Zebra Forest (2 page)

“Where’d you move from?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I said, feeling foolish. “The city. I’m not sure which one.”

“Well, you’ve got to know where you’re from,” Beth told me. “Ask your mother.”

“I have a gran” was all I said to that.

“Ask her, then.”

And so I did ask Gran. On good days, Gran would tell me plenty, but none of it answered Beth’s questions. She told me about her growing up in crowded apartments where someone was always cooking, about having lots of cousins and playing marbles in the street.

Gran didn’t talk like anyone else. Maybe in Chicago, where she came from, everyone sounded like her, but no one else in Sunshine could pull their words out flat, the way she did. No one else had the gravelly sound she had, even in her singing voice.

“The whole family lived in a three flat,” she told Rew and me once. “That’s three apartments stacked one on top of the next. And I mean uncles and aunts and grandparents and cousins — everybody. Downstairs we all worked in the family grocery. We took turns behind the counter and delivering round the neighborhood. We went where we pleased, my cousins and me. They had no playgrounds in those days. We just had the streets. The streets were ours.”

“What about school?” Rew wanted to know. “Didn’t you go?”

“Up till the eighth grade I did,” Gran said. “Then I had to work. Everyone worked then, if they were lucky enough to have a place to.”

“Weren’t there truant ladies then?” I asked her.

“Oh, not then, not when I was old as that. People overestimate the amount of schooling a person needs to get by, I’d say. Look at my mother — look how she did!”

Gran’s mother had run the family — all three flats of it. Gran said she was a bear of a woman — Gran called her “substantial”— and she took no lip from anyone.

Privately, Rew said “substantial” only meant fat, and that anyone who could barely read couldn’t have been much of a success, but I didn’t agree. In my mind’s eye, Gran’s mother was like Gran, only more solid. Her face was the same: eyes the color of sunny water; white, white hair; pointed nose. Wider, though. Definitely wider. Gran herself was thin, a bird of a woman, who had once been quick but who now, as the bad days grew more frequent, stayed in her chair by the window, sunk beneath her old newspapers, or upstairs, behind her closed door.

All Gran’s cousins were gone now, she said, her being the youngest. There was no one left. Still, I liked to imagine her the way she must have been, a girl on the sidewalk, hair vivid red, shooting marbles and rolling pennies.

When Beth heard all this, she came the two miles from town to see Gran and our house, and she didn’t mind the clutter or that Gran never threw anything out or that we mostly ate from dirty dishes or that, as time passed, I did a lot of the shopping myself, because it made Gran too tired to go into town. Beth thought our house was interesting, what with its old magazines and Gran’s obsession with keeping things. And so we were friends.

That was enough for me. And Gran said I ought to be grateful and not wish the other kids would come by, or want to, even.

“I don’t like people snooping around,” she said. “We’re enough for each other, aren’t we?”

I always told her yes, of course we were. And on her good days, it was even true. But by the end of sixth grade, I’d counted more bad days than good, more days when Gran didn’t wake until noon, and then only got up to sit in the kitchen, staring through the windows at the Zebra, grinding the tip of her slipper into the linoleum until it left little bits of gray rubber scattered like eraser dust on the floor. So I looked forward to summer less than I had. But still, there was good in it. There was Rew, and there was the Zebra, where the two of us would go each day, and tell stories, and climb trees, and listen to uncluttered quiet that had no warning in it.

So as that summer began, while America counted hostage days and Beth learned to swim, I thought up good lies to tell and climbed trees and lay a lot in the shade. I didn’t think any of my wishes would come true, not even the one about getting taller.

W
e called it the Zebra Forest because it looked like a zebra. Its trees were a mix of white birch and chocolate oak, and if you stood a little ways from it, like at our house looking across the back field that was our yard, you saw stripes, black and white, that went up into green.

Gran never went out there except near dusk, when the shadows gathered. She usually didn’t go out in full sunlight, and told me once she didn’t like the lines the trees made. Gran was always saying stuff like that. Perfectly beautiful things — like a clean blue sky over the Zebra — made tears come to her eyes, and if I tried to get her to come outside with me, she’d duck her head and hurry upstairs to bed. But then it would be storming, lightning sizzling the tops of the trees, and she’d run round the house, cheerful, making us hot cocoa and frying up pancakes and warming us with old quilts.

We had few rules in our house, but keeping out of the Zebra Forest in a storm was one of them. In fact, I’d be hard pressed to list any other rules at all, maybe because aside from that, we didn’t think to do much that Gran would have minded. She never cared if we went to school, and lots of times I didn’t. If I missed half a week, Adele Parks would come around, asking if I wasn’t feeling well. And of course I’d hack and cough then, double over in pain and tell her I’d had a fever of 106 just that morning but that it seemed to be lifting and so I’d be back in a few days. And then I’d go back again, but only because I wanted to. Once I missed two whole weeks, because I happened to know Adele Parks had gone off to visit her sick mother out of town. Before she left, she made me promise I’d go to school while she was gone, but she probably knew that didn’t mean much. I only did go back because Beth said she wouldn’t visit after school if I didn’t come at least once in a while.

Adele Parks liked to talk to me about responsibility, a topic that bored me. I figured as long as Rew and I each knew enough to pass into the next grade, we were fine.

“You need to buckle down, Annie,” she’d say. “You could really do something with that mind of yours.”

What Adele Parks didn’t seem to realize was that I used my mind plenty. I used it to tell Rew stories.

