The Jennifer McMahon E-Book Bundle (43 page)

T
ESS STOOD OVER THE
cats, watching them choke the food down, listening to the low drone of their purring. She contemplated ways to convince Henry to take the cats home with them. Maybe not all of them. She’d just start with a couple. Surely Henry’s father wouldn’t object. And though Henry was allergic, there were medications available, right? It wasn’t too much to ask—just one or two of the cats. Carrot definitely, because he had been the first. And maybe little Tasha with no tail. The rest they could at least take back to town. But how would they get the cats down the hill? She didn’t believe the animals would follow them, even if they led with open cans of tuna, fishy Pied Pipers. She began searching around for something to put them in—a large box or crate. That’s when she noticed the aquarium, set up just where they’d left it, on the counter to the left of the sink. She immediately understood that was where the dead animal smell was coming from.

She remembered the day she and Winnie brought home from the lake an old peanut butter jar full of dark eggs in a gelatinous mass. It was the beginning of summer. Anything seemed possible.

“Oh,” was all she could say as she stood before the glass tank now, the stench overtaking her.

How many were there? Fifteen? Twenty? It was hard to make a guess. The aquarium was thick with partially decayed frogs, trapped in the sickening green gel that had once been water and now more closely resembled primordial ooze.

It was there, standing before the tank, that Tess remembered the way Suz had said the word
met-a-morph-o-sis,
emphasizing
each syllable, promising the same fate lay in store for the four of them, the Compassionate Dismantlers, that they too would each be irrevocably changed and there would be no going back.

It was at that moment that Tess’s water broke, the stink of the frogs filling her nostrils, Suz’s voice filling her head.
Met-a-morph-o-sis
.

“Oh!” Tess cried again, louder this time, more of a moan really. Like a heartsick child crying for home.

A
S HIS WIFE’S WATER
broke, the liquid pouring down through her cotton panties, down through the tented opening of her skirt and onto the worn kitchen floorboards, Henry regarded the moose.

He had locked eyes with the animal in the painting and believed the moose pinned him there. He dared not move for fear of startling the creature to life. He noticed for the first time how the shape and color of its iris was not unlike Suz’s own eyes—light amber flecked with gold—and only then did he imagine that it was Suz looking down, judging him, asking why he had come back, what it was that he had hoped to find.

“You,” he told her in a whisper, speaking to the moose directly, saying the word at the same moment his wife began to moan.

Henry stepped forward and removed the upper-left-most painting—the close-up of the moose’s left eye and raggedy brown ear. Then he pushed through the curtain and went to find Tess, clutching the painting under his arm. He moved through the sea of cats in the kitchen and found his wife standing in a puddle before the aquarium. At first, he thought that she’d been trying to rescue the frogs (though it was clear to him at once they were long past the point of rescuing). He imagined that she’d been bailing out the green stinking water with her hands and the very idea terrified him to the point of paralysis.

“I think the baby’s coming,” Tess said, hands over her belly.

It took long moments, even after Tess’s explanation, for him to understand what had happened, and plan his next move. He carefully orchestrated their escape from the cabin, the slow walk down the hill to the car, painting jammed under his arm at an awkward angle, that big brown eye glancing up in his direction, seeming to ask,
What were you hoping to find?

T
HE MOOSE, OR RATHER
, the left eye, ear, antlers, and snout of the moose, hangs from a nail gone rusty in the front hall of their home—the brick farmhouse Henry himself grew up in—watching their comings and goings, greeting each visitor over the years, sizing them up. Sentry moose. Give him the password and enter. But who knows the password? Not Tess. Not Henry, who moved out of the house and into the barn nearly a year ago. Not Franklin DeForge, Henry’s old father who has been dead now four years—brain aneurysm. The moose takes pity on all of them and lets them pass, day in and day out. Watches with curiosity as uncountable bags of groceries, boxes of pizza, handfuls of mail, and loads of firewood come in. As snow is shaken off coats, mud scraped off boots, umbrellas left to dry.

