No Book but the World: A Novel (22 page)

“What about June?” asked Kitty.

“What about her? Neel’s God, nothing else matters.”

This was interesting, too. “But do you think she supports you?”

Ava shrugged. “Who knows? She’d never say. Neel doesn’t come right out and say, either. He’s just all ‘Oh! Oh! I’ve got to go do something in my office now.’”

It was electrifying to see Ava mock her father. She scrunched her neck, beetled her brow, and made ridiculous, jerky gestures that somehow, despite the fact that Neel never literally did any of these things, captured the essence of his disgruntlement. Kitty cracked up. Ava looked startled, but within moments hilarity swept over her, too, and both girls were howling.

A batch of crows lifted out of a nearby tree, trailing a clutter of cawed rebukes. Something about the birds—their indignant departure; their cantankerous voices—seemed a second wicked imitation of Neel, and plunged Kitty and Ava further into hysterics. “Oh! Oh!” choked Kitty, drawing enough breath between fits of laughter to repeat Neel’s line as Ava had delivered it. She tucked her chin against her throat as Ava had, and there was vanity here, cruelty as well, for both she and Ava had slender necks, too long and smooth to bunch up like Neel’s, so that the very imperfectness of their impression mocked his own imperfections more deeply.

Freddy, meanwhile, had drifted over to the stone slab and stood above them, grinning broadly and emitting the rusty hinge noises that marked his own laughter. Kitty felt the scrape of annoyance that always accompanied his intrusion on Ava’s and her space. “Huhhhnn-hhhhnn,” he gasped. His laugh alone would be enough to make life in public school disastrous for him, if ever he went back. He’d never go back, though, that was obvious. With his grating laugh and dumb smile, he’d be the one to fulfill Neel’s wishes, roaming the outdoors without any mandate for unclocked hours, unmeasured weeks and months and years. “Neel must
really
like Freddy.” Kitty made her voice go up and down, goofy, elastic. “He must love him best.”

“I kn—I know!” shrieked Ava. “F—Freddy’s their favorite!”

“Their golden child!” Kitty screamed. This, too, held cruelty. She knew it. But as she let herself be flattened by waves of laughter, falling backward on the slab, Ava joined her, the two of them laughing at the same vicious joke, side by side on their backs.

And Freddy, who would never be golden, never be favorite, never be easy to love, let alone able to understand the joke, joined in, too. His creaky
ha ha
s broke forth into full-on
Haah-Haah
s, and he sunk beside them, flapping his hands against his thighs, his jaw sprung so wide that Kitty could see all his teeth and little webs of frothy spit collecting at the corners of his mouth. Why did Freddy always seem nakeder than other people? His laughter, ignorant, innocent, unabashed, made the whole thing more mean and also more heady, and Kitty laughed and laughed until she ached so much she had to press her hands to her ribs like a bandage.

It was Ava who stopped first. Ava who righted herself, suddenly sober, rolled up onto her knees and brushed pine needles from her hair. “Stop laughing, Freddy,” she said quietly, and he did, or tried. A few rusty bleats escaped. Ava put a hand on his knee, and although he did not like to be touched, in this instance he let her. Kitty sat up, too, and leaning back on her hands she watched them, brother and sister, the one struggling to quell his braying, the other bowing her head over her own hand where it rested on his corduroy kneecap.

And there Ava sat, straight-backed and still, concentrating with such grave dignity that Kitty couldn’t stand it. Or couldn’t stand something. Some underlying unfairness about the whole thing. Hadn’t Ava also laughed? Hadn’t she just a moment ago been rolling around on her back beside Kitty? How did she manage to switch off so quickly, switch allegiances? What made her and how dare she decide to become, all on her own, serious? And however did she know when it was all right to touch Freddy? For that matter, how did he know her touch was meant to protect him—because wasn’t that it, really? She was protecting him from laughing at his own expense. Protecting him—the realization came in a noxious spurt—from Kitty herself! Kitty and all others who would hurt him: his would-be mockers and judges, the untold legions of the unkind and unknowing.

Kitty got to her feet. “You’re so self-righteous.” It was a phrase she’d heard her mother once say to Ellie, her older sister now living in Central Africa. “All of you Robbinses are.”

Ava said nothing. Her face had resolved into an expression of almost consecrated seriousness; her very posture transmitted wordless reproach.

