up the blanket, preparing for whatever came next in their day, that Ruth saw her – a little girl who had strayed for the bushes one day and disappeared.
She could tell by the clothes that it had happened some time ago, but that was all. There was nothing else – no nanny or mother, no idea of night or day, only a little girl gone.
I stayed with Ruth. Her journal open, she wrote it down. “Time? Little girl in C.P. strays toward bushes. White lace collar, fancy.” She closed the journal and tucked it into her bag. Close at hand was a place that soothed her. The penguin house at the zoo.
We spent the afternoon together there, Ruth sitting on the carpeted seat that ran the length of the exhibit, her black clothes making only her face and hands visible in the room. The penguins tottered and clucked and dived, slipping off the habitat rocks like amiable hams but living under water like tuxedoed muscles. Children shouted and screamed and pressed their faces against the glass. Ruth counted the living just as much as she counted the dead, and in the close confines of the penguin house the joyous screams of the children echoed off the walls with such vibrancy that, for a little while, she could drown out the other kinds of screams.
That weekend my brother woke early, as he always did. He was in the seventh grade and bought his lunch at school and was on the debate team and, like Ruth had been, was always picked either last or second to last in gym. He had not taken to athletics as Lindsey had. He practiced instead what Grandma Lynn called his “air of dignification.” His favorite teacher was not really a teacher at all but the school librarian, a tall, frail woman with wiry hair who drank tea from her thermos and talked about having lived in England when she was young. After this he had affected an English accent for a few months and shown a heightened interest when my sister watched
When he had asked my father that year if he could reclaim the garden my mother had once kept, my father had said, “Sure, Buck, go crazy.”
And he had. He had gone extraordinarily, insanely crazy, reading old Burpee catalogs at night when he was unable to sleep and scanning the few books on gardening that the school library kept. Where my grandmother had suggested respectful rows of parsley and basil and Hal had suggested “some plants that really matter” – eggplants, cantaloupes, cucumbers, carrots, and beans – my brother had thought they were both right.
He didn’t like what he read in books. He saw no reason to keep flowers separated from tomatoes and herbs segregated in a corner. He had slowly planted the whole garden with a spade, daily begging my father to bring him seeds and taking trips to the grocery with Grandma Lynn, where the price of his extreme helpfulness in fetching things would be a quick stop at the greenhouse for a small flowering plant. He was now awaiting his tomatoes, his blue daisies, his petunias, and pansies and salvias of all kinds. He had made his fort a sort of work shed for the garden, where he kept his tools and supplies.
But my grandmother was preparing for the moment when he realized that they couldn’t grow all together and that some seeds would not come up at certain times, that the fine downy tendrils of cucumber might be abruptly stopped by the thickening underground bosses of carrot and potato, that the parsley might be camouflaged by the more recalcitrant weeds, and bugs that hopped about could blight the tender flowers. But she was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. It never rescued anything. At seventy she had come to believe in time alone.
Buckley was hauling up a box of clothes from the basement and into the kitchen when my father came down for his coffee.
“What ya got there, Farmer Buck?” my father said. He had always been at his best in the morning.
“I’m making stakes for my tomato plants,” my brother said.
“Are they even above ground yet?”
My father stood in the kitchen in his blue terry-cloth robe and bare feet. He poured his coffee from the coffee maker that Grandma Lynn set up each morning, and sipped at it as he looked at his son.
“I just saw them this morning,” my brother said, beaming. “They curl up like a hand unfolding.”
It wasn’t until my father was repeating this description to Grandma Lynn as he stood at the counter that he saw, through the back window, what Buckley had taken from the box. They were my clothes. My clothes, which Lindsey had picked through for anything she might save. My clothes, which my grandmother, when she had moved into my room, had quietly boxed while my father was at work. She had put them down in the basement with a small label that said, simply, SAVE.
My father put down his coffee. He walked out through the screened-in porch and strode forward, calling Buckley’s name.
“What is it, Dad?” He was alert to my father’s tone.
“Those clothes are Susie’s,” my father said calmly when he reached him.
Buckley looked down at my blackwatch dress that he held in his hand.
My father stepped closer, took the dress from my brother, and then, without speaking, he gathered the rest of my clothes, which Buckley had piled on the lawn. As he turned in silence toward the house, hardly breathing, clutching my clothes to him, it sparked.
I was the only one to see the colors. Just near Buckley’s ears and on the tips of his cheeks and chin he was a little orange somehow, a little red.
