Behind the sofa was a chest of toys, but it contained nothing of interest. Old wooden trucks with strings attached, a few cloth dolls with yellow yarn hair, a set of jacks with a rubber ball that had turned to stone. I’d already been through the desk drawers and the cabinets beneath the bookshelves. The house was like the gymnasium at school, large and empty, concealing nothing. The drawers had nothing in them except pads of paper and pens. It was like a dollhouse, too, in that way, lacking the proper distribution of the detritus that accumulates in places where real people live, and I had rightly deduced that I was to proceed with care. This was not a place for children. My own suitcase of toys was upstairs but didn’t interest me, either.
There was one thing in the living room, a Nutcracker soldier with red gums and white teeth whose head popped off to reveal a hollow interior that emanated a thick purple scent, the dregs of candy, perhaps, though I did not connect the pleasure I took in inhaling the soldier’s empty body to what might have been but what was at that moment there to smell. I felt no need to sift through an imagined past, no need to unearth the source of my pleasure. The possibility of stealing the soldier had not yet formed in my mind but would later that day.
Through a pair of doors with large glass panes there was a sunporch, brilliant with light, and I entered and breathed on the glass and drew faces in the condensation. The world outside was white. The dream was with me still, the parts where I’d flown with Slade over forests and hills, houses with white plumes of smoke rising from their chimneys, and I exhaled again on the glass and drew curves and loops, linked proto-infinity symbols that flowered across the surface until my finger reached the edge of the condensation and, like a skater catching a blade at the edge of the pond, snagged and tripped on the dry glass. I mashed my finger against the cold surface. Parts turned yellow-white and parts turned red, and I flipped it over and looked at my fingerprint, which was flat and white, freeze-pickled. Against my philtrum the flesh was smooth, cold. I stayed at the glass for a while, pressing, touching my finger to my lips. Usually when my mother and I went away, my father stayed home and fed Slade, but because my father was with us this time, my mother said she’d left enough food in the bowl for Slade to eat until he exploded. In my mind I replayed the image of Slade bursting open. I’d been doing it all weekend. His legs would shoot out and his fur would undulate in sharp waves, as if he’d been electrocuted, and then there’d be a cracking sound like a balloon breaking and a ball of smoke and Slade would be gone. It worried me and made me giggle every time I thought about it.
The snow-crusted yard. The driveway, a gray cicatrice that disappeared into the woods. Jane there, pushing a wheelbarrow on the driveway, and when she saw me at the window she set it down on its skids and waved two work-gloved hands. I waved back. Jane mimed digging with a shovel, waved again, and lifted the wheelbarrow handles. I liked Jane.
The sun had found a gap in the trees and transformed the seamless white yard into a ragged moonscape, pockmarked and cratered, and arcing through it, evidence of Mrs. Feeney’s journey from the kitchen door to the property line the night before. I looked for a long time at the footprints, not knowing or caring, of course, whose they were, and I watched the trees swaying in the wind. The chuffing scrape of Jane’s shovel was far off, a rhythm, and I observed with a clarity of vision sought by poets, discovered by those few for whom the physical world can become, with great concentration, nothing but itself, free of the influence of art and metaphor, those palimpsests we lay atop the chaos of existence in the name of order and explanation. The trees were trees and the snow snow, and the footprints footprints, and I did not question the meaning of these things.
10.
The lone adult in the house was upstairs, still asleep, dreaming of a marathon. My mother had reached the final leg and the course had led the runners into an office building. She was out ahead, alone, her shoes thumping down the carpeted hall. She made the right-hand turn onto the straightaway, saw the banner draped from the acoustical tiles, cheering fans lining the walls, and then another runner blew past her, blond hair streaming, tan legs striding with equine grace, that familiar narrow ass flexing in her blue nylon shorts. It was Jane, and she crossed the line first, arms aloft.
My mother woke up and thought, Well, that’s a little on the nose.
She extended a foot from under the blankets to test the air before stretching out one arm to retrieve her nightclothes, a pair of long johns and an old blue T-shirt and a pair of wool socks, which were draped variously over the bedside table and a wicker-seat chair that she now looked at with some suspicion, after my father’s fireside assessment of the house.
Had he jumped on her in the night? She didn’t remember getting in bed naked, but she’d been bombed. No, they hadn’t. You don’t sleep through that, but she checked for crust between her legs, just to be sure. The air in the room was frigid,
