Klickitat (2 page)

“Before,” she said. “Downstairs. You did the right thing, just watching. I can't help it, and then it's just the same thing, over and over.”

“I'm on your side,” I said.

“If I can just change the way I do things,” she said. “The way I walk and listen and talk and touch—but if I keep trying to change then even that trying starts to be the same, like a rut, a robot trying not to be a robot, and I spend all my time watching myself, you know?”

Now Audra did look around at me, and smiled like I should step through the window and sit on the roof with her. I reached out and felt the grit of the shingles. It felt
slippery, like I would slip. I stayed standing where I was.

“I met someone,” she said. “Someone who knows all kinds of things, better than the way we're living, here. Closer to how we're supposed to be.”

“Who?” I said.

“Soon you'll know,” she said. “Everything's going to change.”

Two houses down, at the Haydens', a white van that said
BEE EXTERMINATOR
on it was parked. Across the street, Jimmy Newman was kicking a ball up the hill in his front yard. It was a red ball, and he'd kick it up, and it would roll down, and he'd kick it up again.

I tried to slow down my breathing, but as Audra slid back, closer to me, I felt a trembling start inside me. Strong and too quick for me to get between something and something else, before I could get to my life jacket in my closet in my room across the hall. My arms rose up and my hands were shaking. They reached out and took hold of Audra's arm, of her shoulder where it turned into her neck.

“Vivian,” she said, “it's all right. It's fine. I'm here.”

And then I could hardly hear her because the blood was roaring around in my body and racing in my ears and all I wanted to do was hold on.

I pulled Audra through the window, onto her bedroom floor, half on top of me next to the bed. She was saying something, over and over again, stroking my hair with her hand that wasn't twisted back under her.

“Klick-i-tat. Klick-i-tat.”

That was a game we used to play, when we were younger, that I'd almost forgotten. If we were in trouble, or Mom and Dad were arguing, we'd say that name. “Klickitat,” back and forth to each other, to help us feel better, to know that we were always sisters, always together. We got it from Beezus and Ramona, the name of their street—a block away from our street, Siskiyou, here in Portland—and we said it because they are sisters and we are sisters, and because we liked the sound.

“Klickitat,” Audra said, whispering, her voice close to my ear. “Klickitat.”

It was the word for how we felt together, understanding each other. My fingers began to loosen. A “vise-like
grip” is what I've heard it called, where a doctor wrote it in my file, and they've always pried me off people—it's only Audra who let me hold on until it passed, even if the doctors or Mom and Dad tried to pull us apart.

“I'm sorry,” I said to Audra.

“It's okay.” It was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Are you getting worse, do you think?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“Don't be sorry,” she said. “We'll figure out ways to make it better for both of us, for everyone.”

Audra sat up, stretched her arms above her head, turned her head from side to side like she was checking to make sure her neck still worked. She smiled at me, and just then Mom started calling that dinner was ready.

Audra did not come down to dinner. Instead, she went back through her window and stayed out all night, later than anyone could stay awake waiting.

TWO

The next morning, Audra still had not come
home. I sat at the kitchen table, eating a toaster waffle. A glass of milk, one of orange juice, and my three pill bottles were lined above my plate, all waiting for me. Dad was upstairs, and Mom hurried in and out of the kitchen with a piece of toast in one hand, getting ready to go to work.

“You're buying lunch at school?” she said. “You'll eat something?”

“I'll be okay,” I said.

I waited, but she didn't say anything about Audra. She kept talking about work, about being late. My mom works for Nordstrom, where she's a personal shopper.
That means she chooses clothes for people who can't choose their own clothes—either they don't have time or they don't care or they're color-blind or whatever. It also means that she brought home new clothes for us all the time. I used to think this was great until Audra explained that we only got clothes no one else wanted. That no one bought and that were a year old or more. Audra stopped wearing them. She refused. That's one of the things she and Mom fought about, how Audra wore clothes from Goodwill or the Salvation Army.

“Did you take your pills?” Mom said.

“I will,” I said.

“I'll count them later.”

“Mom,” I said.

“Have a great day, honey.” She leaned close to kiss the top of my head, and then she went out the door and in a minute I heard her car start and back down the driveway, gone.

Outside, rain was misting down. I squinted up through the window, at the gray sky, and then I stood up, leaned close. On the glass, on the other side of the window, was a faint round mark, and tiny, tiny feathers,
stuck there. Right at the spot where the bird had flown into the window. I held up my hand, but my side of the glass was smooth.

Out in the gray morning I could see the trees across the backyard, the small black shapes of birds in the bare branches.

Audra came in only a minute or two later, like she had been watching the house, waiting for Mom to leave. She was wet, and smiling.

“Hey.” She picked up the crust of Mom's toast from the plate on the counter and jammed it into her mouth. I could see the wet footprints of her bare feet shining on the linoleum.

“Did you sleep?” I said.

