Dark Water (16 page)

I found Amiel where tall, skinny oaks and sycamores bend toward each other like a cathedral over Agua Prieta Creek. The path curved sharply to the north ahead of me, deep inside the arched bower of trees, and I saw him when he was just fifty yards away, a dark-haired boy wearing a red plaid shirt, his head down as he scanned the ground for something.

Because he was so busy looking down, I had three or four seconds to think of what to do, and sometimes when you have time to think of what to do, you see what a ninny you are. I stopped walking. I sat down on a fallen log. I faced away from the trail and pretended, like a ninny, that I was completely unaware of him. I thought my act of obliviousness would be more realistic if I had some reason to be sitting down, so I opened my backpack and brought out—presto, chango—the branch of loquats. I snapped off one, peeled it, bit it in half, and pretended to examine the glossy brown seeds. I could hear footsteps, so I knew Amiel saw me, but I didn’t turn my head. I ate the other half of the loquat, and then I dropped the interlocking seeds.

The footsteps stopped. I could feel that he was near me, and I still couldn’t speak. I reached into my backpack, felt for the envelope all thick with money, and pulled it out. I held it out to him and then, only then, did I have the courage to look at his face.

There are emotions your face can’t hide, and he was intensely relieved. His bandaged hand, worn leather work boots, and black eyebrows—all the heavy parts of him—appeared to become weightless, the way your arms do when you’ve pressed
them hard against a doorway and then stepped away to let them float all by themselves. Greenie and I used to make our arms float all the time, going from doorway to doorway in her house.

Amiel looked at the envelope for a few seconds, and I waited for him to speak. He smiled instead, showing the white tiles of his teeth.

“A friend of mine found it,” I said. “Isn’t that weird?”

All around us the just-born leaves of the sycamores brushed against each other in a wind that was blowing from the north. It was hot like the Santa Anas, and it would burn clouds away like a welder’s torch and bake the new leaves into card stock.

Amiel looked up at the sycamores, where the limbs were mottled white and gray and the huge green leaves, nine inches across, touched gently together. I looked at his hands, one swollen and wrapped, one narrow and finely made, and I held out a loquat. He took one and bit into it, and I took another one, and we ate them without a word in the shadows.

This is the most beautiful place
, I thought but didn’t say.
I feel the strangest happiness
. The words weren’t specific enough somehow. I didn’t have words for what I felt.

Maybe that’s why, now that Amiel’s gone, I trace and label the parts of the sycamore in my college botany classes:
pistillate flowers, rounded sepals, acute petals
.

“You dropped the envelope, I guess,” I said.

Amiel nodded.

“What do you call it again—
hacer mal
 …” I couldn’t
remember how to say “juggle.” I tossed one loquat to the other hand.

“
Hacer malabares,
” he whispered. He couldn’t juggle with his hand in a bandage, and we couldn’t talk, so what I felt—the strange happiness, the nearness of him—just got larger and had nowhere to go, as when the sycamore tree swells and strains against heavy bark.

The rigid texture of sycamore bark entirely lacks the expansive power common to the bark of other trees, so it is incapable of stretching to accommodate the growth of the wood underneath, and the tree sloughs it off in great irregular masses, leaving the surface mottled, greenish white and gray
.

Amiel handed the envelope back to me. “
Sí,
” he said, lifting his hurt hand slightly. He tried to curve it into the letter
C
.

“She won’t take it, you know,” I said. “My aunt.”

He nodded very slowly and intensely at me. “
Sí,
” he said again.

I’m not good at arguing with people. I took the envelope and put it in my backpack. All the greenness around us fluttered in the wind, and I was afraid he would go away, but he didn’t leave me, and he didn’t speak. I suppose I couldn’t stand it any longer, the silence and the nearness of his hand to my own skin, which like sycamore bark entirely lacked expansive power. I turned my face with the intention of speaking, and he turned his face to mine with the intention of hearing. I had nothing adequate to say, he had nothing to hear, and so we left
our faces in that position of mute expectation. His cheeks were flat and long and smooth, hollowed by something that was now gone, like the interlocking loquat seeds. On one cheek, he had a little scar like those craters on photos of the moon. His eyes were both still and not still. His lips were dry, and I felt them near to mine the way you can feel a fever before you touch a sick person’s skin. I couldn’t say if he moved forward slightly or if I moved my face, but we did move, and our lips touched. He smelled like dust and loquats. I would have stayed forever in that moment, but he broke away. His face was darker and more melancholy than before—angry, even.

