Dark Water (17 page)

When I came back to the rock, my book was still there. So
was my dad’s old backpack. Nothing looked any different until I opened my paperback copy of
Wuthering Heights
and found, neatly folded like a bookmark, a piece of lined notebook paper.

On the outside was a drawing of an open oyster shell holding a pearl. I unfolded it and shivered.
GO TO BLACK OAK
, it said. I did a full-circle survey of the surrounding trees, heart pounding, but I didn’t see Amiel. I tugged my shirt and shorts back on over my wet swimsuit and walked to the only place I thought might be the black oak, a huge tree burned to volcanic rock by a fire a long time ago. It was hollow on the inside, so it made me think of elves and dwarves and leprechauns whenever I passed it. It now held a red bandanna tied to form a little bag. The bundle clacked when I opened the knot, and dozens of white shells spilled over the ground.

Carefully, I turned them all over.

“Olly olly in come free,” I said when I stood up, as if Amiel knew the rules of the game.

Nothing and no one.

“That means you can come out!” I said.

Someone brushed against a tree, but when I turned, it was just a hiker with a spaniel on a leash. “Hide-and-seek?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Maybe my Greta will sniff ’em out,” she said, and went striding along with Greta while I picked up my white shells and put them carefully back into the bandanna.

I looked everywhere as I walked back along the trail—up in the trees, down the eroded banks where roots tangled with
stones and cobwebs, along the sandbars glittering in the sun. Finally I came to the crossing point. Amiel’s shore, as I thought of it. All I had to do was wade across to the grotto. Perhaps he was in there, his back to the wall, listening and waiting as I used to wait in my favorite hiding place at Greenie’s house, a warm spot between the propane tank and a pink hibiscus. It was that memory that coaxed me to remove my shoes and slosh over, to step with a hammering heart to the wall that was warm and slivery under my touch. I knew Amiel was too skilled at hiding not to hear my approach. I made myself count to ten, and then I sprang into his doorway.

No one.

“Amiel?” I said. All seemed to be in order, though I couldn’t be sure because the room was dark. I stepped in and heard a small sound, no louder than the frisking of a bird or a lizard in dry leaves. I turned around and there he was, seated on the floor beside the wall, waiting for me to spot him. He smiled the way you do when you’re glad to be found.

“You’re supposed to run now,” I said.

He shrugged and stayed where he was.

“Or you’re going to be it.”

I had no idea whether they played hide-and-seek in Mexico. Still, it was a game that let me be confident instead of self-conscious and confused, so I reached out my hand to touch the nearest part of him, which was his knee. “Tag,” I said. “You’re it.”

If he had run, I could have chased him and known what I was doing, because I know how to be eight, nine, ten, and
eleven, but he stood up and looked as confused as I felt. He was holding a long, smooth stick in one hand and a knife that he folded and put in his pocket.

“Thank you,” I said, holding up the bandanna. “For the shells.”

He nodded.

He was two inches from me, and I could see the black stone disk between his collar bones rising and falling with his breath, so I found it hard to think. I wondered again how he bathed in the river because he smelled and looked clean, but the thought of him swimming naked in the river made my breathing more shallow still. I tried to focus on something other than his body, and what I found was the green and black tin box that I’d shamelessly opened on my first visit, the one with the old-fashioned lords and ladies on the outside. I picked it up and said, lamely, that it was pretty.

Amiel nodded and when I set the tin down, he picked it back up and tapped the photograph into his hand. He held it for me and pointed at the little boy, then at himself.

“Is that your mother?” I asked.

He nodded, so I asked if that was his house, and he nodded again.

“Do you write to her?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“May I sit down?” I asked.

This time, he didn’t immediately answer me with a nod or a shake. He leaned briefly against the wall, but then he offered me a kind of tree stump and went outside. I sat on the tree
stump and waited, listening hard for clues to where he’d gone. I stared at the bags of ramen noodles and a can of black beans and wished I’d brought loquats again.