Finally, it is their daughter, Emma, who thinks up the password. It is Emma who names the moose Francis, and knows you have to look straight into its one turbulent eye and whisper,
Nine,
just as you come in. Nine is the magic number. Francis, Emma knows from her parents, was nine paintings big. Eight are missing. Nine would make him whole.

Francis was painted
A Long Time Ago
by a friend they knew in college. Suz, her name was. Whenever Emma asks questions about Suz or the moose—like, “How long did it take Suz to make Francis?” or “What happened to the other eight paintings?”—her parents shake their heads. Their eyes go blank as dolls’ and they say only,
That was A Long Time Ago
.

A Long Time Ago
is its own country, a place Emma doesn’t have a passport for and can only imagine. It’s the time before time; the world without her in it.

Emma sometimes stands in the hall and tries to imagine the other paintings, the full effect of Francis in his entirety. He’d take over the wall, the room, be large as life, and yes, maybe if he were whole, maybe then his entire body would move—not just his eye, as Emma swears she’s seen. Maybe he’d step off the wall and onto the floor, leaving great muddy hoofprints next to their own predictable shoes.

Nine. A lucky number. And just last month, Emma herself turned nine. They had a little party, just Emma, her parents, and her best friend Mel. Her parents had been eager for her to invite more friends, but the truth of it was that Emma didn’t really have any other friends. Most of the other kids in school made fun of her, called her a mental case. And even if she’d had another friend, she probably wouldn’t invite her to her house. Especially not now that her dad was living in the barn. That was not something she wanted going around school.

Mel’s the only one she trusts. The only one who doesn’t make a big deal about her counting under her breath or having to go through the trays at lunch until she finds a blue one without scratches.

On her birthday, Emma, Mel, and her parents went candle-pin bowling, then came home and ate red velvet cake, which was Emma’s absolute favorite because it’s both chocolatey and a strange Mars red color. The other thing she loved about it was
that when her mom was growing up, this was the
exact same cake
Grandma Bev baked for her each year. Emma loved the words
Family Recipe,
and each birthday, when she took her first bite of the cake, so sweet it made her teeth ache, she’d imagine her mother at the same age—seven, eight, nine—taking her first bite, and for those few brief seconds each year, she felt linked to her mother in this fleeting, sugary way.

Emma closed her eyes as she blew out the nine candles on her cake, sure that when she opened them, something miraculous would have happened. She would discover she’d sprouted wings, or find herself living underwater with the starfish. Francis the moose would have come to life—not just a little twitch of the eye, a little wink, but a full-fledged, living, breathing, smelly moose.

But this is not what she wished for. What she wants most, what she concentrated on with all her might as she blew out the candles, was that her parents would get back together again. They would realize they love each other and her father would move out of the barn and back into the farmhouse with them.

Maybe, she decided, as she watched them grinning at her over the cake with its smoking candles, they just needed a little help. A little push in the right direction.

I
T’S
M
EL, WHO IS
ten, one whole year older, who suggests they start snooping.

“We can’t do that!” Emma complains. It’s Monday, the ninth of June, the first full day of summer vacation, and they’re bored already.

“You’re the one who wants to get them back together so bad,” Mel says, then she starts picking at her cuticles, a sure sign that she’s on the verge of losing interest in the problem altogether. Mel is smart, but she hates to be shot down and it doesn’t take much for her to get bored and move on to something else. If Emma’s
not careful, Mel might even hop on her bike and ride home, leaving Emma alone and bored, nothing to do but watch bad reruns. It’s the first day of summer vacation. The first day of freedom. This one day could set the tone for the whole summer and Emma doesn’t want to blow it.

“But how’s that going to help? What would we even be looking for?” Emma asks, hesitant, knowing that what Mel suggested is wrong, bad, it is not
RESPECTFUL,
and respecting one another is the biggest, maybe the only, rule of their house.

“Evidence,” Mel says, her face twisting into a concentrated scowl.