“Sorry,” I said, my first impulse being to apologize.

He looked around us. I knew what he was looking for: witnesses to our kiss. The chest-cracking swells went on inside me. The trees were just the same in their posture, blind to us, invisibly growing inside that stiff bark. The brown seeds we’d spit out lay all around us, dirty now. I thought of saying,
It isn’t wrong. Why is it wrong?

It wasn’t wrong in theory. It wasn’t forbidden. But I understood that it was very strange and different, someone like him and someone like me. The people who have nothing aren’t allowed to touch the people with cars and houses. They can work here. That’s all.

I could hear the leaves patting each other in the wind, and I tried to hear the water in the creek, but it made no sound as it drained and pooled and crept and slid. Amiel didn’t run away from me, but he stood forbiddingly still. I looked at his
furious eyebrows and his mouth and the shoulders that inside the red plaid shirt were strong from picking and climbing and digging and hauling.

“This is America,” I said. “Right? In America, we’re the same. Equal.”

He didn’t answer me.

I considered the other reasons a boy might break away from kissing me, such as my weird eyeballs and lack of Greenie-size boobs. “What is it?” I asked him in a miserable voice, one that made me feel and sound like a kid who’s about to cry.

He stood like one of those Olympic gymnasts before a vault. He shook his head without letting me see his eyes.

I waited. I didn’t say, “Why not?” because I didn’t want to hear that the reason was not being attracted to me.

He turned then and walked back along the path the way he had come, and I had no choice but to go my own way home.

T
his is what happened when I took the money to my aunt Agnès. I waited until Robby wasn’t home, of course. I found her standing at the kitchen island opening the mail while Robby’s dog, Snowy, nibbled dry food out of his red dish. Snowy sniffed at my shoes, then went back to nibbling.

“Amiel wanted me to give you this,” I said, and I set the stack of bills on the granite beside a glossy French magazine. The money looked frazzled and worn, as if it was too shabby to belong to her.

“What?” she asked. She wore a white ribbed sweater with short sleeves and a long necklace of pink stones that clicked when she moved. She was still studying a bill that she’d sliced open with a dashing silver letter opener. Every surface in the
room—the granite, her oval fingernails, her short dark hair, the glasses in the cupboard—gleamed.

“Amiel wants to pay you back,” I said. “For the doctor.”

She wrinkled her perfect forehead and her sculpted mouth. “
Pourquoi?
” she asked. “He is our responsibility.”

“I guess he didn’t like being dependent,” I said, knowing also that he’d hurt himself juggling, which wasn’t her responsibility at all.

She adjusted the handle of her porcelain teacup, out of which steam curled gracefully. My aunt was a fan of fruit teas without sugar, and I thought I could smell sour pomegranate peel.

“Why did he give it to you?” she asked, her focus now changing in the way I’d feared it would.

I blushed, and she took a sip of her sour tea. “Do you want?” she asked, indicating the tea. I shook my head, and her look changed to sober consideration of me. “Where do you see him?” she asked.

“I don’t see him. Except for this. I ran into him, and he made me promise to give it to you.”

“Ah,” my aunt said. “I am not believing you.”

Snowy scrabbled in his dish.

“It’s true, though,” I said. “There is absolutely
nothing
between us.” I said it with enough misery in my face, I suppose, that she believed me. “I have to go,” I said.

“Come back later,” she said sympathetically, holding her thin teacup aloft but not taking a sip. “You and your mother
should come for dinner now that you won’t have so much school. Come tonight.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but my mom already started something. It was in the Crock-Pot when I left.”

This wasn’t true, but it worked. When I left, the worn money was on the counter and my aunt was telling me that I was a very beautiful girl and I should let her take me shopping when school let out.

I
took exams and signed yearbooks and cleaned out my locker without another call from my father, my mother began working at the bookstore, and a single moth emerged from the nest of cocoons on my mother’s desk. The moth was white and ladylike and so still she might have been a pair of flower petals on a thick, furry stem. Although we checked every morning and every afternoon, anxiously expecting her mate, the other cocoons stayed whole and motionless. If you held one of them to the light, you could see a dark shape inside. The lady moth in her white dress waited a whole week, and then, as if she’d reached some final hour, she began to lay sterile eggs all over the nearest cocoons, embossing them with yellow unfertilized seeds. Then, imperceptibly, she died. Nothing changed about her appearance, but if you nudged her, you could tell she was gone.