Amiel returned with another log roughly the same size and set it down. Our knees were almost but not quite touching, and I felt the way the sea looks in the afternoon, when every wave glows.

“How long ago did you first come here?” I asked.

He drew in the dirt with the stick that looked like it had been whittled smooth and then charred in a fire. He wrote the numeral four.

For some reason, the way he was writing in the dirt reminded me of the way Greenie and I would talk to each other in church. For a while, her family took me with them to services and during the long sermons we would write on each other’s backs with a fingertip and the other person would try to guess the word.

“Where do you cook?” I asked.

He seemed glad to stand up and go somewhere else. I followed him out to a path that led through willows so thick and low that you’d think it wasn’t worth it to swat your way through. Then we came to a huge mangled sycamore growing half under and half over a hollowed-out bank. The roots formed a sort of ladder that he climbed, reaching down to give me his hand at the top.

Once I stopped feeling the terrific buzz of his hand on mine, I could look around. We were standing on a strange little plateau where someone had once built a little house out of
river rock and stucco. The house still had a doorway but no door, four windows but no glass, a chimney but no roof, and a concrete floor. All around the ruined house the trees were near enough and tall enough so that they formed a sort of blind, and I thought you probably couldn’t see it at all from nearby hills.

Inside the house, near the hearth, Amiel had built a sort of fire pit with rocks. It was a safer place to cook than most campsites, really, because there was concrete all around, and I longed to be there when he had a fire going, when we could be cowgirl and cowboy and pretend we weren’t a few miles from two million people. We stood in the sunlit, roofless house and looked down at the charred rocks.

“I love it here,” I said.

Amiel poked at the coals with the stick he’d used to write on the dirt floor of his other house. His sore hand had only a small bandage on it and I reached out to touch it.

“It’s better, I guess?” I said.

Amiel wrote
SI
with the black end of the stick, each stroke reminding me of the skin-writing game with Greenie.

“Good,” I said.

He balanced the stick on one palm while standing still and then while walking in a circle. He tossed it so that it whirled several times in the air, then caught it.

“Let me try,” I said. He handed me the stick, and I balanced it for a few seconds on my palm. I tried again, chasing after it as it wobbled and fell. Everything seemed perfect. “Can I come back here?”

His face was unsettled.

“Give me your hand,” I said in a teasing voice, and he held out his flat palm as if waiting for me to balance the stick there, but I left the stick where it fell and pulled on his arm until it was outstretched. I felt him tremble a little as I wrote with my finger in the palm of his hand,
P
. Then, on his wrist and forearm, I wrote the rest of the word,
PLEASE
.

When Greenie and I played the game, we almost never managed to guess each other’s words. Letters, yes, but long words took repetition. Amiel closed his hand over the letter
P
on my second try and withdrew his arm. Then he turned around and faced the empty walls of the ruined house. He crouched down in front of the dead fire and poked at the crumbs of black wood. He refused to look at me, and he shook his head.

I had nothing else to say or do, so I turned and walked through the doorless door of the roofless house, and when I had picked my way down the root-twisted bank, I couldn’t wait for the open trail so that I could run and run and run.

A
few days later, I resumed my old habits of reading and swimming, but I stayed away from Amiel’s part of the river. The days were pale green and flat, like water that got stuck in the reeds and went nowhere. I could have opened my eyes underwater and seen my life as a sunken object, floating and trapped, green with algae.

I was so used to my stagnation that when I found another note from him that said
BLACK OAK
, I went as far as the tree, picked up the small dark-blue bottle with a white flower poking out of the top, and then just put it in my backpack. I didn’t go looking for Amiel because whatever we were doing, it wasn’t hide-and-seek. Twice more he left notes and twice more I followed them. I collected the pair of acorns joined like the chambers of a heart. The small papery man made from corn-husks. I set them all with the jar of shells on the windowsill of
Robby’s tree house, where, I figured, my mother wouldn’t see them but Amiel, who still worked in my uncle’s grove on Fridays, might walk through the grove and see the silent progress of his gifts.

