I was making fun of him. Mom would’ve had to be really careful and deliberate in her decisions not to do anything the way he did it. No moving her hands through the air in an almost musical way as she speaks, no pursing her lips, no excitement, calm, always calm. Maybe he noticed what she was doing. I’ll bet he hated that.
  
• When he talked about rats, his forehead tightened and he looked lost. It was as if the words he was saying didn’t mean anything to him, they’d decided to say themselves and he was hoping they’d leave him alone if he just cooperated. He didn’t tell me how to catch rats in the end. He kept working up to it, then he’d say: “It’s all I know. Maybe you shouldn’t say everything you know. Maybe it leaves you empty-headed, eh?”
  
• I asked him about the syringe, what the liquid in it was. He said: “What syringe?” (What did he do with it? If I’d called the police, would they have found it on him? I went back to the linden tree with Louis a couple of days later and we searched for hours. If he’d dropped it, we would have found it. He didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Acting? I half believe I could dream up a syringe. But only half.)
  
• He says a rat bit him on the face when he was a boy. Mom was really surprised that he’d told me that. She doesn’t know if it’s true; that was the first she’d heard of it. He said he used to have to go through trash cans looking for food. And there was a rat in the trash can, and the rat was hungry too; he was taking its food, so it bit him on the face. I tried to dislike him a little bit less after he told me that, because that’s the kind of thing that shouldn’t happen to anyone. “Where’s the scar?” I asked. He laughed. “It healed well. It healed well.”
  
• He read to me from a little suede-covered book.
  “The bites of rats are sometimes difficult to recognize. They always attack the parts that are fat, i.e., the cheeks and the heels—”
  The book was falling apart onto the tabletop, and the pages he was reading from didn’t have any print on them.
  “They divide the skin in a straight line, which often has the appearance of having been cut with a knife; so close is the resemblance that it’s often difficult to avoid a mistake—”
  He said those were the findings of a French doctor from a long time ago. I just said okay. He said: “Look it up sometime. I’m serious . . . look it up.” I said okay.
  
• Hard to know how to take the things he said about Mom. I don’t accept what he said but I can’t get past it. He told me Mom is evil. I said: “What do you mean, ‘evil’?”
  
• FN stands for Frank Novak and BW stands for Bird Whitman. (I had to be quick; I think I said more but I can’t remember what I said.)
  
• FN: I’m not talking about powers of darkness or something you can protect yourself from with crosses and holy water. Of course it is difficult to describe, because it seems so ordinary. Seems so, but is not. Evil studies the ordinary and imitates it. Then you can say it was just a little bad temper, we all know what that is. But some people . . . with some people the spite goes so deep, it is a thing beyond personality . . . you don’t want to understand me. I’m speaking of a little girl who was born too early. She was so small. It was crazy how small she was. She didn’t open her eyes for days after she was born. She kept her eyes closed and shivered and shivered, like someone was yelling at her that she wasn’t going to make it and she was doing all she could to ignore them. Maybe she wasn’t meant to live, I don’t know. But she wanted to, this baby girl. She struggled. She really struggled. I didn’t work for a month. I held her, walked around the house holding her in a blanket. They couldn’t do much at the hospital. They didn’t have those good machines to help out back then. I remember a nurse told me I should have a Mass said for the baby’s soul. A wet nurse came every day—it was the one time in my life I’ve wished I was a woman, so the wet nurse wouldn’t have had to come for my child. The doctor came every other day. I don’t know how she pulled through. This is the thing—maybe it wasn’t her that pulled through. Maybe it was just that will to exist in the world. I mean, it wasn’t the will of someone young, it was the will of . . . something that has had life before and knows that life is good.
  
• It’s not Mom’s fault if she was born too early.
  
• There was so much he wasn’t saying I didn’t know where to start with the questions.
  

When I opened my mouth, he held up his hand.

