Bird Lake Moon (2 page)

Mitch's throat knotted. “Sorry,” he whispered.

Silence.

Cherry bomb, thought Mitch, eyes skimming the floor for the celery piece.

Again:
chop, chop, chop
. Then: stop.

Little disturbances rippled across Cherry's face. “No,
I'm
sorry.” She sighed, and her sharp, pinched expression turned soft. “That house has been vacant ever since we retired here,” she told him. “I think the owners are from Madison. I've seen a man over there once or twice, checking on things. A yard service cuts the grass, if you want to call it that. More like dirt and weeds. That's about all I know.” She paused, then laughed wearily. “My patience is wearing thin, but I shouldn't lose my temper with you. You're only twelve. I tend to forget that.” She reached out and touched his hand, a feathery touch. If his eyes had been closed, he might not have felt it.

The sky was ice blue. The air was motionless. The sun hammered down. Mitch took a quick swim, dried off, then spent a good part of the day under the porch of the vacant house, hiding from the world. To get under the porch, he'd slide a broken, latticed panel aside just far enough, so that he could squeeze through. Then he'd pull the panel back into place, crawl over to the foundation, and sit.

His interaction with Cherry bewildered him. How come, he wondered, it's so hard to love all the people I'm supposed to love? He squinted out through the diamond-shaped pattern of the latticework. His mind turned fast, from Cherry to his father. He wondered when he'd see his father again. He wondered: Is he thinking of me right now?

Without realizing it, Mitch had brought his finger—the one with the splinter—up to his mouth and was playing it against his teeth. The finger hurt when he thought about it, and when he really concentrated on it, it hurt a lot. The tip was red. He'd decided to keep the splinter. He reasoned that the splinter was part of the house, and so, now, part of the house was embedded in him. And didn't that make it more likely that the house would eventually belong to him and his mother? The splinter would be his good-luck charm. He ran his finger under his T-shirt, lightly touched his heart, and wished.

Suddenly, a squirrel appeared at the panel. It moved its head from side to side in small, jerky increments, then darted off. “Lucky, stupid little thing,” Mitch whispered.

“Mitch!”

He heard his mother calling him. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled forward so that his face was against the latticework. He watched her.

“Mitch!” She broke through the row of lilacs that divided the two yards. She looked uncertainly up toward the house, down toward the lake. Appearing defeated, she threw out her arms, then let them drop to her sides. She stood completely still for a moment, turned, and headed back in the direction of Papa Carl and Cherry's.

He didn't want her to know where he was, so he waited until she was out of sight before he followed her, calling, “Mom! Here I am!”

After lunch, and again after dinner, he headed for his spot under the porch. Both times he brought things with him. After lunch, he brought hand clippers to trim some of the weeds at the edge of the porch, a can of root beer, and an old, stained cushion, from his grandparents' garage, on which to sit. After dinner, he brought duct tape to repair, as best he could, the broken latticework, and another can of root beer. He also brought a photograph he'd taken from one of his grandparents' albums.

In the photograph, Mitch and his parents were standing close together, arms entwined, with Bird Lake in the background. Everyone was smiling. Mitch remembered the day from the previous summer as a twinkling jewel of a day. They'd fished, swum, eaten outside on a blanket. Mitch and his father had played catch with a football, too, every chance they could (Mitch was trying to perfect his spiral), even after the sky had been drained of light and the ball had become ghostly, almost invisible.

Using the duct tape, Mitch fastened the photograph to one of the boards above him, the underside of the porch. He could see the photograph if he wanted to, by leaning back and looking up.

As the sun lowered, a weak puddle of light slanted closer, creeping across the dirt into his realm. Soon everything would be dim and blue and quiet, like a bigger version of the dusky place—his room—under the porch. He didn't mind being here, alone. This particular solitude was becoming familiar to him, and not unpleasant. After a while he grew oddly calm, and just as he had gotten perfectly settled, comfortable on the old cushion, something happened.

It was the slamming of the car doors that he heard first. One-two-three-four. Then a large dog tore past him, down to the lake, and ran back, responding to its name: “Jasper! Jasper, come!”