It was mid-July when my mother’s friend Louise asked my mother, “What’s Pearl doing on Mission Road without a helmet?”

By this point, my mother was so thin she could wear things from the junior department at Macy’s, and she wore brighter lipstick. Between her eyebrows were two wrinkles I’d recently learned (from reading the type of magazine she never used to buy, but now, confusingly, did) were called the “11.” When she was angry with me, the lines deepened. I watched them go dark as she said, “Where in the world have you been going?”

“Just the river,” I said.

“With Greenie?”

“No.”

“I already told you it isn’t safe for you to be there alone, and it isn’t safe to ride your bike on Mission Road.”

“The migrants do it.”

Occasionally, you saw muscled men in helmets, sunglasses, and Spandex using the bike lanes of Fallbrook, but mostly it was dark-skinned men in ball caps.

“They,” my mother said, “have no
choice.
”

“What else am I going to do all day?”

“If you’re going to ride your bike like a migrant, you can get a job like a migrant.”

“So it’s safe to ride on Mission if I have a job.”

My mother blinked. She twisted an earring. “Not safe. Just defensible. And you have to wear a helmet.”

“Fine,” I said.

So the following morning, while my mother watched, I put on a hideous old helmet that used to be Robby’s. I told her when I would be home and exactly where I was going to fill out applications: Major Market and Subway. But after I left those places, I stopped, on a whim, at the Cup o’ Europe, which was right across the alley from the fake Irish pub and had a
WE’RE HIRING
sign in the window.

The manager, Chloe, was this big friendly woman with a cold, and she was just being polite, I could tell, in letting me apply for the job at all (
PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE PREFERRED
, the sign said in smaller letters), but as she was reading the top line of my application, she said, “Are you related to Sharon DeWitt?”

My thigh muscles felt like ironing boards. “Yes,” I said.

“As in?”

“She’s my mother.”

“Well, that would be odd,” she said, letting out an overly big laugh. “Do you two bicker?”

“Not usually,” I said, shrugging.

“You could work together?”

“I guess so. Why?”

Another overly big laugh. “You know she works here, right?”

I felt my neck prickle and wondered how many of the people sitting on the big comfy sofas and big comfy chairs
were listening in on our conversation while pretending to work on their laptops. As far as I could tell, the Cup o’ Europe was not a bookstore. There were some used books in the back, where a sign said,
LEAVE ONE, TAKE ONE!!
but most of them were large print. Also, the two girls working the coffee machines were teenagers, not grown women like my mother.

“What a coincidence!” I said, trying to work up a laugh. It seemed really, really strange that no one I knew, such as Greenie, had mentioned my mother’s new job at Cup o’ Europe. During the school year, I would have heard about my mom’s job from seven people within ten minutes of her first shift. But since school let out, I’d stopped speaking to practically everyone.

“I guess you two need to
talk
more, huh?” Chloe the manager said. “I’ll bet you’re like my kids. Always rushing off to do whatsit with whosit.”

“Pretty much,” I said. “Ha!” I paused because it’s hard to follow up a fake laugh. “Probably we shouldn’t work together, actually,” I said.

“You’d want different shifts?”

“No. I think I should just, you know,
withdraw
. Don’t tell her I was here, even.”

But of course Chloe told her. The next night during our soup course (the only course), my mother set down her twisted shred of a napkin and said, “Chloe said you came by.”

“You said you worked in a bookstore,” I said.

“They sell books. After a fashion.”

“I don’t know why you had to put it that way to me is all.”

“I think they’re planning to sell books. That’s what they told me when I applied, anyway.”

I blinked at her, and she picked up the remote. We watched anchormen, crime tape, the fuzzy progress of car chases, and finally, for comic relief, a tour of the thing I had thought existed only in my imagination: a house that was literally upside down. A man in Poland had painstakingly wedged the pitched roof of a house into the ground and built the rest of the house up from there, balancing the weight somehow on the point of the triangle. The foundation was high and flat like a tray held up by a waiter. On the edge of this elevated foundation, a little cypress tree grew (or merely pointed) straight down.