FN:
There was a morning I was sure that she was gone. I woke up and she wasn’t shivering anymore. You see, I slept sitting up in a chair against the wall, so it couldn’t tilt back. I slept that way so I could have her against my chest through the night. To keep her warm, I suppose. To keep her alive. If anything was wrong, I wanted to feel it immediately. So. She wasn’t shivering. I lifted her up and she was so much heavier than she had been the night before. She didn’t move at all. I put my cheek against her cheek and I cried. I cried so much. And I said
Why?
There was knocking at the outside door as well. I heard it but I didn’t answer, I held the dead child. It was afternoon when I looked at her again . . . I’d been crying all that time. I looked at her again and her eyes were open. She was alive again. There was a tear-drop on her chin and she was trying to see it.

BW:
You think it was the crying that brought her back?

FN:
Without question it was the crying. She liked it. She got better after that. She got strong. The first time I saw her smile—I switched on the wireless set one evening and tried to find some music for us. A woman was being killed in a radio play on one of the stations, and the actress screamed. I thought it’d make Boy nervous, but Santa Claus himself couldn’t have gotten a wider smile out of her.

BW:
That all?

FN:
I could tell you tens of stories about the pain she caused other children before she learned to be scared that I’d catch her at it. Most children get into fights, but it’s a bad sign when a child fights dirty, without anyone even showing her how. One girl angered Boy in some way—she said something, I think—this girl had a sore leg; she’d had some small accident days before . . . it was the sore leg that Boy went for, quick as quick. She kicked that sore leg out from under the girl. The happy children, the ones who had friends they could rely on, those children were safe from her. She was drawn to the anxious ones. The ones who had potential for misery. I watched her. When she ran away from home, I knew she’d gone to find someone who was unhappy, and once she’d found them she’d use her gift to make it worse.

BW:
What do you think Boy would say if I told her all this?

FN:
Don’t know. Try it.

• He suddenly became a gentleman and asked if I wanted the rest of his french fries. He said he hated waste.
  

—

dad knocked on
the diner window; I saw him and Frank didn’t. He had my hula hoop tucked under his arm, and when he reached us, he dropped it and picked me up off my seat. He held me tight against his chest and said, “Thank God,” and “You’re grounded forever,” and I heard the hoop rolling around on the tiled floor.

I said: “I don’t get why I’m grounded forever.”

“It’s directly connected to what happens in a father’s heart when he finds a pink hula hoop just lying there in the mud. To find that and have no idea where its owner is—I mean, goddamn it, Bird.”

I thought about it. He was right.

“And then I ask around and nobody remembers having seen her. And
then
Agnes starts talking about enemies
—”

“This is Flax Hill. I couldn’t have gone far.”

“Don’t you see that that’s what made it so scary that no one had seen you? Your mom’s been on the phone to every kid in your class. But then Susie called your grammy. And you’re grounded forever.”

It was funny—I’d kind of expected Frank to be gone when Dad finally put me down, but Frank was still there, dipping his french fries in mayonnaise. He’d probably guessed that Dad wouldn’t hit an old man.

“Arturo Whitman,” Dad said, and held out his hand.

Frank went right on eating. “I know who you are,” he said.

Dad looked at me, looked back at Frank, then suggested that Frank introduce himself. Frank said his name, said it with pride, and Dad grabbed his arm and forced him out of the booth. For a second I thought Frank was going to get beaten around the head with his own walking stick, but Dad pressed it into his hand and told him to get out. “Just go. And if I see you look back at me or my daughter—if you look back at us even once—I’ll kick you right into the middle of next week.”

Frank said: “Why would I want to look back?” And he did as he was told.

—

apparently susie conlin
told Dad to come get me because of Frank’s negative energy. She told Dad I was sitting in a booth with an old man who was telling me his life story and stopped talking whenever she walked past. She said I was writing down everything the man said, that I was wincing as I wrote with my bandaged hand, and that I looked really tired. She thought the old man should find somebody else to tell his life story to.

