Bird Lake Moon (6 page)

“Spencer! Hurry up!” Lolly's voice rang out.

“Coming, coming,” he muttered, confused by all of it. He longed to be near his family. With his goggles firmly on his head, eyepieces pulled up onto his bangs, he joined them.

“I see you found the goggles,” his mother said, smiling.

“Yeah,” he replied, edging toward the lake, straight to Lolly, so that he wouldn't have to lie to his mother. “Thank you.”

“I'm waiting,” yelled Lolly.

When he was close enough to talk quietly, he asked, “Did you take my goggles from the front porch?”

“No,” said Lolly. “They're on your head.”

“I know that. But that doesn't mean you didn't take them from the porch. Did you? Did you take them and hide them?”

Lolly's face twisted into a look of pure confusion.

“Answer the question. Did you take my goggles?”

“No. Why would I take your stupid goggles? I know you won't race without them, and I want to race you.” She paused. “Jeez.”

Spencer believed her, truly believed her. “Okay. Sorry.”

“Let's race,” said Lolly.

They agreed on a starting point and a finish line, a distance deemed fair by both.

As Spencer lowered his goggles over his eyes and secured them, he considered confiding in Lolly. “Do you feel like something is about to happen?” he asked in a small, private voice.

“Yeah, we're going to have a race.”

“No, I mean . . . Forget it.” But it did feel that way to him—that something was about to happen. The air and the water seemed to be teeming with mystery.

Spencer shook out his arms and rotated his shoulders in preparation for the race. He squinted in resistance to the piercing sunlight on the surface of the water, and caught his bottom lip between his teeth in concentration. That was when an urgent and eerie thought occurred to him: Matty's presence is in the lake. It's all around me. It's touching me. The thought was taking hold when Spencer felt something against his leg. “Ahh—” he cried, terrified to the bone.

Lolly shrieked with laughter. “It's Jasper! He really scared you!”

An understatement. Spencer's heart was hammering inside his chest with the force of a thunderstorm. Can your heart suddenly be twelve sizes too big for your body? Jasper brushing against Spencer's leg had felt like a brush with death itself.

Jasper had a stick in his mouth. Lolly pried it away from him and threw it toward the shore. “Let's try again,” she said to Spencer. “On your mark—”

“I don't want to race,” Spencer told her. He flipped off his goggles and followed Jasper. His teeth were chattering.

“What's wrong?” Lolly asked.

“Nothing,” was the spoken answer. The real answer: everything.

Spencer sat by his parents, lakeside, and stayed near both or one of them the rest of the day. Was he seeking protection? Safety?

He reminded himself that the incident in the lake was simply Jasper pawing his leg. There was nothing mysterious about that. And he reasoned that there must be logical explanations for the goggles in the birdbath and the turtle drawn in sugar on the porch. Everything has a logical explanation, he repeated in his head. Although for the life of him, he hadn't a clue as to what the explanations could possibly be.

He also reminded himself that nothing out of the ordinary had happened inside the house. And despite the strangeness of the two incidents, he still loved the house, still wanted to keep it. And so he decided not to tell his parents anything. Who knew how they'd react? And telling Lolly was out of the question—she'd blabber for sure.

Spencer also tried to comfort himself with the thought that even if there were such things as ghosts (impossible), this ghost would be okay because it would be Matty. If Matty were a ghost, he'd undoubtedly be benevolent. After all, he was only four years old when he died.

“Do you think there are ghosts?” Spencer asked his father. Lunch was finished, and the two of them were washing the dishes in the cramped kitchen.

“Absolutely not.” And then, as if his father sensed the nature of the concern behind the question, he placed his hands on Spencer's shoulders, and gently squeezed them, saying, “Why do you ask?”

“No special reason.”

The day passed slowly. As the sunlight weakened, Spencer's brooding increased. In the privacy of his imagination, the idea that Matty was somehow present, sending signs, seemed plausible and grew as the afternoon wore on.