Mel’s father is a police officer. Her mother’s a librarian at the high school. And Mel always gets 100 percent on the weekly vocabulary tests in school, which means Mel
knows
things. Things like the definitions of abdicate and fortuitous, how to lift fingerprints off a drinking glass with Scotch tape and talcum powder, and maybe even how to get two broken people to love each other again.

“Okay,” Emma agrees. “But if we get caught, they’ll kill us.”

Mel loops her arm around Emma’s neck, pulling her tight in what could be a hug or the beginning of a headlock, and says, “You won’t regret it.” Mel’s words are hot, sour puffs against Emma’s cheek, whispered in a fiery excitement that immediately makes Emma wonder if she should have agreed to this after all.

Their search (now officially dubbed Operation Reunite—OR for short—by Mel) begins with Tess’s bedroom. Henry’s at work. Tess is in the basement working out—Emma can hear the thunk of her mother’s gloved hands on the huge black punching bag hung by chains from the floor joist.
Everlast,
the bag says. Thump. Ka-
chang
. Thump. Ka-
chang
.

Emma stands guard in the hall, shifting nervously from one foot to the other, while Mel pokes through all of her mother’s things. A closet full of clothes from Land’s End and L.L. Bean.
Practical shoes. In the drawer of the bedside table Mel finds only a flashlight and a paperback mystery with a noose on the cover.

Emma plays with the brass knob on her mother’s bedroom door, turning it to the left nine times, then nine to the right, for luck.

“Nothing here,” Mel says, dejected. “Let’s try the office.”

They tramp down the stairs, through the living room and into the tiny room that serves as the office. Mel sits in the old leather swivel chair and goes through the desk. Emma gets the file cabinet. All they come up with are monthly budgets, bills, old coupons, and dust bunnies. Emma hates dust. She read once that household dust is 80 percent flaked-off human skin. Gross. People are like snakes, they just shed differently. Emma vacuums her room every day. She ties a bandanna around her nose and mouth, bandit style, while she cleans, to keep from breathing in all those sloughed-off skin cells.

“I don’t know how you got to be so fastidious,” her mom always says.

“You’re a super freak,” Mel tells her.

“No,” Emma says. “I’m just fastidious.”

Mel laughs. “Like you even know what that means!”

But Emma does know. She looked it up. And it has nothing to do with being either fast or hideous. It just means she’s careful and particular. Nothing freakish about that. Emma believes in order. In putting things together in exactly the right way so that the universe makes sense. Which is why she wants her parents back together. If things are out of order, bad stuff can happen. Storms, car accidents, brain aneurysms. Right after Emma’s dad moved out, a huge tree fell in the yard, almost crushing the house. If that wasn’t proof, what was?

Emma closes the door to the file cabinet. Then, worried she forgot to straighten the hanging folders inside, she opens it again to check. All straight. She closes the metal drawer, resists the urge to open it and check again.

Fastidious.

Sometimes, she hates these feelings. This need to make sure things are put together just right. She can get stuck in one spot forever fixing something, then checking it again and again.

She gives in, opens the drawer, runs her fingers over the perfectly straight files, feels her body relax.

“There’s nothing here,” Mel says, scratching her head. Mel cuts her own hair, so it’s shaggy, with brown bangs at a funny angle across her forehead. She needs a shower. Sometimes Mel gets so caught up in inventing her own secret language or figuring out how to make cupcakes explode that she forgets about details like eating and taking a bath. Her dad works a lot of extra hours and her mom’s kind of a hippie, so Mel gets away with stuff most kids wouldn’t.

Thump, thump
goes Emma’s mom in the basement. Left, right. Jabs and hooks.

“Now what?” Emma asks.

Mel looks out the window, across the yard, her blue eyes glimmering. “Your dad’s barn.”

“I’m not allowed in there when he’s not home.” Emma’s voice comes out as a near whine and she’s a little embarrassed.