“What are you going to do with her now?” I asked my mother.

“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I’m thinking.”

When my mother left for work, I went to the river. It didn’t belong to Amiel, I reasoned, and I found certain places on other banks where I felt completely alone. I read books I’d been meaning to read and books I’d read before. I ate peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and Corn Pops, but no more loquats. I took close-up photographs of the water, the bark, dead leaves, a molted lizard, and a dogface butterfly. I drew pictures of insects in a notebook and tried to identify them the way we’d been required to do in eighth grade, when I was forced to push pins through the bodies of beetles my father helped me catch with a Smucker’s jar full of poison. I drew pictures of plants, too, and this is how I learned to tell miner’s lettuce from black sage, virgin’s bower, and snakeweed. For the rest of June, the weather was mostly foggy and white, as still as the dead cocoons. Then July came and the sun burned yellow flowers called butter and eggs into brown straw, the dodder crept like orange Silly String over the poison ivy, and an insect I never saw made a continuous, furious ticking sound.

I don’t know how often Amiel watched me. In the daytime, I assumed he was away at work, but in the evenings or late afternoons, the whole canyon felt like a tunnel waiting for a train. I listened for him with my feet and my spine and my averted head, but to the hikers who cracked by with their sniffing, leaping dogs, it was just me and my Brontë book, me
and my
Pocket Field Guide
, me and my Corn Pops. I was the hobo girl of Agua Prieta.

Greenie didn’t miss me because she and Hickey had entered a cocoon of their own. They were always together, and Hickey plainly didn’t want me there. Robby, too, had his preoccupations: a college prep class in Claremont that met five days a week for the first four weeks of summer, then a music camp slightly less prestigious than the one he’d failed to try out for in April. My father neither called nor wrote to ask if I’d changed my mind about Paris. My whole life reminded me of how it felt to ride, when Greenie and I were little, in the back of Greenie’s mother’s car, an ancient Pacer with a seat that faced backward and left us staring at places we’d already been and drivers who didn’t want to make eye contact. I was facing the wrong direction, but time still went forward, gliding toward destinations I couldn’t see or choose.

One week my mother decided to have it out with the cocoons. She followed directions from a guy who had his own silk business, and the first, most disgusting step was to extract the worms. Out they came, dead and yellow. Then she soaked the cocoons in hot water. She mushed them around, expecting the hard glue to just melt away, but soon she had a bunch of dented egg shapes that reminded me of Ping-Pong balls you’ve run over with a car. Still, she dried them in the sun, and the next day, right after breakfast, she picked at one until she’d teased out a strand of silk. One strand after another came off in her hands like foot-long hanks of spiderweb. I kept expecting her to give up, but she wrapped the webby bits
around and around until she had a miniature ball of truly unimpressive silk. One down, eight to go.

“Now what?” I said.

My mother dumped the rest of the mashed, hollow cocoons in the kitchen trash, and the lid came down with a clap. She set the tiny ball of silk in the basket of random objects she kept on her desk. She took the corpse of the lady moth outside and set her on a gardenia bush. Then she came back inside.

“Sometimes,” she said slowly, as if she were still searching for a useful moral, “you’ve got to know when to give up.”

She left for work, and I hiked all the way to a series of boulders the size of cars that caused the river to flow fast and loud around them. You could stretch out your whole body on some of those rocks, but they were also prime real estate for taggers, who left giant black graffiti names like FZZZJ or PVVR! It was hot, though, really hot, and the coldest water swirled through those little rapids. I was wearing my swimsuit under my clothes, a one-piece from last summer that I’d never really liked. I soaked my hair and my face, and then I let the current push me to a shallow pool where I closed my eyes and pretended I was a piece of moss, hands on the grainy shore, legs floating free. I looked around, as I floated, for shells to add to my collection. There’s only one kind of shell at the river, a clam the color of Wite-Out that I like to rub with my thumb when I’m reading, and I’d been taking them home in my pockets and adding them to a jar I kept in Robby’s tree house.