Gravedigger's Cottage (9 page)

“What time is it?” I said as nonchalantly as I could.

I meant it as a hint, rather than a real question, but Carmine had a watch. A watch with a luminous dial.

“It’s exactly twelve forty-one,” he said cheerily.

“It is
not,”
I said, pushing Carmine away even though I didn’t mean to. This was by far the latest Walter or I had ever been out. It was the
only
time we had ever snuck out. I had no idea it was this late, and felt immediately all panicky and guilty.

“We have to go,” I said, and pulled Walter. “We have to go, Carmine, and you have to go.”

We left him there and hurried through the gate.

“Okay,” Carmine said, seeming for all the world like twelve forty-one was just lunch break for him. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

I turned to suggest that maybe he didn’t need to, but he was already gone from sight.

Inside, we shut the door as quietly as possible. Then we stood there, frozen in the kitchen, sensing.

The house didn’t feel awake. There was none of the warmth, the scent, the vibration of a house with awakeness in it. It was like when you creep to the bathroom in the middle of the night and you creep back again, really hoping that your dad or whoever is going to call out and ask if everything is okay but he doesn’t and you scurry double speed back under the covers. It felt like that.

Except off there in the distance, not far away but in a way far away, Dad’s radio talked in those husky, hushed tones of the middle-of-the-night radio talk guy.

He slept with the radio on all night. Sometimes it was loud, sometimes it was tippy-tippy soft, but always it was there.

He said it talked him through. We still hadn’t talked about
what
it talked him through. But it talked him through.

I was happy to hear it, happy to know he was in there, happy things were now, for the moment, in their right places and that we were in our right places.

Never should have gone out. Should have been in our right places all along. Got to stay put, when put is the place to stay. Meeting people was a luxury, parties are a luxury, and right now I just wanted the basic comforts, not luxuries. I had the people I needed right here.

“Go on,” I said in a growl whisper to Walter as I steered him toward the stairs. “We’ll talk about it tomorrow when Dad’s at work.”

“He’s not the Digger,” Walter whispered back, kind of shaky. He is especially no good when he’s tired.

“Of course he’s not.”

“Is it you, then?”

“Nobody’s the Digger,” I snapped. “God, just go to bed, Walter.”

G
UMBY ACTED LIKE HE
loved me. He was a green tree frog with a white underbelly, massive orange eyes, and orange hands that had like bitty balloons for fingertips.

He was like gum the way his body felt, the way it stretched and twisted and stuck to absolutely everything, even glass, even if you tossed him like a little beanbag at the outside of his vivarium.

That’s what they called the kind of fish tank setup you made for creatures like reptiles and amphibians, a vivarium. I always loved that word.
Vivarium.
So full of hope, that word, so bursting with life, ripe and fertile and vivid with life.

But he didn’t just stick to me, when he stuck to me. It was like he knew me. Like he knew and he understood, and that I was practically his mother. He held on so tight, wrapping his sticky orange hands around my thumb and looking right up at me, looking up to me all the time, every single second while I held him. While he held me.

His beautiful froggy face was like a question, all the time.

He never once tried to get away from me when I went to pick him up. He would be hanging in his tree branch in his vivarium, the branch that I took so long hunting down because of its perfect length and thickness and whiteness and smoothness, the branch that I polished and polished until it was like marble. He hung onto that branch for most of his time in the vivarium, staring off with the most remarkable wide-eyed faraway face on him, thinking something. Thinking some amazing, simple, froggy something until I opened up the top and he came back from his faraway place and looked up into my mommy eyes.

And then he scooched. Up and up and to me, finally climbing up with his weird elongated sticky motion, onto my hand, to grab on and go wherever I wanted to take him while he held my thumb with his orange hands and stared up at me.

He looked like he loved me. He may well have loved me. Nobody could say different. He for sure trusted me.

“I’m sorry, Vee,” Walter said, patting the palm-sized mound of earth over Gumby. Over the bits of Gumby we were able to find, outside, where he was never supposed to be. Where I was never supposed to let him be, defenseless against whatever. Where he must have counted on me not to ever let him be without me.