“Why can’t I use them?” he asked.
It landed in my father’s back like a fist.
“Why can’t I use those clothes to stake my tomatoes?”
My father turned around. He saw his son standing there, behind him the perfect plot of muddy, churned-up earth spotted with tiny seedlings. “How can you ask me that question?”
“You have to choose. It’s not fair,” my brother said.
“Buck?” My father held my clothes against his chest.
I watched Buckley flare and light. Behind him was the sun of the goldenrod hedge, twice as tall as it had been at my death.
“I’m tired of it!” Buckley blared. “Keesha’s dad died and she’s okay!”
“Is Keesha a girl at school?”
“Yes!”
My father was frozen. He could feel the dew that had gathered on his bare ankles and feet, could feel the ground underneath him, cold and moist and stirring with possibility.
“I’m sorry. When did this happen?”
“That’s not the point, Dad! You don’t get it.” Buckley turned around on his heel and started stomping the tender tomato shoots with his foot.
“Buck, stop!” my father cried.
My brother turned.
“You don’t get it, Dad,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” my father said. “These are Susie’s clothes and I just… It may not make sense, but they’re hers – something she wore.”
“You took the shoe, didn’t you?” my brother said. He had stopped crying now.
“What?”
“You took the shoe. You took it from my room.”
“Buckley, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I saved the Monopoly shoe and then it was gone. You took it! You act like she was yours only!”
“Tell me what you want to say. What’s this about your friend Keesha’s dad?”
“Put the clothes down.”
My father laid them gently on the ground.
“It isn’t about Keesha’s dad.”
“Tell me what it is about.” My father was now all immediacy. He went back to the place he had been after his knee surgery, coming up out of the druggie sleep of painkillers to see his then-five-year-old son sitting near him, waiting for his eyes to flicker open so he could say, “Peek-a-boo, Daddy.”
“She’s dead.”
It never ceased to hurt. “I know that.”
“But you don’t act that way. Keesha’s dad died when she was six. Keesha said she barely even thinks of him.”
“She will,” my father said.
“But what about us?”
“Who?”
“Us, Dad. Me and Lindsey. Mom left because she couldn’t take it.”
“Calm down, Buck,” my father said. He was being as generous as he could as the air from his lungs evaporated out into his chest. Then a little voice in him said,
“I didn’t say anything.”
“I’m sorry,” my father said. “I’m not feeling very well.” His feet had grown unbelievably cold in the damp grass. His chest felt hollow, bugs flying around an excavated cavity. There was an echo in there, and it drummed up into his ears.
My father dropped down to his knees. His arm began to tingle on and off as if it had fallen asleep. Pins and needles up and down. My brother rushed to him.
“Dad?”
“Son.” There was a quaver in his voice and a grasping outward toward my brother.
“I’ll get Grandma.” And Buckley ran.
My father whispered faintly as he lay on his side with his face twisted in the direction of my old clothes: “You can never choose. I’ve loved all three of you.”
That night my father lay in a hospital bed, attached to monitors that beeped and hummed. Time to circle around my father’s feet and along his spine. Time to hush and usher him. But where?
Above his bed the clock ticked off the minutes and I thought of the game Lindsey and I had played in the yard together: “he loves me/he loves me not” picked out on a daisy’s petals. I could hear the clock casting my own two greatest wishes back to me in this same rhythm: “Die for me/don’t die for me, die for me/don’t die for me.” I could not help myself, it seemed, as I tore at his weakening heart. If he died, I would have him forever. Was this so wrong to want?
At home, Buckley lay in bed in the dark and pulled the sheet up to his chin. He had not been allowed past the emergency room where Lindsey had driven them, following the shrieking ambulance inside which lay our father. My brother had felt a huge burden of guilt descend in the silences from Lindsey. In her two repeated questions: “What were you talking about? Why was he so upset?”
My little brother’s greatest fear was that the one person who meant so much to him would go away. He loved Lindsey and Grandma Lynn and Samuel and Hal, but my father kept him stepping lightly, son gingerly monitoring father every morning and every evening as if, without such vigilance, he would lose him.
We stood – the dead child and the living – on either side of my father, both wanting the same thing. To have him to ourselves forever. To please us both was an impossibility.
My father had only missed nighttimes twice in Buckley’s life. Once after he had gone into the cornfield at night looking for Mr. Harvey and now as he lay in the hospital and they monitored him in case of a
