Last Things (21 page)

The following winter, I moved with my father to Connecticut so we could be closer to the show. The house he rented was all white. Every single thing inside it was brand-new. The downstairs was so big there was one room we didn’t even go into. In this room, which my father called the parlor, there were plastic covers over all the chairs.

One night I filled in for the question girl, who was having her tonsils out. I stood in the middle of a fake blizzard and asked why the seasons changed. After the show ended, we went outside and suddenly it was night. “It’s the winter solstice,” my father said. “There is less light today than any other day.” When we got back to my father’s house, he sent me to bed early because of the dark.

Later I woke up and heard my father talking to someone in the kitchen. My mother had just been gone a little while, but already it seemed he talked only to me. When I went downstairs, there was a woman
sitting at the kitchen table, eating a cracker. She had dark red hair and a long, pinched face. I had seen her the day before, working lights for the show. Foxface, I called her secretly.

My father got up to fix her a drink. I stood back a little from the door so he wouldn’t see me. Foxface reached into her purse and took out a cigarette. “Watch this, Jonathan,” she said. She struck a match against her teeth and it caught fire. She lit a cigarette. “Amazing,” my father said. He took a step toward her, then saw me in the doorway. “Go back to bed, Grace,” he told me. I turned and looked at her. She stubbed out her cigarette and held out a hand. “Look who it is,” she said. “Ask me a question, sweetheart.”

The next morning, when I woke up, she was gone. It had snowed for the first time overnight. I drew a picture of a pine wreath and hung it on the door. The real one was back home at the house in Vermont. When my father saw the picture, he asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I said that I wanted to buy a star and name it after my mother. I had read that for fifty dollars you could do this.

My father shook his head. “That’s not what stars are for,” he told me. “I don’t think she would have wanted such a thing.” I hated the way he never said her name anymore. “Your mother,” he said sometimes, but that was all.

I went to my room and got the ad out. It showed a boy standing at a window, holding a small star to his chest. “We don’t have time for this now, Grace,” my
father said. “We’re already late.” He took the ad away from me and put it in a drawer.

I put on my shoes very slowly and followed him to the car. There was nothing on the radio but Christmas music. The car skidded a little on the icy street. My father turned the radio off. We drove over a bridge and past a church where a man was herding sheep onto a stage. A kid wearing silver wings ran across the snow. “Look,” my father said. He slowed down and the boy darted past.

We drove by the frozen river and the houses decorated with white lights. No one had lawn ornaments here. I thought of my mother and her garden gnomes. My father hummed a little under his breath and tried to catch my eye.

“Why don’t we get a dog, Grace?” he said. “You could name it anything you wanted. You could name it Laika like the first dog in space.”

“That dog died,” I said.

“Anything,” my father said. “You could name it anything.”

I looked out the window. Already it was getting dark. Once my mother had told me that she had been named Anna because it sounds the same backwards and forwards. My grandfather liked words like that and had wanted me to be named Eve or at least Lily so I could be called Lil. He died just before I was born and my mother said that this was one of the last things he asked her.

The last thing my mother asked me was this: “Do you know how to run the dishwasher, Grace?” I didn’t
and she showed me how. That night, my mother went to bed very early. The next morning, I heard my father outside calling for her. I went to the window. My father stood on the grass in his pajamas. “Anna,” he yelled. “Anna.” A car glided through the light, silver like a fish. When my father saw me at the window, he picked up the paper and came inside. It was just getting light out. “Your mother’s disappeared,” he said. He looked bewildered, as if she had vanished in a puff of smoke instead of in his green car. There was no note, but there was a shell on the kitchen table that hadn’t been there before. It was white with a thin crack down the middle that forked like a lizard’s tongue. My father touched it lightly. “Don’t worry. She’ll be back soon,” he said.

When she wasn’t, I took the shell upstairs and hid it in the pocket of my old coat, so I could find it later and be surprised.

Two days passed and still there was no sign of her. My father went to the police and filed a missing-persons report. He slept in the living room, next to the phone, but it never rang. Sometimes he would pick it up and listen just in case.

Later they found my father’s green car in the lake by the fire station. They pulled it from the water with a crane, but my mother wasn’t in it. Men in small boats dragged the water with nets all through the night. For weeks, they looked for her, shining lights across the lake. Finally, they gave up and called off the search. I
wasn’t surprised that they hadn’t found my mother in the lake. They couldn’t find a forty-foot monster either, I knew.

Soon after that, a policeman came to the door. He had an old brown coat in his hands. This was the coat my mother wore when she worked in the garden. The policeman told my father that when they found the coat its pockets had been filled with stones. He laid the coat gingerly on the table. It smelled like a wet dog. I reached my hand into the pockets but the stones were gone. My father took the coat and put it away. He said that my mother got the idea for the stones from a woman who wrote a book. Then he locked himself in the bathroom and turned all the water on. I put my ear to the door. “Anna,” I heard him cry, backwards then forwards, “annA.”

I went to my room and took the shell out of its hiding place. One end was sharp like an arrowhead. I pricked my finger on it again and again, trying to see blue, but it was like trying to catch the refrigerator light off.

W
HY CAN YOU HEAR THE OCEAN INSIDE A SEASHELL
?

This is just a trick your ears play on you. What you hear is not the sound of the ocean, but rather the sound of your own blood rushing through your ears. All the shell does is amplify the sound so that you can hear it, the way a stethoscope lets you hear the beating of your heart. Some people say you hear the sea inside a shell because the shell remembers its home
even when it has been taken away
,
but this is just a story
.