I pictured him, not putting up a fight. I pictured him, seeing what was coming and squeezing up tight his big orange eyes.

I
WOKE TO A
scritchy-scratch-tearing sound. It was in the walls, under the floor. It was moving around under me. I couldn’t stand it.

I had not had enough sleep. As I said, I was never a night person, so typically I was up early—we were all up early most days—but I had been out late.

Didn’t even sound right to me when I said it.
I was out late.
Why would I ever be? Me? Sounded so foreign.

But I was and so I needed to sleep later, but I couldn’t because of the scritchy-scratch-tearing sound.

Maybe sleepiness made me more freaked, but I freaked. I jumped up on my bed and stood there, looking all over the place for whatever odd little or not-so-little creature was scuttling around down there.

Walter just then came sailing into my room, ignoring my all-important closed door, running in and jumping up on my bed next to me.

But to be a guy, to do the manly boy thing, he had to be sure not to look like me. He couldn’t catch himself doing what I was doing, which was basically the old cartoon lady-on-a-chair-eek-a-mouse routine. For while he was certainly right up there, shoulder to cowardly shoulder with me, he made out like it was something different.

He put his hands on his hips. More, he put his
fists
on his hips as he surveyed all around us and inquired nonchalantly, “So, what’s going on down there, huh?”

My hero.

“I don’t know what it is, Walter. If I knew what it was, would I be standing on the bed like a big chicken, like you?”

“I am not a big chicken. I came here to check on you.”

“That’s nice,” I said. “You’re a very thorough checker.”

Meanwhile, the sound went on. It was right under us now, louder, insistent, but definitely not in the room with us. It was just after nine, and Dad would have left for work already, so the world as we knew it was without its legs just then. Things could go bump in the night—or scritchy-scratch in the daytime, even—but if we knew that patrolling down below us was Dad, we could deal.

But now he was gone.

And we were alone.

In the Gravedigger’s Cottage. With the Sound.

“Why
did you make us go to that stupid bonfire last night?” I said, slapping Walter on the arm. “This is all your fault, making everything seem so spooky.”

“What is all my fault?” he asked, giving me a shove that sent me backing into the headboard.

I was about to give him a good sharp crack on the shoulder when suddenly the scritchy-scratching stopped.

We stood there, listening to the house.

“Hey,” the house called, from downstairs.

It wasn’t the house, of course, it was Dad. But it was almost as alarming. Dad was supposed to be at work, first day back after vacation, first day back after moving. First day at the new office, the new everything.

Walter and I tumbled off the bed and down the stairs, where we found Dad in a pair of white house-painter overalls, which I didn’t even know he had, cut off for shorts. He was standing at the far wall of the living room, two distinct expressions on his face at once, both grimly determined and satisfied. Like one of those people whose mouths curve downward when they smile, even though he was not one of those people. Around his feet were several big uneven shreds of old wallpaper he had just torn down. He held a putty knife up in front of him like it was the focus of his show-and-tell.

“Good morning,” he said.

Walter said a quick hello, then went right over to that wall. Within three seconds he had uncovered a vulnerable loose corner of wallpaper and was energetically separating it from the wall with that old familiar scratching noise for background.

“Good morning, Dad,” I said, remaining right where I had landed at the foot of the stairs. “We were wondering what that noise was. I was afraid it was some kind of critter loose in the house.”

Dad turned his back to me, put his hands on his hips as he looked the half-bald wall up and down. “Nah, it was just me,” he said. “Though turns out we do have a rat around.”

“No!” I shouted and started walking fast-motion backward up the stairs. As if rats couldn’t climb stairs. Walter paid no mind, because he was completely wrapped up in the boy joy of tearing something down and leaving it right there on the floor without being in trouble for it.

“It’s not in here, Sylvia, don’t worry,” Dad said. “I’ve only caught glimpses of him here and there creeping around the grounds.”

Don’t worry. Does anybody ever stop worrying when somebody tells her to? I’d rather have a dragon “creeping around the grounds” than a rat.