“Do you want your parents back together or not?” Mel asks, pushing her glasses with the heavy square plastic frames up her nose. Mel doesn’t even need glasses—these are from a costume shop. She thinks they make her look smarter. Emma thinks they make her look like Velma from Scooby-Doo—who is, she admits, the smart one.

“Yes. Of course.”
Thump, thump, thump, thump. Ka-CHANG!
Emma can feel through her feet the vibrations of her mother pounding the bag, feels the fury and is sure that one of these days, her mother’s punching is going to knock the entire house off its old granite foundation. Her mother swears the boxing isn’t about anger, it’s about exercise.

“Then quit being a dumbass,” Mel says. “Come on.”

Mel makes her way out of the house and to the barn, Emma behind her, stopping in the front hall to whisper
nine
when Mel’s out of earshot—smart as she is, there are some things Mel just doesn’t get. Like the importance of Francis. And Danner. Mel doesn’t get Danner at all. If Danner shows up when Mel is over, Emma just has to pretend Danner’s not there. Sometimes this makes Danner mad—she doesn’t like to be ignored.

It takes Emma eighty-one steps to get to her father’s barn. Very lucky. Nine goes into eighty-one nine times, which makes it the square root. Trees have roots and so do numbers.

It doesn’t get much luckier than eighty-one.

When Emma gets to the barn, she sees Mel has lit up one of her homemade cigarettes. Mel uses Wrigley chewing gum wrappers and dried herbs from her kitchen: oregano, basil, thyme.

“You can’t smoke that inside,” Emma says.

Mel rolls her eyes, licks her thumb and forefinger, and pinches the burning end of the Juicy Fruit cigarette until it’s out. Then she puts the remains into the Altoid tin she keeps her smokes and pack of matches in.

Mel and Emma start with the south side of the barn, the part converted into living quarters. It’s a studio apartment—one compact room for cooking, eating, and sleeping, and a bathroom tucked into a corner. Emma’s grandpa had it built as a little retirement cottage for himself. He didn’t want to be “in the way” in the main house and felt he didn’t need much space of his own. He was ready to downsize. To simplify.

It doesn’t take Emma and Mel long to search the small living area. Her dad doesn’t have much stuff: a daybed, a desk, some shelves, and a table with two chairs. It feels more like a motel room than a home, and this gives Emma hope. Like somehow he knows it’s only temporary, that he’ll move back into the house one day, so it’s best not to get too settled in the barn.

They move through the kitchenette and open the door to the other side, where her dad has his workshop. It’s an old horse barn, but the stalls and loft were taken out. Now it’s just one huge cavernous space, big enough for a small airplane, Emma guesses. The workshop smells like sawdust and grease. There are metal shelves, workbenches, and tools from three generations of DeForge men: a lathe, drill press, band saw, table saw, seemingly endless hand tools. Her dad also keeps some company equipment in the barn: an extra power washer, scaffolding, broken ladders.

Mel steps through. Emma’s heart is pounding. She knows she’s not allowed in there. She has this sense that if she passes through the doorway without her father’s permission, something terrible is sure to happen. She hesitates at the threshold, turns the doorknob nine times each way, but the feeling doesn’t go away.

“Sometimes my dad comes home for lunch,” she says.

Mel checks her watch. “Please! It’s ten thirty, Em.” She flips on the lights. “Now get in here and help me.”

Emma holds her breath and steps through. Nothing terrible happens. Not yet. But the truly horrible things take time.

“Global warming,” she whispers. “Cancer.” She imagines one little cell somewhere in her body going bad, dividing into another.

“What?” Mel barks.

“Nothing.”

There, in the center of the cathedral-size room, raised up on its own specially constructed frame, is the dugout canoe Emma’s dad is making. He’s installed bright track lighting above it, leaving the rest of the workshop in shadow. Large and pale, with graceful curves, the canoe reminds Emma of a long, white dolphin. It makes her nervous, seeing something so obviously meant for water stuck on land. Not just stuck, but held with wooden clamps and braces. Imprisoned.