Almost anything could be construed as a sign: The three-sided winged maple seedling that fell at his feet in the yard. The drab little bird that seemed to be following him, twittering, twittering. The mildew that looked like a face on one of the leaves of the wild rosebush near the road. The rust stain in the kitchen sink that he noticed late in the afternoon but hadn't seen when he'd done the lunch dishes earlier.

Were there shapes to be found and deciphered within the dark rectangles of the windows as seen from outside?

Were the fireflies—pinpricks of topaz that flared and vanished in rhythmic patterns—trying to communicate with him?

Before bed, Spencer and his mother admired the moon. His mother said, “A full moon on our first full day here—I take that as a good sign.”

“Do you believe in things like that?” Spencer asked. “Signs?”

She sighed and tilted her head upward, rubbing her neck. “Not really. Well, sort of.” She smiled. “Actually, yes, tonight I do.”

That was not the response he wanted to hear.

Mitch dreamed that he was at a restaurant with his parents. Pastel-colored balloons and crepe-paper streamers dripped from the ceiling, the streamers wimpling in the air above him, grazing his hair. The noise level was high. Music, laughter, the clatter of dishes, and the rise and fall of multiple conversations mixed together and had a collective pulse. The light in the room was so bright that everything and everyone looked washed out, bleached. Mitch and his parents were eating all of Mitch's favorite foods: onion rings, grilled-cheese sandwiches, pizza, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, glazed doughnuts. They sipped chocolate shakes through straws. The walls spun gently, and Mitch swiveled his head from shoulder to shoulder, liking the sensation and smiling. He was truly happy. Everyone was. He angled his head back, opened his mouth, and crowed like a bird.

Mitch woke up hearing himself making an odd sound: “Ahh . . .” His pillow was damp with drool. It was a good dream, and yet it had the effect of a bad one.

He sat up and blinked. Details of the dream were fading quickly, edged out by the here and now, but the feeling of being with both of his parents lingered.

He could fight off the tears only so long. Alone, in bed, he gave in and cried quietly into his pillow. Any hope he'd had about his parents getting back together had been extinguished earlier that night at dinner with his father.

They'd been at Smiley's Hamburger House on the outskirts of Bird Lake. Mitch had waited until he'd eaten most of his onion rings before he'd pressed his father. “Are you and Mom getting divorced?” he'd asked, point-blank, surprised by the harshness of his tone.

His father cleared his throat, “Well, we should be with Mom when we get down to specifics. But we've got a lot to figure out before we do that. I thought tonight we could just talk about other things. For starters, what happened to your lip?”

Mitch was feeling bold, more bold than he'd ever felt with his father. “Please, answer the question.”

“Well . . .” Mitch's father tossed his right hand up as if he were throwing something at the ceiling. Then he made the same gesture with his left hand.

Mitch's eyes bored right into his father's. But he could only maintain the intensity for a few seconds before a twinge of guilt caused him to stop.

His father struggled, “All right, yes—what do you want? Yes, we're probably—we are getting divorced.”

The boldness was gone. Mitch was left with a tightening throat, the beginnings of tears. “Probably?” came Mitch's quiet question.

“Not probably. Not probably.”

Where they were, what they were eating, the time of day—all of it became insignificant. Mitch was surrounded by nothingness.

“This isn't about you, bud. What I mean is—none of this is your fault. Listen to me—we both love you and always will. That's the bottom line.”

Mitch was silent. He let his eyes drop but sensed his father's steady gaze upon him. Mitch's inner voice spoke: Do not cry. He willed himself into a human fist.

“We'll make the best of it,” his father stated unconvincingly.

They were sitting in a booth. Mitch's legs were sticking to the burnt orange upholstery. So was the back of his shirt. When he leaned into the table, his shirt resisted. He pulled forward and leaned back and pulled forward a little more. As his shirt peeled away from the back of the booth, it made a whispery sound that he felt as much as he heard:
schrishhh
.

“Hey, I've got that cell phone for you.”

The cell phone was presented. It lay on the tabletop, midway between them, in a swath of late sunlight, thick and golden. Mitch listened halfheartedly to his father's instructions for using it.

When they left the restaurant, Mitch jammed the cell phone into his pocket, but when he got into the car, he slipped it unnoticed under the seat. He'd leave it there.