Every day after school, once we’d gone out and settled ourselves in the Zebra, he’d look at me with expectation, and I’d have to think. That’s how Rew was — it took thinking to keep him happy.

Since he’d been little, Rew loved two things: jokes and pirate stories. He’d gotten attached to jokes when he found an old joke book among Gran’s stacks. And when he’d finished that, he thought up his own.

They were always awful.

“What did the limestone say to the geologist?” he’d ask me.

“That’s not a joke,” I’d say. “It’s a riddle.”

“You just don’t know. Come on, what did it say?”

“I don’t know. Tell me.”

Rew would grin. “Don’t take me for granite!”

He’d laugh at himself then, since I wasn’t about to. “Get it? Granite?”

I would usually groan and fall back against the nearest tree. “How can someone so smart love such stupid jokes?” I’d ask him.

And he’d laugh again. “Actually, that was a riddle. Want to hear a joke now?”

“No!”

“Fine, tell me a story, then.”

He’d started loving pirate stories in kindergarten, when he found
Treasure Island
in Gran’s bedroom. Or rather half of
Treasure Island.
The first seven chapters were gone from it, ripped out neat at the binding, and so we began at chapter 8, “At the Sign of the Spy-glass.” Rew was too little to read such a hard book himself, so I read it to him, and we both loved to hear about Jim Hawkins, treasure maps, and Long John Silver. After a while, I offered to get the book out of the public library so we could see how it all started, but Rew preferred to imagine how Jim Hawkins had got himself mixed up with pirates. So we started to tell ourselves new beginnings, out in the Zebra.

Each of us had our favorite people in the story, and we liked to imagine what they’d done before they all boarded the
Hispaniola.
Even when I grew interested in some of the other books I found in Gran’s piles, about spunky girls who tamed wild horses or geniuses who used math to predict the future, Rew couldn’t get enough of pirates, and he even wanted to hear stories about the terrible blue-faced Captain Flint, who’d killed his men and hidden the treasure.

I couldn’t say I loved the pirates, exactly, but I loved the story, and so I’d take turns making things up and going back to the book, where I never got tired of seeing Jim Hawkins get home with that treasure in the end.

As for Rew, he knew who the good guys were, and he liked Jim Hawkins all right, but he was most of all stuck on Long John Silver. I’d tried to explain to him, when we first read it, how bad old Long John was, but Rew wouldn’t have any of it. He agreed, of course, that Long John was a bad man. But that old sea cook was just so
smart,
Rew kept coming back to him.

“You can’t trust him, though,” I said.

Rew liked him just the same.

And of course, there were other things that drew us to
Treasure Island.
For one thing, we could never get enough of the way they swore. “Shiver me timbers” and “By the powers!” We loved that stuff. When those pirates got mad — which was a lot — they spouted “oaths,” as Jim Hawkins called them. Rew loved that word, too, because he thought it sounded like “oaks”— the kind out in the Zebra. But I looked it up in the dictionary and told him it meant “promises,” which stumped us.

“What’s he promising to do? What kind of promise is ‘Shiver me timbers’ or ‘By the powers’?” he asked me.

I had no idea, but that didn’t stop either of us from spouting oaths ourselves.

Rew loved pirates so much, he started seeing them everyplace.

“Do you think Gran was a pirate once?” he asked me one day, when he had just turned seven.

“Course not!” I said, surprised. “Gran? Why would you think so?”

“She keeps her treasure hidden. Just like Captain Flint on Treasure Island.”

I laughed. “She didn’t get it from being a pirate,” I told him. “Grandpa gave it to her, before he died.”

On one of her most talkative days, Gran had told me that. In the city that had no name, my grandfather had died, just before we came to Sunshine.

“He was a good man,” Gran had said that time. “But his heart couldn’t take it.”

“Take what?” I’d asked her.

“Living.”

Gran’s answers were like that sometimes, and when they were, the story was over. But I knew my grandpa had taken care of Gran, leaving her money to live on if something happened to him, because she’d told me so, told me he was a careful man who always took care. And so she’d gathered up Rew and me, and the money he’d left her, and come to Sunshine, far away from the place where living was too much for Grandpa Snow.

Rew didn’t want to hear about a grandpa with a hurt heart, though. And so one day that year I agreed that our grandpa
had
been a pirate and that Gran got her treasure from a treasure box he’d left, which was still buried out on the edge of the Zebra.

“Is that why she lets everyone call her Morgan?” he asked me, thinking it over. “Like Adele Parks and them?”

When we had first registered for school, Gran had put us down under the name Morgan, which had been her name before she married Grandpa Snow, when she lived in Chicago. “My mother would have liked to be remembered that way” was all she said about it. And that was Gran. But at home, she never let us forget that we were Snows, and neither of us would have had it any other way. Snow had been our father’s name, after all.

“That’s right,” I told Rew. “See, pirates never use their real names. You think Long John Silver’s mother
named
him that? Course not. So Grandpa Snow’s pirate name was Morgan, and he stamped that name right on his big treasure box, with the special seal pirates use. If Gran didn’t use that name Morgan, that box wouldn’t
budge
open. And so she keeps her pirate name, and that’s how she gets at the treasure.”

Rew grinned. “The old pirate Morgan. That’s a great name. Where’d he sail? In the Atlantic?”

“He sailed down to the islands,” I told him. “To the Bermuda Triangle, where ships get lost at sea.”

“And is that what happened to him? Did his ship get lost?”

I nodded. “Absolutely,” I said. “It’s a mystery right to this day. His ship was swallowed up, and no one ever saw it again.”