pillow, all that seemed an eternity away. To rely on Jocho had become automatic with him, but now he was in America, where everyone was a
He woke to a parliament of birds and the trembling watery light of dawn. This time there was no confusion: the moment his eyes snapped open he knew who he was and where and why. He sat up with a long grudging adhesive groan of his Band-Aid plastic strips and examined his shorts and T-shirt and the ventilated tennis shoes that seemed to leer at him from the floor. He could see at a glance that the shoes were at least two sizes too big, designed as they were for the flapping gargantuan feet of
Already he owed her a debt—an
Hiro had been inculcated with the subtleties and minute gradations of this system all his life, his grandmother the most rigorous
Suddenly, he wanted to hide himself. She’d be coming any minute now, bobbing up the path on her long white legs. What would he say to her? And what if she wanted a cup of coffee? What then? Mortified, his ears stinging, he cleaned up the mess and left her his rags, neatly folded, in humble acknowledgment of what she’d done for him, and then he dashed out the door to hide himself in the bushes.
He was squatting over the battered sneakers in a dapple of sun, feeling every one of his hundred and seven oozing cuts, scratches and infected insect bites and thinking nothing, nothing at all—just existing—when she came up the path. Her hair was drawn back in a ponytail that bounced behind her as if it were alive, and she looked waif like in a pair of baggy white shorts and an oversized T-shirt. The T-shirt featured the silhouette of a racing scull, oars in motion, and the baffling legend CREW THANATOPSIS. Hiro held his breath, though she could have passed within a foot of him and never noticed, so thick was the vegetation along the path. As she approached the cabin, she slowed her pace, stealthy suddenly, as if she were stalking something. He watched her mount the steps on tiptoe, ease back the screen door and hold it open just a moment too long, and then glance shrewdly round the clearing before stepping inside. The door slammed behind her like a slap in the face.
All that day, Hiro crouched there in the undergrowth, drowsing, swatting mosquitoes, fighting down the importunities of his
For most of the afternoon, Hiro contemplated that lunch bucket with mixed emotions—he couldn’t take it, no, he owed her too much already; but then she’d offered it to him, hadn’t she? At least she had yesterday. But who could speak for today? Maybe she was hungry, maybe she felt she had a right to her own lunch—or a cup of decaffeinated coffee with artificial sweetener and nondairy creamer. He couldn’t take that lunch away from her, couldn’t face her: what would she think of him? As it turned out, she never went near the lunch herself, but more times than he could count she got up from her desk to cross the room and peer through the mesh of the screen to see if it was still there. He felt terrible. He felt like a baited animal, a squirrel or fox lured to the trap. But most of all, he felt hungry.
When she left for the day—when he was sure she’d gone and had forced himself to count backward from a thousand just in case—he stole out of the bushes, snatched the bucket on the run and careened back to his hiding place, the fish-paste sandwich—was that tuna?—already in his mouth. After he’d eaten it, after he’d licked clean the wrapping paper and probed the crevices of the box for the last hidden crumbs, he felt tainted and polluted, like the alcoholic who succumbs to the temptation to take that first forbidden drink. Still, he
He could not, would not demean himself before her again. What did he think he was doing? Did he intend to crouch forever in the bushes outside the fly-speckled window of the only
Behind a Wall
of Glass
“Now, saxby, I’m warnin’ you—if you get one drop of water on that furniture …”
The aquarium had been in place for less than an hour, and already Saxby was filling it from the green plastic garden hose that snaked in through the open window. The tank was too long by half a foot, and when he and Owen hadn’t been able to negotiate the tricky corner in the hallway outside his bedroom, they’d set it up on the window seat in his mother’s sitting room. He’d covered the seat itself with a double sheet of visquine, but Septima was concerned for the Hepplewhite highboy that stood to its immediate left and the three-hundred-year-old mahogany sideboard that loomed up out of the grip of the wallpaper on the right. “Hush now,” he said, reassuring her, “I wouldn’t harm one little thing in this house, you know that,” and he manipulated the hose with one hand while with