On the drive back to Papa Carl and Cherry's, Mitch's father spoke the only words: “Some moon, huh?” And it was. It rose out of the gathering darkness, above the gray blur of trees. The moon was significant—pearly, tinged with orange—and seemed to mark the day. A big period, saying: It's official. It's over. Everything's over. It reminded Mitch of the moon on the poster hanging in his pediatrician's office, which he'd always assumed was fake, a doctored photograph. He stared vacantly at the unlucky moon and thought, I will always hate full moons.

In the morning, Mitch went to the library with his grandparents. His mother had already left for Madison to see a lawyer and to have lunch with a friend.

She'd appeared suddenly at the side of his bed to say good-bye. He'd feigned sleepiness, rolling over toward the wall and mumbling into the tangle of blankets. “I'm sorry about last night,” she'd told him.

A few minutes later, Papa Carl had shown up in the doorway. “After you get something to eat,” he'd said, “come with me.”

“All right,” Mitch had replied in a soft, almost apologetic voice. He'd thought that his grandfather had meant fishing, and was surprised, at breakfast, to learn that Papa Carl was going to the library to look at woodworking magazines.

“I'm going, too,” Cherry had said. “Let's get you some books.”

Even if it hadn't been intentional, Mitch felt as though Papa Carl had tricked him, let him down like everyone else. He felt trapped inside the warm, sunny car.

Papa Carl stole glances at Mitch by turning his head or catching Mitch's eyes in the rearview mirror. Papa Carl had a square jaw and long earlobes. His skin was darkly tanned and was laced with so many wrinkles it looked as if a child had scribbled all over him with a pencil.

“A lot of people get divorced now,” he said, his head facing forward again. “Not like when I was a boy.”

“There's no disgrace for the child involved,” Cherry added curtly. She sat, rigid. Her bony shoulders and short, gray, frizzed-up hair were unmoving, giving the impression that she was balancing an invisible tray of glassware on her head.

Mitch knew that they were speaking loudly for his benefit but couldn't muster a response other than a cluck of his tongue.

The library was a small, rose-colored brick building. It had a certain quality about it—properness—that it shared with Papa Carl and Cherry's house.

“If you need assistance, the librarian is very good,” Cherry told Mitch. She touched his elbow as they entered through the heavy wooden doors.

Mitch wandered about the nearly empty air-conditioned rooms as quietly as possible, so as not to draw attention to himself. Periodically he could hear Cherry's footsteps on the highly polished floors. He wanted to see if there were any books about divorce but was too embarrassed to ask the librarian for help, and would have been too embarrassed to check them out anyway.

At one point, he rounded the corner of a tall set of shelves and nearly collided with the librarian. “Are you finding everything you need?” she asked. Her face was open and kind, her cheeks ruddy.

Mitch nodded.

Eventually he sat by himself at a lone table in a corner and leafed through back issues of
Sports Illustrated
and
Rolling Stone
, sometimes paying attention, sometimes thinking of other things.

He knew several kids whose parents were divorced, and that didn't bother him one bit. But those parents weren't
his
parents. He knew that all “divorced kids” (his new term) were not like Ross Liscum. He even knew a divorced kid whose parents each had a separate apartment. The kid lived in his own house, and the parents took turns staying with him.

This had sounded interesting, sort of cool, when he'd first heard of it at school, but put in the context of his own life, it seemed off, even scary, as if the kid were the adult and the adults were the kids.

Growing impatient, he wandered some more, ending up, by chance, at a section of books about dogs. He tried to identify what breed Jasper, the intruders' dog, was. He decided that Jasper must be a mutt, because he couldn't find a photograph or illustration that offered more than a weak resemblance to him.

Mitch abandoned the dog books and stepped noiselessly to the center of the library, where an enormous dictionary lay open on a darkly stained wooden reading stand like two tablets of stone. He fumbled through the thin pages, scanning the entries. He'd intended to look up the words
mongrel
and
mutt
to see if the definitions were the same, when, for some reason, his eyes settled on the word
morass
.