The air was electric.

“We're really here,” he heard a boy say.

“That didn't take very long,” said a girl.

“Let's unload the car before we do anything else,” said a man.

“We'll go down to the lake together,” said a woman.

“Listen to your mother.” It was the man again. “I mean it.”

Minutes later, footsteps could be heard directly above him. These people, whoever they were, were on the screened porch, separated from him by mere inches. A couple of the boards creaked and sagged with their weight. He felt a clutch of fear. His heart beat faster, faster. He sat, barely moving, pinned to the cushion by what was happening.

“Hurry, hurry,” said the boy.

“It'll be okay, Mom,” said the girl.

The dog barked and paced across the porch, his nails clicking on the floor like drumbeats.

“I'm ready,” said the boy. “Let's go to the lake.”

“Just a minute,” said the man.

“I can't believe this is ours,” said the girl.

Mitch held his breath. His skin was slick with sweat. He felt the girl's voice, her words, throughout his entire body. He had been scared, and now he was indignant, too.

I can't believe this is ours
.

No, it's not, he thought. It's mine.

Matty's death had been absorbed into the fabric of the Stone family. It was a fact, rarely mentioned, that, in combination with hundreds of other facts, made up the complete picture of who this family was. It was one stitch in a tapestry. That's the way it seemed to Spencer Stone anyway, until the summer that he was ten.

It was on a listless June night, after dinner, that Peter and Emmy, Spencer's parents, brought up the topic of Matty. Spencer's mother seemed particularly serious, guarded. Spencer, his parents, and his seven-year-old sister, Lolly, were on the back porch eating ice cream. Their dog, Jasper, lay at their feet—a lumpy, hairy heap of a rug. The weather had been hot and dry for days. The
tish, tish, tish
of a neighbor's sprinkler blended with the night noises, sounding like a swarm of insects in the near distance. Against the dark vault of the sky, the moon was so bright it seemed close enough to touch.

“How dreadfully lovely,” said Lolly in an affected British accent. She stuck out her pinkie dramatically and fluttered her eyelashes as she raised her spoon to her mouth. With a flourish, after each bite, she touched the corners of her mouth with the spoon. Left, right, left, right.

“Weird,” whispered Spencer.

“There's something we'd like to talk about,” said Spencer's mother, exchanging a meaningful glance with Spencer's father. She straightened in her chair.

Spencer shrugged and looked from one parent to the other, only half curious because the ice cream tasted so good and because his mother's tone led him to believe that she was not going to say anything interesting but rather something about responsibility. A lecture. Spencer couldn't remember if he'd made his bed that morning. He guessed that there were dirty clothes, books, and who-knew-what-else strewn across his bedroom floor as usual. He concentrated fiercely on the ice cream—chocolate, cold, delicious, smooth—trying to stop time, trying to keep his mother from talking.

“Are you listening?” asked his father.

“But of course,” said Lolly, still using the accent.

“Yeah,” said Spencer. So much for stopping time. He braced himself.

“We're going to be taking a little vacation,” said Spencer's mother.

“I know,” said Spencer, somewhat relieved but still wondering if the lecture was lurking just around the corner. “To Michigan to see Gran and Poppo.”

“No,” said Spencer's father. “I mean, yes. Yes, we're going to Michigan. That's in August—same as always—but this is a different trip.”

“Disney World!” said Lolly. She'd dropped the accent. She opened her mouth wide and tapped her spoon lightly against her teeth in excitement. Her teeth were tiny, but they crowded her mouth, and the bigger, serrated, permanent front ones were slightly tilted, like tombstones in an old, untended graveyard.

“Not Disney World,” said Spencer's father.

“We're going to Bird Lake,” said Spencer's mother.

“What's Bird Lake?” asked Lolly.

Spencer narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. Bird Lake. “I know about Bird Lake,” he heard himself say.

“I don't,” said Lolly. “
Do
I? What's Bird Lake?”

“It's where Matty died,” said Spencer.

“Oh, yeah,” said Lolly. “I knew I heard of it.”

“Why are we going there?” asked Spencer.

And they told them.