“He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“No.”

“If he did—”

“No. It was the tree that cut me.”

“Show me what you wrote down.”

“He took it with him.”

Mom was sarcastic when we got home. “You and your Nancy Drew act. Thanks for coming home,” she said, interrupting Dad, who was telling her about Frank and how he didn’t think Frank
was going to come near us again. She was red-faced and red-eyed. I put her arms around me and held them there until she hugged me.

—

also . . . i found
out the worst thing that can happen when you tell someone you love them. I thought that if you love someone and they don’t love you back then they’re nice to you. Or at least, if you end up feeling terrible, the other person didn’t mean for that to happen. But Mom said “I love you” to some man on the phone, a man named Charlie, and he said: “Why?”

I got into the eavesdropping late, but I knew she was the one who’d called him, because the phone hadn’t rung. She was mad at him. She thought he’d told her dad where to find us. “You told that man about me and Bird!” she said. He said he hadn’t spoken to Frank Novak in years, and was Bird a boy or a girl, and Mom said: “She’s my daughter. My little girl.” Then this Charlie person said he had two sons, and a wife. He said he was happy. (I could almost hear Frank Novak saying “The happy ones were safe from her.”) That was when Mom told him she loved him. And he asked why.

Mom said: “Charlie? Charlie?” as if the phone line wasn’t working properly, but the line was clear. He said he had to go and hung up. Then I had to wait for Mom to hang up—obviously I couldn’t hang up before she did. She didn’t put the phone down for at least a minute. I stood there listening to the dial tone and began to wonder if this was a trick and she’d left the receiver off the hook in the parlor so she could appear in the hallway and tell me I’d
been busted. Then I thought she might be crying into the phone, but her breathing was regular. After she hung up I dashed across the hallway and into bed with my heart going like gangbusters.

Mom: Charlie . . . I love you.

Charlie: Why?

Mom wore sunshades for the next few days. She wore them indoors and at night, and she smiled when Dad teased her. He thought she was acting that way because Snow was coming home.

Dad: I love you, honey.

Mom: And I love you.

She slept all the way through the weekend. She didn’t even get up to eat.

I tried to tell Aunt Mia that she should maybe come over or take Mom out somewhere. I’d want someone to tell Louis I was feeling down if for some reason I couldn’t tell him myself. But Aunt Mia was avoiding me. When I called her apartment, she said, “Hello?” and then dropped the phone when she heard my voice, and then I had to call back six times before she finally answered. If that isn’t avoiding somebody then I don’t know what is.

“What’s new?” she asked, once she was done denying that she was avoiding me.

“I met my grandfather.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, on Mom’s side.”

“I figured. Well?”

“Well, we sort of hated each other.”

(I’d cried about that. The tears came all of a sudden, when I was jumping rope with Ruth and Paula. Suddenly my feet wouldn’t leave the ground and my face and neck felt raw, as if they’d been scraped with rocks. It was the look he’d given me when he understood that I was his granddaughter. It was like a burn. And now that I was safe from it, the syringe scared me even more.)

“It’s okay,
cara
. I didn’t get along too well with one of my grandfathers, either.”

“Yeah, but . . . this was . . . anyway, he said something weird.”

Aunt Mia dropped something—a coffee cup, something like that. There was clattering and I heard her curse and scrabble around with a paper towel. Then she said: “To you? He said something weird to you?”

“Yeah. How’s your objectivity?”

Aunt Mia said: “Fine, I guess. Why? What did he say?”

“He said that Mom’s evil.”

I repeated myself after a couple of seconds because Aunt Mia didn’t say a word. I wasn’t sure she was still there. I’m not always sure about Mom, but Aunt Mia is definitely not evil, and in a way she’s my proof that Mom is morally okay. It would’ve helped if Aunt Mia had laughed or seemed shocked, but she was just quiet. I began to whisper it a third time but she stopped me: “Can you put your mom on the line?”