So Kitty left them there, brother and sister, sitting on the slab as the day grew dark. She turned heel and walked away, but with the vexing feeling that they had turned from her first. She would never forgive them, she decided, threading her way through the trees and over the cold-hardened path, although she might pity them in time; yes, she might eventually grant them that, crippled as they both were by their family’s proud eccentricity, its strange pieties. She stalked out of Midgetropolis and out of the woods and straight back to Batter Hollow, where the chimney smoke turned out to be coming from the Art Barn and her mother turned out to be making kale pie, and she threw herself into the rocking chair by the stove—“I hate the Robbinses,” she muttered—and rocked in it violently until Meg said in her mild way, “Don’t take your anger out on that chair,” upon which she sprung from it and tore up the stairs to her room and threw herself furiously down on the bed, with a great groaning of springs that reminded her despicably of Freddy’s laughter.

Too often it was like that: Ava being her friend and then pivoting to become Freddy’s sister instead, as if these were two different people, and always,
always
it contained a kind of censure. For why should being Kitty’s friend prevent her from being Freddy’s sister? What about the one could not accommodate the other? Yet Ava’s actions suggested their incompatibility. Worse, they suggested that Freddy, drooly, tantrumy, stick-beating Freddy, was better, truer and somehow more worthy, than Kitty. Which was crap.

•   •   •

T
HEY FOUND IN
M
IDGETROPOLIS,
in addition to the kettle and the
SAFE SPIRITS
bottle, other objects strewn about or half buried in leaves and dirt, and sometimes these discoveries had an enchanted feel, and sometimes they felt sinister. No matter how often they’d hunted out there, exploring and excavating the same patch of woods until it seemed nothing could have escaped their notice, still new objects managed to turn up from month to month and year to year, as if the earth itself was relinquishing them gradually, hesitantly.

Ava said the items they found must be relics of old Batter Hollow students. She liked to speak as if their ghosts still lingered in the woods, keeping watch from behind the trees. But Kitty scoffed. “How can they be ghosts? They’re not dead, just grown. Think of my dad.” For her, the various objects were clues about something larger and older than Batter Hollow, linked to the fantasy they’d indulged in on the day they founded, or found, Midgetropolis: that of the slab being a giant’s grave marker, evidence of a whole hidden network of behemothic tombs, a vast underground mausoleum, branching beneath the forest floor. In any case, they took pleasure in being a little scared by the items that turned up.

Once they found something rigid and black and full of holes. “Burnt metal,” said Kitty. “Or plastic,” guessed Ava. “Pick it up, Freddy,” she ordered in that mild, offhanded tone he almost always obeyed, and sure enough he lofted it, dangling the thing by what seemed a tail, so that Kitty screamed, “Rat carcass!” and Freddy, screaming, too, flung it away. On further investigation, digging it up with sticks from the damp leaves among which it had fallen, they decided it was only an old rag petrified by some tarry substance, but even then it made them shudder; there was something in the splayed, stiffened, ruined look of it that seemed not simply grotesque but malevolent. Freddy in particular remained really terrified of the rag, which they left lying where it landed, hidden behind a bush.

Other artifacts were less patently spooky. Once they found a couple of cans with their labels still mostly legible.
SWEETHEART BEANS
, one read, and
WEARWELL MOTOR OIL
. Another time they found the plastic yoke of a six-pack and an empty whiskey bottle small enough for a doll. Another time it was a pair of cat-eye glasses with one earpiece missing. The girls took turns sashaying around Midgetropolis, holding it like a lorgnette and saying, “Jolly good,” and “Where did I put my wellies?”

One afternoon when Kitty and Ava were finishing up sixth grade, thinking with excitement about the new school they would attend in the fall and getting used to that exotic term, “junior high,” Kitty spied the tip of something pink poking out of the wet earth by the swale. It turned out to be a plastic barrette, the sort a little girl might wear. (Kitty and Ava were by then styling their hair with blow dryers and mousse.) It had two rows of tiny teeth and was shaped like a bow. “Yours?” she joked.

Ava swiped the object from Kitty’s hand, spit on it, rubbed it on her jeans to remove the more tractable bits of black soil, then leaned over and fastened it roughly to a piece of Kitty’s yellowy-white hair.

“Hey!” Kitty yanked it out, then called over to Fred—they were just beginning to call him Fred instead of Freddy—“C’mere. Come over here a sec. I want to make you pretty.”

He did not glance up from where he was sitting, arranging baby pinecones on the slab. At ten he was supposedly showing signs of being gifted at math. This was according to Ava. Kitty remained skeptical. But Ava said no, Neel had noticed something in him, a kind of attentiveness to patterning, and had helped him make certain connections, with the result that Fred was now obsessed with Fibonacci sets, pointing them out wherever he spotted them, in the petals of lilies and asters, the spiraling seed heads of coneflowers, the complex architectures of cauliflower and pineapples and artichokes.