First, they spoke of the history of the place, reminding Spencer and Lolly that the house at Bird Lake had belonged to Emmy's mother and father. When they died, the property had become Emmy's.

Even though he knew this information, Spencer listened intently. Lolly seemed less interested. She quietly collected the empty ice-cream bowls and placed them methodically on the floor in a row by Jasper so that he could lick them clean.

Matty had drowned at Bird Lake when he was four years old. Spencer was two at the time and had no memory of it—the drowning nor Bird Lake. “And I wasn't even born yet,” said Lolly. “So, of course, I didn't cry.”

Moths, drab and lumbering, had been drawn to the overhead light as if this conversation were important, as if they were listening, too. They batted about and subsided, then batted again.

“We've had the property all these years without using it,” said Spencer's mother. “And your father and I decided that it's time either to sell it or to have it be part of our lives again.”

“So we're going next week,” said Spencer's father. “To check it out. Sort of a trial run.”

Spencer nodded. He compressed his lips until they disappeared.

“I loved it there when I was a girl,” said Spencer's mother, her voice thickening. “I think you might love it, too.”

“Yeah,” said Spencer. It was one of those rare moments in which he felt compelled to make some kind of reassuring gesture for his mother's sake: a hand on her shoulder, a tap on her arm, something. The kind of thing a parent would do for a child. He managed a timid smile.

“It's not Disney World,” said Lolly, “but I'll go anyway.”

“Thank you, Your Highness,” said Spencer's mother.

“And no one will have F.M.S. because we'll all be there together,” said Lolly. In Spencer's family, F.M.S. stood for “fear of missing something.”

“That's right,” said Spencer's father. “No F.M.S. for anyone. We'll all be there together.”

A house on a lake. Spencer's eyes brightened. He felt a sudden twitch of excitement; it spread over him like a stain.

That night in bed Spencer thought about Matty, and the next day Matty was never far from Spencer's mind. The preoccupation grew, but not in a troublesome way. Throughout the week before they left for Bird Lake, Matty was there, like a shadow, or a song you can't get out of your head.

There were three photographs of Matty in the house: one of him as a baby, one as a toddler, and one from his first day of preschool. They hung among dozens of other photographs, mostly of Spencer and Lolly, on the wall along the staircase. The preschool photograph, more than the other two, provided Spencer with the mental image of his brother: a round-cheeked, sandy-haired boy in a striped shirt with longlashed eyes, a comical grin, and potato knees. It was odd to think that Matty would be twelve years old if he were alive. No matter how hard he tried, Spencer could not conjure up a mental image of that.

For Spencer, the only other reminder of Matty in the house was a tiny ivory turtle on the mantel. The story was that when Matty was two, he had swallowed it. It sat by a pair of brass candlesticks, unobtrusive as a pebble, barely noticed.

On the morning of the day they were to depart for Bird Lake, Spencer picked up the turtle and held it for a few minutes. It felt smooth and was cool to the touch. He turned it over and over in his hand. When he replaced it, he nudged it across the mantel, through a fine layer of dust, until it was exactly halfway between the candlesticks, the little knob of a head facing straight forward.

By the time the car was packed and the house put in order, the bright sun was starting to sink. For no reason in particular, right before he ran out the front door to leave, Spencer crossed the living room to the fireplace to look at the ivory turtle one last time. The turtle was gone. Someone else was thinking of Matty.

“Will we get there before dark?” Spencer asked his father, speaking loud enough to be heard over the music on the radio.

“Yes, will we get there before dark?” Lolly echoed, but sounding like an old woman with a high, twittering voice.

“Hope so,” was the terse reply from the front seat of the car.

“I hope so, too, sonny,” Lolly said, looking at Spencer and plucking at his sleeve to get his attention.

Spencer felt heat flood his face. Lolly's voices were annoying him to the point of exasperation. He so wanted to hit his sister, but he kept his emotions in check. He didn't want to upset his parents, especially his mother, by fighting with Lolly. He shook his head in disgust, turned away in frustration, and stared out the window. The clouds were billowy. A passing airplane left a white tail behind it like a vein in the sky. His hands were restless; he drummed his fingers on his thighs.