It was almost dark. My father drove carefully through the icy streets. There were lighted trees in all the windows of all the houses we passed. “What if I buy you some glow-in-the-dark stars?” he said. “How would that be? Would you like a telescope so you can see the planets at night?”

“No,” I said.

He put his hand on mine. “I didn’t mean to be short with you before,” he said. He leaned close to me. The car smelled like birds. There was one in the back he was going to use for the show. Every time the car slowed down, it let out a squawk. I climbed over the seat and put a black cloth over its cage. “When someone dies, their soul flies up to heaven and becomes a star,” I told the bird.

My father swung around to look at me. The bird cooed quietly in the dark. “Did your mother tell you that?” he asked.

“Everybody knows that,” I said. “You’re the only one that doesn’t.”

“Come up front again, Grace. Sit by me.”

“No,” I said.

We came to the road that led to the studio. My father turned onto it without a word. The bird grew quiet too. We pulled into the parking lot. I jumped out of the car and slammed the door. My father took the bird cage out of the back seat. “We’ll do the bird
last,” he said. He tried to catch up with me, but the bird cage made him slow.

The summer I was four, my parents rented an old house on Cape Cod. Our cove was filled with jagged rocks and no one liked to go there but us. “Who’s been walking here?” my father would say when the three of us went out after dinner. Then he’d pick me up and fit my feet to the prints in the sand.

One day my father came home early from visiting friends. My mother was in the back, washing the sand from her hair. He kissed her hello, then went inside. She came and found me on the beach. “Let’s hide from your father,” she said. “Doesn’t that sound fun?” She began to walk crookedly along the sand, dragging her foot behind her. “See, we’ll leave clues,” she said. She walked backwards in her tracks toward me. “Like this,” she said, zigzagging back toward the water. I followed her, copying her limp and adding a little hop. We lurched and peglegged down the beach, laughing to think of my father tracking such strange animals. At the end of the cove, we hid behind a rock and waited for him to find us. We waited for a long time, but he didn’t come. The sun began to sink into the water. My mother held my hand so tightly it hurt. I shivered in my thin bathing suit. “I want to go home,” I said. My mother dropped my hand. We walked back without talking. It was low tide and the gulls were flying in. There was seaweed everywhere,
twisted in great clumps on the beach. I closed my eyes and walked carefully around it. “Are you unhappy, sweetheart?” my mother said. “What are you thinking about when you close your eyes like that?” Her voice sounded funny. Above us, a plane wrote something in the sky. I dragged my bad leg through the sand. “I’m happy,” I said.

When my father finished with the bird, a man came and took it away. It flew out of his hands and fluttered into the rafters. Before he could catch it, the lights began to dim. My father stepped behind a curtain and the spotlight came on.

W
HAT DID THE FIRST BIRD LOOK LIKE
?

The entire kingdom of birds is descended from dinosaurs, feathers from their scales and wings from the second finger of their claws. The first bird, called Archaeopteryx, may have taken flight more than one hundred fifty million years ago. It was a small crow-sized animal that wobbled over bushes and barely maneuvered among trees. But in the days when nothing else could catch flying insects, its awkward flight was good enough. It did not sing, but it may have croaked or hissed
.

H
OW SMALL IS THE SMALLEST BIRD IN THE WORLD
?

The smallest bird in the world weighs no more than a sugar cube. It is called a bee hummingbird because its
body is about the same size as a bee. Even though it is named after a bee, it would never sting you. If you tried to catch it in a jar, it would fly away. You will probably never see one, because they live only in Cuba
.

I stepped out of the light. The music came up, then the applause. My father picked me up and swung me through the air. The bird flew out of the curtains and was captured in a silver net.

In June, we drove back to our old house in Vermont. In the back seat of the car were the books my father had brought to while away the time. How to, How to, How to, they said. We passed the lake, which was filled with picnickers. Foxface had made us bag lunches to eat on the way, but I hadn’t eaten mine.

I had an idea that when we got home my mother might be waiting for us on the front porch, but when we pulled in the driveway, no one was there. The house looked smaller than I remembered. The Purple Pig was still parked on the street, covered with a tarp. My father had a new car now with a convertible top. When we rode in it, we wore sunglasses and waved to everyone like movie stars.

Inside, the house smelled musty and old. I wandered through the rooms, touching tables and chairs. I was surprised that everything was still there.

My father went out on the back steps and looked at the yard. The grass was green and the sprinklers were
on. Tomato plants grew in my mother’s garden. Someone had weeded the plot and made a small pile of dirt and roots beside the shed.

I walked around the edge of the garden to the old doghouse. There was a piece of wood next to it that I hadn’t seen before. I knelt down and looked inside the house, but it was empty.

My father came over and picked up the piece of wood. He examined it for a moment, then threw it on the weed pile. “Edgar’s certainly done a fine job of looking after things,” he said.

We went inside and made lemonade. My father wandered around the kitchen, opening and closing drawers. “Now, where do you suppose he’s put the mail?” he asked.

We looked in all the usual places, the basket in the kitchen, the hallway table, the foot of the stairs, but there was no sign of it. Finally, I found a stack of letters on the floor beside the coatrack. Some of them had spilled over and were half hidden by scarves and boots. I gathered up the mail and brought it to my father.

He went through the pile carefully, but when he got to the end, it turned out every letter was for him. My father frowned. He looked through the mail again. “That’s odd,” he said. Usually my mother was the one who got the most mail. She liked to enter contests and was always sending away for things.
You may have already won!
was the way letters to her often began.