“Why are you here, Dad?” I asked, cautiously descending the stairs again.

He turned, caught off guard.

“Why aren’t you at work, Dad? You were supposed to start back at work today.”

He shook his head, then went to nodding and smiling reassuringly. “Couldn’t do that,” he said, as if he was explaining the most obvious thing in the world. “Couldn’t leave you guys here alone…”

If it had been my dad’s mission to be as surprising as possible this morning, then he was doing a top job of it. Because, wonderful and protective though he was, he was not normally against leaving me and Walter in the house by ourselves. Nor should he have been. We were very responsible people, had learned long ago not to stick our fingers in light sockets, not to chew razor blades, not to communicate in any way with salesmen. I would go as far, in fact, as to say there were times, many times, when a popular vote would conclude that I was clearly the most mature person in this house; and even if the scales were tipped in my favor by the other two contestants being gender handicapped, that still didn’t make it any less the truth.

So, his explanation for being home didn’t wash. Even Walter knew it.

Walter stopped tearing up the wall. “Dad? What does that mean—you’re
never
going to leave us alone ever again?”

Yikes. Much as anybody loves their dad, that’s got to be a little scary.

“No, of course it doesn’t mean that. I just realized that the house needed more, considerably more attention before I could feel comfortable going back to work. The house needs me. The walls, the chimneys, the plumbing…here, feel this bit of wall, and you’ll feel it weeping.”

I had to butt in. “Of course they’re weeping. I’d be weeping, too. You never stop picking at them like a scab, Dad.”

He turned from the wall and gave me a brave smile. “Thank you, honey, but I’m afraid it’s chaos.”

I felt myself glancing quickly this way and that over everything.

“It’s not, really, Dad.”

“Chaos,” he said again, not disagreeably.

It was weird, but the idea of its being chaos seemed to provide him some level of satisfaction.

Or maybe not the chaos itself, but his
war
with the chaos.

“You’re not going back to work?” I asked gently.

He smiled, like he had a great surprise for me.

“Just a little leave of absence,” he said, “until everything is in order here. I’ve earned it anyway. Not a sick day since back before you guys were in day care.”

He turned back to the wall and started making a rather weak assault on the more stubborn bits of paper with his little putty knife. He was never any kind of do-it-yourself guy. In fact, whenever the phrase even came up on TV in a commercial or in some stupid show, he would instantly reply to whoever said it, “No, buddy,
you
do it yourself.”

“Could you fix me a cup of coffee, sweetheart?” he asked as he chipped away at the wall. “Light, four sugars.”

He said it was what made him such a sweet man, the extrasweet coffees. I said it was what made him a little hyper. But at least it was helping to rid us of that horrid wallpaper that suddenly looked like it had been stitched together from rotten banana peels.

Hard on the eyes, yes. But chaos?

Hyper, though, was the way everything started to feel. We went from a nice slow summertime thing, hidden within our green garden walling, listening to the sea from a friendly distance, to a situation too fast, too uncertain, too busy.

“All right now, what do you think?” I said to Walter once we were out of the house. After breakfast Dad gave us a grocery list and sent us out while he plowed away at critical home improvements that only a few days earlier were not so critical.

“I think I hate grocery shopping. I think I wish I could have stayed back there and wrecked the house with Dad.”

“That’s not what I was asking about. I mean about the bigger things. I mean, what do you think about Dad staying home and about all that creepy gravedigger stuff last night at the beach?”

We were turning the corner at the end of our road, coming in sight of Beachcomber, the local supermarket that was no supermarket but more a cross between a Store 24, which was not open nearly that much so should have been Store 8 or Store 5, and a teeny-tiny Walgreen’s, selling beach pails and Styrofoam surfboards and cheap cassettes.

One of the keys to being Walter was his superhuman ability to not see what he did not want to see, and to see what he did see in precisely the way he chose to see it. This skill got Walter through—through all the big things that happened in life and the small. He was great at it, and I had to admit that much of the time I envied him because it seemed to work so well for him and because I could never manage it. I admired it. I loathed it. Here Walter summoned up all his powers of denial.