Now Kitty went over and stood behind him, inspecting the design he’d made for evidence of brilliance. He’d arranged the baby pinecones from small to large. “Wow,” said Kitty, “that’s really good.”

“Leave him alone,” said Ava.

“Now don’t freak.” Kitty addressed Fred, ignoring Ava’s admonition. Leaning over, she extended the barrette on the flat of her hand. Fred looked, then reached. Swiftly, Kitty closed her fingers. “It goes in your hair,” she explained. And cajolingly, “Want to look pretty?”

“Just let him be,” repeated Ava, but she sounded bored and did not stir from where she sat.

Kitty knelt and gingerly picked up a lock of Fred’s hair. He did not protest. It was thick like June’s and curly like Neel’s and far softer than she had imagined. Fred quivered slightly and lengthened his neck toward her as she combed her fingers through it. “What nice hair you have.” He sat immobile, his very stillness a kind of permission. She began to work out the many tangles, trying not to pull. “When’s the last time anybody combed this?” she murmured. “Or washed it?” The only sound he made was that of his stuffy, clotted breathing. Never before had he submitted to her like this, as he occasionally would with Ava, and Kitty was intoxicated by the novelty of his trust. Once she’d worked through all the snarls, she fastened the barrette on this tuft of hair, and it poked straight up from his crown, a little topknot. “Voilà,” she said. “Now you’re Fredericka.”

With a loose, spreading grin, he reached up to feel what she had done, but, “No!” she reproached, “you’ll mess it up!” and seized his hand midair. This, she knew, was risky; he was liable to yank free and strike out at her, but he remained wondrously docile and let her pull him to standing.

“What are you doing now?” asked Ava apprehensively, but she still lolled on her Throne by the swale.

“Come,” Kitty coaxed, and as he reached up again with his free hand, she was quick to grasp that one, too. “You’ll ruin it,” she clucked. “Come, we’ll take you to a mirror. Now don’t touch. Isn’t he pretty?” she demanded, leading him toward Ava and then past her, to the edge of the swale. She pushed the back of Fred’s neck and made him bend down toward it. “Look,” she urged, “you can see your reflection in the water.” The swale that day was no more than a muddy trickle; she was play-acting. “Isn’t Fredericka pretty?” she insisted, bending over and pointing at the glistening rocks and leaves as if his image were available there.

“Ah-yeah!” he agreed, nodding so that the topknot flopped. “Pretty Fred-ah!”

“Fred
erick
a.”

And he married his own laugh to hers, his with its wheezy, broken sound, hers glossy and hard, and then he began to dance, comically, maniacally: kicking up his boot-clad feet and pirouetting with an invisible skirt held in his fingertips.

“Fred.” Ava sighed. “Don’t be a dope.”

But, “S’ah’m Fred
erick
a,” he corrected her, and laughed with great gusto, a spit-flecked, braying sound, embarrassing yet unembarrassed. So Ava, rolling her eyes, smiled in spite of her disapproval, and when Fred began to urge them, “Come-ah on! Ah-dance-ah!” both girls obeyed, joining Fred in his spastic movements. Distinctions between whose laughter and dancing were forced, falsified, and whose helpless and ingenuous became blurred, even for Kitty, so that by the time they all collapsed, panting, on their Thrones, she was legitimately confused about her own intentions. Had all her participation been in mockery of Fred, and in some way, more to the point, of Ava? Or had it at some moment morphed into them all three just having fun? And how bedeviling not to know her own mind.

In any case, the “Midgetropowaltz,” as Kitty christened it, established a beginning. The barrette, the dance, the persona of Fredericka—together these formed a blueprint they were bound to follow. The next time they came into the woods, Kitty brought a composition book. “We have to write things down,” she said. “The life and lore of Midgetropolis.” They all signed their names inside the front cover, and she began to keep a record of what they did. “You do the illustrations,” she told Ava, who was good at drawing and who, with finely lettered captions, made a visual inventory of all their most important artifacts and landmarks: the kettle and the
SAFE SPIRITS
bottle and the scary tarry rag; the Thrones and the Arch and the house itself, drawn with a real fire blazing in the hearth and the pilfered magnifying glass nearby. And she began to do illustrations of the character of Fredericka, who emerged, both in Ava’s drawings and Kitty’s storylines, and also, especially, as enacted by Fred, as a kind of cheery yet hapless maiden, eternally trusting and endlessly susceptible to spine-tingling scrapes. Forever and deliciously at the mercy of evildoers, forever in peril.