“Of course I slept.” Audra poured herself a cup of coffee and walked over close to me. She reached out to touch my arm.

“You smell like a campfire,” I said.

“A bonfire,” she said, and snorted. “Some idiots were trying to jump their bikes over it. One of them broke his leg, I think.”

“Did he get a cast?” I said.

“I don't know,” she said. “I left, to go do some other things, to try to find someone.”

“Did you?”

Audra didn't answer; she took off her wet coat and hung it up, over the heat vent. She shivered, hugged herself, her wet hair tight and dark around her head. She looked even skinnier than usual, and there was a silver stud in the side of her nose. I knew she wanted me to say something, to notice it.

“Remember that bird that flew into the window?” I said.

“What?”

“Yesterday,” I said. “There's still feathers there.”

Audra didn't sit down. She just stood there in the middle of the kitchen.

“There's something I want you to do with me,” she said.

She reached into the front pocket of her jeans and took out a wrinkled piece of newspaper. I held out my hand, but she didn't give it to me.

“You took your pills, didn't you?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, and she gave me a look.

“What?” I said. “I mean, not yet, I haven't.”

“They're poisoning you,” she said. “So you'll be like them, a robot like everyone else. This house!” Pacing across the kitchen, Audra jerked open the refrigerator, looked into it for a moment.

“I could go with you,” I said. “One of these nights.”

“You could.” Audra looked across the kitchen like she was measuring me. “And you could get hurt. People do.”

“You don't,” I said. “I wouldn't.”

Audra closed the refrigerator. She took a long knife from a drawer, looked at its shining blade, then put it back.

“What was that?” I said.

“The knife?”

“That newspaper in your pocket.”

When Audra came back, close to me, her voice was softer.

“It's about the girl,” she said. “She lived for four years in the forest, never in a house. Growing things, hiding, reading books. We'll go see her; she'll tell us things.”

“When?” I said.

“Soon.” Audra folded the newspaper and put it back
in her pocket, then glanced behind her, toward the stairs. “Is Dad still here?”

“I think so.”

“I'm taking a shower.”

Once she was gone, upstairs, I twisted the tops from my bottles and swallowed my three pills, each a different size and color. Blue, green, yellow. I twisted the lids back on, then drank my milk, then my orange juice.

I took a lot of pills, but no one really understood what was wrong with me. Not the doctors, not my parents, not me. “Becoming agitated” was what they called it, and they wanted me to learn to recognize it, so I could be in control of it and not let it be in control of me.

At school, people gave me space. They flinched sometimes when I came close, or held up an arm like they were going to block me from hitting them. I never hit anyone. The nickname they had for me was “Vivian Ritalin”—but that wasn't even a pill I took anymore. The girls only said things like that when they were in groups and even then they never got too close.

At school I was allowed to carry my backpack with me. In it I kept an old zippered sweatshirt that was too
small. If I started feeling like I was becoming agitated, I put it on and zipped it up tight, so it held me and calmed me down.

I was a sophomore, and Audra was a senior. I hardly saw her at school, so she couldn't protect me. The closer she came to graduating, the less often she went to school at all.

It had been easier, we were closer, when we were in different schools. At night, we would sneak across the hallway, sleep in the same bed, whisper all night. She had a black BMX bike with foot pegs, and I'd stand on them, behind her with my hands on her shoulders, and we'd ride through the neighborhood. I could smell her hair. I leaned when she leaned. I saw everything over the top of her head. We would coast along, sisters, and people would see us together, and no one would be moving at the same speed, in the same direction.

THREE

It was a week or so after the bird flew into the
window, another one of those nights when Audra went out and didn't come back until the next day. There were new locks on the outside of her bedroom door, on her window, but that didn't stop her.

I was sitting at the desk in my bedroom, doing homework. The window reflected back, it was night, so I could see myself with my social studies book open, my hand taking notes with a pencil. All about Martin Luther King, and how different people should have the same kind of chances, even if they are different. And then I ran out of paper.

In my bookcase, a yellow notebook was caught tight
between my world atlas and an encyclopedia about mammals. It wasn't a new notebook—it had my name on the cover, written by me. By the curliness of my signature, and the color—yellow was my favorite then—I could tell that it was from seventh grade, or eighth. Now, finding it, I pulled the thin white paper snakes from the metal spiral, left behind when the pages were torn out. I balled them up and put them in my pocket.

It had half its paper left, maybe, and I opened the cover. The first page was blank, but I could see writing through it, behind it. I carried the notebook back to the desk and set it down, under the lamp. I opened it again, and turned that first blank page.

The writing was not easy to read. It was not my writing, I didn't know whose it was, and I'd never heard of what the words were saying. The words were cursive. They didn't follow the lines, but slanted across them.

There is in fact coming and going, bending

and breaking. One single bolt or screw

holds the blades of a scissors together, into

one tool that can cut paper or leather

or steel or meat. If you take that screw

or break that bolt, the scissors become